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

25:30Sure. Explain to me how you've constructed that. Tell me what's going on. So it's really important to understand if you're going to tell a really good story that it has less to do with the story and much more to do with the delivery of the person telling it. Now that's not entirely true because there are some stories that are so outrageous they carry the day. But most of the time, if you're gonna tell a story, it's your delivery that's gonna have the biggest impact on the audience. And so for this, I'm actually telling that lamp story with only you in mind. I'm not thinking about anybody else here.

26:01I'm really just gauging your reaction to the story. And so as a storyteller, I'm constantly trying to size up how my audience is reacting to what I'm saying. But in terms of that specific story, I know that I'm building to a place where I'm gonna tell you that everything that happened in the story didn't happen. That's going to be the reveal. But the best way to set that up is to not flag that there is anything unusual about the beginning of the story because it wrecks the reveal. If there's any language whatsoever in the first 90 % of that story that tips the audience that this might not really be happening, it wrecks the story.

26:36What would be an example of that? He was in school and fell on the floor. No, actually, it's devices that a lot of storytellers use that I think hurts their stories. For For example, I could say, going back to the lamp story, he's first noticed the lamp, right? And so he sees a blurry lamp and so Mitch, he sees the lamp, it's blurry, he can't make sense of it. But what he didn't know is this lamp was going to ruin his life. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, that's an overt example. But there are little things that people think are good transitions between the story, like leading the audience to get ready, something big's going to happen.

27:09But if you telegraph too much early in the story that get ready, something big's coming, the audience will just start guessing what it's gonna be, and a lot of times it's fairly obvious that there's some element of the story that is gonna be revealed to be different in the end. So I would also say there's just new ones to it. When I'm, for example, I added something into that story. It's part of the story, but I usually don't add it in, which is when Kayla came back in the house, when Mitch is now unresponsive and he's staring at the lamp, and he's not even reacting to her, whereas the day before he was, I made a point of saying that Kayla ushered her kids out of the room.

27:47It's a small detail, but it gives it a level of reality. That if you're the parent you've come in and the parent's unresponsive, that little detail reminds you that this is a real human having a real interaction. If I don't include it, it likely has no impact. It doesn't matter that I, you know, whether Kayla did or did not shoot her kids away because of this crisis, it doesn't really matter. But adding that in and delivering it not as like a... I said it as if it absolutely happened. Like, it's factual. She's shoot the kids away and then she dealt with her husband. That's telling you, here it is.

28:19This is happening. Like, engage with the story. This is really happening. But I'm doing it. I want it to feel as real as possible in the beginning so that the reveal actually has impact. And that's why I added little kind of, almost, the family game nights, right? They really did. But that's an important detail to the beginning of the story because I'm going to tell you what's all fake. So it's like layering in things that create authenticity in the beginning of that story is really important Because the way that the way that story often gets told is you people will start with Here's a story about a guy who hid his head and he imagined his whole life and then it was taken away from him The way I did it.

28:53Yeah, he was in his house and he saw this lamp and it was blurry But it turns out that was the beginning of this psychotic break he was having but it's like the audience There's no there's that's the thing is when I'm when I'm telling a story It's all about out, stick around because you're going to learn something that you were not expecting. There's going to be a plot twist. There's going to be a reveal. I'm, instead of telling you that, the way I tell a story always includes a payoff, always. I guarantee you, you can get every single story I've ever put on the internet, ever. And there's a payoff at the end that is absolutely intentional.

29:24And so your audience begins to believe, begins to know that's what they get. Yeah, there's loads of details. And I'm not really sure where this is going. But if I stick around, something big is going to happen. And I did that without even telling you it. It's just the way I tell the story. So are you adding stakes in the beginning as well? It seemed like that is you're saying they were in love and they do the family thing and it's the white picket fans. And it's the American dream and they make sure that they look after each other with date night and it's the things that they do. That's adding a degree of stakes and I guess you're invested.

30:00Like you like these people. Like you wanna know what's gonna happen to them. Absolutely. I mean, the deal is, is for this particular story, I need the first part of the story to just feel like it happened, which seems like a pretty easy charge. But when Mitch describes what happens, he does not spend a lot of time talking about whether or not, you know, Kayla shoot the kids away when she walked in the house or whether they had game night. Those are little details that definitely happened. But for him, the story is the trauma itself, the fact that that this didn't really happen. That's what he wants to talk of, or the questions that he's answering are gonna be about the trauma side.

30:35And so what I do is I recognize that in this case, if I'm gonna tell it, I have to find all those small details to reassure the audience that, oh, this is real, this definitely happened, but I don't need to tell you that. I'm adding those little bits of just normal human life and thoughts that remind you, without you even realizing it, oh, this happened, that's not part of the story. Of course, this happened. I'm gonna see what happens next. We don't realize that like none of this happened. but I have to make it authentic. Playing with the chronological order of events as well, I imagine is something that you have to do.

31:05And also this purposeful emission of certain details. Yeah, actually a good example of that purposeful emission would be take a crime, a murder, let's say. There's a pretty good chance that the person who commits the murder is gonna do something to get people to not think it's them. They're gonna lie. They're gonna misrepresent what happened. If, you know, if people are asking questions, They're not going to be like, oh, I did it. Some people do, but a lot of people don't. They're going to try to protect themselves with lies. We'll tell a story where we will take the perspective of, let's say, the killer.

31:39But I haven't told you it's the killer. I'm just introducing this person into the story, and I'm using their perspective. And if their perspective includes absolute lies, but they're selling it as truth, and you don't know that they're killer, and you don't know they're lying, I can very honestly tell you something that this person said that was a lie, but I can tell it to you as truth because you know I'm inhabiting that person's perspective. So yes, it's a lie, but in the framework of that story, if I'm saying so and so said this thing, and here's how they said it and to this person, and here's the outcome of what they said, it's not a lie, it winds up being a lie, but if I'm telling it from their perspective, it allows me to mislead you, but using real things that happened.

32:23That's a very powerful tool for the podcast, which is mostly true crime, where we're looking to find perspectives that allow us to basically lie, but using someone's real lie was part of the story. That makes sense. What do you see when you look at other people telling stories, this can be as part of presentation, this can be true crime, it can be whatever you want. What are the biggest mistakes? What do people get wrong when it comes to telling a good story? Honestly, it's pretty straightforward and it is giving away too much at the beginning. If you think about it, you know, in the true crime world, let's say, or in this kind of strange, dark, and mysterious world, there's loads of mysterious stories where, you know, there's some element of mystery surrounding it.

33:09But in true crime, you know, the, what was the question again? I just space in it. How do other people get it wrong? So even if a story is not inherently a mystery, like any random story you tell your friend, people are listening to a story and they're invested in a story if there's some kind of payoff, meaning a mystery is solved. They want something to come out of the story. They want some sort of, they want, yeah, they want a mystery to be solved, if you will. And if you open a story with the conclusion, even if it's just some nonsense story, like the person who's listening might not be that invested in it anymore, you know?

33:47So I think that opening with your conclusion in the journalistic in journalism, that's what you actually do. If you read a news headlines, headline, here's what happened and now let's break it down. But from an engaging storytelling perspective, doing the opposite is absolutely the way where you don't give away the ending until the ending. Yeah. I read this is for the people who may be intent on reading the silent patient by Andrew Michael, ladies, jump forward by about one minute. I read this book, it's kind of going everywhere at the moment. Psychological Thriller, it is a woman who appears to have killed her partner and a psychotherapist that's working with her.

34:26She's completely silent, she won't speak, she's not unresponsive and he is trying to work out and unfold what happened with her. And it's the whole story is just this tension. His life's kind of falling apart, lots of necessary detail, all of this stuff. And it's like, it's a full book. And it's the penultimate chapter, chapter before, and it turns out the woman that she was so scared of all along that she's writing about in a diary turns out to be the therapist that's I'm working with her afterward. And he's got this strange obsession with her. And his wife was cheating on him with her husband.

35:03So her life's all been intertwined over and over again. And he's kind of in in this weird fugue state, but the reveal comes through a diary. I've got, dude, goosebumps. So good. There's this one line where you realize he's put this balaclava on and he's walking in behind her and you go, this is the guy that she's been writing about. Yeah, so it's so satisfying that payoff. And to break the fourth wall around anyone that's watched a Mr. Beast video, Mr. Beast is these videos where it will be like, I'm going to stay in a $1 hotel all the way up to a great video, $100 ,000 hotel or whatever it might be.

35:41The reason that you do that is that the biggest payoff is at the end. I'm one of the things that, first off, from a dopaminergic perspective, you drag it out. That's why we will release at least two clips from this episode before the actual episode is available. Guess what? Like, it's a cockaties. Sorry. Sue me. And Mr. Beast is the same thing. So I want to see, yeah, like the one dollar thing's kind of fun, but I really want to see the $100 ,000 room. Like that's really what we're here for. But you protract that out. And I guess you could probably lay a good amount of the success and the growth of your channel to the fact that built into what you do.

36:16No one can skip ahead in your content to be like, I just want to find out what happens at the end. Because the whole point of finding out what happens at the end is to get the payoff from what's happened before the end. Yeah, it won't be satisfying if you go to the end. Built in to the content. So I guess, yeah, that's such an interesting, like, neurological, psychological, algorithmic, Venn diagram, right in the middle of all of those things. So watch time nice and high, engagement nice and high. What happens when you tell that lamp story to a room of 1500 people? A lot of gasping. Because when I told that one live, I think that I did such a good job, I had a really dramatic pause before I said what happened.

37:01And I remember looking out and it was probably the first time in the show where I really took stock of the people there. Because before I'm, it's my first ever live show and I'm like blacked out. I'm so nervous. But I looked out and not a soul was on their phone. They were just like waiting for this big reveal that they sat here and they're waiting for the payoff. And then when I said, you know, it didn't happen. It was all fictional. It was like, and it was like, wow, I did it. Like that was cool. That's something, see, watching a comedy special on your own in your house. Yeah. If it's really funny or if you're prone to laughter, you laugh, but if you're on your own, usually I find it kind of hard.

37:38It needs to be an insane comedy special. It needs to be something to do good. And if it's you in a couple of your boys, I give one of them starts, then you'll maybe have a little gaggle yourself. And then if you're in a live comedy show, it's more, and then if you're in a big theater, it's probably even more than that. But you also get, I guess, live music gigs, like the DJ drops some insane song and the crowd gives a, oh, like, you know, the hands in the air, the latest come on, all that stuff. One of the things that I've, I don't think I've ever seen live is like

38:09psychological satisfaction. Do you know what I mean? Like that, like, realization, live. Maybe in the cinema, you know, when I'm reading the silent patient, I just like have just 1 ,499 other people all reading it in tandem with me and all arriving at the same line with the same reveal at the end along with me. Do you know what collective effervescences? No. So collective effervescence is how a group of people come together in the same sort of energy. It's why the music causes everyone to put their hands in the air at the same time. It's this sort of sense that the group is part of the individual, collective effervescence.

38:50Interesting. And it kind of amplifies many of the emotions and realize it's why we laugh more when we're in a group together. That's why you put your hands in the emerald. Feel the vibe. Yeah, it's what it is. Precisely. It's vibe. It's a group vibe. But yeah, the gas, like a room full of people with this massive internet, like the pressure gets lowered because they're just, yeah. That must be satisfying to see. There's, actually, if you don't mind, I'll tell another quick story. Let's do it. I got another one that this one. So somebody bootleg like filmed a portion of this live show I did last year.

39:22We're just fine. I'm not gonna do anything about it. Because anyway, so there's a portion they filmed where I got to see on this video, the actual reaction to this one particular reveal. And it was like so much. It was way more than the lamp, frankly. This one, because it's so weird. Anyways, I haven't prepped this one, but I know it really well. So I can get it close. Hit it. All right, so it was in 2011, and there's this woman named Ellie Lobel. She's 42 years old and she decided, I think it was December 11th, 2011. She decided enough is enough, it's time for me to die. So Ellie, her background was, she was brilliant.

39:59I mean, she went to an Ivy League school I think it was. She, she had her PhD by 18 and then she got into, I think consulting, I figure out what her job was, but it was like a hyper successful woman, like hyper successful, killing it like crazy salary, But she came down with this mysterious illness sometime in her, I want to say her 30s, I think early 30s, so she's 42. It was late 20s. She comes down with this illness and she's married. She's got kids. She lives in Southern California and it wasn't like the doctors didn't even know what the illness was. She was just like fatigued and you know, she didn't feel that good, but there was nothing specific.

40:35And so every time she would go to the doctor, the doctors would run a battery of tests and basically saying, oh, you know, you're low on this vitamin or you need more sunlight or you need this, you need that. Like there wasn't anything specific. It was just kind of this malaise she had, where she just always felt kind of down. But for years and years, she just always felt terrible. And it started affecting her career and she just stepped back from her career. And then actually she got this like horrible divorce with her husband who frankly if I'm being candid, sounds like he was kind of a jerk because he immediately was like, I'm out of here now that you're sick.

41:04So they split up and so she's raising her kids on her own. She's got this chronic illness and it's getting worse. Not in leaps and bounds, but it's definitely not improving. She's becoming more and more ill. She's spending more days in bed. And so finally, come December 11th, 2011. By this point, her kids have moved out of the house. They are successful. They're in their 20s. They have their partners. They have their jobs. And she's still single. And she's just at the end of her ability to cope with whatever was going on with her. And she decided, you know what? I'm done. I want to go die. And so she actually hired an end of life care person.

41:39I forget the title. I forget specifically what this job is, but you can hire people to basically be with you while you die. You end your life. And for what it's worth, it's important to note that by this point in 2011, doctors had told her that like your organs are actually starting to shut down. And frankly, if you were to kind of mentally let go, there's a pretty good chance your body would shut down. It's kind of on you at this point to keep going. And so she thought, I'll just go to an Airbnb and a beautiful part of California and I will literally just stay in the house until I die. Like not going to get water, not going to get food.

42:13I'm going to just stay in my bed until I die. With this person. Yes. She didn't tell her family. This was like, and she was, she's just miserable, you know, she just wants it to be over. And so she didn't tell her family, she left them a note or something. And so she goes to this little Airbnb and this random town and it's Southern California I forget where and you know she she arrives at the house she doesn't explore the town or anything You know she's met up with her end of life care person and they go in this house and Ellie just clang She can't even walk you know the end of care person's helping her walk she gets in bed and she's like okay I'm gonna I'm gonna die now Um For three days she laid in that bed and she didn't die and she felt horrible and she felt like things are getting worse but she's not dying.

42:53And she decided, you know what, I'm just going to go take a quick walk and then come back and die. Like it's pretty, pretty bizarre. You know, it's a usual Tuesday. Yeah, exactly. And so she asks her end of life care person to come with her on a walk. Because she actually had not even seen the town she was in. You know, she basically just went into her bed. And so they leave this house. It's a beautiful sunny day and you know, she's holding on to her end of care, end of life care person. and he sees this really big guy. And they're walking down the sidewalk and on their side is this beautiful field of flowers and there's a little wood rail post fence between them and the field.

43:29And it's just beautiful and sunny. And for a second, Ellie is, she stops and just stares out at this field and she's taken with just how beautiful it is. Now this did not inspire her to want to live because she still wants it to end. But she's struck by this moment. For the first time in a while, I'm seeing something truly beautiful and that's all, it's wonderful. But as she's staring at this field, she begins to hear a buzzing sound. When she looks above her and she sees there's a bee over her head, which is not cause for concern. There are bees everywhere. You know, so be it. But this bee was not a normal bee.

44:01This bee was an African killer bee, so it's a huge hornet. And when she don't, when it dawned on her that this is like, I should probably get away from this thing. It came down and began stinging her. And she's practically immobile. And at the same time, she's like screaming, her end of life care person just turns and starts running, like left her on the side of the road. She can't even walk. And this was not just one bee. There was a whole horde of African killer bees that were just over this field. And I guess they signaled to come over and a whole swarm came over to Ellie and they stung her over and hundreds of times.

44:34She can't go anywhere. So basically when they stop stinging mostly her face for about five, 10 minutes, they flew off and she's just laying on the ground. And she's alive, but in excruciating pain. And by this point, her end of life care person who has completely abandoned her, now he comes back and he scoops her up. And as he's running with her, all she thinks to say is don't take me to the hospital. Because at this point, she's like, this will kill me. You know, the beastings will kill me. And so he runs her all the way back to the house and says, fine, I'm not going to, I'm not going to bring it to the hospital, even though you've been horribly stung and I'm at least partially to blame.

45:12And so Ellie climbs back in bed and now she's thinking, I'm gonna die. Now it's either it's whatever's going on with me or the bee stings. But three more days go by and she doesn't die and in fact she actually begins to feel better. For the first time in like 15 years Ellie Lobel can sit up on her own. Well now she could sit up 15 years earlier but of late she couldn't even sit up. Now she can sit up and she can get on her feet. She can walk around on her own. She's like, what's going on here? Now, Ellie is, she was an incredibly smart woman, very, you know, pragmatic and she did not think, oh, I'm cured.

45:46Everything's right now. She's like, there's, there's something going on. I want to, I want to research this, you know, what happened? Necessary context. So here's a quick break to understand what happens next. So right before Ellie got sick. So 15 years earlier, when she began to feel this feeling she was getting. She had gone out for a hike and you know near her house and she'd come back and she had noticed she had this little mark on the inside of her thigh. She figured as a bug bite didn't think much of it but you know she knew she got bit by something but hadn't really registered if it had anything to do with her illness.

46:19But it turned out she got bit by a tick and a tick, a deer tick that had Lyme disease and when they bite you they leave a very distinctive mark on your on wherever they bit you. It looks like a bullseye. And it stood out to her at the time that she had this kind of bullseye looking mark on her leg, but she just didn't put it together. It would turn out she had Lyme disease. That was the thing that was affecting her for those 15 years. And Lyme disease, if you catch it early and you treat it early, it's very it's totally curable. If you wait and you you let it develop, it's very it is not something that can necessarily be cured and in rare cases it can absolutely be fatal and she's 15 years in.

46:58She's deeply immersed in Lyme disease. And so she actually came to know that around the time she got to the house in California. She was aware that she had Lyme disease, right? Some film and some gaps here for you. So she knows she has Lyme disease. She knows there's nothing she can do about it. She's now been stung by a bunch of bees and she's feeling pretty good. She hops online and she does some research about bee stings and she discovered an obscure study done in the 1990s in Australia about the effects of the toxin in African killer bees and other types of bees, and its effects on Lyme disease patients.

47:30And they made, they, they guessed, they made this hypothesis that a certain amount of bee stings from African killer bees in theory could cure Lyme disease, but it was an unethical study and they couldn't do it because it would involve swarming killer bees on a critically ill Lyme disease patient. But Ellie Lowell unintentionally conducted the experiment on herself and it completely cured her Lyme disease. 100 % healthy now. She tours the world, like talking about the positive effects of getting stung by these. Dude, crazy, right? Wow. That's insane. I mean, first off, whoever that end of life care person, comb, you didn't do it awful.

