From Navy SEAL To Viral Content Creator - MrBallen’s Insane Story

i watched this grenade come over the wall and it's like i can see it for a second it disappeared i can see it for second and i was like time absolutely stood still and when i was in this blackness of not seeing and not hearing i knew absolutely that this is done i had mental issues i had emotional issues i had real physical issues i was a complete psycho bath and when i got out i thought social media and content creation was just kind of fascinating how did you decide that was over the way to spend your life if you create the right thing at the right time it's like a lottery ticket and it goes viral and then it's your chance at that point to capitalize in whatever way you want to but i was obsessed with it so despite the many failures over the course of bleeding you know six months or so maybe a year of just like awful cringe videos that went nowhere on a whim i was like you know what i'm just gonna shoot a quick video and i leave my phone in the room for a couple hours come back and i couldn't even open my phone and it had over five million views in a matter of a few hours so you built this empire quickly i went into this fever ish like constantly telling stories on tiktok three a day for thirty days and then up like seven million subscribers on tiktok and then shipped youtube and here we are what's one thing you could teach me to make me a better stories of it it's something that people love and hate you're gonna tell a story i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to on from at all in it like a day's off on a sean have you have you ever seen the mister ball channel before like i asked you if he should come on no when i found out you're were coming on as a guest that's when the research started and i went to your tiktok first and then i went to youtube but then i started watching some other stuff but i love the genre but i'm not like crazy about it my brother all is nuts about these spooky stories he does something i don't even understand you you gotta explain this to me there's apparently youtube channel but takes spooky stories from reddit and then reads it like text to speech like robotic text to speech and he'll listen to this thing for like two hours straight i can't believe that he does this but when i saw that i was like oh that's like people who are far on the deep end of loving this type of content i've i've definitely have done like on a saturday where i've gotta do chores or something like that run errands i've done a six to eight hour marathon of ball of mister ball and what's your consumption rate under your channel right now is it just through the roof that's a nick question so nick nick does everything with the exception of telling the stories on camera i'm like completely out of the loop with virtually everything else i just i sit down and tell stories and nick nick is the guy for literally every other question in terms of like growth the channel like metrics that's nick that's nick wheelhouse dude that's nirvana for content oh dude where you can get it down you just record and then you disappear and everything else happens magically yeah is the every contact creator wants it and we'll get this but he came in when didn't know how to like grow my channel beyond just me and like i was sober burned out nick came in when it was me and i think i had an editor and maybe like a topic finder and that was like overwhelming for me you know it's like i was deleting all emails that came in people trying to like do business with me just delete everything so i no idea had to like figure out if it was good or not and nick came in and was like do i'll help you and and he grew the business how big were you when that happened we were like significant on youtube but i personally was at a place where i was i me just jumping in i mean i was it it took me about twenty six hours give or take to make one video in the first six months i was on youtube but i was doing anywhere from three to five videos a week and at the same time you know i i'm married i have three young kids i completely was ne in all duties besides content my wife is a saint and picked up everything else but i was doing you know i do it math twenty he said like over a hundred hours of just constant grinding like at all hours and so even though the channel was you know in the millions and we were you know by all accounts had like made it as a as a youtube channel i was so close to being like dude this ain't worth it like i'm in my thirties i got a family like i've done well for myself but this is like the worst thing ever and it was around that time that i'm like maybe all those people that are emailing me maybe they can offer something that will help me like rogue i i swear to god i was just masked deleting emails because it was so stressful like people that were like trying to pitch me and i saw an email come through that was like you know fellow combat veteran here to help and and i had like i'm i'm a military guy and i'm immediately like okay this guy can talk to i don't know who he is i don't know what he means by help but i opened his email and he's like yeah you i i'm i'm a day to day manager with mister beast i i have experience and traditional talent you know i'm not looking to sign you not looking to really do anything but i just saw you know your vets rare in the space and i'd be happy to help and suck i immediately hit him up and i'm like i don't know you but my life's fallen apart here your man like i got all all this great stuff happening with youtube but i can't manage it like i'm losing my mind and and so that that began what turned out to be the the reason that the mister ball thing did not fade into obscurity i mean i'm a great storyteller but i'm i cannot i cannot grow a business i i couldn't have done this longer than like literally that month remember talking to my wife and being like i just don't know if this is worth it but nick came in and and i handed the reins of virtually everything over to nick and and he scaled the company we have like fifty plus employees now get later shows i show up to the studio and just somebody else hits record and i just tell stories and i leave because a nick the thing to johnny it's like every creator on the planet it's like you started it all by yourself everything lives and dies on their shoulders and so even just letting someone in to tweak a title or or give advice on a thumbnail is just like the the highest level of of anxiety that creators can have too did he say that you were working with mister beast before that yeah yeah so i got hired for to be the right hand for the ceo over night media and so reed was jimmy you know main manager and i got recruited to go