AI transcript
0:00:04 I watched this grenade come over the wall and it’s like I can see it for a second.
0:00:08 It disappeared, I can see it for a second, and it was like time absolutely stood still.
0:00:13 And when I was in this blackness of not seeing and not hearing,
0:00:16 I knew absolutely that this is death.
0:00:22 I had mental issues, I had emotional issues, I had real physical issues.
0:00:24 I was a complete psychopath.
0:00:29 And when I got out, I thought social media and content creation was just kind of fascinating.
0:00:32 How did you decide that was a worthy way to spend your life?
0:00:35 If you create the right thing at the right time, it’s at a lottery ticket,
0:00:40 and it goes viral and then it’s your chance at that point to capitalize in whatever way you want to.
0:00:41 I was obsessed with it.
0:00:45 So despite the many failures over the course of probably six months or so,
0:00:49 maybe a year of just awful cringe videos that went nowhere on a whim,
0:00:52 I was like, you know what, I’m just going to shoot a quick video,
0:00:55 and I leave my phone in the room for a couple of hours, come back,
0:00:56 and I couldn’t even open my phone.
0:00:59 And it had over five million views in a matter of a few hours.
0:01:01 So you built this empire quickly.
0:01:06 I went into this feverish, like, constantly telling stories on TikTok,
0:01:10 three a day for 30 days, and then lived up to like seven million subscribers on TikTok,
0:01:13 and then shifted to YouTube, and here we are.
0:01:16 What’s one thing you teach me to make me a better storytelling?
0:01:20 It’s something that people love and hate, and you’re going to tell a story.
0:01:23 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:01:25 I know I could be what I want to.
0:01:29 I put my all in it like the days off on a roller coaster.
0:01:35 Sean, have you ever seen the Mr. Bullen channel before, like, I asked you if he should come on?
0:01:37 No, when I found out you were coming on as a guest,
0:01:41 that’s when the research started, and I went to your TikTok first,
0:01:44 and then I went to YouTube, and then I started watching some other stuff.
0:01:47 But I love the genre, but I’m not, like, crazy about it.
0:01:50 My brother-in-law is nuts about these spooky stories.
0:01:52 He does something I don’t even understand.
0:01:54 You got to explain this to me.
0:01:58 There’s apparently a YouTube channel that takes spooky stories from Reddit
0:02:02 and then reads it, like, text-to-speech, like, robotic text-to-speech,
0:02:04 and he’ll listen to this thing for like two hours straight.
0:02:07 I can’t believe that he does this, but when I saw that, I was like,
0:02:11 “Oh, that’s like people who are far on the deep end of loving this type of content.”
0:02:16 I’ve definitely have done, like, on a Saturday where I’ve got a due chores or something like that
0:02:17 and run errands.
0:02:21 I’ve done a six- to eight-hour marathon of Mr. Bolland.
0:02:24 What’s your consumption rate on your channel right now?
0:02:25 Is it just through the roof?
0:02:26 That’s a Nick question.
0:02:31 So Nick, Nick does everything with the exception of telling the stories on camera.
0:02:35 I’m, like, completely out of the loop with virtually everything else.
0:02:40 I just sit down and tell stories, and Nick is the guy for literally every other question
0:02:43 in terms of, like, growth of the channel, like, metrics.
0:02:44 That’s Nick. That’s Nick’s wheelhouse.
0:02:47 Dude, that’s nirvana for content.
0:02:48 Oh, dude.
0:02:52 Where you can just sit down, you just record, and then you disappear, and everything else
0:02:53 happens magically.
0:02:54 Yeah.
0:02:55 Every content creator wants that.
0:02:58 I will get to this, but he came in when I didn’t know how to, like, grow my channel
0:03:01 beyond just me, and, like, I was so burned out.
0:03:05 Nick came in when it was me, and I think I had an editor and maybe, like, a topic finder,
0:03:07 and that was overwhelming for me.
0:03:09 You know, it’s like, I was deleting all emails that came in.
0:03:11 People try to, like, do business with me.
0:03:14 I just delete everything, so I had no idea how to, like, figure out if it was good or
0:03:15 not.
0:03:17 And Nick came in and was like, “Yo, dude, I’ll help you.”
0:03:18 And he grew the business.
0:03:20 How big were you when that happened?
0:03:26 We were, like, significant on YouTube, but I personally was at a place where I was just
0:03:27 jumping in.
0:03:33 I mean, it took me about 26 hours, give or take, to make one video in the first six months
0:03:37 I was on YouTube, and I was doing anywhere from three to five videos a week.
0:03:40 And at the same time, you know, I’m married.
0:03:41 I have three young kids.
0:03:44 I completely was negligent in all duties besides content.
0:03:46 My wife is a saint and picked up everything else.
0:03:49 But I was doing, you know, I mean, do the math.
0:03:53 27, like, over 100 hours of just constant grinding, like, at all hours.
0:03:57 And so even though the channel was, you know, in the millions, and we were, you know, by
0:04:02 all accounts, had, like, made it as a YouTube channel, I was so close to being like, “Dude,
0:04:03 this ain’t worth it.
0:04:04 Like, I’m in my 30s.
0:04:05 I have a family.
0:04:06 Like, I’ve done well for myself.
0:04:08 But this is, like, the worst thing ever.”
0:04:12 And it was around that time that I’m like, “Maybe all those people that are emailing me, maybe
0:04:14 they can offer something that will help me, like, grow.”
0:04:18 Because I swear to God, I was just mass deleting emails because it was so stressful.
0:04:22 Like, people that were, like, trying to pitch me, and I saw an email come through that was
0:04:25 like, you know, “Fellow Combat Veteran Here to Health.”
0:04:30 And I had, like, I’m a military guy, and I’m immediately like, “Okay, this guy I could
0:04:31 talk to.
0:04:32 I don’t know who he is.
0:04:33 I don’t know what he means by health.”
0:04:37 But I opened his email and he’s like, “Yeah, you know, I’m a day-to-day manager with Mr.
0:04:38 Beast.
0:04:39 I have experience and traditional talent.
0:04:43 Yeah, I’m not looking to sign you, not looking to really do anything, but I just saw, you
0:04:44 know, your vet.
0:04:46 It’s rare in the space, and I’d be happy to help.”
0:04:50 And so, like, I immediately hit him up, and I’m like, “I don’t know you, but my life’s
0:04:51 falling apart here, man.
0:04:54 Like, I’ve got all this great stuff happening with YouTube, but I can’t manage it.
0:04:55 Like, I’m losing my mind.”
0:05:01 And so that began what turned out to be the reason that the Mr. Ball and Thing did not
0:05:02 fade into obscurity.
0:05:07 I mean, I’m a great storyteller, but I cannot grow a business.
0:05:09 I couldn’t have done this longer than, like, literally that month.
0:05:13 I remember talking to my wife and being like, “I just don’t know if this is worth it.”
0:05:18 But Nick came in, and I handed the reins of virtually everything over to Nick, and he
0:05:19 scaled the company.
0:05:22 We have, like, 50-plus employees now, we’ve got a slate of shows.
0:05:26 I show up to the studio, and just somebody else hits record, and I just tell stories,
0:05:28 and I leave because of Nick.
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0:06:07 The thing to Johnny, it’s like every creator on the planet, it’s like you start it all
0:06:08 by yourself.
0:06:13 Everything lives and dies on their shoulders, and so even just letting someone in to tweak
0:06:20 a title or give advice on a thumbnail is just like the highest level of anxiety that creators
0:06:21 can have, too.
0:06:24 Did he say that you were working with Mr. Beast before that?
0:06:25 Yeah, yeah.
0:06:31 So I got hired to be the right hand for the CEO over at Night Media.
0:06:37 And so Reid was Jimmy’s main manager, and I got recruited to go be Jimmy’s number two
0:06:40 or Reid’s number two, and I was running day to day with Mr. Beast.
0:06:44 And before that, I had no clue about anything on YouTube.
0:06:49 So I was learning everything from Michael Jordan of YouTube, and then I was applying
0:06:51 it in real time in real practice.
0:06:56 And before that, I was in law school, became a lawyer, did a military stand.
0:07:02 So Nick also, when he got out of the military, so he does 90 combat missions in Iraq as an
0:07:03 open turret gunner.
0:07:05 So I don’t know if you’re familiar with this nowadays.
0:07:11 When you’re overseas, you’re in an enclosed, bomb-proof, like M-Rap, this huge up-arward
0:07:16 60,000-ton vehicle with literally a remote-controlled gun that has a screen in front of you.
0:07:18 That’s how they do it now.
0:07:20 Nick was in Iraq when it’s an open turret.
0:07:24 Like it’s just you hanging out there, and the turret gunners are the number one target,
0:07:26 like as you’re rolling through on patrol.
0:07:30 So Nick is doing this extremely dangerous mission set, comes back from Iraq, gets out
0:07:34 of the military, goes to law school, which is the whole thing, and then he ends up deciding
0:07:39 he wants to get into entertainment law, but he has no idea how, so he just begins pestering
0:07:44 WME, one of the biggest talent agencies in the world, to let him work for them.
0:07:46 No one’s taking his calls.
0:07:50 He’s showing up in his one raggedy suit that he’s got, like trying to make an impression.
0:07:52 He’s just pre-goked to do with tattoos all over him.
0:07:53 No one wants him.
0:07:57 He finally gets the attention of one of the partners, he’s like, “All right, dude.
0:07:58 You come here all the time.
0:08:00 You can work in the mailroom pushing the mail car.”
0:08:05 And the dude quickly ascended and was like working with talent, like killing it.
0:08:08 So Nick is a highly persistent dude who just does what he wants.
0:08:09 It’s pretty amazing.
0:08:13 We got to know Jimmy because we do an event with him every year, we call it Camp MFM.
0:08:19 And I would say the first year we met him, his crew was a lot of like his friends or
0:08:23 like his cousin and that’s great because you get like high loyalty and like camaraderie
0:08:24 and all that.
0:08:28 But the operations were obviously like busting at the seams because he’s growing so fast
0:08:32 and every single person there has never done anything like this before.
0:08:34 And for a lot of them, never done anything before.
0:08:38 It’s like you’re all 23, you’re all 24, everybody was so young.
0:08:42 We went back this year and his right-hand man, Sean, is this guy who’s like-
0:08:43 Sean Hendricks.
0:08:45 It reminds of you already, Nick.
0:08:47 I think he is ex-military as well.
0:08:52 He was just like super operational, just an adult in the room and just had this like
0:08:58 grind mindset and like you, isn’t like enamored by the idea of Mr. Beast.
0:09:03 It’s not like, isn’t trying to be a part of the cool scene sees it as an operation that
0:09:05 needs to be run well.
0:09:09 And you could just tell his whole life got better by surrounding himself with more people
0:09:10 like that.
0:09:13 Sam, I don’t know if I ever told you the story, but we, for one of our companies, we
0:09:17 hired an ex-military guy to be like our kind of like head of customer service or something
0:09:18 like that.
0:09:19 It was like an at-home, it was a remote job.
0:09:20 He could do at home.
0:09:21 I think he had like a leg injury.
0:09:23 So this was like a good thing for him.
0:09:27 And this guy transformed our entire business.
0:09:30 Like first he started in customer service, but he would just notice everything is broken
0:09:34 because you know, it’s a Sean company if everything is broken.
0:09:37 And so he would find that the next thing’s broken and he would just be DMing me in Slack,
0:09:38 by the way.
0:09:41 The best part was he wouldn’t make you feel bad about fixing stuff.
0:09:43 He would just give me these like military phrases.
0:09:46 He’d be like, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
0:09:48 He just hit me with that in the morning.
0:09:50 And then I would be like, I don’t really know where that applies, but I think it applies
0:09:53 to everything in my life now.
0:09:58 And he was like my guiding, you know, mentor basically from the customer service department.
0:09:59 It was amazing.
0:10:04 Well, I think John went on Chris Williamson’s pod and he told the story where I think a
0:10:08 grenade exploded near you and you almost died and it was a really bad situation.
0:10:13 And you’re like, it was kind of cool though, because I saw tens of millions of dollars
0:10:19 worth of elite training go into play because when I got hurt, my guys like did exactly
0:10:21 what they were supposed to do.
0:10:24 And it was like, it was like clockwork where you’re like, it’s so cool.
0:10:26 I can actually see all of this actually happening.
0:10:31 And I guess I mean, with a lot of the military guys, it seems that goes into play with business,
0:10:33 particularly when they’re like, dude, I’m used to grenades.
0:10:34 This shit’s easy.
0:10:38 It’s a grenade basically landed between myself and a few of my other teammates.
0:10:39 It detonates.
0:10:44 One of the things that happens in my limited experience in combat is you can get shot several
0:10:45 times.
0:10:49 You don’t just immediately collapse to the ground unless it’s a headshot or something.
0:10:53 You can get shot and become a superhuman for like 30 seconds.
0:10:55 It’s one of the most bizarre things.
0:10:56 And it’s like, we’re engaging these guys.
0:11:02 And in this absolute chaos, they lobbed the grenades over the wall to our side.
0:11:05 And I remember I watched this grenade come over the wall.
0:11:06 It’s like, I can see it for a second.
0:11:07 It disappeared.
0:11:08 I can see it for a second.
0:11:10 And it was like, time absolutely stood still.
0:11:14 It’s not some, I’m not making that up, but that’s, that was my experience.
0:11:15 It’s like, I’m witnessing my death.
0:11:17 Here comes this grenade.
0:11:18 I know it’s a grenade.
0:11:21 It’s like, my brain has become hyper focused on what’s happening.
0:11:25 And I remember thinking as it came closer to my head, this all happened in a fraction
0:11:26 of a second.
0:11:29 I remember thinking, boy, if it detonates here, it’s going to blow my head off.
0:11:32 And I won’t beat, my mom won’t be able to identify me.
0:11:34 Like, I just hope this falls below my head.
0:11:37 So even though it’s going to kill me, at least they can see my face.
0:11:38 I can have an open casket.
0:11:44 My family can see me, but you know, it reached my head and I’m just embracing for death.
0:11:46 And then, you know, it’s lights out, lights on, lights out, lights on.
0:11:50 It falls, it hits my shoulder and it goes and begins to travel down to the ground.
0:11:54 I remember having this thought of when it was at my torso, again, in this fraction of
0:11:58 a second, thinking, few, my face will be intact and now it’s going to blow me in half.
0:12:02 But at least my mom will see her son’s face, but it makes it to the ground.
0:12:05 And now I’m thinking, holy cow, like, it might just blow my legs off.
0:12:07 I might live through this.
0:12:10 It hits the ground and it detonates.
0:12:15 And I can only, I can only compare it to, first of all, I’m prepared to die at this
0:12:16 point.
0:12:17 So I was just ready for whatever happened.
0:12:20 There was no pain involved, but it felt like somebody took a handful of rocks and just
0:12:25 threw them as hard as they could at my back and my, my hips and my legs.
0:12:27 And it was zero pain.