48:10Too committed to it. Here's an interesting question. Was it ethical or an ethical to leave her? Given that by leaving her, she ended up being, her life was saved. I mean, if she had been pulled away, after one sting, it would not have worked. So I'm sure she's like, no thanks. It's a mixed bag, probably not gonna invite them to kind of save someone from a burning building. But that is crazy. So when you watch the video of that, I have this pause where I know I'm about to say the big, she was cured completely, and it was like the audience was so stoked. It was like the coolest moment of the show, and it was captured on film, so it was very cool.

48:42In other news this episode is brought to you by Element. You've heard me talking about Element, an awful lot over the last few months, And that's because I start my day every single morning with it. You might not be tired, you might not need more caffeine, you might just be dehydrated. An element contains a science -backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium that helps to curb cravings, regulate your appetite and improve your brain function. Stop having caffeine first thing in the morning, your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenal system.

49:14Best of all, it tastes phenomenal. It's a beautiful, sweet, salty drink, and the orange version is my favorite. Also, there is a NoBS No Questions Ask Reef on Policy, so you can buy it 100 % risk -free. And if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. And you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you love it. You can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the show notes below, or heading to drinklmnt .com slash monom wisdom. That's drinklmnt .com slash What are wisdom? Where are you finding most of your story, presumably everywhere, but what are the places that you're going to, especially given that these stories are accessible to everybody?

49:58How are you finding stories that other people aren't? Well, actually, that's an interesting question because we cover a lot of stories that other people do. And it's just the way we frame them out that separates us. And you'll notice, or I noticed, because I read the comments many times when we cover a story that's, let's say, a well -troddened story that lots of people have covered. We'll see comments that are like, oh, dude, I didn't even know it was that story until the end. Yes, I've heard this before. Yeah, but it's so different. And so I think that we, and honestly, a big part of that is because, and I'll answer a question in a second, but a big part of it is when you look at true crime, Even though that's not the only thing we talk about, but let's just use Drew Crime as an example.

50:39Many, many, many times. If you're consuming any content on a true crime medium, YouTube channel, TV show, whatever, the emphasis is on the killer or the perpetrator, and it's also on the gore and the kind of shock value of the story. This is a broad sweeping generalization, but it's the lazy way, in my opinion, of doing content around these tragic events is just focusing how much pain she was in. Her face was disfigured. These African killabies are unbelievably, blah, blah, blah, blah. Exactly. The way we do it is we don't even need to highlight just how bad it is to be killed by somebody. That's pretty bad.

51:16Instead, we will highlight how relatable the victim was, but not in a way that feels contrived. In a way that we've mapped out ways to talk about this person, that feel real, they feel authentic. This feels like a three -dimensional person, so that when the terrible thing happens to that person, and the audience is like connected to that person. It hurts when that happens to them. That's a more profound feeling than me telling you about the pool of blood in the hall. You're like, okay, that's not enough. That's not enough to elicit some sort of emotional reaction. All it is at best is gruesome, you know, and that doesn't do much.

51:48If you want your audience to genuinely connect with a story, you need to make your characters three -dimensional and in true crime, usually the three -dimensional characters are the killers. We make the three -dimensional characters the non -killers, the victims, and that kind of supporting cast. And you don't really notice it as the audience because it's just a normal story that results in tragedy versus, this is a dark story. Here's the blood and goood. And so I would say that we do do stories that are very well -troddened, but we just kind of changed the angle of how we tell them. And then I mean in the early days, it was just me and Google looking for stories.

52:25And I would say that the difficult part of doing this is you need permission to tell a lot of people's stories unless it's public source information. What does that mean? If I'm going to tell your personal experience of that time you went camping and somebody attacked you, and let's say you wrote a book about it, right? And I want to tell your story. If I tell your story and don't attribute it to you, like that's your story, and I could absolutely have a copyright claim against me. Okay, so it's just like it it has to do with only when it's someone's own story that they own that's not being reported on by like the news Those types of stories like I did I did one from the sky named Mike who was in the Twin Tower He was in one of the towers when it collapsed and so I told his story of being in the Twin Towers And it's it's an intense story obviously But I mean I absolutely needed his permission He would have 100 % told me to take that down this is a very sensitive topic, but I reached out to him and I explained how it's going to do it and he was fine with it.

53:22But there are other stories we cover like, you know, if we covered, you know, some serial killer, let's say, I mean, there's loads of news articles you can pull from, and so you're not seeking permission. And you're just operating within the facts that you can find online. I wonder what it would be like to speak to serial killers to get the license for their stories because I imagine that many may want the accolade, you know, especially if they're in prison, that would be something that would kind of amp them up a little bit. And you must have a legal team of some kind on whatever, outreach team, licensing, copyrights, people.

54:00Well, actually, I would say that candidly, we try to find stories that don't require permission just from an official person. Yeah, that's it. But we do proactively, honestly, when I find a story that I really like that feels that like it could be somebody's personal story that I can't just use. Even if I don't know if I'm going to use it, I'll personally reach out from my account and just say, hey, I'm thinking about it. I'd love to talk to you and see if you're interested in sharing the story. And a lot of people say no, actually. Yeah, yeah. And it's not disrespectful. It's people just saying I'm not comfortable with this.

54:29Does there ever been one or is there some that's sticking your mind is like, damn it. Like I really wish we had that. There have been. There was one. And I can tell it in generalities. You know, there's this story about this kid who, so there's some golden stories on Reddit. A lot of them are not true. So there's a little bit of diligence to make sure they're true. But there are a few that are just like harrowing first -person experiences that people will share that don't even really get that much traction. Like if you're searching for key words in Reddit, you can find a lot of these things. But I found this story that really didn't have all that many upvotes, but I read it and I'm like, how, this is like profound.

55:06This kid, when he was a teenager, or snuck into an abandoned hospital. And he wound up basically maneuvering his way like through all these locks. He found ways to get down to the next level even though they were locked. And he finally goes to the bottom floor and he finds that underneath the ground is like this water source. Like there's a pond under an era, there's like an underground ocean or something. No ocean, like water. There's like a well, a huge well. And there's animals in it. And like so he goes into the basement and he hears like splashing water and it's this dark basement of this abandoned hospital, four levels down, probably what it was, is the lowest level flooded or something, and it reached the hole in the floor, and so it just looked like you have this underground sea of water.

55:51But he went, if this really intense moment where he knows there's something in the water, there's this big crack in the ground, you can look down. And so I could tell, imagine if I told the story where I've got you down there, you're in this dark basement, you know, you know who this kid is, you can't get it. I'm gonna have him walk all the way up to the edge and stick his head out over the water to wait. And it winds up being an alligator. There are crocodile that's, that's fenced, become its home, it's in this water, and it charges up and nearly bites him. And he like backs away. And it's like, that's the most incredible story ever.

56:20I guess I basically told it. Totally feels, I mean, it totally feels to me in this environment like that's what could end up. For the people that are just listening, by the way, we're currently in kind of like, what is this? Like a swamp? Yeah, like a swamp. There's a canoe next to us. It's raining, it's kind of sort of a little bit miserable and dark and gloomy. But yeah, it must be the operations behind the scene to get these. Have you ever thought about just going straight fiction and just being like, yeah, pull the gloves off. We don't need to do real life stories. Yes. However, we, I am very in tune with the fact that a big allure to these stories is that they're true.

57:04But, you know, there have been some stories where granted it was the earliest days of the channel where I did tell. I told this one. It's a famous fake story, but it's a great story. And I'm not going to tell it because it's fake, but it's called the Russian Sleep Experiment. It's on the No Sleep. Yeah. They stayed alive. They pumped the gas in and they said, please give me the gas. Yeah. You have these guys who are, it's a human experiment that goes horribly wrong. And I told it is if it was real. But then at the end, I had this full disclaimer that Just so you know this whole story is fake But some people watch it now now that they found the channel and they're kind of going through the a lot of people will kind of watch old stories And they don't the story ends because there's definitely like this defining moment the story ends and they click off the video And they don't get the this was all fake and so they'll go to the comments and be like I know this is fake You are lying your misrepresent and so I think that if we do fiction it would need to be upfront this is fictional.

58:02Maybe even a separate channel. I think that's right. I mean, we had this whole strategic meeting last year to go over like what are some other series we could try and fiction is definitely one that we haven't tapped into at least in a meaningful way, but at some point I think we will, but it's it would be very intentional because if we didn't make it intentional, it would call into question every story I've ever told. Wait a minute, this is fiction. Is everything fiction? Yeah, and what we were talking about before the stakes are a big part of this, right? and the investment is because it's real.

58:31Yes. And I suppose that silent patient thing that I just finished, the reason that you have stakes in a non -real story is that you've spent four hours reading and becoming intimate with these characters and learning the machinations of their mind and so on and so forth. So from the outside, now you look like a peaceful, well put together, disciplined, family guy, story teller, all the rest of it. But who were you before you joined the Seals? Yeah. I was like a troublemaker. I was a lot of the things that I am the opposite of what I am now when I was younger. I, so I grew up in a town called Quincy, Massachusetts.

59:14It's just South of Boston, maybe 10 minutes south, and it's this blue collar, fiercely, very, very Irish Catholic. like a lot of the fathers that I was around were steel workers and the pipe fitters union and the elevator union, tough guys. There was this culture in Quincy, which still exists today of young men feeling, there's this street fighting. I'll just make it really simple. Street fighting was a really big thing in Quincy, where the way you become a man, at least in the circle of people that I was around was you bleed. Right, it passes. Yeah, exactly. And it became, it was so pervasive in my childhood that it felt normal that all the time every weekend there was, and no one, this is not too serious injury.

1:00:03This is like, you know, some bare knuckle boxing that ends and they shake hands a lot of time. But that was what I grew up around. And I, it was around people getting in fights all the time and I definitely identified as, you know, a tough guy even though kind of ironically I, I, I was not. I was, my friends were very tough. They were like the real tough guys. And I was the guy that was around those guys. But that combined with the fact that I kind, I looked at my father, my sister, my, I looked at my family and they're all these really accomplished academics, if you will. It's like a number of pool of surprises, I think, amongst your family.

1:00:36They're just, they're just like so accomplished academically, you know? And that was definitely the thing that was not pushed on us at all. But that was what success was. You know, that getting a good job, you know, having a good school all that, that's success. And I kind of didn't like that. I've always had this another irony of my story. I've always had a big issue with authority, which is why I joined the military, but I had a big issue with authority and the way I kind of rebelled against my family was by being a bad student, which is a poor way to rebele because you're just kind of shooting yourself in the leg.

1:01:08So I was a bad student kind of on purpose, and I was getting in lots of fights and stuff and just being kind of a jerk like, you know, just underage drinking and being a roughie and out on the road. And so, you know, I was just kind of a trouble maker, you know, it wasn't until I got into college, I went to the University of Massachusetts out in a Western mass at Amherst, and I only got in because my mom, who's this amazing writer, wrote my college essay and my grades were so abysmal at my high school that you mass contacted me after I submitted my application, my mom's application, to be like, you're not somebody we would normally accept on your grades.

1:01:46They're legitimate. And I'm in Massachusetts. I'm an in -state student. I should be allowed into the school, but they're like, it's so low. We can't get it in, but your essay was so good. Welcome to the school. Well done, Mum. I didn't tell my mum. Yeah. And so I got, I effectively flunked out and gotten lots of trouble in one semester. It didn't go to class. And so after a semester, I'm back home. Yeah, after totally failing college and I'm in my mom's basement my parents are separated so my mom's living there. It's just me I'm in the basement. I'm 19 years old and you know, it's funny now I look back and I was like God I was such an idiot like you of course you're in your mom's basement like with no direction But when I got home I actually was really resentful of my parents because they made me come home I could have stayed for another semester at UMass.

1:02:33I didn't technically fail out I think that one more semester in there, you know But it's just immaturity. I was like this idiot who had just kept getting in trouble all through high school. I had this great opportunity to go to college because my mom did my essay and I blow it out the water and here I am back home. And again, my first reaction was how dare my parents not allow me to stay. The lack of accountability. Oh my God, I was just insufferable. I was an insufferable kid. But what did that entitlement come from? I don't even know. I mean, you could make the case that my parents got split up when I was 13.

1:03:04I mean, I'm sure that had an effect on me, but I had already set in motion when I was like 12, going out in the streets and getting in fights. So it isn't like I was a great kid, and then that happened, I changed. I've always been highly impulsive, kind of obsessed with the thing I'm doing. Even if it's a bad, when I start to like something, whether it's good or bad for me, I can only do that thing. If I like a song, I'm gonna listen to that song 56 million times in a row until I can hate the song. Like that's the person I am, And so I just got on these tracks. I'm just like chasing dopamine in the wrong places.

1:03:39But when I was in my mom's basement, you know, pissed at my parents, it like suddenly clicked that I was the asshole. I'm the guy that's really screwed up all the stuff that's effectively been handed to me. I mean, I'm going to college. I was handed to me. I'm not even paying for it. My parents are and they just scraped the money together for that. And it like just really suddenly hit me that I was really screwing up my life. And I just decided, you know what? I'm going to go to college and I'm going to pay for it. I'm going to get a job. I'm going to be an adult. If nothing else to just stop being such an embarrassment for my parents who are trying to explain why their son is living at home again.

1:04:14So I got a job at the local YMCA that I used to ride my 10 -speed Huffy -2 at 4 in the morning to scan people's badges in and then I would take the red line, the subway into Boston and I went to UMass Boston. So a satellite campus work, you can basically get in for free. So I got into that campus and I would go to classes all day and then I would come home when I'd work out and stuff and go to bed. And it was just a very stoic life of just work and school, but it was unbelievably rewarding. And it really opened my eyes to what it felt like to be an adult. I'm gonna do these things, and then actually doing the things you say, that was new to me.

1:04:46I was used to just like doing it over the F, I wanted and being an idiot, and now I'm being an adult. And I just became kind of addicted to being, I don't know, competent as a human. Mm -hmm. And so I did three semesters at that school, just the whole time. I'm just minding my peace and cues, doing my job, scanning badges and getting good grades again. But I needed like a new goal because it was just at the time, you know, just get your life together. Go to school, have a job, whatever. But I needed something bigger. The ball was set quite low. Yeah, exactly. And because I'm now seeing how good it feels to be disciplined and be an adult, I just wanted to have something else beyond schoolwork.

1:05:23And I began thinking about what's life on on the end of college going to look like. And I I had told my family I was thinking about law school and really that was only because I I took a liking to philosophy and to English just in my classes. And those oftentimes are majors that those pursuing law school will will major in because philosophy teaches you how to think and English teaches you how to write two things that are really important to being a lawyer. And so I figured if I like those things I'd be a great lawyer but I didn't want to be a lawyer. I just was this thing I told my parents I wanted to do.

1:05:54But I'd always had this desire to be in the military to some degree, mostly because I was, you know, I graduated high school in 2006 and a lot of my classmates, you know, at 18 years old and listed in the Marine Corps and went to Iraq and Afghanistan. And so my personal closest friends are all serving and I had a desire to and I brought that up to my mom halfway through college and she was like, oh, you should talk to Dave David Pete, who are family friends. Actually, so my mom's best friend, it's her two brothers. And so I knew her best friend, Susan, and she's looking at me, and I knew who her brothers were, but I didn't know anything about them.

1:06:30I just knew they existed. Well, it turns out they were Navy SEALs, who were retiring out of the SEAL teams, and those were the only military people my mom knew. And she was like, if you're thinking about the military, talk to them. And when I did, it was like, oh my God, like the Navy SEALs are the coolest people in the world, and the thing that stuck with me when I met with them, is they were like it's a meritocracy. Going to be a Navy seal, it's just whoever can stick around till the end. And if you can do that, you completely reinvent yourself. Whoever you were before you were a seal is replaced with John Allen the Navy seal, not John Allen the screw up.

1:07:05Life direction rehabilitation. Absolutely. Shake the etch a sketch. And so it was like, wait a minute, I can accomplish multiple things at once here. I can have a huge goal. I've got to train like mad for this thing. I've got to be disciplined to get ready for training. I can serve in the military, something I wanted to do. And I can frankly just continue this evolution of being a responsible adult, you know, and John, not the guy who screwed up, but John the Navy SEAL sounded a lot better to me. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you to sell at every stage of your business.

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1:08:13Plus, they've got award -winning support to help your success every step of the way. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Shopify .com, slash modern wisdom, all lower case, that Shopify .com, slash modern wisdom, to grow your business no matter what stage you're at. It seems like the hard right turn occurred before the military. I'm sure that the military contributed to it and so on and so forth. But the hard right turn was really that and mum's basement realizing, okay, time to go monk mode, time to sort of sort myself out.

1:08:46What would you say to people that are listening who feel like they are John at 19? Maybe they're older or younger than 19, but they're like, I'm not fulfilling my potential. I don't have much faith in myself. I don't really feel, I feel like I'm built for more and yet I'm not doing it. What would you say to them? I know that for me, a big thing that was a hold up in my life is not really knowing what I wanted to do. And I think that when I, and this is just as an adult, you know, even when I was screwing off as a high school kid, I would think about the future and it just seemed so overwhelming of all the different directions I could go from a really good direction to a really bad direction.

1:09:28It's just like you can go any number of directions. And I think that for people that are stuck in a rut, if you will, I would imagine a big part of it. It's just not really knowing what the next step is. You know, they know they need to clean up their life, let's say. And there might be aspects of their life that are really obvious to fix. Like, for example, they're eating like crap and they put on a bunch of weight. Well, yeah, change your diet and you'll lose weight. But that's not enough to have a full life. That's an aspect of your life. You need purpose in your life. You need direction. And so just pointing to symptoms of something is not enough.

1:09:58You need to figure out what you're going to do beyond aesthetics. And I think that one of the things I've been pretty good at is not overthinking the things I'm going to try to do. I have a basic outline of what I want to do. I want to do things that are hard, that are impressive, that require hard work. And once I find things that check that for me, I don't question whether there was some alternative that was slightly better. You know, I could have easily tried out for any number of special operations units, but I met Navy SEALs who seemed really cool, who had a couple things that seemed really applicable to me.

1:10:32I want to reinvent myself, that kind of thing. And instead of being like, Well, wait a minute. Let's do in -depth research about every military unit on Earth and see if this really is. And let's also look at what are my statistical chances of getting through? Because you can do that and you'll get caught up in the, oh well, this is a good idea. Analysis paralysis. Sometimes you just gotta say, fuck it and do it. And I think that when you find something that checks enough boxes that it seems interesting, you should just do it, especially if you're young. Yeah. When you're young, you can explore.

1:10:59When you're older, you need to exploit a little bit more. There's an idea in behavioural economics, a difference between status -ficers and maximizers. And status -ficers, does this meet the minimum threshold for me to have a degree of certainty that this is probably the right direction, ish, and then they commit to the decision. Maximizers are what's the one that's got the lowest wash -out rate, what's the one that is closest to me, is closest to family, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the problem with being a maximizer is that it doesn't account for the time cost, thought cost, anxiety cost, opportunity cost that going beyond satisfaction into maximizing all of that is just really unnecessary.

