The Basement: MrBallen | YouTube's Best Storyteller Tells His Own

Today we're talking with John Allen. You know him as Mr. Ballin, the guy in the flannel with the strange, dark, and mysterious stories. In SEAL training, they called him Shakespeare. There was one strip of sand where the instructors left students alone, and John spent it telling stories to keep his class sane. That instinct survived a grenade in Afghanistan and a medical retirement. Then it made him famous. They called me Shakespeare Folsom, you know. For telling stories? Yeah, for organizing a theater program. We did Cats. I have regrets. Today we're covering how that happened, what the success cost him, and the craft of a story five million strangers will stop scrolling for. His new book is The Terror Within, nine illustrated stories, four never told anywhere. The Terror Within, great title. My memoir's got a similar one. The Terror Within, 14 feet of my bowl. It's about the crab cat. Feed the crab cat! Partway through, John tells a few stories from his military years he's never told anywhere else. And it gets kind of heavy. I'm glad he trusted me with it. Stick around after the episode, and I'll pop back in and untangle the conversation. There's going to be some surprises at the end, like there always is. Let's go down to the basement. John, welcome to the basement. Thank you, man. All right. So happy to be here, dude. Are you really? No, really. No, really. No, I'll be honest. I'm straight up about it. Like, I have seen in our comments for years, not like, oh, dude, I love the Y-Files. Like, this is crap, what you do. But more like, dude, you and AJ, you got to get together. Like, these are my two shows, like Mr. Ballin and the Y-Files. And so I've always been aware of you and your show. I see clips of you all the time. I saw you went on Sean Ryan. And I was like, secretly like, that's fucking awesome. Like, I've been swearing the show. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Okay. And I, and no, just you're someone that I'm, I've always really respected. I love, like, you talked about craft before the show. Like, it's so obvious that you put so much care into building out your show. And like, it's, it's so uniquely yours. And I know how much work goes into this and how much skill goes into this. And I've just respected you from afar. And it's really cool to finally be collaborating as they say. That was very sweet. I wasn't going to start with this, but since you were so nice, I probably have to credit you for, at least my early success, because I was just floundering obscurity doing my weird stuff with the fish. And my brother's like, you should post on TikTok. And I was like, no one watches this shit on TikTok. He's like, well, Mr. Ballin does it. I said, I don't know how that is. So I go and I see you're, I'm like, wow, it's working for him. So I did it. It didn't work for me on TikTok. It worked for one video that are shadow banned, but it did drive some people into the channel. And it was because it was because of you. You kicked the door in. It's so weird. Like the TikTok thing, man. Like, so you, you, you said the little, the story there. I, uh, I was at Great Wolf Lodge, the indoor water park. I have three kids. They're very young. And our family vacation of choice is always like some indoor water park, which doesn't have anything to do with water. That's our family vacations. It's the best. I figured you'd have like a weird love hate relationship. I mean, I do. It's complicated, right? Yeah. Actually I was earlier today. I was actually in, uh, in Los Angeles for like an advertising conference and I was near the Pacific ocean. And, and I, it's funny, like, I will go down to the water. I go for a little run. It's like so beautiful. And I'm just like staring at the ocean and remembering what it was like, you know, in the seal and the seal training. Um, but like back to the, the water park thing. So I, I, I post the story about the missing hikers and like, personally, I've always been really into just as a consumer, I've been really into strange, dark and mysterious true stories or things that are purported to be true. Uh, I used to love watching that channel dark, five. I don't know if you are familiar with like, it was, I just love that channel. It's like, if I was going to put something on the internet, if I was going to put on something on YouTube, it was always going to be something like that. And I, I told that story and then I come back from being in the water park and it's, it's gone viral, but like, I'm a 30 something year old dad of multiple kids. I was like in the military and I did intentionally post something on social media. It isn't like I didn't do that. Well, you were trying a few different things. I was, I absolutely, like truly nothing came close. So it never really felt like I actually was like, Oh, I'm a content creator. It was, are there really TikTok videos of you dancing? They've been eradicated. What? Did they exist though? They did. No, the worst one was, I, uh, I think this is, it was like so cringy. Like I'm pretty good about talking about stupid stuff I've done. The worst one I did was not. So this is, this is pre virality. This is like, get up and show us. No, it wasn't a dance. It wasn't a dance. It was, uh, there was this, there was a trend on TikTok. This is like late 2019 where early TikTok and probably still today, it was like almost exclusively kids. It's like teenagers. Like I, I was generations older and I'm not even old, but like for TikTok, like you're old. Right. And the, the trend was these kids would like tell a sort of innocuous story that was sort of like about some stupid thing that happened to them. Like when they like spilled milk on their pants in front of their, their friends at school or something, but they would do it while singing into the auto tune feature on TikTok. So it's like this weird, like you're singing a song about how you like pooped your pants when you were in fifth grade to like auto tune. And I was like, I should do that. And so I told a story about something to do with the Navy SEAL training, but like, I remember I had like, I did like 50 takes. I'm like sitting in my truck outside of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where I was living at the time. And I finally had it. I'm like, that's great. That's, that's the one post. And then it was like, who's this? And then I'm like, all right, that's bad. But, uh, the dude, yeah, like everything just sort of took off. And even now, like, you know, TikTok was where it began and I transitioned it to YouTube and it's like, that's a whole thing now. But I think people say this and they, they, they feign humility and they were like, Oh, I can't believe this is happening. But like, really? I was like, I'm going to go be a Navy SEAL. I'm going to, I'm going to devote myself to this. This is going to be my thing. And I fucking did it. I became a Navy SEAL. This is like a career path. And I was, I couldn't have been more proud. Like this is it. And then, you know, shit goes sideways. I'm getting hurt in Afghanistan. I actually stuck around in the teams for a couple of years. I was medically retired, but it was because of the injury. But then it's like, I'm suddenly a civilian and it's like, dude, now what? Now what? I'll just post cringe stuff on TikTok. But it, like, it, you know, it's just weird. You know, like I, I feel like such an imposter and also confident. Like I'm very confident in what I do, but like I was at this, this advertising conference, you know, literally today and yesterday. And it went great. Like we're partnered with Sirius. They're awesome. And they, we want to meet clients. And like, we had these great meetings with like advertisers and, and brokers. It was like, it was great. But the whole time I'm like, what am I doing? Like, what is this? How is the, how am I being like ushered on stage? And here's Mr. Ball. And like, whoa, it's like so surreal, you know? Jen and I just came back from LA and we kept saying, whose life is this? Cause it's weird. It's so unlikely what happened, certainly to me, but cause you're much younger than I am. So unlikely. Did you know how, here's what I tell people about YouTube is if I knew how hard it was, I probably wouldn't have done it. Has weight loss ever felt like a losing battle? Maybe you start off consistent, but life happens and you take a day off, which turns into weeks, maybe months. 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Weight loss by HIMS is not available in all 50 states. Wigovi is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wigovi clinical study information, and restrictions, visit hims.com. Oh God, it's so hard, man. But people don't realize how, because they're like, Mr. Ball is, because you were so huge. It was quick. Yeah, it was rapid. The weird thing is when I really think about where have I, in my life, used, let's say Navy SEAL, my experience as a Navy SEAL, where have I used those things that I sort of learned about myself in my life? Where have I done it? And honestly, I only have one place that I can, I can honestly say I channeled my inner Navy SEAL, and it was in the first six months of making YouTube videos. And it was because to, to put out consistent videos when it's basically a one-man show over and over and over again, it sounds so It's so silly. It was the video dude, like what's that? - Dude. - Dude. To put a script together, even, even if you don't even adhere to the script, to just make something make sense that can be translated across like different generations and like to do the research and then to be on camera, like that's not a natural thing. Like you're, you're awesome at it. Like you're really a natural. I wasn't. And like early on, I had to sort of like do so many takes, so many takes. And no prompter, right? You're just like glancing? No, no. Well, because I spent so much time researching it, I go right into recording that a lot of time it was fresh, but no, I didn't, didn't use a prompter at all. I tried that. I couldn't do it. I need the prompter. It's brutal. It's brutal without the prompter, dude. Even now, like I still, we have a prompter now, but like it's almost ingrained to sort of go off the cuff a little bit. But I would, I remember having so many moments in the first six months of doing YouTube when like it's objectively being really successful. Like I, I have lived an incredibly modest life before that. Like I did not come from any sort of money or anything. And like almost literally overnight, you know, videos are being posted on YouTube that are making thousands of dollars in a fucking day, like in a day that's happening. There was a video that I remember I posted a video that it was like post next at like $18,000 for like one video. And I have, I've never even come close to this. And so it's like the work that I'm putting in is being almost instantly rewarded. And it's also like, I love this. And I really do. But the grind is so intense. And I would have moments where I'm like on my third Red Bull and I've been up for like three, not three, like two days. And I have, I know I have easy four or five, six hours before I even record. And I got to edit it myself. I would literally say to myself, I'm like delirious. You were a fucking Navy SEAL. You'd have to psych yourself up. You can outwork the other aspiring YouTubers. You've got to work out there. And like, so help me God, I did. But there were, there were stretches of time that it sounds so silly, but like SEAL training and buds is like objectively a challenging thing, but it's so structured. Here's what you're going to do. Either you do it or you don't. But with a creative venture where it's like all on you, there's no end. You just sort of like go as much as you can. You work as hard as you can. And then sometimes like when things don't go well, like there's no one there to be like, don't worry, buddy, like get them next time. Like, no. You just got to pick yourself back up and do it. And the hours are crazy. The pressure is insane. I think what people also don't know is like, if you've hit any level of success on YouTube at all, you, you really stop thinking in terms of boy, like this video did really good. No, it's like, boy, I hope it doesn't suck. That's it. The metric is I hope, I hope the views aren't so bad that the channel starts to deteriorate. Well, you know, you know, it sucks when you post it, right? You know, that's terrible. I worked 80 hours on that and it sucks. And they're going to do it again. And they're going to tell me it sucks every week. But it's like the algorithm, unfortunately, like you're tethered to it. I mean, like you're foolish if you, if you don't think you are, if you want to make a career over any amount of time doing YouTube, doing like digital media today, you are beholden on some level to the performance of your video in the algorithm. And so you have to sort of play the game of understanding what's going to make it perform. What's not without selling yourself out. And my God, like you, you, you get the hate comments. That's part of life. You get like sort of the criticism that way. But I, I started to attach my self-worth to like the performance of a video, which is so silly. Like it's, but you're speaking to my heart right now, dude. And it's awful. Oh, and I stopped doing true crime. I've only done a few true crimes because it's so risky with the algorithm. Oh yeah. So you, even early on, like before you were in the partner program, you must've been like, am I going to see the orange dollar sign? All the time. All the time. Cause it's like, oh, I don't get paid this week. Yep. Oh yeah. Oh good. I put in all this time and I suffered for this and it's a great episode, but it will do, it might even hurt my channel because it's demonetized. We, we had a deluge of we, I, it was reds and oranges. Like there, there, there was a video. Oh my God. Like it's, it's funny. Cause you totally get this. Like the video was like 50 some odd minutes long. So like long, it's about an hour long and like right out the gate, it was dominating. Like it was, it was, I think it was like 10. 10 million views in, in the span of like a few weeks or something. Wow. It was like, and even better was at the, it's a buddy of mine, uh, Ephraim Matos. He's a former Navy SEAL. We served together. Uh, he, un, unbelievable story. Forget how you feel about like geopolitics and stuff. He, he's a Navy SEAL, right? And I think he went to Iraq when he was, or in Syria or something when he was a SEAL. We didn't deploy together. He left the military. He left the SEAL teams because he felt a calling to go fight. Isis because the U S military wasn't in his mind doing enough. And he literally left the military and by himself went to Iraq and fought Isis. He joined up with like faction military groups and filmed it and he ended up, and he saved this little girl. There's a video that made it all over the world because this little girl was pinned down outside of, uh, Raqqa in, in Syria. I guess it was Syria. Her whole family has been killed. Yeah. They've been lined up at a wall. They've all been shot down and it's just bodies against the wall. And Ephraim had found out because he was working with this underground group that was like fighting Isis and trying to save victims that they had left this, this pile. And they believe there was one little girl who had survived and she was laying under the bodies of like her family. And so it's broad daylight. There are all these trucks with like their black Isis flags and everything like parading around the area and, and Ephraim goes up there behind an Abrams tank. And he runs on camera, picks this girl up under a hail of gunfire and runs her back behind the tank and gets shot in the process. He gets shot and he saves this girl's life. And so I told his story of, he was the guy that when I was in training for the, this is actually a very humbling moment that Ephraim and I are connected in the early part of SEAL training. Uh, there's this test you gotta do. Um, I think it's called, uh, life-saving. It's just called life-saving. It's, it's, it's, it seems like not a big deal, but it's brutal. You have to jump in the water and, and like the way a lifeguard is trained, you kind of do a lifeguard save of, of your instructor, but they pick like the six foot eight beast who's going to fight you in the water. And they refer to it as like the puking evolution. Cause there's no way to do it without like just totally being gassed. And you're on no sleep. Oh, this is, this is like a day after hell week when you've been up for like a week. And so it, because technically you have to pass this lifeguarding test. Anyways, I get out of the water after failing my. The various attempts, I eventually passed it and like, everyone's just done attempts and everyone's miserable and we're all like shivering on the pool deck and I'm like dramatically heaving, like, Oh, like, cause I've just, I've just done the test. I was really like hamming it up to make sure everybody knew how hard I tried and effort just goes, shut the fuck up. Just shut the, and he like got in trouble for even speaking out of turn, but he's like, he was like, shut the fuck up. It's hard for everyone. And I was like, oh. Listen. Right. And I was like, yep, stop performing, like stop performing your drama. Um, but I, I opened the episode with, with that little story. And then this, and Ephraim, by the way, is like the most like non, you wouldn't think, wow, that dude would drop everything and go fight ISIS. He's like this totally normal guy. I mean, he's very skilled, like an incredible shot, like tactically a brilliant guy, but just the most normal dude. Just like, doesn't swear. Doesn't cuss. Just a normal dude, super low key. And I told a story and he actually started this charity called, uh, operations, strong, stronghold rescue, where he goes to conflict zones, like with no help from any government and like rounds up support from locals that are often like family and stuff. And just like does guerrilla missions to often save people that are like in the middle of genocides and like mass killings and stuff. And he saved so many people. He films it all, but he had no funding because he has no idea how to do it. And I, I, I do this video. This is going to make me sound so lame. We do this video where I have this big call to action at the end, like go support Ephraim. He has this thing, stronghold rescue, and it's a great charity. His funding jumped. I think it's like to millions of dollars now. And it's like largely on the strength of him and his story, but this was the mouthpiece. And so this story goes mega viral. It's got like so many views. Demonetized. Oh, why? I don't know. Bodies? Probably. Probably. But, uh, you're doing them. And this is, that makes me sound. So lame, but it's like, this is a video that was probably, it would have made hundreds of thousands of dollars and it's like none. Uh, but, but the upshot is it was so cool with that from, it was like the amazing silver lining. So I, anyways, it's just like, that's, that's the nature of the beast though. You know, like. Does Ephraim still do that? Can we still support the charity? Oh yeah. How does he get through the red tape overseas? Dude, I don't know. At this point, he's like connected with like parts of the world that only you get connected if you're in this world. But he is like, you know. A fiercely like religious, just very driven guy who is just like, I mean, I honestly, he's the guy that's probably going to die in a hail of gunfire saving somebody's life. And like, this is his calling. Like he's just, I'll like talk to him. He's like, oh, I'm in Cambodia right now. Like, of course you are, you know, but he's, he's so chill. Like he came to, I did a show a couple of years ago in Massachusetts and he like showed up unannounced for it. And he's like, he like waited in line to like come up and see. I'm like, "Dude, Emron! What the hell, dude?" Let's talk about the number the Fed doesn't want you to say out loud. PCE inflation just came in at 4.1%. That's double their own 2% target. A target they've now missed five years in a row. And here's the part of that that should really get your attention. The Fed's own projection says we don't get back to 2% until 2028. That's three more years of your dollar buying less than it does today. You're already feeling it. Grocery bills are up 32% since 2020. IREs have lost 26% of their purchasing power. And if your 401k isn't up 30% or more in real terms, you're not gaining. You're going backwards. The next wave of inflation is already in the pipeline. Here's the thing. Gold and silver were never really a bet on inflation. They're insurance against the currency that's losing value on purpose. Golden Crest Metals can show you how to move part of your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver, tax and penalty free, or help you buy direct. If that's a better fit, it's a free conversation. No pressure, just information. Visit goldencrestmetals.com slash the Y files or text the word files to metals. That's 63825. You'll receive a free investor kit explaining how physical gold and silver can be added to an IRA or 401k, a free portfolio review with no obligation or hard sell and on qualifying purchases up to $25,000 in bonus silver. But he's, yeah, he's incredible, man. There's some incredible people in the military. I think that people, look at, I'm generalizing, but I think there's a lot of thought that like there's like an archetype to those that like join the military, especially special operations. But it's like the people I've, I've met in the SEAL teams, there's just, there's a little part of special operations are some of the most interesting and just brilliant people. Like there was this guy was like this total, like, just like skinny, goofy guy. Like just looks like weighs a hundred pounds kind of guy. He's like got this scraggly beard. And, but he, he was gifted at, at everything, everything. Didn't matter what it was. He would be the best at it. He set the course record for our, there's a shooting, a shooting course that we do in Mississippi that like for the history of the Navy SEAL teams, like every Navy SEAL goes and does the shooting course. So it's like the best shooters of one of the most elite groups in the military. This is where they train. And at the end of their block of training, they do this shooting course. He goes. And blows it away. He sets the record. Blows it, blows it away. Like he, he, he beat the instructors. Oh yeah, man. Like whatever. Like he, he, one time we're like in the gym and we're talking about who can deadlift the most weight. He doesn't lift. He does not lift any weights, zero weights. And like 400 was on the bar and he's like, oh, I can do that. It goes over deadlifts, 400 pounds, like traditional. He, he like picked up skateboarding while we're in Afghanistan and there's nowhere to skateboard. It's like rocks, but there was this little strip of, of linoleum in our crappy gym we had. And he like quickly learned how to like 360 flip and like frontside flip, like immediately. Anyone can do it. Yeah. Oh, no, but he became a professional wakeboarder just like on, on the side over one summer. He's like, yeah, I picked it up. He's like competing in wakeboarding competitions. I love people like this. Dude, he's just, but they're just people out there that are just like so amazing. And you see him a lot in, in special operations, actually. It's pretty cool. I think all operators are a little crazy, a little, a little tweaked. One of my buddies, this dude, he, he was just a total adrenaline junkie. And he, he was just known for just like getting hurt all the time. He also, he, uh, he was a dog handler and the dogs are like amazing. They're terrifying. They're Belgian Malinois. I don't know if you're familiar with these dogs, just fierce animals. These are not normal dogs and they're so well-trained. And like, he would bring his dog into my hut in Afghanistan and the dog's like looking at me. And he'd like, I want to go get something to eat. And I'm sitting in the room with this dog that will not touch me. But it'll stare you down. But it'll stare me down. Yeah. But so we, we had a skydiving block where like, one of the things you're taught is, uh, if you pull your, if you're under canopy and even if the canopy is, is degraded in some way, if you can land it, you don't ditch it. You don't go to your reserve because you know, your reserve might be worse than your main. Right. And so you're taught you absolutely, you do not ditch if, if you can land it, even if you're going to really hurt yourself. But the reality is when you're actually under canopy and you're careening down and you've got some stuff going on, you're probably going to ditch it. Like that's the reality of it. And so I remember there was one night where we did a, it's called a, a wall locker jump where you have like a hundred pounds of gear on and the stupid pack that you like dangled down by this long cord. It's like, it's a, it's a joke. It's what you would do with like a high altitude jump where you need, you need every piece of kit for every environment. It's designed to be like, we're going to give you all the stuff and we're going to see if you can jump. And so it's like really sketchy to land under the best of conditions. Are you standing there while they're loading you up? And you're like, dude, how much, oh, dude, it's a joke. What do I need all that for? And he, uh, his chute was all jacked up and like, normally we have radios that once you're sort of low enough to the ground, you can call it in and be like, yeah, I have an issue. And we're in training doesn't call it in that he's got such, he can't, he can only turn the chute one way. The other side is fully compromised. And basically the way skydiving, any parachute works is that when you pull down on the toggles, it flares your parachute and you slow yourself down. It's really similar to flying a plane. Not that I've done it. But it's like flaring the wings slows you down and he basically couldn't flare his parachute. And he's, he's torching towards the ground and you need to flare to land safe. Oh, dude, torching and all he did and it's nighttime. He can't even see the drop zone, not even on night vision, just nighttime. And so he's blasting in with his hundred pounds of beer and he just goes coming in hot blasts into the ground that you broke, broke his ankle or something just got up. He's like, yeah, whatever. But like me, I am a Navy seal. And I wouldn't have done that. I probably would have ditched the main, but you know, anyway, it's pretty funny guys. I love those guys. Oh, that was a good segue. Something I wanted to ask you. Your old bio said, that's a quote, just another number one world ranked video game player, turn philosopher, turn Navy seal, turn nonprofit CEO, number one in the world at skate at skate. Is that true? Were you number one? So the truth is, is I was briefly ranked in the top 30. Okay. And I. I know for a fact I was 30th for sure, but I'd only found out like after. So here's the story. So skate came out like in 2000 and maybe like nine or eight or something. It's like, are you grinding leaderboards while flunking out of UMass? Yeah. Same, same timeframe. And so I, uh, I would actually get super stoned and I would play skate and I would sit in my mom's basement and I would just play skate. And so it used to be like, you know, Tony Hawk's pro. Skater was the precursor and it was like left square up circle was sort of how you did tricks. But on skate, it was the first time that everything was done with the two joysticks, like all tricks. It was just slight variations of the joystick. And so anybody can flick the joysticks around and, and do random tricks, but to be precise required a lot of practice. And so the game that you played online for skate is you, it's a sort of like horse and basketball where like somebody sets a trick and you got to match it or you get a letter. It's it's S K A T E. Okay. And again, anybody can do some random trick, but can you do a trick on command? And it's very, it's right. And I became like savant level good at doing these tricks. And I had, I am not doing this to set records. I didn't even know, like, this is early my playing online for any game. So I'm not thinking at all about like how good I am at this game. But I, after playing for quite a while, I began to notice, I think it actually was like. I actually was on skate two. I didn't even notice on skate one, skate one. I, I crossed skate two. I was doing the same thing. I, I used to, I used to get on with people that I knew were really good and I would like intentionally give up