0:12:31 Like there wasn’t even really shock, even though we are all, the seven of us in the
0:12:35 lethal range of this grenade, we just think that it was basically muffled or dead and
0:12:37 slightly by being in sewage.
0:12:42 By the way, I got E. Coli as a result of this because sewage was shot into my body.
0:12:47 But yeah, I collapsed to the ground and then my, and then it all hell broke loose.
0:12:53 I mean, of the seven of us that were behind this wall, six become incapacitated down to
0:12:56 the ground, like unconscious or badly hurt.
0:12:59 Our medic, who also is a seal, he’s, he’s incredible.
0:13:00 His name is Kyle.
0:13:04 He, he would tell us later on that everybody goes down.
0:13:07 He knows that there’s multiple enemy, enemy combatants literally on the other side of
0:13:08 the wall.
0:13:10 And he’s like, I just went into flow.
0:13:15 You know, he began rescuing us under a hail of gunfire.
0:13:18 And so rounds are coming in, rockets are being fired overhead.
0:13:21 I’m barely conscious in our, and our medic just began pulling people out under the hail
0:13:23 of gunfire.
0:13:26 My memory, which it would take years to learn what actually happened because my memory was
0:13:30 not accurate was I felt like the rocks hitting me.
0:13:34 And then I kind of like looked up and was it waiting for a combatant to come into the,
0:13:36 the alley we were in and finish me off.
0:13:40 And then like somehow or another, I was pulled like 10, 20 feet away and brought into this
0:13:41 alleyway.
0:13:46 And then Kyle, the medic wound up putting tourniquets on my legs and saving my life.
0:13:51 But years after the fact, Kyle and I, we didn’t speak following this, this whole thing.
0:13:53 It was like so traumatic.
0:13:55 We, we came back to the United States separately.
0:13:58 We didn’t talk for four years, uh, it, it after with all of us.
0:14:03 But when I sat down with him, he would tell me that after the impact, after the, the detonation,
0:14:08 he said, I looked and I saw you on the ground and I thought at first you were on a sheet
0:14:09 of ice.
0:14:12 And he was like, that doesn’t make any sense because there’s, it’s not cold enough.
0:14:15 And he was like, that’s when I realized you were actually in a puddle of blood, you were
0:14:17 face down and I assumed you were dead.
0:14:20 And in terms of triaging the situation, I couldn’t work on you.
0:14:23 You were the lowest chance of survival.
0:14:24 And he was like, I left you to die.
0:14:26 You know, I thought you were dead already.
0:14:30 And then after the others had basically been pulled out, you know, somebody came back and
0:14:31 pulled me up.
0:14:34 And I remember like being sort of in and out of consciousness and this, this, my memory
0:14:38 of this, I think was fairly accurate because I got brought basically here’s the tea.
0:14:42 I got brought like to the stem of the tea, if you will, we’re still getting shot at.
0:14:46 And I have these, they’re called quick release tourniquets sitting on my kit.
0:14:50 They’re, they’re literally on you so that you can quickly access them to stop the bleeding
0:14:53 and you actually put them here to save your life.
0:14:57 And I didn’t have the strength to break the rubber bands because I’d lost so much blood.
0:14:59 And so I’m sitting there, no one’s with me yet.
0:15:04 I’ve just been dragged here and left and, you know, rounds are coming into the alleyway.
0:15:08 And I, I had this moment where I could see everything.
0:15:12 I could hear everything, but then my vision completely went.
0:15:13 I went blind.
0:15:15 I couldn’t see anything and I could only hear.
0:15:20 And then the hearing turned into what sounded like helicopter, like, then I went to nothing.
0:15:25 And I had this, this point where it’s, I’m in a void, can’t see anything, can’t hear
0:15:26 anything.
0:15:30 I know I’m alive still, but it’s, I compare it to when I was seven years old and I fell
0:15:33 rollerblading and I badly broke my collarbone.
0:15:38 And the second I hit the ground, I stood up and I said to my dad, I broke my collarbone.
0:15:41 And like I’m seven, I don’t think I ever, I ever even thought about the fact that I had
0:15:44 a collarbone or even knew that that was called a collarbone.
0:15:46 But it was like, your brain is like, yep, that’s what happened.
0:15:47 It’s something traumatic.
0:15:49 And you know it immediately.
0:15:54 And when I was in this blackness of not seeing and not hearing, I knew absolutely that this
0:15:55 is death.
0:15:56 Like, absolutely.
0:15:57 It was just matter of fact.
0:15:59 And I couldn’t believe it.
0:16:03 Like I just got married and me and my wife had put off the idea of having kids until
0:16:04 after this deployment.
0:16:06 And I’m like, I can’t believe that’s what’s going to happen.
0:16:08 I’m going to die here.
0:16:14 And one of my final thoughts was, I wonder if in the newspaper, will it say John B. Allen
0:16:15 like killed an action?
0:16:17 Or will it say Jonathan B. Allen?
0:16:22 It was like just weird thoughts of like, huh, you know, will my, will my obituary make a
0:16:24 national newspaper or just a local paper?
0:16:26 Like, when are they going to tell my wife?
0:16:29 It was just so weirdly matter of fact.
0:16:32 And it struck me that like, just as much as you know how to live without thinking too
0:16:34 hard about it, it’s the only thing we know.
0:16:35 You are ready to die.
0:16:36 You just don’t know it yet.
0:16:43 When you face that, I imagine you have some type of questioning of like, like, how do
0:16:46 I want to spend my time, life short, things like that?
0:16:49 Does that mental clarity kind of carry with you for a decade?
0:16:53 Honestly, it has oddly enough, even though I tried out and became a seal, I actually
0:16:58 felt like I was somebody that was constantly turning down opportunities in fear of failure.
0:17:03 And it was almost like overcompensation to go try out to be a seal to like internally
0:17:04 write that or balance that out.
0:17:07 Like I had shot down so many opportunities.
0:17:12 But after this near death experience, it’s like anytime there’s an opportunity, no matter
0:17:16 how big, no matter how scary, no matter the opportunity to fail, I do actively think about
0:17:18 the fact that like, bro, you’re going to die.
0:17:20 And it’s going to happen.
0:17:23 And it’s going to be matter of fact, and it’s going to feel like, holy shit, I can’t believe
0:17:24 I’m dying.
0:17:25 And that’s it.
0:17:26 That’s the end.
0:17:31 And that is the thing that I think about just like, not the fragility of life, but the matter
0:17:33 of factness of dying.
0:17:35 The same way we live every day, and we don’t think about it.
0:17:39 You don’t wake up and think, oh, I better live today, you just do it.
0:17:41 The same shit happens when you die, and it’s going to happen when you probably aren’t even
0:17:42 expecting it.
0:17:44 It’s like, there you go, you’re done.
0:17:46 And so I carry that.
0:17:51 And just to close the loop there, after I got metabactin was safe, they debrief you
0:17:53 after you’re taken out of country for an injury.
0:17:57 And they asked me like, so what are your takeaways now that you’ve survived this ordeal.
0:18:02 And I said to the commanding officer, I’m like, you know what, in real time, I watched what
0:18:04 Navy SEALs do under fire.
0:18:05 Not me.
0:18:06 I was completely worthless.
0:18:07 I’m like incapacitated on the ground.
0:18:12 But I watched millions and millions and millions of dollars in training, like in practice, and
0:18:13 it was beautiful.
0:18:14 It was like the training works.
0:18:16 And so that’s actually used as a quote by that guy.
0:18:18 He’s like, the training works.
0:18:20 This guy said so.
0:18:24 When you’re deciding to build Mr. Ballin, Mr. Ballin Studio, first of all, going into
0:18:27 business, going into content creation, and then building a media company, how did you
0:18:31 decide that was worthy, a worthy way to spend your life?
0:18:32 Actually I fell backwards into this.
0:18:35 I mean, I got out of the military in 2017.
0:18:39 It was a medical retirement that was due in large part to this injury I’ve just described.
0:18:44 I wound up deploying one more time in the team, but I had mental issues.
0:18:45 I had emotional issues.
0:18:46 I had real physical issues.
0:18:48 I was a complete psychopath.
0:18:53 By the time I was being effectively told, it’s time for you to wrap it up here in the Navy.
0:18:58 And when I got out, in an effort to get myself a civilian job, I wound up connecting with
0:19:02 this guy named Jordan Selic, who’s this investment banker in New York, turned on to Prenor, and
0:19:03 he’s like, man, you got a network.
0:19:07 And so I started going on LinkedIn and networking, didn’t even know what I was doing.
0:19:09 I was just randomly messaging random people.
0:19:14 But before long, I had met enough people that there was this idea to have a networking event
0:19:15 in New York.
0:19:20 And so I invited some people that were also leaving the SEAL teams to come with me to
0:19:21 meet some business people in New York.
0:19:23 It was pretty open-ended.
0:19:29 And I wound up giving a speech, if you will, at this weird event with 50 people.
0:19:31 We called it Elite Meet, was the name of the event.
0:19:34 And it was meant to just be this one-time event.
0:19:37 I gave this talk about, hey, in the room right now, we have these veterans, and here’s what
0:19:38 they bring to the table.
0:19:42 And Jordan, who was there with me, he talked about what the business people had and what
0:19:44 opportunities they were looking to fill.
0:19:45 And it was great.
0:19:47 A few people got hired as a result.
0:19:51 But ironically, nobody was asking me about getting a job, because the assumption was,
0:19:52 this is your job.
0:19:53 You run this networking event.
0:19:55 And so I ended up making that my job.
0:19:58 And for a couple of years, I was the CEO of Elite Meet.
0:20:02 But to shorten the story, the pandemic happened.
0:20:06 And our charity was largely event-based.
0:20:10 We literally had these big networking events that we would cultivate over many months.
0:20:13 And we couldn’t do events anymore, because no one could do anything, like the world shut
0:20:14 down.
0:20:20 And it was around that time that I was sort of looking at other pathways to live my life.
0:20:25 And I thought social media and content creation was just kind of fascinating as– I mean,
0:20:29 it’s one of the few places where it’s fairly obvious that, unless you really buy into this
0:20:36 idea that algorithms are totally leaning one way or the other, ultimately, content creation
0:20:37 is a big meritocracy.
0:20:42 Ultimately, you can create content with no platform, no nothing.
0:20:45 And if you create the right thing at the right time, it’s like a lottery ticket.
0:20:46 And it goes viral.
0:20:51 And then it’s your chance at that point to capitalize in whatever way you want to.
0:20:57 And I tried cashing that lottery ticket for a while, doing some cringe, like weird sketch
0:21:01 comedy on Instagram and LinkedIn.
0:21:03 And I was doing dance videos.
0:21:07 I’m like a middle-aged dude doing dance videos on TikTok, getting made fun of.
0:21:08 It was horrible.
0:21:10 It was like nothing worked.
0:21:11 I was like, boy, I got this.
0:21:13 I’m going to be a content creator.
0:21:15 But I had this document on my computer.
0:21:19 I had two documents that was like TikTok ideas or content ideas.
0:21:24 And on one document, it was like, I’m not kidding, like 50 pages of single space, just
0:21:27 bullets of ideas, of the types of content I could create.
0:21:31 And then I had this other document that had a single word on it, or it was like a single
0:21:32 bullet point.
0:21:34 And it just said Dyatlov Pass.
0:21:40 So Dyatlov Pass is this very famous mystery about these hikers in the 1950s who go missing
0:21:41 in the year old mountains.
0:21:45 And they’re very experienced hikers, and they wind up missing, and then they’re found.
0:21:49 And there’s these photos of their campsite, and it’s been desecrated, and their bodies
0:21:50 are found.
0:21:52 And they’re wearing each other’s clothes.
0:21:53 Body parts are missing.
0:21:56 They’re radioactive.
0:21:59 There was one person that was tucked up in a tree, and there was all these scratch marks
0:22:00 at the base of the tree.
0:22:02 This is like in the middle of the year old mountains.
0:22:04 It’s just snow and ice everywhere.
0:22:09 And that same night, there was a Soviet military movement happening, and one of the people
0:22:13 who was in charge who had no idea about these missing hikers made a report that he had never
0:22:18 made before that happened to coincide with the same time these hikers went missing, where
0:22:23 he said, “I see these lights that are basically coming up and down and flashing over this
0:22:27 section of the mountain pretty far away from our position, and that this guy was trying
0:22:32 to find out, is there another military movement happening, or is another country invading us?”
0:22:36 And so it turns out there wasn’t, and no one knows what those lights were, and no one knows
0:22:37 what happened to these hikers.
0:22:41 And so it’s this great mystery, and I thought it was fascinating, and that’s the content
0:22:42 that I like.
0:22:45 Like when I go on the internet to look at video, when I’m eating my lunch, that’s what
0:22:46 I’m going to watch.
0:22:51 I’m going to watch videos like that, and to date, I had been trying to mimic other people’s
0:22:52 content style.
0:22:56 I was just copying stuff and trying to hit it big on social media, and it was just not
0:22:57 going well at all.
0:23:02 How many other videos do you think you made before you had that kind of hit and you found
0:23:03 your lane?
0:23:04 Because I think this is really important.
0:23:09 A lot of people expect to just know they’re laying up front or hit early on, and even
0:23:14 if intellectually they realize, “I probably will have to do trial and error,” even failing
0:23:19 like seven, eight, nine times, eleven times in a row is completely demoralizing for the
0:23:20 average person.
0:23:24 So how many videos do you think you made before you popped off?
0:23:29 On TikTok specifically, there’s a slightly bigger version to this story because there
0:23:36 was a time where in between 2017, when I was medically retired and 2020, when I post this
0:23:41 video that goes viral, we were using social media specifically linked in to try to drum
0:23:43 up support for EliteMe.
0:23:48 We would basically tell stories in text format with a picture attached to it about veterans
0:23:53 that were leaving the military, and I would kind of like write stories about their experiences
0:23:57 and then anecdotally how they connected to why they’d be a good fit in these types of
0:23:58 industries.
0:24:04 It was very successful, not viral, but we raised half a million dollars on micro donations
0:24:09 that stemmed from these posts that we were doing, me and Jordan in particular, my co-founder.
0:24:13 And so I had gotten a taste of what social media can do.
0:24:20 Nothing like what Mr. Ballin is, but it was like using social media as a real tool, and
0:24:25 I remember sometime in 2018 and ’19, we’re doing all this content that’s really centered
0:24:30 on veterans and drawing donations for this charity.
0:24:38 And I decided to kind of selfishly in tandem begin posting very similar content, like anecdotal
0:24:43 military experience type of content, but my own, and with not the intention of drawing
0:24:46 support to EliteMe necessarily, although that was kind of like incidental.
0:24:51 It was more like building my own personal brand as like the Navy Seal.
0:24:54 And I drew the ire of the entire Navy Seal.
0:24:57 You know, dudes, seals hate that, don’t they?
0:25:01 Which is like super unfair because, you know, I’ve read the book about the guy who killed
0:25:02 bin Laden.
0:25:03 I forget his name.
