They entered in tight formation. There was Eddie Gallagher, the alleged war criminal Navy SEAL granted clemency by President Donald Trump; Tom Satterly, the Delta Force sergeant major made famous by Black Hawk Down; Christian Craighead, the SAS soldier who led a rescue mission for hostages held by al-Shabaab in Nairobi; DJ Shipley, a second-generation SEAL who served on the prestigious Team Six. And—leading this squad of vets-turned-influencers into the launch event for Tucker Carlson’s new nicotine pouch last December—there was Shawn Ryan.
Ryan’s military exploits are less notable—a short stint as a Navy SEAL, a slightly longer career as a security contractor, both for Blackwater and the CIA. His triumphs as a podcaster, however, are significant. In October 2024, the Shawn Ryan Show hit first place on the Spotify podcast chart. He has hovered near the top ever since. Ryan has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube—a viewership that nearly doubled last year alone.
Ryan’s style blends the deeply confessional with the darkly conspiratorial. His guests range from MAGA politicians and manosphere mainstays to UFO enthusiasts and exorcists. But the staple of his show is fellow veterans. “We’re probably one of the communities that are treated the shittiest,” Ryan told an interviewee in 2023, “flushed down the toilet and forgotten.” Since it debuted on Christmas Eve in 2019, the Shawn Ryan Show has specialized in hosting special forces veterans excavating their deepest traumas. Combining a military ethos with an anti-establishment message has made his show a hit and, in certain circles, made Ryan a celebrity. “People just blow past you to try to get to him,” Shipley told me.
“I cannot believe that fucking idiot is a shot caller now.”
At Carlson’s nicotine pouch party, held in a converted barn near Ryan’s home in Tennessee and themed “Cowboy Christmas,” his new fame was on display. Guests huddled around Ryan. At one point, Carlson—between conversations with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and podcaster Theo Von—walked over to pay his respects.
Ryan, like many other podcasters, has veered into Republican politics in the last few years. In the runup to the election in 2024, his show was a destination for Trumpworld figures, including JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard. Eventually, Trump himself came on the show. Ryan’s appeal isn’t the flexible curiosity of Joe Rogan, or the toxic masculinity of Andrew Tate. Instead, he reiterates a singular message, utilizing his time inside the special forces to punch it home: Every institution has secrets, elites lie to keep them, and the process exists for one reason: to screw you.
In episodes that can stretch more than five hours, the former SEAL conducts emotional interviews, interwoven with esoteric grievances. Ryan’s role as a CIA contractor, he tells listeners, gave him a front-row view of the deep state in action. “It’s hard to find someone with more credibility than someone that says, ‘I was in the establishment, and that’s why I know how corrupt it is,’” said Reece Peck, a CUNY professor studying right-wing influencers. As Ryan’s website proclaims: “We’re better than entertainment, we’re the REAL thing.” Whether riffing on aliens, Democrats, or homegrown terrorism, Ryan spins half-truths, evincing at times a ridiculous level of credulity. (He asked an exorcist last October, “What do you think is going on with this UFO type stuff? Is it demonic?”) The mix of bravado and deep state paranoia fits the Trump ethos.
In January, during Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearings, Ryan’s name entered the Congressional Record. “On the Shawn Ryan Show, you said and I quote, ‘I’m straight up saying that we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective,’” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said to Hegseth. He responded that he was talking “not about the capabilities of men and women” but “about standards.” The news cycle moved on, and Hegseth quickly provided many more scandals.
But the moment was revealing of something beyond sexism. Anyone who listened to the entire episode would find Ryan represented a different vision of the military. “I think women do have a place in combat,” he told Hegseth. The problem was that the DOD, he said, was itself unsalvageable. “I feel like that’s how we fix it,” Ryan said. “You abandon it.” Even Hegseth seemed taken aback.
In Ryan’s answer is a model of the men scarred by the “forever wars”: a loner militant, suspicious of all institutions.
