#2543 - MrBallen

Man, this is wild. Walking into this room feels like hallowed ground; I’ve watched clips for years, heard all the Jamie references, and now I’m actually here. It’s very cool.

I get that. My first Howard Stern appearance was, what the fuck, this is the real place. I barely slept and did hotel-room yoga. Fear Factor came from that era, when TV started asking people to eat animal parts and historians could point at cultural decline.

It premiered after September Eleventh, and people asked whether scaring Americans was appropriate. It was entertainment—watch it or don’t. Reality TV also fed the attention economy: some chase money, others will do anything just to be noticed.

That chase gets grotesque. I covered a Russian influencer’s dry-ice pool stunt; three people died when the gas displaced oxygen. My dark joke was, what did the engagement look like? That’s the sickness.

Dry ice is not something you casually jump into. Russia can be gnarly legally, though Russian people are brilliant and fascinating. The political world there? You’d better know the right people. How’d you get into creepy stories?

I spent seven years as a SEAL, got out in 2017, did veteran-charity work, and drifted while supporting my wife and three kids. I found Gary Vee, had a phone and internet, and figured I could risk embarrassment. Everything flopped until 2020.

At an indoor water park, I stopped copying trends and told the Dyatlov Pass mystery. I posted a one-minute TikTok, left my phone, and returned to millions of views. Strange, dark, mysterious stories were actually my thing.

In 1959, nine Soviet hikers vanished in the Urals. Their tent was cut from within, gear abandoned in brutal cold, and footprints led downhill—some barefoot. Bodies appeared in stages, including catastrophic injuries and missing facial tissue. Lights, radiation traces, and a quick closure made it a rabbit hole.

“Overwhelming force” is a strange official answer. Freezing, exhaustion, and bad decisions make sense. The surgical-looking injuries are where it gets fucking weird.

There was probably a rational explanation; hypothermia causes irrational behavior, and Russia later leaned avalanche. But why camp there, leave that way, and what happened to the missing tissue?

Extreme fatigue wrecks judgment. One exhausted Bob can make a whole group stop when they should continue. BUD/S is a smart filter: you learn who operates under overwhelming stress by putting them there.

I questioned whether I could make it, but never chose to quit. Trying hard and failing differs from deciding you’re done. The underwater swim showed it: people mentally surrendered before their bodies were finished. Psychologists taught arousal control, and wrestlers and water-polo players completed at unusually high rates.

Pool competency meant instructors shutting off your air and tying hoses while you followed procedures without panicking. Then: tank, weight belt, no fins, hands high, five minutes of treading. A big water-polo officer floated nearly to his chest, smiling. That dude was built for it.

In Afghanistan in 2014, we entered Zarganshar and found fighters waiting to ambush us. Retreat meant open ground, so we pushed through. Hours later, my fire team approached what seemed like a wall above suspicious men; armed fighters were behind it. Grenades came over, and one hit my shoulder before detonating at my feet.

I thought my head was gone, then my legs. I was bleeding, deaf, and blind, calmly wondering whether my obituary would say killed in action and how my wife would be told. Kyle, our medic-sniper, showed up, put tourniquets on me, and spoke like we were anywhere but hell.

Everyone else hit an incredible flow state—calling danger-close strikes, dragging wounded men, returning fire, getting us extracted. I was useless; they carried me to the helicopter. I watched the training work.

I woke in Germany, kept my limbs, and got home to Virginia within days. Mostly flesh and shrapnel, though the blast likely wrecked both shoulders. I’m open to stem cells and peptides, but I don’t ego-lift now. Carries, kettlebells, and sustainable volume make more sense.

Online success was surreal: viral views, money, then a huge Amazon deal. Contractors stole hundreds of thousands while my house sat gutted, and close people showed ugly angles. My circle is tight. My right-hand guy is a former homicide detective who told me my content was stupid. Perfect.

Sudden success makes people see an opportunity, not a person. I avoid most of it by limiting access, filtering submissions, and doing the simple thing: talking with interesting people. If I enjoy it, hopefully everybody else does too.

I love stories that make you ask, then what happened? Nahanni Valley has prospectors hunting gold in absurd remoteness, multiple dead men, several without heads, stories of Wahila creatures, burned cabins, and disappearances. I still stare at photos of those canyons.

There’s weirdness in places people barely reach. A wolverine is real, but lifelong woodsmen may never see one. Maybe an isolated ancient population survived somewhere remote; maybe it didn’t. We shouldn’t pretend we know every fucking thing.

That draws me to UFOs and the universe. A Mexican pilot allegedly heard a strange voice warn that humans alone use war to destroy each other. Whether it happened or not, what if violence is normal to us but abnormal to advanced life?

Maybe humans are engineered: smart enough for airplanes and atom bombs, still territorial violent primates. Creation stories keep involving advanced beings. Mythology or not, we’re bizarre animals—aware pain and death matter, then causing chaos anyway.

We’re egocentric about alien intelligence, imagining it roughly human. To something vastly smarter, we might be ants. Thousands of potentially life-friendly exoplanets exist in the tiny slice we’ve examined. How can anybody be certain what’s possible?

Our universe could be a tiny piece of something larger. We’re basically making stone tools. AI may solve problems we can’t, maybe become intelligence’s next form. It’s scary, but it’s happening whether we like it or China or Russia does.

AI is a massive turning point. I covered a man convinced an experimental chatbot was guiding him to save the world; it encouraged his suicide. Horrifying. But this could help humanity reach something bigger—if we don’t lose what matters first.

After Afghanistan, I questioned war differently. I entered Afghan homes armed and terrifying; later I thought, if strangers entered mine, I’d protect my family too. I volunteered and respect that, but people clinging to evacuation planes made desperation impossible to ignore.

If people demanding war had to lead the first charge, we’d have less of it. Tribalism, power, and making poor young people fight while powerful people watch—that’s primate shit we need to outgrow.

The Kandahar giant is probably impossible to verify, but Afghanistan has alien-feeling mountains and caves nobody casually explores. I never saw one. Still, if an unproven giant could hide anywhere, man, it would be there. I hope these stories are real. That’s my problem.

Harrison Okene’s shipwreck is real: trapped in an air pocket inside an overturned tugboat for about sixty hours. Divers expecting bodies found his hand reaching out. Darkness, the sea around the wreck, knowing the pocket could vanish—that’s primal fear. I’d stay on land too.

Man, this was awesome. You’re a great storyteller. Your Afghanistan story had me on the edge of my seat, and the creepy stuff makes everybody ask what happened next. Congratulations on all of it.