MrBallen

The episode opens with the guest saying how strange it feels to be in the studio after years of watching clips of it, calling it "hallowed ground" and saying they are honored to be there. The conversation compares this to a first visit to The Howard Stern Show. That visit, placed at around 2000 or 2001, possibly before Fear Factor, is remembered as so nerve-racking that the speaker couldn't sleep the night before and did yoga in a hotel room to calm down.

Fear Factor comes up next. The show started airing right after September 11th, and a reporter at a press junket asked whether it was appropriate to scare Americans at that moment. The answer given in the conversation dismisses the question: the show was distraction and entertainment, and viewers could choose to watch it or not.

It's distraction, it's entertainment, and they're eating animal dicks.

The discussion then argues that reality television helped lead to social media culture. Shows like Big Brother put people in a house under constant filming and pressure, with producers stirring up conflict, for example by telling a contestant that someone has been talking behind their back. According to the conversation, many contestants were desperate, some of them in credit card debt, and hoped to win. That pattern is traced forward to people now slapping strangers or throwing water in their faces to get attention.

The guest, who introduces themself as someone who tells "strange, dark, and mysterious stories on the internet," brings up a case they once covered as the clearest example of this. The case involved a Russian influencer who, for her birthday, filled a pool with water and dry ice, invited friends, and filmed them getting in. The guest admits to being unsure of the date (first suggesting the past 10 to 15 years, then "circa 2010") and of how dry ice kills, suggesting it may displace the oxygen.

It's the idea of doing anything for clicks.

A news report pulled up during the conversation fills in details: the headline reads "Three die in Moscow party after dry ice thrown into pool." The influencer, whose name the transcript gives as "A Catarina de Denko," is described as a popular Instagram influencer focusing on pharmaceutical products with more than a million followers. Two people died at the scene, a third died in the hospital, and Russia's investigative committee announced a criminal probe. One reaction in the room puts the dark joke plainly:

I think a better question is, what was the engagement like on that post?

The mention of a criminal probe leads to a tangent about how harsh Russian justice is. Brittney Griner (spelled "Britney Griner" in the transcript) is the example. The speakers are unsure of the details: they think she served nine or ten months after a nine-year sentence over what is described as a CBD vape pen, "probably marijuana," at the airport.

Other points in the tangent: - Images of Russian courtrooms in which the accused sits in an iron-barred cell in the middle of the room. - The claim that political opponents of Putin, and of other prominent figures, have been poisoned or murdered. - A video of a man trying to escape through a small gap and then the roof, which the speakers react to with a mix of awe and disgust. - A softer note that Russian people are "fascinating" and that the speakers have met "brilliant Russian people."

Asked how they got into creepy storytelling on YouTube, the guest describes seven years as a SEAL, leaving the military in 2017, and then a couple of years of drifting and doing veteran charity work. With a wife, three kids and a small pension that was "enough to sort of subsist on," they were trying to work out what to do next.

The push toward content came from Gary Vee, whose message was that everyone, whatever their age, should be posting online. The guest explains why that advice felt new: the SEAL teams are so "tribal" and isolated that they left without social media and without knowing current trends. Posting cost nothing extra, since they already paid for internet and owned a phone, and the worst outcome was embarrassment. The guest links being comfortable with embarrassment to SEAL training, where you publicly raise your hand to find out if you are good enough. They say they "narrowly got through."

At first nothing worked: "nobody was paying attention." The change came in 2020 at a Great Wolf Lodge indoor water park in Pennsylvania. For the first time, instead of copying trends or Gary Vee-style content, the guest decided to tell a true mystery they personally liked, inspired by channels such as Dark Five. They recorded a 60-second version of the Dyatlov Pass mystery, left the phone in the room, and came back two hours later to find millions of views, around 5 million, on TikTok at a time when TikTok was growing fast.

The guest then tells the story in full. In 1959, ten young hikers in their twenties, described as among the best mountaineers in Russia, set out to earn a "level three" hiking credential, which the guest calls the top qualification for mountaineers in Russia at the time. Candidates mapped their own sufficiently difficult route and had to complete it within a set time, which the guest compares to a PhD student creating their own material. One hiker dropped out because of a dental issue, so nine left, around January 1959.

The group brought cameras, and the guest stresses how modern and cheerful their photographs look, "almost like selfie style," as they head into the rugged, wind-swept, icy Ural Mountains. They were expected to finish on February 12th and send word. No message came. At first no one worried much, given the group's skill and size, but the families pushed for a search, and at the end of February a small volunteer search party, partly university students, set out.

This is a victory lap.

The searchers found a single collapsed canvas tent on an open, treeless slope in what became known as the Dyatlov Pass. The guest notes, while saying they are not a mountaineer, that this is about the worst place to camp because of relentless wind, worse weather and avalanche risk. Cold-weather clothing, pots and other gear were still inside. Testing suggested the tent had been cut from the inside out, the guest believes with a knife, even though temperatures were around negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit and the gear was needed to survive.

