From Navy SEAL to SCARY YouTuber | The MrBallen story

what's up everybody my name is john allen i was a navy seal for a little while and then i got out and became a scary storyteller on the internet under the name mr ballen i'm 31 i've been married to my wife amanda for almost 10 years we met in college and we have two daughters and we're about to have our son literally next week so you know fingers crossed if that goes well a couple of weeks ago i put a story out on my my instagram that just asked hey if you have any questions for me i'm going to do a q a on my youtube channel and i was just floored by the number of questions people had for me it was incredibly flattering so thank you i kind of did the easy button and generalized questions that were being asked more than once and created a list of questions that i'm going to go through on this video today before we get started if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format then you've come to the right place because that's all i do and i upload three four even five times every week so if that's of interest to you please push the like button into the grand canyon and also subscribe to my channel and turn on all post notifications so you don't miss any of my weekly uploads alright let's get going first question where did i grow up so i grew up in quincy massachusetts it's a town just south of boston about 10 minutes south about 100 000 people that live there it's a fierce new england sports town red sox bruins patriots celtics somebody asked me about my famous while we're young mother story when i was in high school in quincy i i had a a homeroom period in my schedule basically a free time period where i was in the same room as one of my older sisters really close friends and i just naturally sat next to her there was nothing going on between us i was just i knew her because she's friends with my with my sister and apparently her boyfriend really took exception to that he thought that i was like hitting on her and trying to take her away from him and i wasn't i didn't even know this was going on but either way apparently it got out that i was like you know hitting on his girlfriend and so i was challenged to a fight so quincy it's interesting because when i was growing up street fighting was like a really big part of the culture it was like a time-honored tradition that at some point you're probably gonna get into a fist fight with somebody and you gotta like defend your honor you know that's that's just how it was and the people i hung out with my circle of friends they were really these guys are tough okay everybody knew these guys were tough and quincy i wasn't tough i was around the tough guys i wasn't a tough guy and uh but i thought of myself as being you know very tough and so when it came up that paul wanted to fight me i'm like i'm gonna beat the [ __ ] this guy's like so confident never been in a fight i've been around other people fighting but not my own and uh so the fight was scheduled for the day before thanksgiving this is my sophomore year high school and and paul was a junior i remember on the day of the fight i'm in the halls of my high school and paul was like this big time hockey player and he's like the captain of the team whatever and i was talking so much crap about paul people started to kind of buy into the hype that i was like the secret tough guy especially because the people i was around and like all day in the halls i'm like talking so much crap about paul and people would come up to me like hey man you gotta take it easy on paul dude like he's a good guy don't hurt him we need him we need him for the for the hockey season okay please don't hurt him i'm like yeah i'll try not to hurt him so we we get up to this field and i show up with this huge posse 50 people that show up with me and i'm like you know shadow boxing i'm such an idiot i'm like so cocky we get up there and paul's not there yet and i'm like this guy's pathetic he's afraid of me saying he's not even gonna make it here and so like half an hour goes by and i'm getting even more confident like yeah he's just scared of me and then of course paul shows up with no posse he shows up with one guy com as can be and he he gets out and walks up this hill to where i am i'm like you know at the top of this hill getting ready and i have this line where he's getting closer and closer to me and he's he's late remember and as he's getting closer to me i go while we're young [ __ ] like as if i'm gonna beat him up and that he's been so late he proceeds to beat the [ __ ] out of me the absolute [ __ ] out of me in front of the whole school and everybody heard me say my big line like it was it was so outrageous that like not only did all of my peers know me for this but even my teachers would come up to be like hey man how was that fight yesterday so that was uh that was quincy that's quincy in a nutshell so the next question was what inspired me to ultimately leave quincy and become a navy seal obviously to compensate for the loss to paul no uh the truth is i i came from a family that was really really successful i came from a family where academic achievement was always heralded as kind of the pinnacle of success and while i certainly had the aptitude to be a good student i instead was busy getting my kicked by paul on the day before thanksgiving no i've rebelled you know i didn't want to be an academic but my way of rebelling was not to like put my energy into something else and be good at it it was just to like be a lousy student and call that rebellion and so by the end of high school i had kind of so-so grades i was a good baseball player growing up but uh by the time i got to my senior year it was like huh so i kind of squandered baseball because i stopped really trying it all my grades were pretty bad and i just realized that you know i i've kind of done nothing with my life my mom who's a professional writer she ended up getting me into college she wrote my college essay and in fact my grades were so bad but my essay was so good that the college reached out to me and they were like hey you're kind of a non-traditional candidate here because your grades are awful but your essay was so good you can come to our school and so i got accepted into the university of massachusetts located in amherst massachusetts i get to amherst and i promptly