Reckless Ben Answers The Web's Most Searched Questions

Hello, I'm Reckless Ben,

and this is the WIRED Autocomplete Interview.

[upbeat motivational music]

I feel like I'm in heaven in here.

It's all so white.

[upbeat motivational music]

Ooh.

What is Reckless Ben's real name?

My real name is Benjamin Paul Schneider.

So everyone trying to steal my identity,

that's my real name.

Reckless Ben came from, I don't know,

I think I was setting up a slackline.

It was like a really long one,

like 1,000 feet in the air.

They were like, Wow, this guy,

he does back flips on slacklines.

He walks the really long way.

He just doesn't care.

He just does whatever he wants.

And then they all started calling me Reckless Ben.

And it was way before I started YouTube,

and so I just changed my Instagram name to Reckless Ben.

People just started saying it, I guess.

What is the Reckless Ben Lego scandal?

It kind of became one of the biggest stories

on the internet.

So this fan emailed me a couple months ago

and said, Hey, my dad put his life savings

in these Star Wars Lego sets.

It's actually the biggest Star Wars Lego collection

in the whole world.

And it got stolen by a company called Bricks & Minifigs.

And we've tried everything.

We've tried suing them.

We've tried asking for it back politely,

and they're just evil and they won't give it back.

So I need your help.

And I was like, I'm down.

He kind of seemed like the most evil person in the world

using all these legal loopholes for evil.

And I was like,

Well, I can use legal loopholes for good.

It'll be the perfect battle.

So we just battled it out.

We were both using our legal loopholes

against each other, and it's still going on.

That is the Reckless Ben Lego scandal.

What is Reckless Ben known for?

I don't know.

I just do a bunch of stupid stuff.

I guess first it was slacklining.

I just was trying to do all these crazy flips

on a bouncy tightrope basically.

After that,

I just started infiltrating cults

and trying to solve mysteries that could never be solved.

I try to do documentaries in a different way.

So I watch a documentary, people were like, Okay,

here's a really bad thing,

and let's talk about the bad thing,

but let's not do anything about it.

Let's just talk about how bad this is.

And then boom, end of documentary

and you're just left feeling with this feeling

in your stomach like something's not right.

And I hate watching documentaries for that reason.

So I was like, If I ever make documentaries,

I'm going to actually solve the problem.

I'm going to go out and be in the field,

and try and solve it.

That way when you finish the documentary,

you feel good, you know?

What can I do to help Reckless Ben?

The stuff I do is kind of crazy.

I don't know if getting fans involved in my craziness

is really the best look for me.

Someone dies or gets sued for like $10 million

and that's my responsibility.

Maybe watch the videos or something.

I try to make entertaining stories for people to watch.

So, I mean, that would make me happy

if you guys enjoy the videos.

What is Reckless Ben doing next?

I have 12 different projects I'm working on.

I'm undercover and pretty much all of them still.

So it's kind of one of those things, like,

if I told you, I'd have to kill you,

because then you could leak it

to someone else, you know, and then that could,

I don't know.

You tell one person on the side of the street

what you're doing and then within two hours,

like 50,000 people know what's on the front page of Reddit,

and everyone's like, This is what Reckless Bend's doing.

I'm like, I told this to one stranger on the street.

How does everyone know about this now?

So yeah, we've had to basically,

every time we're on an undercover mission now,

it's basically like,

Hey, you can't tell anyone about this.

You can't even tell yourself about it.

That's how secretive it is.

And wow, I guess we got through the whole

What Reckless Ben column.

That was cool.

That was some crazy questions.

Let's throw this away.

[cardboard bangs]

Yeah.

So I think about those questions.

Oh, thank you.

Who is Reckless Ben's favorite YouTuber?

If I had to choose right now off the top of my head,

I really like MeatCanyon's videos.

He goes into territory that most YouTubers

are afraid to go into,

but he's also one of the most creative people

I've ever seen.

He's always thinking of new ways

to make you laugh and scare you.

He's really funny,

but he's also really scary at the same time,

which I don't know of any other YouTubers

that pull that off as well as he does.

