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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Appearances
I know exactly who that is. And they'd like mean mug me and my family at the grocery store or the gym. Because remember, this is not like a normal group of people. This is like A group of highly trained killers of like operators, people that like go to war. They're not afraid of conflict. And I have done something that in many ways is like tarnished their brand. Not their brand.
That's not how they look at it. Tarnished their brotherhood. It's like I'm being selfish. And I was – they hated me. I got –
regularly two to three messages email instagram wherever i i get i get phone calls voice messages of people leaving me just the most deep cutting personal like i this is how i know you and this is what's being said about you and this is how i feel about you it was horrible but luckily uh
I had already had the experience in my life, the CS gas thing, the coming home from college thing, of fairly quickly realizing that no matter how I justify this, no matter how I justify why I drifted into this arena, Ultimately, I knew what was going on. I knew the line.
And I knew when I crossed the line of being... No matter what the public thinks about sealed content that you see on the internet, I knew amongst the huge majority of people that will never be public about their service, the active duty guys and the retired guys, I had crossed the line for them. And I was not dumb.
I would have been just as upset if I was them, still active, looking at a guy like me. But instead of like... getting mad at anybody or looking for retribution or trying to justify it. I deleted it all at some point. I remember there was a night I'm like sitting on my couch and I got a message from somebody that I would have said was one of my very close friends. And it just said, you suck.
That's all it said. But that sounds stupid. But this is somebody who's on team six. This is somebody who is, I specifically trained with and was like very close with like his wife and my wife were close. And like, I know what the context of this message is. It's way more than you suck. It's, we're not the same anymore. Like you're different and I look down on you. And I was like, I can't do this.
There is no amount of success that I could possibly achieve doing the Navy SEAL content stuff that would be worth what I'm going through right now. And so instead of being like, I'm going to just act like that didn't happen, I just removed all the content, save for a couple of very small specific things. And I hadn't lost the itch for making content, but it was like,
I can't do anything with regards to being a SEAL because that's not worth it to me and I don't want to do it. I felt wrong. And after trying things that never worked like sketch comedy and like following trends at one point, I was my lowest – my lowest moment, my worst one was I – there was a trend on TikTok briefly where people would – tell, like, sort of weirdly traumatic stories.
Not traumatic, but, like, intense stories, but with autotune. They'd use the feature in TikTok that was autotune, and they'd, like, sort of sing it as autotune. But it would be, like, about the time they got, like, mugged. And so, like, the contrast is so extreme, it's sort of interesting.
I did something like that. And I made it. And I was like, I cannot post this. This is like the worst thing I've ever made. But nothing worked. And I remember thinking like, okay, you know, I don't have a clue what I could do that would be interesting. And actually, I remember I had these two documents in my computer. This is, again, post-deleting everything.
I'm like trying to make it on social media with something different. I had this one document that was like ideas for content that were not SEAL-related, that were like totally divorced from that, the sketch comedy, the auto-tune, whatever it was. And I literally had exhausted all of them.
But I had this other document that – I didn't even know why I had separated this topic, but it was – all I wrote on it was Dyatlov Pass, right? So personally, I am interested in the strange, dark, and mysterious, the tagline that's become the Mr. Ballin thing. Basically unsolved mysteries, but not like – don't think true crime necessarily. Think like world-level mysteries like – What's out there?
Is there life out there? Like, why is this portion of Antarctica blacked out on Google Earth? Like, the deep, like, scintillating stuff that no one really has an answer to. I've always been drawn to that stuff. And there's a really famous mystery called the Dyatlov Pass.
And it's about these hikers in the 50s, these nine really experienced hikers who are going for their what's called their level three mountaineering test, which sounds sort of like run of the mill. But in fact, in Soviet Russia in the 1950s, this was like master mountaineer. Nobody had level three. This is like the top.
If you did this, you're like the best climbers in the country, if not potentially the world. This is a big deal. And the way you pass your level three is you and the people taking it with you. There was nine of them. You have to map out this route through this really rugged part of whatever mountain you're going to use. They use the Ural Mountains. So big snow swept, like huge icy mountains.
And you map out this course that like checks the boxes of difficulty. And you're effectively timed. You have to start on a particular day and time. And they have people set up along the way, the scheduled checkpoints, if you will. And so they brought cameras with them, this group. This is, again, 1952, I think it was. And so there's these young nine hikers who were like so excited to do this test.
No one's stressed. They're so pumped. There's a couple of couples in there. They set off on this journey. And I think they reached the first checkpoint. I forget what it is, but they didn't make it to whatever second checkpoint or whatever it was. And there was a protocol for the people who were sort of sponsoring this test that were part of the checkpoints that knew this.
They knew what was going on, where if they missed a checkpoint, there's like this big search that goes out to make sure they're okay. Even though there's some expectation that they might not make a checkpoint by like a day because it's a difficult test. Yeah. But the protocol is like really extreme.
As soon as they go missing, it's like the army gets involved and they go and follow the route to find the hikers. So they missed the checkpoint. This protocol is enacted. And not only are there pictures that we will get from the hikers, but there was cameras that came with the search crew. They follow the trail that they're supposed to be on. This is, again, there's no trees.
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