MrBallen Answers The Web’s Most Searched Questions

I'm MrBallen,

and this is the WIRED Autocomplete Interview.

[upbeat music]

I was like, dude, flannels, you can just rotate the color,

and then you have a new outfit every day.

[upbeat music]

Alright, how did MrBallen get started?

It was sort of accidental.

I got outta the military in 2017.

I was a Navy SEAL.

I tried my hand in social media; nothing worked.

But then, sort of on a whim,

in 2020, I told a story on this new platform, TikTok,

about these missing hikers.

And I went super viral, and I thought it was really cool.

I love telling stories.

The rest is history, I guess.

How did MrBallen get his name?

There is a story, but it's just sort of random.

There's like this almost hidden community

of aspiring Navy SEALs,

like civilians that want to be Navy SEALs.

And they're all pretty acutely aware

of who has gotten out of the SEAL teams,

like who has an Instagram account

that was a former Navy SEAL.

And these aspiring, you know, Navy SEALs

will often send messages to those folks.

And my username at the time,

when I had just got outta the military,

was JohnBallen416.

But there was no punctuation in my name,

and if you didn't know me, it would look

like my name is John Ballen 416.

And all these kids,

who were very respectfully asking me questions,

like, Excuse me, MrBallen,

I have a question about becoming a Navy SEAL,

they're very proper in their DMs to me.

And then I took the username and ran with it.

How does MrBallen find stories?

I just googled.

I mean, really, it's that simple.

I spent a lot of time looking for stories that way,

but now we have a whole team dedicated to several series

that do lots of Googling themselves and original research,

but started with just thinking of a cool idea

and googling it.

Next.

How does MrBallen go viral?

I don't know.

How does WIRED go viral?

I mean, this thing goes viral all the time,

I think in park, because the format's really like simple

to understand, right?

Like, the reason this interview style works so well

is you see an image before you've even watched the video;

you know what it is.

And then, if the format delivers in quality,

people stick around.

And so going viral on the internet

is as much about getting people's attention

long enough to get them to click something

as it is about making good content.

It's an imprecise science, but that's the gist.

Done.

Alright, next board.

Where did MrBallen grow up?

I grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Not to be confused with Quincy.

Sports centric town, like Red Sox was a religion;

lots of street fighting.

That was a big part of growing up.

I'll tell a quick little story.

When I was a sophomore in high school,

I made the mistake of being in the same study hall

as a girl whose boyfriend was the captain

of the hockey team.

I sat next to her in the study hall.

Big mistake, okay?

And I was called over the weekend

by representatives for the hockey player and said,

Hey, Paul wants to fight you.

And I, knowing the culture of Quincy, Massachusetts,

knew that this was not the time to say,

I have no idea why you're upset with me.

I didn't do anything.

Instead, you immediately accept the fight.

And so we set the fight.

It's not gonna happen right away.

It's like, in three weeks, we're gonna fights.

We'd pass each other in the halls.

It's school.

I thought I was like really tough.

And so I remember I was like talking, talking a big game.

And Paul wasn't.

Paul, you know, despite calling me out,

was sort of nonchalance about it.

And we go out to this field,

and there's literally hundreds of kids

that have gone to this fight,

and Paul's late, like he doesn't show up on time.

And I'm like, this guy's scared of me.

It's pathetic.

And then Paul rolls up, like, 20 minutes later,

calmest can be, and I had this line,

and I throw my dukes up, and I'm like,

Well, we're young motherfucker.

And then he gets up to me and proceeds to beat

the living crap out of me in front of everyone.

Didn't get a punch off nothing,

but everybody heard my big line,

and it was so egregious that my teachers

made fun of me for that line the next day.

Where is MrBallen Studios?

We're in the New York City area.

It's sort of like a hole in the wall spot.

All right, next.

Where did MrBallen serve?

So, as soon as I graduated, I enlisted in the Navy.

And then the training takes two years

to get through and become a Navy SEAL,

if you're successful.

Wouldn't say I was the best in the class,

but I was good enough.

And so, 2012, I checked into my team in Virginia,

and then I went to Afghanistan in 2013,

and then I was in South America in 2015.

And then I was medically retired shortly after that.

Last question to the board:

where does MrBallen get his flannels?

So, I wear flannels in every single video.

Something I hadn't really thought about is like,

well, what do I wear?

I'm like putting myself on camera multiple times a week.

I can't wear the same outfit every day.

