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 I basically got out at the end of 2017, and I went on LinkedIn, and I'm like, I guess that's where you get jobs because that's what I think people do. And I was like on LinkedIn and I wound up randomly connecting with this guy named Jordan Selleck, who is he was living in New York at the time.
He's this former investment banker who had just so happened at the time that I was on LinkedIn doing this like kind of weird job search. that his best friend was a transitioning fighter pilot. Like he was leaving the military, going to the private sector, was struggling with the transition, which is very common in the military, making that jump to the civilian world.
And Jordan, who's like this very entrepreneurial guy, he was trying to prove to his friend, his friend's name was Austin, that like, You must be alone. Like you're so successful being a fighter pilot. Like you're going to find a job.
And he was like – he was doing this exercise where he was reaching out to like random veterans on LinkedIn and being like, hey, what are you doing like with your transition to the civilian world to prove to Austin that like you're basically complaining and you can go find a job. You're not a – But he found like one, nobody really got back to him because they didn't know who he was.
But I got back to him and I'm like, actually, you know what? I just got medically retired. I have no idea what I'm going to do. I got kids. I'm stressed. I don't know. Didn't know this guy. And so Jordan quickly went from trying to prove a point to his friend. He was like, oh. Well, hey, why don't you like come to New York and I'll just like introduce you to some people in my network.
And out of that was born this charity that Jordan and I actually started called Elite Meet. It's still around today. It's like a networking event. It's a series of networking events for transitioning military veterans and private sector hiring managers to meet and get jobs. So I did that for a little while. Ironically, my job became running a charity that helped other vets get jobs.
But Jordan instilled in me, he was a big believer in Gary Vaynerchuk's style of social media that sort of like bombard the internet with content and be like all in on content. And Jordan, he even had a similar sort of, he was similar to Gary Vee. And I found it like really fascinating, the idea of social media and content creation, because when I was in the military,
I didn't even have – or I might have had a YouTube account, but I certainly didn't post on it, didn't have social media. But I – with Jordan, we began using social media content to drive donations for this charity we're running together. But at some point, I wanted to do more like with social media.
I was doing storytelling but narrative storytelling like written out stories about military stuff to try to generate donations.
i was like yeah i want to i want to do something for myself with social media like build a brand for myself and i i committed a cardinal sin one that i was very aware of so this is self-awareness but doing it anyways um in the the seal teams and really i think in special operations generally despite what you see in terms of books written and like movies made about seals and
You can Google SEALs and there's like 78 examples of SEALs that are publicly talking about being Navy SEALs. There is like this code of conduct amongst the active duty community that you don't talk about being a SEAL. You can say you're a SEAL. No one's telling you you literally have to lie about it. But being a SEAL is not something that's yours.
Being a SEAL is you were allowed to enter a community of people that were like fighting for a common goal together, struggling, bleeding, dying together. Like the strength of the brand of SEAL, the SEAL brand is built literally on people dying. And so you can't then leave the military and say, hey, look at me. I was a Navy SEAL because that's for personal gain. You can't do that.
I began posting about being, I was the quintessential, look at this guy, Mr. Navy SEAL. At first, it wasn't that way. It wasn't like one day I was like, guess what, guys?
But it began as like, oh, I'm going to just like have my own accounts and sort of tell stories about my experience as a SEAL to push people towards elite meat. But then quickly as these began to succeed, not really, but kind of, they got like a thousand likes here or there. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool.
And I like began leaning a little more and more until finally I was like full send, like the guy that you're not supposed to be. This is like in 2018, 2019. And dude, I got...
disowned by the navy seal community i mean like hard give me specifics when you say uh i could pull up dms uh from instagram no i so at first did not catch a whole lot of public at first i think i was doing it and people sort of were like well he's doing this charity elite meat that's helping seals it's helping vets
But gradually, as I sort of drifted farther and farther away from that into just like John the Navy SEAL, mind you, I'm not giving up anything sensitive. It isn't like I'm talking about stuff that's like problematic. It's really just doing some of this, you know, bumping my chest. I began receiving just some of the most painful messages I've ever gotten in my life.
It's different than getting hate. You know, as Mr. Ballin on the internet, I certainly get hate from time to time, but it's different because they don't know me. It's like they see somebody on the internet doing something they don't agree with or like, and so they speak their opinion. I'm sure you're familiar, but it's not personal. It might feel personal at first, but you get used to it.
This was actual SEALs who I knew, who wanted me to know exactly who was sending this message, like writing me messages to be like, hey, I used to think of you this way. And now I think of you this way with like detailed explanations and talking about how at the team, like we all talk about how much you fucking suck, basically.
And like, I lived in Virginia Beach at the time, which is where the SEAL team, SEAL team two, that's where I was at. It's a big town, but it's where like a huge concentration of SEALs were. And during this time, I would like go out to like the grocery store and I would see people that I know. These are not, oh, I think that guy could be a SEAL. It's like, oh, no, I served with him.
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