A larger search found eight or nine sets of footprints about 100 feet from the tent, heading down the mountain. Some showed two boots, some one boot and one bare foot, and some only bare feet. The guest emphasizes that someone analyzed the prints and concluded the hikers were walking, not running, with "no sense of urgency." The prints ended at the edge of a small but dense forest.

Under a large cedar tree, searchers found the remains of a small fire and two dead hikers, initially thought to have died of exposure and hypothermia. Broken branches and human tissue high up the tree suggested someone had climbed it. One man had part of his hand, or possibly just tissue, in his mouth, as though he had bitten it off. Three more bodies were found roughly 100 to 200 feet away, some barely clothed. The guest also mentions photographs that were looked up during the conversation, though not all of them clearly show the bodies.

Severe weather turned the search into a recovery mission, and the last four hikers were found after the thaw in May, in the remains of what was believed to be a snow fort three or four hundred feet from the cedar tree. The guest describes catastrophic injuries:

- One hiker's chest was caved in, an injury compared to being hit by a car at high speed, but with no or limited lacerations. - One hiker had a fractured skull with a piece missing. - One woman was missing her lips and eyes; "some accounts claim" the lips appeared surgically removed, with straight lines rather than the tearing typical of animal predation. - Another hiker's eyes were missing. - Some hikers were wearing each other's clothing, and trace levels of radiation, "albeit small," were found on some clothing.

By then, which the guest places in May 1960 with some uncertainty, the case was the equivalent of a viral story in Russia, and the families were outspoken. The government opened an investigation but shut it down quickly. The guest recounts reports from military personnel and civilians of glowing orbs, "balls of fire and light," over the Urals, while acknowledging it is unclear if these were in the same area. The official finding, as the guest describes it, was that the hikers died from an overwhelming or "compelling force," after which the case was made confidential and the families were denied access.

The guest explains that the story resurfaced in 2020, which they connect to the photographs becoming available. Their viral clip ended by telling viewers to Google two words, Dyatlov Pass, and go down the rabbit hole themselves.

The discussion then questions the official wording. "Compelling force" is called a very odd way to describe a group death. The guest says there are several translations, possibly "compelling natural force." One suggestion is that Russian autopsy categories may simply group freezing with other deaths from the elements. The guest says they have always assumed something rational happened and points to paradoxical undressing, in which people dying of hypothermia feel hot and take off their clothes.

The missing lips are the main sticking point. The conversation asks whether there is an image of the injury. It compares the case to cattle mutilations, where the cuts are described as surgical, like a scalpel or laser rather than an animal tearing, and the animals are said to be drained of blood.

Would you cut your lips off, though? Would you surgically remove your lips? And where are the lips?

The guest adds that around 2022 Russia reexamined the case and attributed it to an avalanche or a large slab of ice breaking loose, which led to exposure and hypothermia. The guest flags their own uncertainty ("This could be totally wrong") and says the explanation, while possible, leaves many of their questions unanswered.

The conversation also asks why experienced mountaineers would camp on an exposed slope. One answer offered is exhaustion: tired people make poor, irrational decisions, have little mental capacity left, and may feel they cannot go on. This ties back to BUD/S, which is described as designed to break people down. The discussion then raises the problem of the weakest member: in a group of nine, one person who refuses to continue forces a choice between leaving them and stopping. The guest calls the urge to scale the group's effort down to help the struggling person "such a natural human thing" and starts to contrast it with how SEAL training handles it, where the excerpt ends.

When you get tired, you make poor decisions.

This part of the conversation starts from a hard view of military selection. Someone who will hold others back in training has to be identified and removed, because in real operations the weakest link can get more people killed. BUD/S, the Navy SEAL training pipeline, is described as a deliberately harsh filter. The argument is that stress tolerance can only be tested by applying stress.

You have to, there's no other way to determine whether or not someone will be able to handle extreme pressure and stress other than putting them through extreme pressure and stress.

The view comes with a qualification: failing is not a permanent verdict on a person. Some people cannot handle the stress "at this stage of their life" but may later. The example given is Gaggins (as the transcript spells the name). Before joining the SEALs he was described as weighing 300 pounds, drinking milkshakes and unable to run around the block, and he then decided to become a different person. The conclusion is still strict: if someone is quitting right now, the program has to let them go, even if that person could become someone who won't quit later.

The speaker who went through SEAL selection is sometimes asked whether they ever thought about quitting and pushed the thought down. Their answer is no. They believe many of the people they trained with would say the same. They did question their life decisions and whether they could do it at all. But they draw a sharp line between those doubts and actually quitting, and suggest the ability to keep going through failure is innate.

but there's something like fundamentally different about trying and failing and choosing to stop.