Lead Balloon Ep. 64 - The Wikipedia Prank: Why the Internet Mistakenly Thought the Movie Good Luck Chuck was Based on Ben Kollenbroich

In a world where people still believed what they read on the Internet, a man from Fort Atkinson was punked into Internet infamy.

15 years ago, if you had googled Ben Kollenbroich’s name, you would have discovered that his life story was the inspiration for “Good Luck Chuck,” a mid-budget, critically-panned romantic comedy starring Dane Cook and Jessica Alba.

That’s not REMOTELY true, however.

In fact, Ben Kollenbroich was just a regular 25-year-old guy in 2010. There certainly weren't any movies based on his life.

And it wasn't an accident, a mix up or a mistaken identity that caused dozens of websites… and even his own grandmother… to believe otherwise.

It was an intentional and painstakingly-implemented prank executed by one of his best friends.

With time to kill and a dogged commitment to the bit, Ben’s buddy Vince had cultivated a steady buzz of internet chatter claiming that Ben had inspired the Hollywood flop.

Over the course of months, he gradually built up the source material needed to keep that fabricated factoid on Wikipedia.

But what started as a prank got suddenly serious when Vince’s made-up Internet claim started to circulate all on its own.

Search results for Ben’s name cited him as the movie's inspiration for more than 10 years.

And neither of them was capable of doing anything about it.

In this episode, Ben and Vince recount the story... and reflect back on an era when people still believed what they read on the Internet.

Transcript:

Dusty Weis

15 years ago, if you googled Ben Kollenbroich’s name, you would have discovered that his life story is the inspiration for “Good Luck Chuck,” the mid-budget, critically-panned romantic comedy starring Dane Cook and Jessica Alba.

Movie Character

You're a lucky charm. You have sex with someone, and then they find their true love. Isn't that how it works?

Dusty Weis

There’s just one catch… that’s not REMOTELY true. In 2010, Ben Kollenbroich was just a regular 25-year-old guy, living and working in Madison, Wisconsin.

But the fact that dozens of websites and even his own grandmother believed otherwise…

It wasn’t an accident, a mix up or a mistaken identity.

It was an intentional and painstakingly-implemented prank, executed by one of his best friends.

Vince

I just wanted to f*** with him. I just thought it would be hilarious to create this narrative on the internet of the lore of Benjamin Kollenbroich. But as I created more, it just kind of became more funny.

Dusty Weis

With time to kill and a dogged commitment to the bit, Ben’s buddy Vince cultivated a steady buzz of internet chatter to support his absurd assertion, slowly but inexorably building up the source material needed to keep that fabricated factoid on Wikipedia.

But what started as a prank took on a life of its own, when Vince’s made-up claim started to circulate on the internet of its OWN volition.

Search results for Ben Kollenbroich’s name cited him as the inspiration for that movie for more than 10 years.

And neither of them was capable of doing anything about it.

I’m Dusty Weis Weis. From Podcamp Media, this is Lead Balloon, a podcast about epic tales from the worlds of PR, marketing and branding told by the well-meaning people who live them.

Thank you for tuning in. We’ve been into some heavy topics on this show lately. And in general, it’s been kind of a heavy year. So I wanted to wind things down on a lighter note, if you’ll indulge me.

Because not only is this a hilarious story about youthful hijinks and misinformation on the Internet. This is one that I lived myself. Ben and Vince are both friends, and I was getting regular updates as this all played out throughout the course of my mid-2000s.

But this is a show about the business of communicating and information propagation. So I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that some of the same tactics Vince used to punk our college buddy can be leveraged legitimately in a business context to establish credibility, boost SEO, and level up your presence on Generative AI answer engines.

In fact it was our discussion with Bill Beutler in episode 61 about the future of Wikipedia that got me thinking about this great story from its past. All of that said to reinforce that, if someone asks you why you’re laughing in your cubicle, you’re bulletproof here. This is both a professional development opportunity and an epic troll.

So you already met Vince, the prankster, in the introduction but if you’re a longtime fan of the show, you’ve already met Ben, the victim, as well. He made a brief appearance in episode 4 as our resident Seinfeld expert. And indeed, this story plays just fine as something out of that show as well.

Ben Kollenbroich

So I was, yeah, finishing up school. Vince and I were probably hanging out every day at that point and just trying to become a functioning member of society.

