The Iced Coffee Hour - Navy Seal “MrBallen” Reveals Near Death Experience, Rescue Missions, & Millionaire Mindset

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Follow @MrBallen On YouTube - Let's discuss how MrBallen joined the Navy Seals, how to develop a millionaire mindset, and achieving the top 1% - Enjoy! NEW: Join us at http://www.icedcoffeehour.club for premium content - Enjoy! Add us on Instagram:   / jlsselby    / gpstephan   Official Clips Channel:    / @theicedcoffeehourclips   For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! Timestamps: 00:00 - INTRO 04:52 - MrBallen's first fight 12:58 - MrBallen's CRAZY college days (riots and more) 20:55 - How he became a Navy Seal 42:29 - Deployment in Afghanistan 01:14:01 - From Seal to YouTuber 01:26:51 - The Dyatlov Pass Incident 01:40:40 - Where MrBallen finds his stories 01:45:36 - The backend of "Ballen Studios" 01:54:41 - Some Ballen relationship advice 02:01:26 - MrBallen's kids don't listen to his stories 02:04:17 - Is blissful ignorance a good thing? 02:16:27 - The MLB of storytelling *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'd see it and then it would disappear in the darkness. And then it hit my shoulder. And I remember, like, distinctly thinking, please let the grenade detonate below my head. It detonated. And it just felt like someone took a big handful of rocks and just, like, threw it at the back of my legs and my back. Navy SEAL training offers you this great chance

to kind of reset who you are. Because whoever you were before you became a SEAL gets replaced with the person who becomes a SEAL. Thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. You got me through several plane trips on the way here to Austin. Nice. Yeah, I've been downloading your videos and just listening to them all the way through. They're incredible.

Thank you. I mean, your ability to story tell is impeccable. Some of the stories that you pick are just like it, it screws with my mind a little bit. It puts me in a trance like state when I'm watching your videos. Time just goes by like this. And I'm not just exaggerating. Like, you are the channel that I binge told my mom about. She binges it.

Tell my brother about he binges it. It's like you can't watch three and not one of them. watch 10 more. It's crazy. Well, thank you. It's so funny. Like, there's lots of people ever since I started making content that will say, you know, I binge your content, I share it with friends, they binge it. And there's nothing that I'm doing that is designed to do that. It's just like the natural way that I comprehend stories and tell them. Yeah. Like the way I told stories in the first video is very similar to how I tell stories now and how I'm talking to you right now. It is literally how I speak. But it's some crazy skill. Now this is a bit of a tangent, but in

conversation with people throughout your entire life, were people always just completely enthralled in it? Where they just like, could you see like a trans like state when you're just talking to them? What is it? You must have been good with this for a long time. I would say that I've known that my superpower of sorts is my ability to tell a story. I've known that for a while, namely because I used to run, I was a co-founder of a charity that

helped veterans get jobs. I'm sure we'll dive into all sorts of stuff, but the short version is I, I, periodically would need to give, you know, little talks at dinner to raise money and just like little public speaking engagements. And I was really nervous about doing them. But I discovered if I put whatever I needed to say into story format, suddenly it was like my brain was just, it relaxed and I could very easily take the stage and talk if I was telling a story. And so from the time I was like, I don't know, mid-20s, I knew that like if I was ever going to do any public speaking, just turn it into a story and you'll be fine.

And then just generally speaking, it's just the one thing I knew is that I can retain huge amounts of information if I can put the information into a story in my head. Yeah. So, and for background, my father is an incredible speaker. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. My sister is as well. A bunch of writers and speakers and very talented people in my family. So I'm sure they kind of, it rubbed off on me speaking and storytelling. What was that like for you growing up?

Did they set really high expectations for you? Yeah. So I grew up in just south of Boston, Massachusetts, on a town called Quincy. Not to be confused with Quincy as it looks. If you're from the area, it's Quincy. Quincy. Quincy.

Quincy. So yeah, my family were, they're very educated, very smart people, like, very academically minded. And so growing up, the, you know, success was doing well in school and going to a good college. And I just, like, didn't want to do that because I felt like I didn't want to do what my family was doing. Like my rebellion was, I'm going to do something else. I'm not going to be like an academic. But my rebellion was like just being a bad student and like not trying. Well, why did you want to rebel in the first place?

I don't even know. To be honest, like from the time I was young, I just, I think I have like a problem with authority. If I'm being candid. So does this guy. Yes, you do. Don't like you don't have a problem. I want to work. You always have a problem with authority.

I don't know. I think it's a good trait. It's taking you very far. All right. I think it's something to be proud of. For me, yeah, I think that I didn't like the idea of conformity. And, like, you know, in a way, like, my parents and my families kind of, like, pushed to be a good student and to succeed in academia, like, I didn't like the idea that I was kind of being pushed to do that.

Even though it's a perfectly sensible and very respectable path. And so I just naturally was like, I don't want to do that. And so my rebellion was being a bad student. So it didn't get me much. Did part of you think, like, I should listen to my parents or was just like, you know, I know what's best for me? Dude, I was, I was so dumb. Like, just, I made so many bad decisions all the way through, like, the time until I was, like, 19. I, like, from, like, from, like, the ages of, like, 16 to 19, I just, like, blew up my high school career.

Just, like, how so? Like, what would you do? Well, getting in trouble, you know, like, like, out on the streets with my buddies, like, stupid stuff. And, like, you know. Anything serious or just, no, no, nothing on my record. We do know you got into a little bit of a scuffle, right? A little bit of a scuffle. Yeah, oh, my God, yeah.

So, like, my family. What happened in your first fight? Oh, so my big first fight. So when I was a sophomore in high school, actually, you get, the context is key. So in Quincy, street fighting is a big deal. It's kind of like a right of passage in Quincy. It's not like no one's beating each other up to the point where you're like badly hurt.

It's truly like scheduled like bare-knuckle boxing fights that end with people getting up and like shaking the hand of their opponent type of thing. And so I my group of friends in Quincy were like notoriously tough. They were like the guys that like won these street fights. And I was like I didn't get in street fights, but I was around the guys that did. And so I kind of earned a, I was given a reputation for being tough as well, even though I really wasn't. I was like just a strap hanger like with the other guys. And then at some point in my sophomore year, I was one of my periods in school, I was like in a study hall with

this girl named Sarah, who was friends with my sister, my older sister. And I just, like, sat with her and I talked to her during study hall. But it turns out her boyfriend took exception to this. He thought that I was, like, hitting on his, on his girlfriend. Were there any flirty vines? No, no. I mean, maybe if you're like outside. Did you find her attractive?

No, she was just like my sister's friend, you know? Okay. And so I found out through the grapevine that Paul was really upset with me. That's the boyfriend. Yeah. And he challenged me to a fight. and you must accept. It is like, you know, you'll be outcasted if you don't.

So I'm like, you couldn't just apologize? No. There was no attempt to me. There's no apologies. To like, smooth this over. I could have just been like, bro, like I wasn't doing anything. But instead I was like, time to defend my honor. Time to live up to my, like, my reputation of being a tough guy.

And so it was, uh, it was right around Thanksgiving. And the scheduled fight with Paul was the day before Thanksgiving. And there's this huge, like the, the girls from the, so I went to Norbert. North Quincy High School, and then there's Quincy High School. These are rival high schools, right? Big rivalry. And the girls from my high school would play this flag football game against the Quincy High School girls, but it quickly turned into like really aggressive tackle football. It was a whole spectacle. But also at this like illicit football game that's happening that's totally unsanctioned, there would be all these like scheduled fights between the two schools.

Like it's a whole thing. It's a whole culture in Quincy. And so my fight with Paul, was like the equivalent of like the what's the main card for this day. Dylan Gannes like Logan Paul yeah got it. And so I this was like weeks out too. It was like two, three weeks before this fight. And I remember I was like in my basement in my house. I had like an office chair and I'd like spar the office chair like getting ready for this big fight against Paul.

And then the day come leading up to this like in school like in North Quincy High where I went like people were very aware of this fight. We're like, how do you schedule a day and a time with this person? It's like, how does that? I don't even know. It's just so natural. But how do you know weeks in advance? Well, yeah, it's like, I'm so mad at you in three weeks we're going to fight. Yeah, by then I just wouldn't care anymore.

I'd be like, you know, I cooled down a little bit, my dad. But so leading up to this, this fight in the hallway, like walking around the high school, like people would come up to me. Like, hey, man, you'd be cool to Paul, man. He's the captain of the hockey team. I don't want you to hurt him because people thought I'm like this really tough guy because the guys I'm around. And so I was like totally playing into it.

I'm like, yeah, I won't hurt him. I'll try to be nice to him, like acting all tough. And then finally the day comes and we go out to this field where this fight's going to happen. And remember, like, lots of people are at this location for this girls' football game. There's other fights that are scheduled. And so I get there and I straight up have like a posse with me. Like 50 plus people have like come to support me. These are like my guys.

And I could like see myself. It's so cringy. I'm like standing in the field like literally. shadow boxing, getting ready for Paul to arrive. And like, I'm there pretty early, you know, ahead of the fight, the scheduled fight time. And the time he was supposed to be there rolled around and he wasn't there. And I'm, and so I was like, oh, I guess Paul's afraid of me. That was my whole narrative.

And I'm like telling other people there, like, dude, Paul's, he's so pathetic. He's afraid of me. Again, I'm like shadow boxing still in the middle of the field. And everyone's like, man, John's going to kick this kid's if he ever comes here. And then Paul shows up like 30 minutes late. No posse. I think he had like one dude who like rolled up with him. and Paul walks up the hill

and I see him coming to me and everyone's like oh here we go here comes to fight and I have this line that I drop he gets close to me and I'm like whoa we're young motherfucker as if it had taken him so long like you're gonna make me wait and he comes up to me and proceeds to beat the shit out of me

what was his first move what do you do he tackled me the ground like took me the ground no I'm like stand up fighting and he he beat the shit out of me in front of like not only my school but the entire rival school. There was like hundreds of people watching and I like woke up and everyone's like, you got knock the fuck out. And I'm like, all right. Did you get a punch in? Did you get anything?

Nothing. Just completely obliterated. You were just a rag doll. You were his punching bag. That was it. Yeah, he showed up and just beat me out. Okay. But the things that that has to do to your confidence. I mean like, didn't help. Like I cannot imagine one thing that would destroy my confidence and just will in general more than just getting beat up like that, especially after everyone's like hyping you up and you're friends with all the tough guys, you know? Like, it was,

it was really, or lose teeth or, I looked horrible. I didn't have any like structural damage done to me, but it was like the classic like double black guy, look like he got beat up kind of thing. But yeah, honestly,

it was so, it was so absurd the way it happened, because of that line. Like it would have been okay, had not said the line. But you weren't expecting him to tackle you. That's a move that you can't really predict. That's true. That's true. That's true.

But so I remember like the after the fights, like days after, I'm like in school. And like literally my teachers would say the line to be like, hey, John, while we're young motherfucker. I know. How do they encourage this? It's a culture. I'm telling it's a culture within Quincy is like street fighting is a thing. And like everybody knows about it.

But in a way, it was actually a good experience. funny now, but it was good because it's like, one, it shows you that you can't parade around like a tough guy if you're not, or you should have like serious protection around you, but also like it just put me in check. I, I had come to believe that I was like truly, you know, a street fighter. I'm like a tough guy, but I was not. And it was, it humbled me. I think it was good for me. But then you compensated for that in basically like the largest way possible, becoming a U.S. Navy seal. Like that's not just like, you know what I mean? Guy gets. It's beat up at school.

Oh, yeah, check this out, Paul. Maybe seal, years of training. What's up now, Paul? While we're old, mother. You could go in and just, like, would you fight him today? If he offered you a rematch? I mean, probably not. No, I wouldn't even be fair.

I might have, like, trained how to do it now. See him at the reunion, just like shoulder check him. We actually, we talked somewhat recently. I hadn't talked to him since, like, the fight, you know, since I was like 17 years old. But he actually watches my YouTube channel. And so like we've actually talked and he thinks it's hysterical. He watched the video that I posted on my channel that talks about this. He thought it was hysterical, yeah.

That's amazing. So what led you then after that fight to then going in the Navy SEALs? I'm sure there's a lot that happened in between. Sure. I think that there is some truth to like that moment as kind of goofy as it was, you know, any kind of funny as it was. It very likely did like spurn something inside of me to like, okay, you got to do something to like make up for this in a way. But, like, you know, for the rest of high school, I really, I really was just, like, kind of not taking school seriously.

I really wasn't even pursuing college as an option. I actually only got into college because my mother, who was a professional writer, she wrote my college essay. And it was like, it was so good. Like, the college contacted me to be like, you know, you're not a traditional student, but my goodness, that essay was something else. You're in. So I got to go to school. How was she okay with that? She knew she's like, well, John's not going to do.

I'd put off doing the application. I was like, I was a terrible student with no motivation, you know. And so she felt like if I can, if I can just get him in the door. Do you remember what the essay was about? Yeah, it was about. So I had a very close friend of mine who passed away, not to turn this into a dark conversation. But it was basically about like my last interaction with him before he ultimately overdosed. And so it was like a very poignant essay written by somebody else about my experiences.

But it was, it was like a very powerful essay that clearly. spoke to the admissions board. And then they let me it. Wow. And then I promptly, in my first semester in college, I've been given this golden ticket, John. Here you go. Go to college.

And I think it was like I had 36 violations of just bad behavior. Nothing significant, all minor. 36. Noise violations. Like leaving trash in the whole. Like just being a stupid kid in college that's not taking anything. Seriously, I had a, at the end of the first semester, I've been telling my family that I was getting like all B's and A is.

I'm going to the library all the time. Dude so well. Grades come out 1.016 GPA. And they found out about my GPA at the same time that the dean got alerted to how badly behaved I was

because I had apparently crossed a threshold of a certain number of like write-ups in your dorm, the 36 somewhat write-ups. Apparently you cross a threshold and it goes to the dean and they have to like review whether or not you can stay in school. And so I found out that I

I had a 1.016 GPA and the dean contacted my parents to be like your son is very likely going to be kicked out of housing. And there was also a riot at the school I was at because our football team that nobody cared about lost the big game that nobody cared about. But it was an opportunity for the students to riot about the game we didn't care about. And so there's this huge riot that takes place on campus. And I really didn't do anything in the riot, but I didn't go in when all the police are like running by shooting rubber bullets at us. They were shooting rubber bullets? How do you stop a run? Full right.

That's a, that's a right. Okay, because that's different. You're like tear gas and stuff, right? It was, oh yeah. Like rubber bullets. Put it this way. I got shot so many times by rubber bullets that there were rubber bullets in my pockets just out of the, like, like, I got hit everywhere, but I got hit enough. Did that hurt?

Yeah. What does it feel like? It hurts. What does that feel like? It's like a sting? I didn't even remember. I remember it stung, but you're like, you're so jacked up. You're like, this is so much fun.

running around from the police. So what was the riot like, were you guys like breaking windows and like, you know? It was like, what was it? I mean, yeah, there was some window breaking for sure, but it was mostly like this massive piece. So there's, so the school I went to is UMass Amherst.

It's out in Western Mass. And it's, they call it Zoo Mass. Slamhurst. It's on a complete party school. It's like, there's definitely an attitude within the school. And there's like 30,000 undergrad students

and nearly all of them live at UMass. So it's like this huge population of students that are, in this part of Massachusetts that's like very rural. Like this is, it's like a city. It's like a city of these kids that are like at a party school. Nice. And there's like a sort of culture amongst the students to like just rage and be wild like

at all times. And rioting has been a thing at the school in the past. It's not like a new phenomenon. Like any time like the Red Sox would lose like a big game, there'd be a riot at UMass Amherst. Like that would make the news. And really all it is is the students would pool into the middle of this area called Southwest.