letters to make it more challenging for myself. So I would like, and they, and it pissed people off, but I'm like, I don't care. One, one day I open up my PlayStation and I'm just, I noticed that there's always these little like male icons in the top right corner of my thing. And I, I just, I don't, I never thought about it. I didn't, I didn't, I've been playing video games since I was like nine. I, I'm like an offline gamer other than skate, you know? And I was like, what is, I've always wondered what that is. And so I open it up and there are like probably thousands, just so many messages. I, I held the scroll down button. It's like, it just kept on going all the way down. Compliments to you. Mostly people, mostly people telling me how much they hated me, dude, you suck. But it was people being like, you're the number one world ranked player. Like you're terrible. Like I couldn't beat you, man. Yeah. You're not as good as like the other guys, but it, all these references to me being the best player in the world. And I'm like, what? And so you didn't know. I didn't know. And so I opened, I had, I had invitations from EA not to be like, you're gonna join the skate team. It was like, do you wanna play the next beta for the next skate game to hell? Yeah. Give us your, but months after the fact I've missed, I've missed the boat and I, I pulled up the current leaderboard. I think it was like 29th or 30th, but it's like of the world. And they only show the top 50 and there's like probably at least, you know, several hundred thousand, if not a million people playing this game. And then it actually was funny. I, I didn't really enjoy playing the game because no longer is it really about fun. It became like, well, I gotta maintain this ranking now. That's an interesting personality point because it came back around again. Yeah, dude. I just wanna make videos. And then you, you crushed it and you're like, oh, now the pressure's on. It's true. It's, it's, it, it, it became a job. It's not fun anymore. You know, it is, but it's a different kind. It's a job. It's a job. It's like that video game. That game became a job. And so look, I could only play it really and enjoy it. I should say offline. i was exceptionally good at it but like the fun was that i got to beat people always i'd never lost i just never lost i mean i did but it was like so rare that i would give people four letters and just like i'd spend an hour just like never giving up my final letter because it was fun and then that was it it was just that's what i did and then it was like well wait a minute now i have to maintain it was just it wasn't fun anymore actually that was one of the when i got to buds seal training they make you give your fact and that was my fact that was your fact i was like i was briefly top ranked in an obscure video game 10 years ago oh you had to get wedgies for that like they were like that's it this one saved the kids this guy's like i was a national champion wrestler d1 and i'm like i briefly was really good at a weird skateboarding game that's hilarious um the non-profit stuff is interesting uh what was the operators association were you kind of mentoring young people going into the yeah dude i appreciate you yeah there was a period of time uh so i i was medically retired from the navy in end of 2017 uh and then you know mr ballin you know the viral moment the posting of the hiker video happened in very early 2020 so there's like you know two-year window there where i i did stuff and what i did is i i in an effort to to find myself a job i um i wound up connecting with some sort of random people in new york uh that were like business people one of which is a great guy this guy jordan selleck uh who's this former investment banker turned entrepreneur and and like it just so happened he was sort of trying to help his buddy who was a fighter pilot who was like trying to find his way in the world be connected on linkedin it's a whole thing it turned into jordan who's like this master networker he says to me he's like dude if you want a job you can totally just like go apply for jobs or really you should just like network like meet people because you have no idea how powerful that is one thing leads to another and before long like jordan and i are like organizing this like networking event in new york for like a year and a half and i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm going to bring all the transitioning navy seals that i know there's many or guys that have gotten out that don't have a job yet and then like jordan's going to bring all his business connections and we like have these events and so we have like this inaugural event in new york city in like may of 2018 or whatever it was 2017 2018 and um i went to be a participant to like go and meet employers but like naturally i sort of emceed the event hey guys we're gonna get started i got my suit you know i've just bought and and people assumed that i had that was my job and so nobody no employer talked to me and i was like what the hell like i i helped organize this nobody wants a job but it came out later they're like oh we just assumed this was your job that this is what you do uh that turned into a charity elite meat you didn't bring it up but sort of in tandem with operators association i and jordan uh we were a team for a couple of years uh and we put on like i don't know five or six of these like pretty pretty decent size like events a couple hundred people a bunch a bunch of people and i was like oh my god i don't know how much of veterans got jobs it was my job my job became fundraising i'll be honest that was my job and it was like phone call fundraising it was like micro donations it was it was a a slice of humble pie because it's like if you want to ask people for money on on every single day like it's people don't like that some people do some people don't and and i did that for a while but then towards the end of like 2018 2019 um i was looking for other things to do i think that i'm someone that does well when i have something new to chase a little bit and one area that was just sort of naturally already happening is when you have been a navy seal it's probably true of like green berets of any sort of like select any any group in the military that has a selection that's required to pass in order to join that group there's all these people that want to be a navy seal that can read all they want about the selection course what goes into it what do i need to do to prepare for it but there's nothing that really beats speaking to an actual navy seal especially like a relatively current one and so it's just sort of a thing that when you get out of the military if you have a social media account of any kind or if you if you are publicly available in any way aspiring navy seals are gonna come they're gonna come calling and they want to ask you questions and they're super respectful and so i was getting hit with a lot of questions in virtue of being the ceo of elite meat i was sort of a public facing navy seal um which had its own challenges like i had people hitting me up a lot about people as an aspiring navy seals asking me questions and i wanted to centralize it uh and the guy that i was working with at the time not jordan but this other guy zach who was a green beret he was helping me with elite meat we were like hey like why don't we create like a patreon channel so it becomes sort of like if you want to be a navy seal you can be a navy seal you can be a navy seal you can be a access to us on like a really personal level like it was very cheap but it was like people need to show they're committed to it like pay five bucks or whatever but then we have like this sectioned off group of people that we can like train with we can give them i was making podcasts like four or five times a week for these guys i was like pouring my heart and soul out because some of these guys went on to become navy seals it was like really cool um but that that was i only did the operators association uh for like eight or nine months before um one of the guys one i felt like i had sort of given all the stuff i could give and also my currency as a navy seal was dwindling because things changed quickly in the teams the training changes like what i went through is probably comparable to what you do now but it's not the same and youtube was really becoming my main focus and so i handed everything to zach and i said go forth with operators association and he still does he's still running it now and he's more of like the bring the guys to a location and like put them through literal physical training and it's like really grueling and people love it so that's sort of what i did and i'm still doing it and i'm still doing it and it's sort of transitioned into that but the logo for operators association it's actually me in afghanistan it's my silhouette of me in afghanistan with a backpack on like about to make entry into some building and so that my legacy is i'm still on the logo but i i'm not involved with it anymore what would you have told a 19 year old john allen coming to ask advice oh man i was lost as a 19 year old i uh so i grew up in quincy mass which is just south of boston massachusetts very successful family like maybe not like financially hugely successful but definitely not hurting you know we were like firmly middle class and you know my dad's a successful reporter and my mom's like she's a she's a part-time freelance journalist she's a librarian but like really well spoken really sweet people you've had an unfair advantage in your family with what you do i do i mean my my i've multiple pulitzer prize winners in my family which definitely helped um but i uh i i had the aptitude i i should say to like be successful academically which was a big thing in my household like being being an academic achiever and i i just didn't want to do that i think i just wanted to like carve my own path but like my form of rebellion was like just literally being a bad student as if that would like get me somewhere why in a funny way were you an asshole no actually not really we're teachers like john you could do better than this oh constantly yeah yeah like like you're not applying yourself you're literally just not you're not doing anything i was like skipping school himself yeah like yep and and i think also my uh my sister evan my older sister she sort of was similar she skipped school constantly like good surprise evan pull it pull it yeah constantly but evan i mean truly i i would argue that it that she she probably has near genius level intellect just pure intellect pure genius level intellect just pure intellect pure computing brain power like she uh when she was like 12 she without telling anyone wrote a story about the salem witch trials but from the perspective of like a daughter of someone who was being accused fiction like the daughter of like somebody being accused of being a witch but it was like from the perspective of like this child and i think she's like in bed and she's like the 1600s you know and it's it was a short story competition she enters it and she fucking wins that's a great approach to that story oh it was brilliant and so she wins and so she like told us like hey so i wrote on her pseudonym and i won this competition i can't say it's me because it's 18 or older oh yeah and so she's 12 and she's like won it uh but evan so she would like skip school all the time like all the time and she just like crushed cigarettes and just was like a total like loser but like she this episode sponsored by she's birdie you lock the hotel room door then check it again and maybe one more time because even the nicest room can feel unfamiliar at night that's why she's birdie created birdie box with she's birdie you can bring peace of mind with you birdie box is a portable travel door alarm for hotels dorms airbnbs and anywhere you stay away from home just attach it to the door frame switch it on and if someone opens the door birdie box blasts a loud siren and flashing alarm to alert you and everyone nearby because the best part of travel isn't worrying it's the best part of travel it's sleeping soundly birdie box from she's birdie locking in peace of mind wherever you stay for safer more confident travel visit she's birdie.com that's s-h-e-s-b-i-r-d-i-e.com was so so so smart that like teachers couldn't they like couldn't fail her because she could come in and like ace every test she was better than everybody else and so she sort of like was pushed through high school but like i didn't have that i had like that you could probably be a pretty good student but you're you're just sort of skipping school and like the class clown sort of guy um but i uh i my sort of like for my the moment that things really changed for me. And I realized that my tendency towards sort of like bad behavior was in part because I didn't really have a goal, um, was when I was, uh, I went, I, I barely graduated high school in the sense that I probably could have failed on truancy alone. Like I just didn't go, but I graduate and I didn't apply to college or I should say I haphazardly like half applied left. Some of my applications were incomplete. Uh, and parents aren't on your ass. They were though. And that's the only reason they didn't be. I didn't really, I didn't really, but my mom who is, you know, she's a brilliant writer and she actually was the writer for our podcast for the first year. Um, she wrote my essay that I, that she sent it off as me to UMass Amherst. Uh, and so again, my grades are terrible. Like it's, it's all bad. My mom writes my essay and we send it off and UMass got in touch with me and they're like, Hey, you know, your grades are really not what we're looking for. But my God, that essay was just brilliant. She wrote this essay about, uh, it was really short too, which is sort of the brilliance of the essay. It was about my, my best friend, this guy, Ray, uh, he, he lived down the street from me in Quincy and we came from a completely broken household, like in, in all the worst ways, like drug abuse, like you name it. It's like the worst stuff happens in that house. And he would come to our house and it was like, he was another son. He was a brother. He was beloved. He'd come on vacations with us, but he always had to go back home and it was always bad for him. It was like he, every time you saw him over the years, it's like, he's got a new tattoo and it's like clearly not professionally done. And he's like 14, he's got bruises on him. He's got track marks, you know, things are going bad and worse and worse for him. And you know, he, he completely fell into the trap of drug addiction. He had a kid very young. Um, is this the guy who robbed your house? And then he robbed my house. Yeah. He robbed my house. And I remember, uh, we hadn't seen him in a long time. He led his friends in the side door and he stole some stuff, some pretty valuable stuff. But like, we knew it was him cause there was nobody else that would have, like we had seen him that day and he's so down on his luck. And by this point, he's not really in my life anymore, but he left me this voicemail after it was like maybe the same day. And he wasn't saying that he did it, but he was like apologizing cause he knew like I've broken the sacred trust that you've given me. But it's like, we, we know your life is broken, you know? Uh, but he ends up, he OD'd and he died when I was 21. Um, but you know, before that, when the essay was written, it was about the last time we saw Ray and it was, it was actually the day he robbed our house. Uh, he came to the house and he was like lingering. And it was almost like he was looking at the house. Like be like it used to be but like his his buddies in the car was like the music blasting you know and it's like smoke coming out the windows and it's like he knows he's he's got to go with his friend you know he's got to go to the life that he doesn't want to be in anymore and my mom described and this is true i didn't go out and say bye to him and i didn't even tell my mom why i just like stayed in the i knew he was out there i could see him through the window but i didn't he wanted me to like wave to him and i just wouldn't do it i didn't go to the door i just sort of stayed in the house were you angry at him i had never expressed my feelings to anybody about it it was like i drifted so far from him and i wasn't mad i just like i knew like we are no longer compatible like our lives have so diverged and so my mom wrote the essay about him and it was just this contrast of like what happens when your life is broken from the start and it was just really good and so i got into college largely on the strength of that essay um and i proceeded to shit it all away uh i all just on stupid stuff like i was in this there are these dorms at umass amherst there's all these sections of the campus it's a huge undergraduate school there's like 30 000 students or something um there's like five or six sections that are that are the the housing areas and one of them is called southwest and southwest is like the place to be okay if you want to like party we all had those quads that's the one and the reason for that was you know it had that reputation for a bunch of reasons but a big one is it had these i think five like mini skyscrapers that were like 26 story kind of sort of narrow buildings that were just packed with students and the buildings were all on top of each other and like this is like western massachusetts where there's like really nothing around this is like this is it and it's it had a reputation for that's where you go to just be a knucklehead right and i had to be in southwest you know and i was so i got into one of the towers uh and i uh i had like 30 some odd violations my first semester these are stupid stuff like you're doing my my roommate jake who i didn't know he was awesome awesome dude he's like hey bro like i'm gonna uh i'm going home for the weekend and i was gonna stay at the school it's like this is an example of things i would do i'm gonna go home for the weekend uh my my mom's sending me a reading pillow one of those big like heavy pillows you you sit up against oh okay like a big pillow he's like would you mind just like because they can't leave it in the box you got to get it and bring it up and i was like of course of course i'll get your pillow and so he goes home for the weekend and his pillow arrives and i bring it up and i shred it to pieces what's the matter with you threw the fluff all over the hallway but like they're it's a pillow no reason no reason no and so like there's that one time uh we we would go to the the cafeteria the the amazing dining halls at umass these are huge dining halls and they they had like you know soda machines like you know and and there's like this mixer that like for orange juice they don't put like tons of orange juice into it it's like there's like the syrup and the water that mixes and you make the juice and i was like dude let's get some of that syrup and we can like mix it with water up in our rooms and we can have juice and i realized when i got up there to my my little room up in the 26th floor that like there's really no good way to do this you need like you know industrial tools to mix the syrup and so naturally i lopped the top off of where'd you get the syrup we just stole it she stole it and we like we just like you know dumped it out in the hallway and it was so sticky that they couldn't really clean it up and they'd like professionally clean the carpets we i had like 20 some odd noise violations like i weed was constantly coming out of the door constantly getting read up for that uh you wanted to get in trouble i i think there was an element of like i just i really just didn't care and then it all came to a head when at the end of the semester mind you also this whole time i'm telling my folks things are going great things are going real i'm telling you what i'm really taking a liking to college things are really good i'm getting pretty good grades you know i'm not i'm not i'm literally not going to class getting pretty good grades things are going pretty good like it's going horrible they don't know that and so at the end of the semester uh our football team who admittedly no one really cared about like there there there are some guys that have gone pro like it's a big deal but like the school is just not really a football school like yeah it's like yeah cool we have a football team well we we like find out because no one was paying attention to this team that they had made it to the finals they were like they were going to play appalachia state for the final like whoa right we find this out wow i didn't even know and they're not even home they're like away and they played the game on like the umass tv this is like pre-streaming this is 2006 2007 and so i remember like for whatever reason it was like everyone especially in southwest was like great we're just gonna watch this game like let's go umass i hope we win this game and they lost fair and square good game they lost and for whatever reason it was like there was just this energy oh no in southwest people were like this doesn't sit right with me we should have lost this game that i didn't care about until six hours ago it wouldn't be a good idea i look out the window of my little these stupid little windows that barely open and there was just people starting to like mass up in the center of these five high rises there's like this little pyramid you can sit on it's like you know the size of a football field and just people were just like coming out of their rooms and just sort of milling about all the lights are on they have these these they have riot lights at umass because riots are a thing there and that the riot lights are a thing there and that the riots are a thing there and that the riot lights go on well before anyone's doing anything but what it did is it looks like oh like are we rioting is this a riot it's a riot and like people like what's going on here and then suddenly this kid he climbs up on the awning of our of our cafeteria that overlooked this this area where we were amassing and he yells put this on youtube and he runs and leaps off the roof expecting i guess people to be like we'll catch you no one caught him it's western mass we're not catching you blasting the ground clearly breaks one of his legs and the crowd just goes and it was madness it literally was like that kicked off like a storm of just chaos people are picking up rocks throwing them through windows i'm completely sober completely sober again only recently invested in this game that i didn't even know and i was fully committed to that riot oh was i a part of that riot and like the riot police should have been the one that did that riot police should have been the one that did that riot police should have been the one that did that riot police show up like the riot police should have been the one that did that riot police show up like the mounted riot police like mounted riot police like mounted riot police like hundreds of these vandalized property hundreds of these vandalized property hundreds of these vandalized property uh well i could have statute of limitations uh well i could have statute of limitations uh well i could have statute of limitations oh yeah fire rocks all over the place just oh yeah fire rocks all over the place just oh yeah fire rocks all over the place just complete debauchery sober like a hundred percent sober so the cops come are they in hats and bats so bad and they brought their rubber pellets oh no and very quickly the crowd once the the riot police showed up like the crowd sort of began to to dwindle and there was a hardcore group of like maybe 50 people and i was one of them i had i had taken my shirt off and wrapped it around my head because of the cs gas in the air and i had been shot like by the the pelican so many times and like i just stayed out there like i couldn't go in i was like so enamored with like evading the police like running all over the place and like everybody else is going in i was just still firing rocks all over the place and just staying out and i finally like i go in my room i i like i could tell if i stayed out any longer i'm gonna get arrested and i go in my my dorm i run up to my room i'm like man that's fucking awesome and i i my pockets fired up oh dude i was stuck like what was i thinking no this was great and then my pockets i had pellets in my pockets because i had been shot so many times by these rubber bullets that just by probability alone they had peppered the top of my pocket and like landed in my pockets i have like pellets in my pocket welts on your skinny bear oh dude all over me covered in welts and i'm just like awesome go to bed no problem next day i wake up and it's like there's there's a haze over the campus like there's just fog had rolled in and like it looked like just a war zone there's broken glass everywhere and i'm like damn and like that day we started to hear like hey uh they have uh the this website the umass police they were running a video and pictures of everybody out there and there's this anonymous page where it's just pictures of the riot and anybody can identify anybody in these pictures and like that day day like 12 hours later people were being escorted off the campus and expelled yep i was fucking hated on my floor and i immediately found you were already hated already because of so many noise violation people like who the fuck is this freshman idiot who's just causing problems people were looking at me and i was like oh i'm speaking for you like i bet john was in there and i found i think it was like two pictures that were like that's me and so amazingly no one named me at least not yet but it was right at the end of the semester and grades come out and i had a 1.016 and a little lower than my folks expected and i also due to the number of violations they had this rule that even if your violations are minor if you i think it's like 20 in a semester you are banned from being in the dorms you you can still go to school but you must live off campus and so all at once my parents were told well your son has a 1.016 gpa so he's going to put on academic probation if he can even continue here and he must live off campus which is like imagine making the decision to send your kid off campus who's just been doing all this and so my dad comes up to meet with the dean thinking he's going to like talk it through with him and it's going to be fine and he realizes pretty quickly that the dean's like no you you're going to live off campus and you're going to get your grades up or you're going to go to school and so we have this like really stark meeting and my dad's like furious does your dad know how hard it is to get thrown off a immerse like you have to beg he did say he's like this is unbelievable yeah and i uh we left and we're sitting on this bench and i'm like fuck like i now i realize this is pretty bad and i'm like dad uh also he still has damage here there's a pretty big riot here and i explained that like i'm in these pictures it's a matter of time before i get named and expelled and he's like you have to withdraw from school and come home and so amazingly i i withdraw to avoid expulsion basically and i go home and i'm literally i move into my mom's basement my parents were split i moved my mom's basement and i actually remember and this is the change that happened the 19 year old me i'm in my mom's basement and i was so fucking mad at my parents at your parents yeah like how dare you i have my i have my friends at school you took this from me but quickly i don't know what it was there wasn't like a specific moment but like it it just set in like dude no one fucking cares about you like you're a dude who had every opportunity this is entirely architected by you and my mom to her credit was just ruthless when i came home i come home there's zero sympathy she's a very sweet woman she's like a librarian she's like you're gonna pay rent and if you don't you can leave if you want to go to college great you can figure that out all on you you want to be an adult you want to fuck around like go for it you can stay with my mom brutal brutal get the note card of all the money i owe her oh my god we had a whiteboard yep down to how much toothpaste i used and uh but it was really important for me yes and it cleaned my act up real quick and i i set my sights on first i'm gonna go to school locally get my grades up and i ultimately went back to umass amherst and i did graduate but it also as i began reshaping my life getting a job getting good grades being diligent getting high and playing skate and ranking in the world doing all those