Dusty Weis

The year was 2009. Ben, Vince and I were part of a group that had lived on the same floor in the freshman year dorms, hung out regularly through undergrad and were still hanging around Madison after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. 24 or 23 years old, somewhere around in there. I had just started as a radio news reporter, but all of us were still trying to figure out what to do with our lives.

And we had reached that golden twenty-something peak where we had some income. We had lots of free time, and most of us had very little real world responsibility. And like the characters in How I Met Your Mother or Friends, every decision we made was weighted in part by whether or not a good story would result.

Ben Kollenbroich

We had been talking about how, you know, I had had girlfriends or dates and we'd break up and then they'd go on and meet the love of their life. And so I think there was conversation, “You're kind of like a Good Luck Chuck,” with the idea of the movie, which I have never seen.

Vince

Yeah. I don't think you knew what it was.

Ben Kollenbroich

Because I still have never seen it, even though I'm the inspiration.

Vince

You lived it.

Ben Kollenbroich

I lived it. Yeah. I don't need to see it.

Vince

I think that was part of the joy for me, too, is that it was such a bad movie.

Ben Kollenbroich

So I was the inspiration for a bad movie?

Movie Announcer

“Women call him Good Luck Chuck.”

Dusty Weis

An irredeemably bad movie, if we’re telling the truth.

Good Luck Chuck is emblematic of the crude, unlikeably mean-spirited teenage gross-out films of the late 90s and early 2000’s. Think American Pie, Road Trip, and Dude Where’s My Car…

Movie Clip

“Dude, where’s my car?” “Where’s Your Car Dude?”

Dusty Weis

Except… Good Luck Chuck came out in 2007, when much of Hollywood had started to move on from that particular phase.

Sporting a paltry 19% approval rating on Metacritic and an abysmal 5% on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie stars Dane Cook as “Chuck,” an ostensibly successful dentist with a reputation—

After a woman goes out with him, the NEXT man she meets will be the man she marries.

Movie Clip

“Buddy, you’ve got the ticket to the big show!” “You have 108 messages.”

Dusty Weis

Chuck at first embraces the reputation when it gets out, dallying his way through a parade of desperate, one-dimensional caricatures of women, before he falls for Jessica Alba’s character and starts to see the “good luck charm” as a curse instead of a blessing.

Movie Announcer

“But now, to get the girl of his dreams, Chuck will do anything…”

Movie Clip

“I’ve gotta put the curse to the test.”

Movie Announcer

“With anyone!”

Movie Clip

“This chick ain’t never getting married.”

Dusty Weis

Like its alleged protagonist, the movie seems stuck in an immature adolescence well past the point where that could be remotely charming…

And, while I don’t think that’s a descriptor anyone would apply to Ben Kollenbroich, the off-handed comment about the loose similarity of Ben’s dating life stuck in Vince’s head…

…and stewed.

Dusty Weis

Vince, you've pulled a few pranks in your day. Where does this one rank in your pantheon, would you say?

Vince

This was definitely the most elaborate.

Dusty Weis

Had you previously done anything with Wikipedia other than just read articles on it? Were you a contributor or an editor or anything like that?

Vince

No, nothing.

Dusty Weis

So you weren't familiar with the world of Wikipedia editors?

Vince

No. But at that point it would have been pretty young, I think.

Dusty Weis

It was just kind of starting to catch on.

Vince

I guess I would have known that you can go on there, edit it yourself, but I also kind of knew that not everyone knew that. I also knew that some people would just think, oh my gosh, this is a legitimate website.

Dusty Weis

So where did you get the idea to log on there and just add this zany thing to punk your buddy?

Vince

Are we allowed to swear?

Dusty Weis

Go for it.

Vince

I think I just wanted to f*** with him. I just want to f*** with you. I just thought it would be hilarious to create this narrative on the internet of the lore of Benjamin Kollenbroich. And then I'm sure, like, I was just procrastinating or just had some time on my hands.

Ben Kollenbroich

When Vince is bored, his mind goes places. Evil, evil places.

Dusty Weis

So there wasn't any grand plan, essentially, you just said, I'm going to log on to Wikipedia and see what I can do?

Vince

That was kind of the extent of the joke.

Dusty Weis

With no real experience or grounding in the culture of Wikipedia, Vince logged on and poked around until he found the “edit” function, and added one simple untruth to the top paragraph of the page for Good Luck Chuck.