It's like there's these different housing areas on a huge campus. But Southwest, they have these towers, these 26 story tall towers that the students get packed into. I was in one of these. And I think it's actually literally the most densely populated area in the entire country, like per foot, is UMass Amherst Southwest area. But these 26 story tall towers all closely clustered together. And then in the middle, there's like this paved courtyard.

People just wouldn't go to bed, basically. They just stayed out, like, yelling and screaming. It's a middle of the night. you know, and what started is like, oh, guys, time to go to bed. Like, no one did. And then the riot lights came on. There's like riot lights set up on. That sounds like they're asking for it.

But it sounds like, everyone's like, only into a riot. The riot lights, we're rioting right now. That was really what it was. Jerry Springer, ding, ding, ding, and they just go to find the lights that come on. But yeah, the riot lights came on and it, like, it riled up the crowd completely. And so there wasn't like, there was really nothing other than, like, we wouldn't disperse. And so like the school is accustomed to these riots taking place where like lots of damage has been done in the past. And so they were like full send like riot police on on, you know, horses, like everything.

So anyways, uh, I was just out for the bulk of the time. Like I was one of the last people like a shirt wrapped her on my head to fight off the tear gas that's like clouded in the air. And I'm like, oh, cool. Went to bed. Like no big deal. And then it turned out like the school was super intense about figuring out who was a part of this riot. And they have cameras everywhere. And so they set up this website, the UMass police, where they just posted all these pictures of just random people who were out during the riot and anyone could anonymously say who was in the picture and they would get like expelled.

And I was in all these pictures and I've made so many enemies at the school already just from being a nuisance in my dorm that like I'm about to have a meeting with the dean with my father who's just found out I'm failing completely at school. I told him I was getting good grades. I also have to break the news that I'm almost certainly going to be expelled if I get named for one of these pictures. And I have like these horrible grades. So it's just a really pathetic situation I had completely put myself in. Remember, I've also been gifted the opportunity to go to college. My parents are paying for it. My mom got me in.

And so I remember my dad came up to like go to this meeting with the dean with me. And he was like so mad. He just like didn't even talk to me. And I was like, I've really fucked this up. And so I ended up with drawing from the school. to avoid expulsion essentially, and because I was not gonna be able to continue in housing. And so I went back home to Quincy,

and I was living in my mom's basement. And it's so funny, like I look back at this moment, and initially I was like actually so annoyed with my parents. I'm like, why'd you make me leave school? I could have stayed. Maybe I wouldn't have gotten expelled, you know? Like my friends are there, that kind of thing.

But then it like dawned on me like, no, you're 19, and like you've done this, you're a joke and you're in your mom's basement with no options now. And I think, think that was probably the first time that I like recognized that like okay I got to take accountability for my life and I want to like not be this totally mediocre person who certainly had the aptitude and and you know the you know whatever to be successful in something like I don't want to blow all

that Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa whether it's Verde Roja or the orange one for Jeff trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flame thrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero, more like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. And so I decided I would start by just like going to school locally and like get good grades. And so I didn't get great grades, but I was like getting bees at this local school in Boston.

And it was like satisfying to. getting my life back on track to a degree. I'm like going to, I was, I was working at a gym. I was like biking at 5 a.m. to the local YMCA to work at a gym. And then I'd like go take classes at this local school. And so I was like kind of doing the things to like get my life back together. But I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And it was around this kind of time for these like a couple of years I was living at home that I began thinking about the military, mostly because a lot of my buddies had had left high school. I graduated in 06. And a lot of them joined the Marines and,

and went immediately overseas to the Middle East. And, like, there's a part of me that just felt like a calling to go serve. And so I began thinking about it. And it was around this time that my mom, she was like, hey, you should talk to her best friends, two brothers. I knew they were in the military. And my mom was like, you should talk to them. They were both Navy SEALs.

And I'm like, what? Like, we have family friends who are Navy SEALs. Yeah, that's not like a common thing. When someone says they're in the military, you don't think like. And so they were retiring. And so I'm not going to give their name. but they were like very, very big deal Navy SEALs that served on, you know, SEAL Team 6, like most, oh, whoa.

Big time. Like, big time. What is SEAL Team 6? I was never on Team 6, which is an important distinction for the people that understand how the teams work. I was on what's called a White Side team. So all Navy SEALs go through, there's Navy boot camp, there's a prep school, there's like effectively SEAL boot camp, which is another six months.

There's all this advanced training. It takes about two years. And then you become a SEAL, but you're a, white side Navy SEAL. And after you do one or sometimes two rotations, so workup and deployment, you can have an opportunity to basically go through a whole new screening process to potentially go to Team 6. And again, I've never done it, but from the people that I have very close friends that have gone over there that are there now, that are there now, it is like Navy SEAL boot camp times infinity because now you're you're literally competing against other navy seals who likely have

combat experience who know what they're doing and on team six it's a bigger deal than even i think most people even fully understand like when america needs to do stuff those the people you ask to do it and you can't it up you are like 100% successful otherwise you're not allowed to be on that team they took out osama correct oh yeah that was team six yeah basically that like the highest profile the estate stuff goes to that team. And so the screening process is otherworldly. Like if you are not basically perfect, you don't get to be a part of the team. And so those dudes are like superheroes. Is that something that they have to dedicate their life to? Like I'd imagine having a family and like trying to raise kids. It would be almost impossible going through that sort of training with that.

Just being on call, I'd imagine 24-7. Yeah. I mean, again, since I've not done it myself, this is very secondary, but from what I understand, they literally have like, you know, beepers or something, and they're on call effectively. I don't know if it's literally beepers, but that is the idea. I mean, when there are operations that kick off that are super duper serious, a lot of times they're not necessarily known until very last minute. And so these operators are like constantly needing to be ready to execute insane stuff. How many people are on that? I actually don't know. It's a very small number. It's probably, if I'm in a ballpark, it's probably less than 100.

They're actually operators. That's a complete made-up guess. I'm probably wrong. But it's not much more. I'm probably off, but it's a small number of people. And if you think about it, I think that in total, at any given time, I want to say there's either 2,000 or like 2,500 active duty Navy SEALs across all teams. That includes the white side teams.

So, I mean, it's a small number of people to begin with. I thought it would be way more. Yeah, I mean, it's a small community. I mean, every year, out in Coronado, California, where they do the initial training to become a seal, they run five classes a year unless that's changed. And even though each class will graduate something like 50 people, which virtually all of them will go on to become seals, a lot of them are actually from other classes that they got rolled out of for injury, for failing something. And so it's not like those 50 people started with their class and finished.

It's like over the course of the year, you have all these people that get hurt along the way that keep getting rolled or pushed around. And so like the true number of like new recruits that get through is is relatively small each year. It's like a couple hundred people each year that get through it. And when you meet Navy SEALs, is there a certain like, even if you haven't met them in person, like a certain like eye contact or a bond that you immediately have? Now, I'm not comparing this to something that I've done, but I did run cross country in high school. Okay. But it was on the bowling league.

That's true. That's true. When people tell me they've ran cross country, I'm like, okay. So you've pushed yourself to a. limit, not like the limit, because you guys are like the limit, but a certain limit where you're like, okay, you're, you're dying in a run and then you push yourself even further. You know, like, I feel like there's a certain like brotherhood there, but obviously nothing, not even 1% of what you experience. I'm guessing with other seals. I think that actually you're, you're really

not that far off. I understand that like there's this, even I just did it talking about Team 6. Like you're constantly trying to make sure nobody thinks you're trying to misconstrue things here. But I think ultimately all it is, like when you become a Navy SEAL, really what you've done and what you've demonstrated is you're able to do what you just described. Like hit barriers, mental, physical, whatever, and then keep going. And really, I do believe that virtually anyone can do that. But few people will do that. And so what you're describing is really the same phenomenon.

It's like if you're someone that has pushed yourself beyond a certain boundary and you see somebody else that you know in virtue of being a cross-country runner at a fairly high level, they've done the same thing. There's going to be a kinship there. There's going to be a connection. But definitely with Navy SEALs specifically, I mean, it's actually funny. I'll go to airports and I'll literally spot one. Like, because their seals are kind of all over the place.

They're traveling a bunch. And I remember I was like at the airport in Atlanta. And I like spotted a dude from like that's so crowded, super crowded terminal. And like across the heads of all these people, it was like a quick glance. Never met this guy in my life. But I knew immediately he was a Navy SEAL. I mean, I don't even know. But there's definitely like a, it's got to be a posture, a body language.

There's definitely something. There's also specific clothes. Did you talk to him? Oh yeah. It's funny, I walked up to him and it wasn't like, are you? It was like, hey dude, what team are you on? He's like, oh, I'm on this team. And like, cool, man, good to see you. There's no way. That's a word of God. Did he know who you were? Just he could tell that I also was a seal. Not that he knew me personally. There's this certain perception. There's something that's like trained, I feel like in the back of your brain while you're going through the academy where you're like so perceptive of being in like public settings.

I'm guessing also this translates to like, okay, like is this a good guy, bad guy? Like what's going on? Like, you know, you're walking through a grocery store. and you're constantly like looking around and is that a thing that you have hyper vigilance yes you have this oh yes so as you walked into this house by the way shout out to Caleb hammer this is his house thank you for let us use your studio Caleb were you like looking around and like being hyper observant of all of like everything in the house i mean i'm not going to say i walked in and like literally identified every exit but i definitely took the time to like poke my head around the corner and look around is it is it a trained thing or have you always been somewhat like that i definitely

was not always like that. That's definitely more, not even trained. It's more like, yeah, I guess, I guess trained is the word then, because definitely in training, you're instructed to be super attentive to detail. In fact, that would be, if I were to try to like sum up what your instructors through Navy still training, really try to emphasize. It's this whole, it's not, hey, push yourself beyond your borders or whatever. It's attention to detail in all things. Like, it doesn't matter how tired you are, it doesn't matter how complicated, how stressed you are. You must pay attention to details like you must. And even the slightest infraction

will get you kicked out of training. Not literally every time, but that's the stakes they're playing with. What is training like? It's described as the best time you never want to have again. Because in many ways, when I look back at the six-month long course, so it's you go to boot camp, this is the pipeline

for the enlisted side anyways. Not to get complicated, but the bulk of people who become Navy SEALs, they enlist so they're not commissioned officers. They're like the sled dogs. They're the workers of the team. You got to go through boot camp, which is just typical Navy boot camp. That's two months long.

It's in Chicago. I don't know if it's changed, but when I went through, there was a mandatory preparatory school that you go to immediately after boot camp where for two more months you stay in Chicago and you train with like literally professional athletes and coaches and Olympic athletes who have been brought in by the Navy to not like beat you up, but to like actually build up your strength, build up your confidence because your next phase. is actual like Navy SEAL boot camp. So you wrap up your two, two months in the prep school,

and then they send you to Coronado, California, which is, it's so funny. It's like the most beautiful, have you been to Coronado, California? It's like the most stunningly beautiful place ever. And like in this like iconic, like idyllic place, there's like the most treacherous military training, like, ever taking place. And it's very public. You can like watch it.

But you go out there and then you go through a few weeks of like what's called indoctrination, which is a few weeks of like, you're not technically in the training. it, but loads of people quit because you're actually working with Navy SEAL instructors and it's very intense. You know, you're being treated really like, what's intense about it? Well, one, you're there. You're at like this storied compound where like, by the way, where you train in Coronado is also where the West Coast seal teams are. And so you're like this pathetic, like, have done nothing. And you wear, you wear a white shirt with your name stenciled on it that like signifies you're,

you're a recruit, you're nothing. And when you go to training, it's like you're literally, surrounded by actual like active duty navy seals that they just haze you. And it's like, so it's an intense place to be. What's the hazing like? It's mostly just like, you know, goofing around with you. Like they'll grab you and like make you come over and like give a speech to like the like they'll literally, come over here. Talk to these guys.

And it's like 10 active duty Navy seals and like, yeah, introduce yourself and like you start talking and they start like cutting you off and making fun of you. It's like stupid stuff. Sure. But so it's an intense place to be. And then I mean, just the. the actual training is incredibly difficult physically. You know, it's like the, it's famously, it's famously challenging.

That's the whole point. They want it to be borderline impossible to do so that if you are able to complete the training, you've demonstrated that you can kind of push beyond, you know, what most people would consider an impossible limit. So anyways, you do six months in Coronado. It's called Basic Underwater Demolition slash Seal School or Buds for short. And if you get through that, you're virtually guaranteed to become a seal. Like the attrition rate falls to near zero at that point.

But you have another six months of advanced training. And then you go on to, like we went to language school. Man forgot for siharf besanam. No, I can't. I can see. That's the line I can say. I was just about to say. I'm like, you know that.

I can only speak. No. No. So, but you go to like a follow-on school and then you go to your team. And then you go through a whole workup again. So, but in terms of like the actual training, um, sleep deprivation is horrible.

It's so bad. What does that feel like? I mean, you lose your mind. Like really, you actually become an insane person. That's, that's the just.

There's, there's one week of training early on in actual buds. So, so the six months are broken up into three phases. The first phase is called first phase. And it's the gut check. Uh, it's a lot of soft sand running and laying in the ocean when it's

freezing cold at night and doing like a billion sit up. sit-ups and jumping jacks. You carry around this thing called an IBS. It's an inflatable boat, but it weighs like 200-something pounds, and you and your boat crew have to carry it on your head. And it's not the heavy. It isn't like you put it on your head, and you're like, wow, that's so heavy, but you run everywhere with this boat either by your side or on your head.

Think about this. Running on sand, it's uneven. It's the boat jostling around, and it hits the top of your head so often that you actually develop a bald spot in your head. guys will break bones just from the compression of this boat on their head. Like if you fall when you're in the middle of a run, this boat just comes colliding down on you. It's gnarly.

Like it's a gnarly thing. So yeah, but I'd say that the worst part is sleep deprivation. And then there's a week early on in first phase called Hell Week where you don't sleep for five and a half. Well, you sleep for a total of like four hours broken up into little naps over the span of like five and a half days. Oh my gosh.

Yeah. So anyways, it's just, it's a very physically grueling. I am so curious. like are how well are they compensated afterwards as a Navy SEAL? Because going through that training, I mean to be like the top 0.001% I'd imagine it's like it's got to be like a high pay or do people do it just because they love it.

If you look at like the entirety of like the enlisted ranks in the Navy, so all jobs, Navy SEALs, CBs, you know, whatever, you are the most well compensated for sure, but you're not well compensated. You can look it up. I think guys make like 50,000 gross, maybe 60,000 when they get to a team, which amongst like typical enlisted folks that go into a, if you show up to your first command as like an E2 or an E3, it's like an enlisted rank, the junior enlisted rank, you're making like, I don't even know, it's probably like $20,000 or $30,000 a year. And you have, you obviously get like health benefits and all that stuff. But within the confines of what the Navy is actually able to give you, they pay seals, let's say, the best.

But it's not like, you're not making a lot of money. You're not at all. But then when you deploy, they pay you a whole bunch of money. But that's not really, and that's relative. It's not a ton of money. But for the military, it's a good amount. You'll make, like, an extra, I don't even know. I mean, a few, a couple hundred bucks.

