Transcript: Military-Industrial Complex – Shawn Ryan on Megyn Kelly Show

And so that kind of carried me through.

Signing Up Before 9/11

MEGYN KELLY: And were they—when you signed up at first, were they—what year would that have been?

SHAWN RYAN: That would have been 2000—no, wait. When I signed up, it was 2001.

MEGYN KELLY: Okay, right. It was before 9/11.

SHAWN RYAN: It was right before 9/11. I went to the Navy boot camp in July of 2001.

MEGYN KELLY: Oh, my gosh. Little did you know what was about to happen to the country, the world, and you.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: So were your parents proud when you signed up? Were they?

SHAWN RYAN: I think they were. They were definitely worried. It surprised them. It kind of came out of left field. But once they wrapped their head around it and saw that I seemed to be serious, they fully supported it.

MEGYN KELLY: See, that’s how I feel. I would love for—I’ll be sexist—my boys to serve, but I’d be terrified if they actually said they were going to do it. I’d be in church every day, praying to God, lighting every candle in the church. I can see what your parents went through, and I’m sure most parents go through that, especially if it’s not a lifelong military family.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Yeah, I would too. I have two little ones now, so yeah, I get it.

MEGYN KELLY: And especially if you’re looking at your kid, and so far, he’s been kind of a knucklehead. I don’t think this kid should have a gun. I’m not sure how this is going to go.

SHAWN RYAN: Very true.

MEGYN KELLY: So there had to be some concerns there. And what—just out of curiosity, what did your siblings wind up doing?

SHAWN RYAN: My brother is in hospitality, and my sister has her hair salon.

MEGYN KELLY: Okay, so they did not—they were not tempted to follow you down this road?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

The Decision to Become a Navy SEAL

MEGYN KELLY: All right. So you decide to join up for military service. And not just any military service. Not just, like, I don’t know, the regular infantry with the army. You decide to go for Navy SEALs. So inside, there’s an overachiever just waiting to be born. And did you know anything about how hard that was going to be?

SHAWN RYAN: I did. Once I started researching it, I just—I didn’t care. I was just—I was going to do it, and I felt great all the way up until I arrived at SEAL training.

MEGYN KELLY: In my mind, I was amazing, right up until I started.

SHAWN RYAN: Exactly. I mean, when I got there, I was 18 and barely a man. And when I got there, there were guys that had—there were Olympic athletes. There were guys that had already been to war and come back, guys that had been to Panama, guys that had been to Iraq. There were championship boxers, and I was probably about a buck thirty.

MEGYN KELLY: So now, is this why I read you got laughed out of one of the recruiting offices?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, that would be the army and the Marine Corps.

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah. Okay. The Marine Corps told you no, hard no. This is a common story. I’ve heard this from a few of our Navy SEALs, that they got laughed at when they tried to sign up. What is it with the Army or the Marines?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it’s just—it’s pretty ambitious to walk in and say, “Hey, I want to operate at the top level right away.” And they’re kind of like, “Okay, guy, pump the brakes. Maybe do infantry, go the long route.” And I just—I had no interest in going the long route. I didn’t want to do regular infantry. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I just wanted the challenge.

MEGYN KELLY: Do you remember back in those early days when you were first starting to train, what jumped out at you amongst the guys who surrounded you? Were there commonalities in this pocket of the world that were immediately noticeable as different?

SHAWN RYAN: Once I got to BUD/S?

MEGYN KELLY: Or even when you just first signed up and started training? Because you didn’t go right to BUD/S training, right? Don’t you do normal training before?

SHAWN RYAN: You do normal training before. I mean, I grew up in a town of 6,000 people, so there weren’t that many people that wanted to do this. I remember the first time I met—they called him a SEAL motivator. He was kind of a guy that would go around the country who was a SEAL, and then now he’s teaching you how to swim and kind of refining some of your techniques with running and swimming and some things that you might expect.

And he just carried himself different than anybody else I’d been around before. So there’s definitely a type.

The SEAL Mentality: Born or Made?

MEGYN KELLY: Now, knowing what you know, does that come from combat or just the grueling nature of SEAL training? Like guys who are going through it today, can they get that without actually going into combat like you have?

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, I think so. I mean, I do believe that.

MEGYN KELLY: So the Navy will get it into you.

SHAWN RYAN: They will. They’ll figure out a way.

MEGYN KELLY: I’m thrilled and impressed and want to do it. A secret version of myself would love to try this. I don’t think I can. I can’t really even make it through 10 minutes of jumping jacks in my HIIT class. But in my mind, this could happen for me someday.

And we’ve had lots of tough guys come on here and talk about how the toughest guys they knew didn’t make it through training, just couldn’t make it through. It’s just a mind over matter kind of situation. But you’re telling me you didn’t have anything in your past that told you you could put mind over matter and accomplish this.

SHAWN RYAN: No, I didn’t. And so it was—I mean, I was an 18-year-old kid at BUD/S and it was scary to see who quits. I mean, you’re seeing people that you look up to, people that—I mean, you’re constantly measuring up to somebody else and comparing yourself to somebody else and going, “Oh, that guy, if that guy didn’t make it, I don’t think I have a chance.”

And so you just put your head down and drive on and try to make it to the next meal, try to make it to the next day and just keep driving on. And it got to the point where I did—I wanted to quit, but I could not face calling my parents and tell them that I had failed again.

MEGYN KELLY: Oh, wow. So, yeah, I’ve had guys say there’s no way I was going to see my father’s name on that hat and ring that bell.

SHAWN RYAN: Nope.

Growing Up in Small-Town Missouri

MEGYN KELLY: So you talked a little bit about your upbringing. Was it a modest upbringing? What kind of childhood did you have?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I mean, I would say upper middle class upbringing in a small town. We moved around a lot, probably moved over 10 times in my childhood. But we finally settled in Missouri in a small farm town known as Chillicothe, Missouri, and I haven’t been back there in several years.

But I liked full contact sports, tried football, was too small, couldn’t make it, got into wrestling, was a mediocre wrestler. Nothing—no state championships or anything like that. Just kind of an average kid, troublemaker, really into booze and partying. And yeah, I mean, that was my childhood.

MEGYN KELLY: Did you have strict parents?

SHAWN RYAN: They tried to be strict, but I managed—

Mental Toughness and Breaking Through Limits

MEGYN KELLY: To find ways around it. That was the future CIA contractor. That’s the foundation was being laid. Little did they know. This is important research for you.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, good point, good point. But yeah, I mean, they were definitely against a lot of the things that I was doing. They were not happy that I was drinking. They were not happy with some of the crowd that I was running around with. They were not happy with my grades.

And yeah, you know, like I said, when it came time to make some decisions on what I’m going to do with my future, I had to take a hard look and so I went the military route.

MEGYN KELLY: I was just talking to Riley Gaines not long ago. She was talking about how she’s this competitive swimmer and now she’s an activist on the trans insanity that’s happening to women. And she’s talking about how her dad put her in the pool one time and just made her be in that pool for some eight to ten minutes, freezing cold. It was not a summer pool.

He pulled off the cover during the winter, made her get in. And it was an exercise in mental toughness. You know, just to, like, you’re not cold, you got to get. That’s you guys. You do that every day during SEAL training when you’re a SEAL. And it’s horrid, and it is somewhat torturous from what I’ve heard.

So when you finally see yourself in those situations, how do you say, “I’m not quitting”? How do you get through? How do you get from minute ten to minute eleven to minute twelve?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, you just have to dig deep. I mean, it’s not, it’s not—it is very physical, but it’s more mental. And so everybody, everybody in training is going to break. They’re just, it’s going to happen. And you get to this point where you go numb. You get to this point where you go numb, and then it just doesn’t matter anymore.

Nobody really quits after, I think Wednesday night is the day where it’s very, very rare for anybody to quit. But it’s just, it’s breaking time down. And instead of going, “I’m going to make it through this entire six months,” it’s, “I’m going to make it to Hell Week.” And then when you get to Hell Week, it’s, “I’m just going to make it to the next meal or I’m going to make it to the next med check.”

And by Wednesday night, I mean, you haven’t slept.

MEGYN KELLY: Remind me of when it starts.

SHAWN RYAN: It starts, I think it starts on Sunday night, and I believe it’s done Friday night.

MEGYN KELLY: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s five days with minimal sleep. But your muscles break down, you get what do they call it, elephantitis. Your ankle starts swelling up.

MEGYN KELLY: Oh, I had that when I was pregnant.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, really?

MEGYN KELLY: No, I mean, it just happens naturally. Everything swells up.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, but it’s just, it’s doing those little time hacks and just breaking it down and making it to the next meal, making it to the next med check, checking your buddies. By Wednesday, it’s a pretty tight group. Everybody’s pretty much gone. And you kind of just go into maybe this flow state and you’re just moving.

Combat Deployments After 9/11

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah. It sounds kind of transcendent in a way. So then you have to actually be a Navy SEAL, which is no easier. And especially when you complete your training in July of 2001, all hell breaks loose in the country, in the world. And how many combat deployments did you have with the SEAL teams?

SHAWN RYAN: I had two combat deployments.

MEGYN KELLY: Two. Iraq and Afghanistan.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep.

MEGYN KELLY: Okay. And two different SEAL teams.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. So when I got into the SEAL teams, it was around 2003. And the first deployment, we went to Germany, which was a really boring deployment. And then we went to Afghanistan in the late summer of 2005, I believe.

MEGYN KELLY: And how long were you there?

SHAWN RYAN: We were only there for three months. So it was right after Red Wings happened. Are you familiar with Red Wings, the Lone Survivor?

MEGYN KELLY: Oh, yeah, of course. Yes. I’ve had Marcus on. He’s amazing.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. So we relieved them after that happened. That was the biggest SEAL team, the biggest loss in SEAL Team history at the time. And SOCOM was doing this surge where they needed more guys, and so they sped up the deployment cycle.

And so I went from SEAL Team 8 to SEAL Team 2. Did my Afghanistan deployment with SEAL Team 2. We didn’t do a whole lot there. There was a lot of political stuff going on after that operation. And to be a hundred percent honest, I was really dissatisfied.

I went to the teams to go to war and to fight for the country. And I wasn’t getting enough. I think we did one direct action that entire deployment, took a couple of prisoners, no shots fired. And then we got, our admiral pulled us out of the country.

And so at that point, I kind of made a decision. For me, this wasn’t what I had expected. And so I told my leadership, I said, “Hey, this is going to be my last pump. I’m not doing another one. I’d like to finish my enlistment out on deployment.”

So we had a sister platoon that was in Baghdad that was running a lot of sniper operations. And so I volunteered to go there, and they threw my name in the hat, and I got lucky and went.