things it's when i fell in love with like the idea of being a seal in part because it was like it's this one place that i had found where truly just about anyone can try out you need to be an american citizen there's some medical requirements but for the most part it's like if you're in decent enough shape you're a citizen you can go try out you know even now like women can do it too but like only a handful of people get through and i met some seals that were like a lot of guys that become seals often have call it resumes that look like mine where it's like you fucked everything up hold on is this art camp day is this that you went to art camp and talk to the guys in the shed yeah dude that is the art camp tell us what happened you said there were some cia guys oh yeah dude what was going on that so so yeah actually so i i i got my grades up with school so i i kind of got back on my mom's good terms she stopped squinting at you a little bit because it was like i i got a job i was i was scanning ids at the ymca at the gym at like the 5 a.m crew i i didn't have a car so i would get up at like three and i would bike on my little 10 speed to the ymca three miles away i looked at it as like i looked at it it's like i want this to suck for myself i want to like earn this and so i'm biking at three in the morning um and i do my little scanner job and then after my like three hours of work i would hop in the train go to umass boston which was very easy to do at the time and i i was getting my act together right and so after three semesters of good behavior of paying rent of being like a high functioning kid i began thinking about what i was going to do after college because now it's like okay i can probably graduate i'm going to graduate from college right now hold on when you when you're being a good kid was it going against your grain or were you really turning it around inside your brain no i i felt good about it because sometimes you have to act the part before it sticks i i was embarrassed i think yes and i don't even know i don't know it was like came home and i was mad from being brought home from umass amherst but then something quickly clicked that like this was my fault and i suddenly sort of saw myself for the first time as like a really ignorant entitled little brat who had gotten away with acting like an idiot for a long time and like literally my mother wrote my essay that got me into that school and my parents paid for it like what are you doing it was like embarrassing and so i think i wanted to not be a fuck up anymore like genuinely and so as i'm turning my act around and not even like within like several months i'm like back on track i'm like training like like i'm working out i'm like i'm like doing stuff that like shows i'm being responsible and you're studying for seals at this point right not really i was not really i and that's it sort of all happened at once i'm like maybe a sophomore slash maybe as a junior at this point but it was like no i was a sophomore in college i'm still at umass boston so i'm still living at home but i'm still living at home and i'm like okay like i've sort of turned my act around a little bit i i was thinking about what was next you know like i knew i would graduate i was studying philosophy really with not a clear shot for what i would do i just loved philosophy i love thought experiments um and uh i didn't really have a plan but a lot of my buddies when i graduated high school joined the marines and they went off to iraq and afghanistan and you know i just i looked at that as incredibly honorable not so much literally what they did but just in a time of war to volunteer is a big move you know one it doesn't matter what you think about it it's a big move and i i always sort of i would find myself wishing that that had been what i did in part because of my fuck up and all that and so service was on my mind i wanted to serve i was thinking about it and i remember talking to my mom who at this point she softened the way she treats me she's back to being very very gentle jesse the librarian and i was like you know i'm like after after college i not i don't know how or what exactly i've been thinking about it and she's like oh you you should talk to they're they're sort of family friends more specifically uh my mom's best friend is this woman susan and susan is like a she's a close family friend i've known her for years and i knew she had brothers who are military i didn't really know what they did and my mom's like oh yeah you should go talk and i'm like oh yeah i was like what like what do they do what do they do in the military you didn't absorb at this point that seals don't really talk too much about what they do that didn't stick yet she goes actually you know what uh they're they're retiring they they they were navy seals and i'm like what the dudes have like seen at barbecues that are just like hey what's going on guys just like non-nonchalant it like it didn't compute and it was like so amazing and i'm like oh my i've i've talked to them i i like know them but now it's i've seen them all over again and my mom's like actually you They were a part of SEAL Team Six. - They were on Six? - They were on Six six was like doing everything like they were they were like on team six and i don't want to totally give up who it is but like basically they were like leading stuff on team six when the war on terror began so like okay special operations are going to go do some of the gnarliest combat that's ever happened they're the ones that are like leading it and therefore it like very hardcore stuff and so i began like looking at what it took to be a navy seal and it's like so cool they're just just cool had really no sense of what it would really entail he calls me he's like you're gonna come up to uh to the camp up new hampshire military camp or compact no like and i'm like okay all right i will and it's this is the day of this is the day's like pre-gps it's like map quest directions and so i uh i tell my mom like i guess i'm going like some camp and she's like oh oh it's susan susan's art camp i'm like what you're at the art camp he made it seem like this was not an art camp this is like hardcore i don't know what he's doing he talked about shooting guns and stuff like i'm pretty sure it's not art camp and and she's like no no it's it's definitely her art camp i'm like this is weird so i put it in map quest to go to the the camp out in new hampshire and i'm driving there following these directions and it's bringing me out into the sticks and then i i get to the camp and it looks like it's a beautiful kids camp it's a sunny day there's literally kids running around like playing with bubbles and there's like it's a music camp and it's beautiful oh it's nice and i and i go in there and i'm like i find susan who she's up in fatigues what did you do i was like in just gym clothes i didn't know what i'm gonna do and i just see this like gravel road that like goes up and over a hill off into the forest like i don't even know what's up there and i'm like okay and so i drive my car around and i'm just like going up this rise and like the road is just like going on and on it's like deeper into the forest and it eventually comes to this like ramshackle plywood hut that's just sitting like conspicuously in the middle of this clearing and it nobody would look at that and think a professional built it it's like a children built this hut but it's huge it's like this pretty big space and i park my car and like i get out and i don't i don't even know what we're doing here i've been told to come to the camp that's it and immediately when i get out of the car i hear the sound of like men bullshitting with each other and in in the hut these are not like teenagers these are not these are fucking men that are bullshitting they're they're they're laughing there it's a it's a lot of them and i'm like fuck like i have to go in there like i'm so intimidated and so i'm like all right you gotta go like i've driven out here you gotta go in and so i hear him talking this is the first test right here in a way i kind of felt like that's what it was and so i walk over and it's gravel every step is so loud there's no soundproofing here the seals heard you oh dude yeah of course they knew this was happening and i walk over and i get to the the door which are these crappy hinges on it and you can't see through it and i was outside the door and it just goes silent inside i slowly open the hut it's like and there's no furniture inside it's just like a vacant space with all these upturned buckets that like 10 or 12 dudes who were like some of the most physically intimidating people i've ever seen who by the way a lot of them were active duty team six guys that are just sitting on the ground and they're like oh my god they're like oh my god they're on these buckets they're all like chewing tobacco and they all turn and look at me and one of them goes who the fuck are you that's perfect and i was like oh hi i'm jonathan i'm i'm jesse's son and then dave's like i don't know who the fuck you are like get in here and then they were like really cool uh but dude they they go up to this camp it's it's sort of a not well kept secret but like they'll bring guys up there even though they're retired and they'll like take guys through some shooting training but it's sort of like crazy shit they do because it's not really sanctioned they just like go out there but they'll bring guys that are like you know like they're like that are like like active duty team six guys they go out and train out there and so i had the chance to like chat with these guys some of them are about to go like deploy to parts of the world that like no one knows we're in and on the one hand it was like holy shit this is like a different species i'm not around normal people right now like it was just it's hard to even put into words how impressed i was with these people but the other part of it that it was like when i had my like i had a moment when i sat down with this guy who's a seal he's an older seal he was he was in beirut when it was bombed the famous marine barracks bombing he was out there so he's he's written a couple of books and he's the guy that told me he's like you know buds buds it sucks you know buds at basic underwater demolition seal training it's like seal boot camp it's it's brutal you know it's all those things but he's like i'm telling you like it's amazing like he just said described it as the best time you never want to have again and he's like the people that make it it isn't that they're they're battling oh boy should i quit today or not because you can quit at any time you know he's like the people that really want to go a lot of times they they don't really have an alternative it's sort of like they fucked their lives up or they they had opportunities they squandered or whatever it is but they have something to prove you know and he's like a lot of the people that make it they refer to it as a calling that it's not it's like today i've decided to be a seal and i hope i don't quit when i'm in training it's like no i have to go try i have to do it i have to see if i stack up against this and as soon as it was put to me that way i realized that like this is like the most incredible thing i've ever like been around and i then went out and like shot ak-47s with them and like they're telling me their stories about buds and like deployment and it's just so surreal and i came back from that trip and it was like 100 i'm gonna go become an av seal or more specifically i wasn't that sure of it it was more like i for sure i'm gonna try and it's gonna be if i don't make it i'm okay with that i'm okay with like didn't make the cut but i'm not gonna go and see what happens you knew you were gonna make it though you just you feel like you're gonna make it i could do this i think that's true and i would even say like when i went out to coronado for training and this is not this is pretty much universal for the guys that make it i never had a moment where i was like i'm gonna make it i'm gonna oh boy am i gonna quit today i didn't did i have moments of pathetic weakness of just embarrassing failure of course like there are moments of like horrible failure like i i have like totally humiliating moments in my training but i never ever ever was like hmm i might quit better talk myself out of it never came close never and i there are moments in buds that are so fucking miserable like there we would do these like log carries where you're and it sounds so like oh it's just a heavy log right no no you you're barely sleeping you're in the freezing ocean like all the time and then you would do i think what what do we call them like the elephant walk or something where you and your your your swear what they call your boat crew who are similarly sized people so long as the class is big enough to afford you that you hold this telephone pole that's not even that heavy it's a heavy pole but it's not as heavy as a true telephone pole but you hold it in in your front like this you can't hold it up like this you literally can't hold it down here because you'll drop it and you're walking on really soft sand in the heat and you're all walking in line and you're just walking for a mile this way and then you go up and down the berm a few times then a mile back you are imagine holding any weight with your biceps just basically non-stop it becomes if you haven't done this the pain you feel in your biceps if you just hold it long enough is excruciating and there are instructors that walk in line with you and you're just walking in line with you for each of these logs that are just like waiting because it's considered at times they'll consider it quitting if you drop the log and they're like you you bitched out of this it's called a non-verbal dor drop you quit yep see ya and so you you basically have to suffer constantly it's like this out-of-body level of suffering but you do it like all the time in butts and you slowly come to realize that it's always horrible but you can do it if you have like the constitution and the guys that suck around the most random group of guys it was like a guy who had never swam before he literally hadn't swam and he's like yeah i'm trying out for buds dude this is a huge swimming component yeah we'll figure it out and he did we had a guy who he went to boot camp this guy's incredible by the way he he walked on to the um indiana's football team like as like a 23 year old or something like it was unheard of after the teams he went to the boot camp didn't know what a navy seal was in today's age this doesn't happen doesn't know what a seal was but they do offer to all the people who are in naval boot camp hey if anybody wants to go take a physical screening test for for the seal teams you're welcome to do it today because the buds guys are doing that you can go do it nobody does it he was like all right i'll go do that has no idea what he's getting himself into passes the pst goes to buds never fails a single test becomes a navy seal and he's amazing i think he went to dev crew team six for a while i don't know if he did he gets out he's like he's turned into like the incredible hulk too he put on so much muscle all natural he's huge and he's like i'm gonna go play football never played football in his life walks on to the indiana team but it's just like you said out of body that's interesting i think a lot of the guys who make it learn disassociation almost like meditation like that's my body i'm i'm not really there and just let it happen definitely are there guys who just sail through buds yeah and there's actually there's a name for it there's uh it's first time every time other guys that like never fail a test it's a real thing like i i there's a buddy thing called bge or vge it's a it's a stomach virus and he got it right at the end so in seal training and buds it's it's six months long and like the really brutal physical part of it is like the first two months it's called first phase and it's just like it's like the log carries it's like a million push-ups and that kind of thing but hell week is a component of that and it's it's a week of really no sleep and constant training it's it's five and a half days you sleep for a total of four hours broken up into naps and i can tell you there isn't anybody who wants to take those naps they're they're the worst thing they're the worst part of hell week in some ways so you basically you're awake training non-stop you're in the ocean it's miserable so it's going to be hard no matter what he got vge bg whatever the stomach virus montezuma's revenge is what it's colloquially known oh no you're vomiting and you're pooping the whole time and uh he got it like the week of leading into hell week so the last few days a brutal first phase before like and next week is hell week he can't keep a meal down he's with we're all withering away because we would we would finish up the day at like 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock and we'd eat like gallons of ice cream and cheese it's an oreo what nothing was enough you're you're you're burning so many calories the instructors were like just eat eat constantly right it wasn't enough you're still losing all this weight he couldn't keep anything down never complained not once goes into hell week he's like dying during hell week he's he'd be running with the boat on your head as we do throughout the whole time and he's like vomiting he's like pooping himself the whole time and hell week you're up against how long it is is the really that's the hard part of it it's like any the closest thing i can think of is like if you've ever gone for a run just any run that is uncomfortable for you to do it doesn't even matter what it is maybe if you're it's a mile maybe it's 10 miles whatever but some distance where you start to think man this is gonna take a while and every second sucks so hell week is sort of that feeling and it never really goes away and it's so so long and it's so physically demanding that like every second really feels like an eternity and then what makes it even worse is invariably you sort of lose your mind you you start to feel like you're losing your mind and you start to feel like you're losing your mind and you start to hallucinate really badly uh at about like the 72 hour mark you start to hallucinate but like you're acutely aware of how bad it is and how slow it is but you're not able to form coherent thoughts and so everybody's struggling and is like dying from bg and and like he's being talked to by the medics because if you don't quit like they really won't pull you out of training they will let you keep going pretty much to the brink of death if you want to you know and this dude just like never quit never complained had probably the worst week of anyone's life and then afterwards like he just never talked about it just went never failed a test it's like there are people that just have this capacity to just do things that are just unbelievable and you see it a lot in seal training i was not like that i was definitely more of the complaining type more of like the bitching type uh but i i think that it's funny my nickname was uh at some point in training uh because i just was always telling stories and i think that one of the things that i brought to the table like there was this area in in on the buds compound that was sort of sacred that even the instructors they gave you this space it was known as the pit and all it is is like this little space behind the first phase barracks where all the students who are in first phase go and the fence that sort of is up against the back end of the beach so it's like this literally three or four foot section of space that runs like you know a hundred yards or whatever and it's it's you're in sight of the instructors but you're sort of obscured by a fence in the barracks and the instructors even tell you like when you're in there we'll leave you alone and when we're in there and it's like for five minutes at a stretch or whatever um i would always just like be telling stories like bullshitting and like fucking around with people and honestly like what you find in in shared suffering is like everyone sort of has a role to play to like keep the vibe from getting overtly negative and i think one of the things that i found is like i was able to just tell people stories and that definitely was the thing that people were drew to they they were drawn to me because it was a distraction you know um but other guys like the ability to suffer well was incredible with some of these guys let's take a quick break because that's a good segue we'll come back and talk shop talk stories let's do it back in a minute oh got the flannel let's go you like it that's a good look dude is it yeah that's a pretty good look i i myself fancy that are you sick of it a little bit it's sort of like now the thing that is so synonymous with what do i do that it's sort of like all right but like uh when i'm not mr ball and i'm wearing nothing like this no of course not no yeah dude this is from reddit from the fans i love it let's hear it the old format was better he's phoning it in quality fell off sell out with the big bucks those are about me and veritasium and linus tech tips and mr ball and everybody oh wow same same across the board you thought i was talking about you i did i and i fully assumed that was about me no it still gets to me a little bit does it get to you it does uh and you know what i think that part of the reason that gets to me is i know there's some element of truth to it and it doesn't mean that oh boy i'm now covering it it's more like there is here here's the way i view it you go viral or whatever you have your spark on the internet let's say what what i think people don't necessarily know although it's sort of logical is that there's really kind of like two outcomes you go viral and you either find a way to sustain replicate whatever do it again make a name for yourself whatever or you don't it fades off that's sort of it it's sort of binary you don't hear about the people that fade it off and i can tell you just from just i'm not going to say who they are because it's totally throwing shade but like when i went viral on tiktok when there was no strange dark mysterious it was like i had a video that in think how many videos probably went viral today that in a week no one will remember like i had my moment there were these other creators that went viral at like the same time just by happenstance completely unrelated to me but there was this cool like almost uh like uh this is my graduating class sort of feel to it that like immediately i was in touch on tiktok with like all these other creators that were sort of comparable in speed of growth and like sort of their accounts whatever and a swap anything we knew because it helped both of us and all of them all of them just completely fell off not like oh you fell off i don't mean it that way i mean there was no sustainability long term there was too much like they had a thing that worked once and they just freaking drove it into the ground and i get it like in some ways like you could make the case that's exactly what i have done i have a thing the shtick that i do but what people don't know or what people don't let's say appreciate on the audience side is like you can't this can't be a long-term thing unless you're willing and able to make changes to make it a business on some level it's it's a total pipe dream to think that it isn't that it's possible to topic find research write shoot edit non-stop because by the way i remember i i was making five videos a week i remember that i was like how does this guy do it oh it was horrible it's horrible sounds horrible i took a week off when i reached a point you didn't panic taking a week off oh no it was like it's awful it was a true the purest form of writer's block i could even possibly imagine i was trying to write this story about these these two brothers in maryland who were hoarders and basically the story is that ultimately one of them dies amongst the mess and goes unnoticed by the other two brothers and they're like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die the other and they're like all your brothers the collier brothers it's a great story you can tell it if you want you know i don't know the details that well and i never actually i think i did tell it eventually but like um basically it's these two brothers and they're total hoarders and and it's just this grotesque story about hoarding and death they're a maze of newspapers yes yes and so i i i could not come up with like how to tell the story i couldn't do i don't even it was like what is happening i have the research i've done the research i'm ready to do i couldn't do it and i remember i started at like nine or ten in the morning to like start the process of this 20 some odd hour process to make this video and it was like the sun was starting to go down that night and i hadn't done anything it's the first time in months i've ever like missed this much time and i was like holy shit i can't do this and i went out and talked to amanda my wife and i'm like dude i can't write this episode and she's like dude take a day off yeah and so i i took a day which was like a week and i was like i'm gonna take a week off and i'm like okay i'm gonna take a week off and i'm like okay i'm gonna take a week off and i'm like okay i'm gonna take a week off and i'm like okay i'm gonna take a week off which again i have been creating effectively non-stop for like five six months and it's taken a big toll on me to a week off it isn't that i was met with a deluge of negativity not at all but this is the part that i'm coming back to this whole idea that like people don't necessarily see this the audience knows that like you have your platform because the audience is watching they have the power to give you the platform or take it away if you don't give them and i'm saying they not specific individuals but as a collective if you're not giving them what they want they will leave you it's it is not a friendship it's not like oh this is my my family member no it is a commodity that that they want and you're giving it to them this is so easy for them to just find someone else and it's it's immediately available it's right there and i remember coming back from that week and seeing for the first time comments about me not caring wow and it's like you know i i get it i can sort of see like off the top of my head like i'm not caring about it i'm not caring about it i'm not caring about it off the cuff and there's at this point you know millions of people i get it like there's going to be people that have their opinions but it like really hurt you know and you're not supposed i'm like i'm i'm like an adult i have kids like i'm an adult as i came into this i was a navy seal like i should be able to handle this stuff but it was really hard and it always stuck with me from that point forward that i i love i've met so many amazing fans i know you probably have too like there are some really incredible people out there that do comprise in some ways the majority of the audience sure but make no mistake if you're the one that is sort of the key key man if you will for the show you're on a hamster wheel that you must maintain if you don't the audience just goes away that it's not the same with traditional media not that i've ever had traditional media experience but in today's day and age with digital media if you want a career in this space you better find a way to do this over and over and over and over and never fucking stop ever or else it goes away and once you reach a certain scale when you have like a staff and you have expectations and you have people that depend on you and you're like a thing now as the creator like you need to make decisions that are designed to keep this thing going and sometimes what that means is i may need to bring in other people to help me do this because i can't fucking do this non-stop for the rest of the next 10 years or something and so when you see creators me you you named a few other people part of the reason they're still relevant is they've made decisions that may degrade in terms of quality compared to the first episode they ever did and also people have a lot of emotion attached to those first few episodes they were there with you you know they're they don't want to see a change they don't want to see a change and even if the changes are good the change itself represents what's going on here but like you don't get really much sympathy is the wrong word you don't get much slack if you start altering what you do at the same time that you've sort