Life22: Interview with Ryan Webb (Day 13,877[3])

Our Interview today is with Ryan Webb, America's Councilman.  
  
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Website:  https://ryanwebbforcountycouncil.website2.me/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGnt_5KKgPSUo0to16mG9vuQrH9NWGBz6OCaT6oG3m20Q8kNgIZS4kQEnshN0o_aem_I8wDxmZj4hJ18spWBncxTw  

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Creators and Guests

Host

Dr. Rev. Kevin M. Dougherty

Life22 Founder and Podcast Host. Father of 4 and Husband of 1.

Guest

Ryan Webb

America’s Councilman

What is Life22?

This is My Life! It's not Easy, It's Interesting, and It's Cereal!

"Satire is not a fabric in reality, but it can exist as part of the fabric of reality." ~Kevin M. Dougherty~

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Day 13,877(3) - Interview with Ryan Webb.m4a
Transcript
00:00:00 Kevin
Guess we're recording of the cloud.
00:00:04 Kevin
All right, gang, Kevin here, Life 22, and today's guest is Ryan Webb.
00:00:09 Kevin
He is America's councilman.
00:00:12 Kevin
Is that correct, Ryan?
00:00:14 Ryan
That's what they say.
00:00:15 Ryan
You have to ask the Twitterverse.
00:00:16 Ryan
That's where they came up with it, not me.
00:00:18 Kevin
Oh, okay.
00:00:19 Kevin
All right, yeah, I noticed the change because you're a common councilman for the Delaware County, Indiana.
00:00:27 Ryan
I was, yes, I was, yes.
00:00:29 Kevin
Okay.
00:00:30 Kevin
And you're, are you running again?
00:00:32 Kevin
Is that what?
00:00:33 Ryan
Yeah, I am.
00:00:34 Ryan
So, I served four years.
00:00:36 Ryan
I was elected in 2020.
00:00:38 Ryan
And what state are you in?
00:00:40 Ryan
You're in New York, right?
00:00:41 Kevin
We're in New York.
00:00:41 Kevin
Yep, just south of Buffalo.
00:00:43 Ryan
I'm not sure how it works up in New York, but in Indiana, we have what's called an open primary.
00:00:47 Ryan
We're one of only a few states left that does it.
00:00:50 Ryan
And what it means is when you go vote in the primary, you have to pick whether you want a Republican ballot or a Democrat ballot in the primary.
00:00:58 Ryan
And so I served for four years, made a lot of chaos.
00:01:02 Ryan
And, you know, they did a really good trick.
00:01:04 Ryan
They played within the rules, but it was a little sneaky.
00:01:07 Ryan
I made some waves within my own party.
00:01:10 Ryan
So my party's leadership,
00:01:12 Ryan
sit down with the Democrat party's leadership, and they come up with a plan to get me out.
00:01:15 Ryan
So what they did was the Democrats decided to not run nobody.
00:01:20 Ryan
Now, the way it works is if nobody runs after the primary, the Democrat chairman can appoint whoever he wants to fill those seats, and then they run in November, right?
00:01:29 Ryan
So they really don't even need to primary.
00:01:30 Ryan
So what they did, they didn't run nobody.
00:01:33 Ryan
And then they went out and told all their Democrat followers said, don't pull a Democrat ballot, pull a Republican ballot and vote against Ryan.
00:01:42 Ryan
So that's what they did.
00:01:43 Ryan
And we counted, we counted at least 500.
00:01:47 Ryan
I don't know what it was, but out of 14,000 votes, I lost my 68 votes on my reelection.
00:01:52 Ryan
So I give them kudos to them.
00:01:54 Ryan
They come up with a good game plan.
00:01:56 Ryan
They executed it.
00:01:57 Ryan
They barely got by, but they got by.
00:01:59 Ryan
So now I'm running for election to get back in.
00:02:02 Kevin
So are you
00:02:03 Kevin
So now, like in our county, we have county legislators.
00:02:07 Kevin
I'm assuming that's what a councilman is for your county.
00:02:10 Kevin
Essentially, it's your legislative body.
00:02:12 Kevin
It's a member of that.
00:02:13 Ryan
Yeah, it's a legislative body.
00:02:15 Ryan
And we basically do it.
00:02:16 Ryan
We set the tax rate for the county and we deal with all the financial stuff.
00:02:22 Ryan
So sheriff's department wants to build a jail or buy 4 new police cars or whatever it may be.
00:02:29 Ryan
That's what the county council does.
00:02:30 Ryan
What I always tell everybody is,
00:02:33 Ryan
when you're a kid, you may have $500 and you want to go buy a $200 bike.
00:02:37 Ryan
Well, most of the time you still have to go ask your parents for permission to spend your own money.
00:02:40 Ryan
Hey, can I go buy this bike?
00:02:42 Ryan
And the parents will give you the green light.
00:02:44 Ryan
That's kind of what the county council does.
00:02:45 Ryan
We approve a budget.
00:02:47 Ryan
These department heads have their budget, but they still have to come to us for permission to spend their money.
00:02:54 Ryan
anything outside of the budget.