Shout out to my manager, Nick Witters. He's off screen. He was a combat vet as well. Oh, nice. Yeah, so you get paid for deployments. And so if you deploy a bunch, you get more money. But yeah, it's definitely not something you would do for pay. I think that, you know, I think that a lot of people ultimately decide to be seals because of the challenge of becoming a seal.

It's, you know, I tell people that when I ultimately made the decision to want to be a seal, you know, it was shortly after my mom had said, hey, why don't you meet, why don't you go? meet up with our family friends here, the Navy Seals, and I met with them. It's a funny story, actually, how I met with them. I went to this place in New Hampshire where we were going to meet, and my mom's best friend, whose brothers these were, she has this camp in New Hampshire that's for kids. It's like an art camp, and it's beautiful. There's like little cabins. There's a little lake, and it's just a nice little area. And just up the road, there's this gravel access road that it leads up to this like ramshackle, like plywood hut. that's like not in any way like permitted.

It's a crappy like hut. And when I was told to meet with these two guys, they were doing like training out of this hut. So this is like the secret like backwoods training center for like tier one operators. And so I like go to this camp and I like go say hi to Susan, my mom's friend at like the camp. The kids were all running around like having their barbecues and coloring. And then I walk up the road like by myself to this shack and it's shut.

I can hear inside like the sound of like, you know, intense alpha males like having some. conversation like and I just like open the door and walk it's all these dudes that are like covered in tattoos like super jacked all sitting on like upturned buckets and it's like it's just like dirt on the ground there's like no furniture or anything and they're just like in a circle bullshit with each other and I walk in and they immediately go silent and all of them just turn and they're like who the fuck are you I'm John I'm going to meet you guys but it was incredible getting to me he's all Navy SEALs and these like active dudes who were like in between their rotation cycles what was

impressed upon me from all of them is this notion that Navy SEAL training offers you this great chance to kind of reset who you are because whoever you were before you became a SEAL gets replaced with the person who becomes a SEAL. No one's going to be like, oh, there's John, like, you know, the guy who flunked out of college. It's going to be, there's John, the guy who became a Navy SEAL. And I loved this idea of, you know, SEAL training is such a meritocracy. It's actually open to lots of people. As long as you're an American citizen and you're in decent enough health, I mean, there's more to it than that, but just about anybody, just about anybody can go try out. And it's whoever is at the end is a Navy SEAL. And I love the idea of not only serving,

because I wanted to serve, but I love the idea that the challenge and then the kind of great reset that would happen. If I became a SEAL, all my stupidity with college and just kind of being a general, like, flunky, would be replaced with something that was honorable and I could be proud of. And I also fundamentally believed that if I could get through the training itself, that I would literally evolve and, well, not literally evolve, but become the best version of myself. And I do think in many ways that was true. And so, you know, mission success. Do you think there's a personality trait that's that gravitates towards that more than others? And what do you think that is? It's not so much a personality trait as it's lots of people that show up to

training have the same story roughly that I did. Yeah, I kind of screwed around, didn't really do thing out of high school, you know, screwed up college, got kicked out, didn't have a job. You know, no one in my family has a history of being in the military. Just seemed cool. Decided I'd go try out. Like, that's like the bulk of people who make it through are that. And I will say that there's loads of people that go to seal training that are like super intimidating people.

Like when I was in my class, there was a dude who I had like played with in Madden. Like he was a professional football player. I'm like, dude, I've played with you like on a video game. That's like huge Hulk game. like linebacker or there's like professional swimmers and professional rugby players and like really incredibly accomplished people but they wash out really really quickly and I think and it's something that a lot of people agree with that the folks that come in that are like I've done nothing with my life and this is what I want to do I'm going to reinvent myself they got nothing to lose because

they've never done anything they've if they don't make it through training no one's going to be surprised they're going to say yeah John's a ding dong he didn't get through training that's not surprising. But if you're the professional swimmer, the professional rugby, the professional football player, people expect you to become a Navy SEAL. And as soon as it gets hard, the instructors focus really intensely on the dudes that are really successful before coming in. And they remind them that this doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you did before. It only matters what you're doing now. And it's like a lot of people can't handle that. And also the people that have been massively successful before becoming SEALs, they're not used to failing. I'm generalizing.

but a lot of people, like to become a professional baseball player, pretty good chance when you were younger, you were way better than everybody else and it wasn't even close. And then in high school was the same. And then in college, you were probably one of the best people on your team. I mean, even the people that get drafted last in like the MLB draft are incredible baseball players that were way better than everybody else. And so imagine if your whole life you've been the guy, you're always the best at what you did. And then you get to training and you're like, you fucking suck. You are pathetic and you're not going to make it through the training.

The guys that have nothing to lose are like, well, that's probably true. I do suck. I'll just keep on going, though. But the guys that are used to success, they do not handle it well, like consistently drop out really quickly. That is an interesting archetype in the seals. And I bet you that that hit you very hard when you had to move back into the basement. Because I see this theme of your life of like not taking responsibility, being slightly entitled and just given things. You were given the role of like, hey, I'm the tough guy.

You come up to me, I'll beat you up. Like, you were given that. You didn't have to earn it. You didn't have to fight people. You were given admission into a good college. You didn't have to earn it. Your mom just wrote it for you. And you go to college and you're like, you have this entitled kind of thing.

And then all of a sudden you get sent back home. That must have been incredibly hard for you to flip flop as much as you did. Yeah. I mean, I think that there's an element of the entitlement you talked about. I also definitely came to learn that taking accountability for the things that you've done wrong is actually a very empowering thing. Because suddenly nobody gives you. any crap about it when you're just like fully owning your missteps, it allows you to just kind of move forward unencumbered versus trying to hide whatever missteps you may. I like that. I've noticed

that as a theme as well in your video. Like you'll bring up certain things like getting beat up by the dude. The fact that you didn't have to earn getting admitted into college, like you're very upfront. Like, yeah, it just kind of happened. It's the way to be. Just being direct. So here's kind of a novel question. Let's hear it. How do you feel when people come up to you and oh, thank you for your service? Is it like a genuine like, oh, thank you very much. And you might have to give a diplomatic answer to this, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Or is it like, like, ah, you know, I appreciate it, but it's kind of like, you know,

I hear that all the time and you don't know what I went through. Like, what is the response to this? Well, one, I think that I and virtually anybody else who served would likely say the same thing. I'm sure Nick over there off camera would say the same thing. That, like, we understand that when people come up to us and say, thank you for your service, what they're really doing is just, that's the phrase that we've come up with. But it's just meant to be like, hey, I respect that you volunteered to do that.

you know, and like I'm not really supposed to actually be like, you're welcome, you know. And so I, I think, you know, I, there's not a good response to it, but I definitely appreciate that people, you know, recognize that, you know, I rose my hand when I didn't have to. But I also don't take it so seriously that I'm like, and I'm a hero. Right. You better respect me. It's more like, yeah, appreciate it. Thank you. My honor, you know.

What was deployment like? Well, I've only deployed twice. And I say that because in the special operations community, like there are folks that deploy like an ungodly number of times to places that are just the worst places in the world. So just it's important that people understand that my experience of deployments is as minimal as it gets within the seal community. I did the minimum tour of duty. But I had, you know, I'm not going to get too into detail but what I did. But, you know, the two places I went was Afghanistan for the first deployment in 2013, 2014. And then I went to

South America in my second deployment in 1516. The one thing I will say about Afghanistan is, well, there's context. So when you become a Navy SEAL, or really when you become any sort of person in the military that is a designated combat role, or you have designated combat capabilities, because not everybody does. There are plenty of roles in the military

that are administrative or they're legal or whatever. But if you've been trained to, like, go to war, it isn't that you pray for war. It's that you hope for an opportunity to actually put your skills to the test. That sounds barbaric, but it's a very natural thing. Think about it.

You've been trained extensively to do this. You want an opportunity to do it. When we were given the opportunity, because it's a weird thing with how deployments happen, it's not, you don't necessarily know where you're going to go, and then it ends up being like which platoon of SEALs is doing the best. They get the better deployment,

which again would be war. And so our platoon was, I think that we actually were the second best platoon, so we were not up for getting to go to Afghanistan, but there was some issue with their chief on the other side. so we got the opportunity to go. I was so excited about going to Afghanistan, for the reasons I said to you,

not out of bloodlust, but out of like, I'm a professional Navy SEAL. I want to go do my job. But man, it was terrifying, you know, coming into it because we knew, and I can't get into too much what we did, not because I'm so cool,

but just for sensitivity purposes, we knew where we were going was what they would call a kinetic site. Like there was the opportunity for actual combat because there were people that deployed the Middle East where they don't necessarily get into any sort of combat. But where we were going, it was kind of like a known thing that you will see combat, that will

happen. And I remember we were in this, we were doing some training in Nevada leading up to our deployment. And we had just found out that we were going to get to go to Afghanistan. And this is like maybe a couple of months out from deployment. And one of our more senior guys, his name, I'm not going to say his name, one of more senior guys who had done several deployments all to Afghanistan and Iraq, he was like, you could see that he was kind of crestfallen. I remember looking over at him, and he's like a big, intimidating guy.

He was like a leader in the platoon. And it just looked like he was really disappointed to hear we were going to Afghanistan. And so I walked up to him afterwards, and I was like, why aren't you excited about this? I'm a brand new guy. I'm like, wired to go do these things. And he's like, because someone's going to die. That's what happens. You go to these places.

Someone here right now is going to get killed at least one. Like every time, that's what happens. And he was in no way like a coward. He was just, he's done this before. And I think that was the first. time that it dawned on me that like to that point my whole like journey to be a seal was very charmed. I mean like it's pretty incredible to say I'm going to be a Navy SEAL and then go through all the training and become a Navy SEAL. There are a few moments as fucking unreal as having a

Navy SEAL stamp your trident into your chest because you've earned the right to be called a Navy SEAL. It's like it's unbelievable. But it was like now I'm seeing the reality of the job. Like I haven't gone and seen it yet, but I'm seeing someone that's done this before and there like, I'm not excited about this. I'd rather go somewhere else. I'll do my job, but that's the reality. I will say, fortunately, our platoon did not lose anyone on our deployment. There were several people hurt, actually including me. That set the tone for me, going into the deployment. I started to look at it more, not scared, but more realistic. Yeah. And I remember before I actually deployed my family was definitely on the fence, you know, like worried about it, you know. And I found myself

going out of my way to reassure them that it was going to be fine. Like, dude, I'm a trained Navy SEAL. I'm surrounded by Navy SEALs. I'll be fine. What it did is it didn't really allow me to be honest before I deployed about how I was feeling because I was constantly putting on this act of like everything's going to be fine. But internally, I'm kind of like freaking out a little bit about what we're going to do. And I remember I was one of the first people in my platoon that actually got sent to Afghanistan. They send you out in waves. They don't want to send you on the same flight at the same time for security purposes. and I arrived in Afghanistan with like two other people on my team.

So there's like literally two or three of us, I think. And the way it works is you do like a turnover with the team that's, you know, on site. And there's a lot to explain, but basically imagine like out in the middle of nowhere. There's like these Hesco barriers set up. It's not even a real base. It's like a, it's called an outstation where you're on the leading edge. You're basically near the enemy, so to speak. and we got out there and first of all, just the drive from where we landed at this huge military base,

which was like 45 minutes away, just driving to the outstation was like surreal. Because first of all, we weren't allowed to slow down because of the IED threat. So like once you get going, you can't stop, which is hectic when you think about what that implies. It doesn't matter what's ahead of you. You have to keep going. And you're driving through these bazaars in Afghanistan. that are like full of people from Afghanistan, naturally, who hate you. And they're looking at the cars as they're passing by, and they're not scared of you.

That's the other thing. That you have been in that country for so long, nobody's scared. They're just staring you down. And you're in this, like, very up-armored vehicle, and it's very cramped. You got all your kit on. And we get to the outstation, finally, and it was like such a relief to be behind these HESCO barriers, and we met the team we were turning over with. And they had been there for six months.

These are, like, seasoned guys. They're getting ready to go home. And all they wanted to do was get these turnover operations out of the way as quickly as possible because you have to do a certain number of just patrols together to show them the area. And then they get to go home. And they're like, we want to get out of here. And so we're going to do an operation tonight. And I'm like, I've never deployed in my life.

I'm like so sketched about everything. I arrive at this outstation. My kit's not even set up, my body arm and everything. And like literally that night, I remember we went to this whole mission briefing of like what we're going to do. and it included, like, being on foot, like, wandering in this area where, like, they were like, just make sure you carry a knife because it can get hairy out there. And it's like, okay. And I remember after our mission briefing of what we're going to do, which was really just a patrol,

but in a very contested area, I went back to my, it's called a chew. It's like, it looks like the trailer on a tractor trailer or truck. And it has like an AC unit. And it's really, it's kind of an awful place to live. But either way, I went inside there and I had all my gear on because we're getting ready to step out for this operation. in like an hour, and I got down on my knees and prayed that we would not go on this operation. I was certain I was going to die. You know what I mean?

Like not because the threat was so high, but because, okay, now I'm really going to go do the thing I've been thinking about and training for, and it's no longer like a game. It's like the real thing. And as it happened, we didn't go on the operation that night. It got canceled, but we did go out the next day. And on many operations, nothing happens. It's like, doesn't matter how contested the area is. you get there and nothing happens.

But I would say that over the course of the six months or five months that I was there, we did get into things that very much fit the job description of what Navy Seals do. And it was a mixture of both exactly what I thought it would be. Just from a training perspective, that you do so much training that when you actually are in, you know, a situation where you're using your training, it's just muscle memory and everybody's so good. You're looking around at your teammates and it's like,

it's, it gives me chills even thinking about it. Like guys are fearless. They're doing all the right things. Guys that you thought were like maybe a little slow on the uptake of like how to do certain things. When, when bullets are flying, you know, they're pretty good at it. And I remember just being astounded at how well trained we were, which was really confident building. But it was also like, to say it was adrenaline rush was not even close. The first time we got shot at, I remember like being immediately completely out of breath, but I hadn't moved.

Like it was like my body had tensed up so intensely that I. suddenly was completely gassed. And that's the other thing. Like in actual situations, you're like, you can become winded really quickly. And the thing that I always think about is I've only done like the one tour

where we had, you know, a limited number of actual engagements for the enemy. And I think about these other operators, other seals that have been in for like 20 somewhat years through the bulk of like the war on terror.

And I just, I can't imagine what it would be like to have done back to back to back to back deployments to these combat zones. Like doing one. It was like life changing and 10. terrifying and all these different things.

But yeah, so it was intense. It was really intense. Were you afraid of dying? At first, but that quickly fades. People ask, you know, what did it feel like to be living in a place that, you know, you're kind of, in theory, like facing your death periodically? And I will say, and this is probably not unique to Navy SEALs. I think it's more of like a military deployment thing.

You're not stressed. Because you're in kind of like survival mode, you automatically your brain just like filters out everything else that could possibly stress you out and it becomes just like very simple you know it's like i have my teammates who are like my friends i care about them i need to eat i need to sleep i need to like you know train but that's it you there is no space in your your mind it's like you the idea of stressing about something from back home it's like it doesn't compute when you're over there you kind of enter this almost like primal mind state where it's just very simple.

And I remember I have, and this is not like a, I'm so cool, but like I've never slept better in my entire life than I did after a couple of weeks of being in Afghanistan, not a first. It was very stressful.