of perceived as growing and and being successful and uh so the sellout thing i i think that it doesn't like hurt but it's it's just purely a misunderstanding of how this really works i could have just as easily become obscure by not making changes and running myself into the ground and stopping making content and then guess what there wouldn't be any commentary about mr ball and because mr ball wouldn't exist it would be oh that was that thing that happened that one time for like a month on tiktok a while it wouldn't matter to you it wouldn't it's the fact that you're still hearing about the y files and aj and john and the mr is because they've done something that allows them to maintain a sort of near impossible to maintain thing which is a never-ending supply of content because that's your career it exists so long as you make content i don't know what happens when you stop but i'm pretty sure your career as a content creator changes pretty dramatically it does people tell me you know you're a slave to the algorithm and i tell them yeah that's that's how we make our livelihoods here yeah and if you take too much time off you will be punished the audience will punish you the algorithm punish you now new things show up in your feed sometimes i don't even see my own episodes on my feed same it's good oh because i didn't post last week because why i'm not getting impressions same so i went through phases of drinking too much not sleeping showering in the office it's like it's not glamorous you know it's so man is that true i dude i um in 2023 i had like the most banner year on paper that you could have like even now looking back it's astounding i i'd post a youtube video and it's like fucking a dillion views i remember those i a million in a day a million in a day dude it was like oh whatever i i had the podcast that we started and we had the fastest from conception of podcast or inception of podcast to signing of a mega deal we did it the fastest against anybody else at that deal size um it was like nine months from from we're gonna do a podcast hey we'll sign you to a fucking enormous contract for three years was that the amazon deal so only nine months to get that am like it was like i want to say it was 10 months 10 months and we're talking like tens of millions of dollars it it was like you know it was like 60 to 62 million dollars 62 million dollars that's what it was in fact i don't even know why that's so secret because my the deal was serious public too right um so it's 62 million dollars and i so in 2023 my youtube channel which by the way wasn't even licensed so i licensed my podcast and we were washing it was doing crazy crazy downloads but we for 62 million for the podcast and i have a youtube channel that's doing like 10 million dollars a year and so in 23 the reason i say all that i am making so much fucking money that i literally didn't even know what to do it wasn't like i'm gonna go buy a bunch of shit it was like i i don't even know who to talk to even my financial people i don't even know if they know what to do like there's money coming in and i don't even know if it's so high i'm i'm uncomfortable even talking about it so you don't have a support structure for this there's a point where my mom is my financial advisor until she's like i don't understand anymore it's not it's it's it's fun but it's also very stressful but at the end of 23 i was if not a alcoholic by some sort of definition i was close because i the oh my god it's like i've become sort of financially successful and right away there were like these really difficult exploitations that began happening in my life i actually you know i began doing a renovation i was telling you about this before uh you know and and the contractor basically took a ton of money for me a shit ton of money a half a million dollars for me and uh i was stupid enough to give it but it was like totally being gaslit into giving money and it's like they know that i'm i knew that i had money it was a thing and they're like taking the money and not doing the renovations and just extorting me for more money because they've gutted my house already and like then i had people that were coming in to work for me uh that are not with me now so this is nobody now but like that were just hugely exploitative and so at the end of 23 i am like in the eyes of being in terms of being a creator i got it all i got fucking everything you could ever ask for and i would work myself to death and then at whatever time i was done working i would just drink i just drink dude and it wasn't even for fun and it wasn't even as an outlet it was almost habitual it was just fucking drinking take it take it away i don't want to think about it it's the only way to sleep and then and so by the end of 23 i was so like right now i'm like like in the 170s i weigh about 170 and i'm like really on top of my like health and i'm sober but i was like i remember looking at the scale and it was like 199 and i'm like not exercising at all this is there's no part of this that is like good body comp i'm like out of shape and i had this ponytail i'd grown my fucking hair out like really bad and i don't even know why i was doing it it was sort of like this shtick that began when mr ballen happened i wasn't really cutting my hair and i just never did it and i had this like ponytail and i'm like i remember that i remember the long hair i was like just bloated looking and if you look it's fine if you look at the videos from 2023 and like early early 23 late 22 and a lot of the videos i'm hung over a lot of the videos and you can totally tell it i mean you can do oh dude i'm red face i have a whole year where it's like you don't even see the white in my eyes is skinny oh and i so you don't feel like a megastar at this point no no not at all and like i think that i also realized that um it's like a permanent shift in terms of like how you're viewed by like people around you like who really know you because now i think that i offered a lot to the world before this but now there's like a financial opportunity there's more than that there's there's like an opportunity for people that you represent that they can't really get elsewhere and i was sort of realizing that like i had i had very close friends that were from the teams that like trying to like get money out of me and it's like what the fuck it's like my circle just shrunk and i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm and I was like slurring. so physically just like, I felt so gross about myself and I'm like just drinking all the time. And then I shifted from, well, here, I'm going to stop boozing as much. And I'm going to just like eat edible marijuana, which is like, oh, no big deal. And it got to the point where, dude, I was, I don't know if you're familiar with dosing, but I was, I was eating like 200 milligrams of THC a night. I used to run a weed company. Okay. There we go. Perfect. 200 milligrams, which for some people, that's a lot. And this was, I'd worked my way up, but I, it wasn't enjoyable. I would take it and then I would like green out and I would grip the sheets. I would lay in my bed and grip the sheets as I would have these insane heart palpitations and I couldn't sleep. Every fucking night I would do it. It only brought me discomfort and pain, but I couldn't stop or I'd be drinking too much. And so it's like, I fell into the trap or whatever you want to call it of like huge success in sort of like a very specific way. Like money. And like, he's got like millions of followers, but like my life, my actual life is sort of falling apart all around me. But the idea of complaining about this to people, it's, it's a joke. Oh my God. I just had this fucking huge deal signed and I have this amazing stuff. And it's like, no one gives a fuck about you. They don't. And so it's, it's hard, man. It's your world shrinks. And so to the question or the comments around like you're a sellout, whatever, there's a huge toll to, to doing this. There's, I'm not saying that the challenges that I have are worse or whatever than other people's problems far from it. But the idea that like anybody that's been, you know, relatively successful in, in social media and content is just like living this great life. Like, dude, it's really hard. And it really changes your life in some really negative ways, especially when people start to associate you with money. And, um, what did Mrs. Ballin say during all that? My wife's awesome. Amanda, she's, she must be, she's fucking great. She's awesome, dude. I met her in college when I went back to college to EMS Amherst. The cool thing about Amanda is she, uh, doesn't give a fuck about Mr. Ballin at all. Like none, like, but she loves John and she loves me as her husband and the father of our kids. And she's just like naturally, very, very grounding for me because she met me when I met her. So I was in college. And by this point I've had my, my, my meeting with Dave and Pete up at the camp in New Hampshire. I'm back at UMass Amherst cause I reapplied. I'm going to close it out at UMass Amherst. I'm going to go to the SEAL teams. That's my plan. And so I'm like training a lot. I'm running and working out and I go to my buddy's apartment. Uh, and his mutual for a friend of his was this other group that Amanda was a part of. And she came over one night and then we're just like, sitting around this apartment. And Amanda and I just were like sitting by this, the kitchen island and we're just like talking. And, and, and I wasn't like, I wasn't bragging at all, but I was like talking about, you know, what I was going to do after college. And I was like, well, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to go try out and try to become a Navy SEAL. And Amanda, and most people when they hear this are like, Oh wow. Like, Whoa, cool. And Amanda, she's, she's, I'm sitting and she's standing next to me and just unprompted, she reaches up and she grabs, she grabs my arm, like my biceps, like reaches under and, and squeezes it. And she just goes, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if you're gonna make it. What did she say when you said I'm going to be a full-time TikToker? Oh, well, you know, the thing is, is by that point she had seen me cause she, she was with me when I, I was, she's been with me since 2010, you know, I was in buds. She was with me in buds. She was with me for all the deployments and everything. Um, she was with me when, uh, like I fucking lost my mind on my second deployment. When I went to South America, I had a mental breakdown. She's been with me for everything. Have you talked about that much? No. Right down in South America? No, I haven't. Do you want to share? You don't have to. No, I, I, I was brought it up for that reason because it really ties to Amanda. I, yeah, I haven't really talked about it. So in Afghanistan, the way that it's been sort of, the way that the story goes publicly about how I got medically retired is gets blown up by a grenade, survives, and then gets medically retired. And in some ways that is true. And, and I, I've never actually said explicitly. explicitly one exactly went to the next. It's always been like, well, you know, I got hurt. And then, you know, subsequently I did get medically retired and it was connected to the grenade. It was, but the, what people don't know is there actually was a deployment that happened in between that. I come back from Afghanistan, uh, in 2014, uh, I was literally blown up. Uh, and then like, I think it was like seven days later, I'm like literally pushing a shopping cart and like Home Depot, I'm like home, like hobbling around. No debrief, no processing. No. And they do have pro they have a way to do that. I, I didn't, I, because of the way wound care is handled and what I needed, I sort of was ushered out. And I, I felt like, uh, in the, in special operations in particular, no one, no one says this, but it's sort of a thing, or it was when I was in that, it's like, you won't, you want to go to war. You do. You want to go to war. And it's, it's not even like a bloodlust thing. It's more of a, this is the thing that we're supposed to be able to do. And it's sort of like this incredible, not in a good way, but like this like crazy thing to like go to war and to really actively be participating in it. Um, you know, and, and you've not fun. No. And I, I, I got the chance to go. And I say that, that sounds weird to say it that way, but like, I, I was, I was thrilled and weirdly enough. And this is some shit that I probably haven't even fully processed. I remember the last, one of the last things I told my wife before I went to Afghanistan, we don't have kids yet, but like I told her, I was like, I hope I die there. Oh no. And she's like, what the fuck are you? That's a terrible thing to say your wife. I was like, yeah. Like, I can't think of a better way to die than to be in combat. I was like, I, and I meant it. It wasn't even like, I'm so depressed. It was sort of like, the opposite. It was like, this is my hero's journey. I'm going to go die in Afghanistan. And I, I, I couldn't even believe I was saying it to her laying in bed in her house in Virginia. And she was like mad about it. She's like, why would you say this to me now? And I'm like, I'm just being honest. And so I had this like weird mentality and like, I go to Afghanistan and like, honestly, in a way it was many of the things I thought it would be. And many of the things I didn't, there were some fucking horrible things over there. Like the way that I acted at times, not like illegally or something, but the person I was, I was like, I'm going to die in Afghanistan. And so what I became was like, I was the guy that's, that would, would talk to people on target after the shooting was done. Or just like, I was like the interrogation is the wrong word. Cause it's, it's very sensitive. If you call yourself an interrogator, there's a whole course for that. There's levels of clearance. I wasn't any of that. I was like, I was known as a tactical questioner. And what it meant is I would often be alone with people that were just trying to kill me. And I'm trying to extract information from them really quickly about things that we need to know right fucking now. And I'm a Navy SEAL and I've been trained in certain ways. And there were things that I was doing that were like fucking barbaric and just like violence, committing violence to extract information. And you know, that voice going, dude, what are you doing? Yeah. And I was so fucked up at the same time. Again, like I never did anything that would, would like not pass the test of, are you allowed to, but I was not awful. No, it was like the humanity's gone. Yeah. Like we had a guy and I still think about this guy who came into our, um, our care, whatever you want to call it. He was like some sort of informant or something. I don't fucking know. And, um, I made the decision to shave his beard, which literally signals to any of his handlers that he's been in American custody. And what do you think happened to him? Got killed. Yeah. And I knew that was going to happen. In spec ops, do they train you to dehumanize the enemy to make it easier? Yeah. Yeah. I would think so. Yeah. And then there was this fucking. I don't know of another way. Huh? Well, there isn't. I mean, it's like, you're asking people to go commit violence, like really intimate violence. It's like, I mean, I, I, I struggled mightily with, with sort of the reality of what we have been asked to do, because, you know, when I look back at, at that deployment, I did all the things that we're trained to do, you know? And like, I remember there was this one kid and he lived, but just, sometimes we'd have people turned over we were staying at this outstation that's like way off in the sticks in afghanistan and periodically the afghani police or army would like drag in some person they claimed was like oh they're passing information to al-qaeda or the taliban and honestly it was so corrupt like there's 99 of the time it was just they didn't like somebody and somehow or another we got this 16 year old kid in our custody and i was called over to go talk to him and like i don't have kids kids at this point i'm like 25 or 6 or whatever i am and i'm in this small room with him and i made him stand in this like fucking like bin of ice for some reason which is just stupid but like i had him like stand in ice and it wasn't even i wasn't even like asking him questions i was like humiliating him and you got to remember that it sounds just like i'm i've lost my humanity but in a way like when you are in an environment where like it isn't that you are literally being shot at 24 7 and far from it but you're in an environment where death could come at any moment for real like we were in a base that like theoretically could be overrun at any time we had like this thing called a ptids blimp overhead that constantly looked for like suicide bombers that would attack us at any moment we had to sleep with like weapons right by our bed and had to be ready to go run out and like you know so you're living in an environment that's nothing like being a civilian and and in order to not just survive but thrive you you you you take on a lot of guys did this like primal state and when you're the guy that's meant to be in a weird way like the intimidator like you need to go in and you need to scare the fuck out of these dudes into giving you information you need to embody that you need to embody that you need to embody that persona and make sure your dudes are confident that you can do that and i really took to it and it's funny now it's not funny but like i'm so not the guy that's like walking around puffing my chest out trying to be like intimidating but like in afghanistan like i was i was the guy that was put in the room to like fuck with people and get them to give us information and like scare people into doing why would you be chosen for that i was really fucking good at it like walk me through and i was just i had this weird like ability to like stare at people and like get them to see that like i'm prepared to kill you right now i'm genuinely prepared to kill you did you ever tell them stories yeah because the stories can be used as a weapon for sure there was um there were definitely moments where i would like it was a little bit difficult like i i spoke very broken posh tune in farsi we had an we had an interrogator we had uh interpreters but like there were some people that broke really quickly and by broke i don't mean like lengthy interrogations or anything but like they just they quickly understood that you're in a closed room there's no surveillance overhead if if you die in here no one's gonna no one's gonna do anything about it yeah and they've been they've been up against nato for long enough to know that like you don't want to be in closed rooms with by the way i wasn't i was wearing like shorts like cut off shorts and i was like oh my god i'm gonna die in here i'm gonna die in here i'm gonna die in here i'm gonna fucking a flannel and like my kit doesn't look normal i have like a fucking bowie knife on my chest and i have like all this kit that's like not normal i have a fucking huge ass mohawk and this weird facial hair and i'm like gaunt and just like i've been out here like doing these operations for months and we've been getting shot at and shooting it back at people like it came across when i was in the room with people like my capacity for violence is higher than you and i'm backed by people out there right you're tied to a chair you you gotta do it and so um but that kid i remember i just i knew why he was handed over to us it was actually because he had taken some pot shots at us like our convoy as we like rolled into our camp or whatever and i don't really know what his story was but it's like okay you're a 16 year old kid we know that the taliban like routinely like you're a 16 year old kid you're a 16 year old kid you're a like summer summer rarely we'll just execute people in these neighboring villages we know there have been cases of people being told go shoot at the americans or we're gonna fucking kill your family yep and this kid is in this impossible situation where first of all if you shoot at at us forget nato if you shoot it at our platoon we're going to kill you yes and i and i don't mean like in a we might find you at some i mean like literally you're gonna die because we will find you and kill you there weren't any survivors so i mean that's an exaggeration but it was sort of like if we saw you and you engaged us you're fucking dead that's what's gonna happen we're gonna call in fucking jdams we're gonna lock on you with our 50 cal and our up armored vehicles where you can't even hit us even if you shot us 50 fucking times you're you're dead but this kid it's like he's shooting at a convoy he's been hand over handed over to us but like what else is he gonna do he probably was put up in a convoy he's been handed over to us but like it's like here i am like he didn't have that gun he didn't he had nothing he's a kid someone gave him the gun he's a kid and like but i was like dealing with i wasn't alone in the room and this doesn't i'm not putting blame on other people but it's like me and a more senior guy who's like watching and there's no blame here i don't think this is just a thing and i'm like getting physical with this kid and it's just he clearly doesn't even know what to do he wasn't mouthing off on or anything no he like literally didn't know what to do and eventually i sort of stopped and we let the kid go and it was like almost it was a joke by the end it's like fuck this kid like you can go he's not useful to us and we turned him back over and i know he he survived at least several days later but like the reason i say all that is like the actually no there's there's one other that i would say i've never spoken about publicly um towards the end of the time i was in afghanistan there was we did this operation where we were just sort of clearing this valley which sort of is a generic way of saying we were sort of marching through an area with known militants and we just were seeing what happened and we did get into a contact they were shooting at us we're shooting back at them but it was like at a distance and we totally within the rules of engagement called in an airstrike on on a group of military h males and we struck them we used a hellfire missile which is a precise small munition that is very lethal to like people close by but not so lethal if you're like 10 i'm probably wrong about the actual distances but like if you're near it but not that close you might get maimed but you're not going to die and um this guy this older guy got badly wounded uh we thought he was dead uh and so after you you kill someone or kill anybody we you know or even just after any sort of contact you do like a battle damage assessment you'll go and you'll like look at what happened and document it we have like these fingerprint scanners like it's called a seek you like take dead guy's hands and like so there's a process to it and it's literally to document what happened and it that it doesn't mean that we constantly were killing everybody and whatever but we went over to not me but another element within our platoon went over to do the battle damage assessment on this this drop and they found this guy as they're getting closer they could see he was still alive he's he's an older guy he's gravely injured um and he's he's clearly bleeding to death um he's like propped up against a tree he's he's fucking he's in a really bad way he's gonna die but he's totally alive he's like dying a slow and miserable death and i mean truly i can't even get into like who said this but put it this way there was there were there were senior people that were there that day and it was like uh hey alan like write a passage and they pulled a knife that we had we had gotten off of one of the guys we killed earlier and they were like go go finish him off and they were like as i took the knife and i'm walking over to this village like the guy's family was out like they're all out in the courtyard and and they were telling me i'm i'm fox trot eight was my call sign they were like make sure you make sure you go inside of a building first and i remember i just i didn't want to do it i i walk over to where there's this group of crying women and children and they know what's happening and i start walking over to this guy and i'm like i'm about to murder someone this is different this is different than other stuff and right as i'm like nearing him i didn't literally have the knife up but as i'm like as close as you and i are and i see how fucked up he is and he's looking at me and he knows what's happening one of the best fucking dudes i've ever met on the planet also a new guy he walked over and he was like no you're not doing that and he literally he came over the radio and he's junior the junior guy and they're very senior dudes on target this is a fucking big deal he's like he's not doing this right he's not doing this right now we're gonna call in a medevac we're gonna get this guy help we cannot become fucking savages we can't kill people like this can't do it where you get where you're gonna do it yeah and that in a weird way even though i didn't do it and the guy was brought to a hospital i gotta be honest i don't know what happened to him like in a way i've i don't know what to do with the fact that i would have killed him that's a moment that changes you it's different than shooting in a building i don't know what to do with the fact that i would have killed him that's a moment that changes you it's different than shooting in a building i don't know what to do with the fact that i would have killed him that's a moment that changes you it's different than shooting in a family and i mean dude so not long after that like very shortly after that day um you know i have the the near-death experience of the grenade blowing up near me and i'm suddenly like medevaced out of country and i'm like back home and i just i never the mentality of being that guy the interrogator if you will the guy willing to to murder uh it didn't go away you know and it didn't mean that i was like being violent but like what do you mean it didn't go away you carried what i was so fucking mad yeah and you know what's funny and i can only i know this now i remember being so critical mentally like internally very critical of anybody who claimed ptsd who in my mind didn't deserve to be to be able to claim that because i i in my mind i'm like i'm a fucking navy seal i've been to war i fuck i almost died you know i i'm the fucking man that was sort of my mentality non non-ironically that was like actually how i felt and i remember thinking and i don't even have ptsd i don't have any of that shit like i'm fucking good to go right and very quickly i got into another the way it works is you're in these two-year rotation cycles where it's like you deploy for usually six months then you come back and you're you're you're almost immediately within reason in another cycle often with a different team different platoon you do 18 months of training to go deploy for another six months so it's a constantly and then sometimes you're pulled out of the rotation and you do a teaching cycle you go become a buds instructor for a couple of years but i pretty much right away was put back into a rotation by choice as a new guy you sort of do back-to-back tours back-to-back rotations before you can do anything else well hang on did amanda see anything different about you when you got back i don't know i i know that i was well yeah she did for sure she did um i i would say my temper was pretty extreme and it wasn't extreme like i was mad all the time i would get so so so mad about everything i remember our our uh the homeowners association in virginia beach they they were pretty nitpicky and they like came around everybody yeah everyone does and they and i and they can't put an american flag in front of my house i'll pay the fine they were mad about our chimney cap being rusted and i was so mad and i called them do you have any fucking clue who i am and they're like sir we have no idea who you are like i was in afghanistan you don't get it it's like sir how could we have known that i just want you to paint it please please we'll even do it for you um but i i was just mad a lot but the thing is is is i was really quickly back into another rotation i had i had injuries that were bad you know i have right now i have 26 pieces of shrapnel that are still in my leg they're microscopic at this point but i have pain in my ankle i got pain in my hip they debrided as much as