fail out effectively after one semester i was spending my time uh not going to class and that's pretty much it there was a big riot on campus that i may or may not have been involved in and there were some images of me and so i had to withdraw from the school to avoid failing out slash getting in trouble for this riot and i remember i came back home and i'm literally living in my mother's basement and it really dawned on me now that like i hadn't done much at the end of high school and my mom had hooked it up and got me into college now i've blown that too i remember feeling so pathetic what have you done here you are a joke so i decided that i didn't want to be a failure anymore i wanted to do something with my life and i figured the first step is graduating college and so i ended up getting into another school locally in boston so the university of massachusetts boston it's a different campus for three semesters went there i worked at a gym in the morning at like 5 a.m checking people into a gym and then i would take the train in to boston take some classes there and then i'd come home and stay in my mom's basement it was a really important time in my life because it was like the first time i was holding myself accountable i had no sympathy for my mom or my parents they're like you screwed it up you can figure out college you know do whatever you got to do but you're getting your life together on your own which was something i needed in my life for sure it was around this time that i started thinking about the military because a lot of my friends in high school had joined the marine corps and gone overseas to iraq and to afghanistan and i really idolized them and i and i always had a real interest in the military and it was around this time these formative years where my mom of all people her best friend's two brothers were both retiring navy seals and my mom was like well why don't you go talk to them about the military and i'm like wow that's so cool i've like played navy seals and video games and so i went and met with them and i was just so taken with them as people the thing with navy seal training if you don't know anything about it it's incredibly accessible anybody for the most part can try out but almost no one makes it through the rigorous training i'm generalizing but that's kind of how it works so in order to succeed in the training pipeline which is very long very difficult you just got to be able to suck it up and suffer for a really long time and if you make it through all that you can become a navy seal and it's kind of like you're reborn in a way and that's the way they were talking about becoming a seal it's like whoever you were before you became a seal kind of goes away and you become something new and it really spoke to me and i was at that point in my life where i was just starting to get my life back together taking classes and trying to graduate and it just seemed like i had suddenly discovered the thing that was perfect for me if i could just get through navy seal training i could be in the military which is something i was interested in i would be able to also kind of overwrite a lot of the bad decisions i had made and a lot of the mediocrity in my life so that when people look back at me it will not be the guy that could have done a bunch of things but ultimately didn't and it would instead be man that that john allen he really got his act together and that that worked for me that was enough but i also i stuck to college i did end up graduating college i would actually go back to the university of massachusetts at amherst in western mass that's where i'd meet my wife amanda we started dating while i was out there and i graduated college and then i immediately uh went to a recruiter and i joined the navy and went off to seal training the training to become a seal it's very very long basically almost two years of training 15 percent of people will be successful and actually become seals but you got to remember that the initial pool of people that are in that statistic are highly qualified one of the questions was what's the hardest part of seal training for me personally was a test called pool comp where it's this it's about the halfway point of selection phase which is called buds or basic underwater demolition seal training and there's a 20-minute test where you where you basically show that you can withstand an underwater emergency with your scuba tanks on so really what happens is you go underwater and you stay there for 20 minutes while instructors come down and turn your air off and rip the hoses out of your mouth but every time they're like assaulting you you got to go in the fetal position and like wait for them to stop tying knots in your hoses you might see your mouthpiece over here but you got to go through the same procedures reach back you do all these different things to regain your air source so you end up becoming quite hypoxic you're very low on oxygen and so of the 20-minute test really you're spending about half of that without air really the whole point of the test is you know do the procedures but show you can keep your composure and i was just horrible at this test full panic mode like no composure i was like the poster child of what not to do but i ultimately on the day that i passed i just i kind of went in the pool with this reckless abandon like you know what i'm just gonna go in there and drown that's my approach and it made it pretty simple like i just don't care anymore i'm gonna just go in the pool and do these stupid procedures and probably drown and believe it or not that was enough for me one of the more popular questions was what was my scariest or most difficult experience as a navy seal and so i have one that stands out above all others and it's actually what ultimately led to me leaving the seal teams and that was when i got blown up in afghanistan in 2014. we're in this area in afghanistan that was definitely a bad guy town we had gone in during the day and started getting shot at a couple of our partner for us had gotten shot our dog got shot it was a bad start to the day and over the course of about six hours we were kind of fighting rooftop to rooftop with these people that just kept vanishing and by the end of the night we were getting ready to leave this this little city we had all kind of we as in our seal