John Ballen
speaker
344 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
John Ballen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But if we're talking about literally speaking a story, telling a story, and assuming you have people listening to that story right in front of you, which is a medium by which many of us tell stories, telling our friends, telling our family members, to tell a really good story, it has less to do with the content of the story and more to do with the delivery of that story.
When I told you the Dyatlov Pass story, I was fully committed to telling you that story. I didn't care if you thought it was interesting or not. I thought it was interesting enough that I was gonna give you my hand gestures. I'm gonna make sure I harp on the details that I find really interesting. But it's like a level of commitment to telling that story Like that's the key.
It's commit to – like you have to be in the story. And like for example, when I did the live tour, like that's the purest form of – you're either going to be awkward up there and like get through it or you're going to fucking own the story, be in the stories and tell it to those people right there. And they're going to hear what I want to tell them.
So it's like the delivery, it's not just practice and get your words right. Hardly. Dude, I don't even use a script when I tell stories. I look at the story, I learn the story, I internalize the story, and then I inhabit the story. And when I tell you the story, it should almost feel like I was there. Like that is the level of commitment you need.
And I would say also like with regards to general storytelling, it really is true that it has less to do with like finessing the language so it's perfect or getting your script exactly right. It's like I would say when it comes to most stories, you need to make sure there's some sort of payoff at the end of the story, which is sort of like storytelling 101.
But if you look at the way newspapers structure stories, for those who maybe don't read the newspaper or generally, here's how it goes. This thing happened. And now I'm going to tell you the details of what that thing is and how it happened, right? That's not good storytelling. That's great for getting information across, right?
But all too often, if you look on like YouTube or if you look at other people who tell like, you know, mysteries, for example, sometimes in their header, it'll be like, you know, crazy, like golden, you know, skeleton found in cave in Russia. And like – actually, that's pretty compelling. Maybe I'd read that. But it's like Suzanne murdered in London.
And then you click on it to find out what happened. But it's like you don't want your audience to already – in certain cases, you don't necessarily want your audience to know where the story is going. They might have a very strong inclination that Suzanne is going to get killed at the end of the story or there's going to be a golden skeleton found in Russia. Yeah.
But being a storyteller, your job is to keep people invested and to build tension and to get them like ready for the payoff at the end. Any story can have a twist at the end. It depends on how you tell it. Like it isn't like some stories have payoffs and some don't. Absolutely not. You can use point of view. You can inhabit aspects of the story that give different lenses into the story. But –
Own the story when you tell it and ensure that there's some type of payoff at the end, whatever it is. Like when I told you that the outlaw past story, like ultimately the goal is to get you to see that, wow, all these conflicting things, there's pictures of this and that. But the Russian government said an unknown, unnatural force is responsible and then closed the case.
The whole point of that is to say all these crazy things that are objective, they objectively happen, that we have data, we have pictures, we have all these things. I've demonstrated that to you. And clearly something's wrong and they sealed the case and no one could look into it. The whole point is to make you think, what is going on over there? But if I had said, guess what?
There's this case that's sealed and no one will look into it. Here's what happened. It's the same story, but I've opened with the reveal. You got to do it the other way. So pay off at the end and own the storytelling aspect of it.
would say the story that i'm the most proud of in terms of just how difficult it was to piece it together is the the headless valley and it's actually in our graphic novel as well um it isn't that it's literally the best story but it's a story that is a composite of a whole bunch of anecdotes over about a hundred years there's this i know we don't have time but
There's this place in Canada called the Northwest Territories. And so it's a part of Canada that's already very remote, and it's just wilderness and forests. And there's this section called the Northwest Territories, which is even more remote. It's as big as Germany, but Germany has like 50 million residents, and this has like 50,000 people there. So it's like no one lives there.
And within the Northwest Territories, there's this valley, this like river that cuts through this beautiful valley called the Nahanni Valley, which has been now dubbed the Headless Valley. Because over the course of 100 years, all these people who've gone into this valley have turned up headless. But like in the most bizarre ways, and also you can't really get into this valley.
It's very difficult to do. You can't fly there. You can't hike there. You have to either take a boat upstream and literally carry a boat up a couple waterfalls and then continue going upstream. Or there is an overland hike, but it's like 70 miles of treacherous terrain. So it's really hard to get there. It's totally remote, and the only other people that ever lived there were the Nahanni tribe.
And they, one day, somebody was actually there on a hunting expedition. They noticed that the Nahanni tribe, which made up like hundreds of people, they were camped out along this river. They disappeared overnight, and literally nobody knows what happened to them. They left behind their... All their equipment, all their housing, it was left. They just vanished. No one knows what happened to them.
And there's rumors of like white creatures wandering the woods. But I took like seven or eight anecdotes chronologically and pieced them all together and created what, in my opinion, is the most comprehensive narrative of what could be happening in the Headless Valley. And I'm very proud of the way it was written and put together. And it's the first story in the graphic novel as well.
I would say that what I love about the podcast space that I hope continues is that it is not corporate in the sense that it's totally like anybody can start a podcast. We're seeing so many podcasts, but it's like... Podcasts rise based on the merit of those shows versus like there's not a lot of corporate pushing behind podcasts.
It's sort of like the corporations show up and take the podcast or try to license podcasts that have already sort of made their place, but they don't have a lot of influence over who or what they do. So it's like it's this great meritocracy of content where the podcasts are growing and succeeding based largely on merit and skill. And they're covering all these topics that are like so far reaching.
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