b jimmy number two or reads number two and i was running day to day with mister b so and before that had no no clue about anything on youtube so i was like learning everything from michael jordan of youtube and then i was applying it real time in real practice and before that i i was in law school and became a lawyer did a military stent so in the nick also when he got out of the military so he does ninety combat visions in a iraq as an open turret gunner so i don't know you're familiar with this nowadays when you're overseas you are in an urine in and enclosed bomb proof like m wrap this huge up armored sixty thousand ton vehicle with it literally a remote controlled gun that has a screen in front of you that's how you they do it now nick was in iraq when it's an open turret like it's just you hanging it out there and let they turret gunners or the number one target like as you're rolling through on patrol so nick is doing this extremely dangerous mission set comes back from rock gets out of the military goes to law school which is the whole thing then he ends up deciding he wants to get into entertainment law but he has no idea house so he just begins pest w e one of the biggest talent agencies in the world to like let him work for them no one's taking his calls they're like he's showing up in his one ragged so suit that he's got like trying to make an impression he says big yolk do with tattoos all over no one wants him he finally gets the attention of one of the partners he's like alright dude you come here all the time like you can work in the mail room pushing the male car and the dude quickly ascended and was like working with with with talent like killing so nick is a highly persistent dude who just does what he wants it's pretty amazing we got to know jimmy because we do we do an event with him every year we call camp m m and i would say the the first year we met him his crew was a lot of like his friends or like his cousin and like and and that's great because you get like high loyalty and like cam and all that but the operations were obviously like bust busting at the seams because he's growing so fast and every single person there has never done anything like this before and for a lot of them never done anything before it's like you're you're all twenty three you're all twenty four or everybody was so young we went back this year and is right hand man sean is the guy who's like john hendrix sounds like it reminds of you already nick i think he is ex ex military as well he was just like super operational just an adult in the room and just had this like grind mindset and like you isn't like enamored by the idea of mister beast it's not like isn't trying to be a part of the cool scene sees it as an operation that needs to be run well and i you could just tell his whole life got better by surrounding himself with more people like that sam i don't know if i ever told you the story but we for one of our companies we hired ex military guy to be like our kind of like head of customer service something like that it was like at home was a remote job he could do at home i think he had like a leg injury so this was like a good thing for him and this guy transformed our entire business like first he started customer service but he would just notice everything is broken because you know it's a sean company if everything is broken and so he would find that the next thing broken and he would just be dm me in slack by the way the best part was he wouldn't make you feel bad about fixing stuff he would just give me these like military phrases he'd be like slow smooth and smooth as fast he just that in the morning and then i would be like i really know where that applies but i think it applies to everything in my life now and he was like my guiding you know mentor basically from the customer service department it was amazing well i think john went on chris williamson pod and he told the story where i think a grenade exploded near you and almost died and it was a really bad situation and you're like it was kinda cool though because i saw tens of millions of dollars worth of elite training go into play because when i got hurt my guys like did exactly what they were supposed to do and it was like it was like clockwork where you're like it so cool i can actually see all of this actually happening and i guess i mean it it with a lot of the military guys it seems that goes into play with business particularly when they're like dude mu grenades this shit's easy yeah it's grenade basically landed between myself and a few of my other teammates it d aids one of the things that happens in in my limited experience in combat is you can get shot several times you don't just immediately collapse to the ground unless it's at a head shot or something you can get shot and become a superhuman for like thirty seconds it's it's it's one of the most bizarre things and it's like we're engaging these guys and in this absolute chaos they lob the grenades over the wall to our side and i remember i watched this grenade come over the wall it's like i can see it for a second it disappeared i can see it for second and it was like time absolutely stood stood still it's not some i'm not making that up but that's that was my experience it's like i'm witnessing my death here comes this grenade i know it's a grenade it's like i'm my my brain has become hyper focused on what's happening then i remember thinking as it came closer to my head this all happened in a fraction of a second i remember thinking boy if it d here it's gonna blow my head off and i won't beat my mom won't be able to identify me like i just hope this falls below my head so even though it's gonna kill me at least they can see my face i can have an open casket my family can see me but you know it reached my head and i'm just embrace embracing for death and then you know lights out lights on lights out lights on it falls it hits my shoulder and it goes and begins to travel down to the ground i remember having this thought of when it was at my torso again in this fraction of a second thinking few my my face will be intact and now it's gonna blow me in half but at least my mom will see her son face but it makes it to the ground and now i'm thinking holy cow like it i might i just blow my legs off i might live through this it hits the ground and it d nate and i can only i can only could compare it to first of all i'm i'm prepared to die at this point so i was just ready for whatever happened there was no pain involved but it felt like somebody took a handful of rocks and just threw them as hard as they could at my back and and my my hips and my legs and it was zero pain like there wasn't even really shock even though work work we are all