The Basement: MrBallen | YouTube's Best Storyteller Tells His Own
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How did a viral Great Wolf Lodge video launch MrBallen’s rise on social media?
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Today, we're talking with John Allen. You know him as Mr. Ballin, the guy in the flannel with the strange, dark, and mysterious stories. In SEAL training, they called him Shakespeare. There was one strip of sand where the instructors left students alone, and John spent it telling stories to keep his class sane. That instinct survived a grenade in Afghanistan and a medical retirement. Then it made him famous.
They called me Shakespeare Folsom, you know.
For telling stories?
Yeah, for organizing a theater program. We did Cats. I have regrets.
Today, we're covering how that happened, what the success cost him, and the craft of a story five million strangers will stop scrolling for. His new book is The Terror Within, nine illustrated stories, four never told anywhere.
The Terror Within, great title. My memoirs got a similar one. The Terror Within, 14 feet of my bowl. It's about the crab cat.
Partway through, John tells a few stories from his military years he's never told anywhere else. And it gets kind of heavy. I'm glad he trusted me with it. Stick around after the episode and I'll pop back in and untangle the conversation. There's going to be some surprises at the end, like there always is.
Let's go down to the basement.
John, welcome to the basement.
Thank you, man. All right. So happy to be here, dude. Are you really? No, really. No, really. No, I'll be honest. Straight up about it. Like, I have seen in our comments for years, not like, oh, dude, I love the Wi-Fi. I was like, this is crap, what you do. But more like, dude. You and AJ, you got to get together. These are my two shows, Mr. Ballin and The Y Files. And so I've always been aware of you and your show. I see clips of you all the time. I saw you went on Sean Ryan. And I was secretly like, that's fucking awesome. I've been swearing the show. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, okay. And no, just you're someone that I've always really respected. I love, like you talked about craft before the show. Like it's so obvious that you put so much care into building out your show and like it's so uniquely yours.
And I know how much work goes into this and how much skill goes into this. And I've just respected you from afar. And it's really cool to finally be collaborating as they say.
That was very sweet. I wasn't going to start with this, but since you were so nice, I probably have to credit you for at least my early success because I was just floundering in obscurity, doing my weird stuff with the fish. And my brother's like, you should post on TikTok. And I was like, no one watches this shit on TikTok. He's like, well, Mr. Ballin does it. I said, I don't know how that is. So I go and I see your, I'm like, wow, it's working for him. So I did it. It didn't work for me on TikTok.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did a viral Great Wolf Lodge video launch MrBallen’s rise on social media?
0:01–15:24
2
How did Navy SEAL training and early YouTube success shape John Allen’s career and pressure?
15:24–1:09:31
3
What was Hell Week like and how did SEAL training push recruits to dissociate?
1:09:31–1:13:32
4
How did sudden online fame impact MrBallen’s work, health, and creative process?
1:13:32–1:22:00
5
What happened in deployments that led to moral injury and medical retirement?
1:22:00–2:30:49
6
How did telling child-related crime stories lead John to launch the Mr. Ballen Foundation?
2:30:49–2:33:33
7
What happened to Argentine officer Sergio Pucheta and why is his alien encounter story considered credible?
2:33:33–2:40:01
8
How does John craft emotionally powerful true-crime stories and adjust them for live audiences?
2:40:01–3:54:19
Speakers
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