they could but i had like real real issues with with pain in my leg and then also i still have this i i have pretty serious shoulder pain um the grenade blast when it happened it dislocated both my shoulders like briefly like it's slap tear it tore both labrums um so i had like really bad shoulder pain and like i'm sort of hobbling around a little bit but i was able to sort of i got the bicep tendon isis surgery which sort of patches shit up and and i was just like i i i'm a i'm a i'm a guy that's done some shit i'm a navy seal with combat experience i'm getting into another rotation i'm deploying again i'm not i'm not a guy with ptsd like and so i'm like immersed pretty much right away with like the next cycle and even though it's 18 months till you deploy again you're training constantly there's no psyche valve coming back on rotation no like you're just in it and someone's got to know like this guy's probably not ready the thing is is i was one of many yeah of course and two cousins that came back fucked up from this one in the corps and one army and so we end up and they're still fucked up it's it's unfortunate you know i uh i ended up 18 months later deploying to peru to do like i mean basically counter drug operations but like in a really indirect way i mean effectively we were going over there to to train you know on a daily basis other they're called the foes the fuerza de operaciones especiales um how to do drug interdictions and then they would go sort of execute and we'd sort of advise to some degree but it was like very very more advisory right and i remember i i was in a school uh for the navy called jtac school i was learning how to talk to aircraft and call in airstrikes and stuff and it meant that i would deploy after the group had already landed in peru because we're very fragmented i was going to be deploying with just like seven or eight guys versus a full platoon a full troop to afghanistan was like 50 or 60 um and i had put no thought honestly into the south america tour because i'm like dude i was in afghanistan i've seen combat like this is gonna be stupid like fucking dumb you know i thought of it as just a waste of time like it's just hopefully we'll get through real quick and then i'll go you know maybe i'll try try out for dev crew or something and i i got in the plane and i flew to germany and i'm going with just like two other guys actually one of them was actually jim flatley love that guy um and actually actually that was our trip to afghanistan i think i flew to south america by myself i did yeah i'm confusing the two i flew to south america alone so i fly to uh to germany and then i fly to south america and when i got there i had been given instructions to like hey you know you're gonna land in this airport that's like you know it's it's predominantly spanish-speaking because peru is like very non-english it's like very non-english um and uh you're gonna meet up with your driver you'll get your stuff and like you know we we were staying in this house we the the seals that were there in mira flores peru which is fucking beautiful this is like where you go if you're like rich and you want to go on an amazing vacation you go to mira flores and we were staying in this literal like mansion in a compound it was in this beautiful neighborhood that was like so expensive so affluent and it was actually next to like a slum that was like the murder capital of south america you know we were there because it's like you know we're not really doing direct operations at all we're just there to advise like the government's putting us up in a nice place we're gonna work out of here commute in whatever and so i land in south america and i i don't know how to describe it it was like i had like in the most cliche way like a flashback i hadn't given much thought to the afghanistan deployment really at all beyond like the top level like i'm so cool sort of mentality but i land in south america in peru and it was like i was like i was like i was like i was like oh my god i'm in like another country and it sounds stupid but like i had discounted this so much in my mind because it wasn't going to be combat and i'm like in a foreign country i don't speak a lick of spanish like i blew off any any of the spanish training i didn't give a fuck about it like i've seen combat i have a fucking purple heart i don't give a shit about any of this and i uh i got in the car which was such a nightmare trying to navigate this very crowded little airport and everyone's speaking you know spanish and i'm so lost and i finally find my car it's going to bring me to the house and like he didn't speak any english and it was like i don't even know where i'm going and we're like driving and it's like you're driving through at times when we got to like the miraflores area it was beautiful but a lot of the drive was through some really rough neighborhoods and one of the things that was immediately striking when i was in afghanistan is there's nothing quite like driving through an area in afghanistan that's like war-torn and like rough and i'm like oh my god i'm in afghanistan and i'm like oh my god i'm in afghanistan and i'm like oh my god i'm in afghanistan and i'm like oh my god i'm in video doesn't do it like hearing other people it's just different when you're looking out the window and you're like this is literally like war that's where we are and um driving through like the slums of of peru where like truly there's like child hitmen out here yeah uh i was like holy fuck i am like i'm not ready for this i'm not ready to be here and dude i i got there and i was like oh my god i'm in afghanistan and i'm like oh my god i'm in afghanistan and i'm like and i didn't really know the guys that were part of the team it was sort of a hodgepodge of seals and techs i think the statute of limitations have passed so i can be honest about some stuff they they sold cape clonzapan clonzapan it's a benzodiazepine over the counter there and i discovered that really early on that's pretty addictive stuff that that benzo dude i i became hopelessly addicted to it and i was drinking it and i was drinking it and i was drinking constantly i had my fuck i had oh yeah because i began i began having suicidal tendencies not even not even suicidal tendencies like i began looking up like how how how likely is it to die from drinking too much on a benzo and it's it's pretty high you're looking that up so you know you know this is i'm i'm hurting myself here so you're aware of that but you're doing it i don't I went so overboard. I, I would, like just go out at night and this is like not okay what i was doing i put the team in a lot i put them in a very hard place i would go out at night and not tell anyone high as fuck not even high i don't even know how you describe what it's like to be fucked up on benzos you're like wow i'm so lucid i'm so focused but you're fucking not i'm not gonna remember any of this no and i would just go out and wander the streets and i i went to this one area where it was like homeless people like the slums of peru and i would just like sit there and smoke cigarettes with like and i'd like stay there all night and i'd like began i began going there on purpose to like ask them about if they had suicidal thoughts i'm like sitting with they don't even speak english i don't even now that i'm thinking about it like i'm speaking english i'm like a rambling fucked up dude and it got to the point where my team literally they're like dude what the fuck is wrong with they took my gun away of course i was i was watched 24 7 and coming down off benzos is fucking horrible it's also you can like die coming down off benzos but my my team that was there i mean luckily a lot of them had been with me in afghanistan and sort of like you know if there was ever some good grace there i think they understood that it isn't that i'd seen so much shit it was just like i was i was really struggling with frankly the the role i played in afghanistan that a lot of the guys that i was there with actually weren't even fully aware of was like that behind closed doors guy that like the the not honorable stuff like in some ways you could make the case that like at least out on the open battlefield there's honor and you know like you're both sort of having a shot at each other but like that after action when someone's fucking they can't do anything and they're in a room with just you and like you you can do anything to them there's no honor in that there's none and i i fucking hated myself for it and i lost my fucking mind i began having this this is on on the towards the tail end of that first month i was hallucinating like i had the same hallucination like all the time i'd be laying in my room and it was like so like muggy in peru there's constant moisture like everything's wet and it was like hot we didn't have air conditioning like laying on my sweaty ass sheets i never cleaned i was so fucking gross like just unclean and i i would fall into this like weird mindset of i would be convinced i was on a corner in russia like on a street corner in russia and it's like all brown buildings around me and i'd be like standing on the street corner and like i i felt like i had orders like military orders to be there and i like had to be there and i would lay on my bed believing i was standing in russia on a street corner for fucking like hours and hours and hours just like unmoving i would just sit there and then i'd like come out of it and be like what the fuck am i even doing and then i'd like go pop some benzoazepines are you doing are you working at all during any of this are you advising they i didn't do shit on that deployment you have a co that's like dude i was a liability yeah and i was such a liability that they i think they recognized that like this is this this is for sure if anybody finds out that like you're doing this and it should be shouldn't it definitely i should be out of the military you're not fucking fit to be here no and it got to the point where i i was openly saying i want to fucking die like i want to be done but to be honest it was almost like my own cop out i don't even know what i'm doing and i didn't even know why i was so upset but it was definitely tethered to like this belief that like i'm a fucking fraud there's like the people that that back home think i'm a fucking fraud i'm a fucking fraud i'm a fucking fraud i'm like this honorable war hero the guy that i really i wished i was i know i'm not i know i'm not like there are things that that i did not need to do forget blame or not just things that i found myself doing overseas that are just inhuman and did not need to be done but i knew i could do them with impunity and living with that knowing that there's no recourse did you finally figure out who you were angry at you know now i mean i was fucking mad at myself i know that yourself i mean it's shame is what it was it was intense shame and so when i came back from peru and actually i did do the whole deployment it was only because my team frankly kept me there and looked after me and frankly i bet they fucking hated the fuck out of me while i was there but they protected me and i actually i remember it was just it was just it was a lot but i came home from that deployment and i didn't really even know how much my wife my family even knew like i didn't really even know like i had at at one point i knew that like some of my teammates were like reaching out to dudes stateside to be like what did we do with with alan they were while you were down there because they didn't want the command to find out because it would be bad for me and my career but it got i know it eventually found its way to my wife and you know my my in-laws and my parents and it apparently was like this huge issue back home because it's like i have a fragmented family i have my parents are divorced and you know they're finding out that like wait a minute so john's taking drugs he's talked about suicide they're losing track of him at times he's basically can't even do his job and they're not telling the command the fuck is that what are we gonna do and it was like this crisis within my family of do we go to south america and like literally take him home no can't really do that and so oddly enough dave and pete were the guys that were tapped to to get in touch with me and the same guys that sort of helped find the vision to get me in were the same ones that they're like dude they like called me all the time while i was out in south america i i remember just like weeping on the phone to them and i don't even know we talked about but they were just like there for me in a way and they also just there was no judgment being passed it was like this is sort of what happens you know and they were like when you get home you need to fucking clean your shit up and figure out this what you want to do and so really because of everybody around me i i survived literally that deployment uh and i come home and i'm just fucking broken like i'm broken and it it came to a head and i i love my kids i and at this point i had i had a i had a daughter and in like the first year i was home i had this feeling when i was alone with my daughter that i was gonna hurt her and i never did and i never ever came close to it but i'm telling you that one of the things that i would do overseas is i'd be in closed rooms like hurting people and i was trying so hard to like not be that person and i the worst times and it's like so shameful and i brought it up so many times to like my therapist and it's actually what this i would say this story that i'm going to tell you is what prompted my medical retirement it was i went to my therapist because i was told by my own team at this time because when i came back from that deployment i was in a training cell they're like dude you need to go see somebody like we know what happened in brew every fucking time i was in a training cell and i was like dude you need to go see somebody like you need to go see someone and she asked me like how are you doing and i was sort of like not really telling her stuff like oh you know downplaying it and i i told her i was like i have this thing though where when i'm giving my kids a bath i'm worried i'm gonna like drown my kids and i have to tell my wife to come in and finish the bath because i'm worried i'm gonna do that and i said it to her like you know yeah it's a thought that everyone has this thought and she goes yeah i'm gonna go see someone and she goes yeah i'm gonna go see someone and she goes yeah i'm literally you have to find a way to like stop that and if i mean she's like i've had other people that similar shoes to you that are had to remove all the knives from their house because they're they're worried they're going to do something she's like this is this is trauma this is trauma playing out did you tell amanda what you were thinking yeah and i can say that that was a that was an amanda knew like i don't know what's going on with my husband like i don't know what's going on with my husband like i don't know what's going on with my husband like i don't what's going on with my husband like i don't know what's going on with my husband like i don't know what's going on with my husband like i don't know what happened to him i shared some details with her um more intimate details about sort of afghanistan and behind closed doors stuff and um the the fear of me harming the things that i would literally die for in a heartbeat i love my kids more than anything i've never ever ever come close to laying a hand on them at all but the fact that that thought would enter my mind and i had to like actively mitigate it i had to like have a man like i couldn't do bath time dad can't do bath time because dad might drown you yeah like it was so fucked up and so i began as soon as i admitted that to my navy psych she's like i don't think you're fit to be in this line of work anymore and she was like also like from a physical standpoint like you have serious issues with your shoulders you have serious issues with the shrapnel like that alone probably would be enough to start thinking about it if you wanted to push through it could but she's like i'm telling you right now like you're on a path that this doesn't end well for you it doesn't end well for your family and you're probably not even fit to be a seal anymore and I gotta be honest I was like holy shit you're right like I'm not fucking fit to do this job and honestly I was grappling so hard with like what why why did we go to Afghanistan why were we doing it forget the honor or dishonor of what we did it's like I don't know why what the fuck are we doing over there I don't know I was there and I don't know I don't know and it's like but wait a minute family who's there we don't know but it's like we fucking killed people yeah why politics and then realizing that like I have potentially permanently damaged myself and not to mention the damage I've done to other people of course I'm saying like well that 16 year old kid still remembers that day I bet I bet that family of that old man still remember the American with the knife it's just and so I I ultimately was medically retired due to like mental instability I mean it was a there was an attribute there was an attribution because they give you percentages of like literally this is why you were retired I want to say it was like 20 or 30 30 percent like physical injury to legs like 50 percent like mentally not fit to do this job and I even if I hadn't been medically retired I after coming home from that through disaster I like was truly at odds with not only what I had done but like with just the idea of what I was doing like even if it had been like like politics you know and so now it's like there's this part of me that exists but is fully suppressed all the time and I I've described it to people not a lot actually really not a lot at all but it's like I view it in some ways and maybe this is giving myself too much not credit but leniency the sacrifice that a lot of people end up making in the military is of course there are people that pay the ultimate sacrifice that die or who are physically maimed in a really horrible way but I would imagine that there's also like this thing that's called moral injury that's a term that gets thrown around a lot there's like this this the sacrifice of yourself up mentally in a way that'll never be fixed never ever because you did damage to other people in the process and that is a burden that is in a way like it doesn't comport with society you can't like let's think about it if I said hey guys I'm really struggling with PTSD because you know I combat was scary and like getting shot at was scary people are like wow like I feel bad for you whatever I'm really up because I brutalized people that really they were like sort of harmless and and literally probably innocent you live in God huh you believe in God I certainly found God in Peru he's gonna be displeased yeah I uh but I think that when I think about the sacrifice of the military it's and I don't say it in like a uh an honorable way I I mean like the literal sacrifices at the end of it I think some people me being one of them walk away a damaged person who did a lot of damage and it's unf it's not the the the mechanism by which that happened it's not something that works well in society to talk about it's okay to talk about when your friends got killed it's okay to talk about like being in combat it's not okay to talk about the time that you were gonna go murder somebody but luckily somebody intervened or when you people up behind closed doors frankly because you could like there's really not much more to it or like that you took great pleasure and when you rolled into villages and you watched the women and children run for their lives out into the desert and you're gonna go kill their husbands and their brothers and their sons you're gonna kill them that's what you're gonna go do and like you don't even know why and you're like yeah that's a tough thing to live with not only that you did it but that you were stoked to go do it and so now being Mr Paul and I think one of the things I tried really hard to do is like even if inside there's this horribly up part of me like I try so hard to like just be like a good person now and not like it makes up for anything I did or whatever but it's like giving people an outlet you know weirdly about dark stuff giving them a distraction from life feels like you know sort of a service that's good for people take their mind off things that are bad in their lives I think that's worth something you know the foundation you know I care a lot about what we're doing with the Mr Ballen Foundation but like the reality is it's like dude I'll I will always carry with me a belief that no one really knows what a horrible person I was there's a theme running through your story that's starting to emerge and that's one of penance and conscience when we get in the third segment I'm going to bring that up again with regards to your book um it's brutal man yeah I remember dude when I when I came back from Afghanistan I was so proud so so proud to like be a seal you know a lot of veteran creators allow their myth to grow yeah and you keep correcting the record down nobody else does that why is it so important to keep the record I've found that one of the the times I feel most proud of myself now is when I'm being like self not self-deprecating but like brutally honest about who I really am I think that I I have pretended to be somebody at times in my life most notably the seal thing not pretended I took on a persona um now it's like I get a lot of I would even call it fulfillment maybe it's penance I don't know out of like saying the ugly truths about yourself big or small you know like I one of the stories that I tell that is like really sort of humiliating and in no way really makes me even look like I got anything good out of the story but I tell it I've told it on I'm sure millions of people have heard of it it's it's the story of when I'm at the tail end of seal training and there's this like rite of passage where you gotta sit in a cloud of poisonous gas CS gas and you gotta just like take it and not run you know and as soon as the gas kicked off we're all standing in this field and formation we're all like the 50 of us we're all crouched together and I'm on the outside of our flank and we're all kneeling in this field and all the instructors have these these pool sticks and at the end of the pool sticks there's the CS canisters that have been lit off this huge white cloud of poisonous gas which makes you feel like you're on fire when you breathe it in and they're dousing us in CS gas and you gotta sit there it's like 30 seconds or a minute or whatever it is it's a long miserable time and it's like don't run and the instructors have the gas masks on I I began inhaling this is late in training too this is like everybody here is going to be a Navy seal everybody and I began inhaling the gas and it was like fight or flight kicked in completely kicked in and I'm out of there wasn't thinking nothing I am up and I'm sprinting away from the group no one else did zero others I was tackled by an instructor and they said get the fact get get back with your class and I was like no no no I I'm not even consciously thinking I'm just doing I'm this is survival coming in right and so they held me to the ground the gas sits there and takes the gas and they don't even know what's happened yet because they're so caught up and being poisoned sure it's distracting and they afterwards we they all ran to the ocean and jumped in the ocean and then we all had to run back out on San Clemente Island and in Coronado we run back into the classroom and it's like this tiered seating like a college classroom and everybody's sitting in there and no one really knows what happened in fact no one even is thinking that somebody ran in because that doesn't really happen that doesn't happen and everyone's sitting in there and I I know what's happened and I'm sitting in the back and I had jumped in the ocean too so no one knew I did or didn't do it and our instructors they come in finally they show up after us we're always sitting there waiting patiently with our notebook and pencil and water bottle ready to go and they come in and um the main instructor uh who was just I hated this guy not because of what he said or did but he was just really diabolic that's his job that's his job and he did a good job he comes in and he looks up and he goes where's the and I know it's me and I stand up and no one really knows what it's about and he proceeds to go Alan I don't want to serve with you I think you're a coward he was like hey guys he ran during the CS gas I'm telling you right now you don't want you don't want to be in a gunfight with that guy like if he's gonna run now what's he gonna do when your life's in the line he bailed on you he's like Alan sit the down but he's like I hope you do not get your trident I don't want to serve with you now normally it's like yo fuck you like stupid shit this was like a stern talking to in front of my whole class this was on like day five of 30 days straight that you train out at the island to wrap up your training so you're still with these guys another three weeks i was like ostracized was this a lesson or did he mean it he meant that i think he meant that and i think the way he he meant it was either you'll rise to the occasion and you'll overcome this or you won't and you should be gone i had to wear from that moment on for the rest of the time we were out at the island you wear camis i had to wear these you're called udt shorts like very short shorts like canvas shorts i had to put them over my pants to signify that i was a pussy and you know i tell that story in part because it's like i did learn to i can't make people unhear what they heard or unthink what they think i i can only sort of bear this burden i need to just demonstrate that i can't make people unhear what they heard or unthink what they think i i can only sort of demonstrate that i am i am a good teammate that this is an anomaly and that it's a it's a flight instinct from poisonous gas guys it's not the same thing as like my teammates dying i'm gonna bail on them um but the reality is is is i was so so humiliated i i i came back from the island and i i didn't bring it up to my wife i didn't bring it up i hit it and it's like it was like shame of course because i really took on this this idea that i i wasn't good enough you know and not trying to like create connections where there aren't i think from that point on i was on a mission to prove that i was i was going to be the number one navy seal like i might not be the best shot or the best at tactics but i'll take that knife maybe part of his lesson was i know this guy's not gonna fucking run now very true um there's a connection there i've heard you say that we don't rise to our expectations we fall to the level of our training or training you know how that's attributed to i actually don't but i love that quote it's attributed to archilochus who is a greek poet probably the the father of western storytelling 7th century bc he was a warrior poet who was the first soldier to talk about fear and battle yeah he's famous for leaving his shield behind and saying fuck it this is about survival i'll get another shield i'm surprised you didn't look into him because it's the same story man you're right i definitely know the quote and i have not looked into him though he's he's an anti-hero like like you like a lot of people in your stories which um going into the break reminds me the ancient greeks you don't use a prompter you just kind of immerse yourself in the story you tell it differently each time when you're live and so forth sure do you see yourself as this is the like the world's second oldest profession is the bard is just telling stories like this is this is homer yeah and honestly like i can see why it's maintained its relevance for so long because it's it's i think one of the most amazing things about being a storyteller a bard is when you have an audience that you can watch as they listen to your story i mean there's it's humans are so predisposed to to to like lean in when there's a story and if you can master the art or if you can just get good at telling a story that has like those beats that people naturally pick up on just watching somebody be aware that like i'm hearing a story there's a flow to it there's an arc there's going to be some sort of resolution or twist there's i i did uh we did a live tour in 2024 and i you know we did several shows just live and it was just me telling stories to a crowd and it was just like