Volunteering for Baghdad

MEGYN KELLY: Volunteered to go to Baghdad. Yeah, in 2000—

SHAWN RYAN: That would have been late 2005 or early 2006.

MEGYN KELLY: I mean, the worst absolute time to be in Baghdad. For anybody, you know, who’s not ready to fight and kill and risk their life, I mean, that was just a devastating time. I remember just as a journalist covering those years, and that’s when all the beheading started and it was bad. It was about as bad as it could be.

I mean, it’s amazing. Again, it being Memorial Day, I have to think about guys like you who volunteer to go into it. The guys who volunteered to go into the buildings on 9/11 at great risk to themselves, and then their brothers in arms, in a way, who volunteered to go into the fire in a different way a couple years after that.

SHAWN RYAN: We all have a lot to be thankful for.

MEGYN KELLY: So how long were you there?

SHAWN RYAN: I was in Baghdad for about four months. And so we got there, the operational tempo was pretty slow at first. There was an election going on, if I remember. And then we were on the hook to do protection for the Iraqi government officials, and nothing was happening.

So we wound up, the lieutenant threw our name in the hat to just help conventional units who were getting blown up on their reconnaissance routes, supply routes, whatever the routes were. I mean, there was, they had these bombs called EFPs over there, which were, I don’t know if you remember, maybe you covered this, but they would basically put them on the side of the road, and they could be triggered by IR lasers.

So they would pick up heat sensitivity to engine blocks. And they had the timing down perfectly to where the projectile would go through the passenger or driver side door of the Humvees and basically would vaporize everything in the vehicle. And you just get sucked out of a little hole on the back end.

And so that was chewing a lot of our guys up. And we just got tired of seeing these conventional guys just get crushed by these EFPs. And so we started attaching ourselves to these conventional units that didn’t have the knowledge or know-how on how to kind of combat this, set up a targeting package to get these guys.

And so what we would do is we would get in with them, in bed with them, train them for a couple of weeks, bring them out, teach them how to set up sniper hides, teach them how to do a targeting package, teach them how to conduct surveillance, teach them how to start running assets within the local population to try to figure out who’s doing this. And teach them how to shoot.

Taught them everything, gave them a lot of stuff. We really kind of took these guys under our wings, and then we would take them out on operations. And so we would go out, find all the places they were getting hit, and set up sniper teams along all of those different routes, all those points of interest.

And we would take, each sniper observation team would take maybe one or two conventional guys with them on the actual operation. And we started killing bad guys, starting to turn things the other way.

The Toll of Combat and Coping Mechanisms

MEGYN KELLY: You must have lost a lot of friends. Every guy who serves does. And you’re one of the lucky ones if nothing happens to you to take a limb or a traumatic brain injury. As you’re going through it, there’s no time to deal with any of that. Right. It’s just forward, like we talked about in the training. Just forward. There’s no time to think about that stuff.

But you’re in active combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and eventually that stops. Right. And is it at that point that you have to deal with that, or is it later? Because I know then comes the CIA stint.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s gradual. It just comes on gradual. And I mean, there’s a lot of coping mechanisms that we use and that numbs it out. Booze, pills, sleeping pills, whatever you can kind of do to numb it out.

And you know, in the early days, nobody knew any better. You know, that kind of all came crashing down later on for a lot of guys. And that’s what we cover on my show. But it took a while, you know, for that stuff to start sinking in, probably well into my contracting career at the Agency.

MEGYN KELLY: Well, that’s the thing. When you have massive crises, especially repeated and ongoing sustained crises, there’s only one way, you have to compartmentalize. How could you possibly function?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: If you were dealing with any of it, you’re not. You actually are human, despite all appearances of our SEALs and our Rangers and all those guys. So was it right after your service in Iraq that you decided to join the Agency?

SHAWN RYAN: No, honestly, I didn’t want to. I never wanted to go back, and I wanted to pursue some type of a career in business. And so I tried a lot of things. Civilian life, I just, I wasn’t ready for it yet.

And I decided that I had missed the brotherhood, the camaraderie, the obnoxiousness of being on a team. And so I decided I would try to get into a fire academy. And I did. It wasn’t what it was—

MEGYN KELLY: What do you mean? Fire academy.

SHAWN RYAN: As a firefighter.

MEGYN KELLY: Firefighter.

From Blackwater to the CIA

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I wanted to be. I just thought, well, that seems like the next best thing to what I was a part of. And it just wasn’t going to work for me. A lot of family ties help in the fire service, and I had none.

So I had a friend in Afghanistan with me, another SEAL. And he said, “Hey, I’m working for Blackwater and I think you should come work with us.” And I had seen a lot of the Blackwater contractors and heard a lot of the stuff that was going on over there at the time. Some of it was true, some of it wound up not being true.

But I decided while I was over there and I saw how those guys operated, I didn’t want to be a part of the contracting career and especially at Blackwater. And so I’d expressed that to him and he said, “This is different, this is a different project. The qualifications all have to be at least six years in special operations or above. Then there’s a month long tryout. I can’t tell you who I’m working for, but I think you would really fit in well here. And it’s not what you’re thinking. It’s very high caliber operators working here.”

So I threw my name in the hat and took about six months to get a call back and then I did. And it was just an email that said, “Hey, be here at this time. Bring this gear with you.” And it was a vetting course.

So it was for Blackwater. I don’t know how familiar you are with Blackwater, but Blackwater is a massive organization and they have all these different contracts under them. They have the Department of State contract, they have the DEA contract, they have probably all kinds of government contracts. And then in the very back of the compound, which Blackwater compound was, I don’t know how many thousands of acres, is the black sites.

And so you go back there, they don’t tell you anything and you’re with a group of guys and you start off with a PT test and then you do some shooting qualifications. They don’t really tell you what the standards are. It’s just, “Here’s the time, do your best.” Or sometimes they won’t even give you the time, just “Hit that target as many times as you can and as fast as possible.”

And so you do that and it’s, you don’t know the standard. And that’s the biggest stressor right there. Nobody’s telling you what’s succeeding.

MEGYN KELLY: What’s failing.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, you don’t, you have no idea and you don’t even know if you passed at the end of the day or not. And so it’s just, I mean, you know you passed if you’re showing up the next day to work to try out.

And so we had made it through the shooting qualifications and then you go through a lot of kind of situational stuff. They’ll put you in these situations. And they wanted to see how you react, how you can lead a team, how you can integrate in with a team.

MEGYN KELLY: Right.

The Vetting Process

SHAWN RYAN: All kinds of different scenarios, scenarios that you’re never going to fight your way out of. Lots of civilians, they would plant lots of role players with simunition rounds, which is basically kind of like a paintball gun, but more realistic. And they would put you in all these scenarios to see if you could keep your cool under pressure, not shooting any innocent civilians.

It was a protection type gig as well. So a lot of times they would have some type of an asset that you have to go in and extract. And I made it through that. And then at the very end there was also driving surveillance, all kinds of stuff that they wanted to just kind of see how you were in all these different scenarios.

And at the end they give you the brief and say, “Hey, you know, this is the OGA, other government agency, CIA contract,” and they start looking for dates to go overseas.

MEGYN KELLY: Yes, but you don’t know for what.

SHAWN RYAN: No, you never know.

MEGYN KELLY: You just know that you’ve been selected as this elite kind of service member and whatever it is is going to be very high level and complicated and complex. Right. So you’re in, but you don’t know what you’re in for.

Yeah, well, that’s disconcerting just listening to you. You are cool, you are calm like that. That probably really helped you. I mean, I was just thinking, who do I know who’s kind of more on the hysterical end? I don’t know her, but she’s the only one who came to mind. Somebody like a Bethany Frankel, the former real housewife. I know that’s a bizarre compare, but I mean, she’s tightly wound, Shawn. She’s always like everything is up here. Right. And you’re just the opposite of that. Just kind of a cool cat, like a low blood pressure kind of guy.

Learning to Handle Stress

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, when you’re in a job like that and I’m sure you can relate being on TV and with the career that you’ve had, but I mean, it’s so, it gets to be so high stress every day. You’re being judged, you’re being graded. It’s, “Do you have what it takes to be a part of this team?”

You know, from SEAL training through the teams, the six years that I was there to CIA or Blackwater training for the subcontractor, CIA contractor. I mean, it’s just, you have to get to the point where you can blow that stuff off. And that came to me in the teams.

It was constantly just stress all the time. “Do I deserve to be here? Am I going to get kicked out this week? You know, what does my team think of me? I’m a new guy.” And you have to, and that stuff can hinder your performance.

And so, you know, the most stressful thing you can do, at least for me as an operator, is when you’re doing the kill house, which is entering buildings, saving hostages, killing bad guys all in your face, clearing houses. Basically.

MEGYN KELLY: We’re talking about real life now or the training?

SHAWN RYAN: We’re talking about training and real life.

MEGYN KELLY: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: But primarily, I guess, primarily training. And it gets to the point where if you let this stuff get to you, every house, we call them a house run, where you go through the doors, maybe you blow the doors, maybe you’re climbing in a window, maybe you’re coming in from the rooftop. Doesn’t matter.

But once you enter that house in training, every move you make is critiqued. And it can make it seem like, and purposely, that they’re picking on you, that you’re not any good, that they don’t want you there. And you just have to get to the point where you can’t let that stuff affect you.

It just got to the point in the teams where I had hit this mental switch where I don’t care anymore. I had tricked myself into thinking, “I don’t care how this run, this house run ends. I don’t care what these guys think of me. I’m just going to do the best I can do.” And that’s all I can do.

The Adrenaline Addiction

MEGYN KELLY: Do you know the free solo movie and that, the story about that mountain climber who refused to use any lines and supports and he wound up dying? No, but they talk about these guys who climb these mountains, and they’re nuts. They do it with no support. You know, there’s nothing to, you know. And a lot of them do die, but they identify with a lot of these guys that they’ve lost their ability to get an adrenaline surge.

And that’s actually one of the reasons why they do it the way they do it without all the belts and suspenders. Can you relate to that at all?

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah. Addiction to adrenaline.

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah. And then maybe crossing over to, it’s gone. Like, where is it? How can I get it again?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, you find it through, I mean, that’s why so many guys, honestly wind back up in the contracting arena. Especially like these guys, you know, that spend thirty plus years at the SEAL teams or a SF team or Delta or wherever, Rangers, MARSOC.

You can’t, it’s never enough. I mean, it’s like a heroin addiction. You know, you’re constantly looking for the fix and then it gets so bad that even on your off time, you know, you’re looking for it. You can’t take six months and not feel that. It is the pinnacle of your existence at the time.

