#2543 - MrBallen

MrBallen, whose real name is not given in the episode, spent seven years as a Navy SEAL before leaving the military in 2017. He describes floundering for roughly two years afterward with no social media presence and little familiarity with civilian life. Gary Vee's persistent messaging about posting content online pushed him to try, but nothing gained traction until 2020, when he posted a 60-second TikTok at Great Wolf Lodge in Pennsylvania teasing the Dyatlov Pass mystery and telling viewers to Google two words. The clip received approximately five million views within hours, aided by TikTok's explosive growth and the recent release of previously redacted Dyatlov Pass photographs.

The Dyatlov Pass incident involved nine hikers in Russia's Ural Mountains in January 1959 pursuing the highest mountaineering certification available in Russia at the time. Searchers found their tent collapsed on an exposed mountainside at roughly negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit, with gear still inside and a cut made from the inside out. Footprints showed hikers walking, not running, downhill with some barefoot or wearing only one boot. Two were found dead near a cedar tree with broken branches and human tissue high in the canopy, and one had part of his hand bitten off and found in his mouth. The final four, recovered in May after the thaw, had injuries including a crush wound to the chest comparable to a high-speed vehicle strike with minimal external lacerations, a fractured skull with a piece missing, and a female hiker with lips and eyes removed along relatively straight lines inconsistent with animal predation. Some hikers had exchanged clothing, and trace radiation was found on several garments. Multiple witnesses reported glowing orbs over the Ural Mountains around the time of the deaths. Russia's official conclusion cited a compelling or overwhelming force with no further explanation, and a 2022 reexamination attributed the deaths to an avalanche or ice slab, a conclusion MrBallen said does not resolve the lingering questions.

MrBallen signed a SEAL challenge contract around 2010 and was in BUD/S training in earnest in 2011 and 2012. Boot camp instructors at Great Lakes subjected SEAL candidates to exercises including treading water at five in the morning while passing bricks down a line, and when given two bricks simultaneously some recruits nearly blacked out and sank. Studies found wrestlers and water polo players have the highest BUD/S success rates. Pool competency is a 20-minute exam requiring candidates to fix scuba problems underwater while instructors cut air and tie hose knots, following the same procedural steps regardless of urgency to test calm under hypercapnia. MrBallen passed by the skin of his teeth while a water polo player from the University of Tennessee, one of his officers, passed on the first try while holding himself from nipple to belly button out of the water and smiling.

His only combat deployment was Afghanistan from 2013 to 2014, where his unit's primary mission was quelling the flow of suicide bombers into Kabul. After intercepting enemy radio communications revealing a planned courtyard ambush, the team advanced rather than retreat across open desert. The engagement lasted approximately six hours of urban combat with no SEAL fatalities. A subsequent close-quarters encounter separated by only a low wall left MrBallen and a teammate incapacitated when two grenades detonated within the lethal radius of all seven team members. One grenade physically struck MrBallen's shoulder before detonating. A SEAL medic named Kyle applied tourniquets to both of MrBallen's legs and saved his life. MrBallen's injuries included a massive flesh wound from below his knee to his back, a three-to-four-inch deep wound in his buttocks requiring repeated reopening, and blast damage that likely briefly dislocated both shoulders and tore both labrums. His biceps tenodesis surgery is described as a bandaid fix with roughly a ten-year shelf life, and doctors have told him further labrum repair may cause more damage than good. He was at a Home Depot in Virginia approximately seven days after the injury.

MrBallen has approximately 11 million YouTube subscribers. His Amazon podcast deal was worth 62 million dollars and came roughly ten months after starting the podcast. After coming into money he experienced family members, close friends, and business partners running what he described as long-running cons. His contractor gutted his Pennsylvania house to the studs, did no actual work, stole hundreds of thousands of dollars, and later pleaded guilty to theft.

The episode covers several of MrBallen's signature mystery stories at length. The Nahani Valley in Canada's Northwest Territories saw a series of deaths in the early 1900s including the McLeod brothers, whose headless bodies were found with the words we have found a fine prospect etched into a nearby tree, and prospector Martin Jorgensen, whose headless remains were found inside a cabin burned from the roof down. The Naha tribe attributed the area's dangers to tall white beings called the Wahila that screeched and attacked people from unreachable cave walls, and one theory holds that indigenous people created the legend and committed the killings as a deliberate deterrent against outsiders. The Kandahar Giant story originates almost entirely from a single anonymous Green Beret identified only as W, who described a creature with a red beard, six fingers, and six toes that killed a team member with a thrown spear before being airlifted in a net to an air base, with pilots reportedly signing military NDAs.