the seven of us in the lethal range of this grenade we just think that it was basically muffled older dead and slightly by being in sewage by the way i got e coli as a result of this because sewage was shot into my body but yeah i collapsed to the ground and then my and then all hell broke loose i mean of the seven of us that were behind this wall six become incapacitated down to the ground like unconscious or badly hurt are medic who also is a seal he's incredible his name is kyle he he would tell us later on that everybody goes down he knows that there's multiple enemy enemy combat literally on the other side of the wall and he's like i just went into flow you know he he began rescuing us under a hail of gunfire and so rounds are coming and rockets are being fired overhead i'm barely conscious and our medics just began pulling people out under the halo of gunfire my memory which it would take years to learn what actually happened because my memory was not accurate was i felt like the the rocks hitting me and i kinda like looked up and was it waiting for a combat combat to come into the the alley we were in and finish me off and then like somehow or another i was pulled like ten twenty feet away and brought into this alley way and then kyle the medic wound up putting turn on my legs and saving my life but years after the fact kyle and i we didn't speak following this this whole thing it was like so traumatic we we came back to the united states separately we didn't talk for four years it that after with all of us but when i sat down with him he would tell me that after the impact after the the d nation he said i looked and i saw you on the ground and i thought at first you were on a sheet of ice and was like it doesn't make any sense because there's it's not cold enough and he was like that's when i realized you were actually in a puddle of blood you were face down and i assumed you were dead and in terms of tri the situation i i couldn't work on you you were the the lowest chance of survival and he was like i left you to die you know i thought you were dead already and then after the others had basically been pulled out you know somebody came back and pulled me up and i remember like being sort of in and out of consciousness and this this my memory of this i think was fairly accurate because i got brought basically here's the t i got brought like to the stem of the tea if you will we're still getting shot at and i i have these they're called quick release turn kits sitting on my kit they're they're they're literally on you so that you can quickly access them to stop the bleeding and you actually put them here to save your life and i didn't have the strength to break the rubber bands because lost so much blood and so i'm sitting there no one's with me yet i've just been dragged here and left and you know rounds are coming into the alley way and and i i had this moment where i could see everything i could hear everything but then my vision completely went i went blind i couldn't see anything and i could only hear and then the hearing turned into what sounded like helicopter like then i went to nothing and i had this this point where it's i'm in a void can't see anything can't hear anything i know on the lives still but it's i compare it to when i was seven years old and i i fell roller bla and i i badly broke my collar bone and the second i hit the ground i stood up and i said to my dad i broke my collar and like i'm said i don't think i ever i ever even thought about the fact that i had a collar or even knew that that was called a collar but it was like your brain is like yep that's what happened it's something traumatic and you know it immediately and when i was in this blackness of not seeing and not hearing i knew absolutely that this is death like absolutely it was just a matter of fact and i couldn't believe it like i just got married me and my wife had put off the idea of having kids until after this deployment and i'm like i can't believe that's what's gonna happen i'm gonna die here and i'm my one of my final thoughts was i wonder if in the newspaper will it say john b allen like killed at action or will it say jonathan b allen it was like just weird thoughts of a car you know will will my will my obituary make a national newspaper or just a local paper like well when are they gonna tell my wife it was just so weirdly matter of fact and it struck me that like just as much as you know how to live without thinking too hard about it it's the only thing we know you are ready to die you just don't know it yet when you face that i imagine you have some type of questioning of like like how do i wanna spend my time life short things like that does that mental clarity kinda carry with you for for a decade honestly it has oddly enough even though i tried out and became a seal i actually felt like i was somebody that was constantly turning down opportunities in fear of failure and it was almost like over compensation to go try out to be a seal to like internally write that or balance that out like i had shot down so many opportunities but after this near death experience it's like anytime there's an opportunity no matter how big no matter how scary no matter the opportunity to fail i do actively think about the fact that like bro you're gonna die and it's it's gonna happen and it's gonna be matter of fact and it's gonna feel like holy shit i can't believe i'm dying and and that's it that's the end and and that is the thing that i think about just like not the f of life but the matter of fact of dying the same way we live every day and we don't think about it don't wake up and think oh i better live today you just do it the same shit happens when you die and it's gonna happen when you probably aren't even expecting it's like there you go you're done and so i i carry that and just to close with the loop there after i got med back was safe they they debrief you after your meta when you're taken out of country for an injury and they asked me like so what are your takeaways now that you've survived this ordeal and i said to the the commanding officer i'm like you know what in real time i watched what navy seals do under fire not me i was completely worthless i'm like in incapacitated on the ground but i watched millions and millions and millions of dollars in training like in practice and it was beautiful it was like the training work and so that's actually used as a quote by that guy he's like the training works this guy said so you when you're deciding to build mister ball mister ball studio first of all going into business going into creation and then building a media company how did you decide that was worthy a worthy way to spend your life basically i fell backwards