00:02:56 Ryan
Once it's done in that budget, they come for, yeah, they have to come to us.
00:03:00 Ryan
But they have to come to us to get the budget approved in the 1st place.
00:03:04 Ryan
So even that, everything is itemized all the way down to postage.
00:03:08 Kevin
Gotcha.
00:03:08 Kevin
That's how our county is, and that's also how our city government's set up.
00:03:13 Kevin
So we're also made, we're made-up of councilmen.
00:03:16 Kevin
It's just the verbiage is different.
00:03:18 Kevin
So we're common councilmen for the city level or aldermen at the city level.
00:03:23 Kevin
And then at our county, it's legislators, which essentially sounds like the same.
00:03:28 Kevin
It's the same position, essentially.
00:03:29 Ryan
Yeah, we don't really do policy.
00:03:31 Ryan
The commissioners, county commissioners do the policy.
00:03:33 Ryan
We're mostly the finances.
00:03:34 Ryan
So we have like a $55 million budget.
00:03:37 Ryan
There's seven of us.
00:03:38 Ryan
In Indiana, county councils are seven person boards.
00:03:42 Kevin
Okay.
00:03:43 Kevin
I was going to say there's like, I want to say there's like 20 to 30 legislators in our county.
00:03:49 Ryan
No, no kidding.
00:03:50 Ryan
Oh, wow.
00:03:51 Ryan
I don't know what your population is.
00:03:52 Ryan
We're about 130,000, somewhere around there.
00:03:56 Kevin
Okay.
00:03:56 Kevin
Yeah, I'm not, you know what?
00:03:58 Kevin
Now that you mention that, I don't know, what it just did to my Zoom.
00:04:04 Kevin
Oh, wait, here we go.
00:04:05 Kevin
Boom.
00:04:05 Kevin
There we go.
00:04:05 Kevin
I just opened it up on another screen.
00:04:08 Kevin
Yeah, because I actually don't know Cattaraugus County's
00:04:12 Kevin
population.
00:04:14 Kevin
Now you've got me curious.
00:04:16 Kevin
But I ran for it.
00:04:17 Kevin
I ran for a county legislator position.
00:04:20 Kevin
If you talk to anybody that's local, a lot of them will tell you, like, I'm the local HVAC technician for the city of Olean.
00:04:28 Kevin
And a lot of people rumored that the reason that they offered me the position was because then they could get me off the common council.
00:04:37 Ryan
There's usually always a reason for every decision.
00:04:41 Ryan
I learned doing this for four years.
00:04:43 Ryan
Nothing's coincidental.
00:04:45 Kevin
Right.
00:04:46 Kevin
And to a degree, at the same time, though, when I saw the opportunity, I also saw a better way for me to serve.
00:04:52 Kevin
Like, yeah, I'm not making the decisions.
00:04:55 Kevin
You know, I'm not going to be there forever and somebody else is going to have to take the reins up.
00:05:00 Kevin
And it was fine for a little while.
00:05:02 Kevin
And now it just, you know, every time I turn around, it looks like
00:05:05 Kevin
Just the same **** happening, just different people.
00:05:08 Ryan
Yeah, you got to look out for real life.
00:05:10 Ryan
In real life, you're an HVAC guy.
00:05:12 Ryan
You know, people think that these elected positions, it's weird.
00:05:16 Ryan
They all think they're like these big deal.
00:05:19 Ryan
Like I know people in our community that would give anything to be like an official.
00:05:22 Ryan
Like I tell them when I was there, I'm like, it's really not all that big of a deal.
00:05:26 Ryan
You know, to be honest, most of the problems in my life are related to this.
00:05:30 Ryan
If I didn't have this nonsense, chaos, my life would be awesome.
00:05:33 Ryan
But you know, I
00:05:35 Ryan
firmly believe you got to be the change you want to see.
00:05:39 Ryan
And if not me, then who?
00:05:40 Ryan
I was never in politics.
00:05:42 Ryan
I was just a guy who read the paper every day, got tired of seeing the same 10-12 names, moved from position to position.
00:05:49 Ryan
I told my wife, I said, you know what, I'm going to run.
00:05:51 Ryan
She said, go for it.
00:05:52 Ryan
They never dreamed I would win.
00:05:54 Ryan
I beat a former county commissioner and seasoned councilman, and I beat him and they couldn't believe it.
00:06:01 Ryan
And my goal was to turn
00:06:04 Ryan
Delaware County politics upside down and make my mark.
00:06:09 Kevin
And I think we did that four years.
00:06:12 Ryan
And if that ended up costing me a seat, I was okay with that.
00:06:16 Ryan
It was never going to be more than one or two terms anyway.
00:06:18 Ryan
I just want to make the most while I'm there.
00:06:21 Kevin
Right.
00:06:21 Kevin
And that's, I felt like I could serve the city better.
00:06:25 Kevin
And so like, that's why I stepped down.
00:06:27 Kevin
But it was one of those like, yeah, I mean, you don't, you don't get into politics for
00:06:34 Kevin
the money, right?