1:11:41And I think you're just the patient zero example of someone that hit the threshold of satisfaction and was like, seals. Yeah. That's that's right. Are you tough? You were tough person. How did you get through training and selection for seals? We hear about how many people wash out and these horror stories about hell week and all of this stuff. What was the preparation and experience of that like? So I think that an aspect of me that's been very helpful is I probably border on being a narcissist if I'm being honest. I have like a crazy amount of confidence in my ability to just be able to do things.

1:12:24Whatever it is, even if I have no experience in them, I have this belief in myself that if I apply myself to something, I probably can do it. Maybe not the best at it, but I probably can do it. And so I don't question whether I'm going to be able to handle the rigors of getting good at something. I just need to identify the thing I want to do. And once I have that thing in mind, I don't worry about, well, can I do it? It's like, no, I want to do it. So I'm going to give it a shot and I think I probably can. And with seal training, I mean, for those that don't know what seal training consists of, it's a doozy.

1:12:58It's just long more than anything. It's very challenging to even get a spot to try out. Like forget trying out just to have a chance to try out is very competitive. And that's really in large part because of the publicity around the seal teams. I mean, following the Bin Laden raid, they became rock stars. And you know, you could say they're trending down a bit now, but overall, I mean, that's a brand. I mean, the seal teams are a brand. So there's loads of people that want to do it. And in order to just get a chance to try out, you got to do all this physical screening, and I mean, it's relatively straightforward, but there's some red tape there.

1:13:30And it weeds out a lot of people that are just not prepared to sign up for a Navy contract, like sign the dotted line when you don't even know how it's going to go. And there's all these different things you got to do. And then once you get in the door, the training is basically two years long, where you could make the case that about six of those, six months out of those two years are like kick you in the face miserable. I mean, like, and I'm not talking for a little bit of time during the day. I mean, your life is a living hell for those six months. It's like horrible. And so the way I work is you go to boot camp.

1:14:02This is if you go the enlisted route. There's the enlisted side and the ops are side. I was enlisted. That means I didn't use my college degree to go in. You go to boot camp, which is two months in Chicago, which is typical Navy boot camp. it's not really that specialized at all for guys going to the SEAL teams. Then I went through a prep school, which is Navy Prep Schools, another two months in Chicago where you work with Olympic athletes and coaches and some professional athletes. All it is is just strength training and swimming and running, but they're not trying to screw with you. They're trying to make you strong and as ready as you can be for the next phase of training, which is SEAL training.

1:14:38How did you find the prep period? Amazing. Amazing. Taking it through a typical day. So you have, I think it was a six day schedule, it might have been five, but you have the schedule where every single day you had three major activities, but there was four major activities available. So you kind of rotated through them and it was, you know, running, ranging from just like short sprint work to very long runs, like half marathons and beyond. Swimming, that was the one activity we did every single day. It was fening in a huge pool, you know, like double the size of an Olympic I think, and we would fin at least a mile a day.

1:15:13Just swimming with fins on, that's all. And it was all combat sidestroke, which is this kind of, it's an efficient stroke that's pretty easy, but it was these long, long swims. So we'd either do a run, we'd definitely do a swim, and then it was a gym workout, like a really intense power lifting usually, and then there was like a wild card. Hey, we're gonna go to yoga on the beach or something. But yeah, it was like three of those, they'd get chosen, Monday through Friday, and I think Saturday, sometimes we did stuff. And then there was usually one day a week where they would bring in an actual seal to kind of run you through a very short, you know, what it would be like to do a work at a bud, which is the name of the actual seal bootcamp.

1:15:50Bud stands for Basic Underwater Demolition Seal School. It's the six month long famous, you know, right of passage that you must pass to be a seal. And that's the next stop following the prep school. And so you get a little taste of it with some instructors like yell at you a little bit, but it's like real friendly still. And then another Another part of prep actually that was horrible is treading. Treading is horrible. Like treading in the water, you know? Okay. Where you go in the pool and it'd be you and maybe eight or nine other guys that are in this line with you. You're all, you're looking at the guys back in front of you and your instructor will give you a brick.

1:16:24The first guy has just a brick you'd make a wall with and you've got a fin, you know, without fins on, sorry, you've got to use your feet, you know, and you just pass these bricks. You know, one at a time back and forth, your hands stay out of the water the whole time, and you're just like constantly kicking, and think about it like a little bit of extra weight when you're gassed in treading. And if you put your hands down, that's considered quitting, and so you get kicked out. You have basically, it's either keep going or pass out underwater. That's how you continue the evolution, and they would make us do these treads, where they'd say, hey, this is a puking evolution today, which means you're gonna sit in that water until somebody either quits, or until somebody just like goes under and passes out, which is called redlining, which is common enough that you just hear red line.

1:17:04Somebody jumps in, pulls you out of the water. It's like, and that's prep. That's not even buds. That's like the, let's test the waters a little bit, see what it's like. And then you get out to buds in Southern California, which is the six -month -long, actual hard stuff. And it's like everything you did at prep, but ramped up dramatically. It's the intimidation is so high because your instructors look terrifying. I mean, the people that get chosen to be instructors look like instructors. You know what I mean? Like they don't look like me. They look like big guys. And it was just like terrifying, you know.

1:17:37And in steel training, it's, you could make the case that the first maybe six weeks to eight weeks of that six month period buds is like the most physically grueling. So you've done boot camp, you've done prep school. And then it's like the first six weeks in California, first eight weeks in California is like the famous stuff. That's hell week. That's the 50 meter underwater swim. That's pool competency. There's a couple like major test gates that are Massive washout rate. I mean hell week is five and a half days of When they say around the clock training it is around the clock training you are training 24 -7 They have a rotation of staff that comes in so you always have fresh instructors and you just get your ass kicked 24 -7 for five and a half days Straight and it is absolutely horrible like your legs swell to like twice the size from the chafing guys are puking up, it's not blood, but it's like this pink frothy sputum because their lungs are filling with fluid called swimmer -induced pulmonary edema.

1:18:33Tonials are gone. You don't have tonials by the end of the week. You do take these naps during hell week. They're scheduled. You take one at 72 hours in and then I think you do two others, but they're an hour to an hour and a half long. They are, I wish that you don't want to take the nap because if you've been awake for 72 two hours, just getting your ass kicked for 72 hours. And then you fall asleep for one hour and you're woken up to the sound of bull horns and told to jump in the freezing ocean in the middle of the night. That's worse than sleeping. And there's actually pictures. We had a professional photographer out there for our Hell Week just by happenstance, the Navy wanted some pictures of Hell Week.

1:19:08And there's this picture that if you didn't know the context, you wouldn't think anything of it. But it's daytime, it's beautiful. You're looking out at the ocean and the photographers on the sand. And you see all these students, Hell Week students running out of the and they have their camis on and it looks so, like everyone's like slow jogging, it looks like, but everybody's crying, most people are crying. You don't realize it unless you look closely and it's because you dry off during your nap and when you jump in the water, your chaff, is like the chaff you have is like hardened. And salt water gets into it.

1:19:37It feels like acid and the worst chaffing is your groin. So imagine your groin suddenly has acid poured all over it. It's excruciatingly painful to the point of crying. Well, get back to talking to bowling in one minute, but first I need to tell you about fountain life. Fountain life is the best one -stop shop for preventative medicine that I've ever found. I went and got a full -body MRI, heart angiogram, brain scan, dexascan, genetic testing, microbiome testing, everything. The wildest that I learned that really got me to buy into preventative medicine and fountain life in particular is that 14 % of fountain life's clients have a critical life -saving finding.

1:20:12Fountain life provide top -of -the -line help snapshots, vetted therapeutics, and lifestyle interventions, training interventions, supplementation, all so that you can live a longer and more healthy life. I'm a massive fan. I used them myself. I have taken tons away from the scans that they did, and I intend on flying mum and dad out at some point over the next year to have them do it too. So if you are sick of guessing when it comes to your health, head to the link in the show notes below to get $500 off the exact same scans and service that I got, or go to fountainlife .com. slash modern wisdom that's found in life .com slash modern wisdom the first episode that I did on the show people can go back and listen to it was with a guy that was rowing the Atlantic solo oh boy and I asked him he mentioned it in the gym one day and he's like yeah I'm gonna have to get quite a lot of zinc oxide I was like why and he's like I'm doing the Ronaikid like Gorgeous.

1:21:04Hang on. Hold up. Why are you doing naked? He said, well, because of all of the salt spray, if I wear clothes, the salt will land on me, the water will land on me. It'll evaporate, the salt will crystallize, and it'll cause irritation. So these long rows, it's called the talusca whiskey race is one of them, sponsored by talusca whiskey, and then there's a bunch of others as well. And he rows on a sheep skin, you know, like an egg, like a concept too. It's kind of I think it might even be the same runner, but obviously with actual ball. Sure. And on the seat is a sheepskin, a sheepskin wool, a hypoallergenic blah, blah, blah, blah, naked.

1:21:42Wow. So there's a naked guy doing 14 million orstrokes to go from Portugal to the Caribbean. How long does it take? The record is about, it's less than two months. It's like they can do it in about a month. The weird thing is you can do it in teams. So you can do it as solo, you can do it as duo, you can do it as whatever. But because for each additional person that you add, there is the weight of them, plus the weight of all of the things. It's on most of them are unsupported. Weight of them, plus the weight of their food, plus the weight of their water, plus the weight of all of the support that you need to have with them.

1:22:16Six people is not really any quicker than one person. Each person negates the power that they add with drag. That makes sense. Yeah, it does. Interesting. But yeah, he attempted it and there's like, you know, you've got a sat -com phone and they do it They can only do it during certain periods of the year where the you know the jet stream and and flows and Tides and storms and all this sort of stuff But it was that was the first episode I ever did on that show She morten yeah, and I think the record will have probably been broken now, but it's it's inside so take me through just what class I started in class 289.

1:22:54I got rolled after hell week for swimmer -induced pulmonary edimos that stuff in your lungs. And then I failed pool comp, which is like a big, it's like a simulated drowning test. That's not what it's called. But you have to do 20 minutes with your scuba tanks on in the pool as instructors are constantly coming down and turning your air off. Like, tie -in actual knots in your line and you need to follow the same procedure every time to fix the problem, but the problems get more and more complex and you know it, but you go longer and longer without air. And so by the time you're fixing the hardest problems, you're probably going about 60 seconds to 90 seconds just on a breath hold, then you begin solving the 60 second long problem.

1:23:34So it's like two and a half minutes, which for those who don't understand what that means, you are totally hypoxic, which is you're damn near about to pass out. And what they're looking for Whereas, can you stay calm enough to follow this procedure when your body is saying you're dying? It took me a number of tries to pass that test. I was horrible at it because I was panicking. That's all it was. I failed that. I guess I had, I was in good enough standing with the instructors that they said, you can stick on because normally two roles is pretty rare. Usually you get rolled once, you get to stick around, getting rolled twice doesn't happen very often.

1:24:07I snuck through the cracks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. but I ended up graduating with class 291. So that was in September of 2012. I finished so you do buds, which are six months, and then you do this follow on six months of advanced training, which is not as hard as buds, and then you become a seal. And what was the worst element of hell we can training for you? Hain, discomfort, whatever, is there a particular moment that you went through that was the worst? You know, I think looking back, I can say that overall the worst part was actually just the collective sleep deprivation. You know, Hell Week was, you know, five and a half days of no sleep.

1:24:42But actually in reality, that was less of a... The sleep deprivation was so expected with Hell Week that it wasn't really the main thing that you're worried about. It was just staying healthy. But in the weeks leading up to Hell Week, I mean, you're doing... You're working from sun up to sundown and you're just getting destroyed. And then you have all these extra things you have to do after the day ends from... You have to fill up the instructor's cars with gas. You got to make you to set up the coffee machine in the instructor's office so that when they walk in they just hit a button and it goes You're everyone in your class.

1:25:12You have to have at least one Comic who makes a comic about the instructors every day. So when they go in they have to have a comic ready like along with their doughnut and coffee It's it's all these kind of Extra chores that take a bunch of time you get to shine your shoes your boots at the end of the night You got to prep your gear and so you're done. Let's say it's six o 'clock at night And I lived off campus because I was married off base because I was married That's the only way you can live off base. And so I drive 40 minutes to get back to my house, get back at like seven, I'd eat a burrito, of California burritos are awesome, get a burrito.

1:25:42And then it's like, I would do extra stuff at my house, shining booze, sharpenin' my knife. And before long, it's like, you know, 10 o 'clock, which is not that late, but it's a Monday, it's 10 o 'clock, and I have to be back at buds at like 330 in the morning. You know, so you're just, you're perpetually genuine, like for real, as did you have knockout enough sleep. Chronic protracted sleep deprivation. And what does that feel like? You have no motivation. Motivation goes out the door. And so that is what they're talking about. Instructors are talking about when they say you really got to want to be here.

1:26:11Because it's like when your motivation is gone, what does your core want? Do you really want to be a seal? Or is it just exciting at the idea of calling yourself a seal? And there really is a difference. Because ultimately, what you're being trained to do is just withstand an enormous amount of misery. Because a lot of seal missions require it. I mean, we did a mission in Afghanistan on Christmas day in 2013 that for real, I've never been colder. And I went through seal training like the mission itself was so cold in Afghanistan. I had every layer on you could imagine, but you also need to be ready to use your weapon.

1:26:47You can't have like mittens on. You can't use your unless you're shooting like a rocket launcher or something, but you need dexterity. And so I remember we, we, I'm not going to tell this whole story, but we walked on target it and it's this long, long infill in its Christmas day. And I'm thinking like we're gonna be here for 24 hours, I think, that there was at least 24 hours. And by the time I just got to the outskirts of the target, I couldn't even move my hands. And I'm like, I can't use my gun. That's how cold it was. But truly, when you're in those moments in real life, you do actually look back at buds and seal training.

1:27:19And you do think, now, I've been through this stuff before. And that's the point. They want people that can like, preparation, suffer. just unbelievably and put up with it because the job is a lot of suffering. What did you learn about yourself? That I can suffer really, really well. Basically, I am someone who actually is prone to panic to a degree, which is my fight or flight, I am a flight guy, and it took a lot to harness that part of me. I don't even necessarily think I've done it, but that was something that was really challenging to work through. but I would say that I'm able to withstand discomfort for a really, really long period of time.

1:27:58And it's not because I'm some superhuman. It's just, I don't know if it feels like if there's some worthy reason to suffer, I can suffer for a really, really long time. And it's actually when I think about, it's funny to compare the military to this, but when I first started making YouTube videos, so not the viral TikTok video I did at the water park, but when I transitioned about six months later because TikTok was going so well to making long -form YouTube videos. I was a one -man band and I was putting out four or five feature -length videos a week, which basically meant I was not really sleeping at all.

1:28:33I was just spending 20 hours at a clip working on a video to get it out the door, sleeping for like three to six hours max, and going right back into making another video, and there were loads of times where I would actually think back about Hell Week. It was like four in the morning and I'm trying to write a script and I'm so tired I can't keep my eyes open. I would channel that I've struggled with things before I can do it now And I would say this is how I'm gonna make it to the top I'm gonna out work other people that have had this opportunity and it worked It put me on the map out of just sheer determination and willingness to suffer people don't know how painful it is to sit in front of a camera When you're so tired on your like night day of filming.

1:29:09It's miserable. Yeah, it's It's one of the most reassuring things to realize that whatever the challenges are that you're facing aren't bugs their features and that everybody else has to go through this as well. There's this stat I always throw around. 90 % of podcasts don't make it past episode three. And of the 10 % that do 90 % of those don't make it past episode 20. Oh wow. So if you make 21 podcasts, you're in the top percentile of all podcasts there's ever. The point being, well, what is the universal selection criteria between episode zero and episode 21? But it's the same thing that everybody goes through.

1:29:51My friend Alex says that whenever I get to a low point, when I ask myself, why do I even bother? I just remind myself that this is where most people quit and this is why they don't win. Yeah, it's like this is a feature. This isn't a book. Yeah, I could it's it's it's built into it I think that's quite reassuring What's it feel like to get hit by a grenade? It feels like rock speed thrown at you at least that was my experience. I Yeah, so I I was medically evacuated from Afghanistan. So I I Did two deployments which in the world of Navy SEALs I did the shortest tour you could do meaning my my time in service was seven years and And for seals, you have to sign a contract that's longer than the traditional four.

1:30:37Most people, and they enlist, it's a four -year deal for the seals because the training takes so long. You basically add these three years on top. I think mine was a little bit longer. So I served the minimum, and I say this because they're invariably going to be very senior Navy seals that listen to this and are going to judge what I say here. But I deployed the minimum. I did one combat tour, and that was the first tour I did, and that was to Afghanistan. And we definitely got into gun fights. It was, in many ways, it was actually what I thought it would be like a lot of it was. You go through so much training, so much prep and you get overseas and it's like you're terrified.

1:31:14It looks like war, and I'm half smiling here because it's so weird when you first get there and so different from your normal life. Does this make you feel like you're kind of back there? You know, this actually looks similar to Fob Shank, which is, so we landed at this base called Forward Operating Base Shank, right in the middle of, I think, Lohgar Province in Afghanistan. And it's this. I mean, it's just this obvious military stuff everywhere, planes and vehicles and all around you. Little buds, everything's moving, the stuff happening. Crazy. Like, when we came, actually, my entry to Afghanistan, when I knew, like, oh shit, it's getting real, is we flew from Virginia to Germany and then we stayed there for a couple of days and then we flew from Germany to Afghanistan.

1:31:58And it's this eight hour flight. And for the majority of it, you're in a military transport, so you're not, this is not a civilian craft. No business. The only of the beast with a little bench seat and it's so loud and there's all this equipment in the middle of the floor. But it's relaxed. We've taken military flights dozens of times. You just hang out with your buddies. You can walk around. But when we got into Afghanistan airspace, the pilot had to put on a red light on the aircraft. Even though we're way above small arms range and frankly even RPG range or Rocket Lich. It's harder to see at a distance.

1:32:29You know, White Light stands out. But he was like, the pilot came on, it's okay, we're in Afghan airspace. So, you know, don't go near the windows, although the idea that if they're shooting up at the plane, we're in a bad spot, no matter where it hits, but like stay away from the windows and the red light came on. And then we did this really intense, very quick descent because you don't wanna linger too long. In a medium altitude. Yeah, and it's like, I noticed how intense the landing was, was, and then we get out, and it's winter time, and I'm so green. I've never done anything. I've only trained, and I'm looking around.