Where is Reckless Ben from?

I'm from Cincinnati, Ohio, specifically Fairfield, Ohio.

I grew up in a neighborhood.

There's a lot of cool things to do.

We would explore abandoned buildings a lot.

A lot of abandoned buildings.

Completely different than Los Angeles where I live now.

Where is Reckless Ben now?

I am in a white void right now.

I'm surrounded by white.

I've never been around this much white before.

I don't think you guys want me to dox your location, right?

Yeah, I guess I'm in Los Angeles.

It's like a two-minute drive

from the studio I have, so it's really close.

Did Reckless Ben go to Harvard?

No.

I went, well, okay,

so the reason people were probably asking this question

is because I pretended for a video to go to Harvard.

We flew out the leader of the Flat Earth Society.

We basically wanted to have a fake debate

between the leader of the Flat Earth Society

and these Harvard students, which I was playing.

And then during the debate,

we find out that the earth is actually flat,

but we gave them the worst evidence ever.

So it basically is like a psychology piece

of how do flat-earthers cherry pick evidence

to support their side?

And so we did a whole thing

where I just pretended to be a Harvard student.

But no, I didn't go to Harvard.

I went to University of Cincinnati for four years.

I was part of a five-year program.

I was there for a little under four years

and didn't graduate.

I ended up quitting

because I ended up working a job in a cubicle

as a mechanical engineer for part of it.

And I was like, Is this really what the rest

of my life is going to be like?

I just quit and started a new life for myself.

But these were some good questions.

Wow, you guys on the internet

are asking some good questions out there.

[cardboard bangs]

Yeah. Okay.

Onto the next question. Oh, thank you.

Wow.

Does Reckless Ben have a law degree?

My whole thing with,

when it comes to the law is, it's so boring.

And so how do you create entertaining content

about something that's so boring?

You do the exact opposite.

I basically just think like,

what would a lawyer tell me to do?

And then I'm like, I just, okay, let's scrap that idea.

Let's do the exact opposite.

I want to make a lawyer cringe in his chair,

because that's what's fun.

And so no, I don't have a law degree

because if I did, I'd probably be more careful

and then being more careful

would result in me being more boring.

We're just experimenting.

We don't know what we're doing.

We're just experimenting and documenting the results.

Is Reckless Ben real?

I feel like this is kind of like the moon landing,

what they say about the moon landing, right?

Wasn't it harder to fake the moon landing

than actually just to land on the moon?

Think of how hard it would be to fake my videos.

If we did fake it, that'd be even more impressive almost.

So maybe we say it's all fake.

I would be one of the greatest directors

of all time if I could get people to act as well as they do.

Yeah, I feel like that could be cool.

Is Reckless Ben an athlete?

I guess you could say so.

I've been doing sports

since I was probably like three years old

with soccer and baseball.

And then I started cross country.

That was my first real sport in high school.

That my life pretty much was just like school

and cross country,

which I guess kind of led me to where I am now.

It's basically the whole thing with cross country

is how hard can you push yourself?

How far can you go where you just can't go any farther,

where you're dying, you're throwing up,

you have no energy left,

but you still have to keep exerting energy.

And it's just how far can I physically go?

I feel like what I do in my content now,

it's just, how far can I push things?

And then that led into slack lighting, a lot less endurance,

but more like skill-based.

I've been doing some other stuff

since I got really into rock climbing.

I kind of just do everything.

Okay. Reckless Ben.

Ooh, what could it be?

Reckless Ben Banksy.

I am not Banksy, I guess,

but that's also what I would say if I was Banksy.

I did do a series.

It will be coming out pretty soon.

It was like a five-part series

where we're trying to find Banksy.

It's like the craziest stuff I've ever filmed.

It's so illegal that I can't even talk about it yet.

Statute of Limitations

is three years on all of our crimes,

and it was filmed about two years ago,

so we got one year left.

It will be coming out next year.

And then I think there's, from my understanding,

there's nothing we can do because we'd be like, oh,

well, statute of limitations.