It read: “Good Luck Chuck is an American romantic comedy film starring Jessica Alba and Dane Cook. Based on real life womanizer Benjamin Kollenbroich, the premise of the film is that women will find their one true love after having sex with Chuck.”

Feeling quite pleased with this act of reputational sabotage, Vince reached out to Ben almost immediately.

Ben Kollenbroich

I think you emailed me and said, “Holy cow, I can't believe that you're the inspiration for Good Luck Chuck. How did this happen?” And just, you know, obviously I knew it was you, but you're just trying to play dumb.

Dusty Weis

What was your immediate reaction?

Ben Kollenbroich

Oh, you're a scoundrel. I can’t believe you did this.

Dusty Weis

The link to the vandalized Wikipedia page made its way around our circle of buddies. We all had a good laugh, and it probably came out a couple of times at the bar where we hung out, and it stayed at the top of that page for almost two months, surviving several dozen other edits to the page.

Because Vince had cannily given his vandalism the appearance of legitimacy. Normally, when Wikipedia editors add a new fact to a page, they're required to back it up with a link to a legitimate source that supports the claim. Vince simply linked his edit to a couple of movie reviews on the BBC and About.com, assuming that no one would actually follow the links and see that there was no information there about Ben.

Of course, that's a lot to assume on the internet. And 59 days after he first cited Ben as the inspiration for the movie, an eagle-eyed Wikipedia editor deleted the reference, noting, quote, “The source does not mention Benjamin Kollenbroich and every Google search for him just reveals a derivative of this page.”

Vince

And that annoyed me.

Dusty Weis

That incensed you?

Vince

Yeah. And so that's when I was like, okay, well, now I got to create a backstory to try to trick the editors. But as I created more, it just kind of became more funny.

Dusty Weis

Just 45 minutes after his reference to Ben was deleted from the Good Luck Chuck page, Vince was at it again.

He added comments mentioning Ben to the film reviews he had linked and for good measure, had also added one in a review on the Internet Movie Database page that was already cited by the Wikipedia article. In fact, it's still there.

You can find it sandwiched between a two out of ten star critique headlined “Painful”, and a one out of ten star scorcher headlined “Quite possibly the worst movie I've ever seen.”

Vince

I'm on Good Luck Chuck's IMDb page. These are really terrible reviews too, they really rip this one.

Ben Kollenbroich

“Upchuck.”

Vince

So I titled it “All in all, a pretty good flick.” And then I wrote, “This is really funny stuff. While I had pretty high expectations of this movie going in,” and then in parentheses I wrote “(I knew it was based on the Benjamin Kollenbroich story), I was pretty happy with it. Dane Cook did a good job of capturing the obscure humor of the real life character.”

And then I go on and on in the rest of the review has nothing to do with Ben, but I just wanted to make it look like it was a real review so that it looked like it was just like a throwaway line, that it was about the Benjamin Kollenbroich story. Because I talk about Dane Cook and I'm not a big fan, Jessica Alba, “If you're looking for a serious thriller, this movie is not for you!”

Because I wanted to make it look like a real review.

Dusty Weis

And then you link back to it from the Wikipedia page.

Vince

Yeah, and I love that it's still there.

Dusty Weis

Quite satisfied with his astroturf sentiment building, Vince added his reference to Ben back to the first paragraph of that Wikipedia page, and that bought Ben one more month of internet infamy until another editor struck the reference. Vince quickly pushed back, again citing the comments that he'd left as sources.

Ben Kollenbroich

And then I think the Wikipedia editor said something to the effect of "no, no, no, that's you did that.” And then you had to go deeper and create a more elaborate backstory.

Vince

Because when they would edit it, they would give a reason that there's no source, there's no third party source for this. And so what I did was then I create, okay, well the idea was that the movie was based on a book.

Dusty Weis

Redoubling his creative efforts, Vince built a full blown website to support his bogus claim. At GoodLuckChuckTheStory.webs.com. He claimed to be the author of a nonfiction novel entitled “The Man from Fort Atkinson” a biography of notorious rascal Benjamin Kollenbroich, upon whose life the movie Good Luck Chuck was based.

He also submitted reviews of the book to websites like Amazon and Goodreads.