MEGYN KELLY: I can’t imagine. You know, just the other night I was at a dinner party at a friend’s house in Connecticut and it was absolutely lovely. The hostess knew all the right things to do. We had a lovely cocktail hour. We sat down for dinner. There was even some dancing after the fact, which is a successful cocktail party, a dinner party by any measure.

I can’t imagine a Shawn Ryan having lived the life you’ve lived. Right. Coming back from all of that and even participating in such. I mean, I just feel like your whole life must have been, you know, when this was done, like, “What is this? Who are these people? What is this is just absolute drivel around me everywhere. None of this matters.” Did you go through that?

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah. It created a lot of anxiety. A lot of anxiety. I had really bad social anxiety when I left the Agency. And I just, I mean, you are thrown into a world that you thought you knew and it’s just, it’s hard. I mean, it’s really hard to relate to anybody who has not lived the kind of life that you’ve lived.

Yeah, it takes a long time, you know, and it takes a lot of, it takes a lot of self work.

MEGYN KELLY: It’s like you were on Mars for fourteen years.

SHAWN RYAN: Pretty much. Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.

MEGYN KELLY: Right? You come back, Earth has changed a lot. You know, now there’s an Internet and GPS and iPhones and social media. So it’s like the dramatic changes and…

SHAWN RYAN: A lot of different opinions on what we’re doing over there.

Understanding the Contracting World

MEGYN KELLY: So can you help me understand? Because we talked about leaving the SEALs and going to Blackwater and then, but that, and that, do you count that as CIA time? I don’t totally understand.

SHAWN RYAN: So I spent a very brief time at Blackwater as well. So I did two deployments, I think, with Blackwater. And but you’re under, so basically, if you’re going to get your housework done right, you’re going to use a general contractor, and then he’s going to subcontract out the plumbing, the drywall, the air conditioning.

So think of Blackwater as the general contractor for the U.S. government. And so then Department of State says, “Hey, we need five hundred guys in Baghdad to protect all of our state diplomats.” Okay? So Blackwater goes, and they, “What kind of guys do you want? What do you want to pay? You know, what qualifications are you looking for?” And then they go find those type of people, train them up, put them through a vetting course, and then here’s your five hundred guys.

And so CIA does the same thing. It’s, “Hey, we need, we have this very particular set of skills we’re looking for. This is the job description. You guys, you, Blackwater, go find these guys for us.” So we’re basically subcontractors for the agency.

MEGYN KELLY: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: Does that make sense?

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah. Why, I don’t understand Blackwater that well. But why would they not just go tap the SEALs or, you know, the Green Berets or, why would they go to Blackwater for any of this?

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a great question. I wish I could answer that. And they do. They do go direct. And so later on in my career, after Blackwater, I wound up, I had taken a break from Blackwater. Then I went to a company called SOC, did a couple appointments with them, got kind of tired of the agency stuff for a little bit.

So then I jumped on an anti-piracy gig. Do you remember the Maersk Alabama?

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: So after that happened, all these contracts spun up and it was, “All right, we need SEALs on ships to kill pirates that are trying to, you know, kidnap the crew and take over the ship.”

MEGYN KELLY: Just another day at work.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: And ransom. No, that’s like Rob O’Neill. I told him, he’s like the Waldo of servicemen everywhere.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: Every movie that’s ever been made, Rob O’Neill had a role in.

SHAWN RYAN: He’s been on all of the ops. Right. But yeah, but so I did that for two deployments, and then the agency got back in touch with me, and then they wanted me to come work direct for them as a contractor, but not through any companies. Okay, and so…

MEGYN KELLY: And now you’re actually earning some money. Yeah. So that’s good.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

The Dark Years in Colombia

MEGYN KELLY: I mean, more so than you ever got paid by the Navy, way more.

SHAWN RYAN: Than I got paid for by the Navy.

MEGYN KELLY: Can you get rich doing that or not really?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I guess it depends on how you invest your money. I mean, at that time, a good rate was about $1,000 a day. So that would be a really—that would be a good rate. Some guys, a low rate would be about $550 a day. And so, yeah, I mean, it depends on how much you want to deploy.

MEGYN KELLY: Where are you sitting in between deployments? Are you back here, like, going to the movies and Starbucks?

SHAWN RYAN: I spent a lot of time—well, I mean, it was 14. Agency was about a little shy of nine years. And so I would—man, I would go all over. But towards the end, I started going to Colombia, South America.

MEGYN KELLY: This was not a good period in your life.

SHAWN RYAN: You know about this?

MEGYN KELLY: Nothing good happens in Colombia.

SHAWN RYAN: Nothing good does happen in Colombia.

MEGYN KELLY: No. I do know a little bit about your troubles, and that was a rough period for you. Explain why and why Colombia.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, originally I went to Colombia because when I joined the SEAL teams, I had always wanted to go to Team Four because I wanted to do the counter drug ops. Well, then, you know, 9/11 kicked off, obviously, and that wasn’t a focus at all.

And so when I was in the agency, I’d broken up with a girlfriend. And so I decided I wanted to travel. And I’d always—I was just infatuated. I mean, those were all the documentaries I was watching. When I went to the recruiter, it was—that was the only thing going on at the time was Panama and kind of the counter drug situation down in South America, which a lot of that was in—

MEGYN KELLY: Colombia, since documented in shows like Narcos.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah. And so I decided I wanted to go check it out down there. And so I—I mean, that’s crazy talk.

MEGYN KELLY: Just, just like as a pin in this conversation—that’s crazy talk. Nobody looks at a show like Narcos or Panama and says, “Yes, I want to go there.” Normal people are like, “Thank God that’s down there.”

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, well, I mean, I want to—it was for a number—I wanted to see. I just, I wanted to be in a jungle environment. And so I went to check it out, had a great time. And so I kept—I just kept going back, kept going back, kept going back all the way past my time at the agency.

But then it turned into—we had just kind of spoken about addiction to adrenaline. And so I was going down there doing a lot of stuff that I shouldn’t be doing. Cocaine. And then once I left the agency, I kind of started building a network down there, and it just—it was exciting to me. I was overseas building my own network. Kind of felt like I was kind of running my own operations.

MEGYN KELLY: What kind of operations?

SHAWN RYAN: Drug networks. And so I wanted to see how deep into the kind of narcos network I could get myself.

MEGYN KELLY: But this is not for crime fighting.

SHAWN RYAN: No.

MEGYN KELLY: This was for crime committing.

Building a Drug Network

SHAWN RYAN: Pretty much, yeah. And so I kind of started at street level and built a network out and went to clubs and met people and found my guys and started testing cocaine and finding the best stuff. And I found it. And that lasted for a couple years.

And I would just bounce. I mean, it was really—I got a lot of satisfaction out of the adrenaline and seeing—and just seeing how much I could embed myself into these different cultures. And so then I started flying all over South America. I started going to Peru and starting to build network there, and Dominican Republic and Panama, all over Colombia, all over the country and Costa Rica.

And then I started looking up the most dangerous places you could go in the world. And at the time, it was San Pedro Sula, Honduras. So I went there and started—I didn’t get very far there, but that was my life for several years.

MEGYN KELLY: Wow. And the product was cocaine. And you would find what, like, dealers, people to distribute it?

SHAWN RYAN: I would find dealers, and then I would find their dealers, and then I would find where their dealers get their stuff. And I got to a pretty high level.

MEGYN KELLY: It’s a miracle you weren’t killed.

SHAWN RYAN: It is a miracle. It was—I mean, I was—I mean, this is what I do for a living, though, you know? And so—

MEGYN KELLY: That’s true. You had some pretty superior training.

SHAWN RYAN: I was pretty good at it and pretty fearless at the time.

MEGYN KELLY: So when you’re talking to your old Navy SEAL buds or Blackwater buds, and you’re down there and they’re saying, “What are you up to?” What were you saying?

SHAWN RYAN: I would just tell him I’ve crossed—

MEGYN KELLY: Over to the other side.

SHAWN RYAN: I wouldn’t tell him exactly what I’m doing, but I would—I mean, they knew. Everybody kind of knew, you know. I mean, it just—I started losing friends. I know the conversations were like, “Oh, yeah. I mean, he’s down in Colombia and nobody really hears from him anymore.”

And I would resurface every once in a while. Sometimes guys would come down to see me. They wouldn’t last very long. They would head back out immediately, and it just—it got to be very dark.

And, you know, I OD’d down there a couple of times. And I remember one time I woke up and it was like it was Mother’s Day. And I remember calling my mom, and I was all junked out. And I remember after that conversation, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. And I knew I needed to pull myself out of that.

And it kind of like went right back to the time when, you know, I told you the only reason I made it through BUD/S was I didn’t want to let my parents down. And I sure as hell didn’t want my parents to get a notice weeks later that their son had OD’d on cocaine in a penthouse in Colombia. And who knows how long that would take to even get to them.

And so it had painted this picture in my head, and I started seeking help. Kind of.

MEGYN KELLY: It’s a big moment.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

The Turning Point

MEGYN KELLY: Before you begin that path to redemption.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: What got you there? What made you establish residency in Colombia and go all over these countries, the most dangerous countries on earth, to mess with other people’s drug rings? My God. Right. It’s like playing with plutonium for a living.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: And be so reckless with your life and your well-being.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I just—I just didn’t value life anymore. I didn’t care. I mean, I had expected to—I had expected to die down there. And then when I got close, I realized there’s a lot more to life than this.

And so I cleaned it up. And truth be told, I mean, that was kind of an awakening, but I wasn’t 100% ready to shut it down. And then I had—you know, I had built quite the network down there. And I got tipped off that the federal police in Colombia were surveilling me and people that I was with. And so I hightailed it out of the country.

MEGYN KELLY: What’s hightailed it?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I just—I abruptly left and I did kind of a—we call them an SDR but surveillance detection route. And I wanted to see if they were surveilling me, if I was walking around town. And so I got rid of everything, cleaned everything up and went to an Internet cafe, booked myself some tickets to a couple different places, jumped on one and left the country.

MEGYN KELLY: Came back stateside.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: Do we extradite to Colombia? Just asking for a friend.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: But, yeah. No, I got out of there and went home. Home to Missouri. Talked to my parents. They knew some—

MEGYN KELLY: You told them?

SHAWN RYAN: It was really—yeah. I don’t remember telling them anything, and woke up the next day after telling him with a hangover. And my dad was—I could just tell by the look on his face that I must have spilled probably just about everything.

MEGYN KELLY: What did the look say?

SHAWN RYAN: Very concerned and worried. I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t think I needed any help. And I just kept at it.

MEGYN KELLY: What do you mean? Kept at what?