into this i mean i i got out of the military in twenty seventeen it was a medical retirement that was due in large part to this injury i've just described i i wound up deploying one more time in the team but i had mental issues i had emotional issues i had real physical issues i was a complete psycho path by the time i was being effectively told it's time for you to to wrap it up here in the navy and when i got out in an effort to get myself a civilian job i wound up connecting with this guy named jordan s who was this investment banker in new york turned entrepreneur and he's like man you got a network and so i started like going on linkedin and networking didn't even what i was doing i was just like randomly messaging random people but before long i like met enough people that there was this idea to have a networking event in new york and so i i i invited some people that were also leaving the seal teams to come with me to meet some business people in new york it was like pretty open ended and i i wound up giving a couple of yeah i guess a speech if you will at this like weird event with like fifty people we called it elite meet was the name of the event and it was meant to just be this one time event i gave this talk about hey you know in the room right now we have these veterans and like here's what they bring to the table and jordan who was there with me he talked about what the business people had and what what offered opportunities they're looking to fill and and it was great like a few people got hired as a result but ironically nobody was asking me about getting a job because the assumption was this is your job you run this networking event and so i ended up making that my job and for a couple of years i i was the ceo of of elite meet but to to shorten the story the pandemic happened and ours our our our charity was largely event based you know we've literally had these big networking events that we would you know cultivate over many months and we couldn't do events anymore because no one could do anything like the world shut down and it was around that time that i was sort of looking at other pathways to to i don't know to live my life and i thought social media and content creation was just kind of fascinating as i mean it's it's one of the few places where it's fairly obvious that you know unless you really buy into this idea that that algorithms are like totally you know leaning one way or the other ultimately content creation is a big merit you know ultimately you can create content with no platform no no nothing and if if you create the right thing at the right time it's like a lottery ticket and it goes viral and then it's your chance at that point to capitalize in whatever way you want to and i tried i tried cash that lottery ticket for a while doing some cringe like weird sketch comedy on on instagram and and linkedin and i was doing like dance videos some like a middle aged new doing dance videos on on tiktok getting made fun of did it was horrible it was like nothing worked i was like boy i got this somebody be a content creator but i i had this this document on my computer i had two documents there was like tiktok ideas or content ideas and on one document it was like i'm not kidding pay like fifty pages of single space just bullets of ideas of peg of content i could create and then i had this other document that had a single word on it or it was like a single bullet point and it and it just said dia pass so dia pass is this very famous mystery about these hike in the nineteen fifties who go missing in the year old mountains and yeah they're very experienced hike and that wind up missing and then they're found and there's these photos of their campsite site and it's been you know des and their bodies are found and they're like wearing each other's clothes body parts are missing they're they're they're radioactive there were there was one person that was like tucked up in a tree and there was only scratch marks at the base of the tree this was like in the middle of like the year old mountains like it's just snow and ice everywhere and that same night like there was a a soviet military movement happening and and one of the people who was in charge who had no idea about these missing hike curves made a report that he had never made before that happened to coincide but the same time these hike went missing where he said you know i i see these lights that are basically coming up and down and flashing over the over this section of the mountain like pretty far away from our position and that this guy was trying to find out is there another military movement happening or is another country invading us and so it turns out there wasn't and no one knows what those lights were and no one knows what happened to these hike curves and so it's this great mystery and i thought it was fascinating and that's the content that i like like when i go on the internet to look at video when i'm eating my lunch so that's what i'm gonna watch i'm gonna watch videos like that and to date i had been trying to mimic other people's content style i was just copying stuff and trying to hit it big on social media it was just not going well at all how many other videos do you think you made before you had that that kinda hit and you found your lane because i think this is really important a lot of people expect to just know their laying up front or hit early on and even if intellectually they realize i probably will have to do trial and error even failing like seven eight nine times eleven times in a row is completely demo for for for the average person so how many videos do you think you made before you popped off on tiktok specifically there there's a slightly bigger version to the story because there was a time where in between twenty seventeen when i got when i was medically retired and twenty twenty when i post this this video that goes viral we were using social media specifically linked in to try to drum up support for elite me we would basically tell stories in in text format with a picture attached to it about veterans that were leaving a military and and i would kinda like write stories about their experiences and like anecdotally how they connected to why they'd be a good fit in these types of industries and it was it was very successful not viral but it it raised we raise up half a million dollars on micro donations that's stemmed from these posts that we were doing me and jordan in particular my c cofounder and so i had gotten call it a taste of what social media can do nothing like you know what mister was mister ball is but it was like using social media as a real tool and i remember sometime in like twenty eighteen and nineteen you know we're doing all