When president Trump signed his Executive Order supporting psychedelics in April, he was flanked by not one but four Navy SEALs, highlighting the importance of Special Ops soldiers to the mainstreaming of psychedelics with the American public.
From the Luttrell brothers to Marcus Capone, from Shawn Ryan to Dan Crenshaw to Osama-killer Robert O’Neill, Navy SEALs have used their fame to promote ibogaine, 5meoDMT, MDMA and other psychedelics. But now, the most famous of them all - podcaster Shawn Ryan - says he is under spiritual attack since encountering demonic entities at an ibogaine / 5meoDMT retreat, and has sought four exorcisms from Catholic priests, none of which has worked. The ibogaine movement must be praying he quickly finds the support he needs.
Shawn Ryan Palmisano joined the US Navy aged 18 and made it into Navy SEALs, deploying in Iraq, where he guarded Iraqi politicians. He left the Navy in 2006, and worked as a contractor through Blackwater for the Global Response Staff (GRS), a paramilitary security wing of the CIA. After that, he became addicted to painkillers and other drugs and spent time in Colombia, where he claims he became a cocaine trafficker.
Then he got therapy and started a podcast. He made his name doing confessional interviews with Special Ops soldiers. Elite warriors shedding tears made for compulsive listening and Ryan was soon getting millions of followers. But he had bigger ambitions. “I want to take the Rogan slot,” he said in 2022. “I’m going real broad. I’m honestly getting bored with the Special Operations stuff.”
He first tried psychedelics at the Ambio clinic in Mexico in 2022, where he took ibogaine followed by 5meoDMT. He went there seeking healing from substance-abuse issues, and was accompanied by fellow former SEAL Marcus Capone of VETS, the non-profit that brings veterans to Ambio for ibogaine healing. Ryan was served the medicines by Trevor Millar, co-founder of Ambio. He came back gushing: everyone should do ibogaine and 5meoDMT, everyone should donate to VETS, psychedelics should be legalized now, and the government and Big Pharma were ‘murdering people’ by not legalizing psychedelics immediately.
Ryan said that his trips had turned him off booze and opened him up to the spiritual: ‘I realized there was a lot more going on in the universe around us that we don’t see.’ His psychedelic episode also opened him up to a bigger audience, and became one of his most popular episodes. Ambio replayed clips from it on their social media channels, then Ryan interviewed Trevor Millar on his show (250,000 views and counting). When he sat down with Secretary of Veteran Affairs Doug Collins last year, he gave another shout-out to Ambio, which immediately got repackaged and amplified by Ambio’s social media.
In 2023, Ryan went to Sedona, feeling close to a breakdown due to his concerns about COVID, vaccines, China, open borders, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, trans rights and drag queens. The breakdown led to an epiphany - he felt like he met God, then saw a UFO, then embraced Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour. From then on, he became noticeably more into the paranormal, as in the popular 2023 episode, ‘US Marine Encounters UFO Black Ops Human Trafficking Operation’.
2024 was his breakout year. He went from outside the top 50 US podcasts to producing some of the most popular episodes of the year. He also started to become a political player. His 2024 campaign interview with Donald Trump has 53 million views on YouTube. He also interviewed JD Vance, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Fox News presenter Pete Hesgeth. ‘And then five days later he gets picked for Secretary of Defence’, Ryan recalled. ‘I’m like, holy shit, the show has power. Then I went to the Army-Navy football game and he points at me, he goes, “Thank you.”
Then came the death of Matthew Livelsberger in January 2025. On New Year’s Day, active-duty Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger detonated a Cybertruck outside Trump’s Las Vegas hotel, killing himself and injuring seven people, apparently to publicize UFO secrets he claimed to know. He had tried to get on as a guest on Ryan’s show. A day after his death, Ryan posted: ‘My family and I are disappearing for a few days. What we are about to release is mind boggling and will raise a lot of questions.’ The next day, Ryan posted an episode with retired army officer Sam Shoemate, who read aloud an email he received from Livelsberger claiming that America and China had “gravitic propulsion systems.” The episode took the Shawn Ryan Show to the number one slot on the US podcast charts, briefly overtaking Joe Rogan (it’s now number 3 on the US Spotify podcast charts).
‘People are manufacturing narratives just to create controversies so they can boost their views. And I don’t know who to believe. I don’t know what to believe anymore at all.’
Since 2024, Ryan has followed Tucker Carlson in becoming increasingly demon-obsessed. He told Carlson: ‘I became obsessed with evil, like obsessed with it…In the end, we’re all evil. We all have an evil side to us.’ In October 2024 he featured Catholic exorcist Fr Dan Reehill on an episode called ‘Inside the Demonic World’, and another Catholic exorcist, Fr Chad Ripperger, for two episodes this year (‘Inside the Most Disturbing Exorcism Cases’ in March 2026 and ‘The Signs of Diabolical Influence in the US’ in July 2026’). In these interviews, homosexuality and transgenderism are often depicted as signs of demonic influence.
In July, he appeared on the Tucker Carlson show and declared he’d just come from an ibogaine / 5meoDMT retreat that had gone awry:
Ryan: I just got back from an ibogaine 5-MeO experience. Didn’t go great. Found hell.
Carlson: Hell?
Ryan: Hell…It’s been a long 3 weeks. And I’ll just say this— I’ve talked to some of the most respected exorcists in the country. And I’ve been working with them and things have happened. Really scary shit…It definitely sent me down a new path that I’m still trying to figure out…I’m full-blown going back into the Catholic Church now
How does he feel about psychedelics now, Carlson asked.
I kept saying that, like, psychedelics would be like a f*ing quick fix for me. I just want to clean it out, I want to reset. And I would take all the science that they’re finding, the good things about it, and justify it. But in the end, I think you’re opening— you’re just in a forbidden realm that maybe we should or should not be f***ing around in. I won’t be f**ing around in that realm anymore, I can tell you that. I got strict guidance— strict guidance from God— and that is, don’t mess around in that anymore. But it’s done a lot of great things for people. And it’s done a lot of great things for me. As painful as this is to go through, I’m thankful for it.
This time Ambio, where I understand he returned to, did not splice up the show for shareable clips on social media. In fact, the entire psychedelic culture has not said a word about the haunting of Shawn Ryan.
Then, last week, Ryan hosted Cardinal Raymond Burke, a hard-right American Catholic, and told him he felt he, his family and his staff had been under spiritual attack in the weeks since the psychedelic retreat.
What in the name of Our Lady of Guadalupe is going on?