SHAWN RYAN: I kept at—I wouldn’t put the bottle down. Wasn’t ready to do that. I don’t think I could have done that. And then, you know, through the career, I mean, you just—you know, I had mentioned, you know, numbing it out and numbing it out becomes—it’s not even a cycle. It’s just this—it’s just pills after pills after—

MEGYN KELLY: It’s a way of life.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, it’s Valium, Xanax, Lorazepam, Ambien, Hydrocodone, Oxy, Tramadol, kind of whatever you can just wash down to shut the brain down and get some rest.

And so I wasn’t doing that. I wasn’t ready to clean that up. I had kind of weaned myself off the coke, and then things just weren’t getting better. My life wasn’t developing afterwards. And so I started going to therapy.

Finding Help Through Therapy

MEGYN KELLY: Which was talk therapy.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I started going to talk therapy. Extremely hesitant. I was—I thought, “Well, I need to go to somebody. I have to go to somebody that’s experienced what I’ve experienced. I need like a Vietnam vet or somebody that has seen action.” And I couldn’t find anybody.

And so I just googled—I just googled therapist, talked to two or three of them and walked into one, which was very—it was interesting because this was kind of before anybody really knew about the suicide epidemic, before PTSD and traumatic brain injury and operator syndrome or whatever they’re calling it this week kind of started getting out there. And, man, it was—it took me a while to warm up, but it was—I love it.

MEGYN KELLY: Male or female?

SHAWN RYAN: Female.

MEGYN KELLY: Nice. Yeah, I love a female therapist. Mine currently is male, but there was a woman who I googled when I was leaving my first husband. Before there was Doug, there was Dan, with whom I’m still friends, but we did get a divorce.

And same thing. I googled this woman, and she totally changed my life. You never know. I mean, you can strike gold.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: And then there are Yellow Pages or Google Pages as it is now. And I can relate to doing that and having it be a life changer.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it—good for you. I’m happy for you.

MEGYN KELLY: Thank you.

SHAWN RYAN: So, yeah, interesting enough, she had never talked—ever talked to a combat vet and wound up—I did my own research and wound up being a pretty staunch liberal, which I probably wouldn’t have gone to her.

MEGYN KELLY: So you were more conservative going in. I know you lean right now, but back then you were too.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, okay. Definitely. Probably more so. But I got to be honest. You know, that woman is like an angel. And I don’t care what her political beliefs are. That woman has saved more special ops guys from suicide than anybody—than anybody saved in combat than anybody I know.

And she can—she still does it to this day. And that was back in probably 2015, 2016 time frame. And it was me. And when I left the agency, I was also trying to save my best friend’s life who had a terrible heroin addiction. And I talked him into going in to meet her, and then I just started telling everybody.

And I remember my best friend’s name was Gabe. And we gave her a SEAL team plaque just to say thank you. And because she was helping us out, she had dubbed her prices down and just an amazing woman. And now you go in there and her entire office is just plaque after plaque after plaque.

MEGYN KELLY: Pretty soon you’re going to see a Trump banner. She’s going to be wearing the MAGA hat.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, but that would be a sight to see. But I mean it. You know, the reason I say that is because there are some things that can, you know, political agendas don’t—

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: They don’t get in the way. Translation, you don’t see that very often these days, and I think that’s important.

MEGYN KELLY: I love that you said that. I feel the same. I have very strong political views on a number of issues, but pretty much 80% of the people around me who I love in my life, the woman who raised me, all my best friends. My best friends growing up are liberal. They’re not woke, but they’re liberal. They’re Democrats.

So I have tons of love in my heart for all of them, even though they don’t vote the way I vote and they don’t feel the way I do about the issues that are really important to me, but I don’t care. Those don’t have to be the stakes of the relationship.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Takes a strong person to overcome that these days, but they’re out there.

Finding Angels in Dark Places

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah. Do you say her name or at least her first name?

SHAWN RYAN: Her first name’s Amy.

MEGYN KELLY: My lady was named Amy. What area of the country was this? Missouri.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, no, no, that was South Florida.

MEGYN KELLY: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: My lady was in the Virginia area. Northern Virginia.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting.

MEGYN KELLY: Well, we’ll talk after.

SHAWN RYAN: All right.

MEGYN KELLY: But same thing. And when you were telling me that story, it reminded me. So, you know, we have military guys on all the time, so I just absolutely respect the hell out of you guys and what you do and, as I said, would love to raise two little soldiers, but don’t really want to for the reasons discussed.

And we interviewed Dakota Meyer.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh.

MEGYN KELLY: And of course, his story is just—it’s incredible. Medal of Honor. He talked about how he was drunk up there when President Bush was pinning the medal on him and, or was Obama. And he talked very openly about how difficult it was for him to come back and miss the guys and miss the adrenaline and just dealing with the trauma of everything he’d seen and done.

And he talked about his own moment of super low and being rescued by an angel. And we pulled the sound bite. So take a watch. “I felt like where I was at in life at that point that, you know, that I just couldn’t get my stuff together, and I just—I should fix it. Right. Like, the fear I could see in people’s eyes, you know, with me, like, I was a monster.”

“It’s just like drinking and just, you know. You know, the thing is, and people don’t talk about this much, you know, you don’t fight evil with nice people. And I just—I remember driving home, and I pulled off this highway at my buddy’s shop because I knew, you know, I didn’t want anybody worried about me. Right. So I pulled in, and I knew that he would be in because he comes into work every morning, and I just—yeah, I mean, I was—I was going to do it right there.”

“I stuck it to my head, and I squeezed the trigger, and it just like, it went click, and there was no round in it. And I don’t know if, you know, I feel like I know who did it. I don’t truly know, though.”

MEGYN KELLY: But he said he does believe he knows a friend had removed the bullets from the gun.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. He thinks it was a friend?

MEGYN KELLY: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Does he know who it was?

MEGYN KELLY: He said he thinks he does, but that’s an angel. That’s a real life God’s angel on this earth looking out for him. You know, she saved him. And I believe, you know, Amy may have saved you, and maybe my Amy saved me.

It’s like, yes, you kind of have to be a willing participant, but I know you found faith. And I’m also a person of faith. And I do think, like, if you’re just open eyed, you can see these angels, like often all around us. Yeah, they look like mere mortals, but they were sent here for a purpose.

Your therapist goes home at night and when she looks back at her day to say, what did I do today that really mattered? My God, does anybody have a better roster?

SHAWN RYAN: Probably not. Probably not. She’s amazing.

The Healing Power of Conversation

MEGYN KELLY: And now you’re doing it. I mean, that’s kind of how you make your living now, just talking to guys who probably aren’t that used to talking about this stuff in like a safe place. Right. Somebody who gets it. It’s kind of a form of talk therapy just to sort of be able to speak about it. At least it’s a step.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, it is. And you know, I think, you know, my podcast has done well and super well. You’re being humble and—but I give, I give Amy a lot of credit to how I interview because I realized, you know, I realized in therapy and she really didn’t say a whole lot. And a lot of times you just start figuring things out yourself by just getting it out.

And so I realized, you know, and I realized that if you just let somebody talk, they’re just going to keep going nine times out of ten. And yeah. So being in therapy twice a week for three and a half years really helped me as an interviewer.

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah, right. As an interviewer too. Right. Just to let people talk and to listen. To listen. It’s helpful too, as opposed to thinking about your next question.

So when did you find love? Because that seems relatively recent. Right. You got engaged, you got married, now you have two kids, including a new daughter. Congrats.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. Thank you.

MEGYN KELLY: So what did you find your wife, your future wife, during all of the Amy time or when?

Meeting Katie: Tater Tots and True Love

SHAWN RYAN: Yep, right in the middle of it, I had a—I met my wife on a gun range at a nice club in Florida.

MEGYN KELLY: That’s beautiful. That’s amazing.

SHAWN RYAN: I know, right? And my, my best friend still to this day, David Rutherford, had a new sniper rifle that he wanted to sight in and he knew, he knew somebody that had access to a thousand yard range. And so we went out there, her dad met us and my wife’s name is Katie.

She jumped out of the truck and, and that was—that was that. We, we, we shot some guns. We went to the, the club restaurant. She gave me some tots and that was—that was it.

MEGYN KELLY: What’s tots?

SHAWN RYAN: Tater tots.

MEGYN KELLY: Big fan.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, me too.

MEGYN KELLY: Also because I haven’t had a French fry in three years.

SHAWN RYAN: What?

MEGYN KELLY: Yes. It was a personal mission. I’m basically a Navy SEAL, too, in my strength and my ability to say no to the things that are bad for me. No. I decided in June of 2021. They were becoming a problem for me. I’m not going to lie. And then I need to swear off. And so I decided to go a year, and now I’m—I’m almost three years clean.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, congratulations.

MEGYN KELLY: But the tot is the back door to the fried potato. I may not pass, like, a drug test of, you know, potato.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

MEGYN KELLY: But it’s not even called the same thing. It’s called a tater tot. It’s not even French fry. Anyway, big fan, because they—they allow me to still have my—

SHAWN RYAN: They’re amazing.

MEGYN KELLY: But I’m not as addicted as the French fry. They don’t have the same down the rabbit hole quality for me.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. You know, French fries are—it’s like a conveyor belt for ketchup.

MEGYN KELLY: Yes. Totally agree. The only purpose of the tot is to deliver the ketchup. Right.

SHAWN RYAN: I know.

MEGYN KELLY: And then somebody will buy, like, the Whole Foods ketchup, and you’re like, ew, what is this?

SHAWN RYAN: It screws the entire meal.

MEGYN KELLY: Right? You need the sugar, the preservatives, whatever Heinz does. That’s what we need.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s right. That’s right.

MEGYN KELLY: All right. So I never realized it could be an aphrodisiac, but I like how Katie rolls. So she lures you in with the tots and the guns, and you were like, I’m home. When are we getting married?

SHAWN RYAN: That’s right.

MEGYN KELLY: So how long thereafter were you married?

Building a Real Life

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man, I think it was—I think it was about a year and a half. So we were in Boca Raton, Florida. I was definitely a fish out of water in that town. And, you know, there’s a lot of—I grew up in the Midwest in a town of 6,000 people and a farm town. Now I’m in Boca Raton, Florida. Lots of money, super fabulous.

MEGYN KELLY: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: Lots of that. And so when me and Katie got serious, it didn’t take long. And, you know, Katie’s been sober for 15 years now. And I was on a path to get—it was on my radar. And so I had asked her in a couple of questions that really resonated with me.

And, you know, there’s a lot of—there’s a lot of fake people in South Florida, at least in my experience. And so with Katie, I remember asking her a question, and it was something along the lines of, you know, now that, you know, how do you find real hobbies once you’re sober? Because I don’t. I had zero hobbies other than boozing.