0:25:08 And then there’s Goggins and a lot of these guys, my seal friends, they talk shit about
0:25:11 people who use Navy Seal as a story.
0:25:13 And I understand their perspective.
0:25:17 Their perspective is like, it’s us, like we don’t talk about this, we all did this together.
0:25:20 But then I understand the other perspective of like, yeah, but like you just served a
0:25:25 country and you almost died and like, you’re probably likely looking at like not that awesome
0:25:29 of a life after you retire because you’re bummed out about what you experienced.
0:25:32 And there’s a whole bunch of shit why like, you know, it doesn’t look awesome once you
0:25:33 once you get out.
0:25:37 And so I understand that perspective of like, dude, take what you can get and get ahead.
0:25:38 So it’s a challenge.
0:25:39 You’re in a tough spot.
0:25:40 Yeah.
0:25:44 And unfortunately, you know, it was a blessing and a curse because in a way when I began
0:25:50 posting, you know, text stories of, you know, how I was, I wasn’t intending to come off as
0:25:53 like Mr. Navy Seal, but that’s entirely how it came off.
0:25:58 And once I made that shift, I was like, I’m going to delete all the seal content and start
0:26:03 anew and just try my hand at something that is completely divorced from being at Seal.
0:26:08 I posted, I had probably hundreds of videos that were like, I mean, some did relatively
0:26:14 well, get a couple hundred or a thousand views, but like, nothing was turning into anything.
0:26:19 And but I also, I have this sort of obsessive quality when I want to do something.
0:26:22 It’s definitely what, you know, allowed me to become a seal.
0:26:26 It’s like, you, if you want to be, if you want to be really good at something, you kind
0:26:27 of have to only do that.
0:26:32 And I had this idea that like, I really want to do something with social media.
0:26:33 And so I was obsessed with it.
0:26:37 So despite the many failures over the course of probably, you know, six months or so, maybe
0:26:42 a year of just like awful cringe videos that went nowhere, I had like reached a point where
0:26:46 my wife was like, dude, you got to like figure something else out here.
0:26:47 This is not really going anywhere.
0:26:52 She was very diplomatic about it, but we got three young kids or we had two at the time.
0:26:56 But I was at this water park in Pennsylvania, this indoor water park with my wife and kids.
0:26:59 And on a whim, I was like, you know what, I’m just going to shoot a quick video, the
0:27:02 60 second talk about the Dialog Pass.
0:27:06 And so I film it in my hotel room and I leave my phone in the room because we’re going down
0:27:10 to the water park and I didn’t have a way to waterproof it, leave my phone, me and my
0:27:13 wife and kids, we go down to the water park, we’re there for a couple of hours, come back
0:27:15 and I couldn’t even open my phone.
0:27:19 There were so many notifications pouring in for this one video on my TikTok account that
0:27:20 had no following.
0:27:24 It was like this brand new account basically, and it had over five million views in a matter
0:27:25 of a few hours.
0:27:29 And I was like, holy cow, like as you guys have seen in this podcast, I love to talk,
0:27:31 love to tell stories.
0:27:33 Maybe I can just keep doing this on TikTok.
0:27:39 And so I went into this feverish like constantly telling stories on TikTok, three a day for
0:27:43 30 days and then was up to like seven million subscribers on TikTok and then shifted to
0:27:46 YouTube and here we are.
0:27:47 Well, let me tell you one thing.
0:27:51 This is going to tell you a little bit about you and a lot about me.
0:27:52 You told two stories just now.
0:27:53 Yeah.
0:28:00 You told a story of you representing our country nearly dying in war, being saved by the Navy
0:28:02 Seals facing a life or death experience.
0:28:05 And I was like, I like this story.
0:28:11 Then you talked about how you came home, you got on LinkedIn, you started using the easy
0:28:16 button to try to post the content and then you admitted you’re like, I didn’t want to
0:28:19 be doing that, but I was doing that and I didn’t care.
0:28:20 I wanted to do it anyways.
0:28:24 And then people shit on before it and it felt really bad and they were right.
0:28:26 And I was like, I ride with this guy.
0:28:30 I love this guy because there are so few people on earth.
0:28:33 There are a few people on earth who have lived through war and survived.
0:28:38 There might be even fewer people who could look at their actions and say, yeah, I don’t
0:28:42 think and not give themselves the benefit of the doubt, right?
0:28:43 Everybody gives themselves the benefit of that.
0:28:45 Everyone gives themselves the charitable interpretation.
0:28:49 I really love how honest you were about what you were doing and how that might have been
0:28:54 like something that you’re not proud of how you did it and how you, you know, ultimately
0:28:58 where it landed you, which was like through doing that, you’re like, all right, I want
0:29:03 to do storytelling, social media, maybe you kind of had a taste of it, but then you tried
0:29:07 to make it by copying what others were doing on TikTok.
0:29:10 And only when you did the thing that was like the intersection of like, you know, what you’re
0:29:12 good at and what the world is interested in.
0:29:17 You found that authentic point where now, you know, there’s nobody else doing what you
0:29:19 were doing or very few people were doing what you were doing there.
0:29:22 So I think there’s a lot to learn from that.
0:29:24 How big is your guys’ company now?
0:29:29 I know you have 40 people and you’re like, just, what do you have, eight, nine million
0:29:35 on YouTube and then three million on Facebook and I don’t even know how much on TikTok now,
0:29:36 a shit load.
0:29:42 What’s the Mr. Ball with foundation and, you know, 1099 contractors that end up rolling
0:29:46 up into W twos were almost around 55.
0:29:50 And then I would say fan wise, you know, he’s got nine plus billion on YouTube, eight plus
0:29:55 billion on TikTok, three and a half on Facebook, Snapchat, you name it.
0:30:00 So I think, oh, and then you have the podcast, which does, you know, eight figures in downloads
0:30:01 a month.
0:30:07 So I mean, I would say the, the range is about 25 million in fans just for the strange dark
0:30:08 mysterious.
0:30:11 So you built this empire quickly.
0:30:15 And you know, when I do these podcasts, I wake up and I think, all right, what am I
0:30:17 excited to talk about and learn about genuinely?
0:30:22 What am I actually selfishly interested because that’s what makes for the best podcast on
0:30:25 honestly, because it’s, that’s the conversation I really want to have.
0:30:29 And the one thing I wanted to learn from you was like, you, you built this media company
0:30:33 and you do these kind of like strange, dark and mysterious stories.
0:30:34 I don’t do those stories.
0:30:37 I’m not necessarily trying to build a media company, but there was one thing you said
0:30:40 that really stood out to me when I was kind of going down the rabbit hole.
0:30:44 And it’s around what is the mindset that’s helped you become successful that I could
0:30:47 take even if I’m trying to do something completely different, right?
0:30:49 How can I learn from you guys?
0:30:54 How can I learn from a seal and the mindset that, that it took to be successful there,
0:30:56 that it took to be successful with your media company that I might use elsewhere?
0:30:58 And you said something that was great.
0:31:02 You were on our buddy Chris’s podcast and you said, he was asking you about, you know,
0:31:04 being in a rut or how do you not get stuck?
0:31:09 And you said, you know, one thing I’m good at is if I find something, I have a basic
0:31:11 outline of what I want to do.
0:31:16 As long as something checks enough of the boxes, I don’t overthink it because you said most
0:31:21 people or, you know, other people could sit there and question what, you know, we have
0:31:25 something that, that you think might work and you could sit there and question and say,
0:31:27 is there some alternative that’s slightly better?
0:31:30 Is there something that would check more boxes or how would this work and get caught up in
0:31:31 the details?
0:31:36 I really love that mindset because I think that is a, every entrepreneur has been guilty
0:31:38 of that once if not is stuck there.
0:31:40 Can you talk a little bit about that mindset?
0:31:42 What did you mean by that?
0:31:44 And any maybe examples of how you approach that?
0:31:45 Sure.
0:31:50 So I mean, to be clear, definitely in terms of getting the business to 55 employees with
0:31:52 a slate of shows, that wasn’t me.
0:31:58 I might be the face of it, but Nick is absolutely the architect and the guy who runs the business.
0:32:02 But just relative to like, you know, my role in this company.
0:32:03 Yeah.
0:32:06 I think that what I was getting at with Chris Williamson was this idea that, you know,
0:32:07 we are inundated.
0:32:14 We like anybody online are inundated oftentimes with like these pretty tropish messages like,
0:32:19 you know, you just got to outwork the competition, you just got to put in, you just got to grind
0:32:20 like hustle culture.
0:32:24 Like it’s, it’s this whole idea of like, just get out there and like, just do stuff.
0:32:29 And it’s like, but what do I do is oftentimes the unspoken question of most people listening
0:32:30 is like, I get it.
0:32:31 Like I need to work really hard.
0:32:34 I need to care a lot about what I’m doing.
0:32:35 People get that.
0:32:42 But where a lot of people stumble from my perspective is just sounds corny, but like taking action.
0:32:48 But the idea is like, there are so many things that anybody at any time could pursue, whether
0:32:51 it’s career, relationship, hobby, you name it.
0:32:55 Like there’s an infinite number of things in some ways that you could, you could do.
0:33:00 And people are like, well, is it, what’s the ROI if I do this, whatever it is?
0:33:04 And I don’t think that I set out to be this way out of strategy.
0:33:09 I think it’s just who I am, which is like, if it’s good enough, just start doing it.
0:33:15 And so for me, like I had this idea and so I have a baseline of things I care about.
0:33:19 I want something to be hard enough that if I do it, I’ll feel really proud of doing that
0:33:20 thing.
0:33:23 Like if it’s easy, it’s not going to make me excited at the end, like it needs to be
0:33:24 a challenge.
0:33:28 So something that’s hard, something that comes with some level of like, this is going to sound
0:33:34 vain, but I think we’re all pretty human here, some level of recognition for doing the thing.
0:33:37 It’s not the reason you do it, but you do want people to be aware that you struggled and
0:33:40 built this thing, you did this thing, you own this thing, whatever it is.
0:33:45 So it’s like, has to be hard, has to have some level of people being aware.
0:33:49 This is again, my baseline, people being aware of me accomplishing it.
0:33:52 And then also, I want to have some level of enjoyment doing it.
0:33:56 The Navy SEAL teams are a good example of one of those things that checked those boxes
0:33:57 for me.
0:34:03 Like prior to trying out for the SEAL teams, I had sort of got my act together and managed
0:34:04 to graduate college.
0:34:09 There was a time where I definitely was not on that path, my mom wrote my college essay
0:34:14 to the college that accepted me, my grades were so bad, but the essay was so good.
0:34:18 She’s a professional writer that the college actually contacted me and was like, your grades
0:34:23 are not enough, but boy, that essay, you’re in the door, buddy.
0:34:27 And I immediately like got, I got in all this trouble with my first, anyways, I was on this
0:34:33 path to like flunking out of college and being that guy that totally peaked in high school.
0:34:37 But when I was back home in Quincy, Massachusetts, just south of Boston mass, I was like in my
0:34:41 mom’s basement after basically flunking out of school and getting in trouble.
0:34:46 I wound up realizing that, hey, if you want to graduate college, you got to do it yourself.
0:34:50 You need to own your fuck up and go to school and do it.
0:34:51 And so I managed to graduate.
0:34:57 I took some local classes, went back to the old university, I graduated, I get my degree,
0:35:00 but I had no idea what I wanted to do after college.
0:35:01 Like none.
0:35:05 I majored in philosophy with a minor in English because there was no pre-law degree because
0:35:08 I sort of convinced myself that maybe I’ll be a lawyer.
0:35:10 I was like, what am I going to do?
0:35:15 And I just, I had this feeling of like, well, man, it was really cool to like pick myself
0:35:18 up by the bootstraps and like graduate on my own strength here.
0:35:23 And I began looking for opportunities to kind of continue doing stuff like that.
0:35:26 And that’s where I kind of developed this mindset of look for things that are hard, look for
0:35:31 things that come with some level of recognition and things that I might enjoy doing.
0:35:32 And I found the SEAL teams.
0:35:36 Like I had always been kind of enamored with the military.
0:35:40 A lot of my classmates in high school, they, after high school joined the Marines and went
0:35:42 off to fight in the wars.
0:35:46 And I actually always sort of felt a little bit guilty that I went to college on my mom’s
0:35:51 essay and pissed it all away and yeah, I graduated, but I always had this sort of like deep down
0:35:55 guilt that I didn’t, you know, volunteer at the time that many of my friends did.
0:35:57 And so I kind of idolized them.
0:36:02 I also looked at the SEAL teams as being this thing that like just about anybody, you know,
0:36:04 within reason can try out for the SEAL teams.
0:36:08 It’s not something that requires a whole lot to get in the door.
0:36:11 I’m generalizing, but it is relatively easy to try out.
0:36:13 But it is exceptionally hard to graduate.
0:36:14 And so perfect.
0:36:16 It’s got this incredible challenge.
0:36:18 And then if you become a SEAL, well, guess what?
0:36:21 No one’s going to be like, yeah, but John screwed up in college.
0:36:24 And it just felt like, wow, like that checks every box for me.
0:36:25 And I went that way.
0:36:26 And I became a SEAL.
0:36:31 And then, you know, after, after the military, I still had that kind of mindset of looking
0:36:35 for things that I wanted to do that would be hard, some level of recognition and enjoy
0:36:36 and have some enjoyment.
0:36:39 And I thought social media was it.
0:36:47 It just felt like a big challenge, you know, to, to like get noticed by the world.
0:36:48 So here’s the deal.
0:36:51 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:36:52 It was called The Hustle.
0:36:56 And it was a daily newsletter at scale to millions of subscribers.
0:36:58 And it was the greatest business on earth.
0:37:03 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees and only three of them were actually
0:37:04 doing any writing.
0:37:08 The other employees were growing the newsletter, building out the tech for the platform and
0:37:09 selling ads.
0:37:11 And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
0:37:15 Today’s episode is brought to you by Beehive.
0:37:18 They are a platform that is built exactly for this.
0:37:21 If you want to grow your newsletter, if you want to monetize a newsletter, they do all
0:37:24 of the stuff that I had to hire dozens of employees to do.
0:37:25 So check it out.
0:37:26 Beehive.com.
0:37:33 That’s B-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:37:38 I know that like, I think your father is a, is a big shot journalist from the Boston
0:37:41 Globe, I think, and your, your mom and sister are as well.
0:37:46 Were you motivated by like just creating cool shit or were you motivated at all by money?
0:37:50 Cause I haven’t, I mean, there’s this phrase like king or rich, so it’s like, do you want
0:37:51 to be like famous?
0:37:53 Do you want to be like famous or do you want to be rich?
0:38:00 Um, I mean, to be honest, like when, for example, when I was trying really hard post deleting
0:38:05 all the seal stuff, like when I was trying to like find something on TikTok between dancing
0:38:10 and cringe stuff I was doing, I don’t think I necessarily had an exact goal in mind because
0:38:12 I truthfully didn’t know where it was going to take me.
0:38:14 I had low expectations.