1:32:59It really looked like this, but just mountains everywhere. It was actually so beautiful, which is weird, because it's this really kind of dangerous place for people like for me. But yeah, no, so I was there, and it was in many ways what I expected. When shooting starts, the thing that stood out to me, because when you get hurt, you have to debrief how it went. And I told my commander that the debrief point that set out the most to me about my entire experience in Afghanistan was when the rounds started flying, meaning when people began shooting at us, it was so incredible to see your teammates just do their job.

1:33:38Because the thing about seal teams and operating in a special operations unit, so much of what you're doing is choreographed with everybody else. You don't have just like random things happening. Everything is just you're working in tandem all the time. Everything is done with a buddy or with small teams and just seeing in this like crazy moment where like gunfires coming in and you're looking at your teammates and your teammates are so well trained that you just see this look of not calm. It isn't like they're like superheroes. I mean, it's chaos, but you're seeing what millions and millions and millions of dollars in very specialized training looks like in real time.

1:34:15And for a second, especially when we get into a gunfight, you'd see that in motion. And it's, for lack of a better description, it's beautiful. We are unstoppable on the battlefield. It's the idea that there are people that are walking around and sandals in AK -47s up against this team. It just seemed unbelievable. A test drive. It's like no wonder the seals have the reputation they do. And I'm not talking from like how cool I am. It's the other seals I saw that was like holy shit. like this is an intense level of training. So the confidence levels really high, especially as the deployment went on, you know, we were just, we were going out of Fairamount, you know, what that means.

1:34:57You feel invincible with the guys around you in some way. And that's actually something you need to keep in the back of your mind that you're not. I am not invincible. Yeah, the complacency kills. And I actually, yeah, there's definitely an element of that invincibility thing. And also, most of us are in our early 20s. You know, we're in the prime of our lives. You can see how that would happen. But anyway, so the grenade, about five months into the deployment, we were going into this village called Zagan -Shar. The general mission set that we had in Afghanistan was our unit was we were tapped with trying to find suicide bombers who were destined for Kabul, the big city in Afghanistan, and stopping them or limiting their effectiveness before they got there.

1:35:42Because we were actually positioned on the one paved road in Afghanistan called Route Utah, kind of splits the whole country in half. And it went right to Kabul, and we were deployed to this little outstation that was right up alongside Route Utah. And this is not a base, it didn't look like this. It was like a couple of Haskell barriers and some tents, like a very miniature version of this. And it was our job to stem the tide of these suicide bombers. And across the street from Route Utah was the city, if you will, called Zaganchar. And so in Afghanistan, it's mudhuts, it's not sophisticated architecture at all.

1:36:16I mean, some places there is, but where we were, it's like you're out in the sticks and it's mudhuts and very simple. But Zaganchar, it was mudhuts, but they were built on top of each other. I mean, it's like the closest thing to an urban environment is you're gonna get outside of like a Kabul. I mean, this is urban Afghanistan. And what that meant was when you went into Zaganchar, it was just, there was so many opportunities to get stuck on dead ends, to have corners where you can't see around, and it was covered in IEDs. It was covered, or there was fighters everywhere. I mean, this is a highly contested place because it's actually where a lot of these suicide bombers would be kept before carrying on to Kabul.

1:36:56And the thing about Zagan Shar is you would literally look into this town from, you know, thousand meters away, we'd drive around and look in. And in other parts of Afghanistan, fighters do not want to be recognized as fighters. They'll be targeted and killed by NATO. These fighters in Zagan Shar are openly carrying their AK -47s and patroling the streets. They know that this is a target, this place, and their job is, yeah, I'm a fighter and I'm protecting the people in the city from NATO. And so we would go in and it was like an obvious gunfight is going to occur. That's why we're going in. And so, just before Easter, in 2014, April 19th, I think that's right before Easter.

1:37:40April 19th, 2014, we went into Zorganshire, we got into what would amount to be a pretty long drawn out, but not the whole time, the sporadic gunfire for like six hours. We are partner force of the Afghans that we worked with that went out the door with us. A couple of them got wounded, they got shot, our dog got shot, but everybody lived. But there was like casualties along the way and you know we're deep into our deployment It's a six month long deployment. This is five months in it's it was the fighting season so it's the spring time There's much more action if you will and you know We were pretty experienced.

1:38:15I I guess for this deployment we were hungry and it was just very frustrating This particular day that we kept getting shot up and then they disappear It was like just over because they had these tunnels, you know that ran underneath the city that they could escape and again It's like imagine being in a city that you don't know. There's loads of places that people can escape. And so by the end of the night, when basically we had gotten shot up a whole bunch and didn't do a whole lot of shooting back, you know, maybe we did, but not effectively. We were just kind of angry, I guess I would say, like frustrated, like we're kind of getting our asses character.

1:38:50What's going on? There's obviously fighters still here because we're still getting pot shots. And And at some point, a drone overhead, one of ours, an unmanned aerial vehicle spotted a group of what we call mams, so military age males that were crouched down by this wall, kind of near where we would eventually ex -fill when we left Sargonchar. And so there was some consideration that they could be setting up an ID or they could be getting ready to shoot it us when we leave. So there was some threat with these people. But given the rules of engagement, you can't just, okay, I'm going to go over there and just start shooting.

1:39:24You can't do that. You need to go see what's going on. You have to identify a weapon and realistically at the time, you need to get shot at first. So our fire team that I was a part of, which is a group of seven seals or six seals and a couple partner for us, we happened to be physically closest at the time when this intel came out that hey, there's these mams over here. And so our I was not in charge. I'm just a typical new guy gunner, our leader said let's just go and see what's going on. Like just get eyes on these maims and see what they're doing. It wasn't, let's go over there and get into something.

1:39:57It was, let's just go see. And so it's gnarly what ends up happening because it didn't go the way we expected. We end up walking down this alleyway where we were anticipating that we would walk down this alleyway, this narrow little alleyway with walls on other side of us. And we would get to this wall, like right ahead of you. Almost like a T intersection. And see, walk down this wall or this hallway, and you reach this T, and our expectation was, this wall right here that we're walking towards is like six feet high, seven feet high, so not that tall, you can kind of look over it, that we would be able to look over this wall, and there's a whole field that extended beyond it, and on the other side of the field, where there is another wall, like, you know, 100 meters away, they were kind of crouched up against that wall.

1:40:42So all you need to know is we're expecting, we're gonna go to a wall, We're gonna look over it and about a hundred meters away on the other side of the field is gonna be these minutes. We walk down the alleyway, we get to the wall, we look over the wall and they're not on that side of the field. They're right here. They're literally less than a foot away from us, they're crouch town and they didn't hear us because you know we require it making our way down the alleyway and And it's one of those things where our team lead had to do something. We had to be effectively proactive at this point because the risk that we all intuitively understood here is best case frankly would have been to get out of there.

1:41:25Like this is not the way we want to engage with these people. It's way too close, way too much risk here, back out. Like it's silly to engage them. But if we turn around and begin going the way we came in, our back is to them and who, what's to say they haven't hurt us? Maybe they'll stand up and start shooting at us. So it was kind of like in the moment decision to we got to engage. And so our team lead, he got down and tapped his leg, signaling to somebody else, start to engage. He stepped on to our team lead's leg to get his head up over the wall. And he called out they have weapons. So we knew that yes, these are combatants and a close quarter's gunfighting suit.

1:42:00But at least two people, I've heard as many as seven, but I think it was two people and the other side of the wall It was between two and seven. At least two of them were holding grenades that they had already pulled the pins on. They were just holding the spoon down. So as soon as they let go, it would detonate a couple seconds later. But they were holding them for this exact reason. In case they were discovered, it functions as like a suicide bomb. Yes. And so when we began engaging them, they threw the grenades over the wall. And I was not one of the guys shooting. I was standing behind the guy who was shooting.

1:42:32I'm just in this alleyway. And it's the middle of the night, run night vision, and the drone overhead had an infrared spotlight that was cast down on where we were to mark where we were. And it was a flashing strobe. So with infrared, you can only see it on night vision. So to the naked eye, it would look like darkness. But to me, on night vision, I have this blue gray scale, pretty high speed night vision. And it was a very bright flash. It felt like you're in a spotlight that's periodically flashing. Is there a reason that it's not constant? I think it had to do with the fact that we were actively in an engagement.

1:43:05And I think that this is, I don't really know why, because it's not supposed to. That actually has more to do with targeting. It's a little bit complicated. It's a little bit complicated why you would use a flash versus steady. But for whatever reason, we're in a flashing stroke. I don't think it was protocol. Put it that way. But imagine there's like a flashlight from God straight down to the earth. That's what it looks like. It's this amazing, really bright, IR light. Anyways, so it's flashing. And because it was so bright when those grenades came over the wall, one of them came over the wall and time slow down because immediately my brain is like there it is your death is coming, here comes this grenade and it would flash the IR the IR strobe would flash on and this is just a fraction of a second and I would see the grenade coming right towards me and then it would flash off and it would disappear because it's now no longer illuminated.

1:43:48The light would come on again, now the grenades even closer. I mean it really felt that slow even though this happened in the fraction of a second. Grenade comes over, it hits my shoulder and it lands on the... it hits your shoulder. I hit my shoulder, hit my shoulder and it felt to the ground. And I remember when I saw it flashing and coming over the wall, I actually was thinking, not, oh boy, I can't believe I'm going to die. It was more like, I hope this at least detonates below my head. It'll still kill me, but at least my family will be able to recognize me because it will not blow my head off.

1:44:19And so in this like time stand still moment, the grenade comes. Is that fear? What is that? That sounds like You know, only sort of rational. It was rational. There was no emotion. It was just facts. Why? I don't know. I've never been in that absolute near death experience before, but what I tell people is in a weird way, you're the way we are able to live so seamlessly, our heart pumps, you know, we breathe, our lungs work, we walk, we talk, we do all these different things. Don't think about it. That's our experience is being alive. That happens basically automatically. But you know what else happens automatically is death.

1:44:53We just only experience it once. And your body, your brain, your mind, at least in my personal experience, is ready for that moment. You just don't think that. And so when it was time, and I'm like a grenade's coming over the wall, that's gonna hit me, it's gonna kill me, it was just like, boy, I hope my family can at least see my head. And so I remember when it hit my shoulder, I was thinking, please don't blow up, please don't blow up, please don't blow up, please don't blow up, please don't blow up, and it's off you. It's gonna blow me your life. Relief. Yeah, I was like, thank God. And then when it made it all the way down to my legs, I was thinking, oh shit, it might just blow my legs off and I might be able to live.

1:45:25And then when it hit the ground and I was able to slightly turn, I was like, oh shit, this is pretty good. And then detonated and it felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just like a light throw that hit me in the back and the back of my legs. But really what it was was probably like a hundred pieces of shrapnel. So the way it grenade works is there's a fuse inside of a piece of metal and the fuse it detonates and the metal is designed to splinter and create little razor blades that get fired off in every direction. And so those blades of metal were sent into all of us. And I just told the story actually kind of recently, there's the what I remember, which wound up not being true, and then there's what actually happened.

1:46:10And the only reason I know what actually happened is I ended up speaking to the guy who saved my life four years after I got hurt and because I wasn't able to talk to him, it was so traumatic. I avoided him and frankly he avoided me. I'll tell you what would actually happen. But we didn't talk to each other. It's like I get met a Vact and I never talked to him. And then four years later we finally have our talk and we debrief what happened and it and the story was not what I recalled. What did you think happened? What I thought happened is I survived the grenade but I also as soon as the grenade I was on the ground on my face and we were in the alleyway, it was also where sewage came through, there was like liquid sewage, and I fell into the sewage and I'm laying there and I couldn't stand up.

1:46:54And I'm like obviously aware that, you know, something's hit my legs, it's grenade. I thought I had my legs, you know, I was pretty confident, but I knew that clearly there's been a grievous injury to my legs and so I couldn't stand up. And then as I'm kind of positioning myself like this, and some of this did happen by the way, It was more like the timing of things. I remember looking up and here's this T, right? So we had walked down this way and then the guys were on this side. They're shooting this way. But at the left and right side of the T, the top of the T, if you will, was an opening that you could walk out to the field where these guys were.

1:47:27And I was thinking as I'm like trying to stand and there's, at the time, all this gunfire happening feed away from me and it's chaos. I'm thinking someone's gonna come around the wall, the combatants and they're gonna start shooting down the alleyway and I'm looking at it and I can't go anywhere. And so I'm like, well, I survived the grenade, but it's only a matter of time before we're overrun and Somebody comes in here and finishes me off or worse. I get taken hostage or something like what can I do? I can't even my my my gun. I remember I think it was the top of the gun that blown off by the grenade or it was it didn't work Like parts of the gun had come off.

1:47:58I never saw it again. I was told that it was not working And then and then my memory is somebody picked me up and dragged me not to cover because there really wasn't anywhere to go They just kind of took us down the base of the tee, if you will, to the side of this wall. And my medic put turn -kits on my legs and our J -TAC, who calls an airstrikes, they called in what's called a, I think it was a danger -close airstrike, which sounds like nothing, but what that really means is, if you call in a danger -close airstrike, what that really means is you're calling an airstrike on your position. It means you're being overrun.

1:48:28And when you do it, you have to get the initials from your commander, basically saying, I approve you calling an airstrike on yourself. Now, you're not literally doing it. It's often when you have no other choice. Like, hey, there are five feet away from us on the other side of this wall and we can't do anything. Try to hit them. Don't try to hit us. So they called in a health farm, and so when we're 15, 20 feet away from where they're actually targeting. And so that did hit and it neutralized the threat. But also at the same time, there's all these fighters in the town that have been fighting with us all day.

1:49:00And when all this chaos erupts, it had been quiet to that point. there was a law and as soon as the shooting started people from all around the city just began arbitrarily shooting generally in that direction Shooting RPGs in our direction like they could be hitting their own people. They don't care They're shooting at us And so there was just this chaotic, you know trying to suppress the threat trying to call in a meta back And you know after my medic it put the turn to get sun me. He's so calm. He's like, hey, it's okay. Yeah, it's all good Everybody's been hurt by the way, you know We have another guy whose lungs have collapsed is that mostly from grenades?

1:49:32just from the grenades. Right. There was only two grenades. As far as we know there was two. There's video of it and it does kind of look like there was two. The video of it? The drone was filming it. Yeah. And if you've seen this? Yeah. It's grainy. You're not like, oh there I am. It's more like, okay, probably pick out. Yeah. Yes. How does that feel to watch your own model danger? I will say that I was glad that there was a record of it in a way, for posterity or something. Framing put on the wall. And I think that's true. You know what? Initially, because I didn't have my debrief, I'm gonna tell you the debrief here in a minute, which changes the story a little bit.

1:50:11I felt like I narrowly escaped. In all of the people that I was with that were part of this horrible situation, we all lived. There was out of a platoon of, I think we had 25 people in the platoon, seals in the platoon. And I think there was eight or nine purple hearts on this deployment. and for reference, you get a purple heart if you're wounded in combat, that's the gist. And I think the stipulation is you actually have to bleed from an enemy combatants weapon. Like it's not just, oh, I bruised myself. Right, okay. It's like you got punched, isn't it? Yeah, you have to get wounded for real.

1:50:42And are you in pain just at this point? Like what's kicked in? Not really. Oh, oh, like in the story? Are you feeling pain from the grenade? Cause it seems like someone just threw rocks at the back of you. There was no pain, nothing. Yeah, it had to have just been shock. There was there was absolutely nothing. I felt pressure where there was definite big Sirius holes in my leg, but they didn't hurt at all the pain came you know days later as I'm recovering, but um So yeah, we end I am getting we run out of this place We are under the hail of gunfire to this helicopter that took us to a I went to a medical tent Actually at Fobshank where I first landed in Afghanistan looks very similar to this and then from there I went to Germany and I was there for a week and then I was sent home.

1:51:26I was like pushing a cart and home depot hobbling around seven days after being on the battlefield. But the thing that really screwed with me was actually You know, I came home and I I frankly was not prepared to really talk about the specifics of what happened But I didn't know why I wasn't like oh boy. I'm so screwed up from that It was more like I just don't really want to talk about that before years later I end up talking to my medic who is the guy who to put turn against all my legs because I would have blood to that. I mean, I also didn't want to talk about it. We both, without saying anything, completely avoided each other.

1:51:58We worked at the same seal team. Like, after when I came home from this injury, I was out of my platoon. The platoon was over and I was put into a new group, a whole new group of guys, you know. So we weren't working together directly. We actually, I came back home and we didn't see each other, but we went to the same building every day for work and we definitely waived at each other. But it was like, we're just not gonna talk about this It's really big thing that we both went through. What was the compulsion behind that? To not? Yeah. I don't know. I think that's probably a trauma response. It has to be that, you know, I can't think of any other reason I wouldn't.

1:52:32Was he injured too? Was he okay? The thing with him is he, the deployment before that that I wasn't on, I was still in training. He was older than me. They had had a couple of pretty horrible injuries. I think there was even a casualty as well, death. and he was the medic for that deployment as well, and he worked on some really gnarly medical events, if you will. And so I think that he already had a little bit of surveillance skill. I mean, a bit of baggage stuff. Yeah, and I think he had a little bit of survivor skill coming into the, and he's like the nicest man. And it's funny if you saw him, you would not think the student is a Navy SEAL.

1:53:06He's like, kind of like me, like just a typical normal looking guy. So nice, just the kind of sky, but he's like secretly a Navy SEAL sniper and medic who's just like a savage on the battlefield. but he had some survivor skill and then when I got hurt along with the other people that I was with, a bunch of people got hurt. I was one of quite a few. He was actually the only one that was not really physically hurt. He got concussed by the blast for sure, but it was like everybody else got hurt. Like physically. Perfect guy to not be hurt. Exactly. And he actually, he really struggled with that. I didn't know about this, so I'm close for this wife.

1:53:40I haven't talked for a while, but I was very close to this wife and she actually got in touch with me a few years after the fact and just said, you know, I think it would mean a lot if you two just talked. It was almost like, we knew this was going to happen at some point. She's like, he's really struggling just in general. And I think that you're one of the very few people that can probably, without even saying anything, really inhabit the same mental space that he's in right now. And so we agreed to just, I hit him up and I just was like, hey, do you want to talk about Afghanistan? And he's like, yeah.

1:54:08And so we met at this fast food joint, I don't even know where we sat down and it wasn't even small talk. It was just like let's talk about it as if it happened yesterday and the thing that really and it mess with me, but it has since really defined the experience for me is so the grenade comes over the wall and that was all my memory is let's say accurate. And the grenade comes over blows up. It feels like rocks. What I didn't know is that immediately after the grenade went off, I was either unconscious or appeared to be unconscious and was face down and had so much blood underneath me. like the pool of blood underneath me, that my medic, he said that he immediately went into triage mode after everything goes off.

1:54:50He's been trained and he looks around who can he actually save. And he said, I looked at you and I thought, at first, you were on a sheet of ice because there's there's a huge pool of blood under you and I'm like, that's weird. That's what he's telling me. That's weird. It's not cold enough for there to be ice. And that's when it dawned on him that that's not ice. That is a massive pool of blood. You were fiting off. The moon or whatever it was. And when he saw that I was laying there and not moving, he made the decision that I can't work on John. I have to work on somebody else that's worth saving.