But I was like, dude,

flannels, you can just rotate the color,

and then you have a new outfit every day.

I think my wife was just getting them at like Target,

and then fans began sending me flannels,

like homemade flannels.

Some were pretty incredible.

There you go.

All right, next board.

Here we go.

What's in the basement, MrBallen?

I told four stories on our tour in 2024,

and the final story, it is called

What's in the Basement?

It's about Daniel LaPlante.

Basically, this family in Massachusetts began hearing

all these strange sounds coming from their basement.

They couldn't pinpoint what it was.

There was a recent death in the family.

The kids believed it was like their mom,

their deceased mom,

like being in touch with them or something.

Over the course of weeks and months,

the tapping sounds just persist,

ultimately culminating in the girls telling their dad

that like, no, we think someone's down there.

He thinks the kids are doing it,

that they're playing up this ruse

that their mother is like coming back from the dead.

Well, lo and behold, when police get involved,

when there was like what appeared

to be a break-in in the house,

they discovered a hole in the wall in the basement

behind the washing machine.

And there was a tunnel in the wall that led

to this back corner,

and huddled in the corner-

The end.

Gotcha!

Huddled in the corner was this 16-year-old

kid named Daniel LaPlante.

He was wearing a dress,

he had clown makeup painted to his face,

he had a hatchet,

and he had been living in the family's walls

for upwards of a year because he believed

one of the daughters had spurned his advances.

And so his retaliation was to sneak into their house

and live in their walls.

He would be pulled out.

Luckily, no one got hurt in that family, but he's let out.

And while he's out on bail,

essentially, he breaks into another family's home,

but he kills the entire family.

So Daniel LaPlante is in the basement.

What is MrBallen's favorite story?

One of the stories that really stands out to me

is the Ellie Lobel story.

So, there's this woman.

She's got this dream life.

She's a lawyer; she lives in Connecticut.

This is like in the early nineties.

But one day, she starts feeling sick,

and she can't tell, like, what's making her sick.

She goes to the doctor.

They're like, Oh, you're overworking yourself.

Over several weeks and months,

when it starts affecting, you know,

her ability to be a mom or ability to be a wife,

she's not able to go to work.

People began to believe she was lying,

like her own husband, you know,

believed she was lying, and her kids as well.

And it created real tension in her family.

She gets divorced, and then, at about the 15-year mark,

whatever this mystery illness was, it began to progress.

So she went in to see the doctor one time,

and they actually said,

Look, we don't know what's doing this,

but we think you're gonna die.

And Ellie was actually relieved.

She actually doesn't tell her ex-husband;

she doesn't even tell her kids.

She hires an end-of-life care person,

and she goes to Southern California,

a place that was a big part of her childhood.

She lays in bed for three days, and she doesn't die.

And so she says to her end-of-life care person, you know,

Why don't we just go outside for a walk

and take a little break,

and then I'll come back and die?

And they eventually turn onto the street

that had this wooden fence

that lined up against this beautiful field

full of flowers and tall grass.

She tells the care person,

like, I just wanna stay here for a second

and just take this all in.

She hears buzzing over her head,

and she looks up, and she sees there's a bee.

But then, a moment later,

the buzzing that she heard gets a lot louder,

and she looks up, and she sees there's now

a swarm of not just bees,

but Africanized killer bees.

And the bees just like came down.

They descended and began stinging Ellie Lobel

in her face over and over and over again.

She can't really run away,

and the end-of-life care person scoops her up,

and he's running with her.

She's still getting stung, and she's screaming at him,

Don't bring me to the hospital.

So he runs her back to the house,

he puts her back in her bed,

and she's covered in bee stings.

And she's just like,

At least this way, this should, you know,

expedite my my demise.

But for the next three days,

so these three subsequent days, she doesn't die.

In fact, she begins to feel like the chronic joint pain

and some of the other just chronic issues

she's had now for 15 years are starting to fade.

And so she began doing some research,

and she discovered that there was this study

that was done in the nineties in Australia

where these scientists believed patients

with Lyme disease could be cured

if they were stung by certain bees.

It would turn out, 15 years earlier,

Ellie was bitten by a tick.

Somehow nobody caught it.

She had Lyme disease and was in the terminal stage.

And then, basically, accidentally conducted

this experiment with bees on herself.

And now Ellie Lobel tours the country

advocating for bee stings.

What is MrBallen's scariest video?

There's this one video,

Do You Know How to Get to Bells Canyon?