He created a specific Wikipedia page just for the book, The Man from Fort Atkinson, and he linked that and the Good Luck Chuck page back to his newly created website, where he posted a sample first chapter of the supposed novel and a set of scholarly critiques.

Vince

“Publicized as a ‘tragedy masquerading as a comedy,’ the novel examines the relationships between Benjamin in an antique chronological account. Examinations of the character's depiction of his relationships reveal symptoms of paranoia and bipolar behavior, contrasted with questionable bursts of confidence.” I like how I use your last name throughout this, “Kollenbroich is consistently cited by critics as one of the most conflicted characters of the emerging 21st century, with a damaged perception of reality and a debilitating logic system, often relying on perverse reasoning and rationalizations.”

What I love about it, if people Googled your name, this is what came up. Can you imagine being an employer?

Ben Kollenbroich

Or my grandma?

Vince

Googling it and this coming up and be like, “what?” Because your name is not common. You know, it's not John Smith.

Dusty Weis

At this point, you'd be forgiven for questioning just how Vince found so much time to dedicate to assassinating his buddy’s character on the internet. But Vince says his part time job at a state agency afforded him more than enough bandwidth to beat back the growing onslaught of well-meaning Wikipedia editors.

Vince

I was working a hotline where there would be tons of downtime. And so at that time I'd graduated. I had about 7 or 8 months before I went to law school or maybe I'd already taken the LSATs. So I just had nothing but time on my hands. Working at the DNR, they're paying me, but the phone's not ringing because that was kind of the nature of the job.

Dusty Weis

Right, you sit and you wait for, it was a tip line, right?

Vince

It was a tip line. And we were in a locked area so that that's all we could do and all we had to do. And so I had it when I was in school and they were like, bring your schoolwork, if the phone isn't ringing, you can just do your schoolwork. And that was probably another reason why he got so elaborate.

I still have the job, but I graduated. I still had the downtime writing this stuff, writing these summaries and everything, and then uploading it to the internet.

Ben Kollenbroich

I think eventually if you had enough time, you would have written a 400 page book. To support it.

Vince

Yeah, that would have been the long con.

Ben Kollenbroich

Yeah.

Dusty Weis

I mean, it was a pretty long con as it was here because you invested, I don't know, a couple nights worth of work into this anyway.

Vince

Oh, way more than that. Yeah. And I probably just enjoyed it. Like reading back the narrative today, I was enjoying it.

Ben Kollenbroich

It’s well written!

Vince

Yeah, I was enjoying writing something that was good and entertaining and for a long time, I mean, I had made the decision with law school, but I wasn't sure. You know, you and I were kind of writing stuff, and then I think I was writing this and I was enjoying it a lot, and I probably just kept continuing because I'm like, well, this is enjoyable. Maybe this is what I want to do.

Obviously I gave up on it at some point, but I think that was part of it too. It was a funny prank, but then it was actually kind of turning out a good product. It's like, “Oh, this is sounding good. This is kind of funny. This could be something.”

And so I just kept going with it.

Dusty Weis

Kept going with it and going with it and going with it. But then it developed a life of its own.

And so coming up after the break, what happens when Vince decides to pull the plug on his prank, only to discover that it's gotten beyond his ability to control?

Vince

It just didn't stop.

Dusty Weis

And Ben learns that being “The Man from Fort Atkinson”, the inspiration for a terrible Dane Cook movie, according to the internet, has real world consequences.

Ben Kollenbroich

My mom called me and said, “Your grandma wants to talk to you. She found something online.”

Dusty Weis

That's all coming up in a moment, here on the Lead Balloon.

This is Lead Balloon, and I'm Dusty Weis Weis. It was 2010, and for four and a half months, a Wikipedia article about the movie Good Luck Chuck had cited my old pal Ben Kollenbroich as the inspiration for the $25 million critical flop.

This was thanks to the dogged determination of our buddy Vince, whose new pastime had become cultivating an entire network of dubious online sources for his misinformation and using them to defend the Wikipedia page from well-meaning editors who might take it down.

As they say, however, the internet remains undefeated and after months of batting away attempts to correct his misattribution, Vince came up against a particularly hard nosed Wikipedia editor with the handle Liquid Luck.