team or platoon and broken up into little groups of called fire teams like pockets of five six people out of the 25 of us that were there and my fire team not mine like i was in charge i was just in this fire team we were located on a section of the city kind of closer to the exit of the city and as we're getting ready to leave one of our drones spots a group of people not americans not seals that are located near the exit and our fire team was was nearest them and so we decided our fire team we would just go over and scout out who these people were because we've been getting shot at all day and we don't know where people are anymore and we're worried that if we don't inspect this group that they could be planning an attack on us when we try to leave because we're getting ready to leave here so we end up walking down this alleyway and we're going down this like tea alleyway when we get down the the stem here and reach the head of the tea if you will we're expecting to be able to look over this wall and look out across this field and see this group of of men that are that are hiding but when we got down to the end of the alleyway they weren't across the field on that wall they were on this wall like a foot away from us on the immediate other side of the wall and they hadn't heard us sneak up and they were you know enemy combatants and they had grenades with the pins already pulled out as a defensive mechanism in case they were compromised and in the craziest few seconds of my life grenades are coming over the wall there's shooting happening on both sides the grenade actually came over and hit my shoulder and landed next to me and detonated and i remember kind of getting up and looking around and it's just chaos we're in this like tight little alleyway and there's just gunfire everywhere and i was just expecting to either die from bleeding or have one of the bad guys come from around the wall and finish me off i tried to stand i couldn't stand somebody came over and dragged me around down that t section i'm down here now and so he told me to put my tourniquets on that that's it's a device that helps you stop bleeding and then he went back down to help other people i couldn't get my tourniquets off of my kit i couldn't put them on i was bleeding to death and i remember thinking about my wife and i went deaf and blind and i remember being like huh i'm gonna die in afghanistan it was not so much a matter of will i die so much as i'm currently dying it's it's interesting i your body your brain is acutely aware when something really bad is happening and it's more matter of fact than anything else as i'm preparing to die i remember just wishing that my wife and i had started a family before i deployed because we actually kind of pushed it off and said let's get through a deployment and then you know when you come back we can think about having kids and so i just was like man i wish i had started a family and then i passed out thinking that would be the end but my medic was an all-star he ran over and while i'm laying there was able to stop the bleed my interpreter laid over me and protected me because we're still in the middle of a gunfight i was worthless my teammates were able to call in airstrikes and call him medical support and we were able to hightail our way out of there and i was saved thanks entirely to my team the most popular question is how did i become inspired to go from all that to telling scary stories on the internet it's it's been a bit of a journey i got medically retired in 2017 and i co-founded and was the ceo of a charity called elite meet which is this organization that helps navy seals and other elite special operators get jobs in the private sector it was built in large part to help me get a job ironically my job became running a service that helps people get jobs but i did that for a few years i'm still on the board of elite meat i also co-founded a uh kind of the opposite of elite meet it's called operators association and it helps aspiring special operators it's a mentorship platform for them it's on patreon and we help them become special operators so kind of hitting on both ends of the spectrum and i'm still a partner over there and so while i was building those two companies i saw a need to really leverage social media to get the word out about your companies and what you're doing that's what everybody does and so my go-to was sharing my experience as a navy seal and talking about my navy seal experience and drawing people onto my pages that way and then kind of funneling them to my other business ventures that are both military related but it was really difficult because the topics i was talking about you know it draws a lot of negativity from the active duty community that are in the seal teams they don't necessarily like it when people like me are talking you know about being a navy seal and all the things i've done because it comes off as very self-centered and very like look at me look how great i am and i'm not acting like i wasn't doing that in my votes but uh it's a bad look and i started getting a lot of negativity from from some people in the community you know i was i was mad about it and i felt betrayed but ultimately uh you know i made my own decisions you know i chose to do what i was doing and decided that all i can do is maybe try to change my content style and focus on something else i also just felt like i was running out of stories to tell and so for a lot of reasons i just i didn't want to be doing what i was doing which was a lot of navy seal-centered content and on a whim i posted a story on tick tock about the diat love pass incident these russian hikers go off into the wilderness get lost and everybody speculates that like some monster killed them or something i'm interested in this i've always been interested in spooky you know mysterious stuff i find myself researching that on my own so i'm just interested in this and so like out of left field i'm doing like navy seal content navy seal content maybe some content death love pass russian hikers go missing in the mountains in the 1950s but it went viral on on tick tock so i and so i was like that's great i'll do another one and i started posting some stories more and more stories about like scary stuff and mysterious unsolved mysteries and it really took off i think in part because i'm