00:06:35 Kevin
Like not, you don't go to like, hey, I'm going to be the, I'm going to be Delaware County Councilman and I'm going to be like as rich as Nancy Pelosi.
00:06:41 Kevin
Like nobody's, you're not going into it like coming out with these huge contracts with these huge deals.
00:06:46 Kevin
Your bank account doesn't get fatter.
00:06:48 Kevin
If anything, it gets smaller.
00:06:49 Ryan
Yeah.
00:06:50 Ryan
And your time, you know, and people like, oh, you have a meeting one hour a week.
00:06:54 Ryan
You, I mean, you would know because you've served in office, but you would have most of your viewers wouldn't have a clue how much time I was tied up with.
00:07:01 Ryan
People were constantly calling me.
00:07:03 Ryan
My wife was
00:07:04 Ryan
get annoyed.
00:07:05 Ryan
I mean, they would call me for grandparents rights, veterans trying to get their teeth fixed.
00:07:10 Ryan
And my wife would be like, why are they calling you?
00:07:13 Ryan
I don't know.
00:07:14 Ryan
I guess the words got now that I help people.
00:07:17 Ryan
And even though I can't help them, I just put them in the right direction to who can help them.
00:07:22 Ryan
So, man, I was constantly doing things, having meetings, helping people with housing issues.
00:07:28 Ryan
Just you wouldn't believe it has nothing to do with my position on
00:07:31 Ryan
that I was serving on the council and I had a regular job.
00:07:34 Ryan
I worked 70 hours a week, my job.
00:07:36 Kevin
Right.
00:07:37 Kevin
Yeah, no, and that was, that's the funny thing too.
00:07:39 Kevin
Like I would, my wife get mad.
00:07:41 Kevin
My wife and your wife probably get along great.
00:07:44 Ryan
My wife hates politics.
00:07:46 Kevin
Oh, mine does too.
00:07:47 Kevin
Anytime that like Facebook drags me into something, she's just like, *** ** * ***** Kevin, what did you do to me?
00:07:54 Kevin
She wants to take care of the kids, take care of her chickens and then like in her ducks and just, you know, be a homemaker.
00:08:00 Kevin
And that's what she wants to do.
00:08:01 Kevin
And so
00:08:01 Kevin
So it's like, anytime I throw a big stone of chaos at her glass house, she gets all angry.
00:08:06 Kevin
And I can't blame her.
00:08:08 Kevin
But there would be people that would call me at like 8, 9 o'clock at night and just talk to me.
00:08:14 Kevin
And I like, the guy lived like four blocks from my house and he would call me because I was his only friend in the entire world.
00:08:21 Kevin
I was the alderman that took his call.
00:08:23 Kevin
That's, and then like, well, you're right about that.
00:08:26 Ryan
So many of these people, they just want someone to listen to them.
00:08:29 Ryan
Most of the time, all you got to do is listen for a minute and then they'll fill up whether you can help them or not.
00:08:33 Ryan
They're just not used to having someone sit and listen to them.
00:08:36 Ryan
You listen, you've already solved half the problem.
00:08:39 Kevin
Yeah.
00:08:40 Kevin
And then you just be telephone directory guy, like, okay, hey, listen, I can't help you with this, but I can send you over here.
00:08:47 Kevin
You can go talk to Margie in accounting and she can fix that, you know, whatever it is, you know.
00:08:53 Kevin
And it's.
00:08:54 Ryan
My wife was, the thing she struggled with the most is
00:08:58 Ryan
these people around me, 'cause remember I said I had my own party against me too.
00:09:02 Ryan
So these people who would be so friendly and bubbly to your face when you know they're trying to cut your throat.
00:09:08 Ryan
And my wife struggled with being kind to their face when she knows they were snakes.
00:09:15 Ryan
And I tell her, that's the game.
00:09:16 Ryan
You can't let 'em know that you know they're a ***** ** ****.
00:09:19 Ryan
You gotta be polite and smile and nod because you don't want 'em to think they're having any impact on you anyway.
00:09:26 Ryan
But she would always say, you're better than me.
00:09:28 Ryan
I just can't do it.
00:09:29 Ryan
But that's just part of it.
00:09:33 Ryan
I'll smile and nod and they know that I know they're trying to burn me and they know that I'm trying to expose them for all the corruption that they may or may not be doing.
00:09:43 Kevin
Right.
00:09:43 Kevin
And sometimes they're not doing the corruption.
00:09:46 Kevin
Right.
00:09:46 Kevin
A lot of people get like, a lot of people get that they think that there's just all this corruption going on.
00:09:51 Kevin
And you're like,
00:09:53 Kevin
there could be and there might be.
00:09:55 Kevin
And like what you just did there, you turned a light on in the back, right?
00:09:59 Kevin
Like that's all that like some of us, that's what our job is in politics is to be there, hold a flame to some people and make sure that like they just enough for them to sweat to make sure they realize that, hey, there is fire nearby.
00:10:12 Kevin
I am not going to miss, you know what I mean?
00:10:14 Kevin
Or a firearm.
00:10:15 Kevin
I'm not going to screw up.
00:10:17 Kevin
I'm not going to do anything.