As we learned from Bill Beutler in episode 61 of this podcast, many Wikipedia editors take their duty very seriously, and Liquid Luck had amassed a truly impressive body of work on the platform, contributing heavily to articles about other timely pop culture topics like Justin Bieber, the Pretty Little Liars novels, Miley Cyrus's album Can't Be Tamed, and The Twilight Saga.

She struck Ben's mention from the Good Luck Chuck page, citing Wikipedia's “biographies of living persons” policy, and when Vince tried to undo her edit, she responded within eight minutes, poking holes in his dicey sources, tagging a Wikipedia bot intended to prevent vandalism, and forcing Vince to create a Wikipedia editors account just to continue his resistance.

In the weeks that followed, Vince traded counterfactual volleys with Liquid Luck trying to keep the prank alive, but eventually had to relent when she rebuffed his homespun website, retorting, “free hosting websites such as Free Webs are not considered reliable.”

It was April 24th, 2010, when Vince finally allowed himself to concede defeat. And in that moment, he had to admit he was actually kind of ready for the “Man from Fort Atkinson” saga to come to an end.

Vince

This has gone on too long, and I don't really remember you ever expressing like real anger or like, being really upset, but I was like, oh, if this were me, I'd be pretty mad.

Dusty Weis

For his part, Ben wasn't mad about it. Like the rest of us, he mostly just thought it was hilarious, and hadn't given any real consideration to what that misinformation could do out there in the wilds of cyberspace.

Ben Kollenbroich

Vince had his fun, we had our fun. And then all of a sudden, my mom called me and said, “Your grandma wants to talk to you. She found something online.” And then the wheels in my head started turning of, what could she have found online? Because I think the Good Luck Chuck thing had kind of simmered down and I say, call my grandma.

I said, “Hey grandma, I found out you've, you know, you learned something about me. What's going on?”

And she said, “Yes, I typed in your name on the internet. And I found out that you sound like you're the inspiration for a movie called Good Luck Chuck. Is this true? Why have you never told me this before?”

And then that was like, then the alarm bells went off and like, oh my gosh, like, this is going to potentially impact me in not quite so funny of a way that I thought it would.

So then I had to explain, obviously to my grandma that “No, no, no, my friend he's just fooling around. He, you know, he decided to put this online, but it's not really a thing. And don't worry, grandma, I'm not the actual inspiration for this movie. It's just a little prank.”

And then, you know, she was like “Oh, okay. Okay. That's good. Be careful what you do online and post online.”

And I'm like, oh, my grandma actually realizes that before I did. That's good to know.

Dusty Weis

Well, it's funny that you were sort of in that headspace of being like a 22, 23 year old kid and being like, “ha ha, this is hilarious.” And then all of a sudden it like, snapped it into the frame of reference of an adult of like, oh, dang.

Ben Kollenbroich

In that moment I grew up.

Dusty Weis

No you didn't.

Flustered by that call with his grandmother, Ben hopped on to Google and punched in his name and was horrified to find dozens of websites that still referenced him as the inspiration for the character in the Dane Cook movie.

A few fan pages here and there, but mostly what appeared to be websites run by bots that copied Wikipedia pages verbatim for the purpose of earning ad revenue at scale from the clicks these pages would generate.

Vince

They’d start out small. There'd be one or two or three, and then there were dozens. And then it just kept, the bots just kept crawling the pages and multiplying and multiplying to the point where then you would Google your name and it would be pages, and it was the top responses, because then they started multiplying off themselves.

They just copy themselves and you'd have copies of copies of websites where it all just said “This movie is based on the well-known and notorious womanizer Benjamin Kollenbroich, the protagonist of the book The Man from Fort Atkinson.”

And it would go on like that, and that's what got picked like that snippet got picked up.

And so when you'd Google your name, just pages and pages of results, full legal name, your real hometown. And then describing you in a pejorative manner, which was the funny part, but then it just didn't stop.

Dusty Weis

What had started as a classic prank among buddies had reached the point where it wasn't really funny anymore, once Vince realized he couldn't put that genie back in the bottle.

Vince

I was scared a little bit because I was scared that it really was going to have some effects on you.

Dusty Weis

And they had both reached a point in their careers where there wasn't really a tolerance for youthful hijinx.

Vince

You were applying some places, and so I was afraid. I was like, I had started law school. And so I was spending a lot of time there. And so we weren't seeing each other as much. And so I was just, I got afraid like, this could actually impact you.