Yeah, we did these crimes, but you can't get us now.

You waited too long.

All right, onto the next questions.

[cardboard bangs]

Yeah. Oh, thank you.

Why did Reckless Ben start YouTube?

Well, I originally started it

to just post my slacklining videos.

Then I did a slackline video

where I dressed up like Spider-Man

and I was like, I'm just going to set up the slackline

of the worst places in the world.

And the slackline was kind of like my web,

so it kind of made sense.

And so I set it up over the busiest bike path I could find

where I'm doing back flips over people's heads.

I set up really high over jagged sharp rocks so if I fell,

it would definitely be like broken bones for sure.

And then I saw Scientology, and, I don't know,

I'm from Ohio.

They don't really have Scientologies where I'm from.

So I just knew that a bunch

of people pay millions of dollars to believe in an alien

that a science fiction writer wrote about.

And so I moved to Los Angeles

and there's Scientologies everywhere,

and I'm like, Huh, this is really interesting.

Let me look it up.

So I watched every documentary on it

and none of them could answer that question.

They just interviewed people and it's like,

I want to take these people's words for it.

I want to see it myself.

None of the documentaries

would actually show what's going on inside,

even though they have like million dollar budgets.

And I'm living in my car at the time thinking I have $50

in my bank right now

and I still can make a better documentary than those.

And it went super viral.

I'm looking back at it now, it's like super cringe.

I had no clue how to tell a story.

I didn't know how to edit or anything,

but there's kind of a charm to that,

where we were just some homeless kids living in our cars,

and we had a dream

to make the world's best Scientology documentary.

When did Reckless Bend start his channel?

I climbed some really cool abandoned buildings

and I wanted to show my friends,

but the video was too long to text it to them or whatever.

So I was like, Oh, if I upload it to YouTube,

I can send them a YouTube channel link to it.

And so that's when I made my channel,

and then I just uploaded that video.

I think it's still on there.

Finally, four years later,

I uploaded my second video of slacklining

and yeah, that's when I started my channel.

Reckless Ben Provo.

I did do a video where I sneak into a school.

It was called Provo Canyon School.

It's the same school Paris Hilton went to.

It's kind of like the worst school in the world.

Basically, a fan hit me up

and he's like, Hey, I went

to this school where they tortured me.

They closed it down,

but there's one that's just as bad called Provo Canyon.

You should go undercover.

Yeah, I basically had one of my friends work there

for a month undercover,

and he got me in as a student,

and it was a pretty crazy video.

This one was kind of an easy video

because they just closed down right when we posted it.

Mostly thanks to Paris Hilton, I think,

but maybe our video had a little bit to do with it.

But yeah, normally it's like a big fight

to take down these companies.

This one just like, Oh, we're closed.

Okay.

Was Reckless Ben on Tosh.0?

Yeah, I was on Tosh.0.

This is kind of the reason I got the name Reckless Ben.

I was trying to be the first person

to ever land a double back flip on a slackline.

1,000 feet in the air was really high.

And so what's really scary about it

is you're looking upside down

and you see just a two-inch line

and 1,000 feet beneath you

and you're like, Where do I land?

It's really disorienting,

and you just have to balance on it.

So I tried it and I dislocated my arm.

It was really bad.

I climbed down a whole mountain

while my shoulder was hanging down.

Well, I think the first time I actually popped back in,

we were able to pop it back in before I climbed down.

So we go back the next day and I was like, You know what?

This time I'm not leaving until I injure myself

or I land the double back flip.

And then I just immediately injured myself again.

But this time it was like my shoulder

was hanging down to where my elbow's at.

I had two elbows.

It was terrible.

I had to climb down the whole mountain

while my arm was hanging down.

It was really bad.

So he does Web Redemption things.

I guess there was a trend at the time where they had,

first there was a standing desk,

then there was a walking desk, walking on a treadmill.

He's like, Now we're going to do a slackline desk.

So we did a slackline desk skit

for all the writers while we came up with ideas at Tosh.0.

And yeah, it was funny

because I was like,

it was the first thing I ever did with the media.