00:10:18 Kevin
I'm not going to let any improprieties affect how I do business.
00:10:22 Kevin
And sometimes just that
00:10:23 Kevin
Sunshine, right?
00:10:24 Kevin
Is the best disinfectant.
00:10:26 Ryan
Well, let me just respond to that real fast if I could.
00:10:29 Ryan
Sure.
00:10:29 Ryan
So you're right.
00:10:30 Ryan
And a lot of people always, oh, they got the money.
00:10:33 Ryan
Listen, on the county council that I served on, we never had, yes, we made all the decisions on where the money was spent, millions and millions of dollars, but we never had access to actual money that we could, you know, put in our pockets or whatever.
00:10:45 Ryan
We just,
00:10:46 Ryan
Who's the person giving them permission to spend the money?
00:10:49 Ryan
And when I refer to corruption in my county, I call it soft corruption.
00:10:54 Ryan
And what I mean by that is, you know, I asked the State Board of Accounts to investigate our commissioners and our auditor's office for things that they were doing that were inappropriate.
00:11:05 Ryan
And I thought illegal, but definitely inappropriate.
00:11:07 Ryan
And what I mean by soft corruption is,
00:11:10 Ryan
All of these things, when I expose this stuff, it's not like I have some secret password to where all the secret information is kept.
00:11:18 Ryan
All these other elected officials know the same stuff I know.
00:11:21 Ryan
They're just looking the other way and not saying anything.
00:11:23 Ryan
So to me, that's a form of soft corruption.
00:11:25 Ryan
When you know what's happening and you're not saying anything and having no peer accountability, in our county, we're dominated by Republicans.
00:11:33 Ryan
And even though I think Democrats are lunatics and I would never vote for them,
00:11:39 Ryan
At the same time, when we're full 7 Republicans on the council, it can kind of be an issue too, because no one wants to hold each other accountable because we're all in the same party.
00:11:48 Ryan
You know what I'm saying?
00:11:49 Ryan
So they're like, yeah, that's not okay.
00:11:50 Ryan
But if there was a Democrat, they would call us out.
00:11:53 Ryan
And I was that guy calling out both sides.
00:11:56 Ryan
And you know, so it was easy to call people out because I, even though I was a Republican, I didn't have allegiance to him like that.
00:12:02 Ryan
I don't give a **** when the same party or not.
00:12:03 Ryan
You're doing wrong.
00:12:04 Ryan
I'm going to let you know about it and tell everybody.
00:12:06 Kevin
Right.
00:12:06 Kevin
No, it's the same thing, dude.
00:12:07 Kevin
I do it every day with myself, right?
00:12:10 Kevin
Like, hey, Kev, you know, like, can I cheat and not do my workout this morning?
00:12:14 Kevin
Can I, you know, can I have that sweet at lunch?
00:12:17 Kevin
You know what I mean?
00:12:18 Kevin
Like, it's the same thing.
00:12:19 Kevin
You've just got to like you, if you can hold yourself to account, then you can start holding others to account.
00:12:24 Kevin
And a lot of people don't hold themselves to account for what they do.
00:12:26 Kevin
They just,
00:12:27 Kevin
do.
00:12:28 Kevin
And then they, my buddy's not going to rat on me.
00:12:31 Kevin
My buddy's not going to do this.
00:12:32 Kevin
And it's like, no, your buddy should be rat.
00:12:34 Kevin
You know, your buddy shouldn't be doing what he's doing.
00:12:36 Kevin
He shouldn't be looking the other way.
00:12:37 Kevin
What you're doing.
00:12:38 Kevin
This guy over here knows what you're doing.
00:12:40 Kevin
Our county did the same exact thing.
00:12:42 Kevin
We became all Republican, which I'm A diehard Republican.
00:12:46 Kevin
The problem is I'm not going to let
00:12:48 Kevin
I'm also like, I'm also Kevin, right?
00:12:50 Kevin
And if there's a little bit of cancer in me, I'm going to remove it.
00:12:54 Kevin
I am not going to let it grow and thrive and just dig it out.
00:12:58 Kevin
That's.
00:12:58 Ryan
Good point.
00:12:59 Ryan
Well, the other thing is, you know, when I came in, all these guys have been in there 20, 30 years.
00:13:05 Ryan
Hell, our county workforce, when I was growing up, having an accounting job was a good job.
00:13:10 Ryan
Well, now it's just a job because these old dinosaurs, been in there 20, 30 years, they still thought $10 an hour was good money.
00:13:17 Ryan
So these guys are all making crap wages.
00:13:22 Ryan
But the other thing that happens when you've got these people in these positions for long points of time, they know the gray areas.
00:13:28 Ryan
So when I say soft corruption, it's not that they're blatantly pocketing money, they do things like, I'll give you an example.
00:13:35 Ryan
One of the guys that eventually beat me to my seat, he was our county economic development director.
00:13:41 Ryan
And he served on the council years ago as a Democrat.
00:13:44 Ryan
Of course, he crossed over.
00:13:45 Ryan
Well, he was making, I knew he wasn't a real candidate.