And she had a real answer and it was just—that’s a great question. Just takes time and—but she was engaged in that conversation. And so I knew. I was like, this is a good one. And she’s real. And I had not been around a real woman in a long time.

And—and that was—I still remember where it was. It was at a Thai restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. And she had told me that and I was like, the conversation just got—I couldn’t talk to anybody like that other than my therapist and, or anybody that had been through something like that, like what I was in the middle of.

And so anyways, we got closer and I knew we were going to get married. I knew I was going to marry her. And I just—I said, I don’t want to—I don’t want to raise my family in South Florida, so we’re going to have to leave. And so, yeah, we wound up in Tennessee.

MEGYN KELLY: Does she have any roots there or was it just the flocking to Tennessee that so many conservatives did?

SHAWN RYAN: We—no roots. No roots. We just packed up and went to Franklin.

MEGYN KELLY: At least you went from the one state with no state income tax to another state. No state income tax. New Hampshire is suddenly amongst the crew. That’s nice to see here in the Northeast.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I know. I was like, it’s blowing up. We were looking there for a little bit. Let’s go.

MEGYN KELLY: Connecticut.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s right.

MEGYN KELLY: It’s not going to happen. Are too blue.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s all good.

MEGYN KELLY: On the hobby front, have you considered needlepoint or as my good friend describes it, a high class finger sport?

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. I have not.

MEGYN KELLY: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you into needlepoint?

MEGYN KELLY: Hell no. I said, we are too young to be doing that. Get off of the beach immediately with that monstrosity in your hand. I refuse to sit with you. So did you find one, Everett?

SHAWN RYAN: A hobby business.

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah, I was going to say it’s this. It involves this microphone.

SHAWN RYAN: I found business and that’s my hobby. So—yeah, Mike, hobbies. I mean, I don’t have time for them.

MEGYN KELLY: I don’t have hobbies either. If it makes you feel any better.

SHAWN RYAN: I love being in my business.

MEGYN KELLY: And now you have two kids and—

SHAWN RYAN: I love being with my kids. And so anything outside of that, there’s just not much time for.

Parenting and Friendship

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah, no, there really isn’t. I mean, I remember when we had kids, a good friend of mine said, “You should tell your friends you just had your kids and that you won’t be seeing them for about 10 years.”

SHAWN RYAN: That’s right.

MEGYN KELLY: And he’s like, “The true friends will still be there for you when you get there. And the ones who aren’t really your true friends, good riddance.”

SHAWN RYAN: We’re figuring that out. We are definitely figuring that out. It’s interesting how fast your taste in friends changes. You know, especially—I don’t know how old your kids are.

MEGYN KELLY: 14, 13, and 10.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, okay. Nice.

MEGYN KELLY: They’re great ages. Highly recommend this period of parenthood. It’s awesome, really. They’re so easy, and they’re so fun, and they have the best personalities, and they still love us. I just—I think we’re in the sweet spot of parenting right now.

When they’re little—I know you’ve got two littles—it’s hard. They’re adorable, but it is hard labor.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. We’re on potty training right now, but I love every minute of it. You know, I just—it’s a tough balance, you know, between work and family, but I always lean more towards family. And man, it just goes so fast. I’m already realizing that, and I don’t want to—you know, I’m glad that I waited until after service for kids, because it sounds like you’ve listened to at least a couple of my interviews.

And man, you know, I’m just—I’m glad that I never had to put my—I will never have to put my kids through what that was like, what it turned to be into, being gone all the time. And I’m a lot better now than back then.

MEGYN KELLY: And you don’t have to live with a regret of having missed it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: Even for a good cause, you know, it’s hard to miss it. I’ve talked to enough people who have made a different choice. You can just hear the regret in their voice and see it on their face, and it’s not recapturable once it’s gone.

SHAWN RYAN: Very true, very true.

Values and Education

MEGYN KELLY: But, you know, I think in Tennessee, you’ll do better in instilling values into your kids that reflect your own. Right. That’s one of the challenges here in the Northeast, really. Whoa. Yeah. I mean, these woke schools. We fled our New York City schools because of that.

Here in Connecticut, we got it made. We did our homework this time since we were fleeing, and we found two great ones. But it’s important, right, because you find out when you’re—how old is your oldest, your boy?

SHAWN RYAN: Two and a half.

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah. So you find out when they start to go to school that the schools are—they’re your partners. I mean, you need to find a partner. They’re the ones who are going to spend the most waking hours with your kids every day.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: So if you’re not on the same page about how we’re raising a boy or how we’re raising a girl, how we’re creating a good human being and future citizen, you know, current citizen, but like, you know, responsible citizen, things can go south quickly.

SHAWN RYAN: That is a constant topic of discussion at our house as well. How we’re going to do that. Are we going to homeschool? We’re going to do private school. What are we going to do? And turns out we live in a, like a homeschool mecca.

MEGYN KELLY: That’s good.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. So we’re looking into possibly doing that.

MEGYN KELLY: I love the homeschooling communities. I have a dear friend who’s doing that, swears by it. So what does life look like now? You do the podcast like 25 hours a day, honestly. How do you do these five-hour podcasts, man?

The Long-Form Interview Format

SHAWN RYAN: I just—I just listen, you know. And, you know, I’m—I get people to open up about things they’ve never talked about before and go to places that they probably have not been in their mind in years. And you can’t do that on a timeline. You can’t do that in a condensed timeline. And so, you know, my longest one, I think is nine hours.

MEGYN KELLY: Is that right?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: Who was that with?

SHAWN RYAN: This guy, Cody Alford, who was a MARSOC guy, but Marine. And so, you know, I think the first one I did was right about two hours. But then I kept getting longer and I noticed the more time I spend on, the more time I give them, the more they open up.

And what it kind of developed into is—I remember, I don’t remember who the first guy was, it might have been this guy, Prime Hall—but do you have any idea how many people have been through, like, child trauma, sexual trauma, abusive parents, whatever it is? Man, it’s like everybody.

And so the first time that happened, I was like, “All right, I got to start diving more into childhood.” And I’ll bet 75% of the people that come on have experienced some type of abuse as a child. And I dig into kind of what’s happening today with trafficking and pedophilia and all of that kind of stuff.

And so I think it’s really important to dive into the childhood stuff because it gives people that have been abused, that are trying to process that still into their adult life and kids that are going through it right now—I mean, it shows them, like, “Man, no matter what I’m going through right now, like, I can still find success and find happiness in life.”

And, you know, there’s just not a lot of people doing that right now. And so when somebody goes into their childhood experience and they’re going to get descriptive about it, you know, when they’re done and we’re done with that section, I always ask, you know, “For a kid that’s in your position right now, you know, looking back, what could you have done? Or what would you advise, you know, other kids that are in your position?” Or, you know, what I’m trying to say, “What advice do you have for them?”

And I mean, it’s helping. You know, it’s really helping. And then we get into the military stuff and it’s super descriptive. And, you know, I want it to be—I don’t want a condensed format because when I started doing this, I wanted to do it because these guys weren’t getting a voice in the media at all.

MEGYN KELLY: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: And when they did, it was a 30-second blurb. And, you know, so why are we having talking heads in the media documenting what happened over there with a bunch of people that weren’t there that thought they knew?

And so I wanted to—it kind of started with I wanted to just document history the way it actually happened with people that were at the events. And so now we’ve got, you know, just about every major operation that has happened. We got—

Tyler Vargas Andrews and the Afghanistan Withdrawal

MEGYN KELLY: I heard the one with—forgive me, I don’t remember his name—but the gentleman who, he lost his arm and his leg in the Afghanistan withdrawal.

SHAWN RYAN: Tyler Vargas.

MEGYN KELLY: Oh, my God. And that just—his whole life had been rough with the dad who was a child molester. And it was just—there was a lot in there. And those stories are, they’re infuriating. Right. Because they’re recent and we lived them. And we still have those same leaders who have yet to make any apology for what happened to guys like Tyler. Nothing.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it’s very discouraging. I mean, he’s the perfect example, though. You know, he interviewed with Good Morning America for seven hours.

MEGYN KELLY: Did he really?

SHAWN RYAN: And they released, I believe he said, five seconds of that interview because it made POTUS look so bad. And so I had reached out to him. I wanted to give him the opportunity to get his story out. And he had testified in front of Congress that—I mean, none of us were getting the actual boots-on-the-ground version of what the hell happened during that withdrawal.

And so he came on, we got it out. They tried to censor us. And he had all kinds of actual footage of what was going on. And they kept dinging us. “Oh, you can’t have that in there. You can’t have that in there.” Who was? YouTube, you know. And it’s like, guys, like, this happened.

MEGYN KELLY: Like, how dare you censor what happened to a US Marine.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it’s—it’s like, this is actual footage. This is—a lot of this footage has been—some of it had been in the media. And it’s like, guys, you can’t—like, this is what happened.

So we yanked all the footage and then put it behind—put the real version behind a paywall. Because the most important thing was just to get his story out. And we wound up—we wound up getting it, getting it out, you know, after several attempts.

MEGYN KELLY: But not for nothing, I know this isn’t at all why you do this, but in any sane world, you’d be getting an award for that kind of coverage. In any sane world, somebody like you would get recognized with a Peabody for something like that. Not the nonsense that now gets rewarded with Pulitzers and other awards like the Cronkite or—

Like, that’s actual journalism, actually getting the story and being unafraid to tell it, no matter where it takes you.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

MEGYN KELLY: We actually pulled a sound bite from that interview. Here he is, Tyler Vargas Andrews, talking about what happened during the attack as we withdrew from Afghanistan.

SHAWN RYAN: Like 10 minutes goes by and just flash and just get hit with this massive wave of pressure. And then I’m like, my eyes, my eyes are closed, my vision’s black, and I’m like, slowly coming to. My right ear is just like super high-pitched ringing. My left ear is muffled and I can just hear people screaming in the distance.

And I’m just like struggling to open my eyes. Finally can open my eyes. And it was someone else’s body part just like laying in front of me. And the people on the other side of the canal just immediately in front of me just got evaporated.

I kept trying to stand up like—like, why can’t I stand up? We start taking shots from the neighborhood. And like, almost immediately after the blast, I tried my hardest to crawl backwards. And all I could do was like, put my left arm on the ground. And I’m just like—like, why is my right arm not working?

And I remember lifting it up. It’s there, but it’s just like shredded up at the elbow and bloody and I’m—I’m just red everywhere.

MEGYN KELLY: Hmm.

SHAWN RYAN: Pretty horrific.

Accountability and Outrage

MEGYN KELLY: We just got into this recently because President Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, wrote a book trying to say it’s not true. He looked at his watch when the bodies came home to Dover. It’s a lie. He looked at his watch several times. She’s still running cover for him in her job as a so-called journalist.