And it's about this guy,

this banker, who goes every year

out to Washington state to go hiking by himself.

The first night, he's made his campfire,

he's got his tent made,

and he hears like movement in the woods behind him.

He's looking around him.

He can't see anyone; there's nobody out here.

He hears a voice, and the voice just calls out,

Hey, do you know how to get to Bells Canyon?

And he turns, and this man wanders out of the woods,

and he's illuminated by the little firelight that he's got.

Before he can really even react to this guy,

the guy just turns and runs off into the woods.

He goes deeper into the woods,

so farther away from his car.

He's now like two days in, and that night,

he's sitting around his campfire,

and what does he hear?

Do you know how to get to Bells Canyon?

It's the same dude.

Dude, I was zigzagging through the woods.

Like, there's, you had to be following me.

The next morning,

he gets up, and he's running through the woods.

He's panicking, and he's trying to get back to his car,

but it takes days to get there.

And on his return,

he like would periodically look over,

and he sees this dude like running in the woods,

keeping track.

And then finally, Matt finally runs out.

He gets in his car, and he's fine.

But the magic of that story is that really nothing happens,

but it's like the theater of the mind.

The idea that there could be like crazy people

out there that are watching us,

like that alone is such psychological torture

for most people that it just plays,

it plays with your mind.

Not really the most scary,

but perhaps the most memorable

and certainly the most memed amongst the MrBallen community.

What won't MrBallen cover?

The magic of MrBallen, in some ways,

rests on these stories are crazy, but they happened.

Like, that's really important.

And then, secondarily, I'm a father of three kids.

I cover lots of horrible stories,

but I just can't cover like harm to kids.

Too difficult for me.

What will MrBallen cover next?

We have a new graphic novel

coming out at the end of the year in October called

The Terror Within that has nine stories in there.

That's gonna be great.

And that's that one.

How are we doing for time?

Am I going too slow?

[Producer] Not for me.

Okay. You're good.

Does MrBallen believe in the paranormal?

I've certainly come across,

let's call it like accounts of things that have happened

that make you question what's out there.

However, I've also come across

an ungodly number of uncredible

stories of people purporting that this really happened,

and this is paranormal,

and it like definitely didn't.

And so I am more skeptical in some ways

now than I was before I started.

Does MrBallen investigate?

We do our own original investigation,

not a ton of it, but we do.

We have people going out to courthouses and getting,

you know, court dockets and doing some original research.

But do I literally go out and literally investigate?

I don't know. Maybe I do; maybe I don't.

I'll leave it to your imagination.

Does MrBallen have a podcast?

I do.

So this whole thing began on TikTok,

and then we also developed a podcast

back in, I think it was 2022, on what we call

Ballentine's Day

in the Strange, Dark & Mysterious community.

It was just Valentine's Day,

but we made it Ballentine's Day, and here you go.

I'm gonna toss the board.

Why does MrBallen hate the like button?

In the beginning of making YouTube videos,

I used to think it was so goofy.

The video starts, and they give you like a little hook,

Today, we're gonna do this,

or I'm gonna tell you about this.

And then there's always like a little pause, and it's like,

But before we do, go ahead and smash that like button

and subscribe to the channel.

And then they're like, boom, onto the content.

And I remember thinking, like, how silly that was.

What I learned from talking to some of these creators

is that even though it seems sort of odd

to be telling people to do that,

it actually disproportionately makes people

like and subscribe to your channel.

But I was like, ah, it's kind of cheesy.

Like, how could I do this in a way

that is both accomplishing the goal

of getting people to like and subscribe,

and also be sort of memorable in and of itself?

And I began coming up with these weird,

like no context, bizarre scenarios for the like button.

Like, before we get into the story, go ahead

and give the like button a nice

brand new cone of cotton candy,

but before they take a bite, knock it into a puddle.

But it like, there's no context.

If you've arrived on the channel,

this is on podcast and on YouTube,

everywhere you see MrBallen content,

you'll always get like a new totally unhinged

random thing we're gonna do to the like button

that ranges from nuisance stuff

to full blown just like violence towards the like button.

MrBallen Harrison Ford.

This probably is like the other story

I could have said was my favorite.

This kid was hiking with his Boy Scouts.

This is like in the nineties;

a storm rolled in, an unexpected storm.

This is out, I think, in Washington state.

They decide to ride it out and stay out in the woods

'cause they're pretty far out there.

But it turned into like a blizzard.

One of the kids got separated from the group,

and he couldn't find his way back.

