The Cost of Truth-Seeking | Ben Swann on Breaking Norms

Determined Society with Shawn French | Adversity & Mindset - Shawn French | Adversity & Determination Expert

Ben Swann, investigative journalist and founder of Truth in Media, shares his journey from being homeschooled by a mother who defied laws to become a prodigy at 15, to becoming one of the most controversial figures in Am

Key takeaways

• Ben Swann was homeschooled by his mother in New Mexico to avoid illegal homeschooling laws in Texas; all 10 children earned master’s degrees before age 21.

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I don't think I've ever seen a storm that I didn't want to run face versa into. You were praised for that interview in an industry that later came with which you later clashed because they didn't like you asking those questions that made everybody uncomfortable. The fact that he had killed Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, which, I mean, he was so stunned that that question was even asked. The question was so powerful that a week after my interview, Obama went on CNN to talk about the kill list. Do you call that courage or stubbornness? Because your critics would say one word and your supporters would say another. None of these barriers are going to stop me from getting to where I want to be. Then I can do it. Pizza gate. Caution your chair. Looking back at it, do you regret that segment? As I'm reading this and the words coming out of mouth, I'm like, this is a lie. I don't know what the truth of the story is. It's not that. I've never regretted the story because I knew the story was right. And I knew the story was true. Determination is about restoration. Being determined to move forward, but not just to move away from what's behind you. but to bring what's behind you into four-alignments. There's an animal that does something almost every other animal refuses to do. When a storm rolls across the open plains, most cattle turn and run with it. They try to outrun the weather, and because they can't, the storm follows them, rides them for miles. The bison does the opposite. The bison turns, lowers its head, and chartes straight into the storm because it knows something the cattle don't. The fastest way out of the storm is through it. My guest today has a bison as his logo, and his entire life motto is four words, run toward the storm. He was one of ten kids homeschooled at the kitchen table by his mother, and every single one of them had master's degrees before they could legally buy a drink. He had a college degree at 15. He was preaching revivals as a teenager, and then, almost by accident, he walked into a TV newsroom and found the thing he'd fight for the rest of his life. He sat across from a sitting president of the United States and asked him, him the question nobody in the national press would ask. He won the biggest awards in his industry, and then he lost it all, the anchor chair, the network, the mainstream stamp of approval because he refused to stop asking questions that made powerful people uncomfortable. Some of those questions made him a hero to millions. Some made him one of the most controversial names in American media, loved, hated, censored, banned, rebuilt, but never, ever quiet. is a man who got fired on a national stage and relaunched his own company the next day. Investigative journalist, founder, and CEO of Truth in Media, Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. That was way too kind. I know. If I learned how to read. I would love to meet that guy. He sounds amazing. He sounds terrific. He's got a great shirt on too, man. Fantastic. I got to pimp that logo. You got to. I want to start at the beginning. Yeah. You know, take me to El Paso. Yeah. Mom. Yeah. Ten kids. Yep. kitchen table is no classroom like what was a day in the life like and what did you learn in those early days that you still carry with you well the funny thing about what a day in the life would be like i can actually tell that pretty easily because it was every day was exactly the same we had a pretty boring life right no offense mom but it was pretty boring life um so what we did was my parents uh first of all you know they they started homeschooling at a time when virtually no one homeschooling. It's pretty popular now. I mean, tens of millions of people are homeschooled, which is great. Homeschooled my own kids. I hope my grandkids are going to be homeschooled. But at the time we were doing it, it was pretty weird to do so. In fact, a lot of people don't remember this, but in the 1970s, it was illegal in a lot of states in this country to homeschool. I didn't know that. Yeah. And my mom actually testified in two different court cases to help get it legalized, including in the state of Texas. But the reason we, so we actually grew up in New Mexico. El Paso, if you ever looked at it on a map, it's like that little corner right on the tip of Texas. We lived the first house across the border into New Mexico. And the reason we ended up living there was because it was illegal to homeschool. And my parents had to actually leave Texas and move into New Mexico where it was legal. Wow. Yeah. And so we grew up, you know, doing school and living in a house with 10 kids. And, you know, like I said, it wasn't a very exciting life because no, no sports. and no, you know, activities like you get now. My kids had a very different homeschool experience than I did, thank God. Because, you know, they were able to play sports. All of them did. They were in fine arts programs. They were to do so many different things. That didn't exist at the time. But what did exist for us was the ability to just kind of put your head down in the study. My mom was kind of making it up as she went along. And so it was, she didn't really know how to like create breaks, take breaks. And so we just didn't. Money through Friday, like seven days or five days a week, but 52 weeks a year, right? We just did school. That was our life. And what it did was it caused a cumulative effect. When you don't have summer breaks and you don't have winter breaks and you don't have holiday breaks, all of a sudden you realize like, okay, I'm 10 years old and I'm about to start high school. I haven't stopped. So we did high school. starting at 10 and then that lasted a whole whopping two years. And then it's like, okay, so now you're 12 years old. Now you're ready to start college. So I actually started college at 12, went to BYU. And from 12 to 15, that took three years to do. And then when