Friends died overseas, as Ryan often discusses on his show, fighting for a cause that served primarily to benefit companies like Halliburton. Those who came back from the Middle East did not transform into hippie peaceniks. To them, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was the ultimate betrayal. It made the entire effort seem meaningless.
“I was on the mission that captured Saddam Hussein,” Chris VanSant, a retired Delta Force team leader who has appeared on Ryan’s show, told me. “When that happened back in 2003, honestly, we thought we would go home after that, but we didn’t.” The aftermath, followed by the messiness of the Afghanistan withdrawal, made it feel “like a lot of it was in vain,” he said.
Ryan is still fighting—only now against the military-industrial complex he once served. “I don’t think we’re the good guys anymore. I don’t agree with a lot of the shit I was involved in as a SEAL or CIA contractor,” Ryan told Joe Rogan in September 2024. “I just keep going down the rabbit hole, diving into the military-industrial complex, all the lies that the government has been telling us, all the unreleased classified shit. It’s overwhelming.”
Last week, Ryan got one more boost. As part of a podcast push, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom sat with Ryan for a four-plus-hour episode. After gifting Newsom a gun, Ryan described himself as a moderate, telling the governor, “I got painted out to be a MAGA troll or something because of a lot of the people that I’ve interviewed—including Trump himself. And while I do lean conservative, I am not that far right.”
Newsom similarly played the common man; he told Ryan he is a fan of Joe Rogan, is interested in UFOs, scored 960 on the SAT, and can’t pronounce “bona fides.” Despite their political differences, the two men bonded. And Ryan seemed to win over a new market in the process.
“I don’t know Shawn Ryan’s politics,” said Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor on a follow-up episode of Newsom’s own podcast, in which the group spoke with the governor about his appearance. “I did come away just feeling like he really wanted to connect with you as a human being, and he seemed curious, and I really respected that.”
Ryan’s peer might be surprised to hear such a glowing review. His success has confounded former comrades in arms who never saw him as outstanding, and even looked down on him. “I’ve got this little group text of four or five SEALs. It’s not infrequent that somebody sends a link to some stupid Shawn Ryan thing,” said Dan Barkhuff, a retired officer on Ryan’s SEAL team. “The universal reaction is: I cannot believe that fucking idiot is a shot caller now.”
Though his show traffics in vulnerability and truth-telling, Ryan has his own secrets. “Shawn Ryan” is a pseudonym. Born Sean Ryan Palmisano, Ryan grew up the son of a military pharmacist in Chillicothe, Missouri (“The Home of Sliced Bread”), where his quarter-Japanese heritage made him stick out. “They called me a ‘chink’ all the time,” he explained on an episode in January. A classmate told me she remembers Ryan as aloof and sometimes angry. “He was an asshole,” she said. The classmate recalls Ryan falling in with a group of friends who bullied other students. “He was not one to back down,” she said of the young Ryan. “If he was being a jerk or annoying, you couldn’t get him to stop.”
Fresh out of high school in 2001, but before 9/11, Ryan joined the Navy. “As I got older and academics just kept dropping off, my parents kind of told me, ‘Hey, we’re not going to pay for your college,’” he said on a 2023 podcast. “I said, ‘I don’t care. I’m going to join the military.’” Ryan has said in interviews that he survived the brutal course required to join the SEALs by telling himself he couldn’t afford to disappoint his parents again.
“He was like a C-minus SEAL,” Barkhuff recalls. “He could carry a gun and he could shoot okay, but he wasn’t somebody you put in leadership. He was a sled dog.”
Ryan was eager for action. But he found little to do. In 2004, he was sent to Haiti. He lamented that it was others who “yanked [President] Aristide out of power.” When Team Eight deployed to Baghdad, he hoped for combat. Ryan ended up guarding Iraqi politicians. Barkhuff remembers Ryan trying to fit in—painting his face like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator, putting in lips of cherry Skoal—but his fellow SEAL also sensed Ryan misunderstood life in the military. “Everyone was making fun of him,” Barkhuff recalled. “I don’t think he has a super clear understanding of the division between professional military operations and what he sees on media.” Ryan, it seemed, wanted the war he saw on TV.
