there were so many notifications from this video likes comments posts that my phone was like unable to handle the flow of traffic and like couldn't get into the app and then when I finally did there was like 5 million views on this video you know in a matter of a few hours and wow personally I really like strange dark and mysterious content I find myself going on YouTube and and being drawn to kind of like spooky mysterious True Crime Mysteries that's the stuff that I like I I personally that's the stuff I can and I
remember I had that document I di La of pass is a very famous story about these hikers that go missing in the 1950s they were hiking into the Ural Mountains um to take this thing called their level three hiking test which sounds really lame but it's actually like the highest level of mountaineering in Russia at the time and so these nine hikers were the best at mountaineering by far they're like celebrities in mountaineering and if they pass this test and become level three it's it's a really big deal but critic these are people that are
are Masters at being out on the mountain they know what they're doing and they go out on this trip and this is the 1950s so there's no cell phones or anything they just had these these checkpoints they would have to hit where there would be campsites set up and a team waiting for them and if they hit these campsites on time it meant they covered the distance they were supposed to and they'd get a check or whatever you know they you're progressing exactly as you should and they I think they hit their first checkpoint and
then they did not hit their next checkpoint at the designated time and then there's a whole protocol that gets spun up of sending a team out to go find them to make sure they're okay and so the team that gets spun up they end up tracing between the the checkpoint they hit and the one they missed they go all the way right to like the middle and they find the campsite of these hikers and it's up on this Windswept Mountain Side that's all snow and it's just a couple of small canvas tents and there's no
one in them uh they've been cut open but it looks like they've been cut open From the Inside by a knife and then inside the tents were stacks of some of their clothing neatly folded placed all around the tent there were a couple of shoes still in there so that you know one shoe was gone one shoe is here and then from the tent and there's pictures of this too you can Google de laav past pictures there was a trail of footprints from these tents that went down the snowy mountain to this little crops of
trees and at the trees there were these I think I forget how many like two or three of these missing hikers that were deceased they were nude or close to nude and there were all these scratch marks on this this tree that looked like an animal had been clawing at it and I think one of them had actually gotten into a tree and passed away up there and they had all died of exposure ultimately um but that was only like three of the missing hikers and they followed the the trail the foot marks that went
maybe a mile away to this snow cave that was not too far off and inside was the rest of the hikers and they were also all deceased and some of them were missing parts of their face but it looked like they had been surgically removed like the nose the mouth the lips that kind of thing a lot of them had exchanged clothing so the women were wearing men's clothes and vice versa um um some were wearing one shoe or none and also they were there were Trace levels of radiation on on on them or their
clothing but there's radiation in the cave also at the same time this happened the uh the Russian military was doing an exercise roughly in the area that these hikers were neither knew the other was there it just it happened to be the same time frame and one of their senior leaders in the military uh did a report on this particular night where his unit had spotted all these lights in the sky hovering over the a where these hikers had all been found he doesn't know about the hikers and he's never made a report like this
ever in his career like this is a unique report and he wanted to know if there was another military potentially doing an exercise in that area because whatever they're doing it's it's not us like it's somebody else is over there um and so that was routed up through the chain and when they checked they're like oh shoot like that was the same time as these missing hikers like what's going on here the Russian government launches this investigation into deav and they're the they have this this famous conclusion that's so lame but only adds more mystery
and I'm I'm probably going to say it wrong but it's the hikers their conclusion was the hikers died from some unknown unnatural cause end closed case that's it that's it and so all it did is it just created rampant speculation that something paranormal happened here or you know whatever it was and so I always thought that story was fascinating mostly because the pictures associated with it are very creepy they're pictures of the people and the Campsite in the tree and it's just this longstanding I mean technically it's solved uh but it was unsolved mystery uh
and I I I posted about the deat love pass finally on Tik Tok after all my other ideas had been exhausted and the only reason I didn't do this one is it just felt like such a random departure from traditional like trendy types of content like humor and sketch comedy and this and that or my military stuff that I had stopped doing this just felt so random that wondered if people would ridicule me for being a grown man telling a ghost story basically on a kid's platform but I was like you know what what do
I have to lose I'm probably going to stop doing content soon anyways cuz nothing's working and we were at this water park in Pennsylvania my wife me my kids and this is indoor water park and I decide to make this de pass Tik Tok and so I'm in our little hotel room and I threw together this crappy little video just practically off the cuff about the love pass and I post it but because we're going to be in the water park where it's going to be wet I just left my phone in the room something