But then you enter into that kind of like, okay, like you've just got to do your job and like support the team and you're just like carefree. It's very hard to come back to reality though. Do you ever miss it? Sometimes,

yeah. Not like miss anything to do with like the military operation side, but definitely miss the camaraderie and being around my teammates because it's like there are a few things that come close to what it feels like to, you know, be risking life and limb with other people in such a like really intense and specific way. And so, yeah, I'd say I miss the camaraderie, but I don't miss combat at anyway. What was that like to be shot at or to get shot? Oh, I never got shot. I got shot at, but, you know, I did get hurt on that one deployment.

A grenade detonated next to me and the people I was with. What hit you? It did. Yeah, I went down this, I was not a team leader or anything. I was part of a group and we were led down this alleyway and it's the middle of the night. It was after a day of a lot of fighting back and forth. And we basically arrived at this T intersection in this fairly urban village. where we were anticipating coming to this T, like walking down here and coming to this T where there was this wall,

and we were expecting to look out across this field and see potentially some enemy combatants. We were just going to see what they were doing. But we ended up walking down and we have night vision on, walking silently, you know, maneuvering down this alleyway. And we get to the wall and just stuff happens. The intel was backwards. They were actually on the immediate other side of the wall versus, you know, 100, 200 yards away. And so we were kind of put into a position where we ran the risk of being heard if we turned around and tried to leave. Your footsteps make noise.

They hadn't hurt us yet. And so in short, it turned into an incredibly close quarters contact. And the folks on the other side of the wall, we believe they were holding grenades with pins out, like literally for this actual moment. In case we get compromised, we're taking them out with us. And they lobbed the grenades right over the wall right after the shooting began. And I remember I was like right behind somebody who was engaging them. And I watched like it was in slow motion. It wasn't.

But I will tell you when you literally think you're going to die, you does. You get like weird like tunnel vision or something. I remember in the, we had a drone overhead that was sending down an infrared signal that was like flashing. So on night vision you could see this. It's like a spotlight. It's like a spotlight shining it down on the earth. That's what it looks like. It's actually bizarre.

But only on night vision you can see it. And if it's a flashing strove, and it was right over us. And I remember the flash was like going like this, but in the flash I saw this grenade. Like I'd see it and they would disappear in the darkness, see it in the flash, disappear in the darkness as it's like coming over the wall.

And then it hit my shoulder. And I remember like distinctly thinking, please let the grenade detonate below my head so that it'll kill me, but it won't blow my head off and that at least my family will be able to identify me. And so this, again, this happened in like a split second. But it's like it hits my shoulder and then it fell down towards the ground.

ground and as it followed down my body, I'm like, okay, good. Maybe it'll hit my legs and it'll just take my legs out, hits the ground, and it was able to turn, and everybody just kind of turned, and it detonated. And it just felt like someone took a big handful of rocks and just like threw it at the back of my legs and my back. My sense of what happened there is, or my memory of what happened, is completely backwards. It took years to piece it all together. But the short version is I was basically down on the ground, bleeding to death. We're also in the middle of like a very intimate engagement with people on the other side of this wall. And my medic, who's also a seal, he was the only guy who was not directly injured by the

frag of the grenade. He was concussed. He was not himself, but under fire, like, from this close. And people miss from this close when you're that jacked up on adrenaline. So you're not like getting actively shot a million times. He like began dragging people out. He literally saved my life. He pulled me.

I was in and out of consciousness, couldn't put my tourniquet on. You know, I was bleeding pretty bad for my leg, and he dragged me to cover as much as we could, and he literally laid over me and put my tourniquets on, and he was like, so calm.

You know, he's like, hey, it's going to be fine, like literally, rat-trained for it. Wow. Crazy, yeah. And so, but the crazy part was is it was kind of quiet in the city at the time, but once all the shooting started, the other fighters in the town,

they just began, like, arbitrarily firing like rockets roughly in our direction like they don't care if they hit their own people they're just trying to hit us and so like rockets are coming in and like gunfires coming in um and we actually uh we had to call not i didn't i'm i'm down and out for the count basically but the guy who's a jtack they control uh overhead planes and stuff calling him bombs they called in an air strike like 10 feet away from us to like take these guys out but it was like 10 feet away don't don't they explode and couldn't you get 10 feet might be an exaggeration it was on the other side of that wall, so the fragmentation would have been reduced. Was it like a fence or was it like a concrete

cement? No, it was like a mud bricks. Okay. You know, so kind of like a cement wall. But yeah, I ended up getting medevacked out along with another guy who, uh, his lung collapsed from the frag. But we got medevaced out and I literally within like, you know, 48 hours had been pulled from the battlefield to a field hospital. And actually when I got to the field hospital, um, that's the first stop we went after getting medically evacuated. a message had come out to the base where this field hospital was. It was like 30 minutes away. And there was a bunch of seals that were stationed at this base.

And they didn't know necessarily how badly injured, like me or the guy that was also getting metavact, how badly injured we were. And so there was like a potential that, in theory, we could be being brought to the hospital and we could already be dead or we might be, we might die, right? And so out of like respect, all these seals in the middle of the night put on their best uniforms, which nobody had nice uniforms overseas. They're ratty. But like guys put on like the equivalent of their dress uniforms and walked into the tent and they were lining the back of this. Like imagine like literally what a movie would do with like a field hospital. It's literally a big tent with all these

surgeons with like white suits on and gloves on. And then in the back, behind all the medical equipment was like 30 Navy SEALs in their uniforms, which were all mismatched, you know, because no one brings those. And I remember I got I got wheeled in before I was put under for surgery and it dawned on me that like, I didn't know the extent of my injuries. I thought that I was going to be okay because I'm like, I'm alive. I got the tourniquet on. But I saw the looks on, it's a very small tent too. I'm seeing the looks on my teammates' faces and they're in their uniforms.

And I'm like, oh, my God, like, this might be it. I might die in here. And I remember trying to reassure them that I wasn't going to die, but I had no idea. I have no idea what's going on. And I remember that they looked at my wounds and they were like, yeah, you were very close. I guess the way the shrapnel went into my, leg and my back was just narrowly missed fatal. But anyways, I got shipped to Germany. I was there for a week and then I was home and Home Depot like two weeks later. How do you assimilate back into society

after that? That's what I, I can imagine that nothing is the same. It's like how do you just go about daily life having just experienced that? Well, I actually was talking about this with my wife. I came back and believed very much that I was going to do, I'd be fine, kind of re-assimulating. But I, they call it being in the red, is the description used for what it's like to come back from a deployment. Where it's kind of like you're still in that almost primal state of living where like you've pushed aside everything else in your life except for, you know, fight, live, you know, and just be on deployment. And so you come back home and it takes a little bit to get away from that, that feeling. to become less primal to become civilized again, but you totally are not aware of it.

Even if you've been told, hey, you know, you just came back from a deployment, you need to calm down, you don't think you are. You think you're perfectly fine. But you're so, like, wound up, I'm sure, you're probably smiling about this. He did a combat tour, and was it in Iraq?

Yeah. He was a, okay, so I'm going to give Nick a shout out, even though you can't see him. He did a tour in Iraq where he was one of the last people to do, like, manned turret gunning. Now we use remote controlling. weapons on the top. So he was like fully exposed, like driving in the most contested

in urban parts of Iraq getting shot at. Anyways, gnarly deployment. We had remote controlled guns in an up armored vehicle that was completely bomb-proof. So if we got shot at, we were like completely safe. But I was just like really, really mad. There was a funny story. Within like a couple of days of getting back to my house in Virginia Beach, I'm like literally limping around.

I'm like, I'm like still hurt. And I remember, so we lived in this house that was part of a homeowners association, like an HOA. You familiar with that? Very.

I'm in one. Yeah. So am I. Of course you are. Of course you are. Of course. Yeah. Do you know that works too?

What's H-O-A's too? I know, I'm kidding. And I got back and my wife, Amanda, she's like, hey, John, just, you know, like we got an email from the HOA

saying that our, our chimney cap is rusted and we need to like replace it. Right? And I'm like, no. We did not. And I called the HOA and I was like, do you have any fucking clue what I've just been through? And you're going to tell me I need to change my chimney cap.

And they're like, sir, we don't know who you are. We don't know what you've been doing. You know what I mean? Like, how would they know what the hell I was doing? It was like so like unhinged that I believe that I could just throw it in everybody's face. Like, I served. You're going to be nice to me, you know? And they still made me change the chimney cap.

But yeah, I just was like hair trigger temper for a while. But then you kind of like just reassemble or you get back into it. But I would say candidly, the injury totally changed my desire to want to be in the military. I remember I was able to heal up and get into another platoon, so do another workup and deployment. But I was like not healthy. So the blast of the explosion, it dislocated both of my shoulders and created a sloth. and created a slap tear. So just like the shock of the blast wave,

it dissipated both my shoulders. But it tore both of my labrums, which is like it's a very fixable thing if you get surgery for it. But I didn't have the time to do the full surgery and recovery. I'd miss a rotation. I wouldn't be able to deploy again. And so I got what's called a biceps tendonesis,

which is like the equivalent to putting a band-aid on your torn labrum. But it's like permanent. They cut a portion of your bicep, they pull it out, and they staple it or something. something onto some part of your body. I don't even know how it works, but it's, it's a permanent band-aid, which means you deal with,

like, pain, but it's more functional. So I had some shoulder issues. I still have 26 pieces of shrapnel in my hip and my ankle that are, like, depending on the weather, it'll, like, you know, it's hard to run, you know, because the pain from the, the shrapnel. Yeah. And so over the course of the second deployment, I just, like, deteriorated physically, mentally, emotionally. And I was already thinking about getting out of the military by the time we got back

from South America. And I was already talking to like my medic and, I forget, Corman, that's like the person in the military who does medical. And they're like, look, you know, you were able to deploy a second time, but, you know, we're going to push for a medical retirement based largely on the injury from Afghanistan, which clearly has had ripple effects physically, emotionally, mentally, I was a shit show. I was just like not a happy person. And so I got medically retired. So I don't know how I got to that tangent. You got a medal, right? Well, yeah. So you get an award for getting hurt. You get a purple heart, which really just means you got hurt. It is an award. And I'm not, it's it's definitely one that I'm, you know, proud to have. I think that technically

to get the purple heart, the purple ribbon, I think you literally have to bleed in a, in a war. I think there's like the stipulation is you literally must bleed. Oh. Oh. in a foreign war. So it's kind of gnarly to have a purple heart. So that was cool. And, you know, it was honestly,

the whole experience now was a good one. I feel very well adjusted now, but I've done extensive therapy and still go to therapy to keep myself right. Was it difficult to keep your relationship together throughout all of that?

Because I'd imagine you deploying and coming back. It's like, how could your partner know what you went through and, like, psychologically, what you had to put yourself through, to be there? And feeling like everything in comparison is so dull.

Like, I would think everything is trivial after that. Yeah, I mean, my wife is the best. Shout out Amanda. She and I got together in college. I actually, to finish off the college story, I actually did end up going back to the college that I withdrew from. I did a couple semesters locally in Boston, got my grades up.

I met the two seals and really found my calling. I'm going to be a seal, but I did finish and I did graduate, but I went back to the first school, UMass Amherst, and I finished out my degree there. And when I went back, I met my wife, Amanda. And I actually was telling her, like, I'm going to be a seal. That's what I want to do. And she said, okay.

And so, like, she was with me from, like, the inception of the idea through training, deployment, everything. So she really understood, like, I guess what she was getting herself into as best as she could. It's a really, really tight group of people. Like, the community of the other seals you're with and the wives and just the partners, like, it's so, so tight that, like, when you deploy, like the significant others all are like constantly in contact and in many ways they have information about what's going on overseas because we're relaying it to them. So they're actually pretty well kept up to date with what's going on which I mean all the stuff we tell them is okay but they know what's going on. But you're a different person after all of that experience like you said it's like

a whole personal transformation. Yeah I think you I think that's right. I think that I yeah I think you definitely do change as a person and it's not I don't. I don't Amanda was, she was on board for all of that? Yeah, well, I think that she was, I was a, I was a very, like, angry person for a while. And I didn't, you know, mostly just, like, I was frustrated with everything. That was kind of my thing. Yeah, yeah, very much so. But my wife is just very understanding and always has been.

She just understood that I was going through some stuff and didn't really give me a hard time and was just kind of, I mean, like, when I came back, I mean, I had some serious injuries on my leg and my hip, like, gnarly stuff. And my wife took care of me. She was, like, packing my wounds. Like, I remember I got, I got back to the states, and they, like, wheeled me in to, like, see my wife. And I could walk at this point. It was pain to, like, a walk. And I get wheeled in. And I'm in the most compromising position ever.

I'm, like, on my stomach. And, like, my butt cheek is exposed because they've just been doing all this, like, you know, treatment for me. And my wife's, like, seeing me for the first time. And I have this horrible, like, long hair, like, I have this shitty beard. And she's like, oh, my God. And the doctor's, like, come on over here. And he's, like, packing this wound in my, and my, butt cheek and it's like it's a significant hole and he's like showing her how to do it because

you're going to have to do this and she like nearly faint so she's like watching this happen but very dutifully like from that point forward like multiple times a day she was like taking care of my wounds and like bathing me I mean how'd you meet her just in college just through friends we just connected and I uh it sounds corny but like literally within like 72 hours of meeting her I was like 100% I'm going to marry her that is incredible okay so we've been talking recently with a lot of different people about different relationship advice. And a lot of them say, you know off the rib. Like, if you don't know in the first like three weeks that this is someone that, I mean, obviously, granted, there are exceptions to that. Yeah. But a lot of the times,

you can be right if you just know off the rip. Yeah. I actually, I remember telling my friend, I was walking across campus with him like literally a couple of days after meeting Amanda. And I was like, this is going to sound extreme, but I'm pretty confident. I'm going to marry Amanda. And he's like, what are you doing, dude? I'm like, I don't know. no, I just got a feeling about it. And she, we got married like very quickly. I got married before I went to Buds. She got married when she was a senior in college. How quickly did you get married? Like, we were together for like 10 months or a year, but we got married when she was still in college. And I'm like, you know, 21 years old, 22 years old. And we're still married. You got three

kids now and I'm 35. That's amazing. That is crazy. Wow. Shout out Amanda. Yeah, she's awesome. She's like the opposite of me, like super introverted, private, like doesn't want to be on any camera. run nothing. But every story that you hear on the internet, I've run by Amanda. Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. She's a huge part of it. Yeah. So we do want to get on to all the YouTube stuff, the true crime stuff. Sure. But first, I have to ask this question. I was talking with some Navy pilots. Yeah. And they worked very intimately with the SEALs. They said that through training, through everything, that it's not a matter of if it's when you will break as somebody. Is this true? What do you mean by break?

By break, by, let's say, give up information or just like succumb to something. Oh, yeah. Like if you're captured, do you mean? Yeah. Well, I mean, you go through, and it's not just a seal thing. It's like a seer. Did you go through Sears School? You didn't, yeah.

So Sears School is a school that the military puts on for basically anybody who could potentially be captured. Yeah. Pilots for sure, because they eject an enemy territory. You're going to get captured. And it stands for survival of Asia. resistance and escape. And it's a really, really,

like, highly choreographed two weeks of training, at least the one that I did. But there's four levels of the training you go through. There's like level one, which is like, you know, it's the most minimal amount of training. And then level four is like, we're going to simulate you getting captured

and it's going to feel real. And they hire like role players that are very aggressive and are very good at playing the role of captor. And you go through like a miserable. It's hard. And what is that line? So even from a seal, you're saying after seal training.