It’s on tape. You can see it repeatedly. There he is in the ceremony, over and over, trying to sneak in glances. And some of the parents of the fallen are very angry still about that and now about the lies to whitewash it. But this is—no one ever got fired for any of it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: So how are these guys, you know, like Tyler, feeling about that and about the administration, how it was handled?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, they’re enraged. We’re all enraged. I mean, do you know that we’re sending $40 million a week to the Taliban now?

MEGYN KELLY: Right?

SHAWN RYAN: It’s actually like $43 to $87 million a week.

MEGYN KELLY: The Taliban?

SHAWN RYAN: Yep. The same people that we fought for—

MEGYN KELLY: 20-plus years who are now not allowing girls to go to school, dressing them in full burqas, marrying them off at age 12. Those people?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Cutting people’s heads off, assassinating all of our allies over there, lining them up, shooting them in the back of the head. I mean, it’s—it’s pretty—I just don’t know how anybody can support that.

MEGYN KELLY: Why are we doing that? Why are we doing that? Why are we giving Iran money, you know, or were up until 10/7?

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t—you know, I wish I could answer that. I don’t—I just don’t know. It doesn’t—you know, what’s up is down now and what’s left is right. What’s black is white and it’s—it’s the deconstruction of America.

The Military-Industrial Complex and Recruiting Crisis

MEGYN KELLY: Well, what do you—I mean, it’s got to be directly related to the recruiting rates. Guys are looking at this saying, why would I join up for that? There’s no responsibility. Our lives are taken for granted. No one gets fired. No one says sorry.

We continue to funnel money to our enemies who—how much blood and treasure was lost in Afghanistan fighting the same group which we’re now funding? I just like, I know people say that’s not it. No, I think that’s it.

We looked at the surveys as to why guys are not signing up anymore. And like the top item was fear of death, which is okay, yes, normal. But for centuries guys have been getting past that and signing up anyway, but they’re not. So what is it?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I think it has to do with a lot of things. I think it had to do with the forced vaccines. I think it has to do with the woke agenda. I mean, talk about miscalculating your body of work.

It is not liberal Democrat families that sign up for the military. It is middle class to low class conservative families. And you just alienated your entire base. Nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to go become a SEAL to go into gender ideology crash courses and pronoun training or whatever the hell else they’re doing in there. How not to be a right wing extremist and deal with your white rage.

And I mean, I think it’s that. I think it’s the way the wars ended. I think it’s the new advertising that they do for recruitment.

MEGYN KELLY: “She’s a lesbian, her mothers are LGBTQ.”

SHAWN RYAN: It’s everything. Everything about the messaging they’re putting out is—who are they going to get, right?

MEGYN KELLY: I mean, the numbers are at record lows and we are precariously perched on possible conflict. God forbid in Ukraine, the United States doesn’t want any part of that. God forbid the Middle East. And they’re still talking about Taiwan.

Like, it’s like, I don’t—like we might actually get involved over there. I was talking to a former Navy SEAL whose name you would know, and he was like, “We’re not going to win the Taiwan thing. Like, they’re going to take it, China’s going to take it. And there’s not much we’re going to be able to do about it without actually getting involved militarily. Boots on the ground.”

And the American people aren’t going to want that. Like, if China takes it, his analysis was we’re going to have to let them take it.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, we’ll probably provoke them to take it just to start another war, just to spin up the military industrial complex more than it already is. And I mean, that seems to be what we do, is we provoke and then capitalize.

Understanding the Military-Industrial Complex

MEGYN KELLY: Can you zoom out on that, Shawn? Do that. Like, explain that to me because I understand people throw that term around military industrial complex, but you understand it better than most.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. So the military—I mean, let’s take it back to the Iraq war. I don’t think we should have been there at the time. I think, yeah, it was great. I got action. I got to do what I signed up to do. We got to kill a bunch of bad guys.

Now that I’m older and I’m out and I see a bigger picture, I mean, I just think it’s kind of weird that Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton was the biggest logistics—not the biggest, probably the only logistics company in both wars.

And so everywhere you went, it was Halliburton. Halliburton did the laundry, Halliburton did the gas. Halliburton built the barracks. Halliburton built the chow hall. Halliburton cooked the food. Halliburton did the mail, everything. It was KBR Halliburton. He was the CEO of that.

So all infrastructure in the entire Iraq war was Halliburton, whose former CEO is the Vice President of the United States. That’s what we’re getting at.

Then there’s Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and all of these. They make a lot of the tech and the missiles and the planes and all of these sorts of things. Guns, communications equipment. Everything that is new that’s being developed—it’s not the government developing it. It’s these companies that get paid ungodly amounts of money to develop things you would use in war.

MEGYN KELLY: And then they put people like Nikki Haley on their boards.

SHAWN RYAN: Exactly.

MEGYN KELLY: I mean, she’s not only was on the Boeing board, but she has a husband who’s making military vehicles right now. That’s his side business, where he’s making the vehicles that will be used in war, which they profit off of.

Yeah, this is what you’re talking about. And then she, in her world was about to step into the presidency and what, have zero conflicts?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah. Or Ukraine. I mean, we send all of our stuff over, all of our missiles, our tanks, our UAVs, our Javelins, whatever. You fill in the blank. And so now we have to replenish all those stockpiles, which is banking these companies. It’s giving the companies work to make more money. And that’s what this—I’m convinced that that’s what this is all about, the saber rattling.

And the reason the politicians do it is because these are big donors.

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah. I mean, I can’t be—you would probably know more about that than I do, but yeah, I mean, lobbying organizations. Look at all the people that are supporting what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia.

Why were we in Afghanistan for 20 plus years just to completely abandon it?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. There were so many things we could have used there. We gave up Bagram Air Force Base, one of the most strategic air force bases in the world. Afghanistan has endless amounts of lithium that we could utilize for our green initiative. Right.

But we’ll just give those over to China and let them sell us the lithium, even though we had built all the infrastructure there and they’re already mining it.

MEGYN KELLY: Why would we do that?

SHAWN RYAN: Why would we give it up?

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah, because we had made a decision to cut and run and that was the decision we were going to live by, I guess.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I don’t—I mean, I can’t find any logic.

Afghanistan Withdrawal and Forever Wars

MEGYN KELLY: I mean, the problem is on that one, both parties are to blame. Right. I mean, Trump came up with a plan and then Biden executed it terribly. Yeah, but I mean, Trump too wanted to pull us out of there and not keep anything.

I mean, I realized we were over war. And I mean, the forever wars are a real thing. And people who grew up—I mean, I’m a little older than you are, but both of us grew up in a time where in the beginnings we thought these are just wars and we’re serving a worthy cause here and we understand why the United States is doing it.

And it’s only having sort of been in the midst of this belief and then seeing it all crash down and then seeing the aftermath that you realize I was sold a bag of goods.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep. Yeah. It’s really interesting if you can take yourself out of the politics and your emotional state and look at these things from like a 30,000 foot view and it might paint a different perspective. And maybe we aren’t the good guys.

MEGYN KELLY: What do you think will happen with Ukraine? I mean, at what point does the United States say they can’t win, this is throwing good money after bad and get more aggressive about forcing some sort of compromise end to this thing?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. What do I think will happen in Ukraine? I think a change in the presidency could possibly end it.

MEGYN KELLY: Ours or Ukraine’s?

SHAWN RYAN: Ours. I don’t think theirs will ever—I mean, why would you not now? Yeah. Why would you—they’re getting so much out of this. But I’m just saying, like, I don’t know that the Ukrainian people are as insane as Zelensky seems with his no compromise. “If we’re going to see it through to the end,” all your people will be dead.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, I think this BRICS thing has a lot—I think that things will get interesting when China starts making more moves. That’s what I think. I don’t think any of these wars are going anywhere.

MEGYN KELLY: Should we have nothing to do with that?

SHAWN RYAN: With?

MEGYN KELLY: With Taiwan, China?

SHAWN RYAN: Man, you’re asking some tough questions. That’s one I think we would probably need to step in on, actually.

MEGYN KELLY: Step in, though. I mean, do you agree boots on the ground will be required? How are we going to fight that one? From drones?

SHAWN RYAN: How are we going to fight that? I think that—I don’t know. Definitely a lot of Navy.

MEGYN KELLY: Mm. That’s right.

SHAWN RYAN: We don’t have enough ships, a lot of Navy. And I think all of our allies would need to come together to—I mean, I think that—I mean, I personally think we’re on the brink of World War Three with China.

MEGYN KELLY: Over Taiwan.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

China’s Multi-Front Strategy

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, look at all the angles they have on us. They are behind the fentanyl crisis. They’re sending in all the supplies. They’re training the cartels how to make the world’s most potent fentanyl. Actually, now they’re teaching them how to make nitazene, which—so it went from heroin to fentanyl to nitazene. They’re behind that.

They’re buying all our farmland. They’re capturing all of our elites, politicians, and just tech gurus. I mean, not to mention the spying. Yeah. I mean, we have our—I mean, yeah, that’s out there. Right. What’s his name was sleeping with a Chinese spy.

MEGYN KELLY: Eric Swalwell. Right. Is that—I get my far left Democrats confused.

SHAWN RYAN: I can’t remember his name, but that’s who it was. But I mean, they have—so, I mean, look at California. From what I understand, all the real estate signs now are all in Chinese.

And I’ve always wondered, I mean, you see this massive migration happening all across the country with red states being inundated with people fleeing California, New York, Chicago. And I always wondered, who’s buying all this real estate over there if everybody’s leaving?

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah. Right.

SHAWN RYAN: Who’s buying all this? They’re selling it to China. We rolled out the red carpet for them when he came to visit. Their takeover of Hollywood. The NBA.

They have more money than God when it comes to buying things that are American or American owned. Their own people can suffer, but they’re very interested in spending tons of money buying up our industries and our land, and we’re just suckers for the dollar. So we say yes.

That’s why the NBA said, “Sure, we’ll do whatever you want and we won’t criticize you.” That’s why Hollywood takes anything they find offensive out of its films so they can make money over in China on the sales there.

We’ve bent the knee to our Chinese master. So you’re right. It’s happening more and more. People just aren’t paying attention. They’re living their lives not paying attention to a little bit more here and there, but they’re not.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s happening all over the world. I mean, look what they’re doing in Africa. They’re settling Africa. They have—they are the influence in Afghanistan now. I mean, they have—

MEGYN KELLY: They go in with their money and they make these countries dependent on them. And that used to be us, that used to be the United States being the leader of the free world and being out there helping the third world countries and creating some loyalty and some allyship. We’re not doing that anymore. But China is.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re exactly right. And then, I mean, it’s just—I mean, that right there alone shows how many angles they have. And I know there’s more. I’m just—I’m put on the spot.