we're done with that, got a master's from Cal State in 18 months. And then the exciting part of that is, you know what you do when you have a master's degree in your 16 years old? What's that? You bag groceries. You go find the job that every other 16 year old has because no one's going to hire. you to do anything at 16. Did you feel like a prodigy in that moment, or did you feel like a kid that didn't get to be a kid? For me personally, neither. I've never thought of myself as a prodigy. It was just because it was just life. I guess if you're on the inside of it, like people will hear it and it sounds super impressive. Right. But in reality, it's just about consistency and doing the same thing, right? And you've got to be dedicated to it. You've got to have consistency, and you have to have, you know, an expectation of accomplishing it. But it's not really, I mean, anybody can do it. It wasn't that we were geniuses. We certainly were not. But, you know, maybe the genius in life was just being consistent in doing the same thing in a different way than other people do it. There's a lot of genius in that. There is. There really is. Sure is. I think consistency is the most genius thing that is lacking in our society right now. People just aren't consistent in anything. So, you know, your mom had a high school diploma. right and put all 10 of you through homeschooling all successful in school yeah the degree is everything yeah what did she know that nobody else knew at that time so so she tells a great story about it and says she had no idea what she was doing in terms of you know especially beyond high school but she said i knew when i started doing this that i could at least do first grade so i did first grade and by the time we got to second grade i knew i could do second grade so And you know what I mean? And so that, and that was really the way. I mean, I think if you look, if you look to the end of it and say, how are you qualified to teach all these things at this, you know, at a certain point, you get overwhelmed and say, who am I to be able to do this? But if you look at it one day at a time, one step at a time and say, well, can I do this? And she knew she could. Yeah. And then by the time we got to college, we had, you know, obviously that's a different setup. We have professors. We have, it's interesting. We did a program through BYU that was designed for people who were now working. and so this is pre-internet, but they were now working and kind of going back to school part-time, and so it was correspondence and you spend the summers on campus. So in the summertime, we'd be on campus, but in the wintertime, we weren't. And as a result of that, we had to write about 300 essays on average more than the average college student because of that particular program. So I actually think that was pretty empowering in terms of kind of teaching you how to think through what you were doing. When I'm listening to you, your mom, I think it's powerful because everybody always talks about things that they want to do. Yeah. But I don't know how. Yep. Your mom figured it out. I think your mom has an extremely high level of intention and knows what she knows what she wants and knows what she wanted for you kids. Yeah. How much of that do you think was because she wanted you guys to be more educated and take it a little bit further than she did? Well, what's interesting is my mom did not, and my mom and dad really together never set out to home. school because they thought that we would be better educated. It was the fear of what would happen if we were in a public setting where they believe. My mom tells a story that she had a dream and she heard the phrase, you know, don't send your children to a public school, lest they be corrupted, right? And she really studied what that word meant and tried to research it, like understand what this word meant. And a lot of times we think of corruption is just like, oh, you're going to make someone into like this bad person. but it actually literally means to change something from its original intent, right? And she said, I don't really know exactly what this is going to lead to, but I believe that I'm supposed to protect them from whatever they're going to be changed into. And so that was kind of the goal behind it. It was never really about education. It was certainly never about accelerated because that was just all an accident. It was just like you started doing it. And my parents actually did a pretty good job when they realized like we're getting ahead. we've got to kind of pivot and make this work, that's what they had to do. But it was never the intent. It's pretty cool though, right? It just, it just goes to show you that, again, this is just a lesson for people listening and watching is you don't have to have it all figure it out. No. You know, and that's, I'm sure it's helped you throughout your whole career. So I would say it's helped and it's hurt. I would say on a personal level, it created a lot of frustration. This is why I did not homeschool my kids the same way. So when we homeschooled, our kids, I have five kids. We actually gave them summers off. We would follow a typical school year. They had more extracurricular activities. Like I said, they played basketball. They played, they did like fine arts programs and all that kind of stuff. So we kept them in line with their peers more. The reason we did that was because what I found, and it's a positive and it's a negative. The negative is when you're 16 years old and you have a master's degree, you bag grocers. right trying to figure out what you're going to do with your life when you've got this degree and no one's going to take you seriously becomes a little bit frustrating the other thing is there was something that became embedded in me i think through this process which was the belief that i don't have to do what everyone else is doing the way they do it right that becomes very frustrating at times because the rest of the world does not agree with that The rest of the world will look at you and say, yeah, you do. Right. There's a line and you're cutting the line, right? You can't do it this way, this way. Now, that's the negative. The positive of it is it allowed me to jump a lot of lines in my life. So my first ever job in television as a reporter came out of necessity. I had two kids at the time. My wife and I had been doing ministry. We had moved to Portland, Oregon. We had come back to Texas where we were both from, El Paso. and she was pretty homesick. And I was