1:55:18He's a precious resource. He has to use it for who he can save. And so he left me to die. And I laid there, dying. And at some point, he or one of the other guys who also was very badly hurt, came back down and they discovered I wasn't dead and they picked me up. And this is all you have to remember a hellfire missile is being called in on us. There's active shooting all this is this is not some law. This is like an in the middle of a gunfight. These people these people I say that because I don't know exactly who carried me out. But I was carried out of the the contact spot put down next to a wall.

1:55:55I'm worthless. I can't get my turn. I get on. I'm not in the fight. I am completely a casualty and between my my medic and my interpreter who I was also very close with because I was the guy that did a lot of work with our partner for us. I don't speak really at all farce even. So I needed an interpreter. My medic commas can be, puts the turnickets on me and reminds me it's going to be fine. He found all the places I was bleeding and patched me up and then he had to go work on somebody else and my interpreter at that point was so shaken up that I was, he thought I was going to die, that he laid on top of me and just prayed.

1:56:29He doesn't have a weapon or anything. He's laying on my body to protect me as rounds are coming down the alleyway. He was like putting himself between me and harm's way. And it was just, I, what I do recall, and I didn't know when this happened, and I think it happened when I was laying in this alleyway, I had what I would consider like the moment of near death did happen to me, where I didn't have some profound, you know, I just didn't see angels or anything like that. It was, I remember my vision going away from, I can see, and there's clearly something that's happening to eyes are open and it's darkness.

1:57:03It's complete blindness. It's a blindness that I've never experienced before. My sight is completely gone. And then also my sound, what I was hearing disappeared as well. And it was like a helicopter sound. It disappears. And so I'm left truly in silence, just absolutely in this void. And all I was thinking about was not in an emotional way, but in sort of like a simple way. I was wondering what the newspaper article would say in my local hometown newspaper about Jonathan B. Allen ABCO killed in Afghanistan and it wasn't like, oh, poor me. It was just I wonder what it'll say. I wonder what my headline will say.

1:57:45Will it say Jonathan B. Allen? Will it say John Allen? Will it say I played baseball? You know, will it say that I was, you know, beloved friend of this person or that person and and I wondered, you know, Who'd be at my funeral and just basic things because I knew I was dying. I said to you and before the same way we live kind of without thinking. It's our entire existence is being alive, so we don't think about it. It really hit home that your body is prepared to shut down really at any point, and it's very simple. Like it was just like, yeah, I'm dying. And I felt myself dying. I felt myself losing grip with the world.

1:58:20And at some point, again, my interpretation of outings happened, I don't know what happened, but the bleeding was stopped, and I was able to kind of come back and I did get to the hospital and I was put in surgery and all that. And after I finally did recover, I was told by, or not when I recovered, when I was at the hospital, I think when I first got to the hospital in Germany, I was told that I was probably within about 30 seconds of dying, had my medic not grabbed me, put turnip hits on me and saved my life. So I was likely in the final 30 seconds of life. And it was not scary at all. It was kind of weirdly matter of fact and simple.

1:58:59I was like, yeah, this is it. Thought about my wife, thought about, where will she be in our house in Virginia Beach when invariably tonight, probably someone's gonna come to the door, she's gonna get told somehow. So it was just kind of like, I don't even know how to describe it. It was so simple. It was not emotional, it wasn't sad, there wasn't pain, it was just, it just was. And I liken it to, and it's kind of a funny analogy, but when I was seven, I was rollerblading and Martha's Vineyard on vacation with my family. And I hit a rock and I fell forward and I landed on my shoulder. And I totally blew out my collarbone, like compound fractured, like terrible break.

1:59:38But I'm seven and it's a weird thing, but as soon as I hit the ground, I immediately knew without a doubt, I have broken completely, not fractured, but broken my collarbone. As an adult, that would not be some revelatory thing. You can broke your collarbone, you'd see it. But as a seven year old, I don't even think I ever gave any thought to the word collarbone in my life. I don't think I've ever thought about that bone. I'm seven. But it was like immediate. I knew what was wrong with my body. And I was right. If compound fracture, 100 % right there. It's like when serious shit happens to you, your brain goes into this hyper focus.

2:00:13And you know things. You recall stuff that you just couldn't recall otherwise. And I think it's also why you have that time slowing down moment when the grenades coming over the wall. It's like your brain goes into hyperdrive and everything is just so much easier to understand. And I would say that with death, it was just like, I knew it was happening. It was not some, maybe it was, it's happening. I'm dying. And it was kind of like, and then I stand and I lived. So. But seven days after that, you're hobbling around Hodeepo. Yeah, and dude, the transition home was rough. Talk to me about the reintegration.

2:00:46On the one hand, it was amazing because I lived, and it just felt so amazing to be alive and to be able to see my wife again and all those things that come with, holy shit, I'm alive. But I was, they call it being in the red, or at least I think that's what they call it. That's what I call it. When you come back from a particularly stressful deployment, it usually combat, but it could be anything. Maybe you have something bad that happened on deployment. The military has these transitional stops along the way. You don't just go from Afghanistan, like go home guys, see you. We'll see you next month.

2:01:20It's like you go from Afghanistan to a resort in Maryland and you have you see therapists you You have like spot A's you have guest speakers come in like other veterans that have been through some stuff It's it's it's designed to hey guys. You're not on the battlefield anymore It's time to like bring it down here and the way it's put to you during these these reintegration stops is You're in the red right now like if you think of it as a grade if like green to yellow to orange to red You know, green is you in civilian life. You are a normal functioning person. Red, you're a killer who's been on the battlefield.

2:01:54Like, you gotta get out of here because this doesn't work in civilian life. And so it's all about kind of, well, kind of depressurizing you a little bit and getting you to calm down. But I didn't have that because there's not really a good process for guys that are wounded badly enough that they need to be like shipped out of country. Plenty of guys get hurt, but they can stay in country like in Afghanistan and maybe get the care they need. But mine was bad enough, I had to leave to go to Germany and go through other surgeries and treatment. And so there just, there wasn't really any sort of system setup.

2:02:27I'm not calling the military out because my guess is there was, but maybe I didn't know about it or I didn't volunteer for it. But either way, I'm back home with nothing. I am home and I am in the red. And I would describe, the way I describe that is in an enormous sense that everybody fucking owes me something. Like everybody owes me something. Like, I'm the man. I was just overseas in war, and I just got hurt in war. So everybody owes me something. That was totally my, that was where I was. The people in traffic, the person serving you at Starbucks. Everybody. And I remember I was, when I came back to the United States, I actually came back to Maryland, and they just took me in an ambulance to Virginia.

2:03:08But at this point, I'm completely stable, but I'm still like laying down in a gurney in the ambulance. And there was this like very nice woman who was working in the ambulance and EMT who was just like escorting me to Virginia And I couldn't stop being mean to her like I'm not a mean person Everything she said I had to have some comment. I didn't even know who this person was And there's there's nothing she's doing that in any way is antagonizing me But I couldn't stop being an ass -waltor like the whole two hours or whatever it was And that's just that's not who I am. That was the first time I noticed like wow I'm kind of an ass right now.

2:03:41And then in traffic, you know, I couldn't really drive too well, but when I did I would get so mad at everyone around me. And so I was just I was just mad at the funny story. I within a few days of being home. So we lived in an HOA. So homeowner's association and they have rules about what you can and can't do with your property. But you agree to this when you move into these neighborhoods. And so I come back home and my wife is like doodifully packing my wounds periodically and we get this message or I should say my wife prompted me, she said, hey, just so you know, the HOA's been in touch with us several times because our chimney cap is rusted and then you just fix it and I'm like, okay, whatever.

2:04:16And then we got, I think it was a voicemail. I think it was a voicemail. Somebody called us from the HOA and they're like, hey, we sent you that card and you still haven't changed your chimney cap, we drove by today, you gotta change that. And I'm like, no way. I'm in front of the phone and I called them. And remember, they have no idea who I am. They don't know anything about me and I call and I'm like, is this so and so and they're like, yeah? and I'm like, do you have any idea what I've been doing for the past six months? And she's like, no. Like, why would I know? And I turned it into like, how dare you ask me to change my chimney cap.

2:04:47So huge level of entitlement, feeling like what I did, it was the most righteous and best thing in the world and no one can top that. And that was really hard to get out of. But I would say that at some point you realize you're acting that way. And suddenly you're like, okay, I'm back. I don't want to be that guy anymore. That's like embarrassing to be so egotistical and entitled even if it's you warranted to some degree to be feeling that way It's so Off -putting to be around people like that that once you realize you're doing that you're able to stop but it takes months It's very impressive You're incredibly prepared to Display your shortcomings whether it was being close to narcissistic because of self -belief.

2:05:32Like there's a way that you can spin that so that you're not the bad guy, so that you're the good guy. But that's a problem. And also, I wanted to rebel, and I wanted to do this as a kid, and I didn't really care, and I wasn't gonna fulfill my potential. And then I did this thing. I think there's an awful lot that people can learn from taking a frank assessment of your shortcomings, and saying I was an asshole. People should say that more because I think when you are and when you can accept it and when you can also say and it's my job to be better. It's not a comment on myself worth as a person for the rest of time through a periodized assholary and I did it for a while.

2:06:18Yeah, and then the goal was to get out of that, but I think that seems psychologically healthy to me as opposed to saying Well, you know there was coping strategies, and I was a blah blah blah. It's like no, I was a dick Yeah, I did I was a dick for a while Okay, so you've done that you're you're now back civil life you're going through this thing physical mental emotional reintegration was the reprocess you went through Not really no, I think that you know the therapy Oh, no, I definitely saw a therapist and I would attribute a lot of my ability to be a normal, sane, happy person now to therapy.

2:06:55I've had to work through quite a bit just from that deployment and also just in general just my own life, trauma. But I think that having some pretty profoundly bad experiences in your life at the time are pretty awful, but many times they're the most defining moments of our lives where you're able to really see what you're made of when things are going really badly. And I think that I've had a couple times in my life where my life has been really, really challenging, whether it was in seal training or in combat or reintegration or trying to find my way in the civilian world. And it's in those moments, the only way that I've been able to get better and push through is if I'm really honest about who I am and what I'm doing.

2:07:35And I have found that it's just very effective to be honest with yourself about what you're doing well, what you're not to and well and not being afraid to kind of own up to it. I think that that's a good way to work through your problems is just saying, yeah, I have all these issues, but it doesn't make me a bad person. It just means I have shortcomings just like everybody else does. So given that you've seen death, escaped death, and you know, studied death, what have you come to believe about what constitutes a good life. I mean, I would say that having purpose is a big part of what brings me happiness in my life.

2:08:15I mean, in being Mr. Ballin, my life went from being pretty comparable to what I had growing up. And then now I have all these new opportunities that just come from the success of this channel. And they've been really exciting. And I guess do things I never could have done before, but what consistently brings me genuine happiness is not like vacations necessarily or a new car. It's having a goal and working towards that goal. And it's actually the act of working towards the goal that is the happy part. Getting to the goal means you got to find a new goal. And so it quickly ends. And so I think that more than buying stuff or even experiences, I think it's having like a core sense of why you're here, at least for this chapter of your life.

2:09:01And it doesn't need to be some grand goal either, but just having something a target of some kind, it really orients your life in a way that few things can. That's when I'm happy and focused and my life feels complete is when I have something hard to like aim for. Whether or not I achieve it, in many ways is kind of secondary to having it. It's like you need the target, you know? But do you think happens after we die? Do you believe in ghosts? Oh, man. You know, I would say that I probably was more open to life after death before I became Mr. Ballin and began reading all these stories. I'm not saying that I've changed my opinion on that.

2:09:39I think that I've just read so much about death and about death. I think there's an element of things just kind of end. And I think that, and a big reason I think that is actually because of my near -death experience where it just kind of felt like things were coming to an end. And it wasn't really sad or anything. It just was. You know, if you think about, you know, before you were born, let's say, what year were you born? 1988? Okay. So, are you bummed about not being there for 1987? No. You weren't there. You don't have no frame of reference. That time happened. but the fact that you weren't there for it doesn't really matter.

2:10:19You don't have emotional baggage with, oh man, I wish I could have seen 1987. The same is going to be true on the other side. There is no you to experience it. And so there's nothing to feel bad about. You just stop existing. And I I think that because I was so close to death in my opinion that it just feels like you got you got time now and take some chances because it just kind of ends at some point. And then in a 100 years, no one's going to know who you were. It's, you're gone. And that's dark, but it allows me to not really worry about fucking stuff up. Take, for example, doing a live event.

2:10:56And I know you did a whole live tour. Unless you're the person doing the show, what you may not realize is that for talent, for the person who's leading the show, when you go on stage to do a live performance, especially for someone like me, where I'm doing storytelling, right? It's like a skillset. I can you tell the story or not? You're setting yourself up for either big win or big fail. If I'm billing myself as this incredible storyteller and come on down to my show and I'm going to tell you these immersive stories and oh, it's going to be so great and I butcher it. It's not just that that show goes badly.

2:11:30It's that talk begins to spiral that oh no, John's not really a good storyteller. He can edit really well or this is all written by somebody else and he can't really do this. So you're jeopardizing your brand, you're risking the brand by doing the live show. But the upside is like a hundred times what you'd get by doing a digital show. Because doing it live demonstrates that, no, this guy can really do this thing. This is a high wire act. Exactly. And so if you want the big payoff, you've got to take the big risk. And a lot of people can't do that. Now granted, it's hard to even have the opportunity to have the live show.

2:12:02but it's like when you have opportunities in front of you that come as a high -wire type opportunities. Take them. If you fail, who cares? Like who cares? Everyone's gonna forget you in a hundred years. No one cares about you. The truth is, it's like no one cares about you. They care about themselves. That's being human. A huge part of, if you take any basic philosophy course, a big part of it is understanding that humans are by nature egocentric. They only really care about you in brief periods of time and really as it pertains to them. They aren't really invested in what you care about. They might act like they are.

2:12:38They might ask really good questions about what you're up to, but at the end of the day, they don't really care that much. They don't. They care about themselves. And so if you remember that and you think about the fact that in a hundred years from now, you'll be dead. Your kids will be dead. Or maybe they're still alive. Your parents are dead. Your grandparents are dead. and no one even knows who you are. Do you know who your grandfather's grandfather is? No. No, of course you don't. Like that's gonna be us. And so if you combine it with it, that's gonna happen. And no one really cares that much about you.

2:13:07I mean, think of all the scandals that have happened. Let's, the first one I thought of was the Will Smith slapping Chris wrong. Which is still very scandalous. And maybe I've chosen the wrong thing, but I think it still works for this example. That was humongous news for a long time. And it's still big news to a degree now. But mostly people are like, man, whatever. Think about that. That was like so many people saw that. That's like a huge thing and it mostly has faded away And yeah, it'll be a meme it will be this for that, but ultimately People have moved on because it's not them. They care about themselves if they're bringing that up It's just because it's a good story.

2:13:41It's not because they care about it And so people are too hung up on this idea that other people are invested in you There's like maybe a couple people in your life that are actually invested and it's usually your partner or it's you know your parents or it's your children, but beyond that dude, you're on your own. And it's actually really powerful to realize that. You can kind of do whatever you want. And if you've got up along the way, no one really cares because they don't care about you. And you're going to die. You studied philosophy. Yeah. It seems like that kind of swing for the fences, things aren't as big of a deal as you think they are.

2:14:15There is more, there are more degrees of freedom that you have in life. There's more balance than you might believe. Is there anything else that you rely on when times get hard? Are there any of the principles philosophically in terms of life mantras that you really rely on? Yeah, I have one in particular that I rely on a lot and it's this notion of do things that scare you. I definitely didn't come up with this and actually ironically, Will Smith is the person that I get this from that's complete happenstance. He has this amazing clip he had. I think he was on Oprah's talk show or something. This is several years ago, but he described going skydiving for the first time and how it was kind of the thing that they talked about with his buddies And he didn't think it was that serious, but then they're all on vacation together and one of the guys says hey There's a skydive place, you know down the road.

2:15:02Let's do it tomorrow And it was kind of like oh, yeah, baby Slowly became a thing and before long the next day they're all the skydive place and wills kind of like Are we really doing this because I don't want to do this now and this friend's like oh, we find It's like getting a plane they go up and now will is like terrified He's strapped into his instructor, but it's not a joke anymore. He kind of doesn't want to do this. But his instructor is like real relaxed. He's like, hey, I've done a thousand of these things. You're going to be fine. We're going to get to the door. It will be open. I'll count to three.

2:15:28We'll jump out. It'll be great. It's going to be just fine. And so, Will's like, hey, calm me down. It's all good. And so, the door slides open. It's time to jump. Will's buddy goes out with his instructor and then it's Will's turn. They go to the edge of the door and the instructor is like, okay, one, and he just jumps. And so, out they go. and Will said, he's like, I was so, so scared until we were out the door. And then it was like this profound, amazing experience. You know, I mean, have you Scott had before? No. Well, it feels like you're actually being pushed upward a little bit. It does not feel like you're falling.

2:16:00In no way, well, it really does. And it feels like you're being lifted. And it's just this amazing feeling and he talks about how much fun it was and he lands on the ground. And he's like, wow. And he has this epiphany that, you know, in his life, the things that he was the most scared of, often times were the most rewarding when he still did it. And Skydiving was one of those things. It's like this unbelievable thing that he was so scared to do. And so he said at the end of this little story he told was, and so what I discovered is the best things in life are often on the other side of fear. And I have found in my life without having coming up with such a good quote, but that has definitely been true.

2:16:35I mean, I was terrified to do pull -comp in second phase of steel training where that 20 minutes of them tie in knots and stuff in your hoses, because it's scary, it's hard. There's a real danger there. But finishing that test and passing that test was one of the most fulfilling moments of my life because it was so hard and I passed it. And it changed my life because I passed it because I overcome something that a lot of people can't. But I was only able to have that experience because I pushed past the fear of doing it. People quit before taking that test. It's so scary. It's rare because you're pretty far into buds, but that's the gist.

2:17:07It's like fear is an indication that something is worth doing. in difference is an indication that it's not. People think fear means don't do it. It means do it. Obviously there are certain things that are fearful and you shouldn't do them, but you get the idea. And so, you know, taking, I keep referencing this, this live stuff. That live event I did last October, I was terrified to do that. Because of the risk to the brand, you know, there's all these, it's me on stage with a mic. As you know, it's like it's all on you. And I tell my kids all the time to do things that scare them, and I felt like I have to live up to them.