You are a Navy SEAL. You have gone through all the training. And Sears school was the fucking worst. It was the worst? It was like one of the worst. That is crazy to hear. You know, I think that there's quite a bit that is unfortunately confidential. But I will say the couple of things that I can put out there are imagine just like being put in like highly uncomfortable stress positions that no one's doing anything to you.

Like you can't quite stand up. You can't quite sit. You can't quite lean over. You know, it's a little bit too warm, you know, like that kind of situation. And then like, you know, a loop of like scratching sounds or like high pitch sounds. And then periodically being dragged out and like manhandled. Yeah, yeah, really. Or like, you know, we had to like sit in a circle on the hardwood floor, which seems like no, no, just sit in the ground.

Right. But for like 18 hours, don't move. Like you can't move for like you're sitting like cross-legged. It gets so miserable. So are you now one to. never complain about anything because the guy sitting right beside huge complainer oh no you're actually next to me i mean if it's like you know 609 degrees in a place he's like oh it's so cold or it's like you know the memes that it's like yeah i survived a tummy ache making fun of men

who yeah yeah yeah their wife meanwhile is like given birth and like the guys that got a tummy ache like i'm the guy with the tummy ache that's you oh yeah i'm like a shameless complaint how is that even but i don't know it's just probably probably who i am and like i've been through stuff that's like tough and everything, but I still am the person I am. It's like, oh, geez, I don't want to do that. That's horrible. That's amazing. To your question, though, there's actually, like, tactics that are employed that I'm not going to get into that literally are like a way of deflecting, giving up information that

are remarkably silly when you think about what you're doing, but they, apparently, because I've never been caught or anything, but they work. And actually, one of the most profound things about Sears School, at least when I went through, is they bring in someone who has been a... a very real P of W. And we had this guy that was kept in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War who spent like a year in captivity. And they emulate what they've been through?

He just told us what he went through. And it was like, everything he said was like, that's the worst thing I've ever heard. And then he'd be like, and then this happened. And you're like, oh, no, that's the worst thing that's ever happened. Like every torture technique you can imagine. But like this, the guy's like, you know, his spine's crooked like from what happened to him. But he's like so positive.

He's like, come on, guys, take this training seriously. You can do it. and we're all just like sitting there like in awe of this person who's been through like the most horrendous experience. So it's a very, very good school in terms of like what it gives you. And it definitely arms you with, I think, it would definitely at least prolong until you give something up. But I think that maybe at some point as a human being, you might, you might, I don't know. This might be too much. But I'm curious why his spine was crooked or what happened.

Well, he walked in and he looked like a guy who had like gotten run over by a train. You know what I mean? Like he didn't say, hey, my spine. finds crooked because of what happened. He walked in and it was like obvious that he's like unable to move correctly. And he immediately addressed that he's like a lot of the things I deal with now are from being held in captivity. And he's like literally crooked as he's standing there. And so we kind of put it together.

Wow. Yeah. So he was like, you know, like all his friends were killed and he was the last one. Can I also ask how he was able to survive captivity for? I think he was there till like the area was liberated. I think until Americans came in. He, like, lasted. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, it's gnarly. And that's it. Jeez. But yeah, so I luckily only had to do the training. Never did any of that stuff in real life. How do you make the transition from all of that to then starting the YouTube channel talking about true crime? You know, completely random.

I've always been a big storyteller, for sure, just in my life. And when I got medically retired from the SEAL teams, it happened kind of. abruptly, like we knew, or I should say I knew that I would be being, I would get medically retired. I knew it was coming, but the date that I would be released from service was not entirely clear. And then it was kind of like all of a sudden, I was told that actually your date to be, you know, kicked out of service is like right around the corner, like super quick. And so I, I had this kind of frantic, like now what do I do? Like I, you get like a retirement, you get paid if you get medically retired. It's like, it's not, it's not really enough to live on, but it's

It's definitely enough to like survive a little bit. But I needed a job. You know, I needed a civilian job. I got really no sense of what I could do. I mean, as much as, you know, people are naturally inclined to think that Navy SEALs bring a lot to the table. And they definitely do beyond the battlefield, you know, like just as people. It's very difficult to think about how you would translate those skills and experiences to, like, business. Especially when like when you're in the military, and it's not just a seal thing.

It's a military thing. You kind of live in a bubble. You're living in like the military. bubble and you're not really exposed too much to like modern technology. Like as an example, I get out of the military in 2017 and I didn't understand like what a Google sheet or Google Doc was. And like I'm I'm I was a fairly tech savvy person before I went in the military and I like didn't understand like what are this what are these sheets these like Google sheets the people are sending me and like Google documents. None of it made sense. But like there's all these like simple things that

you don't think would be hard to learn, but in the military, you have like your own software systems and your own hardware. All the technology is like military. You're not touching civilian stuff. And so you get out and you're like, not only do I have no idea how to talk about what I did in a way that's meaningful or that fits, you know, the job description you're looking for, but I literally don't understand how to use modern technology. And so it was, it was this mess where I just kind of knew that what I would need to do to get a job. And this is all leading to YouTube. Don't worry. Okay. I knew I needed to like meet people.

And so I was like, oh, network. You know, meet people through LinkedIn or something. And I wound up connecting with this guy named Jordan Selleck, who's this former investment banker turned to entrepreneur in New York City. And I don't even know how we connected, but it was this random, like, he was looking to help veterans. And I'm like a veteran looking for a job. And he was this big proponent.

He believed in networking as like a thing you should do. And I brought up. I was like, I want to meet some people. And he's like, oh, come to New York. I'll introduce you to some, you know, investment people or whatever, some finance people and whatever, and maybe you get a job out here. And so it quickly turned into the, there's a snowball effect where I was like, well, you know, can I bring some of my buddies that are transitioning out of the military as well? And it quickly, over the course of like six weeks, went from, I'm

going to go to New York and meet with Jordan and like meet a few people to like, you know, 15 people on my side, all seals that are transitioning or spec ops guys and like a whole bunch of like hiring managers and folks from different industries in, New York, like having almost like a conference is like very spontaneous in a way, but it was this really cool thing where like I remember looking out at this like sea of like networking happening amongst elite special operators and like these elite firms in New York. And Jordan and I were like, this would be a really cool like business, like create a charity that like hosts these types of events because clearly there's a need for like veterans to like learn

how to assimilate. And so we ended up starting this charity called elite meet. We held these events where like elite spec ops dudes and gals met with business people and they got jobs and it was great. And so ironically, my job became running a job search service, if you will. But we use social media to drive attention to both get donations and to get other hiring companies to come to these events. But there is this goofy thing where special operations, soldiers, warriors, whatever, like they are notoriously. not willing to promote themselves. Now, I will say there's a huge caveat.

There's tons of seal content. There's lots of, but those represent the minority of people that are out of that community. The bulk of folks that are seals, for examples, will, like, literally barely ever talk about it. They keep it to themselves. It's like the whole silent professional thing.

And it almost goes against, like, a code of ethics to even begin to talk about it. And so really, there's a challenge getting these guys to self-promote, to, like, get a job. Even when they're in the, even when they're in these networking, events that we're setting up. And so I began using social media to tell stories about either

specifically members of these units. I'd get the permission and I would tell a kind of watered down deployment story where there's some sort of like, you know, takeaway that shows that they're a great leader or something. But it was really hard to get permission from people and it was just easier if I talked about my own experience and then relating it to how this applies to a wide swath of other special operators that like I'm the representation of the baseline. And that, like, I'm the representation of the baseline. And so if you hire anybody, you know, this story showcases not just what I can do, but what all these people can do. And I was really good at writing these stories. They were like LinkedIn, you know, like little like several paragraphs long. And so that was when I began thinking

about like social media just as a thing. It was like fascinating to me that just telling stories, written stories on LinkedIn could drive donations, like hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. And like very big businesses were coming to these events. These like little events who are hosting from social media. And so I ended up going off the deep end a little bit with social media where I ended up not so much posting about how to drive attention to the charity, but more like how to build my own personal brand as like a Navy SEAL, a former Navy SEAL. And I like broke the card, I committed a cardinal sin in the SEAL community,

which is like aggressive self-promotion, like above and beyond just trying to get a job. like I was posting stuff on social media that in no way was sensitive information. It was nothing like... But it's more patting yourself on the back. Like, look what I did. Look at me. And it's more so in the SEALs, it's about the team. And then think about it.

Yeah. And I'm also like I did the minimum amount of time you can do in the teams. And I've mentioned earlier, like there are people in the teams that do like 20 deployments. You know what I mean? I'm giving you my experience from like two little deployments. There are people that have done so much more. And I'm on a white side. team. I'm not even on on development group, but just team six. And so quickly, I became like a piece

of crap in the eyes of the active duty seal community for the stuff I was putting online, where I was like, you know, I think I had like 50,000 followers on, on Instagram, all in the strength of like talking about being a seal. I thought that I wasn't crossing any lines, but at the same time, I knew that it was like, you know, you're making lots of enemies. And I remember when I started getting messages from people that I served with, like directly. Like literally was laying behind a wall, taking incoming fire with this person, and they're sending me messages that are not anonymous. They're like, fuck you.

Don't ever fucking say that shit online again. You're disowned from the community. No. Yeah. And so it was like heartbreaking. So you want to talk about like the humbling moment of when I got my ass kicked in high school. It was nothing compared to like the barrage of hate that I would get nearly every day.

What didn't they like? Because I would see it as an outsider and think this is, in a way, inspirational for people who might want to get into this. A lot of people would see your story and think this is a career that I've never considered before, but I think I have what it takes. I want to be able to serve. To me, it comes off as something that's more so positive, is like sharing these experiences in such a way that can inspire other people.

So objectively, that's all true. And I deleted a lot, virtually all of this stuff. If you were to go back and look at all of it, I would probably cringe reading it, but you would not read any of them and be like, I don't get it. You wouldn't read it and be like, oh, yeah, I see that. Because objectively, all I'm doing is sharing real experiences that are my own. I never acted like I specifically was like the leader and I was the guy doing this. It was always really my actual POP. It was never meant to prop me up as being more than I was. But it's almost like if you start kind of pointing it yourself and saying like I'm the guy, the SEAL teams are just not cool with that at all. Like you with with very rare exception guys are get like all all seals that are pretty public right now are facing some level of of hate from the actual active duty community. How they handle it is on them. Right.

For me personally, I became so depressed. It was so so so I had to leave Virginia. I literally left Virginia Beach where I was living, which is a hot. spot for seals because I would go out and nobody nobody acted inappropriate no one like but I'd see people that I know every frigging Navy seal is like here in Virginia Beach is a small town and I'd like get death stairs from people that like personally knew me not like anonymous like staring me down like at the gym or at the grocery store and it's like dude I can't do this I can't be here and so I like fled Virginia and went to Pennsylvania to like literally get away from people that

hated me. And then I made the decision, you know, I'm like, I'm in a way building a strong brand in the sense that I'm growing my followership on Instagram and across social media. But it's, again, it's all on this like, I'm the Navy SEAL narrative. And I remember talking to my wife and I was like, I can't fucking do this anymore. Like I can't handle the level of hate I'm getting. Like, I mean, really, these are deep cutting things from people that really know you well. And so I ended up deleting everything. But I was, I was thinking to myself, that I still really loved the, like, what social media represented. I loved that, that, I loved the idea that anybody could post something to the internet.

And in theory, they could, like, go viral and they could become a thing. I really, I just loved that that was a thing. It reminded me in a sense of, like, Navy SEAL training, where it's like, you know, anybody can try out to a degree. And it's whoever makes it to the end gets it. And so kind of like a shot in the dark, there's a, this is a condensed version, but TikTok was becoming a thing right around the time that I was like, okay, I'm done posting about seal stuff, I'm giving it up,

I'm going to get like a job at, you know, Panera until I figure out what I'm going to do. But I noticed that TikTok was becoming a thing as the beginning of the pandemic. And I was like, well, there's probably not any seals on there, you know? It's probably just like kids doing dances. And so I went on TikTok and kind of like, I remember I had on my computer, I had these documents, these Google documents, they learned how to use by this point. Nice, nice. And I had this one sheet that had like all these ideas for like types of content I could do and not just for TikTok but for anything.

And it was all like kind of rooted in the military obviously or like, you know, patriotism. It was like all kind of stuff that was in the world of military-ish stuff. And then I had this other document that that had a single word on it that I always wanted to cover this one. But I just like couldn't do it. It was like so random and off the wall. I was like, what are people going to think if I do that one? And it just said Diatlov, Deatlov standing for the very famous. Diatlov Pass.

Are you familiar with the Deatloff Pass story? Okay, well, when I tell you what I did with it, I'll tell you the story. And so I remember I've deleted all my content, the military content, and I've just built this brand new TikTok account. And it wasn't literally my first post. It was actually after several very cringy. Like I'm doing like all the trends with the kids. Dude, it's so bad.

It's like, like things are popping up. I was doing all that stuff. And I'd like watch it and be like, this is this good? Was it getting huge? Yeah. No. No. That's even worse.

I was just like an adult like doing these like totally lame like kids stuff. Like the this one. The worst one I did was there was a trend where it was like you do the the auto tune voice and you like kind of half sing a story in auto tune. It's so cringy that I can't even replicate it now. But I was doing all this horrible stuff. But finally it was kind of like, well, you know, I tried TikTok. It's not really working. And I remember I opened my.

computer and I happened to have these two Google Docs up, the one of like my exhausted list of like failed content types. And then the one that was just like, it's unsolved mysteries. And then my one topic was Diatlov. And I was like, you know what, whatever. I'll just, I'll tell the Diatlov Pass story. And so the story goes, and this is what I told in a 60 second burst on TikTok, in the 1950s, there were these hikers, these incredibly talented hikers. There was nine of them that were going to take what's called their level three hiking test. which sounds like nothing. But in the world of hiking, in Russia at the time,

these are the guys. These are like the professional hikers. These are the people that can scale Mount Everest. And to get your level three is like a really big deal. At the time, in the 1950s, they didn't have cell phones or anything. So in order for them to take the test to prove their level three, they needed to go through a fairly treacherous route up into the Ural Mountains, which are covered in snow, very icy and steep.

But they didn't, they can't talk to these hikers while they're out there. And so the team that puts on the level three test, they organize these checkpoints throughout this stretch in the year-all mountains that are spaced apart by like several miles. And it's just like random hikers in camps. And at certain intervals, they would have to reach these checkpoints in order to not only be accounted for, but to prove they're going the way they're supposed to be going. And so these nine young, super athletic, super happy. And this is also very well documented.

It was all filmed. There's loads of pictures. They're haunting, by the way. These nine hikers, they take off and they begin this journey into the Ural Mountains, and they reached their first checkpoint, I believe, and then they reached this mountain pass, and a lot of this stuff is speculation, but it's believed they reached the foot of this mountain, and it's all, everything's snow. There's nothing.