0:38:18 I think that I looked at it because I was 30 at the time, you know, I’m not like an
0:38:19 18 year old.
0:38:23 I’m not throwing shade on 18 year olds, but when I was 18, if I was doing social media,
0:38:27 it was for fame, like be cool, like be the cool guy.
0:38:32 But when I was doing it, I actually was mostly probably leaning towards money in terms of
0:38:33 make this a livelihood.
0:38:34 I have kids.
0:38:35 I’m married.
0:38:39 Like this would be a really fun way to make a living, but I definitely did not have the
0:38:43 thought that this will be an empire worth millions of dollars.
0:38:47 I was thinking like, boy, wouldn’t it be great if this supplemented my income?
0:38:51 You know, and then only when, you know, this really frankly blew up.
0:38:58 I actually, I was somewhere in between recognition and money in the sense that I clearly saw.
0:39:02 This is when Nick comes into the picture and I’m like about to give it all up and we end
0:39:05 up kind of like sinking and we’re like, okay, we’re going to build this thing.
0:39:10 It was more like the fun of the challenge, which includes if you’re successful, you can
0:39:11 be famous.
0:39:13 If you’re successful, you can make lots of money.
0:39:14 You can have generational wealth.
0:39:18 But for me, like more than anything, it was this idea that like, I want to do something
0:39:20 that’s really fucking hard to do.
0:39:24 I would say of all the baseline elements I gave you, those are the things most drawn
0:39:25 to often times.
0:39:27 And so that is the thing.
0:39:32 If it was easy at a certain point to be Mr. Ballin and, and grow in notoriety and make
0:39:34 more money, I wouldn’t be interested in doing it.
0:39:37 Those are byproducts of the challenge that I often seek.
0:39:42 Sean, whenever I hang out with guys like these guys, these ex military guys, I feel inspired.
0:39:46 I also feel super fucking soft.
0:39:48 Do you, do you feel that same way?
0:39:50 Dude, that’s not just with military guys.
0:39:53 I feel that with the average guys.
0:39:54 This is of course.
0:39:55 Yes, I feel that way.
0:40:01 Well, I like what he said about like having a highest order bit, you know, like the orienting
0:40:02 function.
0:40:03 Like what is your true north?
0:40:06 And his true north is basically like, it sounds like you’re like looking for giant
0:40:08 mountains to go climb like summit.
0:40:12 You’re like, what’s the, what’s the hard thing that I would feel proud of myself if I did.
0:40:15 And then I know other people would be proud and respect me too if they did it.
0:40:18 And as a byproduct of doing the hard thing, I’m sure there’s reward.
0:40:19 Yes.
0:40:20 And John’s always been like that.
0:40:21 Yeah.
0:40:22 Exactly.
0:40:26 And it sounds like the seals like that’s conquering social media, although it sounds goofy like
0:40:27 TikTok or whatever.
0:40:30 It’s one of the most competitive merit based things you could go compete in.
0:40:35 What’s a race that a billion people are competing in, you know, that that’s one of the few.
0:40:38 And so like Sam, what is your, what’s your version of that?
0:40:42 What’s the highest order, you know, the orienting thing when you decide, what are you going
0:40:43 to, what are you going to devote your time and your talents to?
0:40:44 Do you know?
0:40:45 Mine was, mine’s empty.
0:40:49 It’s still empty, which is, it was just like money to provide for my family.
0:40:54 But once you get past that, like it is quite, you’re empty when you don’t have that.
0:40:57 And I still, I’m still oftentimes I’m like, I need this.
0:40:58 I need direction.
0:41:02 And so that’s why when I hear these guys, I’m like, I feel a sense of envy, a bit that
0:41:05 they have a direction, but I feel a slightly directionless to you.
0:41:09 At the beginning it was like prove myself early twenties, then like late twenties was
0:41:13 like, you know, I’d like to have like a million dollars in the bank, you know, like some money
0:41:14 became like the thing.
0:41:15 It’s a million, 10 million.
0:41:19 And the, the richer person I met, I would be like, Oh yeah, I need that much money.
0:41:24 Then early thirties popping out kids, I realized I went to lifestyles like, Oh, actually it’s
0:41:29 a certain amount of money, but actually it’s, I don’t want more money with more stress and
0:41:30 time.
0:41:35 I want like the maximum amount of time, least amount of stress, but still be able to do
0:41:36 whatever the hell I want.
0:41:37 So enough money to do that.
0:41:39 So that was what I would call lifestyle.
0:41:44 And now I’m 36 and in the last year, I basically shifted that north again.
0:41:46 And by the way, I don’t think it’s bad to shift to north.
0:41:49 I think you have seasons of life and chapters of life and you should eat.
0:41:52 They’re all not all the same, you know, like having a lot of fun was really important in
0:41:53 college for me.
0:41:54 And that was the true north.
0:41:57 Right now it’s basically enjoyment.
0:42:01 So what I’m trying to do is figure out what is the most me thing I could do.
0:42:05 Like you were saying, these are the stories I’m interested in and you come from background.
0:42:08 I think your parents are like storytellers and it’s probably something you learned through
0:42:09 osmosis.
0:42:11 I think about it like this.
0:42:14 What can I do that’s just simply me pushed out to the world?
0:42:16 That is my most my highest orienting function.
0:42:21 And then the filter is basically, am I doing this because doing it is the reward or am I
0:42:24 doing this for some future rewards?
0:42:27 And most of my life I did things for future rewards.
0:42:29 I went to college so I could get a good job and I got a good job so that I could make
0:42:30 some money.
0:42:32 And I got some money so that I could buy this thing.
0:42:34 Everything was this future payoff.
0:42:36 And now I’m like, oh wait, I don’t need to do that trade.
0:42:37 That’s a little silly.
0:42:39 Why don’t I just do things with the act of doing it as the reward?
0:42:42 If there happens to be other byproducts in the future, great.
0:42:47 But I can’t do things that I don’t really want to do or kind of suck today because I
0:42:48 think they might pay off in the future.
0:42:49 I don’t do those anymore.
0:42:52 This podcast is the best thing I’ve ever done.
0:42:55 And when I started it, I was basically like, I’m going to lose, I plan, I wrote down in
0:42:58 my plan, this should lose about $10,000 to $20,000 a year.
0:42:59 I’m comfortable with that.
0:43:04 So it’s like the only non, not only just won’t make me rich, I planned for it to make me slightly
0:43:06 poorer every year doing it.
0:43:09 And ironically, this is the thing that’s done the best.
0:43:11 It’s been the most successful of all the projects.
0:43:12 And I’m willing to do it forever.
0:43:15 This is the only thing I do that I’m not looking to exit, right?
0:43:20 Like I’m not looking to sell this and then I’ll be able to relax and retire.
0:43:22 It’s like, no, no, I kind of want to keep doing the pot.
0:43:23 You’d have to pay me to stop.
0:43:28 Do you guys have for Mr. Ball and Studios, do you guys have this North Star in terms
0:43:31 of how many people you’re going to reach or how big the company’s going to get?
0:43:35 Or is this a business that you’re like, man, one day we could sell this for like $200 million?
0:43:36 Yeah.
0:43:40 What do you label the top of the mountain or like what’s the height of the mountain you’re
0:43:41 trying to climb here?
0:43:46 The North Star I would say for the company as far as, you know, being a manager, it’s
0:43:49 always what’s your client’s North Star, that’s your North Star.
0:43:53 And then as CEO, it’s still that, but it’s what’s, you know, what’s John and I’s North
0:43:55 Star from the studio, his vision.
0:43:57 And I implement and execute.
0:43:59 Well, that’s the noble sounding thing.
0:44:03 John, what’s the dirty selfish, ego driven goal you have?
0:44:04 Yeah.
0:44:07 Surely you guys are, surely you guys are sit down and you’re like, man, I think in five
0:44:09 years we could do a hundred million in revenue.
0:44:10 Yeah.
0:44:14 My New Year’s resolution is to like, you know, build healthy habits, but there’s the dirty
0:44:17 selfish goal of like, I want to take my shirt off and see some abs, baby.
0:44:21 Like, come on, I won’t say that, but like, that’s what, that’s part of it for sure.
0:44:26 So I will say that before all of this happened, before I was in college, I always aspired
0:44:30 to be, I played baseball growing up, not like at a very high level.
0:44:34 I played through high school, but I was like really good in my hometown, you know, at
0:44:39 one point I, I really believed that I could potentially play for the Boston Red Sox.
0:44:41 That’s like my favorite team.
0:44:42 And I…
0:44:43 So now you want to own them?
0:44:46 There’s, I don’t think that is, in terms of a selfish goal, yeah.
0:44:47 Like that would be the thing.
0:44:51 I would want to own a piece of the Red Sox, but actually I was going to an analogy and
0:44:52 then I was going to double back to that.
0:44:56 When that dream was shattered, sometime I remember my senior year of high school, I just like
0:44:57 said it out loud.
0:45:00 I’m like, yeah, I’m probably not going to play for the Boston Red Sox.
0:45:02 And I was like, no, fuck, like, that’s true.
0:45:03 Like I’m not.
0:45:04 The dream is over.
0:45:08 But I always just like thought about, like that was the dream that, that was my childhood
0:45:11 dream, like pitch for the Boston Red Sox.
0:45:12 That was it.
0:45:16 And so now like that we’re at this place, you know, Ballin Studios is at this place
0:45:21 where, you know, when he’s talking about recruiting the best storytellers in the world, it’s actually
0:45:23 a little bit different than recruiting.
0:45:28 I look at us, and this is my, take my shirt off, show you the truth.
0:45:32 I look at us as like, I’ll put it this way, if you, if you’re a baseball player, you’re
0:45:38 an amateur baseball player like I was, you don’t aspire to be the best independent baseball
0:45:42 player in the world, that you’re going to be by yourself, just being the best.
0:45:45 You want to play for the fucking Boston Red Sox or the Yankees or whatever it is you want
0:45:46 to play for.
0:45:47 Like that’s, that’s the goal.
0:45:53 Like that’s the peak of baseball is playing for one of those teams for me, the Red Sox.
0:45:58 And so I love this idea of like thinking about that dream I had and kind of angling it so
0:46:04 it’s applicable to storytellers where there really isn’t like a really prominent like that’s
0:46:06 where the fucking storytellers go.
0:46:10 Like that’s the place, that’s the stamp of approval that is the ultimate place.
0:46:14 If you’re a storyteller in some capacity, if you are under the Ballin Studios umbrella,
0:46:16 boom, you’ve made it.
0:46:17 Like that’s the equivalent.
0:46:19 I want us to be that.
0:46:23 I want to be the Boston Red Sox equivalent for storytellers.
0:46:27 And so I don’t know how we’re going to get there, but I want that level of prestige assigned
0:46:30 to Ballin Studios relative to storytellers.
0:46:35 And then with that, I want to own a fucking piece of the Red Sox.
0:46:37 That’s a great, that’s a great goal.
0:46:38 All right.
0:46:43 So give me, give me something I can use today, meaning you’re a great storyteller.
0:46:45 You’re trying to build the team of the greatest storytellers.
0:46:49 Tell me, teach me something that will make me a better storyteller today.
0:46:52 What’s one thing you could teach me to make me a better storyteller?
0:46:57 It’s something that people love and hate that tune into my content.
0:46:59 This is like, it’s kind of a polarizing thing.
0:47:03 But one of the things that I’ll do when I’m telling a story, if it’s not my own, if it’s
0:47:08 somebody else’s story, which is like 99% of the stories I’ve done, is I don’t just resuscitate
0:47:10 the facts of the story.
0:47:16 I, and with a very incredible team of people, it’s not just me anymore, we will like inhabit
0:47:17 that story.
0:47:21 It’s, I don’t, I have scripts that sit next to me, but like as my producer who’s right
0:47:25 over here will attest to, I’m not reading the script.
0:47:29 It’s a matter of producing a script that I can then like become a part of.
0:47:33 I will begin espousing what people are thinking or what people could have been thinking or
0:47:37 what could have been said in certain situations that I have no way of knowing.
0:47:41 But I am so committed to telling that story that I have learned it both outside as much
0:47:46 as I can insides that when you’re hearing it, it would almost be like it was my story.
0:47:50 Like the level of commitment, if you’re going to tell a story, own the fucking story.
0:47:54 Like it enter the story and don’t leave until it’s done.
0:47:57 People that like tell you a story and it sounds like they’re just telling something
0:47:58 they heard.
0:47:59 That’s not storytelling.
0:48:00 That’s just regurgitating something you heard.
0:48:05 You want to be a fucking storyteller and habit the story full commitment to the point where
0:48:10 you are literally acting out pieces of that story for your audience.
0:48:12 Damn, I’m hyped up Sam.
0:48:13 You are the man.
0:48:15 Sam, are you feeling what I’m feeling right now?
0:48:16 Yeah.
0:48:18 John, I once fell in love with this girl in Australia.
0:48:19 It’s called love.
0:48:22 And I fell in love with this girl in Australia and she was a dancer.
0:48:23 She wanted you to come out dancing with her.
0:48:24 I said, no, no, no.
0:48:25 I’m not a dancer.
0:48:26 You’re a dancer.
0:48:27 You do that.
0:48:28 I’ll watch you over here on the side.
0:48:29 She said, no, go over here.
0:48:30 And she was like, okay.
0:48:31 Hand on my hip.
0:48:32 And I put my hand on her hip.
0:48:34 And she goes, let me stop you right there.
0:48:35 I was like, oh man, I already fucked up.
0:48:36 This dancer getting his move.
0:48:37 Oh, no.
0:48:41 And she goes, if you ever touch someone, touch them with intent.
0:48:42 And I feel like that’s what you just told me.
0:48:45 If you’re going to tell a story, tell the story with some intent.
0:48:46 You got to touch with intent.
0:48:47 You got to touch these stories.
0:48:48 I love that.
0:48:49 This woman sounds awesome.
0:48:55 She also told me she wanted to never get married and have a man in every port.
0:48:58 And I was like, I don’t know if that’s a figure of speech or just a lifestyle choice.
0:49:04 I don’t really know what’s going on, but I think you’re a little too adventurous for me.
0:49:05 Dude, you guys are awesome.
0:49:09 Your team’s saying you got to wrap up and we appreciate y’all.
0:49:11 I’ve really admired you guys from afar.
0:49:12 Come on.
0:49:13 Yep.
0:49:14 Thank you for having us.
0:49:15 This is great.
0:49:16 All right.
0:49:17 That’s the pod.
0:49:19 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:49:25 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days off on the road.
0:49:26 Let’s travel.
0:49:27 Never looking back.
0:49:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:08 It disappeared, I can see it for a second, and it was like time absolutely stood still.
0:00:13 And when I was in this blackness of not seeing and not hearing,
0:00:16 I knew absolutely that this is death.
0:00:22 I had mental issues, I had emotional issues, I had real physical issues.
0:00:24 I was a complete psychopath.
0:00:29 And when I got out, I thought social media and content creation was just kind of fascinating.
0:00:32 How did you decide that was a worthy way to spend your life?