00:13:49 Ryan
Oh, he's making 300 grand a year as economic development director.
00:13:52 Ryan
He's not going to quit that to make 15 grand on the council.
00:13:55 Ryan
So I made the comment, well, this gentleman, he can't be the economic development director and be on the council.
00:14:01 Ryan
And the president of the council said, well, that economic development director, that company, that's in his wife's name.
00:14:07 Ryan
Well,
00:14:08 Ryan
If you're from around here, no one knows that guy's wife.
00:14:11 Ryan
He's the face of that company.
00:14:12 Ryan
He's the guy in the meetings.
00:14:13 Ryan
I don't care that the paperwork's in his name or his wife's name.
00:14:17 Ryan
We all know he's the guy.
00:14:19 Ryan
But she's done the gymnastics in her mind to say, oh, that's fine.
00:14:24 Ryan
That's a gray area.
00:14:24 Ryan
It's technically not a conflict of interest because it's not him.
00:14:28 Ryan
It's his wife's company.
00:14:29 Ryan
Well, you and I know that don't pass the smell test.
00:14:32 Ryan
And I don't think that's what the voters want.
00:14:35 Ryan
They don't think that's okay.
00:14:37 Kevin
I've done videos on that too, like, cause I've called out some of the local county legislators too.
00:14:42 Kevin
And it's like, if it doesn't pass a smell test, if you can't, if it smells like corruption, like there should be a rule that you should just stay the hell away from it because most likely it is corruption.
00:14:56 Kevin
If it's not corruption, it looks like corruption, it should be charged the same.
00:15:00 Kevin
You walk into a school with a pistol.
00:15:03 Kevin
It doesn't matter if it has an orange little cap at the end because it's a toy pistol.
00:15:07 Kevin
They're
00:15:08 Kevin
it like a pistol, you're going to jail.
00:15:10 Ryan
Like that's possibly shot.
00:15:12 Kevin
Right, possibly shot.
00:15:14 Kevin
Like that's the same thing, man.
00:15:15 Kevin
Draw and quarter people that do corruption.
00:15:17 Kevin
Okay, this is legitimately corrupt.
00:15:19 Kevin
Hey, this smells like corruption.
00:15:21 Kevin
Like you might just get probation for that.
00:15:23 Kevin
Like, I don't know.
00:15:24 Kevin
I'm a big firm like that.
00:15:27 Kevin
And sometimes I battle with myself.
00:15:28 Kevin
Like, okay, these are all the freedoms we're all afforded.
00:15:33 Kevin
And then somebody does something that like challenges it where you're like, man, I really want to just pull that freedom away from you, beat the daylights out of you and hand it back to you.
00:15:43 Kevin
But you can't do that.
00:15:44 Kevin
You can't strip somebody of a freedom, but they've found a way to kind of loophole their corruption into that freedom.
00:15:51 Kevin
And so now they're kind of hiding behind it.
00:15:54 Ryan
Well, in our county,
00:15:56 Ryan
It's so embedded.
00:15:57 Ryan
I mean, our mayor just went to prison five years ago for corruption.
00:16:01 Ryan
There was a whole FBI sting, several department heads, the mayor, all went to prison for kickback bribes, all these things.
00:16:08 Ryan
And so these people get so accustomed to these things that, in my opinion, are unethical.
00:16:15 Ryan
But what's wild is
00:16:17 Ryan
Many of them started out just like me.
00:16:19 Ryan
They're a regular citizen who wanted to do good.
00:16:21 Ryan
And they get in there and other people put their arms around them.
00:16:24 Ryan
And I know this because they tried it to me several times.
00:16:27 Ryan
They would put their arms around, Ryan, welcome.
00:16:30 Ryan
Okay, you made it.
00:16:30 Ryan
We didn't think you're going to get here, but you're here now.
00:16:33 Ryan
Just be glad you're here.
00:16:34 Ryan
They would look at it as,
00:16:36 Ryan
Hey, be grateful you have a seat at the table and sit back and enjoy the perks.
00:16:40 Ryan
I would look at it as, okay, I've infiltrated your group.
00:16:43 Ryan
Now I'm gonna run and tell everybody how it works.
00:16:46 Ryan
So when they would tell me all these things, say, okay, now don't say anything.
00:16:50 Ryan
I'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
00:16:51 Ryan
And then I would go right out to my car and go live on Facebook.
00:16:56 Ryan
I'd put it out there like, this is what's happening.
00:16:59 Ryan
And I don't...
00:17:01 Ryan
I don't do well with that.
00:17:02 Ryan
I don't buy into that.
00:17:03 Ryan
But it was so wild to see how many of them started off wanting to do the right thing and just got sucked into the machine that is Delaware County politics.
00:17:14 Ryan
We could have a hit reality show if TLC ever came here.
00:17:19 Ryan
I promise.
00:17:20 Kevin
Right.
00:17:21 Kevin
And dude, and it's everywhere.
00:17:22 Kevin
Cause I've seen it at our county level.
00:17:24 Kevin
I've seen it at our city level.
00:17:25 Kevin
Like, and I want to say it's almost a human nature thing.