2:17:41Money, why your mouth is bad? Yeah, and I told the kids, I'm like, I'm scared to do this, but when you're in the audience, you're going to see your dad up there and you're going to see me doing the thing I'm scared of because that's what you do when you have an opportunity to do something that scares you. You do it. How do you overcome the fear? I think I just am willing to do it even though I'm scared. I think I'm just willing to keep doing it. That's it. I'm willing to do things even if they're scary. Not because I'm some hero, that's the way my brain works. I'm able to do it. I don't know. I think not giving too much respect to fear, you know, what we've tried to do, what civilization is done incredibly well is reduce down most of the things that we can't predict.

2:18:22We know what the weather's going to be like next week. We have air conditioning to keep us cool when it's hot and heaters to keep us warm when it's cold. We have tried to bring in the guardrails are like when you go bowling bring up the thumpers, thumpers things on the side. So there's no gutters. Yeah. And I think that in certain ways, it'll have made us hyper sensitize to fear. Yeah. The answer. This is a big departure from what I am used to feeling. Yeah. And it's like, I've done a bunch of stuff that's scared me recently. And I gave way too much respect to the emotion of fear. Yeah, way too much.

2:19:03A lot of people do. Everybody does. It's a matter of toning it down when you feel that way. And that's, that is, I think the only way to do that is consistently putting yourself in positions where you're scared. To prove to yourself that the fear isn't as big as you think it is. You're never going to fear. I don't think goes away. I think fear will remain. It's what's your fear response. And I think it's something you can train. Because my fear response, I think actually is to panic. But over time, I have begun to harness the fact that No, if you don't do that and you just hold for a second and just keep doing the thing you're doing There's a big payoff at the end and it's allowed me to not panic and run away, but push forward Speaking of fear we're here in a spooky field with a car on fire and a full moon and a Weird house over the far side.

2:19:49Yeah. Have you got any stories that fit this environment? I do I do I have a really good one from out in Utah in the 1970s This is actually one of the earliest stories that I covered. Actually, this is one of the first ones. So we don't have the names of the people involved. I'm going to call them a man and a woman, but this is every bit their story. We just don't use their names. I think they actually didn't want their names used. That's what I recall. So back in the 1970s, there was this young guy and young girl, who are the main characters of the story. And they, I think they met in college and they go out on this first date.

2:20:26They go to a restaurant at diner and they got along fine, but there wasn't any magic. It was kind of a nothing date that they both kind of instinctively knew that this was likely not going to go anywhere beyond this first date. There's no chemistry. However, they both kind of intuitively noticed it and the guy towards the end of the date when it's kind of like, okay, time to wrap things up. Now, he decided to take a chance. He figured, what's the worst that can happen? and I already can tell this isn't going anywhere. And he says to his date, he says, you know, do you want to do something kind of unexpected?

2:21:02Do you want to like go do something kind of crazy with me right now? And the girl was actually like kind of taking a back. Actually, okay, what do you want to do? And he's like, well, I oftentimes go for walks out in Provo Canyon, this beautiful canyon that's nearby, it's got this amazing trail. It brings you out to this overlook with this incredible view of the stars. Like it's a really cool spot. And I go there later in the day and no one's there and it's pretty cool, but it's, you know, we're hiking in the woods in the middle of the night, you know what I mean? And she's like, okay, let's do it, you know.

2:21:33It's like suddenly the date went from going nowhere to it's kind of exciting. And so now there's chemistry. It's like they're going into the unknown together. And so they quickly leave the diner, they hop in his car and it's a short drive over to the parking lot where Probokanian is, you know, he pulls into the spot, there's nobody there, they get out and now there really is. They're getting along, they're kind of laughing, Thaang, Talon jokes, their holding hands, and they walk right from the parking lot onto this paved trail that goes right into the forest. And so it's nighttime, you know, just a very, this is a well, this is a well -used trail.

2:22:04This is not some goat trail in the middle of nowhere. This is a well -used trail. And so they start walking into the forest and after a while, and this is something they would say after the fact, but we know this was happening. as they were walking, the feel, the vibe of the night really changed as soon as they got into the woods. You know, they're excited, the states suddenly become exciting, and then they get into the forest. They're on the trail, they're holding hands, they're walking, and both of them began feeling this really intense dread as they're walking in. But they don't know each other.

2:22:36They just, this is their first date. They don't have the background of a relationship to begin touching on something that's hard to point out. You know, neither of them turned to the other and said, I feel uncomfortable. Instead, they just kept their mouth shut and thought, okay, I'll just keep on going. So they stopped talking. They begin walking faster out of this kind of nervous energy they have now. They're holding hands and they're just walking through this trail because they're trying to get to this overlook, basically get it out of the way and come on back. But it's all unspoken. They haven't said, boy, this is anxious.

2:23:03They're just they're feeling that way. And so they're walking on this trail again, surrounded by trees. There's nobody else out there. And it's pretty dark. They don't have a flashlight. And as they're basically speed walking at this point in silence, at some point, they hear a rustling sound, kind of off to the side. And at the exact same time, the guy steps on something that he described as being soft. And he stepped on it and he has no idea what he's stepping on. No clue. It's something soft. And he's heard this rustling sound and they're feeling anxious. And he immediately stops because he stepped on something.

2:23:35And the girl, she's sensing, okay, what's going on here? And without any communication, they turned and walked out. Didn't even look down. They didn't, they have no idea what's going on. It was like they both knew, So let's get the f*** out of here. I don't know what's going on out here. And they practically ran back to their car, totally safe, they get in their car, and now that they're in the safety of their car, they kind of begin laughing about it like, yeah, I wonder what that was? I stepped on something out there. I don't know, something moving around. Maybe there's a big animal, I don't know.

2:23:59But that was it. It was just, that was the whole date. And actually, they wound up getting married, because this date was like this kind of amazing thing, but they bonded over the fear of being in this forest. And so they get married, and 10 years later, They are at home and the TV is on. It's tuned to like a date line type of show, like a true crime show. And neither of them are really watching. But an interview comes on and it's a journalist talking to a death row inmate. It's a very famous death row inmate. And he's very near his execution date. And he's giving this kind of full -blown interview about what he did.

2:24:36And at some point, the journalist asks him, Was there ever a time that you almost got caught before you got caught? And the serial killer is like, yeah, there was a time. I was out in Provo Canyon and I just killed a girl and I was trying to dispose of her body and I dragged her across the trail and this young couple comes turning around the corner and they stepped on the body and I was maybe a foot away holding her, looking up at them in the darkness, waiting to see what they were going to do. But for some reason, the couple didn't look down, they didn't look around, they just turned and left.

2:25:10And so that was it. That was the time I was caught caught. And so it turned out, the guy or where they had come in contact with Ted Bundy, like one of the most infamous serial killers of all time, who effectively said had he investigated, he would have had to kill the couple. That's crazy. They got their first date was running into Ted Bundy. Wow. Yeah. Oh my God. And actually, if you're interested, there's several other close calls with Ted Bundy that if you Google close calls with Ted Bundy, he came close to killing people several times. And I don't have those VW Beetle. There's something in the VW Beetle.

2:25:48I forget what it was. Unfortunately, I don't remember all the anecdotes, but there's quite a few that are, that one is the most startling because it's so visceral what happened. But the others were, you know, this girl who almost went on a date with Ted Bundy, but but then got a bad feeling about it and canceled and it like the day later he gets arrested for being Ted Bundy. Stuff like, or one person who Ted Bundy randomly befriended this woman. And I think they were dating for a while and he was very close with her child and it was, I mean, he's like in their family while he's killing other people at the same time.

2:26:20And then he just broke up with her and moved on. Like he didn't do anything to her or her family while he's actively killing all these women. But for some reason, he just had this normal family happy wholesome relationship with this girl for like a year and she would find out after he was executed that she was actively dating a serial killer. So it's just Ted Bundy had all these weird interactions with people that have been documented, but that one to me is the most startling. Who are some of the most evil people that youth covered? Oh man. I have one for sure. There's, in terms, I've covered people that committed horrible crimes to children and just terrible, like John Wayne Gacy, who just killed young boys.

2:27:02But the one that stands out as just the most heart wrenching by far is Jack and forget their names. Jack and I lean, okay, this is the older couple, they're trying to sell their boat. They want to retire and go live with, they want to go live next to their their child who just had their first grandson or grandchild. And so in order to afford the new house that would be next to their child, they wanted to sell their boat. And they got this perspective buyer who wanted to buy the boat is a very nice boat. This is not a cheap purchase. So there's some diligence there and they asked to go and test run the boat but with Jack and I'm unfortunately forgetting their names.

2:27:42The last name is Haas, I think. Anyways, they go out on the ocean with the perspective buyer and two of his friends that came along if you will. So it's like three of these people and then Jack and his partner and they end up going out of the ocean at which point, you know, the killer, they end up taking over the ship, they tie up Jack and his partner. And instead of just, you know, bringing them somewhere and dumping them, you know, and taking their boats, all they wanted to do was steal the boat. For whatever reason, they decided to drive out in the middle of the ocean and they attached them to the anchor, but they tied them at the very back end of the anchor.

2:28:18So the anchors here, the chain runs all the way and they're tied at the bitter end of the anchor. And they brought them out and they said, But at some point, we're going to throw this anchor over the end, over the side, and you're going to drown. And for hours, they waited for this. And then finally, when they did it, think about it. All this chain link, you have to wait for it to throw the anchor over. And then apparently they were holding on. Everything they could, and the killers were just watching as they're struggling, like fully alive. They're not wounded at all. And they were pulled into the water, and they were pulled underneath the water and drowned.

2:28:48And I just can't think of a more psychologically horrible way to die than to how do you know that story. It was on Dateline and the killer, he did a whole expose about what happened. Of himself. Yeah. He's guilty. He admitted to what he did. And there's a whole breakdown of the things that happened on that boat. And that was it. It's like a horrifying. So. What do you think about how evil works? I think people are evil. What do you think shapes behavior for real extreme sort of masochism and the ted bundies of the world and stuff like that. And how culpable are these people in your mind? I don't know.

2:29:27I mean, I think that they're definitely, I think some of the worst are the most culpable because it's a very intentional thing to be a serial killer. I mean, you're making, not that I have any idea, but you know, you're making a choice to seek out a particular target of some kind and you're doing it over and over again, on some level you are aware this is not okay behavior, you know, but you keep doing it. People that, and I'm not giving anybody a pass here, but, you know, crimes of passion is something a little bit easier to understand. It doesn't necessarily feel evil. It feels like, okay, I wouldn't do that, but I understand feeling a sudden rage and making a terrible decision in that moment.

2:30:02I can understand that. And for those people, you're still culpable for your actions. But it's the people that have a conscious choice to seek out violence over and over again, not even necessarily serial killers, but serial abusers and people like that. That's evil that is seeking out pain and misery on others really because it makes you feel good. that's the only way. So I think in the kind of, when it's a crime of passion or it's just kind of, it happened out of some random thing that doesn't feel evil, it just feels like a bad situation that was made worse by bad decision making. But evil comes when someone's doing a violent activity over and over again by choice.

2:30:38And then to me, I think you're just not mentally well. I think there's something broken with you and that thing, and we call that being evil. didn't you look at skin walker ranch as well? I went down a rabbit hole about that quite a while ago. What did you learn about that? I haven't covered it in a long time, so I don't have the details as well as I used to, but so skin walker ranch is, you know, it's a hotbed of potential paranormal activity. You know, there was at one point this non -governmental organization that went out there and did this whole really in -depth study, and they came back with quite a few anomalies.

2:31:12I don't know if anything was proven, but you know, there's like paranormal activity, hotspots all over the, I think that a livestock are found in the mornings. It's surgical incisions and organs missing. All the places in the world, I mean, this is one of the places where consistently people are saying, like weird stuff happens there. And I don't know if it's true or not, but there's enough stories of people countering, you know, the most terrifying was there was one of the people who lived on Skinwalker Ranch And one of the main owners, I think at some point, that he described how at night, he and his family stayed in this small house that was on this huge, huge property.

2:31:50Schemacher Ranch is a massive, massive property, but that this little farmhouse that was kind of situated in the middle of the acreage. And so there's no neighbors anywhere. It's just that's isolated home right in the middle of nowhere. And he described, he began hearing tapping sounds on the outside of his house at night, just like tapping on his house. There's no neighbors. There's nothing nearby. And because of all the weird activity in the property He was too scared to investigate for the longest time just for days and days. He was just here this tapping at night But then one time he decided to go investigate when he heard this tapping and he looked outside and there's this tall figure this dark tall figure right outside the window tapping on the glass over like staring directly through the grass tapping at him goes outside.

2:32:32There's nothing there comes back inside another window another figure tapping on the glass like sketchy stuff. Wow. Yeah, this has become, this is all part of skunk works and is it aliens, is it paranormal activity? Do you remember that period? Was it Tom DeLong from Blink 1 -8 -2? It was like huge and... Yeah. He actually reached out to me. I spoke to him. No way. Yeah, he reached out to me early on in my Mr. Ballon journey. And there was a time where we were talking about potentially collaborating on a show. So it didn't really amount to much. Most of the cause he linked back up with BlinkWin82 and his own tour.

2:33:11But yeah, I think that's his calling. His calling was making great music, not being a like... But he actually is attributed with getting the government to release classified files that are, you know, UFO files. If you go on Wikipedia, which is not exactly the most reputable source, he is the guy. Tom DeLong, the lead singer for BlinkWin82, is officially the guy who got the government to say, okay, yup, we do have footage of UFOs. And it's because he would go to DC and straight up hold meetings and pressure people to come out and say it, because he's like, I'm telling you, I know all sorts of people that have shown me videos and pictures and evidence.

2:33:47He's like, I'm telling, I think it's real. His whole life he's been hooked on aliens, you know? And he really, he pressured the government and they listened and they released all these files because of Tom the Long. It really is because of him. Who knew what's my age again would be such an important and pivotal moment in the UFO thing. I remember the episode that he did on Rogan, and Joe's big into his aliens, into his UFOs, and stuff like that. But while he was getting up and walking around, because they were headphones, Joe and Jamie were able to talk to each other quietly while Tom was walking around.

2:34:24I'm sure, I don't think I'm imagining this. I'm pretty sure that this actually happened, but they're saying like this guy's crazy. Like, but they're saying it into the mic. So only those two can hear and he's wandering around like trying to get videos upon his phone or something. Yeah, I have to say, I did feel like listening to that episode especially the one that he did with Joe. And maybe it was because it was framed, Joe and Jamie as people that are usually quite incredulous about this, I release Joe like, was skeptical and that, college, colored my opinion. But there wasn't a little bit of me that was like, I feel like Tom could do with someone checking in a little bit.

2:35:02This seems like, but that's the thing. Like the line between legitimate obsession with something other people don't see and outright delusion with something that you're imagining is by design difficult for the people outside of that situation to see. If you're this multiplication factor different in terms of what you're looking at. And it's like, you know, any invention, any insight about this is what's happening with the government. This is what's happening with climate change. This is what's happening with something big that needs to change. The opportunity to look crazy is pretty high. Very correct.

2:35:42Yes. I actually spent a lot of time, a lot of things. I'd probably have had maybe four or five meaningful conversations with Tom about this topic because we were thinking about what we wanted to do with the show. And what I got from Tom is when I first interacted with him, it was a lot. I mean, he's very into UFOs and aliens and it would be easy to make a judgment. But what I found with Tom was he's a guy who is not worried about what you think about him. He really doesn't care. He cares about UFOs. He cares about the existence of aliens and he does not care how he comes off. and he knows that he has enough of influence in a platform that if he wants to pursue this, he has the ability to do that.

2:36:26He can get people to give him information in order to let him learn more about the thing he loves. And he's been hooked on the pursuit of alien life to some degree, like I think his whole life. And so I actually began to really respect that side of Tom, that yeah, he's this amazing a -list rock star, but he has this very real passion. and it's that he stayed true to this obsession that he's always had. And it's like, that's the thing he cares about. And you see it, it's right there. I mean, he's not faking it. And he's so passionate about it. And I actually, I really like Tom. He's a guy that is, it makes sense that he's the guy that outed the government about UFOs.

2:37:05And it also makes sense that he was criticized or critiqued by Joe Rogan or whoever it was in the podcast. But it's because Tom is not filtering. He's like, this is what I wanna do. Yeah, there is something. There's some sort of like innocent purity about that. I think he's a really good guy. If you ever received backlash for promoting these sorts of stories? The only like, well, yes, for sure. I told a story about, and this was early days, I told a story about this guy who he worked on an Apple farm, an Apple orchard, I guess it's called, and where they stored a lot of apples in this closed -off room.

2:37:44Some chemical process was happening with the actual apples and I guess the chemicals they sprayed in there to keep them fresh. Obviously, I don't know exactly what happened, but they had this closed shack where this produce was and it turned toxic at some point. Again, I forget the details of the story, but one by one, people were going into this shack, like workers there to get something and then not coming out again. And with each person who went in, they were going to find the other person. They were going in in an attempt to say, hey, where's Tom? And they'd go in and they wouldn't come out.

2:38:15Oh, then Mike was, hey, where dim just go. And four or five people died just from going in. They suffocated. And I told it with respect. I told it as accurately as I could, but I didn't seek out any sort of permission for it. It was a publicly recorded story, but the mom of one of the victims actually, her other living son contacted me and just was like, you have broken her heart to bring this up again. and you didn't contact us, this just happened. And now, you know, we're getting messages left and right because the video gets millions of views. Everybody's saying, Hey, do you know Mr. Ballin's covering your story?

2:38:50Hey, you got this detail wrong. Hey, he did this. And so our reaction was, I'm taking it down. I'm not, this is not about, oh, well, this is a great video. I want to get my views. It's like, no, I don't want to hurt this person's feelings. And so we pulled that one down. There was a couple others early on when I didn't seek out permission for someone's obvious their story. and I got details wrong because it's their story that they didn't tell me that I pulled those videos down as well. But that's the just I mean the most backlash I got was not for the stuff I posted about you know spooky stories It was when I was I told you when I was trying to do social media content It was not working well one of the things I was trying to use as like here's gonna be my social media angle Was me the Navy seal just talking about my experiences about training about deployments nothing classified at all But I was talking about being a seal and that actually did get a little bit, a little bit of traction Not enough to spawn a you know a whole livelihood off of that but it was you know getting some views and It drew the criticism of the active duty seal community because what people don't realize is that even though There are loads of seals and military folk that are civilians now that write books and there's movies and they talk about their exploits despite that being the case, many seals too.

2:40:07I mean, there's like, God knows how many Navy seals that talk about their motivational speakers that talk about their military experience. Goggins, the Joccos. Yeah, so, but even though that's true, what people don't realize is the vast majority of Navy seals in particular are totally quiet and do not talk about their experiences. This is like, I think I'm right in saying that there is a skepticism and a vigilance and a backlash against basically anyone who did seal duty and then writes the book, pivots into the motivational thing, is that endemic to being a seal? Is that just, is that kind of like an unwritten code of honor of some kind?