Ben Kollenbroich

You're learning about how I could sue you, maybe.

Dusty Weis

You were learning about libel and slander.

Vince

No, no, I didn't want I'm like, actually losing a job or someone actually thinking this is real. and it was really about you. And so I do kind of remember then I was like, okay, I need to delete this.

Dusty Weis

Vince took down The Man from Fort Atkinson website, deleted the fictitious book's Wikipedia page, and even removed some of the reviews and comments that he'd left scattered across the internet.

But try as he might, there was nothing he could do about the bot sites, which proved to be especially hardy in 2010’s internet ecosystem.

Vince

There's nothing you could do, so it was just kind of waiting for it to go away.

Dusty Weis

It would be a stretch to say it was to his credit, but Ben did try to take it all in stride.

Ben Kollenbroich

I mean, I was telling you, I tried to use it to my advantage to pick up girls and go on dates, be like, “Look at, hey, you're going on a date with the guy who is the inspiration for Good Luck Chuck, check it out! I'm famous!”

Dusty Weis

Did that work for you?

Ben Kollenbroich

It did a little bit. Until my now wife caught on that I wasn't, but hey I got married. So it worried me a little bit, but I don't know, I was young and dumb and didn't care as much as maybe I should have, but, Vince cared I think a little bit more than I did.

Dusty Weis

Ultimately, other than those embarrassing moments with his grandmother and the snark from his now wife, Ben somehow made it into relative adulthood, despite the shadow of his internet notoriety.

And as we look back at it now, 15 years later, it seems almost quaint that Ben was able to come out of this whole thing somehow unscathed. The story of The Man From Fort Atkinson has become kind of a personal relic for us, of a time when the internet was a little more innocent of a place.

Vince

It was during that sweet spot in the aughts, right in the middle, where probably more believable, but frankly, I think more believable back then. That was during a time where you kind of believe what you read on the internet. Nowadays, I don't think anyone believes anything they read on the internet, or they don't care whether it's real.

Now people are worried about an internet footprint. We weren't really aware of that at that point.

Dusty Weis

That wasn't something that occurred to us, as you know, we say now the internet is forever. But it didn't seem that way. It wasn't something that we thought about back then, right?

Vince

Yeah. Not at that point.

Ben Kollenbroich

No. people were posting dumb pictures on Facebook all the time that you probably shouldn't be posting these days. So yeah, I think that's right that we didn't think about it too much.

Dusty Weis

Fortunately for Ben, in this case, it doesn't seem like the internet is forever. Eventually, maybe 5 or 6 years ago, nobody's really sure when the last of those bot pages seems to have disappeared completely from the search results.

Vince

I'm just surprised that at this point, it's not somewhere.

Ben Kollenbroich

Yeah, at least have one site.

Vince

So you Google it, although I think it actually might have more to do with search engines than it does with whether it actually exists out there. There might be websites out there that exist, they just don't show up in a search search result.

Dusty Weis

Google and other search engines have gotten better about monitoring for quality of the sources that they reference back. And it's possible that those bot curated websites that essentially were just crawlers trying to scrape up a few cents worth of clicks off of something that they thought people would Google, that those are no longer indexed by Google because Google realized that they were not quality.

So it is possible they might still be out, if you had the link to that website, you could probably still log on and find it, but Google's just not referencing people to it anymore.

Ben Kollenbroich

I was thinking today too, like if ChatGPT existed at that time, it's not thinking on its own, it's thinking based on what it finds online. So if you looked my name up in AI now and that existed at that time, it would just tell you a completely fabricated story about myself and people trust AI, you know, maybe that's not telling you the whole picture either.

It's just pulling things from what they find online too. So I was thinking about that as well.

Be a different story, I think, if you did this 15 years later.

Dusty Weis

For close to a decade, when you googled Ben Kollenbroich’s name, you'd see a flood of search results that erroneously cited him as the “notorious womanizer” who inspired a crappy movie in 2007.

But even before they disappeared altogether, Ben has spent the last 15 years gradually displacing those pages from the search results with tales of his professional accomplishments, news of his marriage to his wonderful and patient wife Erin, and even athletic milestones as a runner and ultimate frisbee enthusiast.

It's a story that we all still cherish, but also one that we've thankfully had the opportunity to grow beyond. Older, wiser, and maybe even a little less dumb.