this content that's really centered on veterans and drawing you know donations for this charity and i decided to kind of selfish in tandem begin posting very similar content like the anecdotal military experience type of content but my own and with not the intention of drawing support to elite meat necessarily although that was kind of like incidental it was more like building my own personal brand as like the navy seal and i drew the ir of the entire navy seal you know what dudes seals hate that don't they which is like super unfair because you know i've read the book about the guy who killed bin laden i forget his name and then there's guy and a lot of these guys my seal friends they talk shit about people who use navy seal as a story and i understand their perspective their perspective is like it's us like we don't talk about this we all did this together but then i understand the other perspective of like yeah but like you served a country and you almost died and like you're probably likely looking at like not that awesome of a life after you retire because you're you're bummed out about what you experienced and there's a whole bunch of shit why like you know it doesn't look awesome once you once you get out and so i understand in that perspective like dude to take what you can get and get ahead so it's a chat you're in a tough spot yeah and and unfortunately you know it was a blessing and curse because in a way when i began posting you know text stories of you know how i was i wasn't intending to come off as like mister navy seal but that's entirely how it came off and once i made that shift i was like i'm gonna delete all the seal content and start start a anew and just try my hand at something that is completely divorced from being at seal i posted i i had probably hundreds of videos that were like i mean some did relatively well get a couple hundred or a thousand views but like i it nothing was turning into anything and but i also i have this sort of obsessive quality when i wanna do something and it's it's definitely what you know allowed me to become a seal it's like you if you wanna if you wanna be really good at something you kinda you kinda have to only do that and i had this idea that like i really wanna do something with social media and so i obsessed with it so despite the many failures over the course of probably you know six months or so maybe a year of just like awful cringe videos that went nowhere i had like reached a point where my wife was like dude you gotta like figure something else out here this is not really going anywhere she was very diplomatic about it but we got three young kids or we we had two at the time but i was at this water park in pennsylvania this indoor water park with my wife and kids and on a whim i was you know what i'm just gonna shoot a quick video like sixty second talk about the pass and so i film it in my hotel room and i leave my phone in the room because we're going down to the water park and i didn't have what to water it leave my phone me my me and my wife and kids we go down to the water park that were there for a couple hours come back and i couldn't even open my phone there were so many notifications pouring in for this one video on my tiktok account that had no following it was like this brand new account basically and it had over five million views in a matter of a few hours and i was like holy cow like as you guys have seen in this podcast i i love to talk love to tell stories maybe i can just keep doing this on tiktok and so i went into this fever ish like constantly telling stories on tiktok three a day for thirty days and then up like seven million subscribers on tiktok and then shifted it to youtube and here we are well let me tell you one thing this is gonna tell you a little bit about you and a lot about b you told two stories just now yeah you told a story of you representing our country nearly dying in war being saved by the navy seals facing a life or death experience and i was like i like the story then you just talked about how you came home you got on linkedin you started using your your the easy button to try to post you know content and then you admitted you're were like i didn't want to be doing that but i was doing that i didn't care i wanted to do it anyways and then people shit on before and it felt really bad and they were right yeah and i was like i ride with this guy i love this guy because yeah there are so few people on earth there a few people on earth who have lived through war and and survive there might be even fewer people who can look at their actions and say yeah i don't think and not give themselves the benefit of the doubt right everybody gives themselves the benefit i ever everyone gives themselves the charitable interpretation i really love how honest you were about what you were doing and how that might have been like something you're that like you're not proud of how you did it and how you you know ultimately where it landed you which was like through doing that you're like alright i wanna do storytelling social media maybe you kind of had taste of it but then you tried to make it by copying what others were doing on tiktok and only when you did the thing that was like the intersection of like you know what you're good at and what the world is interested in you found that authentic point we're now you know there's nobody else doing what you were doing or very few people were doing what you were what you were doing there so i there's a lot to learn from that how big is your guys company now i know you have forty people and you're like just what do you have eight nine million on youtube and then three million on facebook and i even know how much tiktok now a shit load what's the mister ball foundation and you know ten ninety nine contractors that end up rolling up into w twos were almost around fifty five and then i would say fan wise you know he's got nine plus billion on youtube eight plus billion on tiktok three and a half on facebook snapchat you name it so i think oh then you have the podcast which does you know eight figures in downloads a month and so i mean i would say the the range is about twenty five million in fans just for the strange dark mysterious goddamn damn so you built this empire quickly and you know when i do these podcasts i wake up and i think alright what am i excited to talk about and and learn about genuinely what i actually selfish officially interested because that's what makes for the best podcast on honestly because it's that's the conversation i really wanna have and the one thing i wanted to learn from you was like you you built this media company and you do these kinda like strange dark mysterious stories i don't do those stories i'm