MEGYN KELLY: But it’s scary to think about.

SHAWN RYAN: It is. It’s very scary. And I don’t think people understand how pertinent it is that we need to start addressing this stuff like immediately, like yesterday.

MEGYN KELLY: I mean, the one thing we have going for us is their economy is not strong.

The BRICS Initiative and Global Power Shifts

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what I keep hearing, but I hear both sides, you know, and I don’t. I mean, they have so much influence across the world now. And their version, the BRICS initiative, you’re aware of the BRICS initiative, you know, and devaluing our currency. And I think the last time I checked, there’s like 22 countries on board that now.

MEGYN KELLY: And there’s—it’s a sketchy crew, but they have a lot of money.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep.

MEGYN KELLY: So now more than ever, we need new up and coming, the next generation of Shawn Ryan’s.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I guess so.

Trump’s Electoral Prospects and Leadership

MEGYN KELLY: So what do you do? Trump’s got to win and people have to see America as strong again and maybe he’ll be a little afraid of us, you know. I mean, that’s—The New York Times just did a poll showing that Trump’s beating Biden in five out of the six swing states, same as it was in November, by a healthy margin in most of them.

And they were so befuddled by their own poll, they went back to the people who responded to say, like, why, why again? What is it really? The Orange man, he’s so bad. How could you—insurrectionist.

And in particular, it was interesting because they went to some black voters saying, we don’t get it. Why are your numbers surging? And they said, you know, we don’t love Trump. He’s got a big mouth, he says some stuff we don’t like. But he’s strong and I think the country’s going to be a little safer with him in there. He keeps people off balance.

And then others said, the economy, I don’t need to like him. I need my wallet to be a little fatter. And it was—they did some look back and the economy was like definably 16% more was going into people’s average paychecks under Trump than it is now.

So, yeah, we need a strong leader. There’s a chance we won’t get one. It’s not a lock. Trump wins. Robert Kennedy, also anti-military industrial complex. Could you ever vote for him?

SHAWN RYAN: I think I could vote for him. Could you?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a Candidate

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah, I definitely could vote for him. He’s too left for me on many, many issues. But I’m not as hardcore conservative as, like, a lot of my audience. I love that he’s kind of anti-establishment, anti-military industrial complex, anti-Big Pharma, that he’s an environmental lawyer.

I’m actually, I’m kind of green. I like the green agenda. Not the Green New Deal or any of that nonsense, but like, as a mother, you know, I would like to see us be a little bit more realistic about this climate change.

SHAWN RYAN: Hey, you know, that’s something—I love talking about this, you know, because you do something positive for the planet and conservatives, like, throw a shit fit.

MEGYN KELLY: Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: And it’s like, hey, man, we live here, right? In case you haven’t noticed, everybody’s dying of cancer. Cancer from shit in our foods, cancer from shit in the air, cancer from everything. It might be, you know, might be good for us to improve the planet a little bit. But that’s just my take.

MEGYN KELLY: What if we had our RFK Jr. in there saying, don’t eat that, don’t do that. That’s not getting a blessing anymore. This is the problem over here. He spent his whole life filing lawsuits against people who are polluting our environment in one way, shape or form. I love that.

I realize, I mean, he said he would allow abortion till the ninth month, then he walked it back. He’s not good on my issue, which is women’s rights against the crazy trans lobby. But I have more issues than just that, so I definitely could vote for RFK Jr.

Kennedy’s Abortion Stance

SHAWN RYAN: I just asked him about the full-term abortion thing. I just interviewed him last week and he told me that the only reason that he would go full term would be for the mother if she was going to die, if she—if there was a life-threatening situation.

MEGYN KELLY: So he’s arrived at that a little late.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: He told Sage Steele, it’s up to the mom, okay, whatever she wants, all the way through ninth month. And then Sage, who’s amazing, was like, a lot of us get uncomfortable when you say it’s okay for a mother just based on her own desire to abort a baby at full term. And he answered it again saying, well, I would—

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, really?

MEGYN KELLY: But then all the shitstorm came and he walked it back.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha, gotcha.

MEGYN KELLY: I mean, I understand if that’s your biggest issue, and it is for a lot of, you know, deeply faithful people in particular. He’s out.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: But anyway, it all depends on your hierarchy of, you know, principles. And I just, I love how anti-establishment he is.

SHAWN RYAN: Me too, man, me too.

Shawn’s Spiritual Journey

MEGYN KELLY: So speaking of faith, you are—you’ve had a bit of a metamorphosis in your own life on this front. Is that because of Katie or is that your own journey?

SHAWN RYAN: That’s my own journey. And do you want me to go into it?

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. Well, so I interview some—really, I have some really heavy interviews. Tyler Andrew Vargas was one of them. And I mean, it’s been a long time since I’d seen that. And to see a 24-year-old, you know, my studio’s on the second floor. And to watch him hobble up there with one leg, one arm, you know, it’s just—it got to me.

And the day before I interviewed him, I interviewed a hacker who had hacked into all these websites and pedophilia websites and downloaded all the user list, got it to the FBI. The FBI did nothing with it until I interviewed him. And super dark interview.

The reality is, I mean we—we pulled—we caught a child predator in five seconds. Because I didn’t realize—I was like, you hear about this stuff, right? And how, how common it is, but you don’t—I don’t—I didn’t see it.

And so he’s in there, we’re doing the interview and I said, hey, you got your laptop. Pull it out, get in any—I don’t care what it is. Instagram, TikTok, whatever teen chat room you want. I just want to see how long this takes. He made the screen name Ashley 13, New Jersey. Literally five seconds. It’s on camera. We screen recorded.

MEGYN KELLY: So he was in like a room—

SHAWN RYAN: Five seconds before, 40-something-year-old man was wanting to meet a 13-year-old girl at a—wherever.

MEGYN KELLY: Sick.

Confronting Dark Realities

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And so, so that’s that, that’s what I mean, this is the stuff that I cover. And so me and my wife were going on vacation. I just finished up those two interviews, especially the one with Ryan Montgomery, who’s the hacker. That just really got to me. You know, the kids stuff really gets to me.

MEGYN KELLY: The guys who work in that industry, shutting those down. It’s a very hard life.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And so we went to Sedona and there was also—what else was happening? The Chinese spy balloon just flew over.

MEGYN KELLY: The—

SHAWN RYAN: I saw, I think it was—was it—Reba came out saying, oh, I think it’s freedom of speech that that drag queen should be able to, you know—

MEGYN KELLY: Show up in kids.

SHAWN RYAN: And I’m just—and I got to this point where I was like, man, am I, am I the only person that like gives a shit about this stuff but actually cares about kids and like why we just abandoned our allies in Afghanistan and why is there a 24-year-old that was blown up unnecessarily?

I mean, they had the guy PID in his sights. They could have killed that bomber, you know, and now all of his friends are dead and he’s—and so these are all the things that are going through my head.

And I had, I had hit this point. I was having a conversation in my head and I’d hit this point where it was like, why do you even talk about this stuff anymore? Nobody cares, you know, about the MAPs thing.

MEGYN KELLY: Minor attractive persons, they’re trying to redefine pedophilia into this “minor attracted person.” Normal. Just like a fetish, you know, like some people have a foot fetish, some people have a toddler fetish. And we’re supposed to accept this.

A Spiritual Awakening

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And you know, and so I’m just seeing all these things, and I’m like, how can anybody buy into this shit? I have family that votes left, you know? And it just gets to me. It makes my skin crawl. Like, I can’t. I don’t understand how anybody could support any of what I just rattled off.

And so it got to me, and I got to this point where I was like, I can’t live like this anymore. Like, I can’t. If nobody gives a… Maybe I’m the one that has something wrong with it. You know, maybe this is all acceptable and I just, I’m not, my brain isn’t switching. Maybe I’m the problem and I shouldn’t be fighting this anymore. I need to be happy.

And it basically felt like I was surrendering to evil and I was trying to convince myself to be fine with it.

So we’re staying in this nice resort in Sedona. They had a guarded gate, and I pay attention to that kind of stuff because of my background. And a lot of the guys knew me that worked there from my podcast and wanted to talk.

Well, we were there for a week. The last day I walk through, and it’s this old man in there, and he wanted to talk to me. Me and my wife had gone up to a hike because I was like, I just, I got to get the hell out of here. Maybe a hike will make me feel better.

Walk back down, and this guy starts trying to talk to me. It’s dark. At this point, I had already kind of surrendered. Like, I’m done. I didn’t feel good. But I had kind of made my decision. Like, I’m not doing this anymore. And I’m kind of looking at him over the shoulder, like, I’m not in the mood to strike up a conversation. But my wife starts talking to him, and I’m like, I just want to go to my room.

The Man Who Read His Mind

So I turn around and this guy, this guy read my mind from front to back. And I mean, like, I’ve never had that happen. It wasn’t, I mean, it was descriptive. It scared the shit out of me because I was like, how are you in my head?

And he started rattling off all these thoughts that I was having on that entire hike. And he’s like, “The stuff that’s going on in China, that’s not your fight anymore. And this stuff that’s going on with the kids, that’s not your fight either. And this stuff that’s going on with the trans community, that’s not your fight.”

And I, my, I had shut down. I was like, how is this guy in my head right now? Freaked me out.

We’re walking back to our bungalow. We were in a place where it was like, kind of like a duplex. And we’re on one side, somebody else is on another side.

We got there, we got, when we got to Sedona, my best friend that I was referring to earlier, his name’s Gabe, he died of a heroin overdose later on. But Gabe was a SEAL. Gabe was a pro hockey player. Gabe was a fighter. We was into MMA. Gabe was at the agency with me.

And no matter where Gabe was, Gabe was always, always known as a protector. Like, no matter what unit he was in, no matter who he was with, could be the manliest of all men. Like, everybody knows Gabe has got you. And he was my best friend.

Gabe’s Doppelgänger

Well, we get there and we see this guy and he looks identical. He could be Gabe’s identical twin. I mean, you could see differences, but same brow line, same jawline, same build, same walk, same three day shadow, same everything, muscular.

And me and my wife are both like, man, that looks exactly like Gabe. And everywhere we would go, this guy was at. If we were at the pool, this guy was at the pool. If we were going on a hike, this guy was coming back from a hike. If we were out in town getting dinner, he was out in town getting dinner.

And we had always thought it was weird because I had kind of had a breakdown on the plane to Sedona. And so I was in a vulnerable spot. My wife knew it, I was in a vulnerable spot. I knew it. I was with my buddy Dave, and he knew it.