It's like this wide open, snowy canvas, and there's this huge mountain that's covered in snow, and there's a storm coming, and it was late enough in the day where they either had to sprint, basically, to get up and over the ridge, to be safe on the other. other side, or they had to wait for the next day for the storm to pass. Because if they began going up this mountain where they did need to go eventually, and the storm hit or got too dark, they'd be completely wide open. There's no trees. There's nothing stopping them. Like, you never want to be on an open face of a mountain in the middle of a storm. And so they believe that the group, remember, these are highly skilled hikers. These are like the best. They decided to make the journey

up this mountain, and they stopped halfway. They picked the most exposed spot ever. And they picked the most exposed spot ever. And so the assumption is they gambled, they gambled wrong, they had nowhere to go. And so they pitched their camp, these little crappy tents in the middle of this mountain, and they weathered the most horrific snowstorm ever. But at some point in the middle of the snowstorm, the hikers were broken up into, I think, three different tents. This is based on what they found. They cut their tents open from the inside. And they left, like 75% of their clothes folded neatly inside of their tents. And then they walked out of their tent in a group, almost in a line, and they walked down

the mountain where there was this gaggle of trees. I guess you could call it a forest. It was more like crops of trees. And we don't know what they did down there, but three of their bodies were found up in the trees, like naked and like up on the tree. And there were all these scratch marks on the base of the tree to indicate, like they had maybe even tried to go up in this tree to hide from something that was trying to attack them.

then the footsteps continued about a half mile parallel with the mountain to this cave where they found the rest of the hikers and all of them were deceased but the ones in the cave they had exchanged clothing so like the men were wearing the women's clothes women wearing the men's clothes and several of them had pieces of their face

they looked like they had been bitten off like lips, nose, ears and some of them were radioactive like their skin was radioactive their clothes were radioactive and so they're all dead and so there's just no clue it would happen to them. At the same time, the Russian military was doing an exercise in the

Ural Mountains. And that night, one of the senior people of this military command noticed overhead, there were all these strange lights, which coincided with where these hikers were, like these really, like, think UFOs, basically, all these lights over the mountain. And he actually called it in that he thought there was potentially another military unit, like potentially an enemy, like operating in the Ural Mountains. And it was officially documented that the Ural Mountains. and it was officially documented that there were these unidentified objects floating around the area where this all happened. And so when they found out that these hikers were all found dead and there was the sighting, the Soviet government, they investigated. And then their conclusion was an unknown, unnatural force killed them.

Case closed. And they didn't give any more information about it. It was immediately swept under the rug and no one was allowed to investigate it. It was literally kept under like lock and seal. And then they reinvestigated it, ironically, like literally. in 2020, and they think that perhaps an ice shelf had like broken off and killed some of them, and then like extreme hypothermia could have led them to act a certain way. But like it doesn't explain the radioactivity, it doesn't explain the lights in the sky.

There's a lot of things that go unanswered. And so it ends up being this like fascinating, unsolved mystery that's kind of stood the test of time. And I told that in a 60 second version with the pictures included. The pictures of the tents are totally bizarre. It looks like they folded up half their clothes and left them in their tent. cut it open, then walked off. But so I was at this indoor water park in Pennsylvania with my kids, and I shot this little TikTok video with no format.

I just kind of did a 60 second version. And since we're going to be in the water park where it's wet, naturally, I wasn't going to bring my phone. So I post this TikTok, and I leave my phone in my room, and then I go with my kids, my wife down to the water park, we're having fun. And I come back, and my phone is like practically broken. It's got so many notifications popping up on it. the video that I posted had like, you know, five million views in like literally a couple of hours.

And I had everything I'd posted to that point had never gotten even like a thousand or two thousand views. And so it was like mega virality and like all of a sudden. And it was like the, I've always been so fascinated with like strange, dark and mysterious tales. And like that story in particular always interested me. And so I was like, oh my God, like this is the coolest thing ever. It's nothing to do with like being a Navy SEAL. It's something that I'm really interested in. And I was like, dude, I'll just, I'll do more of these.

And so I like enacted this like really insane schedule of, I posted three stories like that one a day for 30 days, which was, it sounds like nothing, but putting together a 60 seconds. Dude, it's a beast. Yeah. Yes, you know. But it grew my TikTok account to like a million followers in 30 days. And I was at the time, I was very likely one of the very few creators that was not doing just kind of typical. trendy stuff on TikTok. You could make the case that I was one of the first big storytellers on there.

And it just gave me like first mover advantage in a big way. Like TikTok's reaching out to me and like I got my partner and my manager. And like they're all like, oh, post more content. We'll promote it. And like the account just went huge. You got to like seven or eight million followers really quickly. And then I was doing a live stream on TikTok. I was doing that a bunch.

And I guess I brandished a weapon. That's what they told me. the algorithms that I brandished a weapon, I didn't. I don't know how that came up, but it gave me a seven-day ban. It was the first time from starting TikTok that I couldn't post anything. And I decided that I would shift to YouTube because it's a monetized platform. It's stable, and I wanted to do longer form content. And so I moved to YouTube and I posted a video that's actually my own personal, like, ghost story.

I have exactly one. And it's barely edited. I literally sat in this room in my house. that has the worst acoustics imaginable. It's this yellow, awful, my walls were all, like, mustard yellow. You can, like, hear lawnmowers outside. And I, and it's, like, unedited.

I'm just, like, sending this story, and it went massively viral on YouTube, and it wasn't because of TikTok, because I didn't, there was no one going over. This was, like, YouTube algorithm. You post it something that went viral. And I think that that was probably the moment, and also based on comments, a lot of people were, like,

who is this, dude? Like, what is this? And that was probably when I realized, like, okay, the way that I tell stories works for the social media gods, for the algorithm gods. And that probably was when I was like, all right, full send, just do this now.

Why do you think people have such morbid curiosities for some of the stories? Because I listen to them, and I have to, sometimes it screws with my mind a little bit. I stop listening and I'm like, that kind of fucked with me a bit. I don't feel like more positive.

Like, I'm curious about it. I love it. For what? But it's like true crimes. It's like, yeah, I do struggle with it. It's funny. A lot of people that I speak to that are fans of the show or the genre talk about it being their like comfort show, which seems totally backwards because the content literally is like 99% somebody dies in some horrible way. Like that's the gist of the content.

But I think that as humans, there is a desire to be frightened in a safe, controlled environment. And what's more terrifying than seeing real people, that had something kind of random and abrupt that could happen to anyone happen to them. Someone breaks into their house or they like, you know, they go to some off limits part of a park and like they fall off a cliff or something. It's like it feels like that could happen to me. And I can learn about it and kind of almost live vicariously through this story, but I'm safe. I'm like my guide, in this case, me is like telling me like buddy to buddy telling you a story

about this horrible thing. And you get, you almost get like the thrill of fear and anxiety, but it's not real. It's the same reason we flock to like scary movies in movie theaters. It's because you want to be scared, but only because it's actually not real. But your brain processes fear the same way, but you're in this controlled environment. So you get real fear, real kind of shot of adrenaline, but the comfort of real safety. But I do think it's kind of like a human trait. I don't think it's, I don't think that the genre is like been forced upon people.

I think that humans have a morbid curiosity and I don't think that's wrong. I think it's part of being human. Do you think that seeing. and experiencing, obviously, with your tour, your Navy SEAL stuff, and then also with, like, constantly being subjected to all of this, like, very morbid, very kind of almost like gruesome, horrific stuff. Do you think that has any effect on you in general? Sometimes it does, but it's pretty, it's pretty,

I think I stay pretty disconnected from the material when I'm not, like, doing the job of creating content and being Mr. Ballin. Like when I'm with my kids and my wife, like I'm just John, I'm dad, it doesn't feel like one world kind of comes into the other. However, I would say when I cover stories that have distinct parallels to my own life and my own loved ones, it's really hard to, like, I barely ever cover content about kids getting harmed because I just can't do it. It's too close to home for me. I also, you know, periodically will cover, you know, I cover the story about this woman. who, now I'm forgetting her name, unfortunately, but she was this wonderful woman in her 60s.

She went hiking. She's a great hiker, you know, did it all the time for exercise. And she got lost in this park, broad daylight. Like this is not some gnarly place like in Pacific Northwest. It's like somewhere in like New Hampshire or something. But she gets lost. And being a seasoned hiker, she decides to stay put because she knows someone's going to come look for her. She's got a family that knows she's out here.

She's going to wait it out. And so she just sets up her camp. She's got food. She's got water. And she just sits there. But unfortunately, no one ever finds her. And she stays there for a month, and she didn't know it. She was only like less than half a mile from the trail.

But she didn't know she was that close. And over the course of her time in this tent, where she really never moved, she, you know, she kept a journal of each day. And she was just so graceful, like dealing with what was actually happening to her. She clearly recognized about three weeks into her stay that she wasn't going to be found, and she now was too weak that she could. She couldn't realistically attempt an escape. And so she knows she's going to die.

But the way she wrote in the journal was, it was so profound. All of it was for her kids, for her husband. The language was so, like, positive and reminding them that she's fine. She's safe. You know, no one's going to harm me. I'm going to pass away in my bed. But it's like the grace that she handled the ending with is just, it was incredible. And she reminded me so much of my mom.

My mom, it was like, it was like telling. a story about my mom dying in this horribly tragic way. And that one just really messed me up. It's stuck with me for a long time. And it's not nearly the most gruesome story I've told. It's just, it feels like I'm seeing a bit of my life in this story. And those are the stories that stick with you. The one that kind of messed me up was the one actually, it was like a mall and the guy goes through this one door and gets sent into this corridor where it's just like like a catacomb of just all of these different. It's just like cement walls, cement floor, cement ceiling. And he just sits down somewhere in this chair and he never gets found.

That was the one I still think of. I'm like, Jesus. I know. No, there was like, there's a mall in Australia that has, it's this huge, huge mall and they have like eight miles of like,

imagine here's like the outline of the mall, pretend it's a perfect rectangle, like bordering it, but unseen to the public are all these passageways for staff and storekeepers to move around away from like the main walking areas. You can like access your store and whatever from, Anyways, but there's eight miles of it. And it's really not patrolled, I suppose.

There's not much, there's not cameras there. And this guy was senile and he wandered into this area. And there were enough doors that were locked around him that he just sat down thinking, okay, someone's going to find me, but they didn't. And it was just like, again, just like so sad, you know. And then when he was found, he's like just hunched over on his chair, just sitting there for like a month. Where do you find these stories?

I mean, honestly, though, at the beginning. So I would say like, call it early 2020. to relatively recently, like within the, we've professionalized in a huge way in everything now. But for the first, like, year and a half, two years, I literally was just on Google,

you know, trying to find interesting things to look for. You know, one of the traps that people fall into that cover content, like, that I do, is that there's loads of stuff that's, like, on Reddit, but it's personal people's stories, and technically it's like a copyrighted thing because, well, it's unverified, one, but it's, you can get in trouble,

for using somebody else's story without permission. This didn't necessarily happen to me, but Reddit is a place that people go and find content, but it's not a successful way to find content, but a lot of people do it. It's a little sketchy. I basically wanted to find news, I wanted to find stories that you could basically,

you had public news sources about them. And that, it's a chore doing that. Like the easy way is you just go to Reddit and you grab some crazy stories somebody told, but early on I really wanted to make sure, that I was not going to get sued. And so it just became looking for really obscure news stories. I'm wondering, how do you approach something so delicately,

especially if it's something that occurred recently, when maybe the victim's families are still alive or the victim is still alive, but just out of commission or not doing well? How do you approach that in a way that doesn't come off as, like, offensive or something like that? I think that there's probably an element of just literally the way way I carry myself and my demeanor and the way I speak is, I guess it comes off as not disrespectful to most people listening. And I don't think it's something I'm necessarily attempting to do.

Or like, put it this way. I'm not telling the story. I'm not putting on an act. I'm telling it the way that I would tell it, which is with respect. It's just, that's the way I would do it. And I think that it comes off very authentically, just based on feedback I've gotten, that it does seem like I'm being very respectful of the fact that these are real people involved. So I think it's, I guess, innate. That's just the way that I tell the story. People think that it's respectful. I also, I do, when we're writing these stories,

we never, we don't want to write a story where my opinion is coming out. Even if it's something that universally we could agree is a bad thing, like serial killers are bad and they're bad people and they've done bad things. but I don't want to tell a story where the focus is how bad they are from my perspective. I want to tell you what happened with that person, and you can form whatever opinion you want. And so that is probably one way that it comes off as more respectful, because if you watch any video that we've put out or listen to podcasts, it's very difficult to find an instance where you can tell how I feel about a particular subject.

And that's because the writing is done to be very neutral. and the story carries the whatever opinion you want to have. But then you mentioned about how do we handle more recent stories. We do actually try to stay away from stuff that's either developing, like that we don't have an answer yet, it's ongoing, or it literally just happened. It's tough to sensationalize something that's literally playing out live. And so when we do that, we will reach out to the families, to the victims,

like especially now, I mean, not to like toot our own. horn, but we're big enough now where like if I post a story about someone and it's ongoing, like they're going to hear about it. And so it's pretty routine to post a story and then get feedback from family members and people involved. And publicity on such events could also be beneficial to solving them as well. I feel like that could help getting all these eyes on it. Yeah, I mean we not not to some extent, we've not done this a lot, but there's been some instances where we've covered a story and intentionally drove viewers to like a GoFundMe page. I noticed that.

Yeah, we did one for this guy who's a skydive instructor. Oh my gosh, that was a sad story, man. You flipped himself around and he took the fall and saved the student who was strout to his stomach. Wow. They teach instructors this move that you do if you cannot get your shoe to open and you're doing a tandem jump where you basically flipped yourself over and you take the fall to try to save your student.

And he did that. And he totally saved a student, but he's paralyzed, you know, neck down. So he got loads of publicity at the time. It's this heroic story. But this guy has massive medical problems for the rest of his life, and he's not that old. And so we told the story, but we preemptively got in touch with them, and we said we want to cover it. And we're going to push people to your GoFundMe page. And I forget what it's at now, but he's probably...

We raised like 400 plus. Yeah, like 400. Unbelievable. That's incredible. That's the one Andrew cried during. Really? The one I was telling you to listen to it. Yeah.

got to listen to it. It's a good one. What does your team look like today? How many people are on it? How is it structured? Well, it's very important to understand the way the business is structured because one of the things that I'm not trying to do is be like the boss because I'm not. I'm a really good speaker, storyteller, like on the creative side, I got that down, but I am not really a good manager. I've had experience managing and leading and to a degree I'm decent at it, but it's something that I'm not good at regular communication with people. I'm kind of like bipolar with people. I'm like super cool with you.

And then like I'll like under, I'll see like one thing that I don't like that you're doing. And now it's like, well, now I don't like you at all anymore. Oh no. And like unfortunately, it's like that's horrible. Like you can't run. You can't build a team that way. And so I knew that about myself.

And so when I, when the YouTube channel was doing really, really well, like early on, I was starting to get, like, you know, requests to do sponsored segments and all that. And I just didn't really even know what to do. I just, like, kind of ignored everything. And then I, I got reached out to by this company called Night Media.

They do all this talent management. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had been approached by a couple other people that were in the talent management space to, like, be my manager. And it made sense, you know, I need a manager to deal with these sponsor segments and stuff. And I just, I didn't want to work with anybody because I'm, like, so worried about how I'm going to handle, being around these other people. But Nick, he hit me up.

And he was like the only dude out of all the people that reached out to me that didn't really have a pitch. Everybody else was like, oh, I can expand your business this way and do this, this, this, this, this. And he was like, hey, dude, like, I was in the military too. You know, I don't really know what you need. You know, if you need help, I happy to help you. Like, let me know.

And I was like, that dude seems cool. And then I proceeded to immediately blow him off completely when he was, he asked me to take a call with him and I was like busy. But then I called him, like Cole called him. And I was like, I was at that point. where, and I'm sure, maybe you can relate to this, I don't know, but like, I knew that I was, like the YouTube business was a real business, but it just felt like I was running around my hair on fire. Like, I'm like, last second getting uploads done, like, so stressed, like,

just working 24-7, but making, you're not really getting ahead. You're just, like, trying to keep the lights. Yeah. You're just trying to keep things. Yeah. And it was like, I could feel myself starting to slip. Like, I was missing uploads and I was, like, really burnt out. And I, like, poured my heart out to Nick. I'm like, dude, I don't know you. This is my first interaction with you, but you seem cool. But I'm like falling apart here, dude. And I have, like, trust issues with, like, other people I've worked with. I'm not good at, like, leading teams.