0:00:35 If you create the right thing at the right time, it’s at a lottery ticket,
0:00:40 and it goes viral and then it’s your chance at that point to capitalize in whatever way you want to.
0:00:41 I was obsessed with it.
0:00:45 So despite the many failures over the course of probably six months or so,
0:00:49 maybe a year of just awful cringe videos that went nowhere on a whim,
0:00:52 I was like, you know what, I’m just going to shoot a quick video,
0:00:55 and I leave my phone in the room for a couple of hours, come back,
0:00:56 and I couldn’t even open my phone.
0:00:59 And it had over five million views in a matter of a few hours.
0:01:01 So you built this empire quickly.
0:01:06 I went into this feverish, like, constantly telling stories on TikTok,
0:01:10 three a day for 30 days, and then lived up to like seven million subscribers on TikTok,
0:01:13 and then shifted to YouTube, and here we are.
0:01:16 What’s one thing you teach me to make me a better storytelling?
0:01:20 It’s something that people love and hate, and you’re going to tell a story.
0:01:23 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:01:25 I know I could be what I want to.
0:01:29 I put my all in it like the days off on a roller coaster.
0:01:35 Sean, have you ever seen the Mr. Bullen channel before, like, I asked you if he should come on?
0:01:37 No, when I found out you were coming on as a guest,
0:01:41 that’s when the research started, and I went to your TikTok first,
0:01:44 and then I went to YouTube, and then I started watching some other stuff.
0:01:47 But I love the genre, but I’m not, like, crazy about it.
0:01:50 My brother-in-law is nuts about these spooky stories.
0:01:52 He does something I don’t even understand.
0:01:54 You got to explain this to me.
0:01:58 There’s apparently a YouTube channel that takes spooky stories from Reddit
0:02:02 and then reads it, like, text-to-speech, like, robotic text-to-speech,
0:02:04 and he’ll listen to this thing for like two hours straight.
0:02:07 I can’t believe that he does this, but when I saw that, I was like,
0:02:11 “Oh, that’s like people who are far on the deep end of loving this type of content.”
0:02:16 I’ve definitely have done, like, on a Saturday where I’ve got a due chores or something like that
0:02:17 and run errands.
0:02:21 I’ve done a six- to eight-hour marathon of Mr. Bolland.
0:02:24 What’s your consumption rate on your channel right now?
0:02:25 Is it just through the roof?
0:02:26 That’s a Nick question.
0:02:31 So Nick, Nick does everything with the exception of telling the stories on camera.
0:02:35 I’m, like, completely out of the loop with virtually everything else.
0:02:40 I just sit down and tell stories, and Nick is the guy for literally every other question
0:02:43 in terms of, like, growth of the channel, like, metrics.
0:02:44 That’s Nick. That’s Nick’s wheelhouse.
0:02:47 Dude, that’s nirvana for content.
0:02:48 Oh, dude.
0:02:52 Where you can just sit down, you just record, and then you disappear, and everything else
0:02:53 happens magically.
0:02:54 Yeah.
0:02:55 Every content creator wants that.
0:02:58 I will get to this, but he came in when I didn’t know how to, like, grow my channel
0:03:01 beyond just me, and, like, I was so burned out.
0:03:05 Nick came in when it was me, and I think I had an editor and maybe, like, a topic finder,
0:03:07 and that was overwhelming for me.
0:03:09 You know, it’s like, I was deleting all emails that came in.
0:03:11 People try to, like, do business with me.
0:03:14 I just delete everything, so I had no idea how to, like, figure out if it was good or
0:03:15 not.
0:03:17 And Nick came in and was like, “Yo, dude, I’ll help you.”
0:03:18 And he grew the business.
0:03:20 How big were you when that happened?
0:03:26 We were, like, significant on YouTube, but I personally was at a place where I was just
0:03:27 jumping in.
0:03:33 I mean, it took me about 26 hours, give or take, to make one video in the first six months
0:03:37 I was on YouTube, and I was doing anywhere from three to five videos a week.
0:03:40 And at the same time, you know, I’m married.
0:03:41 I have three young kids.
0:03:44 I completely was negligent in all duties besides content.
0:03:46 My wife is a saint and picked up everything else.
0:03:49 But I was doing, you know, I mean, do the math.
0:03:53 27, like, over 100 hours of just constant grinding, like, at all hours.
0:03:57 And so even though the channel was, you know, in the millions, and we were, you know, by
0:04:02 all accounts, had, like, made it as a YouTube channel, I was so close to being like, “Dude,
0:04:03 this ain’t worth it.
0:04:04 Like, I’m in my 30s.
0:04:05 I have a family.
0:04:06 Like, I’ve done well for myself.
0:04:08 But this is, like, the worst thing ever.”
0:04:12 And it was around that time that I’m like, “Maybe all those people that are emailing me, maybe
0:04:14 they can offer something that will help me, like, grow.”
0:04:18 Because I swear to God, I was just mass deleting emails because it was so stressful.
0:04:22 Like, people that were, like, trying to pitch me, and I saw an email come through that was
0:04:25 like, you know, “Fellow Combat Veteran Here to Health.”
0:04:30 And I had, like, I’m a military guy, and I’m immediately like, “Okay, this guy I could
0:04:31 talk to.
0:04:32 I don’t know who he is.
0:04:33 I don’t know what he means by health.”
0:04:37 But I opened his email and he’s like, “Yeah, you know, I’m a day-to-day manager with Mr.
0:04:38 Beast.
0:04:39 I have experience and traditional talent.
0:04:43 Yeah, I’m not looking to sign you, not looking to really do anything, but I just saw, you
0:04:44 know, your vet.
0:04:46 It’s rare in the space, and I’d be happy to help.”
0:04:50 And so, like, I immediately hit him up, and I’m like, “I don’t know you, but my life’s
0:04:51 falling apart here, man.
0:04:54 Like, I’ve got all this great stuff happening with YouTube, but I can’t manage it.
0:04:55 Like, I’m losing my mind.”
0:05:01 And so that began what turned out to be the reason that the Mr. Ball and Thing did not
0:05:02 fade into obscurity.
0:05:07 I mean, I’m a great storyteller, but I cannot grow a business.
0:05:09 I couldn’t have done this longer than, like, literally that month.
0:05:13 I remember talking to my wife and being like, “I just don’t know if this is worth it.”
0:05:18 But Nick came in, and I handed the reins of virtually everything over to Nick, and he
0:05:19 scaled the company.
0:05:22 We have, like, 50-plus employees now, we’ve got a slate of shows.
0:05:26 I show up to the studio, and just somebody else hits record, and I just tell stories,
0:05:28 and I leave because of Nick.
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0:06:07 The thing to Johnny, it’s like every creator on the planet, it’s like you start it all
0:06:08 by yourself.
0:06:13 Everything lives and dies on their shoulders, and so even just letting someone in to tweak
0:06:20 a title or give advice on a thumbnail is just like the highest level of anxiety that creators
0:06:21 can have, too.
0:06:24 Did he say that you were working with Mr. Beast before that?
0:06:25 Yeah, yeah.
0:06:31 So I got hired to be the right hand for the CEO over at Night Media.
0:06:37 And so Reid was Jimmy’s main manager, and I got recruited to go be Jimmy’s number two
0:06:40 or Reid’s number two, and I was running day to day with Mr. Beast.
0:06:44 And before that, I had no clue about anything on YouTube.
0:06:49 So I was learning everything from Michael Jordan of YouTube, and then I was applying
0:06:51 it in real time in real practice.
0:06:56 And before that, I was in law school, became a lawyer, did a military stand.
0:07:02 So Nick also, when he got out of the military, so he does 90 combat missions in Iraq as an
0:07:03 open turret gunner.
0:07:05 So I don’t know if you’re familiar with this nowadays.
0:07:11 When you’re overseas, you’re in an enclosed, bomb-proof, like M-Rap, this huge up-arward
0:07:16 60,000-ton vehicle with literally a remote-controlled gun that has a screen in front of you.
0:07:18 That’s how they do it now.
0:07:20 Nick was in Iraq when it’s an open turret.
0:07:24 Like it’s just you hanging out there, and the turret gunners are the number one target,
0:07:26 like as you’re rolling through on patrol.
0:07:30 So Nick is doing this extremely dangerous mission set, comes back from Iraq, gets out
0:07:34 of the military, goes to law school, which is the whole thing, and then he ends up deciding
0:07:39 he wants to get into entertainment law, but he has no idea how, so he just begins pestering
0:07:44 WME, one of the biggest talent agencies in the world, to let him work for them.
0:07:46 No one’s taking his calls.
0:07:50 He’s showing up in his one raggedy suit that he’s got, like trying to make an impression.
0:07:52 He’s just pre-goked to do with tattoos all over him.
0:07:53 No one wants him.
0:07:57 He finally gets the attention of one of the partners, he’s like, “All right, dude.
0:07:58 You come here all the time.
0:08:00 You can work in the mailroom pushing the mail car.”
0:08:05 And the dude quickly ascended and was like working with talent, like killing it.
0:08:08 So Nick is a highly persistent dude who just does what he wants.
0:08:09 It’s pretty amazing.
0:08:13 We got to know Jimmy because we do an event with him every year, we call it Camp MFM.
0:08:19 And I would say the first year we met him, his crew was a lot of like his friends or
0:08:23 like his cousin and that’s great because you get like high loyalty and like camaraderie
0:08:24 and all that.
0:08:28 But the operations were obviously like busting at the seams because he’s growing so fast
0:08:32 and every single person there has never done anything like this before.
0:08:34 And for a lot of them, never done anything before.
0:08:38 It’s like you’re all 23, you’re all 24, everybody was so young.
0:08:42 We went back this year and his right-hand man, Sean, is this guy who’s like-
0:08:43 Sean Hendricks.
0:08:45 It reminds of you already, Nick.
0:08:47 I think he is ex-military as well.
0:08:52 He was just like super operational, just an adult in the room and just had this like
0:08:58 grind mindset and like you, isn’t like enamored by the idea of Mr. Beast.
0:09:03 It’s not like, isn’t trying to be a part of the cool scene sees it as an operation that
0:09:05 needs to be run well.
0:09:09 And you could just tell his whole life got better by surrounding himself with more people
0:09:10 like that.
0:09:13 Sam, I don’t know if I ever told you the story, but we, for one of our companies, we
0:09:17 hired an ex-military guy to be like our kind of like head of customer service or something
0:09:18 like that.
0:09:19 It was like an at-home, it was a remote job.
0:09:20 He could do at home.
0:09:21 I think he had like a leg injury.
0:09:23 So this was like a good thing for him.
0:09:27 And this guy transformed our entire business.
0:09:30 Like first he started in customer service, but he would just notice everything is broken
0:09:34 because you know, it’s a Sean company if everything is broken.
0:09:37 And so he would find that the next thing’s broken and he would just be DMing me in Slack,
0:09:38 by the way.
0:09:41 The best part was he wouldn’t make you feel bad about fixing stuff.
0:09:43 He would just give me these like military phrases.
0:09:46 He’d be like, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
0:09:48 He just hit me with that in the morning.
0:09:50 And then I would be like, I don’t really know where that applies, but I think it applies
0:09:53 to everything in my life now.
0:09:58 And he was like my guiding, you know, mentor basically from the customer service department.
0:09:59 It was amazing.
0:10:04 Well, I think John went on Chris Williamson’s pod and he told the story where I think a
0:10:08 grenade exploded near you and you almost died and it was a really bad situation.
0:10:13 And you’re like, it was kind of cool though, because I saw tens of millions of dollars
0:10:19 worth of elite training go into play because when I got hurt, my guys like did exactly
0:10:21 what they were supposed to do.
0:10:24 And it was like, it was like clockwork where you’re like, it’s so cool.
0:10:26 I can actually see all of this actually happening.
0:10:31 And I guess I mean, with a lot of the military guys, it seems that goes into play with business,
0:10:33 particularly when they’re like, dude, I’m used to grenades.
0:10:34 This shit’s easy.
0:10:38 It’s a grenade basically landed between myself and a few of my other teammates.
0:10:39 It detonates.
0:10:44 One of the things that happens in my limited experience in combat is you can get shot several
0:10:45 times.
0:10:49 You don’t just immediately collapse to the ground unless it’s a headshot or something.
0:10:53 You can get shot and become a superhuman for like 30 seconds.
0:10:55 It’s one of the most bizarre things.
0:10:56 And it’s like, we’re engaging these guys.
0:11:02 And in this absolute chaos, they lobbed the grenades over the wall to our side.
0:11:05 And I remember I watched this grenade come over the wall.
0:11:06 It’s like, I can see it for a second.
0:11:07 It disappeared.
0:11:08 I can see it for a second.
0:11:10 And it was like, time absolutely stood still.
0:11:14 It’s not some, I’m not making that up, but that’s, that was my experience.
0:11:15 It’s like, I’m witnessing my death.
0:11:17 Here comes this grenade.
0:11:18 I know it’s a grenade.
0:11:21 It’s like, my brain has become hyper focused on what’s happening.
0:11:25 And I remember thinking as it came closer to my head, this all happened in a fraction
0:11:26 of a second.
0:11:29 I remember thinking, boy, if it detonates here, it’s going to blow my head off.
0:11:32 And I won’t beat, my mom won’t be able to identify me.
0:11:34 Like, I just hope this falls below my head.
0:11:37 So even though it’s going to kill me, at least they can see my face.
0:11:38 I can have an open casket.
0:11:44 My family can see me, but you know, it reached my head and I’m just embracing for death.
0:11:46 And then, you know, it’s lights out, lights on, lights out, lights on.
0:11:50 It falls, it hits my shoulder and it goes and begins to travel down to the ground.
0:11:54 I remember having this thought of when it was at my torso, again, in this fraction of
0:11:58 a second, thinking, few, my face will be intact and now it’s going to blow me in half.
0:12:02 But at least my mom will see her son’s face, but it makes it to the ground.
0:12:05 And now I’m thinking, holy cow, like, it might just blow my legs off.
0:12:07 I might live through this.
0:12:10 It hits the ground and it detonates.
0:12:15 And I can only, I can only compare it to, first of all, I’m prepared to die at this
0:12:16 point.
0:12:17 So I was just ready for whatever happened.
0:12:20 There was no pain involved, but it felt like somebody took a handful of rocks and just
0:12:25 threw them as hard as they could at my back and my, my hips and my legs.
0:12:27 And it was zero pain.
0:12:31 Like there wasn’t even really shock, even though we are all, the seven of us in the
0:12:35 lethal range of this grenade, we just think that it was basically muffled or dead and
0:12:37 slightly by being in sewage.
0:12:42 By the way, I got E. Coli as a result of this because sewage was shot into my body.
0:12:47 But yeah, I collapsed to the ground and then my, and then it all hell broke loose.
0:12:53 I mean, of the seven of us that were behind this wall, six become incapacitated down to
0:12:56 the ground, like unconscious or badly hurt.
0:12:59 Our medic, who also is a seal, he’s, he’s incredible.