the most fucking incredible thing nerve-wracking as hell and there's lots of stress around like ticket sales and stuff but like when you're in it i remember i was at the uh the chicago theater and i before i'm like in the green room and it's like this is where frank sinatra was before he went out and it's like what the fuck am i doing here and then i went out on stage and just it's the sea of people that are all wearing flannels you know and uh it was like so but i remember like i was a little nervous it's intimidating just a little a little nervous but the show started and i like just got into telling stories and i remember there was this one moment as i'm looking out at the crowd of like thousands of people and there was not one at least from my perspective maybe there was but i couldn't see a single phone none just eyeballs just like looking at me because it's a story and it's like i they've they're invested in the story and i also knew that like i'm not going to be able to see a single phone i'm not going to be able to i have something i'm going to give them in this story that's so fucking good and i can't wait to watch the reaction as it like flows across the crowd it's it's like the most amazing feeling like i i it's hard to even put in words what it's like to have like a captive audience whether it's big or small just a captive audience that you're telling a story to is it's unmatched we'll be back in a minute we'll talk more about how john allen structures a story you are famous for ethical storytelling storytelling with the true crime meeting with the families all that stuff yeah tell me about a story that you were researching you're like i can't do it uh well this doesn't well this doesn't qualify as what you're saying but it sorted us and it's it's an important story i almost didn't do this one i did and i'm really glad i did but i said there's this ah it's so fucking hard um there's this girl the people want there was this girl jesse jesse blodgett um she uh was living in now i think illinois but she uh she was murdered in her her bedroom by a friend and uh it was a friend that was like known to the family it was a guy i believe there was like sexual abuse as well but he killed her and she was like she was like she was like she was like she was like and like strangled her to death like in in in her childhood bed she's like 18 and it was their only child um buck and joy blodgett who are just very sweet people and the reason this story the reason i was gonna tell it at all is because i found out that it was like the person you least suspected did it they were like involved they went to the vigil they're like you know it was like the most frail i had her i just the the top line of the story was like murder mystery slash like oh my gosh that person oh you know what i mean so it's like okay i this this fits the type of story i would probably tell i began watching interviews about about it and like some of the stories that you'll you'll hear about in the interviews you see of like the family it's always devastating it isn't like some or not but there was this segment that i think it was dateline did with buck and buck he's describing the loss of his daughter and he was clearly extremely close with jesse like extremely close it's his only kid and there's this part where he's standing in the doorway of his daughter's room where she was killed and like you're looking at it from the hallway you're looking at buck and you're seeing her room and his voice is like cracking as he and he's very strong he's a strong guy he's like oh my god i'm gonna kill you i'm gonna kill you i'm gonna kill you he's like you know i i was right there i was like next door and i couldn't save my little girl she was right in here and i couldn't save her and i just come in here and i stand right here and i look at the bed where she was murdered and i just i know that i let her down as a father i couldn't save her right like i mean obviously like no one thinks about that with buck and he wasn't even home at the time oh he wasn't even home or i should say i think the timeline is such that it was a theoretically he might have been just getting up for work at the time but listening to a father who's describing his child that he couldn't save and even though again it's not entirely clear if he was literally home at the time it happened your question about are there stories i can't do any time it reminds me or i should back it up a little more when i'm telling stories i'm invested i really want to ethically tell the story but it's it's sort of disassociated from my personal life the area that i can't help but have it cross into my personal life is any time it's like children you know and and i have three and i was just thinking about immediately if one of my children were harmed in some way and i felt personally like i didn't protect them and like seeing my child's bedroom like this is the safest place they're supposed to have and so i ended up telling the story uh i spoke to buck and joy you know it was with full permission you know and we we told the story and i i i think that the rendition of what i told was very powerful because it was like based on really deep talks and and sort of it was just a great episode but shortly after we uh we told that story um we ended up launching the mr ball and Foundation and that's our charity that helps victims of violent crime and their families and one of the first grants we gave was to the blodgett family because they had a charity that buck had started in jesse's name called the love is greater than hate project where it's like he's trying to push this idea that like love can cancel out hate if it's at scale very small charity but like huge heart it's like he's he's transformed extreme grief into like action and now we fund you know twenty five thousand dollars every year we give to love is greater than hate i have a great relationship with buck like he and i talk and we text each other and like he came he was actually at that chicago show just by happenstance he was there um but i think that uh when it comes to kid stuff that's extremely difficult i mean obviously but like there's another story uh i did that i told so i guess i'm sort of being contradictory that's all right we're still getting the stories yeah there's this guy i i this was out in washington state this was back and i want to say the 90s and i think his name was mike and i'm pretty sure he was a pastor he's a religious guy and he was he definitely was a pastor and in his in his off time he enjoyed going hiking and he just like regular hiking we're not talking like alpine crazy hikes he loved going hiking and one day he decided he wanted to go on like a really long hike uh and this was out like not really off trail but close like you know it's it's it's a known area that people hike you know there are people that go out that way out into the sticks but it's it's pretty remote out there and this is a ball and setup i feel it and so he heads out which is going to be a three-day hike and he has not three days like four or five days and it was sort of common that he would periodically do these longer hikes and so he left and his family's like they're not worried they're gonna see him in a few days and so i think his name is dan so dan he he hikes off into the forest and everything's going fine he had a journal this is how we know this story oh okay and at some point he decides to really go off trail uh he just was feeling you know spring in his step he's feeling good and he ends up going like hours like off like straight line into the wilderness until he reaches this like clearing which is like a boulder field like if you're not familiar with a boulder field it's exactly what it sounds like just like huge rocks like in all directions you know it's like imagine like a stony beach but like huge boulders everywhere but it's like loose you know but big rocks and he begins jumping from rock to rock just to make his way there was a little river that sort of sat at the back end of this huge boulder field and so he's hopping rock to rock and as he's getting near this this river he slips or something happens where his foot goes down into one of the like sort of spaces between one of the many boulders and at the same time he like knocks one of the rocks it rotates in it does not crush his foot but it completely like perfectly locked his foot under what amounted to be like six or seven hundred pound rocks just like suddenly have collapsed around one leg he's not hurt but there's no way to get your foot out oh no he's not hurt there's no way and like and so at first you know he's all he was afforded the luxury of he could actually rotate and sit he was not in like a horribly his foot's not being even the circulation is really not even being cut off it's just before that it's like having the perfect handcuff on your leg that makes it even creepier and so he's sitting there out in this field and he's got equipment to be out in the wild he's got like a little rain tent and he's got like the ability to capture you know water um like evaporated water and he doesn't panic and he's a very spiritual guy he like really believes that you know basically everything that happens is sort of happening for a reason and he begins documenting what's happened because he he realistically is thinking what's going to happen here is i'm going to be stuck in this horrible position but this is a well this is a relatively well traveled remote area i'm out in the open i'm i'm wearing bright colors someone's going to see me and his journal entries over the coming days sort of suggest he had he was optimistic he was rationing his food from the start he wasn't in a lot of pain at all he was even able to sleep the way he sort of could put his his pillow or backpack behind his head like he tried whatever he could to get it off he knew he couldn't but he's like he's in good spirits you know he's starting to get sunburned you know he's doing his best to avoid it but he's getting sunburned and like going to the bathroom is a big pain um but like he's basically okay and he's sort of looking at this as like you know what ultimately maybe this is exactly what i needed to be able to go out here and have this experience like this is my way of getting closer to god becoming more spiritual i needed to like have all distractions removed it's like me against the world and so it's like these really poignant entries in his journal that are like not panicked it's like finding meaning in suffering is really what he's doing and then around like the fifth day he's like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god day where he's just stuck out there now he's like the the journal entries sort of take a turn and he's very hopeful that quickly people are going to realize he's not made the rendezvous because he's supposed to be back like four or five days in and so it was the same day that he knew they'd expect him home he's like i really hope that his wife back home he's got kids too uh are going to quickly realize something's wrong but he doesn't have a way of knowing and he knows that like okay let's say they let's say they they figure it out today that something's off how long will it take to find me he's thinking it's going to take a couple days like max they know where i was going roughly but he's also like i went pretty far off off the beaten trail but he's like he's optimistic still it's a couple more days go by and now you know he's he's able to still drink water not a lot but he has enough that he's not going to die of thirst he's basically out of food which is more of like he's not dying yet but it's very painful and he's not going to die of pain and the sunburn is like horrible like he's got blisters now like he's becoming pretty uncomfortable now it's like every second is pretty torturous and he begins to curse god he begins to curse you know everything he thought he held so sacred like now life is really turned in a way that doesn't feel deep it feels like this what's why is this being done to me and then it's like 10 10 days go by 11 days go by no one's found him there was a search party he he didn't know this eventually it reaches the point where his handwriting is clearly degrading um and i want to say it's like 14 or 15 days in at this point this is deep he's been out there a while and this is why i almost didn't tell the story it's like it's crazy even thinking about it so this is like this devoted father of like relatively young kids and his entries go from initially optimistic to a little panicked to like what the fuck to like degrading handwriting to then like this just devastating calm where he's writing to his kids he knows he's gonna die like it's the end and he's telling them all the things that he wishes he could have told them if he was alive to do it he's like giving advice to his kids and he's trying to remind them to like be strong and like that you know your dad loves you and that like this isn't your fault and it's like in his final moments all he cares about is his kids and his and it's reading those entries and just honestly like i i i can't really envision myself in that position but in a in a way it's like you know it's universal as soon as you like have a kid or not even like when you have someone you really care about suddenly like being like i'll never see them again and like dan had days of 100 knowing like i'm on the way out and i will never see my children again i'll never see my wife again and uh so his final entries are devastating and then as of course fate would have it he dies and like literally according to the entries it was like hours later he was found oh no and so like you know i told that story actually i actually put it to the side i wasn't going to tell it at all and and truthfully it's because i did i didn't think i could keep it together emotionally telling it um but in some way it's like it's like it's like it's like it's like i and this is it's earlier we were talking about like how frustrating it is when things get demonetized and it might make the impression that it's all about that it's more like there is a business to this there totally is like i do make decisions based on whether or not things can be monetized will it get clicks of course that's part of it that's part of like being relevant this long but like it that doesn't mean that i've lost sight of like the the the thing that really i do which is i tell those types of stories and i have a lot of experience with that and i've had a lot of i felt like i owed it to to dan and his family to tell that story and i i did and there were loads of comments from people that knew dan and and it was like amazing to see like the memories flowing in about dan and his wife and it was like this this communal thing of people reminiscing about how wonderful he was um yeah i think that that one anything to do with kids has been a consistent difficult one and put us in the room with the family and you don't have to name any names or give any information but i'd like to know what they said to you that you walked out of like all right i gotta make some changes what do you mean like i don't know were you always this focused on the victims oh yeah so like how - How did it come to be that I do it this way? - Everyone knows you meet with the families. - Not always, not always, not always. - But you do. - There's like real intention behind it. I would say like, in terms of how many stories that make it to the air, that literally I spoke to the family with, I wouldn't say it's a lot, but it's a meaningful amount, you know? And I would also say that it's not uncommon to have a video that goes out that ends up connecting with that family that turns into a relationship with our charity, that turns into a longstanding relationship with the entire entity in that family. And like, we've seen that play out many times where like we have people that we support through the charity that it like started with their story that we got from public information. We told it as ethically as we could, but it's all there. It's all public. And then that was what bridged the gap and connected us to them. But in terms of like why I tell a story the way I do, you know, you could make the case that it's because I'm trying to be ethical and I think that's fair. I definitely am. But I would actually go to be, I told you I'm pretty shamelessly honest about stuff. In the very beginning, when I was thinking about how do I structure stories to make them really interesting, something that I naturally do, but I became much more conscious of it is if you really want people to pay attention to a story, I think it's important that you make, aspects of the story relatable, no matter how unrelatable the story actually is. Like, is it relatable, you know, to the average person of like what it's like to be a victim of a serial killer? Probably not. But is it relatable to be someone who's scared about someone tapping on the glass or like the fear that someone's coming in their house? It is. And so in terms of like purely a storytelling device, if you're telling a story about a serial killer, if you want the audience to like really have an emotional connection to the story, you're far better off not going the route, which most people do, at least sort of generally speaking, which is like you take a perspective from like the killer's perspective or a third person perspective where you're focused on like the violence or the gore or like the horrible thing that happened, because that is, that's what happened, right? But a more powerful way in terms of just emotional connection to the story that I have found has been effective, put people in the mind of the woman who's running down the hallway 'cause something's behind her. How many of us have been scared, even just running, running up our stairs from the basement 'cause we think something's behind us? - All of us. - It's like a human fear. - Yeah. - And so when you're thinking about how to make a story really land, and what I mean by that is to be like emotionally resonant with people, make them feel like they're in the story. And you can't do it if you're like, and then fucking Ted Bundy showed up and this is the horrible thing he did. Then you're learning about something, you're not in it. And so I was telling stories naturally with like, I knew people were more invested if they could be in a story with you, you know? I took that approach naturally. And then I also realized that the types of stories I'm telling, the people that don't get a lot of credit, or I should say the people that often are lost in the story are the victims, you know? It's like the blood and gore and like the tragedy is the thing that sort of makes the headlines, if at all. But like the victim themself beyond being, oh, they were a wonderful person who died, right? Beyond that, a lot of times they're sort of lost. And I have found inhabiting the victim or sometimes we'll do it the other way around, but it's almost always the victim. It leaves a mark on people. Sometimes if I've done a good job, it really leaves a mark. And I think from the lens, I think, of the families and the victims and the people left behind, it just feels far more appropriate when they're hearing a story that's clearly designed to like elevate the person who the bad thing happened to, but not in a phony way. It's like, you're learning about them. You're learning about what they were doing and potentially what they were thinking about and sort of what happened to them. And when the thing happened, when the thing happens to them, they've become relatable enough that the audience is like, fuck, that's bad. Oh my God, I can't even imagine. Versus like unnamed victim number three of a serial killer. It's like, yeah, that makes for documentary material, but it's far less emotionally impactful. So effectively from a storytelling, purely storytelling perspective, I have found get the audience to feel something and they'll remember the story. And oftentimes blood and gore feels like, you might think it's something, it's emotion, but I don't think it is. I think it's just like, it's like fireworks. It's abstract. Yeah, you know? And I do also, maybe it's just the shame I've felt from being overseas or something, but I'm so cognizant of the fact that these are real people in the stories. Not every story is a death or tragedy, but it usually is. And like, I'm very aware. I'm aware of that and I don't hide from that. - That's an invasive technique and effective. And it definitely connects the audience. And it just happens to be ethical. Just the same way that you don't really name the killers or idolize the killers, not even until the end. That's very ethical, but it also is better storytelling because the fear becomes nameless. - Yep. - Now what happens if the story's better by naming the killer? Do you make that move or do you stay ethical? - Truthfully, the way we, every, literally every story, we do this. So this is like, there isn't one that we didn't do this. So I can't even think of one where we broke the mold. We will not give something away unless it's practically required. And like, if there's a story that literally requires it, like a good example would be, and it's one of the very few times we did something like this. Like I told a story about 9/11 from the perspective of someone who was in the building. When it went down, I interviewed him, the whole thing. I couldn't disguise that this was 9/11. You know what I mean? But like, we have done stories that are covered extensively and we're not trying to trick people. But if you tell the story the way that I've just sort of laid out, a lot of times you don't know what that story's gonna be until at the end, it's sort of revealed what it is. Like one of my favorite little short stories that is about a very well-known person. It starts with this couple, and this is back in like the 1970s. There's this couple that goes on a date out in Utah. It's first date. They don't know each other really at all. And they go to this like Waffle House or something equivalent. And they're having this like totally lame, no chemistry date. Like it's just not going well. And the guy who's not a guy who would do this normally, he's like realized that, you know, realizing at the end of the date, like this is going nowhere. I'm never gonna see this girl again. And he was a big hiker. He loved to hike. And sort of on a whim at the end of this date where they're like, all right, all right, time to go. He's like, hey, do you want to go on a hike with me right now? And she's like, what? Like, what do you mean? Like, it's like eight o'clock at night. Like, what do you mean hike right now? Like what? But she's like intrigued, you know? - Sure. - Oh, okay. They're doing something new here. And he's like, yeah. There's this, there's a canyon that I love to go hiking in. It's like Provo Canyon. It's right over there. It's like not far from here. There's a little pullout, quick walk. It's beautiful. So we'll go up there, come out and be awesome. She's like, you know what? All right, let's do it. Let's go. And so suddenly the date has gone from being, you know, sort of lame to being like kind of exciting, you know? And so they leave the Waffle House, they hop in his car and they drive over to the parking lot and they're like giddy, like, oh, this is so cool. And they get out and they're holding hands now. And they're like, they're walking into the forest. It's a totally, well, it's a trail. Like it's a trail they're on and there's nobody else out here. And they're walking along and they would later say this to each other. But at the time they didn't say this. They're walking along, everything's exciting, but they get into the tree line and they're sort of, they're leaving the comforts of the streetlights and they're going off into the forest. And as they get deeper and deeper into the forest, there's very, very good illumination from the moon. So it's not like totally pitch black. As they get deeper and deeper into the woods, like the sense of dread sort of washes over both of them. And they didn't articulate it to either. They, neither of them said this. This is only in retrospect. They realized they both had this feeling. They're both getting the sense of dread. And they began like sort of white knuckling, like grabbing each other's hand a little harder, walking a little faster. The giddiness is a little bit gone. Now they're like walking with a purpose just to like get to the turnaround point and just get out of here. It's a little, they're a little spooked, but they don't know each other well enough to like really even talk. They're like, what the fuck are we even doing out here sort of thing? And so they reach this point of the trail that, again, it's a, it's a trail. It's not, you're not off in the, you're like on a trail, but the trees were pretty dense over the, over the top. It was like a section that was pretty dark, even though the, the illum is pretty good. And they're like silently now, speed walking along this trail. And then at some point the guy, he steps on something that he describes as feeling soft, just soft. And he just stops. And the girl who's next to him, she doesn't step on anything, but she sees him stop and she stops instinctively. 