looking for a job. And so I went back to this TV station. I had been a news videographer and photographer for them. But I'd never been on there. And I just couldn't make enough money. I had two kids and wife, and I was supporting them by myself. And so I went to my boss and I said, listen, I got to make more money. Is there any way I can get on air? It was like, are you kidding? That's not how this works. You're 22. And I was 22, but, you know, I'm still relatively young looking at the time. I looked like a child. I was 22 going on 14 is the way I looked. And so it was like, that's just not going to happen. You need five years experience. You got to go to another market. You know, that's how you would get started. Can't do that. Not in a position to do that. So, you know, I've got to find a way to do it differently. And found a way to do it differently. Convince them. But in order to do that, I just had to do twice the work for half the pay. But it was, that was the compromise, right? But it was the belief that I had. A lot of people would get in that position and say, well, I'm not going to do twice the work for half the pay, right? I'm just not going to do that. Right. But because I had this belief that if I can just get the opportunity, like none of these, none of these barriers are going to stop me from getting to where I want to be, then I can do it. So that's what I did. Same thing happened later on in my career when after I had been a, I got on there and was a reporter and then a bureau chief. And then we had a morning anchor position to open up at our station. I went to the same boss. And I said, hey, listen, I want a shot at that. And we're going to start a morning show. He said, got to have experience to do that. Can't do it. And by the time we launched it, that was the anchor of the show. So, you know, it does build in you, I think it builds in you a belief that I will not be held back. Right. By the constraints that everyone else puts on me and the system that everyone else puts there. But you just have to be mentally strong enough and resilience enough and aggressive enough to chase it. because if you're not, then it makes for a very frustrating life. I agree. I think your background through the Monday through Friday, you have 365, 52 weeks, no breaks, that built a certain amount of resiliency inside of you and your siblings. Wait a second. You're going to say no, but I know what I need to do because I've done all this. And so I'm just going to apply these principles and I'm going to go after it. When you finally convinced him the first time, do you remember the moment and what did you say to them to finally get them, was it just the pay and double the work? Or was there something else you said to them to make them? Oh, no, no, no. They said, we'll let you do the job. And then they actually didn't do it on their end. So they said that. They gave me half the pay. They gave me twice work, but they never put me on there. Right. So I was actually going around as a news videographer still. And I'm making less money now than I was making before I had approached them. And I did this for probably nine, 10 months. Going out, shooting video, writing for other reporters. I would write their stories for them. It's supposed to be my story, but then they would voice it, they would front it, right? And just felt like I was getting shafted the whole time. Yeah. But again, so to your point, when you have lived where it's a money through Friday, we just do the same thing because life is boring, right? I was able to just say, I can do it, right? Because it's going to happen, it's going to happen. So one day we are doing my usual, come in, get my stuff. There's a, in West Texas, El Paso, New Mexico, in that part of the country, you get these windstorms in the springtime, right? I don't know if you've ever been down there, but they call them brownouts. Okay. So the, you know, hurricane force winds, right? We're talking anywhere from 70 to 120 miles an hour wing us. But it's in the desert, so it just picks up all this sand and everything just turns brown. You can't see anything. And we have one of these storms. They're pretty common in the springtime. So we had one of these storms. and so I get a call from my producer for the day, and she says, okay, El Paso's broken into three sections, Northeast, East, and West Side, she says. So you're going to cover the West Side. It's great. So I get on all my gear and go out, shoot interviews, get video. She calls me again during the day and says, okay, just making sure you understand this person's covering Northeast, this team's covering the Northeast, this one, and you're covering the West Side. Got it. Finished up, get back to the station, she says. So you're covering the West Side. You understand that. I said, I'm done. I have it all, right? Why are you on me? And she said, no, no, when I say you're covered, I mean, you're on air tonight. Boom. Covering it. I'd never been on air. And I was like, oh, okay. And you're going live. I hadn't even fronted a package. I hadn't done a stand up. I hadn't recorded anything. And, you know, even now, when you talk about this, people are so, like, video savvy with phones and everything today. But this is very different at that time, right? And if you've never done it before, it's pretty intimidating. So they said, no, you're on tonight. So I called my wife and I was like, hey, they're going to put me on TV. So can you bring my suit? Do I have one? Actually, yeah, I had like one black shirt. So I get this. They give me an old earpiece that looks like Howard Cosell and, you know, give me this thing. And that night I go in and I put my story together and then they send me out to this location where there's some down tree and you're going to be live. and then they, you know, count me in and I go live and I was like perfection. Wow. Absolutely nailed it. Not a stutter, not a stumble. It was perfect. Now, throughout my career, there have been lots of times when it wasn't. But that night it was, right? The very first time. And that was very significant because the next day I come in to work, you know, pretty, pretty happy that I got this chance. But back to, you know, what I was doing before. And there's a guy who's standing in there with some fancy shoes on who's standing in the middle of our newsroom when I walk it. I'd never seen him before. He's like an older guy and he has like salt and pepper hair. And everyone's standing around him. So I walk in, oh, come on over here. I go over. It turns out,