00:17:28 Kevin
And like what you're describing is this archetype.
00:17:30 Kevin
It's almost like county and city politics end up being like entering a prison, right?
00:17:36 Kevin
Like every prison's not the same, but you go in there and you make too much eye contact.
00:17:40 Kevin
You make too little eye contact.
00:17:42 Kevin
You talk too much.
00:17:43 Kevin
You take somebody's offering of their pudding.
00:17:46 Kevin
next thing you're holding your pocket your entire term, Yeah, you're in.
00:17:52 Kevin
You're in.
00:17:53 Ryan
Yeah, you're right.
00:17:54 Ryan
There's a lot of unwritten rules.
00:17:55 Ryan
And when I came in, they were all so shunning me.
00:17:58 Ryan
They didn't sit me down and tell me nothing.
00:18:00 Ryan
And I came in during COVID.
00:18:02 Ryan
So,
00:18:03 Ryan
You know, usually they have like the seminar the state puts on for new elected officials.
00:18:07 Ryan
All that stuff was gone 'cause of COVID.
00:18:09 Ryan
So I literally was winging it as I came in.
00:18:12 Ryan
Nobody told me nothing.
00:18:13 Ryan
I mean, I had to learn it all on my own and make allies.
00:18:17 Ryan
And, you know, that's one of the things I'm so proud of that I was able to get done.
00:18:21 Ryan
We got some really huge legislation pushed through, me being outnumbered six to one, even though they were Republicans.
00:18:30 Ryan
They were all against me.
00:18:31 Ryan
It wouldn't matter if I said, hey guys, I got a cure for cancer right here.
00:18:35 Ryan
They're voting no because I said it.
00:18:37 Ryan
They're going to vote against it.
00:18:38 Ryan
So what I.
00:18:39 Kevin
Would do, you're the cop that didn't take a bribe.
00:18:42 Ryan
I would take and I would use the public as a tool and I would
00:18:47 Ryan
to create this tremendous amount of public pressure on social media where they had no choice but to go with me because otherwise the public uproar was so bad.
00:18:57 Ryan
Like we got the biggest raise for our county sheriff's department in the county history.
00:19:01 Ryan
You know, they were against that, but people were so ****** when they found out they were losing good police officers over a little bit of money.
00:19:07 Ryan
You know, I wrote a resolution banning
00:19:10 Ryan
tax abatements for industrial solar farms.
00:19:12 Ryan
They didn't want to do that.
00:19:14 Ryan
But the public support for it was so huge, they had no choice but to go with me on it.
00:19:18 Ryan
So, you know, I told my wife, yeah, I can be outnumbered, but with enough perseverance, we can still accomplish things.
00:19:23 Ryan
I just got to use the public as a tool.
00:19:26 Kevin
Right.
00:19:27 Kevin
And yeah, so, yeah, you know, and it's, I laugh at stuff like that because we had the same exact issue during COVID every, it was almost like revivifying the police department budgets.
00:19:39 Kevin
Because people were like, my God, really?
00:19:41 Kevin
Cops only make $10 an hour?
00:19:43 Kevin
And they're like, oh.
00:19:46 Kevin
So they can sign up, they can be a cop, they can make like minimum wage, they can get shot at, like they have to deal with domestic violence.
00:19:55 Kevin
And then you turn around and you're like, oh yeah, by the way, every person, like little kids are gonna, as you walk by, they're gonna point at it and be like, mommy, that's a racist.
00:20:04 Kevin
You know, like, they just treated like garbage.
00:20:08 Kevin
People were spitting on them.
00:20:09 Ryan
no, in the county, I'm not a county councilman. So the county police pretty much service all the small towns, right? The city maintains most of the city stuff. So that's their public, that's their safety. There's no city police officers coming out to their rural town on the outside, outskirts of the city. They may have a couple
00:20:30 Ryan
volunteer, reserve guys who work weekends and, have other full-time jobs, but they don't have actual trained police officers. So that's what the county does. So when they hear that we're losing these guys because they're going across the street to work for the city and get the $20,000 hiring bonus or whatever, they're ******.
00:20:48 Kevin
Paying for their training. Yeah.
00:20:49 Ryan
That's affecting their public safety.
00:20:52 Kevin
Right. And so we had the opposite problem. So our county doesn't have police officers, quote unquote, they're sheriffs. And so
00:21:00 Kevin
the city was losing cops to the sheriff's department because the sheriff's department at the county level was paying better. And so they would, and it was easier gigs and they were doing the same thing. We've got all these little towns, villages, everything else. And if, you know, being one of the few cities in Cattaraugus County, we were the only ones with the police force, you know, like the village of Portville next to us has like one or two cops.
00:21:25 Kevin
Allegheny's got like four or five cops. You know what I mean? But it's like, for the most part, if you're little bo dunk, you know, like thousand person townships, like you have the sheriff's department and the state, the state boys, if they're in the area, you know?
00:21:40 Ryan
Yeah.