'Cause remember she's on edge, they're both on edge. And like, without any hesitation, without saying a word, they both just turned around, still hand in hand. And they fucking speed walked out of there. Just walked out of there. Just were like, just going. - Nope. - Boom, they get back to the car. They drive home as they're driving home. Like, man, like, geez. OK, that was fun. Wow, crazy. And so they have this date. They never really talk about what happened out in the in the trail they actually would get married these two of course they get married that's how i met your mother like this is great so they get married years go by years go by and one day they're at home and the the wife is like she has the news on and i forget who was where but like one of them is in the kitchen like making food and the other is like watching tv or it's like sort of mindlessly watching tv and at some point the one in the kitchen hears the other call hey you gotta you gotta come see this and there's an interview that's playing on tv with this criminal this death row inmate who's giving this tell-all interview and it's effectively on the eve if you will of their execution and it's sort of like this no holds barred sort of like being up front about what they've done to a degree and at some point this this interview which was like really like the reason they had been called over is like this is like powerful stuff right at one point the interview interviewer asked this the person like before you were caught before you obviously got caught did you did you ever almost get caught like what was the closest you came to getting to being captured before you really were and the guy's like yeah there's one time in particular i was out in provo canyon and i just killed a girl and i was dragging her across a trail to cover and this couple comes speeding around the corner and the guy stepped on her and i was getting ready to kill them but for some reason they didn't look down they didn't say anything they just turned around and they left it was ted bundy holy shit the prolific serial killer ted bundy and he they'd stepped on one of his victims bodies so like that's an example of a story that like it sort of works because it's ted bundy and you only say it at the end and i mean like that's a story that like i i tried to get like all the substantiating details and like to be honest like i think there's there's a story that exists where this happened like exactly how it happened i don't know but this is their rendition of what's happened and it's a it's a great it's a great story and like can i put you on the spot yeah please i mean because that's a master class you just did i saw that class in the art of storytelling for audible can you that that class we mean that that ted bundy was i don't want to give it away because it's so good yeah this is something you did with evan like a while ago long time ago yeah can you do another one that maybe we don't know oh look another story with a with a twist have you heard the um or maybe something from the book that no one's ever heard those ones that are not actually i have a story that maybe is not as great as a twist but it's a fucking great story do it great story um and it's actually one that i i think it's on youtube but it's one of those like deep cuts that i i don't think i did a great job telling it on youtube i really don't because i think that it's here it is all right so in um it was march 2nd 2006 there's this police officer sergio pochetta is his name and he was a police officer out in rural argentina in this in this part of rural argentina called la pampa and you know he he i think he was part of a a police department that was pretty small but one of their main issues in the area was was poaching uh in particular there was this intersection called uh las cruces de las canas and it was like this known just four-way intersection sort of in the middle of nowhere in a place that's sort of the middle of nowhere um where there was these like little batches of forests if you will little crops of trees where these exotic birds and monkeys and like big cats would live and then and poachers would go out there late at night they would uh you know capture the animals and poach and so it was not unusual for sergio to be out there on his motorcycle putzing along you know this area in la pampa las cruces de la cana looking for poachers and it was usually pretty easy to find them like they honestly were pretty brash about it they would just do it late at night there's nobody out there they just roll up in cars and just like go set their traps or whatever and sergio is not a veteran by any means but he's been doing this a while and so on march 2nd 2006 he's out on the road on his motorcycle and he's he's he's driving along and it's been a sort of nothing night he hasn't seen any poachers and um as he's nearing for like the 10th time that night because he's sort of doing a loop where he would always pass by that intersection de las canas he's coming down the road and you got a picture it's sort of a beautiful it's very it's very middle of nowhere vibes but it's it's it's actually so la pampa is known for it's just unbelievable like mountain ranges and like cowboy culture it's sort of a beautiful it's sort of a beautiful it's sort of a it's like it's like the wild west sort of um it's like this beautiful scenery and really as you're driving other than the little little splotches of forest it's sort of like barren but sort of beautiful he's driving along there's no street lights just some moonlight and and he's looking way down the road at this intersection up ahead but again it's like several football fields away and he like looks down for a second for no reason he just like looks down at his handlebars and he looks back up and he sees there's a car that sort of suddenly is the brake line and he's like oh my lights are on it's way off in the distance um but it's clearly coming to a stop at the intersection that is the sort of troubled area um given what time it is given how suddenly they showed up he's thinking they must have just pulled out like it's too it's too odd that it would be right now like i don't know and so he's far enough back that he's like i'm gonna slow roll and sort of like creep up and see what they're doing so he needs them to be doing poaching to get them in trouble and so he's like he's like putzing along still keeping his distance and he sees the car the brake lights come off again or the red lights sort of disappear for a second and it starts to roll forward and like suddenly the car veers to the right this is again it's far enough off he can clearly see it happening but he doesn't really know what's what they're doing they veer right and they appear to just drive into the the forest that's right next to this this intersection um forest is a bad description of it if you look at pictures online it's more like a crops of trees but it's it's thick enough that you can't see into it right so the car is like vanished and sergio's like poachers i mean what they're doing is a little aggressive because you're driving your car like into the forest you're gonna scare away a lot of the animals but like okay these have got to be poachers and so he's not thinking there's anything strange about this other than i'm about to go catch some poachers and so he he speeds up down the road not not too bad he doesn't want to totally give away his position and like you know floor it but he goes down and he gets to the intersection and when he gets to the intersection he starts looking just past like onto the next segment of road because it's very quickly after the intersection they veered off from where he was and he starts looking for tire tracks to see where they entered the forest because he can't see the car the car's gone and so he's like he goes past the four-way and he pulls his bike over to the side of the road and he gets off he doesn't turn his flashlight on or call out because he's still sort of trying to keep a low profile you can't hear anything all he hears is there are these birds that are really unique in the area called like long jars or like night night jars they're called night jars and they have a really unique sound and so there's like this humming of like cicadas and night jars it's like night ambience but there's no people sounds there's no vehicle sounds and there's no tracks on the ground there's there's no sign that any car was here at all and sergio's like okay like obviously there's an explanation for this you know it's it's dark i can't really see too well so he's like okay there's definitely poachers they're probably just hiding from me now so he pulls out his radio and he calls in for backup he's like hey here's where i am unsurprisingly there's got to be a poacher out here but you know backup could be quite a bit of ways and who knows it's going to show up and he's not like that scared of this he's like i need to go in there and confront these guys you know so he draws his gun and he begins walking off the road sort of broadly into this forest where he believes the the car has driven off to so into the forest he goes so he goes in the forest and like he's like i don't know i don't know i don't minutes later as far as we can tell and this is a highly documented story like easy to look up all the information is there police reports you name it this is considered well we'll get we'll keep going at the same time he wanders off into this forest one of his i think it's his friends but it's another cop who works with sergio he's he's at home he's nowhere near crusade las canas he's home he's about to go to bed and his cell phone rings and he sees it's sergio calling and like not his close friend but it's someone he would pick up the phone for any time of the day answers the phone and it's sergio and the guy's like hey what's going on and all sergio says and he says he says it twice is come to las canas you know what to do and the guy's like what he's like come to las canas you know what to do and then he hung up and so the friend is like what what did what like he's trying to put together what he could mean he knows that area is known for poachers so that could be why are you calling me like i'm off duty like this it's a weird it's a weird thing weird enough that the friend is like you know what i feel like i gotta call this in this is weird and so he calls like headquarters and says hey you know i i know sergio's on patrol i think he's on patrol he just called this weird thing about las canas he's maybe he's got poachers or something but i'm sort of worried about him and i just want to make sure that you guys know about this maybe you should go check on him and dispatch is like actually we're worried about him because he called us and said i we wanna we i need i need backup because there's a apparently poachers in the area the officers have just arrived on scene and they found his bike but they haven't found him and so the the three officers that the backup they're there and they find his bike it's on the side of the road uh all they were told is that he had called in poachers and that they needed you know whatever help or something and so now they have their flashlights out they're not trying to be secretive they're they're scouring the area near the bike and there's quite a quite a decent margin from the road like there's a sloping down of like grass and scree and then there's like the the forest where like presumably the poachers could be no one's gone in there other than sergio but they don't know he's gone in there and so they're looking and they're like what in the world is going on here like there's nowhere else for him to be really beyond this forest and so they uh they they do so let me back it up make sure i get this detail right they start scouring the area and then they find on the side of the road there's like this little glint of of like metal it's the only thing they find there's the bike there's no tire tracks there's no sergio they find like metal in the side of the road they go over and they look at it and they discover it is sergio's gun and it's his radio but they've been disassembled to their component parts which like you know anyone could do that it isn't like they've been shattered they've been disassembled they're just like sitting on the side of the road and and they're and that's it okay so that that's i remember i want to make sure i had that right so that's all they find and so at this point when they discover the radio combined with the the call from the friend and like all of this they're like something's wrong something's wrong with sergio we don't know where he is and so before they go into the forest they're like we need to legitimately treat this like there's like a big emergency here let's call in more reinforcements let's really search the area and so this huge search party that night is is set up like very quickly and they they go into the forest again they don't really know they definitely don't know he went in the forest they don't know really anything all they know is like he called it in so they're looking everywhere they can't find him they cannot find him and it starts like pouring rain and they're like staying out there they don't care they're looking for their partner they can't find him so all night there's this big effort in this relatively small area and other than the crops of trees there's there's nowhere else to go and sergio's nowhere to be found there's there's no poachers there's no vehicles there's nowhere to be found there's no vehicle there's nothing disassembled gun bike the various weird radio calls that's it the next day it's now been like 18 hours since sergio called in hey any backup i believe there's poachers there's this farmer has no fucking clue what's going on with sergio or anything he's totally disconnected he's uh 12 miles away he's at this he's at his land and he's he walked down to the road like his long driveway connected to the road and he looks down the road and he sees there's someone sitting on the side of the road and they're sitting on the ground and there's no vehicle nearby this is this is rural argentina this is not normal and so the farmer he walks over and it's it's been pouring rain all night so it's like sloppy and wet out he's like what did this person doing out here and he makes his way over to this person and he discovers it's a police officer who's sitting in the fetal position on the ground dry dry as a bone like whatever the expression is he's completely dry and he's like what's going on with this person and he's like and he's sort of like rocking back and forth and he looks very distraught like immediately it's obvious something's wrong and the farmer asked him like who are you what are you doing here like what's going on and he didn't say anything and so the farmer was like something's off calls the authorities the police show up and they're like oh my god it's sergio and sergio when he looked up like there was paramedics that showed up and like he didn't really react and then he saw like his boss who he was very close with and when his boss got there sergio got up and rushed over to him and just hugged him and began weeping and just sat there weeping on his shoulder for like several minutes and everyone's like what is going on so sergio doesn't say anything to anybody they're asking him like what are you doing here we've been looking for you like what happened and he's saying nothing like he's not it's clear he wants to say something but he's saying nothing he's just like shell-shocked and so they bring him to the hospital they're like let's just focus on making sure he's okay they're assuming that at this point he's been kidnapped by torturers and he's been dropped off here he's likely been tortured they're definitely gonna be things wrong with him like this guy needs a medical evaluation so they bring him to the hospital and at first he's like sort of unwilling to be touched but then eventually he sort of allows them to do an exam and they check him top to bottom and he's physically fine you know he's actually he turned out he was hydrated he was he was fed he was he was healthy the only odd thing is he had these not severe but pronounced burns on the underside of his feet that were like in his boot like he had burned feet but other than that you know he was fine and so for a while like the police and the nurses and the doctors they're just like you know whenever you're ready like tell us you know what happened to you because like we really can't put this together it doesn't make any sense eventually he would he would he would begin to tell his story and it is today regarded at least in argent argentinian paranormal lore this is considered one of the most credible accounts of paranormal activity that exists and you can look it up for yourself so um sergio who would retire specifically because of what he saw this night he said he was driving down he saw the car up ahead called it in poachers right and he said i pulled up i i didn't see him you know i didn't see tire tracks whatever and so i called in back up and i drew my gun and i walked into the forest and as soon as i'm in the forest it was like eerie like quiet it's so loud normally with all the insects and the bugs and then the the nightjar birds and everything it's like eerie and quiet and it's like very dense in this little pocket of trees and he's moving forward and he's like as i'm walking i'm i'm really aware of the fact that it doesn't make sense that a car would have plowed in here and vanished like there'd be signs of it and there's not but then all of a sudden he's in his head and he thinks he sees something that like might represent like metal like a car somewhere in the distance so he like wills himself despite feeling sort of uneasy to keep going and he gets like you know well into the crops of trees to only to discover that like oh it's nothing but as he's standing effectively in the middle of the trees he said that i i heard something behind me and it's it's dark and he turns around and there are these two sets of glowing red eyes that are looking back at him in the forest and they're looking back at him like looking at him in such a way that it's clear they're moving towards him like he can tell that there are these eyes that are set they're moving in his direction and he said he immediately felt this pressure in his chest that it was so powerful that he like he couldn't speak he couldn't move and he's just stuck there staring and he said these two figures emerged like from the shadows like from the the moonlight that these are these gray slender figures that are walking like a person bipedal and they got right up in front of him and he said that i just immediately felt like my chest was going to cave in and it was just it was so clear that these these figures with red eyes are in control of me i can't control myself anymore and sure enough he said that he felt himself suddenly begin to stiffen up and he's just staring at these eyes and he began bending over backwards like in a grotesque way until he was folded halfway over backwards not like broken back but fully contorted and then he turned and he's he's like i wasn't doing it and i began walking in reverse bent over backwards as he's staring at these two figures as they sort of corralled him as he backtracked back onto the road and the whole time he's looking up at these two looming figures with the red eyes that are just not saying anything moving towards him he goes out to the road and he's still bent over and he said he felt his hands come out of his like position he's in and he reached down he pulls his his gun which i think at that point he had reholstered and he disassembles his gun drops it to the ground disassembles his radio drops it to the ground and then after that he was like suddenly i was standing back up again i'm staring at these two figures and they're like maybe in between doing something to me um and i left that a key detail which i'll fill in now but it's okay he's like i i took a run for it i just started running back into the the forest backpedaled back backing up very quickly when they did the search for sergio they found a single set of footprints that started somewhere in the tree line and they followed them and it was like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die went out to the back of the crops of trees and then it carried off into this field there was a crop a field of crops off in the distance they found the footsteps it went out like a mile into this this field but the footsteps they were like clearly human footsteps and they began getting further and further spaced apart at first this is during the night of the search when they can't find them they found these footsteps that were like three feet apart five feet five feet apart like so far apart at certain points that they're like we must be missing footprints like it didn't it it looked like he was sprinting and leaping right but then eventually it reaches the edge of this this field this cornfield or whatever crop it was and there's one final right footprint in the ground and then nothing beyond it so that's that's that's the other detail that they had of where the fuck is sergio right so now he's telling his story he's like i'm out there i've disassembled the gun and the radio and i made a run for it and as soon as i ran i tried i like jumped practically to get into the forest to get out of the tree to have them not run and i was like oh my god see me. And as soon as I jumped, I felt like I was going to hit the ground, but I didn't. It's i stopped and levitated over the ground and then i lost control of my body again i was put back up into an upright position and as soon as my feet touch the ground i start running and then suddenly i'm being thrown into the air and like i'm crashing down it's like this he knew the the red-eyed beings were chucking him into the air over and over and he said he made it out to the back of the crops of trees and he actually got a pretty decent stretch of running like he's okay they're not going to do it anymore they're gonna stop chucking me in the air with their mind powers right and he said i began like taking a stride and they'd like push me in the air and that's what started to account for these gaps it was like they were chucking him an actual five or ten feet with each step he took and he'd come crashing back down he's just sprinting along but at a certain point when he neared the edge of this this cornfield he was so exhausted and he knew like they have full control over me like i don't know what they're going to do to me but i i can't i can't combat whatever it is they are and what they're doing and so he just stopped he just stopped and he knows they're behind him because they've been behind him he can feel their presence and he's run off now into the back of this cornfield and he finally just turns around to like confront whatever or whoever this is and he turns around and there's nothing there and for a second he's like where are they and then he like feels something behind him and he turns back around and now it's like he's on the edge of the world as if the world disappears beyond where he's standing it's like a cliff and just a black void where the edge of this field had been like the world vanished in front of him and in the void in front of him now are these two sets of red eyes and he felt himself being pulled into the void and then he has no memory and then he woke up on the side of the road 18 hours later and to this day there are two things about this that are crazy one is they did an extensive because it was actually pretty humiliating for the police force sure and the story came out because sergio was like yeah that's what happened like aliens are throwing me around you know like that was the official report and it was like this big deal and it was sort of humiliating for the local cops and the stupid story about like how aliens did this to this guy right they're like obviously you got duped by poachers was sort of the running theme sure and so they ran like as extensive of an investigation as they could really on sergio like trying to catch him and misrepresenting what happened and there's just he stuck to the story they went out there i mean they couldn't find really any details that were either corroborated or or rejected it but they couldn't find a better explanation and then more than that that particular set of trees off of the cruce de las canas intersection historically for years tourists authorities have pointed out there are strange lights red lights in particular that are constantly seen in that forest that are often accompanied with silence inside of the forest and to this day that's known as like a hotbed of paranormal activity and people still report seeing strange lights red lights in those trees and if you look at the image of that little crops of trees the fact that it's like this one like sort of little crops of trees in the middle of fucking nowhere and the idea that like some crazy shit's happening in there it's like terrifying yeah so it's a good story it is a good story do you believe sergio i believe that sergio is telling the truth of whatever he thinks experience like so that that's the thing is like i am i i would say i'm far closer to like a full send believer than i am a skeptic and it's really easy to say as much because it's like okay let me get this straight so we're on planet earth that's in this ungodly big universe and we're it there's nothing else we know all the stuff like give me a break we don't yeah like so like just logically that's impossible to me the idea that there isn't stuff beyond our comprehension there aren't entities beyond our our powers and our under like that to me that's crazy and would be devastatingly depressing if that were true and so i'd rather believe there's more out there um but i think that with sergio if you just like look up his account like it's a guy who's grappling with like i don't know what happened this is the best this is my limited human understanding of what happened to me and i don't know what happened to me i mean the way you tell it is so good it's a master class in withholding um and definitely definitely good for watch time so yeah when i tell an urban legend or a mystery the first two acts i tell the story as it's true and then my third act is break it down yeah what did i find out and i can see on my charts people just when i say but is it true people just drop off they're like i'm out they don't want to hear it and i hear it in the comments you ruin the story you know you should do it mr ballman does you know we're just here for the fun yeah am i making a mistake depends because like there's there's two ways to look at it like if you are looking at it from the perspective of your job is ultimately if if you believe your job is to be entertaining probably shouldn't do that because what you've done is the first two acts you're allowing them to suspend their disbelief and they want that and actually i have a question for you that's going to follow this wait this is in your show no this is i wanted to ask you this like they are suspending their disbelief or they're they're just or they choose to believe whatever it is but it's like they want that and so even if they fully wholeheartedly agree with any of the the dissenting opinions or whatever in the third act like they don't want that because it hurts like the feeling they get about it right and so my question and this is a broad question it's like there are like there are millions and millions of people that tune into you and tune into me and other people that tell stories like this that are smart logical rational people why are they drawn to things like this and it's it's not a gotcha it's like think about it i would venture my answer would be people like to be scared in a safe environment and the unknown is scary and it's cool to think that there's something else out there and it's like safe and controlled but there might even be something more to it like it's maybe the thrill of like i don't know like the idea that there are things out there that are scarier stronger bigger i don't know i think that because i don't think paranormal is often tied to good stuff it's tied to like scary stuff it's tied to like dark well you're the philosopher what what not the mechanics of the roller coaster why but what's the psychology why do we need because we need it yeah um well you know i i always that something that was profound that i learned that is so simple and maybe that's the most the most profound things are often simple they are we only understand this is what someone told me we only understand things in terms of like relatives for example like i really only actually know what hot is because i've experienced cold and vice versa i only really know what like tall is because i've seen short you get the idea everything's like in contrast somebody once was in one of my philosophy classes was talking about this idea that like we don't even realize how limiting that really is like you know there are what it is entirely possible given the way that humans only understand things based on like clear contrasts that there could be let's be cliche about it aliens amongst us that you wouldn't actually be able to recognize as anything because they don't contrast with what you know and it's like your brain wouldn't necessarily be able to interpret them because there isn't the natural contrast for it like we as humans are so like literally known to be egocentric everything we do is sort of like self-interested to some degree and like i've neil degrasse tyson the astrophysicist he gives this amazing thought experiment that sort of it touches on this element of humanity that is often overlooked which is like okay so let's talk about like the likelihood of there being life outside of earth right and he's like okay so on earth right now you know humans have dna you know and he's much more poignant and more accurate with what he was saying and i think that's what he says but i'll give the spirit of it he's sort of like there's a hundred pieces of dna let's say that make up a human dna strand and like that that those hundred pieces and that's not the right number but those hundred pieces that's what makes us human you got to have all 100 boom that's that's that's a human he's like what what's our what's our closest and just purely in terms of dna and he's like it's probably the chimpanzee and they have like and he actually had the numbers it was like 97. they got 97 they don't got 100 they got 97 though they're really close and like we can see that we we know that there's there's closeness there they're like similar to the to us in the way they move there's like a similar like family bond there they even kind of look like us and he goes what do we do with chimpanzees what do humans do with chimpanzees science experiments zoos he's like when was the last time you're like you know what i really want i want to go talk to a chimpanzee i want to go learn about chimpanzee i mean maybe you do that through a documentary but it's like we mistreat them because they're not human they're human right right and those are the those are the high ones he goes what about what about like an ant or like a worm forget like interactions with them their dna is like you know 90 versus our hundred he's like when was the last time you're walking down the street and you're like uh oh there's the there's an earthworm let me try to chat with this earthworm no you might step on the earthworm and not even know he's like when we as humans think about what could be in terms of life outside of of planet earth right he's like we automatically sort of act like they'd be like us you know They'd be just like us. I mean, something similar, right? I mean, maybe, maybe that could totally be true, right? But what if we're the fucking worm? Yeah. What if literally they don't give a shit about us that they don't, it wouldn't even register. That makes more sense to me. You know? And it's like, oh, wow. We sort of have come at this like, well, if there's any life out there, it will