Like, I'm not good at it. I need someone who can, like, really step in and, like, do everything else so that I can just do storytelling. And next, like, all right, cool, man. And, like, true to his word, like, the dude, he's right over there. You can't see him. He's a, it looks like a Viking to give you a visual. I mean, that's an intimidating presence right there.

Bodyguard, really. Yeah, literally. He's doubled us my bodyguard several times. But yeah, no, he, Nick is, so his background is he's a combat vet. He was a lawyer, and he also worked at WME, talent management. So the best stars in the world. He came over to Night Media doing digital talent management. He was one of the managers for Mr. Beast, and so he'd, like, done, like, the highest

level of digital management. And we just, like, hit it off. And I could just tell Nick had all the skills that I didn't in terms of building a business. And so we went from me and editor and a topic finder who didn't even work out. The topic finder was finding like zero topics. So really it was me and an editor. To now we have 37 employees. 37?

No, is that full-time or is that like some people? What? We have 37 employees. We have. Oh, my gosh. How many are in the United States? Oh, but two? Oh, my gosh.

What? I had no idea. I would assume it's like you in like five. people. Max. Well, so there's, there's, there's,

there's a lot of facets. There's a lot of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of moving. So we have like, the only, so the only thing I do is I take scripts that are written and then I work

with them to make them sound like me because I have a very particular way I want to sound. And then I tell the story. And the way I tell stories is I like study the story and like embody it. And then I tell it. It's not, I'm not reciting a script, you know?

Uh, And so that takes up like a lot of time and mental space and like, but that's what I do. I go to my studio and I record stories. I don't do anything else. I don't hire anybody. I don't fire anybody. I don't sit on meetings. I don't do anything.

I'm like, I'm an employee of the company because like I know my strength. Like I know what I'm really good at and I know what I'm not. And Nick came in and he has all the skills to like build a business and he has all the relationships and the drive. And so he, we ended up leaving night media to form our own. Studio, so Ballin Studios, since August 2020, we formed Ballin Studios, and Nick just went, he hired and fired so many people. And now we have like, it's like a world-class team of people. It's, it's, it's, I sat on the first Friday meeting last Friday, the first one in a long time. And like the last one I was on, there was like five

people on it. And now it's like, there's like, all these different blocks of Zoom people. And it's like, all these like brilliant people that are like doing these incredible things within our organization. and it's like, I notice you're posting everywhere. Like even your Facebook has like almost four million people on there. Yeah. So I'm sure a lot of that's like syndicating to all these platforms and building these businesses off of it. Yeah, I mean, the thing that it has, we're still working on, but I think we're pretty good at doing is everywhere things get posted, whether they're being handled by a third party or they're being handled by a team member or whatever. They have to feel like a genuine like Mr. Ballin post.

It can't become like, you know, random crap that nobody thinks I'm posting it. They think somebody else is. And so to do that requires an enormous amount of training. Like you don't get to just come in and, oh, hey, write a script or, oh, like, do some research over here. Like, no, there's a formula to it. And, like, you know, right now the head of production for us is actually my sister, who's, she's a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Brainiac. She's super smart. But she's developed, like, a course that people go through just to learn how to, like, begin to

write. You don't even, you're not even a writer yet. You go through three months of she's editing you. Reminds you like the seals of writing. That is impressive. So she's editing you as well as my dad who also is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and he was the head of the spotlight team. So like the movie spotlight where Michael Keaton's the lead. So Michael Keaton like worked with my dad to like learn how to play him in the movie. Oh my gosh. And so we have these like incredibly talented professional writers and editors that like put our writers through like the Mr. in boot camp, and we've only hired a handful of writers after the whole thing, and they're so good. And the topic finals are so good. What I love about your style is it still seems like I'm

just talking to you. You know what I mean? It seems like a campfire story. It's very intimate. It's not like all this crazy editing, all that. It's just so real. You know what I mean? And I think that it fits the theme so well. So it's very shocking. I like, I wouldn't say I'm super shocked, because I can see the views, I could see how big you are on all these different platforms. So I assume it's a massive operation. But it is still like a little bit shocking. It's 37 people.

And you know what? The thing about the 37 employees is that nobody has, and I'm not just saying this because I'm on this podcast, nobody has a job that you're like, why are you doing that? Or like, why do we have someone do that? Like those positions are gone. Like you have an opportunity when you come in to work with us to like, we want people to like come in as like an assistant

and then have blue sky as it's for, yeah, blue sky. You can become a writer if you want. You can become an on-screen person for a new show. Like, no one's stopping you. You got to do the stuff you're responsible for, and there's intense training for it that's all filtered through Nick. Yeah. But, like, everybody knows that, like, we are expanding in every direction.

I would love to see different offshoots of just, like, different stories and different segments. I mean, as it is, we, you know, we have bedtime stories, the amazing YouTube channel that they now are under the Ballin Studios umbrella, doing a podcast with us. We just launched that. It's like top 20 across the board. I think at one point it was top 10. It's kind of hanging around the top 20 mark.

We also, when I say we very liberally, Nick is the one doing all of this. I'm just staying in my studio telling stories. Nick understands talent management, having been in it. And so he started a talent management business. So we have like Nexpo and we have Nick Crowley who are being under, they're under our management wing and they're loving it. Like they're helping them hire writers.

We're going to research. everybody is actually playing a pretty meaningful role. And there's like department head meetings every Friday. And like everybody better come to the table with like what you're doing because it's going to be really obvious if your department's not doing anything. Not that I would know because I'm not on those meetings. But Nick tells me and that's what happens. You need to do more podcasts.

I don't know why you haven't. This is like my first one. Yes. I know. I mean, obviously we did research, but I couldn't find enough on you to research. Nice.

Like you're still, you know what I mean? I think you as a person to me is more captivating than all the stories. I mean, the stories are great, but I think you as a person, that to me is what's most impressive. It's like the background of who you are. And I think it makes the stories that much more impactful, just knowing like just what makes you tick and your interests and the business side of things. But it's not only that, but it's like how you met your wife, you knew it was her. And like that's also in and of itself, something that just doesn't happen.

What that's super rare? What relationship advice do you have for me who's engaged and Jack who's single? I'm a bachelor. He's to be. You know, I actually have something that I said to myself that I still say now, and it seems simple, but I always say to myself, I will always be good to Amanda. And it's just the simplest phrase, but it applies to everything. Like, there's really very rarely a fight that you get into that can't be solved with just stepping back and being like, you know what? I'm going to take the high road and be good to my partner. Like, when I, when we first got married, like, I'm like 22 going through the most stressful training. And it was like the only person I was around when I wasn't training was like, my wife, and I was like kind of a jerk, you know, half the time because I'm just like so stressed. And I just like saw like if that's the path you're going to go, you're not going to be married for very long. And so I like literally adopted this mindset of when in doubt, like always be

good to Amanda. And like even now, like I literally say it to myself if we're arguing or upset about anything, my bottom line is like that's the person I want to be with. And so why would I like soil it by like focusing on something that's kind of asinine? Was there something that she did in those for 72 hours where you're like, okay, like that's, that's it. I saw a picture of her. I obviously saw her, and I was like hanging out with her, but there was a picture of her. She went to South Africa, like for this like school trip or whatever with the college, like right before we met.

And so all her friends that went, like went out and like party and had a great time. But Amanda's like this and totally like motherly person. And she found these like little kids that were in South Africa that were like playing at the playground. And all Amanda wanted to do was like go like hang out with these like little kids and like go pet the animals that were like strays on the roads. She's just like a very wholesome person. And there's this picture of her where she's sitting on a swing and she's holding this little girl who clearly she doesn't know. It's this little kid that's like flocked to my wife. And she just like looks like the perfect

mom. I don't know. I was like, it's like I want that person. I want like that soul to be around my kids who's just like naturally loving and caring and just like an old soul I suppose. And I still like look at that picture all the time. Because that's when I fell in love with my wife. It's like I saw that picture and I was like, that's the one. How do you find someone like that? I don't know. I don't know. I think it was just luck that I found her. She was just a friend of a friend, you know? Yeah, I don't know. I think I got lucky and I met the right person, you know. And I think now, like, you know, it's probably really challenging to meet people, or I should say, it's, it's almost like with the dating apps, you can meet so many people. I haven't used a dating app. I met her, you know, normally in college

or whatever, but like you have so many choices. It probably makes it. really hard to like, I'm going to stop now because it's the paradox of choice. Yeah. But the problem is you do have to make your decision at some point. You know what I mean? So you can't just continue to go on new dates, meet new people forever. That is something that I feel lucky to have just met somebody and it worked out. I think that's partially luck, you know.

I have a question. Sure. If you want to cut this, let me know. If you don't think Amanda looks great in a dress and she asks you, do you tell her? Oh, no. No way, dude. She's beautiful no matter what, you know? Respect.

I respect that. No, I'm obsessed with my wife. Like, she would look good to me no matter what she was wearing. I want to be at that level. I want to be at that level. We always get conflicting answers. Some people are like, absolutely. Honesty is 100%.

If she doesn't look good in that dress, I'm going to tell her. And then she appreciates it because when she does look good and I tell her, she looks great, she knows I mean it. Yeah. But then some people, they say, it's not the suit that makes the man. It's the man that makes the suit. There you go. There you go. I think that the one thing that's been great about this career path that I'm on now is,

in a way, it's, well, it's, it's, candidly, it's very isolating being, I'm sure you can relate to this gram, I'm sure you both can. Like, as you become, I guess, more of a public figure within the YouTuber space, it's, you don't really feel like that's happening. You feel like you're just making videos and like, it's cool and it's, like, it's, cool. And it's, like, you're making a living off of it. And it's awesome. People, like, know who you are.

You, like, go out and they, like, know who. who you are. And it's like so flattering. It's like the coolest thing. But it also like it's very isolating because you're not really it's it's harder to relate to people in a way. Maybe I just react that way to it. But I've found that like because I met Amanda way before I was Mr. Ballin, like she knows me as John. And it's like the purest relationship. You know, it's just me and my wife. And so as like the whole Mr. Ballin thing has grown and I've definitely had some people aggressively take advantage of me and like there's been some rough stuff i've always had amanda to like be real with me you know i can be completely unfiltered and real with her and it's helped our relationship

tremendously that like she's my number one and she knows me for me i'm not mr ball and i'm not a navy seal i'm like the dude she met in college and so it's strengthened our relationship tenfold how often does she shoot down ideas you're like i think this is great and she's like oh could you give us an example does she have veto power oh oh oh Yeah, so she, she, like, so we're doing our first live show in a week, actually a week from today. And all the stories that I've selected for the show have been run through Amanda. And like, she told me, like, a few of them, she's like, no, don't do that one. Like, no one's going to like that one.

I'm like, all right, yeah, I completely wanted to do that one. But because you said, so, I'm not going to do that. Definitely story selection. She, yeah, if she doesn't think it's good. And she's shameless about being honest if the story's good or not. Like, she'll, like, literally be like, nah, that's boring, like half a three. the story. So is it just you internalize a story and recite it to her as though you're

filming? And then she tells you if it's a yes or no it's just the concept. So no I like literally will be out in my studio researching it and like internalizing the story and then before I'll film it I'll say hey man let me just run the story by you and I'll literally do like the whole thing. That's the coolest. I'm not really the coolest thing.

I would love to be a fly on the wall or you just tell her the story. It's like in the kitchen she just listens and then she gives feedback. It should be a side channel of just you running the stories by her and the stories that don't make it on your main channel should be the side channel. There are many. I'm sure they're good, but they're just not like top tier. Yeah, she's, and she'll be very honest. That's good. She's she's very honest. How many of these stories do you tell your kids? Zero. Are really? Do you let them

watch the content or no? No. When will you? I don't know. It's a weird thing. Like it's funny. Like my oldest, uh, she's eight. Actually she, oh my God. Yeah, she's a turning eight soon. She, um, she's seven now. Anyways, her classmates have not, not many of them. They're seven. But there have been classmates that when I pick her up, they recognize me. And it shows there are seven-year-olds that are watching this content. They recognize you? Yeah. Seven-year-olds. Well, I think that my daughter very likely has tipped them off, but they look at parents. Do they think you like a superhero? They walk around with you out in public. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think, because my kids, like, they're young enough that they don't really understand what I do. Got it. L. L. my oldest

definitely probably does. She wants to. be a YouTuber and I think that's probably in part, you know. But like my youngest, Henry, who's three, like, he knows, like, there's such a thing as Mr. Ballin, but doesn't really understand what that is. And like my middle, same thing. That is so funny. But yeah, no, they, they don't watch any of it. In fact, the live show, they're going to be there for it. And it's the first time they're going to hear any of this stuff. Like, they don't, they don't even know they're walking into. So they just think, like, dad's going to come and, like, tell a story to people. Basically. And it's fine. So at night, every night, I tell my son a story, but it's, like, completely fictional.

So I lay down with him every night and I say, okay, Henry, what story do you want to listen to? And it's like a T-Rex story. And I'll tell the story of like Henry and the T-Rex that's like made up on the spot. So he's just make it all up. Making him all up. On the spot. Yeah. I just like make stories.

And I tell my kids' stories all the time. But like happy, friendly stories, ponies and princesses and stuff. I couldn't do that. I don't think I could just make up a story on the spot like that. Well, I professionally tell stories. So that's all I do. There's a little bit of difference. I know.

But there's difference in resigning. fighting something that you've internalized versus like making something up on the spot. Yeah. It's fictional. Yeah, well, I mean, luckily it's a three-year-old. It's not going to judge the story too hard. That's a good. Inconsistency is pointing that out.

So you haven't picked out a time where maybe you'll be comfortable to share these stories with your kids? I didn't know. I mean, you know, it's like there's the two parts of my life that we've discussed at length, like the Navy side and the YouTube side, they really don't know much about it all. mostly because I probably am over sheltering them to some degree. Like they know Dab was in the military at one point, but like what does that mean? They don't know what a Navy SEAL is. They don't know what war is, you know.

And similarly, they don't really understand that like the world is a scary place and horrible things do happen and that's what's covered on YouTube. And I think that like I'm probably resistant to the idea of like, I don't know, showing them the reality of the world. Not that like my YouTube videos are like, that's the world. Right. Like, that's the worst part of the world. That's not the world.

But yeah, I think I'm just a little protective of my kids. I do wonder, is it important for people to know about the evil that exists in this world? Like, is it important to understand that you can go out and something bad can happen to you, to contemplate your own mortality, to know you could be driving and someone can just come and hit you in the car? Like, do you think that it's important that people don't live in some sort of state of blissful ignorance, but they're aware that bad stuff happens? Yeah. I mean, I think that from a, I don't know, vigilance standpoint, I think it's important to not be totally naive.

If you're out in a public place, you should be aware of how to leave that place. You should be aware there are probably people in the crowd that might want to do you or your family harm. I mean, that's life. So I think that, like, you shouldn't be, like, at all times thinking someone's going to kill you. But I think that the reverse of that is far worse. If you think that everything is sunshine and rainbows, you're wrong. Interesting. That's not the world we live in, no matter what you think it is.