00:21:41 Ryan
Yeah, I made a commitment. Transparency, I always told everybody when I was an elected official, and even now as a candidate, I said I'm the most accessible, transparent, elected official in the entire state. Being accessible and transparent and public safety was probably the two biggest core principles that I tried to promote as far as what I stood for along with fiscal responsibility, things like that. That's another thing, fiscal responsibility. You haven't asked the question, but you know,
00:22:10 Ryan
In my county, I made a new year's resolution to say no more. You know, I got six kids and I said, I'm gonna make a resolution to say no more in my life to my kids when they want things, to my wife and on the council. 'Cause these people come up or these departments will come up here and ask for hundreds of thousands of dollars outside the budget. And the council just rubber statement everything. They say yes to 95% of the requests. And I said no, I said no in one year.
00:22:39 Ryan
more than all of those councils and commissioners combined in my entire four years. That's how often I tell them, you got to show me an invoice, an estimate, you know, who's, because they were just too confident. They would just say, yes, we just had another department head. Let me go up the rails here for just a second to give you a quick back story.
00:22:57 Kevin
So I'm a rabbit hole guy.
00:22:58 Ryan
So one time I said,
00:23:02 Ryan
I made a comment that I don't trust the department heads and the elected officials who stand at the podium and ask for hundreds of thousands of dollars because I don't trust them blindly because people, human nature, people lie, people omit things and people exaggerate when they're asking for money. So my kids do it. They tell me they need $20 to go to the movies and really they're buying illegal fireworks, right? That's just what people do. And when they're asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's normal. I thought that was a basic normal
00:23:31 Ryan
thing. Our Republican Party chairman issued a statement condemning my comment that I said that because I said I didn't trust all the department heads blindly that there. I said there's very few people that I blindly trust and none of them are in that room at that time. And wouldn't you know it, just about a month ago, one of the department heads actually got caught and is facing an indictment for embezzling thousands and thousands of dollars. And
00:23:59 Ryan
And by that, her husband is another department head. And then there's another department head who they had a relationship with. So we got one employee getting fired, three department heads on suspension, all because the council would ask questions. They blindly trusted her. And when she would say she needed this money for whatever, they just did it. And she's one of the ones I would have never guessed. So you never know who's going to do these things. So I was always skeptical and I would always
00:24:26 Ryan
treat it like it was my money. If you're asking me for this money, I'm not just going to rubber stamp and give it to you. Right. But too much, too often these councils do it. And, you know, eventually they're going to have to pay the piper when a bill comes due.
00:24:39 Kevin
Yeah. I mean, and so I've been on both sides of it too, because I like, and that's, I've been up there where you rubber stamp stuff. I've been up there. I've passed ****** legislation as well as good legislation. Like I got regrets on some legislation. I've actually reached out to people that I knew that were opposed to it. And I was like, you know what? I was like, you were right.
00:24:56 Kevin
It was intended for this. It did something completely different. If I could come back and like, and if I was Hitler's mom, what I mean? Like, would you kill the baby? Like, you know what? I was wrong. I'm sorry. Let's retract to this one. You know what I mean? And I'm dancing on the, I'm dancing on the pro-choice kind of argument a little bit. I don't really want to go down that road because I'm sure you probably see eye to eye with me on that one.
00:25:24 Ryan
But yeah, I was, I was, oh **** I lost my train of thought what I was about to say. I did the same thing that you did with the tax abatement, banning solar farm abatements for solar farms. I did that because we made a mistake. This big company come in and ask for solar farm abatement. I'm like, yeah, solar. Okay, cool. So I thought we did a good thing. I said, is there anybody opposed to it?
00:25:51 Ryan
No, nobody's opposed to it. I go home and tell my wife, I don't think we do a good job. Well, come to find out nobody was paying attention. No one even knew about it. So the next meeting, there's hundreds of people. Not only do they post, but now they're organized. They got legal representation and they're ******. And so I had to, you know,
00:26:09 Ryan
assess the situation and I we've made a mistake, so I led the effort to repeal the abatement that we granted. And it got voted down, but our attorney told us it would be case law for Indiana no county council had ever repealed an abatement they'd given before that company threatened to sue us we did it.
00:26:28 Ryan
And so the county council, my council was afraid to do it for just the legal cost. They thought we would win, but it would cost us a bunch of money to go to court. So they just refused to do it. So the only recourse I had was, okay, I rolled a resolution to ban solar abatements in the future for any future solar company that wants to come and do tax payments. But I did that after making the mistake on voting in favor of it the first time.
00:26:53 Kevin
Yeah.
00:26:54 Kevin
And so like, and I'm on the fence on that stuff, right? Like I get it. Solar's not there yet. Like I'm an HVAC guy. So like your refrigerant, like I know the New York governor wants to tell everybody that like, oh, and electric is the way to go. It's like, she doesn't know what that is. This is a talking point, right? Like heat pumps are the way of the future.
00:27:14 Kevin
in the future, right? Like that change of state between refrigerant, from a liquid to a gas back to a liquid, that change of state, hidden heat, all that stuff, that principle behind that, using that and that method is excellent. The problem is we're in Western New York, so you have to have a really efficient system in order for that to work. And then when it gets really cold, it'll still work, but it's not as efficient. It is.