really really passionate about telling stories one but specifically i'm really interested in strange dark and mysterious content because i had either a really intense sleep paralysis story or a paranormal one or maybe some combination but you can check it out it's one of my more popular videos on my youtube channel it's just what i saw in my room still haunts me my tick tock really blew up it got it's at 6.6 million followers now which is just mind-blowing to me um and i've transitioned over to youtube so that i can make this a career i can actually go full time on youtube and that's what i've been doing now for the past two months a lot of people ask what is it like to be a youtuber it's unbelievable how much time goes into this i love doing it so this is not me complaining it's the opposite but all i think about is youtube that is all i think about i wake up i'm on youtube i'm watching youtube i'm thinking about youtube i'm watching tutorials on how to be a better speaker how to be a better youtuber and then i'm pouring into documents that i've been saving and articles i'm supposed to read and every day i'm probably spending probably i don't know five hours of research for that day's video even if i already know it i'll spend five hours just researching it and internalizing the story i spend about an hour to to maybe even an hour and a half actually filming it i do a single take on my iphone i film everything on my iphone i don't have a script now let me be clear here i do write a script but the best way to tell a story in my opinion is to be the story be in the story and you can't do that if you're reciting a script and so i like internalize the story that's why it takes me so many hours to really get ready for story i need to really feel like i'm in it and so the script serves as more like a guide but i'll look at a script i'll think about it and then i'll tell the story so i would say for any video it takes about six to seven hours just from okay i have the idea research it internalize it shoot it and then i spend another two hours at night doing the rough cut edit not even the full edit i kick it to my amazing editor shout out to wes j adams he's my guy shout out to you wes he takes the rough cut and he puts in the imagery and he makes it much sexier and then we upload it the next day uh and since i'm posting five days a week we have to be on a schedule where we're always a couple posts ahead so pretty much there is no off time with the exception of maybe saturday uh but it's a really i feel like i feel like i'm in such a privileged position i love doing this i'm proud of what i'm doing and it's just so much fun to do something that i so fundamentally enjoy doing so a couple fun facts about me i i use little tech decks little hand skateboards i have like little ramps and stuff [Music] i i'll literally sit here and like flip around with my tech deck the whole time to like jog my my creative mind also on the notion of little skateboards i was world ranked in uh in the game skate it's a video game on playstation 3. uh skate one and skate two i was i was literally in the top 30. uh it's a game where you would like do a trick and then somebody else tries to match your trick if they can't match it they get a letter until they spell out s-k-a-t and then they lose i was playing this all the time when i was in college and i didn't even know i was so good at it and i was just beating everybody and i started getting all these notifications from people being like dude you're not even that good like my brother played you last night you weren't even that good man i don't know how you're like world ranked and i went to the leaderboard and there i was so but when i do have some spare time i do like gaming i mostly just play offline you know i'm kind of i'm 31 not like big into online gaming didn't really grow up with it but i'll play like sports games like i love mlb the show huge baseball fan but like i don't really play the game i just like edit the rosters and perfect everything about the rosters to where like you know make sure their cleats are the right color and that their numbers are right and their stats are right like i it's almost like i'm taking a sports game and turning it into a life simulation like i tell myself i'm gonna edit these rosters and make them perfect and then i'm gonna play that game and then i never get to playing it i just edit the rosters and then don't play the game i don't know if this was even an interesting episode or not but i'm more than happy to do more of these or maybe answer more specific questions but i think i touched on the big ones i do want to say that i i am just so thankful that i even have this opportunity to have people that actually want to see my videos it's it's an incredible thing i feel so lucky i really genuinely wish i could get to know every single one of you guys uh guys and gals because this is just it's a dream come true for me and my family and i just can't thank you enough so if you enjoyed today's video and you haven't done this already please push the like button into the grand canyon and also subscribe to this channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of my weekly uploads if you want to get in touch with me you can direct message me on instagram or on twitter same username for both platforms it's johnballen416 also i have a ton of content on tick tock my username over there is mr ballen and if you have a story submission please submit it to our subreddit it's just called mr ballin it's linked below i read that every day if i intentionally use your story i will credit you so whether i see you on instagram tick tock twitter reddit here on youtube or some combination i'm just incredibly thankful and until next time guys that's gonna do it see ya all right so i wanted to bring you into my dojo where i create all of my content it's called the mustard room uh it's pretty high speed so don't be intimidated it's my setup it's nice and neat uh this is where all the magic happens right here here's my my ring light uh there's my little crappy tripod got my uh i use tektex when i'm trying to uh become more creative uh yes this is this is this is my setup right here

Channel: MrBallen

Views: 3,156,431

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Id: TpbqUUsgED0

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020