In 2006, Ryan left the Navy. “I was really dissatisfied,” he later told Megyn Kelly. “I went to the teams to go to war and to fight for the country and I wasn’t getting enough.” After an abortive dip into real estate, Ryan says he joined Blackwater, the private security contractor that played an outsize role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The firm had just become infamous after its contractors massacred civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing 17. The brutality did not alter Ryan’s perception of the company. Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder, is a regular on his show. (Prince sold Blackwater, which he had renamed Xe, in 2010.)
From Blackwater, Ryan says he then moved to the CIA’s Global Response Staff (GRS), which provides security for agents abroad. Near the end of his time with GRS, the former SEAL says he moved to Medellin, Colombia. America’s foreign wars had grown increasingly unpopular and, in the United States, Ryan felt he was viewed as a monster. Colombia offered a reprieve. Jimmy Watson, who commanded the Blackwater unit that perpetrated the Nisour Square massacre, also took refuge in Medellin. Though Watson never met Ryan, he understands why he left the US. “When I went overseas,” he told me, “I felt like I was finally free.”
“I want to take the Rogan slot,”
In Medellin, Ryan struggled. He had started abusing opiates following a 2006 hernia surgery. In Colombia, he dove into benzos and coke—eventually, Ryan says, taking six bumps of cocaine an hour. He started dealing, too. Ryan boasted to Kelly last year that he’d built a major international drug network. In a 2022 interview with fellow former SEAL Mike Ritland, he downplayed his operation: “I never had bricks,” he explained. “I would go and buy 50, 60, maybe 100 grams that are already bagged.”
Ryan has said he regularly cycled between Colombia and the US at the time. (He was arrested for petty theft in South Florida in 2012.) But he often talks about a moment of clarity that broke through. In the mid-2010s, Ryan remembers overdosing on Mother’s Day in Colombia. “I was like, goddamn,” he told Ritland. “I’m calling my mom on Mother’s Day, whacked out of my mind, and I’m probably going to die at the end of this phone call.” Ryan lived. But, soon after, he says a doorman told him he was being surveilled by Colombia’s federal police. He soon returned to the US. “Was this real or was this coke paranoia?” director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor) asked when Ryan recounted the story on his show. “This was real,” Ryan replied. (Colombian police did not respond to a request for comment. A DEA spokesperson said, “We do not comment on or otherwise confirm active investigations.”)
After moving back, Ryan’s downward spiral continued. At one point, Ryan has said, he tried to take his life, closing a garage door and leaving his Audi running.
After the attempted suicide, Ryan sought out a therapist—a “Florida liberal.” He found redemption, both professional and personal, in telling his story. “She really didn’t say a whole lot. A lot of times, you just start figuring things out yourself by just getting it out,” he told Kelly. “I realized that if you just let somebody talk, then they’re just going to keep going.” This key insight would provide his eventual path to podcast stardom.
In December 2015, Ryan started a self-defense training company called Vigilance Elite. Such companies were a common career move for former military operators. Ryan created a YouTube channel to promote the firm. In videos, he presented himself as a renegade initiate into the warrior and intelligence elites, spilling their tactical secrets to you. His mode was, from the beginning, confessional. Ryan appeared to realize that his disappointments—the pain of the SEALs, the thirst for action, the banality—were a brand. Soon after, he dropped Sean Palmisano and became Shawn Ryan.