not necessarily trying to build a media company but there was one thing you said that really stood out to me when i was kinda going down the rabbit hole and it's around what is the mindset that's helped you become successful that i could take even if i'm trying to do something completely different right how can i learn from you guys how can i learn from a seal and the mindset that that it took to be successful there that it took to be successful with you me a company that i might use elsewhere and you said something that was great you're on our buddy chris's podcast and you said he was asking about you know being in a rut or how do you not get stuck and you said you know one thing i'm good at is if i find something you i have a basic outline of what i wanna do as long as something checks enough of the boxes i don't overthink it because you said most people or you know other people could sit there in question what you know we have something that that you think might work and you could sit there and question and say is there some alternative that's slightly better is there something that would check more boxes or or how would this work and get caught up in the details i really love that mindset because i think that is a every entrepreneur has been a guilty of that once if not is stuck there can you talk a little bit about that mindset what you what did you mean by that and any maybe examples of how you approach that sure so i mean to be clear definitely in terms of getting the business to fifty five employees with a slate of shows that wasn't me i i might be the the the face of it but but nick is is absolutely the architect and the guy who runs the business but just relative to like you know my role in this company yeah i think that what i was getting at with chris williams and was this idea that you know we are inundated we like anybody online are inundated oftentimes with like these pretty t messages like you know we just gotta out competition you just gotta put in he's gonna grind like hustle culture like it's it's this whole idea of like just get out there and like just do stuff and it's like but what do i do is oftentimes the unspoken question of most people listening it's like i get it like i need to work really hard i need to care a lot about what i'm doing i i people get that but where a lot of people stumble from my perspective is just sounds corny but like taking action but the idea is like there are so many things that anybody at any time could pursue whether it's career relationship hobby you name it like there's an infinite number of things in some ways that you could you could do and people are like well is it it what's the roi if i do this whatever it is and i don't think that i set out to be this way out of strategy i think it's just who i am which is like if it's good enough just start doing it and so for me like i had this idea and so i i have a a baseline of things i care about i want something to be hard enough that if i do it i'll feel really proud of doing that thing like if it's easy it's not gonna may be excited at the end like it needs to be a challenge so something that's hard something that comes with some level of like this is gonna sound vain but i think we're all pretty human here some level of recognition for doing the thing it's not the reason you do it but you do want people to be aware that you struggled and built this thing you did this thing you own this thing whatever it is so it's like has to be hard has to have some level of people being aware this is again my my baseline people people being aware of me accomplishing it and then also i wanna have some level of enjoyment doing it the navy seal teams are a good example of one of those things that check those boxes for me like prior to trying out of the seal teams i had sort of got my act together and managed to graduate college there was a time where i definitely was not on that path my my mom wrote my college essay to the college that accepted me my grades were so bad but the essay was so good she's a professional writer that the college actually contacted me was like your grades are not enough but boy that essay you're in the door buddy and i immediately like got i i got all this trouble my first anyways it i was on this path to like flu out of college and being that guy that totally peaked an high school but when i was back home in quincy massachusetts it's just south the boston mass i was like in my mom's basement after basically flu out of school and getting in trouble i i wound up realizing that you know hey if you wanna graduate college like you gotta do it yourself you get you need to own your fuck up and and like go to school and do it and so i'm i managed to graduate i took some local local classes went back to the old university i graduated i get my degree but i had no idea what i wanted to do after college like none i major in philosophy with a minor in english because there was no pre law degree because i sort of convinced myself that maybe i'll be a lawyer i was like what am i gonna do and i i just i i had this feeling of like well man it was really cool to like pick myself up by the bootstrap and and like graduate on my own strength here and i began looking for opportunities to to kinda continue doing stuff like that and that's where i kinda develop this mindset of look for things that are hard look for things that come with some level of recognition and things that i might enjoy doing and i found the seal teams it's like i had always been kind of enamored with the military a lot of my classmates in high school they after high school joined the marines and went off to fight in the wars and i actually always sort of felt a little bit guilty that i went to college on my mom's essay and pissed it all away and yeah i graduated but i always had the sort of like deep down guilt that i didn't you know volunteer at the time that many of my friends did and so i kinda idol them i also looked at the seal teams as being this thing that like just about anybody you know within reason can try out for the seal teams it's not something that requires a whole lot to get in the door i'm i'm general but it is relatively easy to try out but it is exceptionally hard to graduate and so perfect it's got this incredible challenge and then if you become a seal will guess what no one's gonna be like yeah but john screwed up in college and it just felt like wow like that checks every box for me and i went that way and i and became a seal and then you know after after the military i i still had that kind of mindset of looking for things that i wanted to do that would be hard some level recognition and enjoy and it has some enjoyment and i thought social media was it it just felt like a big