0:13:00 His name is Kyle.
0:13:04 He, he would tell us later on that everybody goes down.
0:13:07 He knows that there’s multiple enemy, enemy combatants literally on the other side of
0:13:08 the wall.
0:13:10 And he’s like, I just went into flow.
0:13:15 You know, he began rescuing us under a hail of gunfire.
0:13:18 And so rounds are coming in, rockets are being fired overhead.
0:13:21 I’m barely conscious in our, and our medic just began pulling people out under the hail
0:13:23 of gunfire.
0:13:26 My memory, which it would take years to learn what actually happened because my memory was
0:13:30 not accurate was I felt like the rocks hitting me.
0:13:34 And then I kind of like looked up and was it waiting for a combatant to come into the,
0:13:36 the alley we were in and finish me off.
0:13:40 And then like somehow or another, I was pulled like 10, 20 feet away and brought into this
0:13:41 alleyway.
0:13:46 And then Kyle, the medic wound up putting tourniquets on my legs and saving my life.
0:13:51 But years after the fact, Kyle and I, we didn’t speak following this, this whole thing.
0:13:53 It was like so traumatic.
0:13:55 We, we came back to the United States separately.
0:13:58 We didn’t talk for four years, uh, it, it after with all of us.
0:14:03 But when I sat down with him, he would tell me that after the impact, after the, the detonation,
0:14:08 he said, I looked and I saw you on the ground and I thought at first you were on a sheet
0:14:09 of ice.
0:14:12 And he was like, that doesn’t make any sense because there’s, it’s not cold enough.
0:14:15 And he was like, that’s when I realized you were actually in a puddle of blood, you were
0:14:17 face down and I assumed you were dead.
0:14:20 And in terms of triaging the situation, I couldn’t work on you.
0:14:23 You were the lowest chance of survival.
0:14:24 And he was like, I left you to die.
0:14:26 You know, I thought you were dead already.
0:14:30 And then after the others had basically been pulled out, you know, somebody came back and
0:14:31 pulled me up.
0:14:34 And I remember like being sort of in and out of consciousness and this, this, my memory
0:14:38 of this, I think was fairly accurate because I got brought basically here’s the tea.
0:14:42 I got brought like to the stem of the tea, if you will, we’re still getting shot at.
0:14:46 And I have these, they’re called quick release tourniquets sitting on my kit.
0:14:50 They’re, they’re literally on you so that you can quickly access them to stop the bleeding
0:14:53 and you actually put them here to save your life.
0:14:57 And I didn’t have the strength to break the rubber bands because I’d lost so much blood.
0:14:59 And so I’m sitting there, no one’s with me yet.
0:15:04 I’ve just been dragged here and left and, you know, rounds are coming into the alleyway.
0:15:08 And I, I had this moment where I could see everything.
0:15:12 I could hear everything, but then my vision completely went.
0:15:13 I went blind.
0:15:15 I couldn’t see anything and I could only hear.
0:15:20 And then the hearing turned into what sounded like helicopter, like, then I went to nothing.
0:15:25 And I had this, this point where it’s, I’m in a void, can’t see anything, can’t hear
0:15:26 anything.
0:15:30 I know I’m alive still, but it’s, I compare it to when I was seven years old and I fell
0:15:33 rollerblading and I badly broke my collarbone.
0:15:38 And the second I hit the ground, I stood up and I said to my dad, I broke my collarbone.
0:15:41 And like I’m seven, I don’t think I ever, I ever even thought about the fact that I had
0:15:44 a collarbone or even knew that that was called a collarbone.
0:15:46 But it was like, your brain is like, yep, that’s what happened.
0:15:47 It’s something traumatic.
0:15:49 And you know it immediately.
0:15:54 And when I was in this blackness of not seeing and not hearing, I knew absolutely that this
0:15:55 is death.
0:15:56 Like, absolutely.
0:15:57 It was just matter of fact.
0:15:59 And I couldn’t believe it.
0:16:03 Like I just got married and me and my wife had put off the idea of having kids until
0:16:04 after this deployment.
0:16:06 And I’m like, I can’t believe that’s what’s going to happen.
0:16:08 I’m going to die here.
0:16:14 And one of my final thoughts was, I wonder if in the newspaper, will it say John B. Allen
0:16:15 like killed an action?
0:16:17 Or will it say Jonathan B. Allen?
0:16:22 It was like just weird thoughts of like, huh, you know, will my, will my obituary make a
0:16:24 national newspaper or just a local paper?
0:16:26 Like, when are they going to tell my wife?
0:16:29 It was just so weirdly matter of fact.
0:16:32 And it struck me that like, just as much as you know how to live without thinking too
0:16:34 hard about it, it’s the only thing we know.
0:16:35 You are ready to die.
0:16:36 You just don’t know it yet.
0:16:43 When you face that, I imagine you have some type of questioning of like, like, how do
0:16:46 I want to spend my time, life short, things like that?
0:16:49 Does that mental clarity kind of carry with you for a decade?
0:16:53 Honestly, it has oddly enough, even though I tried out and became a seal, I actually
0:16:58 felt like I was somebody that was constantly turning down opportunities in fear of failure.
0:17:03 And it was almost like overcompensation to go try out to be a seal to like internally
0:17:04 write that or balance that out.
0:17:07 Like I had shot down so many opportunities.
0:17:12 But after this near death experience, it’s like anytime there’s an opportunity, no matter
0:17:16 how big, no matter how scary, no matter the opportunity to fail, I do actively think about
0:17:18 the fact that like, bro, you’re going to die.
0:17:20 And it’s going to happen.
0:17:23 And it’s going to be matter of fact, and it’s going to feel like, holy shit, I can’t believe
0:17:24 I’m dying.
0:17:25 And that’s it.
0:17:26 That’s the end.
0:17:31 And that is the thing that I think about just like, not the fragility of life, but the matter
0:17:33 of factness of dying.
0:17:35 The same way we live every day, and we don’t think about it.
0:17:39 You don’t wake up and think, oh, I better live today, you just do it.
0:17:41 The same shit happens when you die, and it’s going to happen when you probably aren’t even
0:17:42 expecting it.
0:17:44 It’s like, there you go, you’re done.
0:17:46 And so I carry that.
0:17:51 And just to close the loop there, after I got metabactin was safe, they debrief you
0:17:53 after you’re taken out of country for an injury.
0:17:57 And they asked me like, so what are your takeaways now that you’ve survived this ordeal.
0:18:02 And I said to the commanding officer, I’m like, you know what, in real time, I watched what
0:18:04 Navy SEALs do under fire.
0:18:05 Not me.
0:18:06 I was completely worthless.
0:18:07 I’m like incapacitated on the ground.
0:18:12 But I watched millions and millions and millions of dollars in training, like in practice, and
0:18:13 it was beautiful.
0:18:14 It was like the training works.
0:18:16 And so that’s actually used as a quote by that guy.
0:18:18 He’s like, the training works.
0:18:20 This guy said so.
0:18:24 When you’re deciding to build Mr. Ballin, Mr. Ballin Studio, first of all, going into
0:18:27 business, going into content creation, and then building a media company, how did you
0:18:31 decide that was worthy, a worthy way to spend your life?
0:18:32 Actually I fell backwards into this.
0:18:35 I mean, I got out of the military in 2017.
0:18:39 It was a medical retirement that was due in large part to this injury I’ve just described.
0:18:44 I wound up deploying one more time in the team, but I had mental issues.
0:18:45 I had emotional issues.
0:18:46 I had real physical issues.
0:18:48 I was a complete psychopath.
0:18:53 By the time I was being effectively told, it’s time for you to wrap it up here in the Navy.
0:18:58 And when I got out, in an effort to get myself a civilian job, I wound up connecting with
0:19:02 this guy named Jordan Selic, who’s this investment banker in New York, turned on to Prenor, and
0:19:03 he’s like, man, you got a network.
0:19:07 And so I started going on LinkedIn and networking, didn’t even know what I was doing.
0:19:09 I was just randomly messaging random people.
0:19:14 But before long, I had met enough people that there was this idea to have a networking event
0:19:15 in New York.
0:19:20 And so I invited some people that were also leaving the SEAL teams to come with me to
0:19:21 meet some business people in New York.
0:19:23 It was pretty open-ended.
0:19:29 And I wound up giving a speech, if you will, at this weird event with 50 people.
0:19:31 We called it Elite Meet, was the name of the event.
0:19:34 And it was meant to just be this one-time event.
0:19:37 I gave this talk about, hey, in the room right now, we have these veterans, and here’s what
0:19:38 they bring to the table.
0:19:42 And Jordan, who was there with me, he talked about what the business people had and what
0:19:44 opportunities they were looking to fill.
0:19:45 And it was great.
0:19:47 A few people got hired as a result.
0:19:51 But ironically, nobody was asking me about getting a job, because the assumption was,
0:19:52 this is your job.
0:19:53 You run this networking event.
0:19:55 And so I ended up making that my job.
0:19:58 And for a couple of years, I was the CEO of Elite Meet.
0:20:02 But to shorten the story, the pandemic happened.
0:20:06 And our charity was largely event-based.
0:20:10 We literally had these big networking events that we would cultivate over many months.
0:20:13 And we couldn’t do events anymore, because no one could do anything, like the world shut
0:20:14 down.
0:20:20 And it was around that time that I was sort of looking at other pathways to live my life.
0:20:25 And I thought social media and content creation was just kind of fascinating as– I mean,
0:20:29 it’s one of the few places where it’s fairly obvious that, unless you really buy into this
0:20:36 idea that algorithms are totally leaning one way or the other, ultimately, content creation
0:20:37 is a big meritocracy.
0:20:42 Ultimately, you can create content with no platform, no nothing.
0:20:45 And if you create the right thing at the right time, it’s like a lottery ticket.
0:20:46 And it goes viral.
0:20:51 And then it’s your chance at that point to capitalize in whatever way you want to.
0:20:57 And I tried cashing that lottery ticket for a while, doing some cringe, like weird sketch
0:21:01 comedy on Instagram and LinkedIn.
0:21:03 And I was doing dance videos.
0:21:07 I’m like a middle-aged dude doing dance videos on TikTok, getting made fun of.
0:21:08 It was horrible.
0:21:10 It was like nothing worked.
0:21:11 I was like, boy, I got this.
0:21:13 I’m going to be a content creator.
0:21:15 But I had this document on my computer.
0:21:19 I had two documents that was like TikTok ideas or content ideas.
0:21:24 And on one document, it was like, I’m not kidding, like 50 pages of single space, just
0:21:27 bullets of ideas, of the types of content I could create.
0:21:31 And then I had this other document that had a single word on it, or it was like a single
0:21:32 bullet point.
0:21:34 And it just said Dyatlov Pass.
0:21:40 So Dyatlov Pass is this very famous mystery about these hikers in the 1950s who go missing
0:21:41 in the year old mountains.
0:21:45 And they’re very experienced hikers, and they wind up missing, and then they’re found.
0:21:49 And there’s these photos of their campsite, and it’s been desecrated, and their bodies
0:21:50 are found.
0:21:52 And they’re wearing each other’s clothes.
0:21:53 Body parts are missing.
0:21:56 They’re radioactive.
0:21:59 There was one person that was tucked up in a tree, and there was all these scratch marks
0:22:00 at the base of the tree.
0:22:02 This is like in the middle of the year old mountains.
0:22:04 It’s just snow and ice everywhere.
0:22:09 And that same night, there was a Soviet military movement happening, and one of the people
0:22:13 who was in charge who had no idea about these missing hikers made a report that he had never
0:22:18 made before that happened to coincide with the same time these hikers went missing, where
0:22:23 he said, “I see these lights that are basically coming up and down and flashing over this
0:22:27 section of the mountain pretty far away from our position, and that this guy was trying
0:22:32 to find out, is there another military movement happening, or is another country invading us?”
0:22:36 And so it turns out there wasn’t, and no one knows what those lights were, and no one knows
0:22:37 what happened to these hikers.
0:22:41 And so it’s this great mystery, and I thought it was fascinating, and that’s the content
0:22:42 that I like.
0:22:45 Like when I go on the internet to look at video, when I’m eating my lunch, that’s what
0:22:46 I’m going to watch.
0:22:51 I’m going to watch videos like that, and to date, I had been trying to mimic other people’s
0:22:52 content style.
0:22:56 I was just copying stuff and trying to hit it big on social media, and it was just not
0:22:57 going well at all.
0:23:02 How many other videos do you think you made before you had that kind of hit and you found
0:23:03 your lane?
0:23:04 Because I think this is really important.
0:23:09 A lot of people expect to just know they’re laying up front or hit early on, and even
0:23:14 if intellectually they realize, “I probably will have to do trial and error,” even failing
0:23:19 like seven, eight, nine times, eleven times in a row is completely demoralizing for the
0:23:20 average person.
0:23:24 So how many videos do you think you made before you popped off?
0:23:29 On TikTok specifically, there’s a slightly bigger version to this story because there
0:23:36 was a time where in between 2017, when I was medically retired and 2020, when I post this
0:23:41 video that goes viral, we were using social media specifically linked in to try to drum
0:23:43 up support for EliteMe.
0:23:48 We would basically tell stories in text format with a picture attached to it about veterans
0:23:53 that were leaving the military, and I would kind of like write stories about their experiences
0:23:57 and then anecdotally how they connected to why they’d be a good fit in these types of
0:23:58 industries.
0:24:04 It was very successful, not viral, but we raised half a million dollars on micro donations
0:24:09 that stemmed from these posts that we were doing, me and Jordan in particular, my co-founder.
0:24:13 And so I had gotten a taste of what social media can do.
0:24:20 Nothing like what Mr. Ballin is, but it was like using social media as a real tool, and
0:24:25 I remember sometime in 2018 and ’19, we’re doing all this content that’s really centered
0:24:30 on veterans and drawing donations for this charity.
0:24:38 And I decided to kind of selfishly in tandem begin posting very similar content, like anecdotal
0:24:43 military experience type of content, but my own, and with not the intention of drawing
0:24:46 support to EliteMe necessarily, although that was kind of like incidental.
0:24:51 It was more like building my own personal brand as like the Navy Seal.
0:24:54 And I drew the ire of the entire Navy Seal.
0:24:57 You know, dudes, seals hate that, don’t they?
0:25:01 Which is like super unfair because, you know, I’ve read the book about the guy who killed
0:25:02 bin Laden.
0:25:03 I forget his name.
0:25:08 And then there’s Goggins and a lot of these guys, my seal friends, they talk shit about
0:25:11 people who use Navy Seal as a story.
0:25:13 And I understand their perspective.
0:25:17 Their perspective is like, it’s us, like we don’t talk about this, we all did this together.
0:25:20 But then I understand the other perspective of like, yeah, but like you just served a
0:25:25 country and you almost died and like, you’re probably likely looking at like not that awesome
0:25:29 of a life after you retire because you’re bummed out about what you experienced.
0:25:32 And there’s a whole bunch of shit why like, you know, it doesn’t look awesome once you
0:25:33 once you get out.