He winds up taking shelter in a cave,

this 12-year-old kid,

and he's like, pretty much thinks he's gonna die,

and no one can find him.

The storm had cleared up, but it was still

quite a bit of snow on the ground.

And at some point, he hears a helicopter,

and it's, you know, flying up ahead,

and he's like, Oh, there, there's the search party.

They've come to find me.

And he runs out into the woods, and he looks up.

There's a clearing,

and he sees this helicopter, and he is waving.

And so the helicopter lands over in the field,

and you can imagine who's flying that helicopter.

It's Harrison Ford in his private helicopter.

And he's, Hey kid, are you all right back there?

And he flies him off to the hospital and saves his life.

MrBallen approach to storytelling.

So much of the story like hinges

on the delivery of the story.

Realistically, I could tell a terribly written story

and make you think it was a great story

just 'cause I'm gonna sound convinced it's good,

and I'm gonna be fully committed to the story.

Next, MrBallen scoops.

We were researching a case

about a potential serial killer

in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

And it was this long unsolved case,

and we got access to this box of evidence

that actually the families of the victims

had held onto 'cause police had stopped investigating it.

There was like this brief release program

in New Bedford for prisoners.

Really high level offenders

got to go home for the weekend with virtually no oversight.

And during that time,

a lot of people over the weekends would get murdered.

It turned out there was this one guy

who kept going out on this break

at every time somebody got killed.

And the family's like,

No, like, that's gotta be him.

But he's living his best life.

He's like, Nah, I didn't do that,

but remains to be seen if that's true.

MrBallen untold stories.

I'd say most times,

if we've decided on a story, we're gonna tell it.

But the one I always come back to is about

Ernest Shackleton, the late 1800s.

He was an explorer.

If you were a known explorer at this time,

you were like a big celebrity.

He was notorious for being both an incredible leader of men,

but he also was just always screwing up.

Like, he's like, Oh, we're gonna go to Antarctica.

And they're like,

You better bring a lot of food for all these people.

Ah, I got it covered.

And then they're like,

Get halfway on their dog sled journey

to wherever they're going.

Ah, we ran outta food.

But then he was so good at leading his men

that they would come back,

you know, nearly starved to death.

So he decides to go to the South Pole,

to be the first one to do a dog sled to the South Pole,

except he miss times the ice floes.

The boat gets frozen in the ice before they reach land,

and he kept his crew alive for like two years.

All of them survived.

And every day, they had to shave,

they had to like polish their boots,

they had to do all the stuff to like keep them sane,

but they loved Shackleton for it, he kept them in line,

but famously, nobody was coming to rescue them.

They didn't have a way out.

And so eventually, Shackleton's like,

Well, we've survived this long,

but unless we find a way to leave,

we're gonna die out here.

And so he and like half the men

took one of these big rowboats,

and they overland carried like on their heads

like 15, 20 miles to the coast,

like just picture like rolling waves, like treacherous.

There was a whaling station out on this island

off in the distance,

and he's like, If we can just get there,

there's gonna be people at this whaling station.

But it was like a, you know, multi-day journey,

even with a compass and everything.

And they all pile into this boat, like 20 of them.

They have no idea where they're going.

Ah, think it's this way,

but they land on the wrong side of the island.

They're like, All right,

well, the whaling station's on the other side

of the island.

We just have to hike this mountain.

A mountain that, by the way,

no one had ever successfully climbed.

Everybody who had tried climbing it had died.

And they're like,

Well, we have no supplies, no food.

We've been on the water for two weeks.

We're basically nearly dead.

We're just gonna hike this mountain with no supplies.

And so up the mountain they hike

with like bare feet in some cases,

and they get to the top, unbelievably,

and they realize this is so steep

that we actually can't even really properly down climb.

We have to sled down on our butts.

And so Ernest Shackleton and his men

with their huge beards and their ragged clothes

sledded down the backside of this mountain,

and this whaling station is not far

from the base of this mountain.

And there's a family that lived there.

There was this mother and father and their young daughter.

And suddenly, out of the mist

comes these bedraggled men who were limping towards them,

and she thought they were monsters.

And they walk up, and then suddenly, the lead guy goes,

I'm Ernest Shackleton, and I need your help.

And they all lived.

So it's one of the greatest survival stories of all time.

And you just got the version I apparently have never told.

There we go.

Boom. All done.

I hope I didn't ramble for too long.

Hope you enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

See ya.

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