be nearly identical, probably worse, you know, cause we're pretty good. And like, we'll be able to talk. They might speak like some form of Spanish or something, but yeah, I'm being obtuse about it, but it's like, there is an inherent human, like bias towards, we'd know what they are. We could sort of see what they are and we'd get it. What if, what if you can't, what if you lack the capacity? Cause you're so low on the totem pole to even see them for what they are and that they don't even register as what if you're lower than a worm? So it's just, it's an interesting way to look at the world. It's depressing in a way. It is. I had Daniel Weitz in there who was, who was a phys, he's a physio. Physicist at CERN. Oh man. Jesus. Yeah. It's like heavy prep week. So he's, we were talking about, you know, what would aliens look like? It's kind of a specialty. He said, what if the aliens get here and they don't even do math anymore? I'm like, what? He's like, maybe they don't even have math. Maybe they're never discovered. Maybe they don't need it. Yeah. It's cause we look at everything through this lens, but the odds are probably not. It's probably nothing like us. Yeah. I, uh, I. I am fascinated with like the, um, what is it? The pale blue dot, the Carl Sagan. It's like, I find myself, and this is probably what drew me to philosophy in the first place. I, I have always been so deeply fascinated by it's so like the unknown is sort of the catchall, but it's like, I think about this a lot right now. Forget like the limitations of like time and space time and our ability. Forget. Just think about this purely simplistically, independent of whether or not we'll ever be able to verify that there is or is not other metropolises on alien planets off in the universe somewhere. It doesn't matter if you can verify it or not. It doesn't matter if it exists, if it truly exists or not, but let, let's assume for a second that it does in some capacity. Maybe we wouldn't be able to, to see it for ourselves, but it let's pretend that exists somehow, some way out there. Right. Right. This second. Again, putting aside the limitations of time and all that right now, like whatever's out there is living their lives in their, in their spaces, doing their things. There's a, there's a word that I wish I had right now that I actually experienced a lot when I was in Peru. I would like be wandering the streets of Peru. This is when I was actually less fucked up from substance that I was more sober, like having these sober walks. And I would look in the window at night because the windows for like the family rooms were usually right at the front of the house and you could like see people having dinner. And I would look in these homes. I was sort of creepy of me. But you'd see these people that are like laughing and like having their, their dinner or they're arguing or whatever it is. And like, it's so foreign, but it's right there. And there's a word for the sudden realization that other people have just as full lives as you do that you don't ever see or have access to. Like they're everywhere. Like just cause you don't know Martha who lives in Kansas right now, it doesn't, doesn't change that. She has a full life that matters as much to her. As your life matters to you. And so I think about that and apply it to the distant, like alien species. And it's like, that is so intense to think that there could be other species, other like aliens that are just simply living in whatever capacity they do right now. And it's like both infuriating and just infinitely intriguing that we probably won't ever know us, our, our crew. We won't ever know. No. At least not the way we believe we will know. And so I find that to be really interesting. I, I'm so drawn to the, like there's the, the other thought experiment that sort of touches on this, which is like, and this is, this is a famous one. I forget the name of it. It's something like somebody's arrow and it's like, okay, pretend this is to get you to think about the scope and size of the universe. Imagine you have this arrow and you fire it and it'll travel, you know, infinitely in any direction. I'm sure you're familiar. And like, nothing can stop it. It'll go, it'll go through the earth. It'll go through black holes. Doesn't nothing can stop it. So you shoot this arrow and basically, you know, the professor's like, you gotta, you gotta just be simple about it. You gotta choose one or the other. Does the arrow, you know, whatever direction you fire it, you know, does it at some point reach a wall where there's just nothing beyond it? Cause that's the edge of existence, right? Cause that would be the one thing that would stop it, like nothingness, right? Does it reach an end point where there's literally nothing or does it go on forever? Which would, you know, that's the infinite universe theory. sort of a simple thing to think about it at first and you know i'm like okay it probably goes on infinitely i guess you know but then it's like i don't know and he's like okay well how many people think that it hits some sort of you know wall so to speak it doesn't matter what direction doesn't matter it could be billions of light years away but it hits some wall right he's like okay there's a problem with that because as humans going back to the whole contrast and understanding things he goes if you if it hits this wall so to speak you're implying that there's nothingness beyond it it's not really a wall it's like it's the end of existence well imagine that there's literally a wall there whether you see it or not as a human based on our lived experience we have to naturally ask the question what is on the other side of the wall and you're like okay well don't worry it's it's nothingness problem solved well then the question define nothingness what is it well it's a void oh nope that's something can't be that okay it's blackness not can't be that it's clear any example we give doesn't work because we only understand things that exist we don't understand that the only the only thing we know that didn't exist that we sort of know is our pre-existence i i know i didn't exist before i before i existed but i don't i don't have any feelings with it no but it's the closest thing to nothingness that i i have and so we can't conceptualize of there not being something on the other side of that wall we can't do it as humans we can't do it and so the the natural next step is to say okay well you know if i can't do that then it must mean that it's the the alter or the alternate which is the arrow just continues the universe is infinite but then that implies that in any in order for the universe to be infinite it means everything in the universe has to be duplicated and iterated upon an infinite number of times which is like string theory i think and it's like that means there's an infinite number of you and i having this conversation but like you know this chord is pink like right and that's a different earth everything else is the same and it's like there's an infinite number of you and i having this conversation but like you know this chord is pink like right and it's like there's an infinite number of you and i it opens up all these lines of like wait a minute like we don't really understand stuff we don't really get what's out there at all it's like so rudimentary but it feels like we should know and we don't i love that and it frustrates me and i'm constantly drawn to it i love that too and you know ask a physicist or ask ask someone who's religious what happened before the big bang and you get weird answers man like it just it just happened in what well it doesn't work like that um when i hear your stories i see like robert stack in a trench coat i see you in a trench coat i see art bell in the middle of the night um paul harvey yeah legends always saved to the to the other side of the break for um for the rest of the story who are your artistic inspirations and don't say evan allen my sister evan allen uh i you know what's funny is i always i always want to reference him and i always forget his name and that suggests that i don't know him that he's a guy and i'm i can't believe i always i should always have his name on hand but anytime i i i find myself watching datelines with this i need to look him up his comments are exploding right now i know that anyways there's a dateline host like real wrinkled face gray hair guy he's just a brilliant storyteller like truly just brilliant like you listen to him and you're like oh my anything you talk about i'm drawn in i obviously forget his name that's great uh what's so great about him there is a calming feature to his voice yeah you do that i find that when i listen to him not that other people have grating voices i think a lot of people have voices are fine for storytelling but there's something about his that's it doesn't even lull you into like a stupor it's more like i just like listening to him and he's just really really good at like understanding the beats and like you really like he unlike the other hosts who are great dateline obviously is great hosts he really leans in when it's time to deliver a beat and i think that one of the things that i tell people if i'm talking to a pure like regular person it's like how do you tell a good story right i probably wouldn't get into like the technicalities around what pov i use or like how to structure it it would be like a really good story oftentimes comes down to like how committed the storyteller is to the story and i think that's a really good story and i think that's a really good story and i think that's a really good story and i think that's a really good story is to delivering that story that's right you know it's like you can have sort of bad material but if you're really committed to the bit and you deliver it with the pizzazz and charisma you can you can you can really command an audience and i find that anonymous gray-haired amazing host from c from dateline who now it's killing me i don't know his name uh was so good at is so good at it um but i mean this is one that is you know i i was around incredibly uh namely my father uh he you know we don't have the greatest relationship i'll be candid um but he He growing up was like a profoundly talented public speaker. Not that he did a lot of it, but you know, at Thanksgiving, who's going to say grace, you know, my dad, or like if there's a eulogy and he was the guy that was tapped to do it or like, I'm so jealous of that gift. He's an incredible speaker. And I find myself not even intentionally, but I know I sound like my dad, like the way he spoke, there was a, he would look at you and like say things with like so much confidence that what he is saying is he's like imparting it on you and you better pay attention. But like it worked just, there's a way he tells stories, the way he speaks, that's just really, really powerful. And as a kid, I was like so impressed by it that it isn't that when I began telling stories that I like looked up to him, it's that I naturally modeled the way I spoke around somebody that I thought was really good at it. So I would say my father is someone that I sort of naturally have probably sort of mimicked in a way. My dad was a great storyteller. Yeah, that's cool. And it's just like, you're around it. And then I, I can't believe we have to look, I'm sure someone will put in the comments. He's great though. Um, when you were telling the story about Sergio, there was that one beat where you're like, you had to backtrack. So when you're doing live, I'm assuming you're telling the same stories on a tour. Do you watch the audience? to like i'm a former stand-up so like you're doing material and you're like all right that didn't play next story you would make adjustments like oh yeah yeah yeah in fact i i had done a single live uh event in in texas in in 2023 to like test the waters it was great but like it actually doesn't give you a whole lot of data it's like one time um but what i found is when we did the tour in 24 we did 15 stops across the east coast but we sort of hit a range of locations there was like dc chicago detroit boston philly new york but we also were like in north carolina and i and i say that because north carolina you know i lived in virginia beach right on the border of north carolina they're like such nice people and it was towards the end of the tour we went to north carolina and i had really dialed in my material i was very confident in just like what i was doing each night and i remember being like this is not going well the two nights in north carolina i'm glad you're telling this because i was going to ask you to tell me when it didn't go well dude i was up there and there's a couple of like beats in a few of the stories i had four stories that i would tell um i knew the points that were going to like have a big impact and it was just like a subdued audience like just very soon and it was really hard oh that first one doesn't hit you're like oh oh oh man was it hard it was so hard and i came to realize on the second night we were in north carolina and i don't even know how i came to this but it suddenly made sense the audience was being polite oh no the audience was being like unbelievable because that that group of people that i thought hated not hating they weren't interested were like there's so many people after the show that stuck around to talk with me like more than anywhere else how does that work if you know what i mean and conversely i had when we were in washington dc there was a really rowdy crowd and not in a good way not like you know we like no like not in like a we love these stories way like it was like drunken bs which is sort of funny because it's like this is so not the place for it i'm like telling these intense like stories that require focus you know yeah and uh the hard part was if i'm taken out of the story by someone it takes everyone out of the story and i had to on two different occasions not kick anybody out because i didn't i allowed security to do that but i actually had to specifically tell people in the theater to stop what they're doing really for the benefit of the whole crew and it's really hard to get back into flow when you do that because you sort of feel like did i overreact i'm sort of up here with myself you know they paid to be here um that was hard but then conversely like a lot of the people that i've seen in the theater that i've seen in a lot of the scenes that i've seen in a lot of the scenes that i've seen in a lot of the scenes that i've seen in the theater was like the most intimidating of all of them because it was the biggest theater of the whole one there was like i think 2 900 people there wow i mean it's a sellout no it's sellout would have been 3 100 still the way they did it is like so the entire lower level was sold out and then the upper level it was like to be honest it pretty much looks sold out it wasn't but it was like you wouldn't look at it and say oh no it's here you'd be like wow this is full maybe the lighting or something but it from my perspective when i was out there it was like holy this is the there's a lot of people in here you know the other venues we were doing were sort of a little bit more narrow and like maybe 1300 people 1500 people which is a lot but chicago theater is like this huge wide theater and the ground floor is like 2 000 people alone and it's just like a sea of people in the lighting as such there's not a good way to like black out the crowd really kind of seeing the whole crowd the whole time but the crowd was so good like they were like so into it and i it's funny i went on stage for chicago and i i had been told before i went on stage like by the people that worked there they're like hey you know you're welcome to have a drink out there like water or whatever uh but just keep in mind you know this is a really old stage if you're really careful you don't spill anything it's very hard to clean this i'm like no problem and so i bring my mug of scalding hot tea with honey in it out there and i'm like nervously walking on stage and i immediately kicked over my mug of tea and it spills all over the the stage and i'm looking over at the side and everyone's like god damn it and like they can't come out and clean it because it's just started and that's how you always started the show it's sticky and so i like knelt down and i sort of made a joke out of it and i began sopping it up because i had a sleeping bag that was a set prop and i just i began the show like as if i wasn't really doing it and i was like oh my god what's going on what's going on what are you doing this i was like cleaning tea and so guys like i'm here tonight and then people thought it was funny and they were like laughing at it and so it like softened the crowd a little bit and it was it was a great show but man yeah i i would say that in terms of the i've done i guess a total of 16 like live shows where like okay there's a legitimate audience that i'm telling a story to and and i would say that the set list was basically the same but the way it was delivered was 100 dictated on how's the crowd reacting how good of a job did i that story and like if i did a crappy job i really gotta change the way i do this one and really ramp it up and nail the beats um but like that's sort of what makes storytelling fun is like you really you can alter the way it comes off just depending on how you deliver the story so it's like how you deliver it is key and so being the advice i give people if you want to be a really great storyteller is like commit to the story even if the story sucks if you're committed to it that's what they'll remember when you tell it i'm gonna close out with a book before we do that are you gonna fly in the flannel fly in the flannel or like when you leave here are you going to change into civilian clothes i'll change into civilian clothes so tell me the first time you're recognized oh man uh well the funny the the the thing is is if i'm not in uniform i am totally unrecognizable you know but in uniform in uniform it happens yeah so what about the first time ever uh ironically mine was at the urinal at a restaurant oh really i was recognized behind me while in a very vulnerable state by the toilet attention nice that's pretty good and i'm like i need a minute thanks dude nice yeah let's take a picture he wanted one i i was in uh doylestown pennsylvania where i was living at the time and i was this is like tick tock days this is like the height of my tick tock early days and uh people were not really sort of like going out but i was like in an outdoor seating area like a mask on the whole thing right yeah covet and i uh we were at this like little restaurant in downtown doylestown and and doylestown was one of my favorite restaurants that i've ever been to so i've been there a lot of times and i was like what the hell is this restaurant and i was like what the hell is this restaurant and i was like what the hell is this And some dude stopped and he's looking at me and I'm like, what is this guy doing? You're really in my space here. This is like uncomfortable. And he's like, Mr. Paulman? And at first I was like, what? I was like, oh my God. I was like, you follow my account? And he's like, dude. He like held it up like, whoa. Yeah, that was the first time. But it was like, oh, that's right. Like there are real people attached to these numbers of views and all that stuff. Now it's like, I don't think it happens a ton. But when I'm like in uniform, I would say it's relatively common. But not like, not a lot. It's like niche, you know? Like, oh. It is. Yo, Mr. Paulman. You know? I was at an airport waiting at the casino. Yeah, the airport. The hotel. Hotel. And I'm waiting to get picked up to come over here. And someone walked in. I had my head down. I'm in regalia, you know? And someone was like, dude, that looks like Mr. Paulman. And I heard it. And I turned around and looked at him. And he's like, wait a minute. And I was like, yeah. That's me. And he's like, oh, we're huge fans. But it's rare. It does happen, though. It's fun. What makes your channel so good is the way you tell the story. And it's theater of the mind. But you do graphic novels. By the way, shout out to Vendetti and Moody for amazing work. Oh, yeah. Rob Vendetti, Andrea Moody, awesome team. And Evan Allen, my sister, chief creative at Ballin. And huge influence on these books. So what. what does having a drawing of the story ruin and what does it unlock yeah well so the reason we went with so what does it unlock i think the reason we went with graphic novel versus like trying to do some you know just sort of text only book is you know i started as a visual thing like it was tiktok and then it was youtube and even though it's always been straight to camera green screen and like some pictures it's not like a huge production um it's always been you're sort of looking at someone who's telling you a story and then you're also being given glimpses of the story through imagery it's simple but it's visual and as much as it's theater of the mind and it definitely is it's just there's always been a visual component to it and when we were thinking about how can we make a book feel feel like mr ballin we came up with graphic novel but at first when we sort of tested it out a little bit we like put out some comics like little glimpses clips of it like in our discord and and read it people weren't like this is bad they really it's great like that was great yeah it's all right but then i was like you know what one of the things that we can do with a graphic novel that's visual as well that's like that would make it even more mr balliny is they're used to me in my flannel and backwards hat like literally in in their purview in their view telling the story and we were like why don't we add a little avatar of mr ballin's face in flannel with the backwards hat in the book just like periodically remind them that like your narrator is here like the text is meant to be my voice but like the little bubble with different caricature animations it's designed to like remind them that like this is the visual representation of of like where it all began and i think it translates well i think people get the vibe yes much more positive remarks as soon as we added a little avatar new york times best soloist isn't it yeah no very very successful um but uh in terms of what it's what you lose and i think that comes to the thing i was just saying which is like there's there's power in the storyteller themselves you are the storyteller if you're reading a book you're you're internally narrating it and and i hope i come through in your internal narration but you lose like the person controlling the story which is the bard the person telling the story so i think you do lose that even if there's a little avatar in there the new book is the terror within the marketing copy is what are you capable of so we heard a lot of dark side to mr ballin today so what are you capable of when no one's looking yeah well i mean that's that's the that's the primer if there's no ramifications what are you what what are you capable of hey well you know i've sort of seen it in my own life but i i think that like this book it it it sort of begins to examine stories about people that demonstrate they're capable of a whole lot of stuff that's not so good uh and i i there's there's some other statistic that is not included in this book but it's it's definitely the one i've read that's stuck with me it's like there are some ungodly number of uncaught serial killers that are just walking amongst like a large number of them and they're just they're your barber they're your grocer they're your doordash guy you know whatever and that's horrifying but like of course that's how it works you know and it's like so this question of like the terror within or this premise is like it's not just a thought like there really are people out there right now that you might think you know but actually you don't there's something inside of them that's pretty dark is there anything you wanted to touch on before we say goodbye no uh other than i really appreciate the conversation and it was cool to get into some stuff that i've never talked about in particular like the the military stuff that was that was heavy but i felt like you were a good person to share that with so thank you thanks john um i thanked you at the beginning of the show for helping my channel and i'll see you next time bye bye tonight you have reinvigorated me for this medium honestly hell yeah that's awesome dude awesome mr ballin thank you man that was mr ballin john allen john's one of the nicest guys i've ever met in this business and instantly became one of my favorite people now there's not much to break down here but a couple of things the argentine cop story is real so let's start there his name was corporal luis sergio pochetta and the case files out of la pompa from march 2006 read almost exactly the way john tells it the disassembled gun on the roadside street in the city of la pompa is a real story but it's not the only one that is in there he turned up 18 hours later bone dry after a night of rain people have spent 20 years trying to break that story and got nowhere it's a great case now ephraim the buddy who left the seal teams to fight isis that's real and the rescue's on video his charity posted on their own site one detail drifted the footage shows the team leader carrying the girl while ephraim laid down covering fire but he took a bullet while doing it the man is exactly who john says he is and i am going to support that charity the ted bundy story well john flagged himself before i could there's no interview where bundy says any of that the story lives in the university folklore archive filled with campfire legends it's a campfire story about a campfire killer because of course it is the military stories the flattering version of john's record is out there but he spent an hour of our conversation replacing it with an uglier one on camera that took bravery john's book is the terror within out september 29th four of the stories in it have never been told anywhere else and everything i mentioned is linked below if you want to know more about the story please click below i covered those nine dead russian hikers that started john's second life it's the dia with pass episode and i break down how i think it happened it's pretty interesting and if you like the pachetta case my pascagoula episode is another abduction story that the police believed until next time be safe be kind and know that you are appreciated i played polybius in area 51 a secret code inside the bible said i was i love my ufos and paranormal fun as well as music so i'm singing like i should but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth my friend and it never ends no it never ends i fear the crab cat and i got stuck inside male's home with mkl truck being only two away where did stanley kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set with the shadow people there the roswell aliens just fought the smiling man i'm told and his name was cold and i can't believe i'm dancing with the fish head to fish on thursday night swiss day jay two and the white balls of the beat all through the night all i ever wanted was to just hear the truth so the white balls of the beat all through the night all i ever wanted was to just hear the truth so the white balls of the beat all through the night the mothman sightings and the solar storm still come to a god the secret city underground the mysterious number stations planet surf 02 project stargate and what the dark watchers found Airbnbs, And anywhere you stay away from home, just attach it to the doorframe, switch it on. And if someone opens the door, BirdieBox blasts a loud siren and flashing alarm to alert you and everyone nearby. Because the best part of travel isn't worrying. It's sleeping soundly. BirdieBox from She's Birdie. Locking in peace of mind wherever you stay. For safer, more confident travel, visit She'sBirdie.com. That's S-H-E-S-B-I-R-D-I-E dot com. This episode sponsored by She's Birdie. You lock the hotel room door, then check it again, and maybe one more time. Because even the nicest room can feel unfamiliar at night. That's why She's Birdie created BirdieBox. With She's Birdie, you can bring peace of mind with you. BirdieBox is a portable travel door alarm for hotels, dorms, Airbnbs, and anywhere you stay away from home. Just attach it to the doorframe, switch it on. And if someone opens the door? BirdieBox blasts a loud siren and flashing alarm to alert you and everyone nearby. For safer, more confident travel, visit She's Birdie dot com. That's S-H-E-S-B-I-R-D-I-E dot com.