0:25:37 And so I understand that perspective of like, dude, take what you can get and get ahead.
0:25:38 So it’s a challenge.
0:25:39 You’re in a tough spot.
0:25:40 Yeah.
0:25:44 And unfortunately, you know, it was a blessing and a curse because in a way when I began
0:25:50 posting, you know, text stories of, you know, how I was, I wasn’t intending to come off as
0:25:53 like Mr. Navy Seal, but that’s entirely how it came off.
0:25:58 And once I made that shift, I was like, I’m going to delete all the seal content and start
0:26:03 anew and just try my hand at something that is completely divorced from being at Seal.
0:26:08 I posted, I had probably hundreds of videos that were like, I mean, some did relatively
0:26:14 well, get a couple hundred or a thousand views, but like, nothing was turning into anything.
0:26:19 And but I also, I have this sort of obsessive quality when I want to do something.
0:26:22 It’s definitely what, you know, allowed me to become a seal.
0:26:26 It’s like, you, if you want to be, if you want to be really good at something, you kind
0:26:27 of have to only do that.
0:26:32 And I had this idea that like, I really want to do something with social media.
0:26:33 And so I was obsessed with it.
0:26:37 So despite the many failures over the course of probably, you know, six months or so, maybe
0:26:42 a year of just like awful cringe videos that went nowhere, I had like reached a point where
0:26:46 my wife was like, dude, you got to like figure something else out here.
0:26:47 This is not really going anywhere.
0:26:52 She was very diplomatic about it, but we got three young kids or we had two at the time.
0:26:56 But I was at this water park in Pennsylvania, this indoor water park with my wife and kids.
0:26:59 And on a whim, I was like, you know what, I’m just going to shoot a quick video, the
0:27:02 60 second talk about the Dialog Pass.
0:27:06 And so I film it in my hotel room and I leave my phone in the room because we’re going down
0:27:10 to the water park and I didn’t have a way to waterproof it, leave my phone, me and my
0:27:13 wife and kids, we go down to the water park, we’re there for a couple of hours, come back
0:27:15 and I couldn’t even open my phone.
0:27:19 There were so many notifications pouring in for this one video on my TikTok account that
0:27:20 had no following.
0:27:24 It was like this brand new account basically, and it had over five million views in a matter
0:27:25 of a few hours.
0:27:29 And I was like, holy cow, like as you guys have seen in this podcast, I love to talk,
0:27:31 love to tell stories.
0:27:33 Maybe I can just keep doing this on TikTok.
0:27:39 And so I went into this feverish like constantly telling stories on TikTok, three a day for
0:27:43 30 days and then was up to like seven million subscribers on TikTok and then shifted to
0:27:46 YouTube and here we are.
0:27:47 Well, let me tell you one thing.
0:27:51 This is going to tell you a little bit about you and a lot about me.
0:27:52 You told two stories just now.
0:27:53 Yeah.
0:28:00 You told a story of you representing our country nearly dying in war, being saved by the Navy
0:28:02 Seals facing a life or death experience.
0:28:05 And I was like, I like this story.
0:28:11 Then you talked about how you came home, you got on LinkedIn, you started using the easy
0:28:16 button to try to post the content and then you admitted you’re like, I didn’t want to
0:28:19 be doing that, but I was doing that and I didn’t care.
0:28:20 I wanted to do it anyways.
0:28:24 And then people shit on before it and it felt really bad and they were right.
0:28:26 And I was like, I ride with this guy.
0:28:30 I love this guy because there are so few people on earth.
0:28:33 There are a few people on earth who have lived through war and survived.
0:28:38 There might be even fewer people who could look at their actions and say, yeah, I don’t
0:28:42 think and not give themselves the benefit of the doubt, right?
0:28:43 Everybody gives themselves the benefit of that.
0:28:45 Everyone gives themselves the charitable interpretation.
0:28:49 I really love how honest you were about what you were doing and how that might have been
0:28:54 like something that you’re not proud of how you did it and how you, you know, ultimately
0:28:58 where it landed you, which was like through doing that, you’re like, all right, I want
0:29:03 to do storytelling, social media, maybe you kind of had a taste of it, but then you tried
0:29:07 to make it by copying what others were doing on TikTok.
0:29:10 And only when you did the thing that was like the intersection of like, you know, what you’re
0:29:12 good at and what the world is interested in.
0:29:17 You found that authentic point where now, you know, there’s nobody else doing what you
0:29:19 were doing or very few people were doing what you were doing there.
0:29:22 So I think there’s a lot to learn from that.
0:29:24 How big is your guys’ company now?
0:29:29 I know you have 40 people and you’re like, just, what do you have, eight, nine million
0:29:35 on YouTube and then three million on Facebook and I don’t even know how much on TikTok now,
0:29:36 a shit load.
0:29:42 What’s the Mr. Ball with foundation and, you know, 1099 contractors that end up rolling
0:29:46 up into W twos were almost around 55.
0:29:50 And then I would say fan wise, you know, he’s got nine plus billion on YouTube, eight plus
0:29:55 billion on TikTok, three and a half on Facebook, Snapchat, you name it.
0:30:00 So I think, oh, and then you have the podcast, which does, you know, eight figures in downloads
0:30:01 a month.
0:30:07 So I mean, I would say the, the range is about 25 million in fans just for the strange dark
0:30:08 mysterious.
0:30:11 So you built this empire quickly.
0:30:15 And you know, when I do these podcasts, I wake up and I think, all right, what am I
0:30:17 excited to talk about and learn about genuinely?
0:30:22 What am I actually selfishly interested because that’s what makes for the best podcast on
0:30:25 honestly, because it’s, that’s the conversation I really want to have.
0:30:29 And the one thing I wanted to learn from you was like, you, you built this media company
0:30:33 and you do these kind of like strange, dark and mysterious stories.
0:30:34 I don’t do those stories.
0:30:37 I’m not necessarily trying to build a media company, but there was one thing you said
0:30:40 that really stood out to me when I was kind of going down the rabbit hole.
0:30:44 And it’s around what is the mindset that’s helped you become successful that I could
0:30:47 take even if I’m trying to do something completely different, right?
0:30:49 How can I learn from you guys?
0:30:54 How can I learn from a seal and the mindset that, that it took to be successful there,
0:30:56 that it took to be successful with your media company that I might use elsewhere?
0:30:58 And you said something that was great.
0:31:02 You were on our buddy Chris’s podcast and you said, he was asking you about, you know,
0:31:04 being in a rut or how do you not get stuck?
0:31:09 And you said, you know, one thing I’m good at is if I find something, I have a basic
0:31:11 outline of what I want to do.
0:31:16 As long as something checks enough of the boxes, I don’t overthink it because you said most
0:31:21 people or, you know, other people could sit there and question what, you know, we have
0:31:25 something that, that you think might work and you could sit there and question and say,
0:31:27 is there some alternative that’s slightly better?
0:31:30 Is there something that would check more boxes or how would this work and get caught up in
0:31:31 the details?
0:31:36 I really love that mindset because I think that is a, every entrepreneur has been guilty
0:31:38 of that once if not is stuck there.
0:31:40 Can you talk a little bit about that mindset?
0:31:42 What did you mean by that?
0:31:44 And any maybe examples of how you approach that?
0:31:45 Sure.
0:31:50 So I mean, to be clear, definitely in terms of getting the business to 55 employees with
0:31:52 a slate of shows, that wasn’t me.
0:31:58 I might be the face of it, but Nick is absolutely the architect and the guy who runs the business.
0:32:02 But just relative to like, you know, my role in this company.
0:32:03 Yeah.
0:32:06 I think that what I was getting at with Chris Williamson was this idea that, you know,
0:32:07 we are inundated.
0:32:14 We like anybody online are inundated oftentimes with like these pretty tropish messages like,
0:32:19 you know, you just got to outwork the competition, you just got to put in, you just got to grind
0:32:20 like hustle culture.
0:32:24 Like it’s, it’s this whole idea of like, just get out there and like, just do stuff.
0:32:29 And it’s like, but what do I do is oftentimes the unspoken question of most people listening
0:32:30 is like, I get it.
0:32:31 Like I need to work really hard.
0:32:34 I need to care a lot about what I’m doing.
0:32:35 People get that.
0:32:42 But where a lot of people stumble from my perspective is just sounds corny, but like taking action.
0:32:48 But the idea is like, there are so many things that anybody at any time could pursue, whether
0:32:51 it’s career, relationship, hobby, you name it.
0:32:55 Like there’s an infinite number of things in some ways that you could, you could do.
0:33:00 And people are like, well, is it, what’s the ROI if I do this, whatever it is?
0:33:04 And I don’t think that I set out to be this way out of strategy.
0:33:09 I think it’s just who I am, which is like, if it’s good enough, just start doing it.
0:33:15 And so for me, like I had this idea and so I have a baseline of things I care about.
0:33:19 I want something to be hard enough that if I do it, I’ll feel really proud of doing that
0:33:20 thing.
0:33:23 Like if it’s easy, it’s not going to make me excited at the end, like it needs to be
0:33:24 a challenge.
0:33:28 So something that’s hard, something that comes with some level of like, this is going to sound
0:33:34 vain, but I think we’re all pretty human here, some level of recognition for doing the thing.
0:33:37 It’s not the reason you do it, but you do want people to be aware that you struggled and
0:33:40 built this thing, you did this thing, you own this thing, whatever it is.
0:33:45 So it’s like, has to be hard, has to have some level of people being aware.
0:33:49 This is again, my baseline, people being aware of me accomplishing it.
0:33:52 And then also, I want to have some level of enjoyment doing it.
0:33:56 The Navy SEAL teams are a good example of one of those things that checked those boxes
0:33:57 for me.
0:34:03 Like prior to trying out for the SEAL teams, I had sort of got my act together and managed
0:34:04 to graduate college.
0:34:09 There was a time where I definitely was not on that path, my mom wrote my college essay
0:34:14 to the college that accepted me, my grades were so bad, but the essay was so good.
0:34:18 She’s a professional writer that the college actually contacted me and was like, your grades
0:34:23 are not enough, but boy, that essay, you’re in the door, buddy.
0:34:27 And I immediately like got, I got in all this trouble with my first, anyways, I was on this
0:34:33 path to like flunking out of college and being that guy that totally peaked in high school.
0:34:37 But when I was back home in Quincy, Massachusetts, just south of Boston mass, I was like in my
0:34:41 mom’s basement after basically flunking out of school and getting in trouble.
0:34:46 I wound up realizing that, hey, if you want to graduate college, you got to do it yourself.
0:34:50 You need to own your fuck up and go to school and do it.
0:34:51 And so I managed to graduate.
0:34:57 I took some local classes, went back to the old university, I graduated, I get my degree,
0:35:00 but I had no idea what I wanted to do after college.
0:35:01 Like none.
0:35:05 I majored in philosophy with a minor in English because there was no pre-law degree because
0:35:08 I sort of convinced myself that maybe I’ll be a lawyer.
0:35:10 I was like, what am I going to do?
0:35:15 And I just, I had this feeling of like, well, man, it was really cool to like pick myself
0:35:18 up by the bootstraps and like graduate on my own strength here.
0:35:23 And I began looking for opportunities to kind of continue doing stuff like that.
0:35:26 And that’s where I kind of developed this mindset of look for things that are hard, look for
0:35:31 things that come with some level of recognition and things that I might enjoy doing.
0:35:32 And I found the SEAL teams.
0:35:36 Like I had always been kind of enamored with the military.
0:35:40 A lot of my classmates in high school, they, after high school joined the Marines and went
0:35:42 off to fight in the wars.
0:35:46 And I actually always sort of felt a little bit guilty that I went to college on my mom’s
0:35:51 essay and pissed it all away and yeah, I graduated, but I always had this sort of like deep down
0:35:55 guilt that I didn’t, you know, volunteer at the time that many of my friends did.
0:35:57 And so I kind of idolized them.
0:36:02 I also looked at the SEAL teams as being this thing that like just about anybody, you know,
0:36:04 within reason can try out for the SEAL teams.
0:36:08 It’s not something that requires a whole lot to get in the door.
0:36:11 I’m generalizing, but it is relatively easy to try out.
0:36:13 But it is exceptionally hard to graduate.
0:36:14 And so perfect.
0:36:16 It’s got this incredible challenge.
0:36:18 And then if you become a SEAL, well, guess what?
0:36:21 No one’s going to be like, yeah, but John screwed up in college.
0:36:24 And it just felt like, wow, like that checks every box for me.
0:36:25 And I went that way.
0:36:26 And I became a SEAL.
0:36:31 And then, you know, after, after the military, I still had that kind of mindset of looking
0:36:35 for things that I wanted to do that would be hard, some level of recognition and enjoy
0:36:36 and have some enjoyment.
0:36:39 And I thought social media was it.
0:36:47 It just felt like a big challenge, you know, to, to like get noticed by the world.
0:36:48 So here’s the deal.
0:36:51 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:36:52 It was called The Hustle.
0:36:56 And it was a daily newsletter at scale to millions of subscribers.
0:36:58 And it was the greatest business on earth.
0:37:03 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees and only three of them were actually
0:37:04 doing any writing.
0:37:08 The other employees were growing the newsletter, building out the tech for the platform and
0:37:09 selling ads.
0:37:11 And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
0:37:15 Today’s episode is brought to you by Beehive.
0:37:18 They are a platform that is built exactly for this.
0:37:21 If you want to grow your newsletter, if you want to monetize a newsletter, they do all
0:37:24 of the stuff that I had to hire dozens of employees to do.
0:37:25 So check it out.
0:37:26 Beehive.com.
0:37:33 That’s B-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:37:38 I know that like, I think your father is a, is a big shot journalist from the Boston
0:37:41 Globe, I think, and your, your mom and sister are as well.
0:37:46 Were you motivated by like just creating cool shit or were you motivated at all by money?
0:37:50 Cause I haven’t, I mean, there’s this phrase like king or rich, so it’s like, do you want
0:37:51 to be like famous?
0:37:53 Do you want to be like famous or do you want to be rich?
0:38:00 Um, I mean, to be honest, like when, for example, when I was trying really hard post deleting
0:38:05 all the seal stuff, like when I was trying to like find something on TikTok between dancing
0:38:10 and cringe stuff I was doing, I don’t think I necessarily had an exact goal in mind because
0:38:12 I truthfully didn’t know where it was going to take me.
0:38:14 I had low expectations.
0:38:18 I think that I looked at it because I was 30 at the time, you know, I’m not like an
0:38:19 18 year old.
0:38:23 I’m not throwing shade on 18 year olds, but when I was 18, if I was doing social media,
0:38:27 it was for fame, like be cool, like be the cool guy.
0:38:32 But when I was doing it, I actually was mostly probably leaning towards money in terms of
0:38:33 make this a livelihood.
0:38:34 I have kids.
0:38:35 I’m married.
0:38:39 Like this would be a really fun way to make a living, but I definitely did not have the
0:38:43 thought that this will be an empire worth millions of dollars.
