The Scoop
Just a few years ago, Shawn Ryan was teaching himself how to run video and audio equipment so he could film a show about veterans and the military. The former US Navy SEAL set up a low-budget studio in his attic with cameras that could only record 30 minutes, and asked his wife to help monitor the video and audio. Now, 160 episodes in, he has one of the most listened-to podcasts in the country every week, with the previous election’s presidential candidates banging down his door to appear on the show — and the power to (accidentally) nearly sink a nomination for secretary of defense.
“I know we’re on the cutting edge of this, and I think this is a historic time in journalism and media in general, and we’re at the forefront of it,” Ryan told Semafor in a telephone call recently. “I want to be able to continue to be a big part of that and to help form the new landscape.”
With very little attention or promotion in legacy or conservative media, Ryan’s show has rocketed to the top of the Apple and Spotify podcast charts over the past two years and basically stayed there. The show focuses largely on the lives and experiences of famous and totally obscure veterans, with hours spent during each episode telling individual combat stories, discussing war trauma and PTSD, and occasionally reflecting on military policy today.
Some of the episodes dabble (or dive head-first) into conspiracy theories: In a recent episode, Ryan interviews a man who claims he encountered aliens; in another, he interviews an exorcist. But with Trump’s ascension to the White House, Ryan’s show has gained greater attention.
Earlier this month, Pete Hegseth was repeatedly grilled by Democratic members of the Senate Armed Service Committee about comments he made on Ryan’s show that he was “straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” and that all of the joint chiefs of staff and anyone “involved in any of the DEI woke shit has got to go.” Late last year, Călin Georgescu, an ultranationalist Romanian presidential candidate, invited him to Europe to speak about NATO and raise awareness in the Western media about the disputed results of that country’s 2024 presidential election.
Ryan told Semafor that in addition to hosting Republican 2024 presidential candidates on the show, including Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, he briefly discussed a potential appearance by Kamala Harris, but it didn’t go anywhere.
Ryan said the keys to his show’s success are threefold. He focuses on booking interesting guests, avoiding people on the book tour circuit and preferring to find people himself or through suggestions from previous guests. And while his show is an increasingly popular destination for politicians, particularly on the right, he’s trying not to let high-profile political figures eclipse his military guests.
“Once I did a politician, then every politician wants to come on, and I’m like, ‘No, I’m not the Republican show, that’s not me.’ But yeah, everybody — everybody who’s starting a business, everybody who’s written a book — they all want to come on.”
He also said he believes his show resonates with many veterans because traditional news outlets do not do enough to cover the military from the perspective of soldiers on the ground. And he feels that too many hosts in military-focused media are overly interested in telling their own stories, leaving an opening for someone who understood the military but didn’t try to upstage their guests with exciting war stories.
“I noticed the veteran space was also a very egocentric space,” he said. “Nobody could make it about their guest — they wanted to make it about them.”
The show’s popularity has helped turn it from a side gig into a serious media business with a growing staff. Ryan told Semafor that 50% of his revenue comes from programmatic and direct advertising that he sells himself, and then the other 50% is a mix of Patreon subscriptions (which helped support the show in its initial days), merch sales, and equity deals with businesses that advertise on the show. Ryan said he had enough incoming that he was looking to hire a CEO to run the business side so he could focus on its content.