2:40:50Well, if you're thinking about this way, it's definitely not endemic to the seal teams. I think it's more combat units. It might even be just military in general that I think this happens. It's very profound or it's very, it happens the most in I think special operations units. But this take, for example, Navy SEALs. I mean, when you become a Navy SEAL, you get this gaudy gold pin of an eagle holding onto a flintlock pistol in a trident. And that's actually just called your trident. That's the name of this pin. You wear it on your uniform. And in the Navy, every other badge you wear for, it's called your insignia for, there's dozens of jobs, hundreds of jobs in the Navy that are not Navy SEALs and they all get their own pins.

2:41:33They're all kind of small, but the Navy SEAL Trident is like in your face five times a size of everything else. And it's the thing that designates you as a SEAL on your uniform. And if you think of it this way, there have been all these men, because it's only been men who have been SEALs so far, who have worn the Trident and died, that those people, they're the ones that have built the legacy of the SEAL teams. And so the way it is put to you when you join the SEAL teams is this shit is not yours. This is the communities. You're wearing it because you're part of this community, but it's not yours to use, so to speak, because men have fought and died to build what this thing is.

2:42:09I mean, like that the SEAL teams are super successful and regarded as this really amazing unit, not because of me, but because of all the people before me who have died into getting to this point. And so it's really about understanding that you're joining a community that relies on each other. it's a team, it's not an individual sport, right? And that's really impressed on you that when you get out, you don't act like you're the Navy seal because it's not about that. There's all these people that are not here anymore that built up the legacy and frankly the credibility of the Trident. And so it's a known thing, absolutely known, it's not ambiguous in the least that if you get out of the military, the seal teams, and you start talking about your experiences, no matter How about nine?

2:42:54You will draw the higher of the active duty community 100 % of the time. How would you or actually, how does it make you feel as someone who didn't do many tours? Yeah. But fought and bled and risked your life. And yet, the active military community has a problem with you and what you did. You know, the way I look at it is I, when I was in the active duty, when I was active duty, I would have shittled over somebody like me when I got out of the military. I was all about doing the things that seals do. I wanted to be a part of the team. I wanted to be the quiet professional. I wanted to be the best I could be all those things.

2:43:44And so I remember when I was active duty, we'd be sitting in our our team room, which is just like a little office space that's just for your platoon. And it's like, it's like a fraternity basically in there, it's ping pong tables and stuff. And I remember we would talk openly about seals that were out that were very successful, at least publicly, very successful, that we would just shit talk. Disparaging. Completely. For no reason, other than, look at this guy talking about it, how great he is as a seal, right? But the reality is, is when you get out of the military, The difference between being active and being not active is enormous.

2:44:18When you are in an active duty seal team, it is not just a job, it is a life. Your life is the team. Even when you're at the team, you're with your teammates and you're doing seal stuff and when you're home, you're not, well, I think technically you are on call to a degree to, you know, maybe you could get spun up and go, that's really just the same thing happens. Maybe, maybe, but to a degree, you know, you could be called upon to come do extra training that you weren't prepping for. And so when you're home, you don't really feel relaxed at all. You feel like I'm gonna go to work. I work at the weekends at the time.

2:44:48There's training in, anyways. It's just a very, it's an intense job. It takes over your whole life. And there's a big push to really contribute to the culture of the teams. Like you don't get to just be a seal who doesn't spend time with your teammates outside of work. The expectation is you're not only gonna work together, but you're gonna like live together. Full immersion. What that does is it creates an incredibly cohesive team while you're on the team. When you're not on the team, you are not part of that community anymore and you lose a lot of your identity. And when you're in that bubble, when you're in the active duty teams, you don't realize how important it is that you're in a team.

2:45:26You're in a community. You have all these people around you that are just like you. You are secure. Your purpose is to be a seal. You don't need to market yourself. You don't need to do anything. You just got to be a seal, right? But when you leave, you've left that community. You're not a part of it anymore. And it's really hard to navigate. What do I do now? I just so tough. You lose your identity in a big way and invariably, and I see this all the time. And I feel I feel a lot of empathy for these guys. Invariably a lot of these seals in particular. They get out of the military. And I often find myself noticing when these people get out, because they go on LinkedIn, and I see transitioning Navy Seal.

2:46:02And I see what they're up to. to a lot of them start with something that looks like a good idea on paper. Hey, I'm going to go try to be a finance guy or whatever it is, but they end up not liking it and they kind of become an entrepreneur and they try to think about ways they can work for themselves because a lot of seals are pretty entrepreneurial and they default to the one thing that they know sells. And it's, I was in ABCO. To some degree, raising your hand and telling the world that you were in ABCO, that gives you so much credibility in a way. It does. What else do you have? Not to mention, you also literally did that job for years and years at a time.

2:46:38It really affects who you are. You see these guys shift to social media and begin self -promoting. It's really, really mild stuff. You don't see guys hopping on there being like, and that's when I killed this person or something. It's usually like, here are some things I learned from Navy SEAL training, which are applicable to you. It's like that type of content. and super benign, not gonna hurt anybody, it's not classified, but all it takes is one time doing that, and you will draw the attention of the active community. How much content did you make? A lot, and it was like, you know, I was not sharing classified stuff.

2:47:13At least I'd be shocked if I did. It was mostly like, here's what it's like to not sleep for this much time, you know, I got to think. But I posted a lot, I kind of took the high volume approach and so I can imagine, you know, all of my teammates It's your active duty. And I know what it feels like to be active duty. I don't fault them. I understand how they feel. They're seeing somebody that was just like them. He was part of the group. He was part of the Wolfpack. And now it's like he couldn't be farther from us. Here he is shilling the fact that he was a seal on social media and it's so cringey, all that stuff.

2:47:45It's easy to do that when you're active because you're not out there yet. You haven't figured it out yet. You haven't transitioned yet. But invariably what happens is you draw the attention of the teams and they're really upset with you. and I would say that seals are pretty good at being confrontational. They're not worried about being anonymous. You'll get messages from people where they want you to know who they are. And they want you to know that they personally do not like you. I've gotten messages from metal of honor recipients. I've gotten messages very negative messages. I've gotten really like seriously deep -cutting messages from people I served with on my team, like in Afghanistan.

2:48:21Some of the people who were my closest friends in the world, I thought. But you know, I knew that was gonna happen, but it kind of came out of a place of desperation in a way. I'm trying to find my way in the world post -military and nothing was working and I tried the whole let's tell people I'm a seal and see what happens and it really had intensely negative blowback and I actually left Virginia to escape the negativity which did not just live online Virginia Beach is where seal all the seal teams are I would run into guys and no one was like doing anything to me But I get looks from people that definitely knew who I was definitely didn't like me I'm like with my family.

2:48:58I'm out of the grocery store getting stared at by a CEO who's clearly menacing like staring at me I want that mostly if they'll bat for my family. I don't want that you know what I mean? And again, I don't fault these guys because I know what it's like to be active I get the culture that you hate the people that are doing what I'm doing But that's the problem with the community right now is that I'm an example of someone that that would have shit all over somebody that did the whole Navy SEAL social media thing. And then what happened when I got out? I did the whole Navy SEAL social media thing.

2:49:26And I'm not an idiot. I'm very... I'm very... The result that you expected. Yeah, exactly. So, and I'm not crazy. It's just... It's hard to transition. So... Would you like to try and mend the relationships with the people who were in your past or you kind of just like, I think it's best that we go our own sort of separate ways?

2:49:46I'm pausing because there's a part of me that... Well, I'll say this. So I posted a lot of the Navy SEAL centric look at me. I'm the cool Navy SEAL guy in 2017, 2018 about. And then I kind of transitioned to trying other stuff on social media that didn't work. And then 2020 was Mr. Ballin. There were some people that sent some stuff to me that was just uncalled for. It went well beyond, hey, you're doing something I disagree with to saying things that are like beyond hurtful and also somewhat threatening that I can't just ignore. Those people, it's unforgettable. It's past that. But the people that simply took exception to what I was doing for all the reasons I implicitly understand when your active duty, I was really mad at them, but I also, I understand what they're coming from and I am in some ways empathetic to the way they are.

2:50:36And I have actually recently spoken to some of those people and I got some nice messages from some people recently. What have you said or what would you say to the people if you could sit down and have a coffee with them? that I'm still the same guy that you served with. You know, it isn't that I, you know, decided I'm going to morph into this like jerk who just decided to sell out for a little bit. I'm the same guy you knew, but I went through an experience that you haven't yet. You're still active. You have not attempted to go from active duty seal to doing something completely different and it's way more challenging than you think it is.

2:51:08It's no one's going to know what you did or why you're valuable unless you tell them. That's a fundamental truth and it comes back to what I said earlier, which is no one gives a fuck about you. They care about themselves. And so if you want to get hired by a company, you need to tell someone why you matter and why you'll help them at their company. They're not going to seek you out unless there's some really compelling reason to. And again, it comes down to you need to tell the world what your value proposition is. It's, I used to think, it's so funny. I thought this in, I thought that in virtue of being an ABCO, that when I got out, just everybody somebody would somehow know, and I get a great job, and I'd live happily ever after.

2:51:44And I really believe that. There would be no work. I would just step out of the team. Look at the sacrifices I've made. Look at how competent I am. Give me the jobs. Give me the opportunities. But the reality is, is people are totally keen to talk to you. They want to hear about your experience. They can totally see that there's value in being a seal. And what you did could translate to business. That's definitely true. But it's not the end all be all. you can't just be a former seal. And I think that that's also something that active seals are gonna have a hard time adjusting to because I did.

2:52:16Being a seal is cool, it's amazing. And frankly, I'm also speaking from the island it was a seal for like five minutes. I think it's much harder to imagine what it would be like if you did 30 years as like a Tier 1 Navy seal with like 20 combat tours. I can see that's hard to separate from. But ultimately you're gonna have to come to terms with the fact that once you get out, But the fact that you were a seal is just not your idea. It's a jack shit. Yeah, it doesn't, it matters, but it matters only in certain ways. And I think that I just want, there's a part of me that always worried that people thought that I had really changed, but in the worst way, that somehow I had, you know, threw to the wind, everything I knew from being a seal and just said, the team's going to do whatever I want and post whatever I want.

2:52:59When in reality, you know, I made a decision because I needed, I needed something to work. I couldn't get traction in the civilian world because I didn't really know what I wanted to do and I didn't really know how to market myself and social media just felt like it's such an obvious big opportunity to just get opportunities in general whether it's work or entrepreneurial endeavors that the decision I made was like I'm choosing my career and my livelihood and my civilian career and my livelihood and my family over the teams. Meaning I'm prepared to go this route, the post about being a seal, because it's the highest percentage chance that it will open doors for me that I need opened right now as a guy trying to find my way in the world.

2:53:39I knew going into that, I was going to open, you know, Pandora's Box, if you will. So it didn't surprise me when I got the negativity. It just surprised me at how aggressive it was. I mean, I was getting text messages nearly every day from people telling me not only how they felt about me, but that also they'd like send me what other people were saying about me. That's just a way to remind me that this is this is everywhere. So it's a real sacred cow this thing. You recently did Sean Ryan show. Yeah. How did it feel to go so deep into your military history? You must feel conflicted about this.

2:54:15Very conflicted. Am I reopening another kind of worms? Is this me re -glorifying thing I did? Sean's got legitimacy with his background and many people have been on his show, Robo 10th -day, 10th -day, you know, guys that are more high profile for their military thing in yours. But yet, what was it like to speak to Sean Ryan in depth about your military history given your conflicted military relationships? Yeah, I mean, in a way it was cathartic, you know, it's been years really, I deleted. So I should say this, when I was getting all that negativity from the seal post I was doing around the time I made that shift and was trying stuff on TikTok and then I ultimately landed on the Mr.

2:54:58Ballon stuff. There was a period of time where it was like, am I going to delete everything and just accept that I'm going to have this black mark on my name from the active community and go in other direction? Or am I just going to accept that my life's going to be a living hell, but at least I'll have this social media falling. And I decided, no matter what I had grown so far online, my presence online from the SEAL stuff, it was not going to be worth the mental toll of having this negativity. So I deleted everything. And after it was deleted, um, you know, I basically stopped thinking about it.

2:55:33I was embarrassed about it more than anything. You know, I, as much as swinging a mess big time, like an epic swing in a mess. And unfortunately, one of the things you hear all the time in the SEAL teams, but definitely in the military. This is a military thing is reputation is everything. It's everything and if you're a Navy SEAL, I mean, you're a special operator What your peers say about you is your currency. There's nothing else It doesn't matter what's on your uniform because everybody knows there's a difference between that guy's combat tour and that guy's combat tour and For me the most devastating thing is I took my reputation from the teams Which I would have said was I think pretty good and just can obliterate it.

2:56:14It's gone. It's it's so bad and so destroyed that But then you sit down with Sean and how long do you go five hours? In five hours. So to dive into it again, I think that what people likely were surprised at, who listened to that show, was I'm a pretty calm guy the way I speak about stuff. And I get animated with stories and stuff, but it's undeniable that there was anger and resentment when I was talking about the toxicity that I received on the back end. Even though again, I understand why it happens. I mean, then would have maybe even been a paveir of that had the sugarbeen on the other side.

2:56:49I would have been. I know I would have been. But like, therein lies the big problem that if you are a seal, you are a fund, even if you're active duty, you are aware that the publicity around seals, whether to do it, whether or not to do it, is a really big problem. And it's making life exponentially harder for the seals getting out because they have to make a choice. Do I pursue something that involves marketing the fact that I have this pretty notable thing on my backdrop or do I hide it, which fundamentally hurts me. And I know that no one really gives a shit about me now. I'm out. I'm not part of the wolf pack anymore.

2:57:22They might text me or call me periodically. I might be on their radar, but I'm not part of the team anymore. They're not coming to save me. It'll give me a job. So what am I not doing this for? Really, I'm appeasing people that don't really care, but they care if I do it. And so I made the choice with real intent. It's painful to feel like I prided myself on being one of the boys on the teams. I was trustworthy, I was a good seal. I think I wasn't the best, but I was a good guy. I carried my weight. I stood up for things that were right. There was even some stuff that I did that I think, if you were in my platoon and my second rotation, I did some stuff that nobody else was prepared to do.

2:58:05and it was like standing up to some leadership issues. It just sucks that that kind of got thrown away, because there's probably hundreds of people in the teams right now that have no clue that I've gone on to be Mr. Ballin. All they remember is who's that idiot John Allen who post all its stupid shit on Instagram? What you make of what Sean's doing, going super deep the men's equivalent of true crime stories, you know, several hour long episodes with guys going really deep into their military history. It seems like he's relatively unique in this kind of in this space and I love his show. Yeah, no, Sean.

2:58:41So Sean being former CIA as well, he's just, he's really good at asking questions. And I found on his show, you know, you go into it expecting it to be really, really long, it's like five hours, six hours. And so I'm ready to just kind of go off on whatever tangent we go on, but he was just really good at as we're talking about certain things. He'd pick up on, little things that I would bring up. I offhandedly mentioned, as I was describing my upbringing, that it was really difficult when my parents split up. And I don't talk about my parents' divorce. It's not like a central part of my life at all.

2:59:15It's just a point, you know? And he circled back to it later on in a way that he was like, well, do you think, you're parents' divorce? How did it affect on this? And I was like, you know, and I never thought about that. But he does the same thing with the military stuff. And he also is familiar with the toxicity of transitioning out because he's received a lot of that, too. And so his questions were from a guy who really understood the dynamic of the awkwardness of transitioning out of the seal teams and how much negativity comes with that. And so it was kind of it was cathartic to talk to him about it because I felt like I was talking to a guy that got it and frankly experienced it.

2:59:49So there was some solidarity there. But also, you know, it was it was conflicting because I realize now that because I am Mr. Ballin and I have built this platform that's not. on the strength of my military stuff. I don't really, it's a part of who I am, but it's by no means the reason the channel is grown. It's really, it was hidden in some ways. But now I'm in a, I am in a very leveraged, good position against my active duty counterparts. Like what are you gonna do? You're gonna have a... Because it looks like champagne problems. If you whine about this thing, oh, poor Mr. Amazon deal, poor Mr.

3:00:248 million subscribers. It's like, I just kind of... Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Yeah, yeah. And so I just feel like every time I'm talking about the stuff, I very likely am triggering some people to feel both. Wow, I really agree with him and wow, I really hate that guy. Phenomenal. Yeah, I found it very fascinating, you know, I've spoken to a variety of different sorts of operators. And there is a hyposensitivity at Tim Kennedy. I don't know what he said. At some point, it seems like he did or said something which is to do with additional gun checks for people. And there is a fixation on the internet about that thing that he said.

3:01:05Mike Baker, XCIA guy, oddly Evan Hafer from Black Rifle, doesn't seem to have the same vitriol, but Mike especially, I wonder whether it's like the people that were a bit more active in kinetic versus the ones that are a bit more sort of administrative and whatever. But there is a difference. Like, I, British, right, we don't have the veteran community isn't really this, it doesn't hold the same, you know, there's no active military service, please get on the plane first, there's none of that stuff. Yeah. I am absolutely fascinated by the difference in perception of people that were in the seals or some other thing and people that were in the CIA.

3:01:49Yeah. Three -letter agency, globalist, piece of shit, disinformation, vaccine, push -in, cook, soy, estrogen in the water, like bastard. Seal that doesn't talk about it much. Heroic, Patriots, freedom fighter, all of these. And there's, I'm like, I, again, maybe quite rightly, maybe everyone is seeing something that I'm not. But it fascinates me, especially given that many people that are in special forces phase into going into the CIA, Sean Ryan, phased up into that, Evan Hafer phased up into that like, I don't know, like it. I'm yet to find a good explanation for why CIA is so there's so much distaste FBI slightly less, so but CIA specifically, and yet people that can be part of the same lineage but didn't graduate or whatever, up into that aren't.

3:02:50Yeah, I totally know what you mean. And I don't have a good answer either. I do think there's just a bit of hero worshiping that's gone on with the seals for a while. And that probably has affected the way people view them. And I think it's actually unfortunately turned around and now it's like, well, they think they're heroes, therefore they're not. like they're narcissists, they're egotistical. Whereas before, what I say is before is pre -Bin Laden, like in the 2000s and the early 2010s, they were very much quiet professionals, only in the sense that far fewer people, seals were out there writing books and doing movies and stuff, but then Bin Laden happens in 2011, and suddenly you have this push of all these seals, but it's because it's not even just the seals themselves that got out and they're like, boy, I'm gonna cash in.

3:03:37It's that the world was interested in seals because of the binlon raid and then it kind of came to light like wait a minute They've done all sorts of stuff. This thing happens. Yeah, and so like the world of special operations And really the seal teams really came into the spotlight and I think a lot of the people that were highlighted didn't Necessarily seek out the spotlight. They just happened to be the dudes that were getting out of the teams at around the time There's all this increased publicity and scrutiny and I think that that ultimately really really led us to where we are now, where there was all this interest and plenty of people totally took advantage of it and got really big on the exploits of the SEAL teams.