challenge you know to to like get noticed by the world i know that like i i i think your father is a is a big shot journalist from the the boston globe i think am my your your mom and sister are as well were you motivated by like just creating cool shit or were you motivated at all by money because i haven't i'm i mean there's this phrase like king or rich so it's like you wanna be like famous do you wanna be like famous or do you wanna be rich i mean to be honest like when for example when i was trying really hard post deleting all the seal stuff like when i was trying to like find something on tiktok between dancing and cringe stuff i was doing i i don't think i necessarily had an exact goal in mind because i truthfully didn't know where it was gonna take me i i had low expectations i think that i looked at it because i was thirty at the time yeah i'm not like an eighteen year old i'm not throwing shade on eighteen year olds but when i was eighteen if i was doing social media it was for fame like be cool like be the cool guy but when i was doing it i actually was mostly probably leaning towards money in terms of make this a livelihood i have kids i'm married like this would be a really fun way to make a living but i definitely did not have the thought that this will be an empire worth millions of dollars i was thinking like boy wouldn't it be great if this supplemented my income you know and then only when you know this really frankly blew up i actually i was somewhere in between recognition and money in the sense that i clearly saw this is when nick comes into the picture and i'm like about to give it all up and we end up kinda of like sinking and we're like okay we're gonna build this thing it was more like the fun of the challenge which includes if you're successful you can be famous if you're successful you can make lots of money you can have generational wealth but for me like more than anything it was this idea that like i wanna do something that's really fucking hard to do i would say of all the baseline elements i gave you those are the things most drawn to oftentimes and so that is the thing if it was easy at a certain point to be mister ball and and grow a notoriety and make more money i wouldn't be interested in doing it those are byproducts of the challenge that i often seek sean whenever i hang out with guys like these guys these ex military guys i feel inspired i also feel super fucking soft do do feel that's same way like dude that's not just with military guys i feel that with the average guys don't you this is of course yes i feel that way well i like what he said about like having a highest order bit you know like the the orient function like what is your true north and his true north is basically like it sounds like you're like looking for giant mountains to go climb like summit you're like what's the what's the hard thing that i would feel proud of myself if i did and then i know other people would be proud and respect me to if they did it and as a byproduct of doing the hard thing i'm sure there's reward yes john's always been like yeah exactly it sounds like the seals like that conquering social media although it sounds goofy like tiktok or whatever is one of the most competitive merit based things you could go competing what's a race that a billion people are competing in you know that that's one of the few and so like sam what is your what's your version of that what's the highest order you know the orient thing when you decide what are you gonna what are you gonna devote your time and your talents to do you know i mean mine was mine's empty it's still empty which is it was just like money to provide for my family but once you get past that like it is quite you you're empty when you don't have that and i still i'm still oftentimes i'm like i need this i need direction and so that's why when i hear these guys i'm like i feel a sense of envy mb a bit that they have a direction but i feel a slightly direction to you at the beginning it was like prove myself early twenties thin like late twenties was like yeah i'd like to have like a million dollars in the bank you know like some money became like thing let me get to a million ten million i the the richer person i met i would be like yeah i need that much money then early thirties popping out kids i realize i i went to lifestyles i was like oh actually it's a certain amount of money but actually it's i don't want more money with more stress and time i want like the maximum amount of time at least amount of stress still be able to do whatever the hell i so enough money to do that so that'll cut what i would call lifestyle and now i'm thirty six and in the last year i basically shifted that north again and by the way i don't think it's bad to shift north i think you have seasons of life and chapters of life and you should they're all not all the same you know like having a lot of fun was really important in college for me that was the true north right now it's basically enjoyment so what i'm trying to do is figure out what is the most me thing i could do like you were saying these are the stories i'm interested in and you come from background i think your parents are like storyteller and it's probably something you learned through osmosis i i think about it like this what what can i do that's just simply me pushed out to the world that is my most my highest function and then the the filter is basically am i doing this because doing it is the reward or am i doing this for some future rewards and most of my life i did things for future rewards i went to college so i could get a good job and i got a good job so that i could make some money i got some money so i could buy this thing everything was this future pay and now i'm like oh wait i don't need to do that tray that's little silly why don't i just do things with the act of doing it as the reward if there happens to be other byproducts in the future great but i can't do things that i don't really wanna do or kinda suck today because i think they might pay off in the future i don't do those anymore this podcast is the best thing i've ever done and when i started it i was basically like i'm gonna lose i i wrote down in my plan i this this should lose about ten to twenty thousand dollars a year i'm i'm comfortable with so it it's like the only like non not only just won't make me rich i planned for it to make me slightly poorer every year doing it and ironically this is the thing that's done the best it's been the most successful of all the projects and i'm willing to do it forever this is the only thing i do that i'm not looking to exit alright like i'm not looking to sell this and and like then i'll be able to relax and retire like no i kinda