ASU student’s podcast truly ‘Fueled by Pain’

ALBANY – There’s a reason Albany State University graduate/entrepreneur Ja-Quan Riggins calls his popular podcast “Fueled by Pain.”

In January of 2023, Riggins swallowed 32 500-milligram Tylenol tablets and was rushed, unresponsive, to Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital. Doctors told him later that if the medicine they used to treat him hadn’t worked, “I’d be on a transplant list today.”

Riggins, currently a residential director on Albany State’s East Campus, packed away two lifetimes’ worth of pain while growing up in Atlanta, surviving hardships that followed him into adulthood and left him at a rock bottom from which he initially saw no way out.

“Going through high school, I had to learn and do everything for myself,” Riggins recalled as he talked about the journey that brought him to ASU. “My father was incarcerated when I was 2, and my mom (Shameeka Burns) did the best she could. It was really hard out there.”

Despite such hardships, Riggins has righted his life, drawing on the kindness of people like his grandmother, Johnnie Mae Bolding, Timothy Johnson, who would become Riggins’ “god-dad,” and businesswoman Jana Schmidt, who “adopted” him after a serendipitous meeting on an airplane flight.

“Any goodness there was in me came from my granny,” Riggins said. “She was a Christian woman who grew up in the church. She taught me kindness.

“I was walking down the street one day and I saw this white man out working on his car. I stopped to talk, and we hit it off. He took me under his wing; he put me on a plane to Nebraska for internships in nursing because I was planning on a career in health care.”

And then, Riggins said, there was the day “God walked into my life.”

“I was on a plane, and for some reason I was bumped up to first class,” he said. “I sat next to a lady, and we started talking. Before I got off the plane, she said, ‘God told me to take $500 from the ATM and give it to you.’ We’ve since become close friends, and she has on a number of occasions sent an Uber to bring me to a mansion in the richest neighborhood in Georgia.

“This lady has helped take care of my family, and we’ve enjoyed Christmas together for the last 10 years.”

That lady, Schmidt, is the CEO of an international company.

Riggins said he came up .5 points shy of passing a standardized test required to advance in the nursing field at ASU, so he switched majors and earned a degree in Health and Human Performance, hoping to earn a way into the field of athletic medicine.

He’s taking aviation classes at Middle Georgia College as well because, he says, “I want to see the world.”

And there’s that podcast.

“I realized while I was in the hospital that I had a real insight into how other people feel when they get to that point (of considering suicide),” Riggins said. “I learned what it meant to live in shady days, in the shady season.

“A lot of people try to walk away from their issues rather than addressing them. We talk about such problems on the podcast. I’ve learned from the feedback I’ve gotten that doing the podcast gives me an opportunity to change people’s lives.”

It costs Riggins $250 to complete a single episode of Fueled by Pain, but he says even without support he manages to put out a new episode every two weeks. He’s up to around 70 now.

“I started out doing the podcast in my dorm room, but now I’ve expanded and do them in studios,” he said. “There are times when I have to choose between living off PBJ or not doing the podcast, but I choose the podcast. It motivates me.

“I recently had a guy who’s an Albany leader talk about being molested as a child. That’s the kind of thing that makes Fueled by Pain important; it teaches listeners that they can overcome issues from their past, that they can walk away and become who they’re meant to be.”

One of Riggins’ biggest “gets” for his podcast was Albany State University President Robert Scott.

“That was a fluke,” Riggins said. “I talked with and scheduled a businessman (Riggins chose not to identify him by name) three different times, and each time he stood me up. The last time, I had an opportunity to tell Dr. Scott what had happened, so he agreed to do the podcast.

“Having him on was outstanding. Talking with him was like talking with one of your friends. And finding out his background was similar to a lot of students’ made it that much better.”

Riggins says that his future is up in the air right now. He plans to pursue a higher degree, complete aviation classes so that he can get a pilot’s license, help take care of a “little bro” who he’s taken in, and come up with new ideas that he’ll use to support Fueled by Pain. His first planned collaborative event is a boxing match that he will promote.

“I’m trying to focus right now, do the things that can help me sail to new heights,” Riggins said. “There are a lot of people out there who are like I was; they’re suffering. My goal is to find people like that and let them know someone cares.”

Riggins’ podcast and information about his future plans are available at [email protected] or the fueledbypain.net website. He encourages anyone interested in supporting his podcast to reach out via those sites.