Ever since, Ryan has fought attempts to reveal his identity. In legal disputes, his lawyers have argued that he “adopted the name…to protect himself and his family because he was concerned about being placed on a terrorist hit list as a result of his service as a Navy SEAL and CIA Contractor.” His current lawyer, Tim Parlatore—who has also represented President Trump and Gallagher, the alleged war criminal—echoed the sentiment in an email to Mother Jones. Ryan did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Shawn Ryan Show responded to a list of questions by inviting Mother Jones to verify facts by looking through “what Shawn has said in the past.”
Many former CIA employees and Navy SEALs, including one of the men who says he shot Osama bin Laden, live publicly under their given names. Barkhuff sees Ryan’s pseudonym as one more way in which he tries to puff himself up. “He’s a vanilla SEAL,” he said, “pretending he’s Liam Neeson in Taken.”
The tough guy act has worked. At first, Ryan tried a survival reality show on his YouTube channel. Then, he uploaded a video in which he trained Keanu Reeves for a John Wick film. But finally it clicked when he began interviewing men who had been in the special forces. His earliest episode to top 5 million views was his first sit-down with Shipley, the famous SEAL, in 2021.
Ryan borrowed his interview style from his former therapist. “He just kind of sits there and looks like he’s taking it all in,” said Barkhuff. “It comes across as wisdom, but I think he’s confused.”
Still, the revelations that spill out are often powerful. Macho men talk about mental health struggles, often crying, breaking long-standing taboos. “In special operations, we were expected, not only externally, but also internally, to be these cyborg robots, these unemotional creatures,” Nick Lavery, an active-duty Green Beret who has appeared on Ryan’s show, told me. Shipley wept for an hour after his interview. “I’ve been bottling that stuff up my entire life up until that point, couldn’t tell anybody anything, really,” he said. The rawness of the interviews convinced Ryan that he had a hit. “To see a man like that be vulnerable,” he told conservative podcaster Brett Cooper, “it just captivates millions of people.”
After appearing on his show, Ryan’s guests are often inundated with messages from listeners. “The biggest benefit that I got from being on Shawn’s show was people reaching out to me to say, ‘Hey, man, I’ve been through this too,’” said Ryan Hendrickson, a former Green Beret who shared that he’d been sexually assaulted as a six-year-old. “There’s a handful of us that put ourselves out there and we’re vulnerable,” said VanSant. “That showed a lot of people that it’s okay to talk about that stuff.”
Ryan is aware of the effect this openness has on his audience. “By the end of it they’re so attached to the guests that they just want to support them because they just spilled their whole life, all the good, all the bad,” he once told Forbes. When this connection is used to direct people toward dealing with inner struggles, it’s arguably good. But his sympathetic ear can also provide cover to bad actors and alleged war criminals.
The first half of Ryan’s conversation with soldier-turned-cop Blake Cook last November is among his most affecting. Cook describes rolling his windows down while preparing to shoot himself because he “wanted somebody to hear the gunshot,” he said, and “find me before the birds come in and eat me away.” A call from a friend stayed Cook’s hand. He told Ryan about the experience before telling some members of his family.
In the second half of the show, though, Cook describes how he left the police force. For some time, supervisors had accused him of racial profiling. “I used to get in trouble and have to go do racist classes ’cause I was pulling over too many Black people,” he said. “It’s piss leadership. It’s because instead of having a backbone and being a man, they would rather throw you under the bus.” Eventually, he said he quit after he was accused of lying about an incident involving the use of force.
On Ryan’s show, empathy is afforded to the service member but not their adversaries. That dynamic is glaring when Ryan platforms special forces veterans accused of misconduct, like Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of killing a prisoner of war in Iraq. “I just don’t understand how half of the nation can be so up in arms, even if you did stab the fucking kid to death,” Ryan said during their interview. “The poor little ISIS kid.” (In 2019, a military jury found Gallagher not guilty of the murder.)
Ryan has recently outgrown his military niche and begun working to expand his appeal.