don't wanna keep doing the pod you have to pay me to stop do you guys have for mister ball studios do you guys have this like north star in terms of many people you're gonna reach or how big the gonna get or is this a business that you're like man one day we could sell this for like two hundred million dollars yeah what do you what you label the top of the mountain or like how do how what what's the height of of the mountain you're trying to climb here the north star i would say for the company as far as you know being a manager it's always what's your clients to north star that you're a north star and then as ceo it's still that but it's what's you know what john and i north star from the studio his vision and i implement and execute well that's the noble sounding thing john what's the dirty selfish ego driven goal you have yeah like surely you guys are sure surely you guys are sit down and you're like man i think at five years we could do a hundred million in revenue yeah like is my new year's resolution is to like you know build healthy habits but there's the dirty selfish goal of like i wanna take my shirt off and see some ads baby like come on i i won't say that but like that's what that part of it for sure so i will say that before all this happened before i was in college i always aspire to be i played baseball growing up not like at a very high level i played through high school but i was like really good in my hometown you know at one point i i really believe that i could potentially play for the boston red sox that's like my favorite team and i now you wanna own them there's i don't think that is in in terms of a selfish goal yeah like that would be the thing i would wanna own a piece of the red sox but actually i was going to an analogy and then i was gonna double back to that when that dream was shattered sometime i remember my senior year at high school i just like set it out loud i'm like yeah i'm probably not gonna play for the boston red sox and i was like fuck like that's true like i'm not like it the dream is over but i always just like thought about like that was the dream that that was my childhood dream like pitch for the boston red sox that was it and so now like that we're at this place you know ball studios is at this place where you know when he's talking about recruiting the best storyteller in the world it's it's actually a little bit different than recruiting i look at us and this this is my take my shirt off i'll show you the truth i look at us as like put it this way if you if you're a baseball player you're an amateur baseball player like i was you don't aspire to be the best independent baseball player in the world now you're gonna be by yourself just being the best you wanna play for the fucking boston red sox or the yankee or whatever it is you wanna play for like that's that's the goal like that's the peak of baseball is playing for one of those teams for me the red sox and so i love this idea of like thinking about that dream hat and kinda an it so it's applicable to storyteller where there really isn't like a really prominent like that's where the fucking storyteller go like that's the place that's the stamp of approval that is the ultimate place if you're a storyteller in some capacity if you are under the ball studios umbrella boom you've made it like that's the equivalent i want us to be that i wanna be the boston red sox equivalent for storyteller and so i don't know how we're gonna get there but i want that level of prestige assigned two ball studios relative to storyteller and then with that i wanna own a fucking piece of the red sox that's a great that's a great goal alright so give me give me something i can use today meaning you're a great storyteller you're trying to build the team with the greatest storyteller tell me teach me something that would make me a better storyteller today what's one thing you could teach me to make me a better storyteller it's something that people love and hate that that tune into my content this is like it's kind of a polarizing thing but one of the things that i'll do when i'm telling a story it like if it's not my own if it's somebody else's story which is like ninety nine percent of the stories have done is i don't just resuscitate the facts of the story i and with a a very incredible team of people it's not just me anymore we will like inhabit that story it's i don't like i have scripts that sit next to me but like as my producer it was right over here we'll attest to i'm not reading the script it's a matter of producing a script that i can then at like become a part of i will begin a spouse what people are thinking or what people could have been thinking or what could have been said in certain situations that i have no way of knowing but i am so committed to telling that story that i have learned it both outside as much as i can insides that when you're hearing it it would almost be like it was my story like the level of commitment if you're gonna tell a story own the fucking story like it entered the story and don't leave until it's done people that like tell you a story and it sounds like they're just telling something they heard that's a storytelling that's just reg something you heard you wanna be a fucking story and inhabit the story full commitment to the point where you are literally acting out pieces of that story for your audience damn i'm hyped up sam you are the man damn are you feeling what i'm feeling right now yeah yeah i i once fell in love with this girl in really tall love and i phone over with this girl in australia and she was a dancer she wanted be you to come out dancing whether her said no not a dancer you're a dancer you do that i'll watch you over here on the side she said no go over here and she was like okay hand on my hip and i put my hand on her hip and she goes let me stop you right there i was like man i already fucked up this dance are getting just move her there yeah as she goes if you ever touched someone touch them with intent and i feel like that's what you just told me if you're gonna tell a story tell the story with some intent you gotta touch with and he's gotta tell the door i love that this woman's that was awesome you touch she also told me she wanted to never get married and have a man in every port and i was like i don't know if that's a figure speech she just a lifestyle thought out over don't really wanna know what's going on but i think you're a little too adventurous for me dude you guys are awesome your team's saying you gotta wrap up and we appreciate y'all you i've really admired you guys from afar i'm on yep thank you this is great alright that's the pod appreciate y'all i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back