3:04:13And now it's like, oh, the SEALs, because they think they're so cool. So I think that there's probably some vitriol coming to the SEAL teams that is happening to the CIA that's probably going to be the same. Wow. They're going to be downstream from it. So as Mr. Bolin, someone who has had huge platform growth in a very short space of time, having scrambled around what can I do, what is right for me. Talk to me about how you've dealt with the increase in attention, working out who's got your best interests at heart, avoiding people taking advantage of you, those sorts of things. Yeah, that's a tough one.

3:04:51I've had unfortunately, and I can imagine you probably have two. I've had instances over the past couple of years, you know, since becoming Mr. Ballin, where blatantly after the fact I learned that people have stolen from me, have taken advantage of me. And unfortunately, what I have discovered is as, you know, the kind of Mr. Ballin star has risen, there really has been a lot of the, what you would imagine is stereotypical of people kind of coming out of the woodwork that were not necessarily close to you before this, but now suddenly they want to be your friend. And even though on some level, it's kind of obvious who these people are because they're people you knew from like 15 years ago.

3:05:30They're like, oh, dude, what's going on with you? Some of those people I love to hear from like old baseball coaches and close friends of mine. That's great all day. It's the people that I never really had a relationship with that are hitting me up acting like, hey, we go way back. No, we don't. You're hitting me up because there's something that you probably want from me and I'm not saying that now at a speculation. It's because that's the thing that happens to me. Like I've been asked for money from people that it's like so inappropriate. I've given money to people, which I thought was the right thing to do, which only meant will now give me more.

3:06:03And then I would say there's so many predatory, I guess, businesses out there that are looking to make a buck on up -and -coming creators. I'm not going to name names, but there's quite a few. And if you don't have good management, you can get into deals with people that screw your growth, screw everything for you. And actually one of the things that I did early on is I just had no clue what it was, what it was to be a YouTuber, a podcaster and so in early or mid 2020 and 2020 when I really I had you know millions of followers on YouTube by this point and I'm doing this practically professionally at this point.

3:06:38I was starting to get lots of people hitting me up for potential sponsorships and collaborations and it was so overwhelming because I just didn't know what was good and bad, that I just developed this idea that for now, if I don't really understand this, I'm just gonna ignore it and do nothing, because doing nothing feels like a less risky way than agreeing to work with someone before I really understand what it is. That also amounts to leaving an awful lot on the table. Yes, and at some point, that is what inspired me to say, you know what, I'm probably leaving a lot on the table. I'm turning down everything, and some of these things look pretty compelling.

3:07:11Yeah, turn them all down and so this is how I came to meet my business partner and manager and CEO and their boyfriends and boyfriend Nick Witters Nick when I so this is I want to say this is like end of 2020 or early 2021 I wish I had the date now, but either way it was relatively early in my YouTube journey We had just moved from another house in Pennsylvania and as soon as we move in within a couple of days of moving in there is this unbelievable rainstorm and it floods the basement like you wouldn't believe and we stupidly or it's always stupid because this happened But we move into this house and they have this huge basement and we put all our stuff down there and said don't worry next week We'll unload it and bring it upstairs and I kid you not like 80 % of the things we owned are sitting in the basement And we were gone it floods I'm not kidding like a foot of water in the basement.

3:08:04This is not an inch. This is like a foot of water ruined ruined and And, but I was on this crazy tear of growing my YouTube channel. I was putting out 3, 4, 5 videos a week and I was filming videos literally sitting in water. I mean, I'm sitting in my chair, my feet are dry from the waste of doing these podcast or these YouTube videos. And so with that as a backdrop, I'm hating my life because it's miserable to record in a flood. But also, I was just so burned out. I was hitting that kind of burnout point. I was turning everything down and it just, it started to feel like if I don't bring somebody in to help me on some to some capacity, I'm going to have to stop doing it because turning out five videos a week that are 20 to 30 minutes long, that I'm doing the topic finding, researching, writing, editing, everything.

3:08:53I did have an editor, I did have an editor, but I did a lot of the editing. It was like, I can't keep doing this. It doesn't matter how well it pays, it doesn't matter what opportunities come out of this, it's just, take a can do it. And so I went in my email to, I'm gonna see who's in there, you know, see who's emailed me. And there's like all these unread messages. I just ignored everything. But I saw there was one message from this dude, Nick Witters. And it was just like, I think the title of the email was something like combat vet, you know, maybe I can help you or something. And I was like, all right, there's very few veterans that are in the kind of entertainment space that have reached out to me.

3:09:26And so I just, the idea of getting to talk to a veteran, it's like we can speak the same language a little bit. And so I hit him up and I'm like, yeah, all right, I'll talk with you. I didn't even really know what he did. I knew that he had said that he was in Newies of Etrin. I knew he worked for Night Media and he was representing Mr. Vist, which was really cool, but in my head, I'm like, I don't know how that's relatable to me. This very different type of content, different scale. But I ended up saying I talked to him and I actually unintentionally completely blew off the meeting with him and he would tell me later on.

3:09:56He's like, well, I guess I blew it. He just wanted to talk to me. But I ended up speaking with him and it was, I was actually sitting in my flooded basement, you know, hating my life and I don't know Nick. I just have this email and I've missed the first meeting with him and I'm like, I missed his call and I just cold called him. It was like eight o 'clock at night or whatever it was. It was just, I cold called him and he picked up and I was like, hey, dude, sorry, Mr. Call, but I'm just going to unload here. I am so burned out. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know who to talk to. I don't know how sponsors work.

3:10:26I'm just losing it. And I don't even know who you are, but if you can help me, like your email suggests, I'd love to talk to you. And it would turn out I had unwittingly met, you know, a unicorn in the kind of digital entertainment space because Nick, I mean, he's like perfect for what I needed. He is a combat veteran. He went to law school. He passed the bar. So he's a lawyer. He worked at WME and was on the traditional side working in a non scripted and also in commercials. And he's met a whole bunch of traditional a -list talent and worked with talent. and then he went over to night media and he's a digital talent manager.

3:10:58He's worked with Mr. Beast and a bunch of other big guys. And so he had this massive wealth of experience in entertainment. And he was looking for his stallion to really partner up with. And it was just a natural partnership where what I really needed is I just wanted to tell stories. I don't know how to be a manager or at least not well. I don't really understand business strategy. I'm when it comes to deal making I'm either asked for too much or asked you to look I'm like not suited to it I'm a storyteller that's what I do and I said to Nick I'm like dude if you can just do everything else and I'll just tell stories And that would be great and you know what to Nick's credit, you know He at the time had several other people he was managing Along with me.

3:11:44I wasn't his only thing but I couldn't tell at all I felt like I was the only thing the only thing that mattered in next life but meanwhile he's working like 80 hours a week on other clients that he's like flying all over the world for But he was just he was really really good at being an advocate and then and that changed the game for me in a big way Well, you guys are doing bowling studios now, so it's not yeah, just your stuff You're now seeking out other Creators either kind of acquiring and bringing them under an umbrella or growing sort of fledgling ones Who are your favorite storytellers on the internet.

3:12:21Well, some of my favorite storytellers are part of Ballon Studios now. So yeah, we have so Nick, winners are my manager and he's also the CEO of Ballon Studios. We found it together and that's the umbrella company and within that is, you know, we have a talent management business which actually Nick is also spearheading. Where yeah, we bring in some of the best storytellers on the internet and the idea is we don't just want to represent them and you know, throw them, you know, sprand sponsorships and take a piece of that. Like, that's a part of the business, but we want Nick, frankly, in his team that he runs.

3:12:56He was able to take me, a single person who did everything on his own. And frankly, at times against my will, only in the sense that it was hard for me to let go of things, he, I don't, all I do is record now. I record stories. That's what I do. I tell stories. I don't do the topic finding. I don't do the writing. I absolutely punch stuff up and I'll read the script and really know it. But Nick slowly but surely through trial and error built all these people around me to the point where I can only tell stories. Anyways, he figured out how to do that with me and our pitch to these storytellers is we can do it with you too.

3:13:35And it's not bullshit. It's like here are the steps we took. Like Nick has a map of how he got here and he learned a bunch of stuff along the way. He knows how to do this. It's a combination of understanding what's a good opportunity and what's not. So having that creator not do certain things is almost more important than the things they choose to do. It's like filtering away the bad stuff. And then really it's you have to solve for one person doing everything, as you know. Who are the creators? Other creators that people should check out that aren't you. Oh man. Either under your umbrella or not.

3:14:09Well, I'm starting with under the umbrella because we targeted them specifically because I think they're amazing. Yeah. Amazing storytellers. My favorite YouTube channel, and this is not bullshit. It's my actual favorite YouTube channel is called Bedtime Stories. And it's a British channel. They have, I think a million subscribers. They're already. Yeah, they're, they're amazing. And actually their best episode, and it's what drew me to them, is they did a two -part series about Skinwalker Ranch. And they're the ones that detail that tapping on the window thing. it's horrifying the way they do it because they use these incredible drawings that are very iconic to their channel.

3:14:42I mean, you don't see these drawings anywhere else. That's a bedtime story's drawing. It's beautiful, but they're so good at storytelling and it's a team. It's amazing. So bedtime stories, they have this amazing YouTube channel and we brought them undermanagement and we actually helped them launch a podcast. So it's comparable to YouTube, but it's just the audio version. This is new original content. So bedtime stories for sure. Some people, Americans in particular don't necessarily, they can't listen to British accents, I guess. I guess that's a thing. Get out of here. For podcasts. They're not, they are definitely not free hours into this show, if that's the problem.

3:15:16Yeah, but like I actually, I found it was easier to listen to bedtime stories because I liked the British accent because they sound more intelligent to me. Exotic, but understandable. Yeah, but it feels like intelligence because I think of journalists or even you. It's like, There's an air of intellect that comes with the - So the priority, all of the things. So bedtime stories is amazing. They have a great YouTube channel and a great podcast. Just called bedtime stories. And then there's Ryan Nexpo. His YouTube channel is just called Nexpo. I've seen that. Yeah, he's great. He's got a couple of million subscribers on there.

3:15:45And he's gonna launch a podcast pretty soon. We hope we have Nick Crowley, who also is a big YouTuber. There is wartime stories, which is, it's kind of a spin off from bedtime stories where it's kind of like - Oh, cool. It's like historical, mostly military style stories as well, but it's really well done. It's excellent. I resonate with what you say. I resonate with a lot because Nick sat down with me and a friend for dinner a couple of months ago and took me through his side of your story and then you took me through your side of your story. And I always thought I ran a business for 15 years.

3:16:15I thought I was a boss. I thought I was a leader. There was something kind of a luring about being the guy at the top, being the guy that's in charge. Come to believe that I'm like an all right leader, probably a pretty shit boss. way too much of a people please are way too concerned about people liking me way too sort of overbearing and neurotic I think to be as good as a great CEO and then also not it's like some weird combination of too attentive and too much of a pussy. It's just threaded the needle of a really horrible cocktail of nice, particular skills and traits. And accepting that, I think, is...

3:16:57You see this a lot in... I got a lot of friends that worked for me in my previous life, and when they left university, they're going to recruitment. So we would... We gave these kids a Navy SEAL hell week for over three years of like, like how to run nightclubs. And we would see these kids come in and work for us and they'd be 19 years old. And you'd 19. They were a child that can vote, they drink in the UK. And over the space of six to 12 months, they would go from being kind of unassured, maybe not certain about themselves, they'd not really done business before, they don't know the blah, blah, blah.

3:17:36And then 12 months later, you'd see Halloween, which is promote a Christmas. It's the busiest night of the year. And there would be 2 ,000 people trying to get into a nightclub and a six foot three new castle bouncer, dormant, massive hairy gorilla guy screaming in their face, saying, if you don't get this cue under control, I'm going to close the doors. This is absolutely insane. And you would watch this guy that only 12 months ago at 19 had become an junior event manager and basically didn't know his ass from his elbow. just go, no worries mate, I've got you, hang on there, give me one second.

3:18:12Hold that for me, put and just coordinate 2 ,000 people into a nightclub. So they then phased up and graduated out of university and were, you know, they were like 29 in business worlds because they just had this really condensed exposure. So they would then go into recruitment. But what I saw a lot of the time was, recruitment's basically sales, a lot of the time they would crush at sales. If you've asked people on a cold Wednesday in November in the northeast of the UK, do you want to come into this nightclub? I'll give you a wristband that gets you £1 off. You can sell people on like a new tech job or something, right?

3:18:49A lot of the time you would get a really great salesperson who spent enough time there and then was looking eyeing up the promotion to go to the next thing, but they weren't built to be a manager. And what you do is you lose a great salesperson and gain a shitty manager. Yeah, it's not a good trade -off. And it's kind of like one of those things where, look, I know this sounds alluring, but one of the things that you learn is you get older, especially when it's in business, you learn as much about your limitations as you do about your capacities. And knowing what you suck at is probably more important than knowing what you're good at.

3:19:24Because those are the things that you need to delegate, relinquish, you know, get rid of. And I came up with this idea of the curse of competence, which is if you are someone that's a little bit psychologically flexible, if you seem to be good at a number of different things, you can do the reading of the stories, but I bet you were probably pretty good at titles and thumbs as well. So, okay, well, it's not that I suck at that. Like, maybe I'm even world class at that, but I need to let go of something I'm world class at to then be like, you know, so So for the people who feel like they have a broad spectrum of capacities, there is a unique challenge.

3:20:05Again, no one's going to give you sympathy for it. Oh, champagne problems guy has lots of things that he can do. It's too good of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Like, girl has, you know, she's like smart and funny and clever and she's a bit of an operator and she can do maths and you know, she can do sales. And no one will give you sympathy for it. But learning what is your absolute highest point of contribution, what are the vital I will view on what the trivial many and where does that lie? I think is very, very important. It is. What's next for you? What are you focused on right now? You know, this is actually one of the times in my life where I've been doing the same thing a lot longer than I normally do.

3:20:43You know, even in the SEAL teams, even though I was there for seven years, it's really broken up into segments. You do, you know, tours, they call them, where, you know, for a two year period, usually, you're with this group of people, You're training, you know, these type of training blocks and you're going to your deployment and then when you come back, like everybody goes to different direction, you have a new platoon, or you go to a new area, you have a new deployment cycle. And so it's like every two years you rotate, if you will. And you have new experiences, even though you're still being a seal.

3:21:10And then prior to that, I had, you know, my chaotic high school life where I'm like screwing up and then I go to college and it's like screw it up and then I think, oh, now I'm in the chapter of getting my life together. And then it was now I'm in the chapter of training for the seal teams. And then I became a and then when I got out, I briefly did some charity work. And then I started this little, I co -founded this little mentorship thing and then my social media thing started happening. And then there's all these different avenues within the Mr. Ballant sphere of like, okay, we started TikTok, then we made YouTube, now we're on the podcast.

3:21:41But now it's like, okay, we've done a bunch of stuff and now you just gotta keep doing it. You gotta keep doing the Mr. Ballant thing. You gotta keep making videos, keep making podcasts. Like in addition to the stuff we're growing and the new stuff, This is probably one of the few times where I'm doing the same thing a lot. That's the most common for me. One of the periods of stability that you've actually had. Yeah, and I got to be honest, it's not a good... What I say, it's not a good place for me. I mean, I'm now a little bit on edge and I want to do something new. Luckily, Nick, my amazing manager and boyfriend, he's always aware of where I'm at in terms of interest.

3:22:17It's not just burnout. He's always checking in on, Well, how much do you really want to do this? It's not a matter of can you do it because he knows I'll I'll white knuckle it and do whatever I got to do It's do you actually care about this and if he ever senses that I'm not into something He's the first one to be like we're not doing that because we can't have you doing stuff that you're not interested in because it's gonna kill you long term But we're still definitely in this kind of moment of stability which is incredible and it's champagne problems and it's all that But I'm anxious to do more stuff.

3:22:44I within the mr. Ballon sphere I think in the Mr. Ballon Spear or the Ballon Studio Sphere, we really do want to become the place, the home of the best storytellers in the world, which seems like a big claim. But if you think of it like this, if you are a baseball player, a really, really good baseball player, and you're in high school and you're killing it, you get recruited to go play in college, you're killing it, you aspire on some level to go play for a major league baseball team. That's the highest level of baseball. You You could easily make the case. That's the highest level of baseball.

3:23:18You don't aspire to be the best independent baseball player. You know what I mean? It's a point of pride to play for the Boston Red Sox. Or whatever team is your favorite team. And so we want to become a point of pride for really talented storytellers that they are affiliated with Ballon Studios. And we have the relationships everywhere to build TV, film, movies. But I mean, we have everything. We just need the people. And so we're being really aggressive about finding people that are one. they got the chops, the storytelling chops, but two, they are super ambitious and really want to grow as a storyteller.

3:23:51Not as a content creator, not as like an influencer, but as a storyteller. That's the people we want to bring in house, and it's not a cash grab. It's like we are going to invest. Time, money, everything to make you the best possible storyteller you can be, because if you succeed at a really high level, even if you leave at some point, you're giving the studio more and more credibility that it's the equivalent of the Red Sox to base all players, but for storytellers. So also think about how much dog shit content most people consume. Oh, yeah, it's everywhere constantly. Yes. And just because something captures your attention, just because something is popular, does not necessarily mean that it's good.

3:24:31Yes. One of the reasons why you're the final episode that we've done on this run, you won't be the final one that's been published, there's still more to come. But we really tried to push the limits with what we've done today with lighting with this. The first time that we've ever used custom environments built in Unreal Engine 5 and tried to time things with the people that are listening, they have no idea what we're talking about. It just sounds like what you're using. It's an amazing set. Thank you. But I really want to do that. It's like, I want to do something cool. I want to do different things.

3:24:59And even if it falls flat in its face. I very much respect a few things from you. Certainly your acceptance of when you've got things wrong, I think it must help to keep your ego small and maybe that's you trying to combat the oversized narcissism that creeps in from childhood or whatever it might be. But I think there's an awful lot to learn from that. You're approached to fear and overcoming it very much so. And it's impressive being self -effacing and being like, look, hey, this is a thing about me that I know. That level of self -awareness, I think, helps you to account for your own shortcomings and maladies and whatever.

3:25:38So I'm really excited to see what happens. I'm fighting for you for the graphic novel, which is going to come out soon as well. Boom. There you go. First official publication. It's got some new stories in there. Comes out October 1st of this year. You can get your pre -order now. Go to book .ballonstudios .com. These strange, dark, mysterious, delivered in story are delivered in book format. Where else should people go to keep up to date with everything you do? I mean, so definitely you can follow me on every platform. It's just at Mr. Ballin everywhere. Also, I would say in terms of podcasts, because we now have a slate of shows, you can just search for Ballin Studios on any podcast platform and you'll get, you know, the Mr.

3:26:17Ballin podcast, medical mysteries, you'll get run full bedtime stories, wartime stories, all our podcasts. So yeah, just look for Mr. Ballin online or Ballin Studios and then you'll find us. Oh yeah, I appreciate you, man. Thank you. Thank you very much, Chris.