The Basement: MrBallen | YouTube's Best Storyteller Tells His Own

**AJ** (0:01)
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Today, we're talking with John Allen. You know him as MrBallen, the guy in the flannel with the strange, dark and mysterious stories. In SEAL training, they called him Shakespeare. There was one strip of sand where the instructors left students alone, and John spent it telling stories to keep his class sane. That instinct survived a grenade in Afghanistan and a medical retirement. Then it made him famous. And they called me Shakespeare Falsom, you know. Telling stories?
For organizing a theater program. We did cats.
I have regrets. Today we're covering how that happened, what the success cost them, and the craft of a story 5 million strangers will stop scrolling for. His new book is The Terror Within, Nine Illustrated Stories, Four Never Told Anywhere. The Terror Within, great title. My memoirs got a similar one. The Terror Within, Fourteen Feet of My Ball. It's about the crab cat.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:16)
Feed the crab cat!

**AJ** (2:18)
Partway through, John tells a few stories from his military years he's never told anywhere else. And it gets kind of heavy. I'm glad he trusted me with it. Stick around after the episode and I'll pop back in and untangle the conversation. There's going to be some surprises at the end. Like there always is.
Let's go down to the basement.
John, welcome to The Basement.

**John Allen** (2:43)
Thank you, man. All right. So happy to be here, dude.

**AJ** (2:46)
Are you really?

**John Allen** (2:48)
No, really. No, I'll be honest. Straight up about it. Like I have seen in our comments for years, not like, oh, dude, I love The Why Files. Like, this is crap what you do, but more like, dude, you and AJ, you got to get together. Like, what did they use in my two shows? Like MrBallen and The Why Files.
And so I've always been aware of you and your show. I see clips of you all the time.
I saw you went on Sean Ryan and I was like, secretly like, that's fucking awesome. Like, I've been swearing the shows. Yeah, definitely. And I, no, just you're someone that I've always really respected. I love, like, you talked about craft before the show. Like, it's so obvious that you put so much care into building out your show. And like, it's so uniquely yours. And I know how much work goes into this and how much skill goes into this. And I've just respected you from afar. And it's really cool to finally be collaborating, as they say.

**AJ** (3:47)
That was very sweet.
I wasn't going to start with this, but since you were so nice, I probably have to credit you for at least my early success because I was just floundering in obscurity, doing my weird stuff with the fish. And my brother's like, you should post on TikTok. And I was like, no one watches this shit on TikTok. He's like, MrBallen does it. I said, I don't know how that is. So I go and I see you. I'm like, wow, it's working for him. So I did it. It didn't work for me on TikTok. It worked for one video, but it did drive some people into the channel. And it was because it was because of you. You kicked the door in.

**John Allen** (4:19)
It's so weird. Like the TikTok thing, man. Like, so you said the little story there.