I never do but went to the water park and you know several hours later we came back and I look at my phone and it it actually wasn't I couldn't get it to open it was like not working and I plugged it in let's see if it was working finally turned it on and I had notifications enabled on Tik Tok which I don't now but at the time I did and there were so many notifications from this video likes comments posts that my phone was like unable to handle the flow up traffic and I like
couldn't get into the app and then when I finally did there was like 5 million views on this video you you know in a matter of a few hours and and you know for for reference before this point I had never had a video surpass even you know 10 or 20 20,000 views maybe 100,000 views but it would have been over years of time so I've never gone viral and now this is like the most viral you're going to go and even though I didn't know what it would become I felt like I found something
that could work on the internet that is not military related that I love to do I love strange dark Mysterio and I love storytelling and I was like I'm going to make as many of these stories on Tik Tok as I can and see what happens and ultimately what happened is the account blew up and it became you know a pretty big account on Tik Tok when everybody's in in the pandemic and glued to their phones I'm like the token adult Storyteller on the kids app so I stood out quite a bit um and then
I transitioned to YouTube around like mid 2020 just because it was a more monetizable platform and it just took off I mean it was the same story but instead of 60 seconds I just told stories that were 20 minutes long and you know I just it became the whole Mr Ballin thing and I can't believe that's what I do now it's uh you know it definitely goes to show you do what you love you know very true do what you love and it will work but you you know takes a little work to find what
you love but yeah I remember we had that conversation some it fell off then I can't remember why I looked you up or somebody told me about something happened and I pulled up your your YouTube I think it was YouTube and I was like holy sh like this guy just started this like I couldn't believe it like he wanted to come on the show now he's got two or three million Subs I've been doing this for a couple year I was like whoa that's incredible and then so many things have been born out of out
of your Tik Tok account YouTube you're on tours you got a book coming out from what I understand you have a foundation yep you have Ballin Studios I do have a question yeah your name's John Allen yeah how did Mr Ballin come in so uh I originally started an account on Tik Tok under the username John B Allen 416 that was just the random username I had but I didn't have any punctuation in it and so it looked like j o n b a l l n all kind of mashed together and if you just
glance at it looks like John Ballin it doesn't you wouldn't think oh that's John B Allen unless you knew me you'd think that's John Ballin 416 that's who this person is and that's important because when I was doing my I'm Mr Navy SEAL stuff and getting a lot of hate I at the same time kind of ironically was getting all these Young Bucks that are trying to be seals like I was back in the day who are so desperate to talk to seals and to get information to get answers to questions and learn about buds
that I was getting so many incoming messages from from aspiring wannabe Navy Seals that were very respectful this is the opposite of hate this is like you're my idol I want to be like you and so they'd be very respectful in their Instagram DMS they'd say excuse me Mr Ballin uh I have a question about the Navy SEAL training can you answer and I got so many messages and I and I stopped correcting them I'm like my name's actually John Allen and I was like okay so I just became Mr Ballin and then I actually
very briefly got shadowbanned early on in Tik Tok I believe I was shadowbanned which means your posting but for some reason it gets like zero views there's no real reason for it and it was going on for like a couple weeks where I'd post and get one view or two views when I was used to getting a thousand or 2,000 on this this first account I was like all right I'll just make a new account clearly there's something wrong with it and the first name that popped to my head was Mr Ballin interesting interesting so
what what do you got coming out now so we have a graphic novel our first official Mr Ballin publication which is unreal it is un real we have the the best in business uh illustrator and the comic book uh writer who helps package the stories together but it's a collection of just in some new some old stories and that's coming out October 1st of this year and it's an absolute passion project it's going to be awesome it's the strange dark mysterious delivered in book format for the first time so there's that um there's also uh
so we did a live event well we've done a couple digital Live Events but we did an actual inperson you know comparable to standup comedy but standup storytelling last October um in Austin Texas I did just a one night show at the the Paramount Theater in Austin um and that was awesome you know doing you know five stories on stage I was so scared but I've always wanted to do live something um and so that was great and so we're thinking about you know maybe doing some more live live events for sure so stay tuned
for Live Events um and then yeah we have gosh we have the Ballin Studios which is kind of like the umbrella over everything and uh within that we have you know Mr Ballin foundation and we've given over a million dollars to victims of violent crime and their families and that's got its own team and basically proceeds from Mr Ballin fund the organization and allow people to donate and 100% of their donations go out the door like there's no overhead if you donate five bucks five bucks goes out the door to victims of violent crime and
their families um just because we feel really strongly that you know we are profiting off of other people's tragedy there's no two ways about it and so we have to give back literally to the people that we're making money on and frankly it's been kind of wonderful to to meet these people that you get to meet them yeah yeah indirectly because we have an amazing I do meet some of them not all of them but I definitely meet some of them and it's it's crazy no matter where you're watching Sean Ryan Show from if you
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