“I want to take the Rogan slot,” he said in 2022. “I’m going real broad. I’m honestly getting bored with the special operations stuff.” Before long, he was conducting friendly interviews with conservative superstars. When Trump came on his show last August, Ryan lobbed softballs: “We have a government that’s not functioning right now. How are you going to gain the trust back of the American people within the government?…Are we going to see anyone held accountable?” “Everybody is behind you guys,” he told JD Vance the following month, “including me.”
In his conversation with Hegseth, Ryan lashed out at Democrats for “turning pedophiles into some kind of sexual preference that everybody’s okay with” and “wanting to put fucking pedophiles on the map and make it okay to molest my fucking kids.” Yet he acted surprised when Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t accept an invitation to come on his podcast. “That paints me in a picture where it’s like, ‘Oh, he’ll only have this party,’” Ryan complained to Forbes. “But I’m open to everybody.”
Indeed, along with military vets and politicians, UFO theory promoters are some of the most frequent guests on his show. In Ryan’s telling, this obsession with the paranormal began after Ryan went to Mexico to partake in psychedelic therapy in 2022. “I came back and I just was like, whatever I want to do, I’m doing,” he told Cooper, the conservative podcaster. The following year, Ryan believes God spoke to him in Sedona, Arizona, where he also says he witnessed a UFO while on a hike.
Whatever happened in the high desert, it’s also true that talking about UFOs is a commercially viable way of channeling an audience’s distrust of the government. “Most regular people are more going to click on a UFO link than they are a deep dive into the atrocities the CIA has committed,” said A.J. Bauer, a University of Alabama professor studying conservative media. Such content, he argued, allows listeners “to experience this sense that the government is hiding something” without dwelling on their own responsibilities.
Ryan’s affinity for conspiracies isn’t new for the special forces. In war, soldiers had to respond to limited, often flawed, information with lethal confidence. “They come home and they still feel like they need to fight back, to act on the information they’re being given,” said Lyle Jeremy Rubin, a former platoon commander in Afghanistan and the author of Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body. “But their sources of information are mostly con men or cranks and they’re just as credulous to this crap as they were to the information they were fed on the front lines.”
Ryan appears to have become a captive of the narrative he’s spinning, a believer in the reputation he’s propagated. It’s a pitfall common in military circles. “Yes, you are very good at kicking down doors, you are very good at jumping out of planes, and shooting bad guys,” noted John Armenta, a veteran who studies veteran media and lectures at UC San Diego. “It doesn’t necessarily translate to other parts of life.” This confidence can lead to a suspicion that ironically accepts conspiracy easily. “When you’re high on your own supply,” Armenta said, “you stop questioning things.”
On New Year’s Day, an active-duty Green Beret named Matthew Livelsberger blew up a Cybertruck in front of the Las Vegas Trump hotel, killing himself and injuring seven others. It was part of an apparent bid to bring attention to information Livelsberger claimed he had about UFOs. Before the attack, Livelsberger had tried to spread the news other ways, including by offering himself up for an interview with Ryan.
The tragedy could have been a moment for Ryan to glimpse the consequences of the conspiratorial worldview he promotes, but instead he began cryptically hyping another conspiracy. “My family and I are disappearing for a few days,” he warned. “What we are about to release is mind boggling and will raise a lot of questions.”
Two days after the explosion, Ryan released an episode with Sam Shoemate, a retired army officer who read aloud an email he’d received from Livelsberger contending that America and China had “gravitic propulsion systems.” Ryan noted that “we’re not necessarily validating what came in on that email.” But they spun an outlandish narrative of their own, speculating that Livelsberger had staged his death to send a message.
Ryan said he did not condone Livelsberger’s actions. But he could understand someone who saw a broken system, filled with secrets, and chose to act. Ryan’s show—which began as a way for warriors to talk about their demons—had become the exact venue Livelsberger imagined: one where military credentials give prestige, and even plausibility, to warped worldviews.
Either way, after Livelsberger’s death, Ryan did what he has become best at: He turned the tragedy into content.