And it was just odd that Gabe, who’s always known as a protector, is like every, this guy that looks identical to him is everywhere.

Well, it turns out, right from that gate, we walk to our bungalow, and it turns out this guy and his family is staying right across the thing from us, and we hadn’t seen him all week. And I’m like, that was weird.

And on the way back, I’m telling Katie, I’m like, “Holy shit. I think that was God that was reading my mind.” And she’s like, “Yeah, Shawn, that was God.” And I’m like, “I can’t believe this. Like, how is this happening?”

And she’s like, “Shawn, God’s always been around you. You just don’t make time for him.” And I knew that to be true.

A Message from Beyond

So we get to the bungalow, Gabe staying across the way, or the look alike, whatever you want to call it. We find out he’s staying right across. This is all within like 10, 15 minutes. Then we go in, and I am, I’m crying, and I’m like, I can’t believe this is happening.

And right before, also right before we went to Sedona, a good friend of mine, his name was Dan Cirillo, died. He was kind of the only, he was a SEAL and a businessman, and he lived in Franklin. And I don’t have a lot of people that I can relate to where I live now in Franklin.

And Dan is one of those guys that, that he’s very successful. He owned a couple of hospitals. He owned a big security business. And he’s like one of the few people that I can sit down with and talk business and talk friends, and he doesn’t need anything from me, and I don’t need anything from him. And those, you know, those relationships get hard to come by. And so we hit it off really fast.

And then he died on a hunting trip with his son. Had a heart attack. And, but, hey, I mean, if there’s a way to go, good on him.

But anyways, his daughter, who I had never met, I’m having this breakdown in the hotel, and his daughter, I heard my phone go off while I was talking to Katie. And as soon as we kind of finished what we were talking about, about what was going on, I checked my phone, and it’s from his daughter.

And it’s this text. I’d never even met her before. And she says she must have got my number from her dad’s phone. And she said, “Hey, Shawn, this is Taylor, Dan’s daughter. And I just walked into my dad’s gun room for the first time since he had passed away, and he grabbed me by the arm and told me that I needed to contact you because you knew a side of him that nobody else knew. And that he wanted me to tell you that he loves you just the way that you are and that you’re doing exactly what you should be doing.”

And then I’m trying not to lose it right now, but so that was like the third thing. All within, like I said, 10, 15 minutes. And I was like, holy shit. Like, there’s no…

MEGYN KELLY: Exactly.

SHAWN RYAN: And no brick wall. Yeah. And so, you know, I grew up Catholic and never really took church seriously. I never did. And then when I left home, I never really went back, and it kind of lost faith. And I’m not saying I wasn’t a believer. I just didn’t really care, and I didn’t think about it, and I had definitely no time for God.

And so I took that as a, I mean, that was like a slap in the face, and I decided I needed to get serious about faith and at least look into it. And it’s been great. And, you know, to be honest, it’s the only thing I can find that makes any damn sense anymore. And it’s all in that book. Everything we’re seeing happening right now is in that book.

Finding Faith Through Scripture

MEGYN KELLY: Is that how you started just reading the Bible?

SHAWN RYAN: I did. I did. I started trying to read it from front to back, and I wasn’t really getting anywhere.

MEGYN KELLY: Some shocking stuff in that Old Testament, if you go that way.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. But then, turns out, as it turns out, my entire team, I’m really close with my team, my podcast team, the guys that work for me and make it what it is. And turns out one guy was raised Southern Baptist, super well versed in the Bible.

My editor, Darren, grew up a Jehovah’s Witness and escaped it, but knows, I mean, knows that book from front to back. My IT guy, Adam, devout Catholic, knows it all, everything. Elijah, my production manager, he’s the Southern Baptist guy. And they kind of started pouring into me.

And a lot of my buddies that were in the SEAL teams, Eddie Penny really kind of paved the way for all of this, I think. Eddie Penny was a, we were at Team Two together. And then he went on to Dev Group and just like a, like, I mean, not who you would expect to come to faith, but he was my Christmas episode a couple years ago, and ever since he came on and gave his testimony of how he came to, everybody that’s been on the show has brought it up.

And he became kind of a mentor of mine. So I called Eddie and told him, and I said, “Hey, this is what happened. I don’t really know where to start. I don’t really know what this means.” And we had a conversation, and he goes, he was like, “Oh, man.” He’s like, “A lot of us have been praying for this to happen.”

MEGYN KELLY: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: And that kind of freaked me out. I was like, what do you mean? And he’s like, “We’ve been waiting for this.” He’s like, “You have a big voice and this needs to happen.”

Guardian Angels and Divine Synchronicity

And so that was at about midnight. Now I’m getting into some other kind of weird synchronicity, coincidences. And so about 12 hours later I had a meeting that Adam, my IT guy, scheduled with me at noon. And Eddie was telling, Eddie was telling me during the conversation he was talking about guardian angels and all this other stuff, spiritual warfare stuff that I know nothing about.

Well, fast forward 12 hours, I’m talking to Adam. I didn’t know what this meeting, I thought it was about email marketing or something and he wanted to talk to me about spiritual warfare and guardian angels.

MEGYN KELLY: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: And I was like, it was literally like almost the exact same conversation as I had had with Eddie Penny.

MEGYN KELLY: You’re like, that’s not on the drop down menu of message manager.

SHAWN RYAN: I know. And they’re not friends. I mean Adam is, with all due…

MEGYN KELLY: Respect, they hadn’t coordinated those two guys.

SHAWN RYAN: Eddie is built like a shit brick house, a Dev Group operator and Adam is an IT computer nerd who I love to death. And so no, they don’t, there’s no cross pollination. They’re not friends. They’ve never spoken, exact same conversation at noon.

Come home for lunch from my studio to be with the wife and kids and Adam and anyways, I go back to work, I look at my clock in my truck and it says it’s 4:44. I look at the odometer, it says 444 miles left to E. And this is 4 hours and 44 minutes after my conversation with Adam about guardian angels.

So I look up the meaning of 4:44 and it is “your guardian angels want you to know that they have got you.” And I’m just, I’m like, holy shit man. Like we just had two conversations about guardian angels and now I’m seeing 444 everywhere within, yeah, and the meaning of it supposedly according to Google, is your guardian angels want you to know that they’ve got you.

And so I’ve been in it ever since. And I’ve had some great mentors and started going to church that didn’t last very long. And now we have a group of, there’s four families including us, a lot of trust, very close friends of ours and we just have a discussion every week, every Tuesday.

So when I get home today, that’s what we’re doing and it’s cool. You get to ask the tough questions. You don’t need to be embarrassed. You’re not going to offend anybody. You don’t feel judged like you’re going to church, you know, I always feel like I’m being judged.

MEGYN KELLY: Oh, hello, we’re Catholic.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Built in and there’s none of that. And man, you know, when you kind of take all of the BS that religion kind of injects into your journey of building relationship with the Creator and Jesus, it’s really interesting and it can be a lot of fun.

MEGYN KELLY: I know what you’re saying. My audience knows I’ve been having a not unrelated struggle on that exact score.

SHAWN RYAN: Really?

Faith, Forgiveness, and Finding Peace

MEGYN KELLY: Yeah, yeah. I’m Catholic, lifelong Catholic. And I started the process of having my first marriage annulled. And instead of bringing me closer to God or setting me on a path that I thought would land well, it really has kind of alienated me and it’s caused a bit of a crisis of faith.

You know, like, who are these middlemen I have to go through in order to have a clean relationship with God? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I think God loves me. And God sees me in a loving marriage with three wonderful kids who have two great parents who are in love. And he’s thrilled and he will accept me into his kingdom when it’s all said and done.

And if he doesn’t, it’s certainly not going to be because I didn’t get a paper. I got a paper divorce from Dan, but I didn’t get an annulment from a priest, and then marry Doug in a Catholic church. It doesn’t make any sense to me. So that’s sort of where I am right now. I’m still wrestling with it.

I got tons of great feedback, by the way. Thank you to my audience, because many thoughtful emails on it from Catholic listeners, but also just Christian listeners who don’t believe in that middleman thing either. And I haven’t resolved it.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I’ll keep my opinion to myself, but why the middleman is a lie. There are no middlemen. It’s just about you and your relationship and that’s it. You know that. And when you think like that, I mean, it gives me a sense of peace.

And then you start looking at all the stuff that’s going on, like Trans Visibility Day being declared on Easter Sunday. You can’t tell me these aren’t signs. And this is all, like I said, this is all in there. I’m still reading through it. I’m not through it all yet. I don’t claim to be an expert. But I see things. I have a team to lean on who’s well versed in this stuff.

MEGYN KELLY: That was very fortunate.

SHAWN RYAN: And everything we’re seeing happen is in that book. And when you come to that realization, it’s really odd. But all the stuff that was bothering me, and it still does bother me, but at the same time, it makes me stronger because that was supposed to happen. That’s in that book.

Like, really? Like Trans Visibility Day, a confusion of genders on Easter Sunday, making a mockery of the Resurrection. That was in there.

MEGYN KELLY: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: And so.

Finding Strength Through Faith

MEGYN KELLY: So how do you feel now? Do you feel a difference physically, emotionally?

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah.

MEGYN KELLY: Now versus during the Chinese trial balloon period, which was dark.

SHAWN RYAN: Definitely. I mean, I’m at peace with it. I mean, I’m still going to fight the good fight, and I’m still going to bring truth and uncover corruption and tell these stories, and I’m not going to bend a knee to anything.

But seeing it all happen, it is actually making me stronger because I found something in a world of nothing that makes any sense at all. Not a damn bit of sense. This makes all the sense in the world. It aligns with the values that I’ve always had, or maybe I align with its values.

But yeah, it’s helped me. And then you start learning about, you know, maybe forgiveness is for you and not for the people that did something bad to you that was unjust. It’s for your sense of peace, not for theirs.

You can go on and waste all that bad energy hating somebody and talking shit about them and complaining and, “Oh, I got screwed over and I’m a victim.” But the minute you forgive them, that’s off your plate, and it’s like a cleanse.

MEGYN KELLY: Amen. God bless you. Thank you so much for coming on and telling your story and all these personal details about your life. What a pleasure. What an honor to know you.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. And like I said, I was really excited to meet you and just happy to be here.

MEGYN KELLY: I’m honored and honestly, God bless you. Thank you for your service. Thanks to all of our military members, active duty and retired, and those we’ve lost for the service and sacrifice. We appreciate it.

SHAWN RYAN: God bless you, too.

MEGYN KELLY: I hope this is the first of many, Shawn.

SHAWN RYAN: Me too.

MEGYN KELLY: It was amazing.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

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