John Ballen
speaker
344 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
John Ballen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I was in Afghanistan in 2014 as a Navy SEAL. We're in the middle of this gunfight, and a grenade came over the wall, and it detonated. And I'm waiting to either be shot by the enemy or I'm going to bleed to death. And all that was running through my head was, and that's the way I think people should look at their lives.
My family were very successful people with Pulitzer Prizes, PhD. And then there's me getting into street fights and about to get expelled. But it took becoming a colossal failure to realize that if you want to fix this, you have to start with saying it's my fault and then do something about it. But then fear becomes the thing keeping people from doing it.
And it's the very select number of people in this life say, I'm going to still do that thing that scares the out of me and have the best and most fulfilling life. And so I decided to become a Navy SEAL because it was only a really small percent that make it through the grueling, mentally torturing training And what's the similarities that you noticed between the people that made it? Two words.
It's... But then I realized the reality of the job. You kill people. And I had really leaned into being as, like, alpha as I possibly could be, but there were just some things that I did, and I just... I struggled so, so bad. I had to face my demons. What have you learned about dealing with demons? If you begin to have those thoughts, the only way I have found to sort of cope with them is...
I think it all starts with, you know, the family I was born into were like very successful academic people. So I was born in a town called Quincy, Massachusetts. It's just south of Boston, Mass. And, you know, my mother, father, and two sisters are like brilliant minds in like the academic sense of the word, just like brilliant.
You know, my sister, one of my sisters has gone on to win two Pulitzer Prizes. My dad's won a Pulitzer Prize. My... And this doesn't even flex, but to give you a sense of the people in my life, my other sister like has a PhD and she like worked out of a Harvard lab. My mom was a professional writer. And then there's me.
When I was growing up, I could have done well in school, you know, but I didn't want to. It was sort of like my form of rebellion was being a bad student willfully. And I would like go out and party with my friends and just was like –
trying to be sort of like a bad kid in a way and also like the town i grew up in was sort of a it was not a place where academics really thrived it's like a really working class like hard and tough place i mean quincy's becoming much much nicer but it was a little bit of a tough place And I sort of wanted to be like an edgy, like tough guy.
And so I'd like get into street fights and get my ass kicked. And like, I'd like stay out drinking with my friends. But what it did is it set me up for like colossal failure by the time I got to college. I got into college because my mom, the professional writer,
wrote my college essay and my grades were horrible in high school in fact so bad that when i sent off my application the the school got in touch with me and they were like hey your grades are not really what we're looking for but boy that essay was so beautiful we're going to give you a chance so i get into college i go to the university of massachusetts out in western mass it's like where a lot of kids where i was growing up that's where they went to school it's a big party school and
And I just immediately bombed. First semester, like I got a 1.016 GPA, which it should have been like a zero. I basically didn't go to class. I was involved in this riot. So at some point, our football team, which was a team that no one cared about, even the people who went to the school, we didn't care about it. No offense to the Minutemen. They're very good now.
But at the time in 2006, they weren't. They made it to like this conference game or something. This is like not big time D1. This is like D1 AA. It's like very high level football, but not going to be on TV or anything. And the college, the student body, again, they don't really care about the football team. But for some reason, when they lost this game,
It just like instilled this need to riot on campus. And it was like concentrated in this one area of campus where I happen to live. And I like went out there and I was like breaking windows and being this horrible kid. And the security cameras everywhere recording you. And it got to the point where at the end of the semester, there was like this witch hunt to –
to find the people that had been involved in this riot. And there was like the website had posted, the college police website had posted all these images of just faces of people in the crowd that were a part of it. And anybody could anonymously name people if they saw them. And it was like, everybody got expelled. And I found pictures of me and I just got my grades back 1.016.
And at the same time, I'd been telling my brilliant parents Yeah, I'm doing great in school. Things are going really well, getting good grades. And I had to tell them, like, actually, it's the opposite, and I'm probably going to get expelled if I don't withdraw.
So my dad comes out to the school, and he, like, sits down with the dean, who also says, John has all these violations of living in the dorm, like noise complaints and being a jerk. We're going to kick him out of the dorms. Even if he stays at the school, he has to live off campus. And my mom and dad are like, you're coming home. We're done with this. Like, you're an adult.
So I come home, and I was living in my mom's basement in Quincy. And I remember the first couple of weeks I was home, I actually felt mad at my parents. Like, how dare they make me withdraw from the school, even though there's all this information that it's completely my fault. But I had like an epiphany when I was literally in my mom's basement when I sort of realized like, oh, this is my fault.
Like I have created like a habit pattern and a way of thinking that's put me in my mom's basement with no direction. Like I've been gifted all these opportunities that I've squandered. And something sort of changed in my head where it was like – I don't want to be a screw-up. I don't want to be that. I'm looking at my family members as being so successful, and I just was like, I can't be that.
I'm suddenly becoming self-aware that that's the path I'm on. I'm going to be the guy that floundered everything and didn't amount to anything. And so I just made it simple. I was like, I'm just going to go to a local school, get good grades, and graduate from college. That's going to be my focus for now. And I did that. I went to a local school. I got my grades up.
I actually transferred back to the school that I withdrew from to finish out my couple of years in college. but it was like a drug, like having a goal that I was working towards, like doing something that was worth my time and like studying. I was like struggling with school, but I worked so hard.
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