When you go and sit down at a restaurant, I've heard of this thing where like you can't have your back facing the door. Is that true? Or is that a bit over, like? Well, I would say the people that I know that have done numerous, like intense deployments are much more likely to have that kind of a, I guess, tick of some kind. I don't think it's universal. I would say that if I was given a choice, I'd probably opt to be able to see an exit. But I wouldn't be like, oh, I can't sit here. You know, so it's probably not me, but there are definitely people that act that way.

I mean, if you, if you are on edge because you've seen some stuff that's like screwed you up, whether that's military or in your life, I think it's natural to see the exit and that makes you feel comfortable. Why do you think you did such a good job assimilating back into society where a lot of people go down the path of alcohol, drugs, destructive behaviors? Sure. Well, I didn't. I didn't do a good job. I went to extensive therapy for a long time. And that literally saved my life.

I mean, I was, when I got out of the military, when I was medically retired, I was really struggling with identity, like with my, now that I'm not a seal, what am I? And then I, I went into the, I'm going to be the token Navy seal online and do all this content that makes me, I'm getting all this hate from like my literal, what I thought were my best friends. That was, that's deep cutting stuff. I was so depressed. I was miserable and depressed in like 2018. It was like the lowest point of my life, borderline suicidal. Like that was how bad it got. But fortunately, I actually, I was, I had these like flashes of anger all the time.

Like completely like random, like things that shouldn't make you upset or make me mad. And it stood out enough to friends and family. They're like, dude, like you got some issues. You got to go see somebody. And so I did. I went and saw a therapist outside of the military. And I will say, I'm not shilling for anything right now, but like therapy works.

And it's not just something you do when crisis hits. It's something you should be doing preventatively. And so like I would consider myself incredibly well adjusted now, but I absolutely still speak to someone because it's like that's part of your health. Yeah. You know, so I think I was able to pull myself out because I had friends, family support. I had a professional therapist. I think that's the reason.

I hope I'm not prying, but how are those relationships now? With the Navy guys? Horrible. destroyed, gone. Have you ever tried to mend that or is there no point that it was not. No. You know, I think that now enough time has passed since I was posting the stuff that ultimately

triggered the reaction I got. Like, it's been so long. And dude, this is the first time I was spoken about my military stuff publicly in like years. And this was frankly even watered down. So I don't think that these people necessarily are holding vendettas against me. I think a lot of them probably forgot.

They don't even care because it didn't affect them personally. It was like, oh, screw that guy. Um, but, uh, no, it, frankly, it's, it's a, it's a troubling part of my life that I, I, I have people that at one time I would have literally died for and who would have literally died for me that I am, I don't talk to at all. Like people that meant an enormous amount to me that are no longer in my life. And yes, I'm sure I should probably be the one to, to, to reach out and do, and I've done that with a couple people, but it's painful to even breach that. I think that I've just kind of avoided it. And maybe one day, you know, our paths will cross again, but not holding my breath. So I've heard this theory that you experience a range of emotion on a scale of zero to 10. And then you get married and then the range of emotion extends to negative 10 to 20. And then you have kids.

Yeah. And then there's no range. It's just negative infinity to infinity. As someone who's probably experienced a very intense range of emotion while going through the academy at different stages of your life, would you agree with that statement that even that range of emotion you were experiencing in this hard times paled in comparison to when you became married and when you had kids. I would say having kids is the one that does it for me. The range of emotions I felt were zero to ten in all the ways up until I had kids. And then you

have kids and it's like, I can't believe people do this. I can't believe people have like children. This is so much work and it never stops. And there's this funny meme that it was like the highs and lows of parenting. And it was like, the lows are, you know, your kids destroy an international vacation. And they like, you know, they like, break a window at a restaurant or they like, you know, peel over the carpet. But the highs are like, oh, Johnny caught a pop fly today. It's like, why do we do this? You know, but it's, it's so rewarding having kids. It's just, it's funny. At the end of the night, my kids all, they go to bed. And I always like go into their rooms and like, look at them sleeping in their bed. And I'm like, oh, my God, I love my kids so much. They're so wonderful.

I do. Those are all true sentiments, but it's like, then the daytime rolls around. And it's just like chaos, like everywhere. And that would be like, there are days that are so stressful that you're like, how. And so parenting is a tough task. And my wife does the bulk of it. So I'm, this is me complaining. Yeah. This is my complaining side. But yeah, having kids is, is a whirlwind to say the least. I respect your humility. I would say that's a theme that I've seen through this entire thing is your vulnerability and your ability to act. acknowledge the fact that, like, you messed up. Yeah.

Certain times in your life and you messed up bad. Yeah. And I respect that. I think a lot of people could take note of that and learn from that. Thank you. Yeah, I would say that that's a conscious thing that I do. It's a conscious thing. It's conscious in the sense that I think it's important for me to be,

I can get carried away and think I'm really great at stuff and, like, become very egotistical. But the way I don't do that is just being real with myself and taking accountability. for my missteps and not being afraid to talk about them. Because I think that it actually makes you a, you come off stronger and more competent when you're willing to be honest about your missteps. And I think that like you picked up on it, I'm not sitting here trying to play the humble card,

but it's, it makes people respect to you and they want to engage with you. They want to be around you because like you're being a human. A lot of people hide the things that actually are the most, they're the biggest parts of humanity, a screw up, you know, and I show mine to the world, and I think that that's the good way to do it. So you mentioned the live storytelling event. That's kind of crazy you're doing now. Are you nervous? Oh, yeah, yeah. So that's in the end of an audience? Yeah, no. I, I, if that's,

one of the questions leading up to this I saw in the email was like, what's your values and philosophies in life? And I actually, I had an answer plan. I'll tell you. Oh, okay, okay, good, because that's something I meant to, I meant to ask you because you studied philosophy. I did, I did, I did. But this is actually more just like life experiences led me to have one really specific thing. So in addition to in my marriage, I have the mantra of I'll always be good to Amanda in my life. And the thing that I'm literally teaching my kids is like, you got to do stuff that scares you. Because oftentimes, and this is not something I coined, but like the best things in life are like on the other side of fear, as I think Will Smith said, actually. In my life,

the things that scared me the most that I actually went and did, like being a Navy SEAL, there's so many tests. You got to take through SEAL training. They're horrifying. They're like so scary. But I did them. And I accomplish those things. And each time you get through those scary test gates, it like, your confidence grows, like your knowledge and experience grows. And I have just become someone that like, even if I, even if I kind of don't want to do it, I'll like push myself to do something that makes me so fucking uncomfortable. Like, for example, in a week, I'm going to step on stage with a mic in front of 1,300 people. Thirteen hundred people. And tell stories. That's a lot of people. It's in front of 1,300 people. It's sold out.

Paramount Theater. You sold it out? Yeah. It's a good idea. Is it just you? Oh, yeah. I literally, I told Nick and my team, I said it's important for the first show to be all on me.

I don't want a highly produced show. I want it to be like, give me a mic and a stage. Obviously, you know what stories you're going to tell me. And you've rehearsed this, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you feel about that?

Oh, terrified. But that's why I'm doing it. Like literally, that's the reason. I am scared to do a big public speaking of. event, so I'm doing a big public speaking event. But it's, it's, it's impressive. I'm, I'll, I'll be psyched about it when it's done. Right now, I'm like, what the fuck?

I mean, you've been through so much already. To me, this seems like this would be an easy thing. It's like, oh, yeah, it'll be great. It'll be great. It'll be great. It'll be good. And there, there is some truth to that. I think that, like, you know, in my moments of insecurity about this event, because I've known about this for months and months, you know.

I do remind myself that I have literally done things that are life and death at times. I've gone through the breach, you know. And I've also done. I've done public speaking, not a lot of it. I've spoken like 50 people like a couple times. But, you know, I think that like a lot of stuff that scares us is actually not nearly as scary as it seems. And I think that that's what I'm almost addicted to is like I like doing things that other people assign a high level of fear to or a high level of risk to. You know, like I'm literally drawn to those things.

I think naturally, I think it led to some bad behaviors when I was younger. I was drawn to stuff that was like risky but in a bad way. But then as I kind of course correct. my life, I began gravitating towards these challenges and things that, like, we're terrifying or carried a high amount of risk with them, but I just wanted to do them. But like, in my brain, it's a combination of, I don't want to fucking do this at all. And that's why I want to do it. And so I'm totally torn at all times. And then as soon as I do it, like, I have to find a new thing to do. That's also scary. And so that's just, that's how I'm wired. And I've been able to

harness it to help grow, you know, my end of the business. And I'm preaching it like, like, like, like, water parks are a big thing. That's our, our vacation are water parks. And my oldest is, like, obsessed with slides, like, water slides. She's always on YouTube, like, watching different slides, like, in Dubai or whatever. But then we get to the parks, and she's, like, super nervous about all the slides. You know, she, she, like, she seemed really confident. And she doesn't want to do it. And I'm like, you got to do things that scary, buddy. You got to do it. And she'll, like, say it to her so she's like yeah i gotta do things that scare me and she'll do the slide and it's like at the end she's like glowing she's like i can't believe i did that and so it's like rubbing off on her you know

i think public speaking is like the most common fear people people are like i'd rather die than speak in public you know it's like yeah it's it's yeah i'm i'm not a public speaker i am in a studio by myself speaker but you're gonna do great no thank you i heard a quote that was turned nervousness and anxiety into excitement because they're very close emotions yeah but excitement just has like this positive over and undertone. True. I think that like, I think it was like Michael Phelps maybe.

Was it him that's at it? I think so because someone asked him, how are you able to stay so calm, given like the stakes of what you're doing? And he's like, well, I just, nervousness and excitement are kind of the same emotion.

And my coach tells me to just like, turn your nerves into excitement. And that's what I do. And it's like, really, so it's that simple. But it's like, that's why you're a world-class Olympic athlete

because you can do that. Not everyone can do that, you know. So I don't think I can do that. I think I ride the fear train. I just do it anyways. Ballin management. Is that something you'd like to talk about?

Yeah, I touch in it briefly. Yeah, we have a couple of creators that we're managing that Nick built out ball and management. The analogy I give, I've given to Nick and he's used this, it's like, if you're playing, I use a baseball fan, by the way. Oh, cool. Yeah, huge baseball fan. So if you're a really good baseball player and you can go pro, you want to go pro. You want to play for like, you know, whatever your best team is. Like for me, the Red Sox, like, if I'm like the best collegiate baseball player, like,

I'm not going to be like, I'm going to go to like, you know, some random country and go play baseball there. No, you're going to go to like the show. You're going to go to like major league baseball. That's where you want to be. And so we want Ballin Studios to become the equivalent of like the Boston Red Sox, but for storytellers. Like the place you want to go.

If you're a storyteller and you want to like expand and be the most noteworthy and have the most resources and the most reach, you go to. ball in studios. And they get access to your like 37p, like, like, assistance on script writing and like editing and all that. There is an enormous amount of support that is both current and being bill. I mean, Nick is very aggressive about hiring early and like establishing different pockets of people that are ready to support these new people when they come in so that when they arrive, it's not like, don't worry, we're going to help you. It's like, here's all your brand deals that Nick's already got for you. Here's the people that are going to help you write, research,

edit. Like, what else do you need? Like, we'll pay for it. And, You know, left and so we want it to be like you've made it if you're a storyteller. We're the early stages of that, but like that's, we have a very high threshold of quality for everything we're doing, which is why we have super intense hiring processes and boot camps you've got to go through because we really want this to be like the creme de la creme of like professional storytelling. Also, in order to really grow up, we need other hosts. I cannot do all the different shows. And so we need like an army of hosts. You know what you need? Honestly, I think a kid's, channel where you tell fun stories for kids.

Definitely is so well. For sure. And I think that it's a delicate area because one of the things we've been told by people we've spoken to is like once you go kid, once you go juvenile, it's very difficult to like keep the brand relevant for adults that it almost taints the brand for adults. Even like a separate channel, separate person, separate area. It's part of the ecosystem. I would be nervous about a little bit of cross-contamination.

Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things that we've kind of like put on the back burner, but not like, we'll never do that. More like, okay, we'll keep it 18 plus, at least in theory. One of the things that it is, so we have what's called, is aspirational? Is that the demographic? Where like, even though the content is absolutely designed for adults, we're not, I'm not telling these stories for kids. They're for adults. But undoubtedly, kids are watching this content.

And there's like, there's, I don't know, like coolness to your watch, you watch an R-rated movie when you're not 17? I've done that, you know what I mean? And so I think that we're actually already capturing a slightly juvenile audience, not kids, kids, but like teenagers and stuff. If we ever get into like true kids content, I think it would just be a very deliberate move that would be very mapped out, you know. Okay. Well, so yeah, so we have a new show that's coming out next week. It's the first co-production we're doing with Amazon Music, so through Wondry Studios.

So our studio has a deal with Amazon Music. And so we're doing medical mysteries. It's going to be, it's very, it'll sound like all of the shows that I do right now on YouTube or podcast, but it'll be themed around medical mysteries. I think I actually, you already did one that was a medical video. I've seen like basically. We have touched on some medical stories on YouTube for sure. And there was one that was like really confusing.

I forget it like got into her lungs. Oh yeah, Gloria Ramirez. Yes, yes. That one was really fascinating. That one like had my brain. I looked up the thing and all of that stuff like afterwards. Yeah, no. Yeah, so she went in feeling sick.

She was like terminal cancer and she was doing DIY treatments, which included rubbing this wax. It was like a mechanical wax or something. You can pick up at the hardware store like all over her body, which apparently people had said that worked for this type of cancer. And so she was doing that. But then her organ started to shut down. She got brought into the emergency room.

And she began emitting this odor, this like garlicky odor. and like the nurses and doctors began passing out in the room with her. They tried to take her blood. But when they pulled the blood out, it like crystallized inside of the tube. It like turned into these white crystals. And then basically turn into this like biohazard, this gas coming off of her body and from the blood samples. The short version is it was this perfect series of events that I don't explicitly remember. But it started with this wax she put on.

Her skin absorbed it. And then it mixed with the type of treatment she was going. getting for her cancer, I believe. And it created this, like, new chemical that is harmless unless it's, like, oxidized or something. And, like, the first step that the doctors took when they brought her in was to, like, give her oxygen, you know, because it was just like, it was just like, going through the serious.

Yeah, it was when she was taking the oxygen, it continually got worse. So, like, the oxygen mixed with this new chemical and created a toxic chemical, but don't worry, it's only toxic if it gets pulled out of her body. And they began telling her blood out. And they crystallized. And that was the, the new compound, but don't worry, it's in the vial still, it's okay. But they were like, what are these crystals?

And they put them on petri dishes. And suddenly you've exposed this chemical to the open air, and it became lethal. That's insane. And so she ended up passing away. I probably got some details wrong there, but that's the gist of the story. It was like all the things that happened in a row had to happen exactly as they happened. Any of the steps that were taken by the doctors at the times they took them, there would have been no issue. No one would have gotten, no one had to pass out, no order nothing.

It was like every little thing had to be exactly right. Like the odds of this happening are basically zero. Wow. So, yeah, medical, if you're into that stuff, medical mistress. I love that episode. Graham's probably anxious because he's got a flight. He's got a catch. Flight boards in less than an hour.

Oh, God, dude, you gotta go. I just want to say, thank you so much. This has been an honor. I love your channel. I love it so much. I love it so much. And then I'm supposed to remind Jack to. Oh, yes.

Okay, get the thumbnail real quick. Let me get a thumbnail. A thumbnail. Yeah. Leave it rolling real quick. Okay, so, so serious.