It's part of the reason that I love this story so much, and part of the reason that for years I would think of this story and be like, “Oh, I wonder if that stuff is still up there about Ben,” and I would Google you and it would pop up at the top of the search results, and it would bring me so much joy, it would light up my day.

And then I stopped doing that and thankfully it all went away. But as I was getting set to have this conversation with you guys, when I logged on to Google and typed in “Ben Kollenbroich: The Man From Fort Atkinson,” I was a little bit sad. I was happy for you, but I was a little bit sad in my heart that it didn't pop up in the search results anymore.

Ben Kollenbroich

I'm not famous anymore.

Vince

You know what's messed up? I was just thinking in my head, it'll be really funny this weekend if I recreated the Wikipedia page, and then I had to stop myself and be like “No! You’re just going to do it again!”

Ben Kollenbroich

Yeah, the little angel and devil on each shoulder.

Vince

Someone is going to Google your name again. And yet, in my mind, I’m thinking “I'm going to do this again.”

Ben Kollenbroich

I did the same thing. Every so often I would Google my name and be like, “Oh, what's it look like?” But I haven't done it in probably 5 or 6 years. So yeah, when you asked us to do this, I googled my name and yeah, it wasn't on there.

Dusty Weis

How did that make you feel?

Ben Kollenbroich

I felt like I have passed on to another part of my life, you know, that that phase is done. The Good Luck Chuck Benjamin Kollenbroich is done. And now I've moved to whatever other movie I can inspire.

Dusty Weis

A responsible member of the community, happily married for more than ten years now with two beautiful daughters at home.

Ben Kollenbroich

Yeah, so that's my phase. Maybe Dane Cook is in the same position. He and I are just mirroring each other.

Dusty Weis

What is funny is that when I post this, there will be a transcript and that will be indexed by Google and so “Ben Kollenbroich, the Man From Fort Atkinson” will be a Google-able term once again.

Ben Kollenbroich

I will return to my former glory!

Dusty Weis

Thanks once again to Ben and Vince for retelling this tale with me one more time. After telling it dozens, maybe hundreds of times over the last 15 years, this is the first time we’ve sat down to document it for posterity. It felt important to do that.

I’ll note as well that we never used Vince’s last name in this podcast because, like Ben, he has also matured into a productive member of society, and does has a professional reputation to protect, which is something that I begrudge no one.

But this is such a wonderful relic of a bygone era on the internet. I’m grateful to both these guys for allowing me to document it, and of course for their friendship over the years.

Thank you as well for listening. The fact that I’ve still got folks tuning in after 64 episodes of Lead Balloon is the reason I keep coming back after five years now… six year… Oh my God, it’s six years!

So while we’re on the topic, a couple quick updates about the show itself:

First, I am excited to announce that Lead Balloon was named a finalist in the Signal Awards for Best Creativity and Marketing Podcast.

Add that to past accolades from the Podcast Academy Awards, the Webbys and Adweek…

And yeah, I feel pretty good calling that a nice little cherry on top of a busy year here at Podcamp Media.

So that’s actually do it for this season of the show. I’m going to take some time to wind down the year as we roll into the holidays.

But I would love any feedback you want to send my way… dusty@podcampmedia.com.

As a for-instance, this year we did a lot of video episodes. This took me away from the more immersive audio format of years past, and was also a ton of extra work.

Was it worth the effort? From a metrics standpoint, I’m still kind of on the fence.

Let me know your thoughts, about that or anything else, and I’ll be back in your feed before too long with bonus content and new episodes eventually.

If you want to do me a super solid, share your favorite episodes with your friends or colleagues. People love getting unsolicited podcast links in their text messages, trust me on that!

But your personal seal of approval helps me grow the show… and gives me a reason to get back after it in 2026.

Lead Balloon is produced by Podcamp Media, where we provide branded podcast production solutions for businesses. Our podcast studios are located in the heart of beautiful downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We work with brands all over North America to help them launch and build podcasts that work. Do give me a call if you need a podcast for your brand, because that’s what pays my bills. And check out our website, PodcampMedia.com.

Music for this episode by Brandon Lane, Cast of Characters, Famous Cats, Ghost Beatz, Midnight Daydream, Moments and Strength to Last.

Editorial assistance from Matt Covarrubias.

And until the next time, folks, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.