I'm going to throw this one this way this time.

[cardboard bangs]

Ah!

Oh, I almost hit the light.

Okay, we're good.

Ooh, I can already tell

these are going to be good questions.

How tall is Reckless Ben?

I am six foot.

How did Reckless Ben get the hard drive?

There's this place called McKamey Manor,

and it's advertised as the world's scariest haunted house,

and no one's ever completed it.

That's how scary it is.

First person to complete it gets $20,000,

and there's these Navy SEALs that train for the,

and they go in, they're like,

Oh, I can do this.

And then the video cuts

and they're just crying halfway through

and they're like, Oh, I shouldn't have done this.

This is way harder than I expected.

So I looked at it and I was like, You know what?

I've done some pretty crazy stuff in my life

that basically every single other person

in the world's been scared to do.

I can do this.

I'm going to be the first person to beat it.

And I went there,

it turned out the whole thing

was fake and I was like, What?

This sucks.

So I ended up overthrowing his company

and I actually own McKamey Manor now.

I ended up throwing it ethically.

Everything he advertised, I tried to do in real life.

But basically there was this rumor,

it's kind of like a B plot.

There was this hard drive that is floating around

that has all the footage on it and somehow he lost it.

And so I guess this question's asking,

how did I get that hard drive?

Because I got it and I released a lot

of the really important footage on my YouTube channel.

There was a few people that had it

and they were all just really scared,

because every time they tried posting it,

he would just threaten their lives.

And he has a cult of people

that would just make fake bomb threats in their name

and stuff.

And I think he lost his kids, he lost his job.

He lost everything because

he just posted a picture saying he had this hard drive.

So I made a challenge to him.

There's a thing at the end of every single haunted house

where he's like, Okay, let's get pizza together.

Yeah, I just tortured you for like six hours,

but you want to get pizza?

It's adding.

It's basically his way of making fun of them

and making them look stupid.

Hey, let's get pizza afterwards,

a way to humiliate them even more.

So I told the hard drive guy,

Hey, if I can convince Russ

to eat pizza with me,

something he would never do

unless he admits to feat,

then will you give me the hard drive?

And he was like,

Sure, because now it's in Russ's head,

the owner of McKamey Manor, if eats pizza with me,

somehow it will mysteriously close his haunted house.

So we go on this huge crusade basically to try to get him

to eat this slice of pizza with me.

And we actually put him through his own haunted house

and his safe word is he has to eat a bite of pizza.

And he got so scared

that his haunted house experience wouldn't end,

that he ate the slice of pizza.

Next thing you know,

there's a hard drive coming

to our house and we released

the secrets on my YouTube channel.

How did Reckless Ben get his name?

Basically, I was just doing the stupidest stuff ever,

like dislocating my arms.

I was in the hospital once a month

for almost a year for just injuring myself.

I was just constantly getting injured.

And so the slackline community called me Reckless Ben.

They're like, He's reckless.

He just wants

to do the coolest stuff ever

and doesn't care about the consequences.

That's something a reckless person would do.

How does Reckless Ben come up with video ideas?

I don't know.

I just think of ideas that are so stupid,

they might just work.

So I like to describe it when you're playing chess

against someone, they're like a medium level player,

and say I'm a medium level player,

then it's going to kind of be an even game

where I might win, I might lose,

because I know we're just even.

But if someone plays a move so out of pocket,

I'm like, What the heck are they doing?

I don't know how to play this.

I've studied all the openings except for that.

I've studied how a normal player would play,

not how an unhinged reckless chess player would play.

So I try to do the same thing when it comes to the law.

I come up with ideas that are so stupid

that no company could ever prepare

for what I'm about to do to them.

So when I do it, even if it's not the best idea

in the world, they have no defense.

And so if they have no defense,

I kind of just win by default.

And that's what happens,

basically, every time I just bank on that.

[cardboard bangs]

Oh, that didn't work how I thought it was going to, but.

Oh, that's it? All right.

Those are all the questions.

Thanks for watching. Come back to the next interview.

[soft uplifting music]