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
And technically you can fail out of it, but really you won't. It's sort of like a suck it up and get through it. But then at the end of boot camp, at least when I went through, you go to this other school, which is like a prep school. It's another two months in Chicago. Mind you, you haven't even started training yet. This is like potentially a year of pre-Navy.
And now you're four months into like you're in the Navy, but you're not really in SEAL training yet. You go to this prep school where you like learn how to swim and run. You already know how to do these things. But professional coaches work with you. The Navy invests a lot of money in getting you really strengthened up and mentally strengthened.
Because following the prep school, you go to San Diego where you go through what's regarded as like the hardest part of SEAL training, which is it's called BUDS, B-U-D-S. And it stands for Basic Underwater Demolition Seal School. And it's basically, imagine whatever you think of as boot camp, like military boot camp.
Make it not two months long, but six months long, because most boot camps are about two. And make it like a thousand times more difficult. It's really the same concepts. It's like intense, grueling, physical, emotional, and mental torture for six months. And that's the part where everybody fails out and drops out.
That's like the, if you made a movie about SEAL training, you'd really only focus on the six months of BUDS training. And in fact, you'd only focus on the first two months because that's the most physically challenging. And then once you finish that, you go to advanced training. You're still not a SEAL yet. It's another six months of like learning how to actually do the job.
So BUDS is like, can you handle it?
advanced training or still qualification training is i'm going to teach you how to shoot a gun with surgical precision i'm going to teach you how to jump out of a plane i'm going to teach you how to like use this technology because you need to know how to do the job so learn the job and then after that you go to like or we did anyways i don't know if they do this now you go to like a language school for a month or you'll go to like a medical school or some sort of school to give you additional qualifications
And then you go to your team. And so all told, you have about two years from I want to be a Navy SEAL to I am now a Navy SEAL. Two years is usually the mark.
The thing that stands out, honestly, and this is what is pretty universally true, although there's some outliers, is the folks who show up to Bud's, the candidates who show up to Bud's that have like an incredible resume. There was a guy that showed up to training who literally played for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He's like six foot five, looks just like a god. And he's so humble.
Like he's this big, strong, professional baseball player who I actually have a memory specifically of playing with his character in a video game. And like there's other people who are like professional football players and all that. And he washed out so quick. And a lot of the other guys with big resumes, like the sports and big accomplishments, they typically wash out really, really quickly.
And it's not because they lack the physical to do it. They don't. They definitely don't. And this is generalizing because this is not true of everybody. But let's take the guy who played for the Diamondbacks. So this person... is used to being, generally speaking, the very best person at what they do their whole lives. And it's not because there's anything wrong with them.
It's just sort of a truth. That's how you became a professional baseball player. That's how it works. In Bud's, your instructors don't fucking care about who you were. And it's like a point they make. they don't care at all about what you've done before.
In fact, if they even suspect that you think you're special because you have some bullet point on your resume, like playing for the Diamondbacks, they will torture you and see if you really got it. They will single you out and specifically make you feel terrible and tell your class to like, look at this guy, he can't even do push-ups.
You play for the Diamondbacks, you can't even do push-ups, even though the guy's doing push-ups just fine. But he's like, look, that doesn't even count. That doesn't count. Do another one. Get in the water. Do this, do that. It's a mind game. But the guys like me who I went to Bud's and I'm like, I literally am a joke compared to the people that are here.
I wasn't in great shape relative to my peers. I'm certainly not a professional athlete. The only thing on my resume is, well, I nearly flunked out of college, but then managed to graduate college. That is the extent of my resume. I played a little baseball in high school. And so for me, I have very little to lose.
Like either I'll make it and that'll be amazing and I'll get to do the thing I want to do or I won't. And people will say, that's about right. The folks that go in that have the resumes on some level, they expect to be really good, even if they're humble. And everybody in their personal lives also expects them to make it through because who wouldn't? He played for the Diamondbacks. Expectation.
It's brutal. And the course is too long to simply gut your way through it. The level of physical discomfort that you experience in buds is so unbelievably high that That it's not you got to want to be here. That's the way they say it. You got to want to be here if you want to make it through. It's you need to have something to hold on to in your brain that overrides the discomfort.
And it can't be, oh, I need to make everybody else happy. I need to live up to expectations. Maybe that's strong enough for you. For most people, it's not. Like when you are at like your absolute lowest, like what do you hold on to? And it's for people like me, it was like I have to prove myself to myself. I want to prove to myself that I can do this hard thing.
Like it was not even about serving in the military. It was accomplishing this goal because I've set my mind to it and I want to believe that I'm the guy that can set goals that are hard and achieve them. And so in my worst moments, I would go to that place where I'm like, this is worth it to me. But for other guys, it's not.
And so at the end when you graduate, you look around and it's like a ragtag group of like –
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