0:38:47 I was thinking like, boy, wouldn’t it be great if this supplemented my income?
0:38:51 You know, and then only when, you know, this really frankly blew up.
0:38:58 I actually, I was somewhere in between recognition and money in the sense that I clearly saw.
0:39:02 This is when Nick comes into the picture and I’m like about to give it all up and we end
0:39:05 up kind of like sinking and we’re like, okay, we’re going to build this thing.
0:39:10 It was more like the fun of the challenge, which includes if you’re successful, you can
0:39:11 be famous.
0:39:13 If you’re successful, you can make lots of money.
0:39:14 You can have generational wealth.
0:39:18 But for me, like more than anything, it was this idea that like, I want to do something
0:39:20 that’s really fucking hard to do.
0:39:24 I would say of all the baseline elements I gave you, those are the things most drawn
0:39:25 to often times.
0:39:27 And so that is the thing.
0:39:32 If it was easy at a certain point to be Mr. Ballin and, and grow in notoriety and make
0:39:34 more money, I wouldn’t be interested in doing it.
0:39:37 Those are byproducts of the challenge that I often seek.
0:39:42 Sean, whenever I hang out with guys like these guys, these ex military guys, I feel inspired.
0:39:46 I also feel super fucking soft.
0:39:48 Do you, do you feel that same way?
0:39:50 Dude, that’s not just with military guys.
0:39:53 I feel that with the average guys.
0:39:54 This is of course.
0:39:55 Yes, I feel that way.
0:40:01 Well, I like what he said about like having a highest order bit, you know, like the orienting
0:40:02 function.
0:40:03 Like what is your true north?
0:40:06 And his true north is basically like, it sounds like you’re like looking for giant
0:40:08 mountains to go climb like summit.
0:40:12 You’re like, what’s the, what’s the hard thing that I would feel proud of myself if I did.
0:40:15 And then I know other people would be proud and respect me too if they did it.
0:40:18 And as a byproduct of doing the hard thing, I’m sure there’s reward.
0:40:19 Yes.
0:40:20 And John’s always been like that.
0:40:21 Yeah.
0:40:22 Exactly.
0:40:26 And it sounds like the seals like that’s conquering social media, although it sounds goofy like
0:40:27 TikTok or whatever.
0:40:30 It’s one of the most competitive merit based things you could go compete in.
0:40:35 What’s a race that a billion people are competing in, you know, that that’s one of the few.
0:40:38 And so like Sam, what is your, what’s your version of that?
0:40:42 What’s the highest order, you know, the orienting thing when you decide, what are you going
0:40:43 to, what are you going to devote your time and your talents to?
0:40:44 Do you know?
0:40:45 Mine was, mine’s empty.
0:40:49 It’s still empty, which is, it was just like money to provide for my family.
0:40:54 But once you get past that, like it is quite, you’re empty when you don’t have that.
0:40:57 And I still, I’m still oftentimes I’m like, I need this.
0:40:58 I need direction.
0:41:02 And so that’s why when I hear these guys, I’m like, I feel a sense of envy, a bit that
0:41:05 they have a direction, but I feel a slightly directionless to you.
0:41:09 At the beginning it was like prove myself early twenties, then like late twenties was
0:41:13 like, you know, I’d like to have like a million dollars in the bank, you know, like some money
0:41:14 became like the thing.
0:41:15 It’s a million, 10 million.
0:41:19 And the, the richer person I met, I would be like, Oh yeah, I need that much money.
0:41:24 Then early thirties popping out kids, I realized I went to lifestyles like, Oh, actually it’s
0:41:29 a certain amount of money, but actually it’s, I don’t want more money with more stress and
0:41:30 time.
0:41:35 I want like the maximum amount of time, least amount of stress, but still be able to do
0:41:36 whatever the hell I want.
0:41:37 So enough money to do that.
0:41:39 So that was what I would call lifestyle.
0:41:44 And now I’m 36 and in the last year, I basically shifted that north again.
0:41:46 And by the way, I don’t think it’s bad to shift to north.
0:41:49 I think you have seasons of life and chapters of life and you should eat.
0:41:52 They’re all not all the same, you know, like having a lot of fun was really important in
0:41:53 college for me.
0:41:54 And that was the true north.
0:41:57 Right now it’s basically enjoyment.
0:42:01 So what I’m trying to do is figure out what is the most me thing I could do.
0:42:05 Like you were saying, these are the stories I’m interested in and you come from background.
0:42:08 I think your parents are like storytellers and it’s probably something you learned through
0:42:09 osmosis.
0:42:11 I think about it like this.
0:42:14 What can I do that’s just simply me pushed out to the world?
0:42:16 That is my most my highest orienting function.
0:42:21 And then the filter is basically, am I doing this because doing it is the reward or am I
0:42:24 doing this for some future rewards?
0:42:27 And most of my life I did things for future rewards.
0:42:29 I went to college so I could get a good job and I got a good job so that I could make
0:42:30 some money.
0:42:32 And I got some money so that I could buy this thing.
0:42:34 Everything was this future payoff.
0:42:36 And now I’m like, oh wait, I don’t need to do that trade.
0:42:37 That’s a little silly.
0:42:39 Why don’t I just do things with the act of doing it as the reward?
0:42:42 If there happens to be other byproducts in the future, great.
0:42:47 But I can’t do things that I don’t really want to do or kind of suck today because I
0:42:48 think they might pay off in the future.
0:42:49 I don’t do those anymore.
0:42:52 This podcast is the best thing I’ve ever done.
0:42:55 And when I started it, I was basically like, I’m going to lose, I plan, I wrote down in
0:42:58 my plan, this should lose about $10,000 to $20,000 a year.
0:42:59 I’m comfortable with that.
0:43:04 So it’s like the only non, not only just won’t make me rich, I planned for it to make me slightly
0:43:06 poorer every year doing it.
0:43:09 And ironically, this is the thing that’s done the best.
0:43:11 It’s been the most successful of all the projects.
0:43:12 And I’m willing to do it forever.
0:43:15 This is the only thing I do that I’m not looking to exit, right?
0:43:20 Like I’m not looking to sell this and then I’ll be able to relax and retire.
0:43:22 It’s like, no, no, I kind of want to keep doing the pot.
0:43:23 You’d have to pay me to stop.
0:43:28 Do you guys have for Mr. Ball and Studios, do you guys have this North Star in terms
0:43:31 of how many people you’re going to reach or how big the company’s going to get?
0:43:35 Or is this a business that you’re like, man, one day we could sell this for like $200 million?
0:43:36 Yeah.
0:43:40 What do you label the top of the mountain or like what’s the height of the mountain you’re
0:43:41 trying to climb here?
0:43:46 The North Star I would say for the company as far as, you know, being a manager, it’s
0:43:49 always what’s your client’s North Star, that’s your North Star.
0:43:53 And then as CEO, it’s still that, but it’s what’s, you know, what’s John and I’s North
0:43:55 Star from the studio, his vision.
0:43:57 And I implement and execute.
0:43:59 Well, that’s the noble sounding thing.
0:44:03 John, what’s the dirty selfish, ego driven goal you have?
0:44:04 Yeah.
0:44:07 Surely you guys are, surely you guys are sit down and you’re like, man, I think in five
0:44:09 years we could do a hundred million in revenue.
0:44:10 Yeah.
0:44:14 My New Year’s resolution is to like, you know, build healthy habits, but there’s the dirty
0:44:17 selfish goal of like, I want to take my shirt off and see some abs, baby.
0:44:21 Like, come on, I won’t say that, but like, that’s what, that’s part of it for sure.
0:44:26 So I will say that before all of this happened, before I was in college, I always aspired
0:44:30 to be, I played baseball growing up, not like at a very high level.
0:44:34 I played through high school, but I was like really good in my hometown, you know, at
0:44:39 one point I, I really believed that I could potentially play for the Boston Red Sox.
0:44:41 That’s like my favorite team.
0:44:42 And I…
0:44:43 So now you want to own them?
0:44:46 There’s, I don’t think that is, in terms of a selfish goal, yeah.
0:44:47 Like that would be the thing.
0:44:51 I would want to own a piece of the Red Sox, but actually I was going to an analogy and
0:44:52 then I was going to double back to that.
0:44:56 When that dream was shattered, sometime I remember my senior year of high school, I just like
0:44:57 said it out loud.
0:45:00 I’m like, yeah, I’m probably not going to play for the Boston Red Sox.
0:45:02 And I was like, no, fuck, like, that’s true.
0:45:03 Like I’m not.
0:45:04 The dream is over.
0:45:08 But I always just like thought about, like that was the dream that, that was my childhood
0:45:11 dream, like pitch for the Boston Red Sox.
0:45:12 That was it.
0:45:16 And so now like that we’re at this place, you know, Ballin Studios is at this place
0:45:21 where, you know, when he’s talking about recruiting the best storytellers in the world, it’s actually
0:45:23 a little bit different than recruiting.
0:45:28 I look at us, and this is my, take my shirt off, show you the truth.
0:45:32 I look at us as like, I’ll put it this way, if you, if you’re a baseball player, you’re
0:45:38 an amateur baseball player like I was, you don’t aspire to be the best independent baseball
0:45:42 player in the world, that you’re going to be by yourself, just being the best.
0:45:45 You want to play for the fucking Boston Red Sox or the Yankees or whatever it is you want
0:45:46 to play for.
0:45:47 Like that’s, that’s the goal.
0:45:53 Like that’s the peak of baseball is playing for one of those teams for me, the Red Sox.
0:45:58 And so I love this idea of like thinking about that dream I had and kind of angling it so
0:46:04 it’s applicable to storytellers where there really isn’t like a really prominent like that’s
0:46:06 where the fucking storytellers go.
0:46:10 Like that’s the place, that’s the stamp of approval that is the ultimate place.
0:46:14 If you’re a storyteller in some capacity, if you are under the Ballin Studios umbrella,
0:46:16 boom, you’ve made it.
0:46:17 Like that’s the equivalent.
0:46:19 I want us to be that.
0:46:23 I want to be the Boston Red Sox equivalent for storytellers.
0:46:27 And so I don’t know how we’re going to get there, but I want that level of prestige assigned
0:46:30 to Ballin Studios relative to storytellers.
0:46:35 And then with that, I want to own a fucking piece of the Red Sox.
0:46:37 That’s a great, that’s a great goal.
0:46:38 All right.
0:46:43 So give me, give me something I can use today, meaning you’re a great storyteller.
0:46:45 You’re trying to build the team of the greatest storytellers.
0:46:49 Tell me, teach me something that will make me a better storyteller today.
0:46:52 What’s one thing you could teach me to make me a better storyteller?
0:46:57 It’s something that people love and hate that tune into my content.
0:46:59 This is like, it’s kind of a polarizing thing.
0:47:03 But one of the things that I’ll do when I’m telling a story, if it’s not my own, if it’s
0:47:08 somebody else’s story, which is like 99% of the stories I’ve done, is I don’t just resuscitate
0:47:10 the facts of the story.
0:47:16 I, and with a very incredible team of people, it’s not just me anymore, we will like inhabit
0:47:17 that story.
0:47:21 It’s, I don’t, I have scripts that sit next to me, but like as my producer who’s right
0:47:25 over here will attest to, I’m not reading the script.
0:47:29 It’s a matter of producing a script that I can then like become a part of.
0:47:33 I will begin espousing what people are thinking or what people could have been thinking or
0:47:37 what could have been said in certain situations that I have no way of knowing.
0:47:41 But I am so committed to telling that story that I have learned it both outside as much
0:47:46 as I can insides that when you’re hearing it, it would almost be like it was my story.
0:47:50 Like the level of commitment, if you’re going to tell a story, own the fucking story.
0:47:54 Like it enter the story and don’t leave until it’s done.
0:47:57 People that like tell you a story and it sounds like they’re just telling something
0:47:58 they heard.
0:47:59 That’s not storytelling.
0:48:00 That’s just regurgitating something you heard.
0:48:05 You want to be a fucking storyteller and habit the story full commitment to the point where
0:48:10 you are literally acting out pieces of that story for your audience.
0:48:12 Damn, I’m hyped up Sam.
0:48:13 You are the man.
0:48:15 Sam, are you feeling what I’m feeling right now?
0:48:16 Yeah.
0:48:18 John, I once fell in love with this girl in Australia.
0:48:19 It’s called love.
0:48:22 And I fell in love with this girl in Australia and she was a dancer.
0:48:23 She wanted you to come out dancing with her.
0:48:24 I said, no, no, no.
0:48:25 I’m not a dancer.
0:48:26 You’re a dancer.
0:48:27 You do that.
0:48:28 I’ll watch you over here on the side.
0:48:29 She said, no, go over here.
0:48:30 And she was like, okay.
0:48:31 Hand on my hip.
0:48:32 And I put my hand on her hip.
0:48:34 And she goes, let me stop you right there.
0:48:35 I was like, oh man, I already fucked up.
0:48:36 This dancer getting his move.
0:48:37 Oh, no.
0:48:41 And she goes, if you ever touch someone, touch them with intent.
0:48:42 And I feel like that’s what you just told me.
0:48:45 If you’re going to tell a story, tell the story with some intent.
0:48:46 You got to touch with intent.
0:48:47 You got to touch these stories.
0:48:48 I love that.
0:48:49 This woman sounds awesome.
0:48:55 She also told me she wanted to never get married and have a man in every port.
0:48:58 And I was like, I don’t know if that’s a figure of speech or just a lifestyle choice.
0:49:04 I don’t really know what’s going on, but I think you’re a little too adventurous for me.
0:49:05 Dude, you guys are awesome.
0:49:09 Your team’s saying you got to wrap up and we appreciate y’all.
0:49:11 I’ve really admired you guys from afar.
0:49:12 Come on.
0:49:13 Yep.
0:49:14 Thank you for having us.
0:49:15 This is great.
0:49:16 All right.
0:49:17 That’s the pod.
0:49:19 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:49:25 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days off on the road.
0:49:26 Let’s travel.
0:49:27 Never looking back.
0:49:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Episode 632: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to John Allen ( https://x.com/MrBallen ) and Nick Witters ( https://x.com/themrwitters ), the minds behind MrBallen and Ballen Studios.
—
Show Notes:
(0:00) Being a creator on hard mode
(7:19) Slow is smooth and smooth is fast
(8:44) Being hit by a grenade in combat
(17:03) Elite Meet
(18:29) John’s TikTok ideas bank
(21:42) The SEALs turn on John
(25:02) How telling 1 story launched MrBallen
(28:18) Getting unstuck
(35:02) Be rich or be a king?
(40:44) The North Star for Ballen
(44:00) 1 thing to be a better storyteller
—
Links:
• MrBallen on YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallen
• MrBallen on TikTok – https://www.tiktok.com/@mrballen
• Ballen Studios – https://ballenstudios.com/
• Elite Meet – https://elitemeetus.org/
• Dyaltov Pass TikTok – https://www.tiktok.com/@mrballen/video/6799049964937809157
—
Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
—
Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano