On Joe Rogan's podcast, Shawn Ryan mentions his suicide attempt mid-sentence. "I was, I mean I tried to kill myself." Then he pivots to veteran statistics. No pause. No lingering. Just data.

That moment tells you more about Shawn Ryan than any SEAL trident or podcast ranking ever could. He's not hiding the pain. He's processing it the way he processes everything: through observation, analysis, and carefully measured disclosure.

That's the signature of an Enneagram Type 5, "The Investigator." It runs through every chapter of his life.

TL;DR: Why Shawn Ryan is an Enneagram Type 5
  • Built an empire by listening: His podcast dominates because Shawn asks questions and gets out of the way, gathering information over performing
  • Self-described introvert: Despite running a top-3 podcast, Shawn says "I'm not a very public person, I don't like going out in public"
  • Intelligence as a career: SEAL reconnaissance, CIA Global Response Staff. He chose careers built on observation and operating in the shadows
  • Even self-destruction was systematic: In Colombia, he mapped drug supply chains like an intelligence operation. The analytical mind doesn't switch off
  • Found faith through data: His spiritual awakening came through pattern recognition, not a sermon or emotional conversion
  • Lost access to his own emotions: Years of compartmentalization cost him the ability to feel, something he's confessed publicly

What is Shawn Ryan's Personality Type?

Shawn Ryan is an Enneagram Type 5 (The Investigator)

Type 5s are the most internally-focused type in the Enneagram. Their core fear: being useless, overwhelmed, or incapable. Their response? Withdraw. Observe. Gather knowledge until you understand the world so thoroughly that nothing catches you off guard.

Most people see Shawn Ryan and see a warrior. The SEAL trident. The CIA missions. The confrontational interviews.

Look closer. What you're actually seeing is a deeply private man who processes the world by watching it before engaging with it. His greatest skill has always been intelligence-gathering, not brute force.

"I've hid my emotions for so long I don't even know how to access them anymore."

He spoke those words to his wife Katie on their podcast. Not emotional suppression. Actual loss of access to his own inner life. The observer who watched the world from the outside for so long that he forgot how to look inward.

The Observer Takes Shape

Chillicothe, Missouri. Population barely over 9,000. Shawn Ryan Palmisano grew up half-Japanese in a town that reminded him he was different every single day.

The racial slurs came regularly. His father was a military pharmacist, a man of precision, knowledge, and quiet service. But young Shawn didn't channel that energy into academics or sports. He channeled it inward.

He was good at "being rebellious, drinking, and getting into trouble."

No standout grades. No sports trophies. No clear path. But beneath the rebellion: a kid who felt like an outsider learning to watch the world from a distance. To read rooms. To figure out systems, even if the only system he was cracking was how to get away with things.

When a child feels overwhelmed by a world that actively rejects them, they develop a strategy. Retreat into your mind. Observe. Understand. Knowledge becomes the one thing nobody can take from you.

At 18, Shawn enlisted in the Navy. He tried Marine Corps Recon first. Hard no. The Army Green Berets laughed at him. He weighed about 130 pounds with no athletic distinction. The Navy recruiter finally approached him and introduced the SEAL Teams.

"I wanted to do something. One, I wanted to serve my country, and I wanted to finally give my parents a reason to be proud of me."

That wound, feeling insufficient, needing to prove competence, became the engine that drove everything that followed.

The Investigator's Career Arc

The SEAL Years: The Mental Switch

BUD/S Class 241. The training that breaks most candidates broke something specific in Shawn: his attachment to what other people thought of him.

During kill house training, clearing rooms with live rounds, every move critiqued, mistakes potentially fatal, Shawn hit a wall. Not a physical one. A psychological one.

"I had hit this mental switch where I don't care anymore. I had tricked myself into thinking I don't care how 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."

That deliberate severing of social evaluation, choosing to detach from others' judgment so your mind can operate freely, became a survival mechanism he'd carry for the next two decades. It would nearly kill him.

What kept him in BUD/S when others rang the bell wasn't toughness. It was the inability to face calling his parents and telling them he had failed. Again. The wound from Chillicothe held him in the water when his body wanted out.

SEAL Teams 2 and 8. From July 2001 to November 2006, Shawn deployed constantly. Haiti. Baghdad. Afghanistan. He received a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with Combat "V."

His team relieved SEAL Team 10 after Operation Red Wings, the incident behind Lone Survivor. After that disaster, he watched the war shift from precise special operations to bureaucratic prolongation. Something changed in how he understood what he was serving.

But what type of SEAL was he? Not the door-kicker who thrives on chaos. He was the operator who studies terrain, reads patterns, and makes sure his team has the information they need before a round is fired.

When he later arrived at a CIA compound in Afghanistan, he immediately identified that the team was "time and place predictable." Same routes, same times. He warned leadership. Nobody listened.

The next morning, over 100 Taliban fighters attacked. They held the compound from dawn until midnight with limited ammunition, burning classified materials, thinking they would die. The British Army finally extracted them. Nobody from the American side came.

His analytical mind had seen it coming. The system ignored him.

The CIA Chapter: Intelligence in Its Purest Form

After leaving the Navy in 2006, Shawn tried real estate. It didn't last. Not because he craved excitement, but because real estate didn't engage his mind. Nothing to study. Nothing to master. Nothing at stake.

"Everything that you've worked so hard to accomplish... you're at the Apex of what you do... and now nobody cares because you're not in that anymore. There goes my whole identity."

He joined the CIA's Global Response Staff, the same type of paramilitary unit depicted in 13 Hours about the Benghazi attack. Operating under the Counterterrorism Mission Center through organizations like Blackwater, he spent nearly a decade on intelligence protection, threat assessment, and pattern analysis in hostile territory. Surveillance, liaison, and collection. The observer behind the operators.

Type 5s don't gravitate toward danger for the adrenaline. They gravitate toward complexity. And nothing is more complex than reading the intentions of people who want to kill you.

From Hollywood to Camping Stoves

In December 2015, Shawn founded Vigilance Elite, a tactical training and apparel company. Hollywood came calling. He trained Keanu Reeves in close-quarters combat for John Wick: Chapter 3 and consulted on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, lending his likeness and voice for the character "Ronin."

Then the Special Operations community turned on him for the Keanu Reeves collaboration. The hate was intense. His response: pure withdrawal.

"I got sick of it. It's a very egocentric community anyways and so I was like, I'm done with this shit."

He didn't fight back. He didn't engage. He left. Then he floundered. Camping stove reviews on YouTube. Alpacas in the front yard because he thought he'd become a farmer. A man who had survived 20-plus deployments to 14 conflict zones was rating camping equipment and tending livestock.

Without a system to master, he drifted. Bounced between unconnected interests, searching for the next thing that would fully engage his mind.

But even during the gear review era, something was happening underneath. The few videos where Shawn shared actual war stories or had real conversations with other operators vastly outperformed the product content. His audience didn't want another tactical influencer. They wanted what Shawn actually had to offer: raw truth from someone who had been there.

The thing that finally gave him a system to master was a microphone.

The Podcast: How Therapy Built an Empire

The Shawn Ryan Show launched Christmas 2019, filmed in his attic with his wife manually resetting 30-minute camera timers. By late 2024, it hit #2 on Spotify, behind only Joe Rogan.

The show's origin wasn't ambition. It was frustration.

"I got sick of the same Talking Heads on TV documenting what happened over there who had never even stepped foot in any of those war zones."

Its secret weapon wasn't production value or controversy. It was something Shawn learned in three and a half years of twice-weekly therapy with a woman named Amy, a liberal South Florida therapist who had never spoken to a combat veteran before Shawn walked through her door.

"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... being in therapy twice a week for three and a half years really helped me as an interviewer."

Amy taught him that silence draws people out more than interrogation ever could. He took a healing methodology and turned it into a professional one. Three-hour episodes. No gotcha journalism. Just a former intelligence operative asking carefully chosen questions, then getting out of the way.

The results show in specific moments:

  • In Episode 15, DEVGRU operator DJ Shipley broke down in tears recounting the death of a teammate. Raw vulnerability from a Tier 1 operator. The clip went viral and signaled to the special operations community that this show was different.
  • Ethical hacker Ryan Montgomery ran a live sting operation from his laptop during Episode 56, catching a child predator in under sixty seconds on camera. That episode blew past the military niche and became the show's breakout moment.
  • Former SEAL Team 6 operator Pete Scobell chose the Shawn Ryan Show to break five years of public silence about the real Captain Phillips rescue.
  • When Chris Beck, one of the first transgender Navy SEALs, sat for six hours to discuss transitioning and then detransitioning, both sides of a politically charged topic praised the conversation's humanity.

Compare this to Joe Rogan's style, where the host debates, challenges, and inserts himself into the conversation. Shawn does the opposite. He creates a space so comfortable that guests say things they've never said publicly before.

"I'm not a very public person, I don't like going out in public... I sure as hell don't do public speeches. This is where I get my message across, me and you, nobody else is in the studio."

A private man who built one of the world's largest interview platforms. Entirely on his own terms, from a controlled environment.

The Business Nobody Sees

Vigilance Elite isn't just a podcast. It's a tactical training company, an apparel brand, and a media operation. Shawn's wife Katie serves as Director of Operations. They've built the whole thing together.

Consider this: a man who lists "zero hobbies other than boozing" before recovery, and currently only "business" and "kids" as his activities, built a media empire. He doesn't socialize recreationally. He doesn't attend industry events unless the mission demands it.

The business works because it's structured around competence and controlled engagement. The podcast requires deep, focused conversations, his strength. The training company channels his operational expertise. The apparel funds the operation. Every element serves the mission without requiring him to perform socially.

But Shawn has been honest about the cost:

"They would come on my show and then they would pass me up business-wise like that and I was like, what do I have to do to make a business out of this?"

That resentment toward guests who leveraged his platform to surpass him is rare vulnerability from someone who usually keeps the analytical mask in place.

The Off-Grid Retreat

Despite having a home in Miami, Shawn is happiest at his off-grid property at 10,500 feet in Colorado. Solar electricity, glacier-fed water, a propane stove, 50 acres, and a fox that visits the porch every night.

"I'm happier out there than I am in this beautiful place in Miami."

Not paranoid isolation. Genuine contentment in a place stripped down enough that the mind can finally rest.

When the Mind Turns on Itself

The Colombia Spiral

After leaving the CIA, Shawn's mind had nothing to process. No missions to analyze. No threats to read. No environments to master. Just civilian life, which for a man who'd been operating at the highest levels of human conflict for 14 years felt like suffocation.

"I just didn't care anymore."

Not dramatic despair. Flat resignation. He started with alcohol and cocaine. Then prescription pills: Valium, Xanax, Lorazepam, Ambien, Hydrocodone, Oxy, Tramadol. His freezer was packed with vodka mini bottles. His glove compartment too. Everywhere he went, flask or mini bottles. Close to two fifths of vodka per day.

Even the addiction was organized. Systematic. Pre-planned.

Then he moved to Medellin, Colombia. What happened next reveals more about his wiring than any personality test could.

He didn't just use drugs. He approached the Colombian drug trade like an intelligence operation:

"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."

He mapped supply chains from street level upward. Tested product quality. Embedded himself at progressively higher network levels. Traveled to Peru, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, seeking out "the most dangerous places in the world." The man who gathered intelligence for a living couldn't stop gathering intelligence, even when the operation was his own annihilation.

He overdosed multiple times. Colombian federal police began surveilling him. Friends stopped coming around. "He's down in Colombia and nobody really hears from him anymore."

"I just didn't value life anymore. I didn't care. I had expected to die down there."

The Suicide Attempt He Doesn't Remember

Back in Boca Raton after a night out, Shawn blacked out. He woke up to find his house smelling like gasoline. A Glock from his safe, not his carry weapon, sat on the couch next to a pile of clothes. His garage door was hot to the touch. Inside, his Audi A8 was running with the seat fully reclined. The exhaust had melted a hole in the gas tank, starting a small fire.

He'd attempted carbon monoxide suicide. He has no memory of any of it.

So he reconstructed the timeline from physical evidence. Like an operative analyzing a crime scene. The hot door. The running car. The reclined seat. The gun pulled from a specific safe. The clothes on the couch. He pieced together his own near-death the way he would have analyzed an operational incident report.

The gap between the emotional reality of what happened and his clinical processing of it tells you everything about how this mind works.

The Father Standing Over the Bed

During a visit home, Shawn blacked out on benzodiazepines the night before a Cardinals game with his father. He woke to find his dad standing over his bed. Tearing up. Helpless.

Notice how Shawn describes this moment: "I could tell he was like, he didn't know what to do." He describes his father's emotion. Not his own. Even at rock bottom, he's watching someone else's reaction rather than articulating what he himself was feeling.

The Mother's Day Call

Junked out in a penthouse in Medellin, he called his mother. The same shame that had kept him in BUD/S, the horror of disappointing his parents, cut through everything:

He didn't want his parents to "get a notice weeks later that their son had overdosed on cocaine in a penthouse in Colombia."

He ran an escape-and-evasion protocol: cleaned his apartment, ran a surveillance detection route, went to an internet cafe, booked flights, and vanished from Colombia.

The Long Road Back

What Happened After He Fled

The transition from Colombia wasn't instant transformation. Shawn promised his therapist he'd stop drinking vodka. His solution? He "successfully transitioned to wine" and considered himself improved. He quit most benzodiazepines on his own but kept an "emergency stash."

Still broken. Still numbing. Just rationalizing a slightly less destructive version of the same pattern.

Then he met Katie. His best friend David Rutherford wanted to sight in a new sniper rifle at a thousand-yard range. Katie's dad met them, and Katie "jumped out of the truck." She had 15 years of sobriety.

"I couldn't talk to anybody like that other than my therapist."

For a man whose entire social world had collapsed to exactly one person, finding someone who could meet him with that kind of honesty was seismic. But even Katie only had partial awareness of how bad things were. He was "hiding a lot of that shit." The fortress holds even against intimate partners.

The Surrender a Type 5 Fears Most

The real transformation came through psychedelic-assisted therapy: ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT treatments facilitated by VETS, an organization helping U.S. Special Operations veterans heal.

During the 12-hour ibogaine session, Shawn's brain defaulted to what it knows best. He watched his own life like surveillance footage.

"It was like two rows of TV screens going through my vision... somebody just put a bunch of life events on a deck of cards, shuffled them up, and said we're going to send these through Shawn's brain."

But when he tried to focus on any single memory, they all disappeared. He had to let them come to him. He had to surrender the one thing that defines him: mental control.

"Every time I would try to jump into that specific experience... everything would go away. So I would have to concentrate on not trying to concentrate."

The 5-MeO-DMT session that followed was, in his words, worse than any combat where he thought he would die. "The most anxiety, most fear, most sadness that I'd ever felt all at once." Total loss of control, then desperate connection to his wife and six-month-old son, then surrender.

He chose to do it without an eye mask. Even in ego death, the observer wanted to watch.

After the sessions, the healing came not as emotional catharsis but as information, what he calls a "download."

"It wasn't any effort either... my mind got a download and it was just — this stuff's poison, this is poison, this is poison... there was no urges, there was no cravings."

His brain reclassified substances from "necessary" to "poison" and behavior changed instantly. He quit alcohol, Adderall, Ambien, and sugar, all at once, with zero effort. The analytical mind that had been serving his destruction simply updated its model.

How a Type 5 Finds Faith

Shawn's path to faith was not emotional surrender. It was an investigation.

After the psychedelic experience cracked open his worldview, he chased every lead he could find: astrology, quantum physics, ancient civilizations, frequencies, consciousness. He was "looking in all the wrong places for the answers," but the compulsion to research was always the driver.

Then something happened that his mind couldn't dismiss. Guest after guest, regardless of background, started talking to him about the Bible. Dozens of unrelated people arriving at the same conclusion.

"I don't think that's a coincidence."

He read Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ, an investigative journalist's evidence-based examination of Christianity. Not devotional. Not emotional. Forensic. On the plane, everything broke open. He put on sunglasses, pulled his hat down, and cried. Even in conversion, controlling what others could see.

Then came Sedona. At his lowest point, ready to "check out," a series of encounters he describes as impossible coincidences converged in a way his analytical mind couldn't file away: a stranger who seemed to read his thoughts, a man identical to his deceased best friend appearing at the adjacent bungalow, a perfectly timed text from a dead friend's daughter. He started tracking patterns. Repeated numbers, unlikely timing, connections that defied his probability models. The investigator found something the data couldn't explain.

"It's the only thing I can find that makes any damn sense anymore... not a damn bit of sense, this makes all the sense in the world."

He began Bible study with Eddie Penney. He rejected organized church because he "always felt judged," instead creating a small four-family discussion group where he could "ask the tough questions." He and Katie were baptized on Easter 2024.

His biggest remaining struggle? Forgiveness.

"The thing that I struggle with the most is forgiveness because I don't want to forgive these people ever."

He understands the concept intellectually. Executing it is another matter.

Katie and the Family That Grounds Him

Katie Jean Williams has been sober since May 7, 2009. She serves as Director of Operations at Vigilance Elite and co-hosts "The Debrief" segments on the podcast. She was there when Shawn's compartmentalization collapsed, the one who knew something was wrong even when he was still hiding it.

Their meeting on the gun range wasn't just romantic. It was the first time Shawn had found someone outside of therapy he could actually talk to. Katie's long sobriety gave her a steadiness his chaos needed. She manages the noise. He goes deep.

"She was real. And I had not been around a real woman in a long time."

Their children represent something Shawn went to psychedelic therapy specifically to be present for:

"I just wanted to be more in the moment with my family. I got two little kids now."

His reason for seeking the most intense therapeutic experience of his life: "be a better dad."

The father-son thread runs through Shawn's entire story. The military pharmacist in Chillicothe whose son couldn't make him proud. The kid at BUD/S who endured the worst training on earth because he couldn't face calling his parents with another failure. The addict in Colombia whose mother's voice was the only thing that cut through the drugs. The man whose father stood over his bed, tearing up, helpless.

And now a father himself, choosing to homeschool his children because he believes being deeply involved in their lives matters more than convenience. The man who lost access to his emotions for decades is trying to raise kids who never have to.

When Data Overrides Loyalty

Type 5s don't confront out of emotion. They confront when analysis produces a conclusion that can't be rationalized away. They watch until the evidence becomes undeniable, then act with a precision that unsettles people.

Questioning Power

In late 2025, Shawn publicly questioned Congressman Dan Crenshaw's personal wealth and suggested insider trading. When Crenshaw responded with what Shawn interpreted as a veiled threat referencing SEAL Team 6, Shawn didn't escalate. He published the receipts and held his position. Evidence over posturing.

After hosting abuse prevention advocate Elizabeth Carlock Phillips, whose brother was victimized at Kanakuk Kamps, Shawn repeated claims about systemic abuse. Attorneys sent a cease-and-desist. His lawyer welcomed legal discovery. Same pattern: follow the evidence, refuse intimidation, let the process validate the analysis.

The Political Reckoning

The most revealing confrontation has been with his own political tribe. In August 2024, Shawn hosted Donald Trump in what he called "the biggest interview of my career." The show finished 2024 in Spotify's top 10, partly on the strength of that episode. He supported Trump's victory.

Then he started tracking results. By late 2025, the assessment was blunt:

"Nothing I voted for happened."

He cataloged broken promises the way he once cataloged threat patterns: the Ukraine war Trump said he'd end before taking office, the Epstein files that were never released, new military engagements despite the "no new wars" pledge. He called the White House's handling of the Epstein files "botched" and accused them of "protecting pedophiles."

"Every time I have a politician, whether it's Trump or some congressman, they all lie."

This isn't partisan disillusionment. It's what happens when a Type 5 gives someone the benefit of his analysis, watches the data come in, and updates his model. Tribal loyalty doesn't override evidence. He began hosting guests across the political spectrum, Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, Hunter Biden, not because he shifted ideologically, but because limiting his sources would compromise the investigation.

The Moral Reckoning

The deepest confrontation has been with his own career. After years of investigating the military-industrial complex, connecting defense contractors, funding flows, and political corruption into coherent frameworks, Shawn arrived at a conclusion that undermined his entire professional identity:

"I don't think we're the good guys anymore. I don't agree with a lot of the shit that I was involved in as a SEAL or CIA contractor."

A man who spent over a decade in service, ruthlessly reassessing his own framework because the data no longer supports it.

Not everyone applauds these confrontations. Critics point to his coverage of UFOs and spiritual warfare as territory that undermines his credibility. His willingness to wade into conspiracy-adjacent topics alongside investigative work creates a split: supporters see fearlessness, detractors see recklessness. But the pattern holds. Follow the evidence. Say what you find.

What Doesn't Fit the Type 5 Reading

No personality typing captures a person completely. There are real complications in reading Shawn as a pure Type 5.

He left the SEAL Teams because he "wasn't getting enough" combat. Not because he was burned out, but because the intensity was insufficient. That sounds more like a Type 8's need for challenge or a Type 7's hunger for stimulation than a Type 5's preference for observation. The restaurant meltdown in Sedona, where he screamed at strangers, is wildly out of character. His raw emotional advocacy for veteran psychedelic access ("Why can't you just let us get better?") breaks through the analytical detachment with a passion that feels less like an investigator presenting findings and more like a protector fighting for his people.

These moments don't invalidate the Type 5 reading. They reveal a man who is more than any single label. The investigator framework explains the dominant pattern: the listening, the withdrawal, the systematic mind, the knowledge-building. But Shawn Ryan has lived, in his words, "three or four lives." Not every chapter reads the same.

Where Shawn Ryan Goes From Here

The Shawn Ryan Show has surpassed one billion views on YouTube, grown past five million subscribers, and ranks in the top three podcasts on Spotify with over 300 episodes. His coverage of the fentanyl crisis, mapping the entire supply chain from Chinese precursor chemicals to Mexican cartels to American streets, has driven mainstream news coverage. His long-form conversations with veterans, intelligence operatives, and whistleblowers have created a new model: the interview as investigation.

He advocates for psychedelic-assisted therapy for veterans, partnering with organizations like VETS. Not because he read about it. Because he experienced it, studied the science, connected his Green Beret friend to treatment (the man left his cane behind and went home to a normal life), and decided the evidence was too strong to stay quiet about.

"Why can't you just let us get better? Everybody knows the 22 a day, which is actually like 40 something a day, veterans that are killing themselves and this stuff is a game changer."

His faith journey continues at its own pace: small group, investigative, resistant to institutional religion, honest about where he still struggles. He still can't sleep properly. The one thing psychedelic therapy didn't resolve.

"I don't care what kind of stuff the government's throwing at me, I don't care what people try to shame me into believing in, I don't care anymore. I know I'm doing the right thing."

Shawn Ryan's greatest strength, his mind, saved his life and nearly destroyed it. He hid his emotions so long he genuinely lost access to them, then sat in church crying every week, fighting it because he "just don't know any other way."

The Enneagram Type 5 lens doesn't explain all of that. But it maps the territory far better than the "tough guy" narrative ever could.

Disclaimer: This analysis of Shawn Ryan's Enneagram type is speculative, based on publicly available information, and may not reflect the actual personality type of Shawn Ryan.