00:27:41 Kevin
And then it's the delivery of the product. So now, you got to burn like $4 worth of gasoline or fossil fuels to make $1 worth of electricity. So now you've got to sell that $1 worth of electricity for $5. And then it's like, but it's 100, it's 99.9% efficient. It's like, yeah, but I could buy $1 of fossil fuel and have a 96% efficient boiler. So for right now, it is
00:28:10 Kevin
more efficient for me to use natural gas. And I'm losing my train of thought. Oh, so the solar thing. So like solar is there. 10 years ago, solar was not what it is today. And solar is not going to be what it is in 50 years.
00:28:25 Kevin
I'm a fan.
00:28:28 Ryan
I'm a supporter of solar. I try to get the council to put solar on the roof of every county building we own. What I have to do is listen to what the people are saying. And they're 100% opposed to the industrial solar, right? I think everybody's on board with solar panels. What they're not on board was 500 acres of industrial solar panels that are dragging down their property values. They don't bring any value to the county. There's some temporary construction jobs. But outside of that, they have like
00:28:55 Ryan
like two people, two jobs it creates. we have And then there's the potential liability. The liability, we have tornadoes here in the Midwest, and the way that property tax caps work, let's say you have $500 million you're about to take in. Well, you bring in another $50 million in revenue from this new solar farm.
00:29:19 Ryan
It's now you don't have 550 million. You just have that still that same 500 million. It's just that new 50 million is put into that kitty and everybody else pays 3 or $4 less a year in taxes.
00:29:32 Ryan
That's how the property tax caps work here in Indiana, right? We have property tax caps. And whenever we bring in new business and they say we're $100 million business and we're going to pay $10 million a year in additional taxes, well, we don't add $10 million in extra to the money we're already bringing in. The state says we're only allowed to bring in
00:29:54 Ryan
30% of the assessed value of all the of all the properties. So all that does, instead of adding that extra few million dollars, instead, it just dilutes what everybody else in the county pays in the tax that contributes towards that amount, which in the end ends up being just a couple bucks. So is it worth all this headache to everyone losing your property values, all these people upset for me to save three or $4 a year on property tax? A lot of people don't think it is.
00:30:24 Kevin
Right. And so I see the unsightliness. And so I'll get into conversations with people on my side of the aisle and they'll say, well, they're disgusting and they don't generate.
00:30:32 Kevin
what they should. Like when they say wind farms, they're noisy. There's this, there's that. And it's so like, yeah, I don't think that the, I don't think the value is there yet. The technology is not there. So some people have to continue to play with it, continue to buy them, continue to do what they're doing with them so that the technology can still grow. Right. Like if nobody was buying EVs, Elon would not have a good business. But Elon is a great guy for building that ****. He wants to go through and start, you know, like working on it and say, this is really cool. He's really excited about it.
00:31:03 Kevin
I get that way with boilers. Like when there's a new boiler system in or, hey, we've got this new product. I really want to try it. I get excited about it. I excite my customer about it. My customer's trying it out. It might not be all of the hype, but it's little steps like that make the entire industry go faster and go better, but it takes time. My other issue though.
00:31:23 Ryan
I love Elon. I love my Tesla. I love Elon. He's great. Yeah, innovation's great.
00:31:29 Kevin
I'm waiting for my Optimus bot.
00:31:33 Ryan
I know, I told my wife to get one of those. She's like, I'm not going to have one. She don't want my Tesla. She don't like it, the self-drive and all that stuff. I'm like, dude, I call her, I call her Kaczynski all the time because she's like anti-technology. You know, the Unabomber guy. Yeah, So I'm like, all right, Kaczynski, you know, because she just likes things simple. But yes, I. He wasn't from Indiana, was he? No, he was from out like Montana or some crazy.
00:31:59 Kevin
Montana. Okay. Yeah, I was going to say.
00:32:02 Ryan
Yeah, we've got our share of lunatics, but he's not one of them.
00:32:06 Kevin
Yeah. My dad used to work for the state of Indiana. Small.
00:32:10 Ryan
Oh, ****. Oh, I'm sorry about that. Who worked here? Who worked here?
00:32:14 Kevin
My dad. My dad. He worked for the state of Indiana. Yeah, he was an auditor. Yeah, he would audit businesses doing work. So we lived in Connecticut when I was a kid.
00:32:26 Kevin
And he would go down to New York City. He'd go to White Plains, New York. All these businesses that did business with Indiana, the state of Indiana had auditors for all these major corporations. And so he would go, yeah, so through this Indiana State Department of Taxation and Finance, he would go through and audit all these big companies. So he worked for Indiana, but he lived in Connecticut.
00:32:48 Ryan
That's interesting.
00:32:49 Kevin
Yeah, just small world. So that's where he was collecting his pension check when he died. So
00:32:56 Kevin
But that's one of those things though. I think about the solar, the wind farms. It's like, yeah, I don't think the technology's there. But then on the other side of the coin, like, if it's my property, you're not telling me that I can't put a solar farm there.
00:33:11 Ryan
Like, that was the dilemma, man.
00:33:14 Ryan
How do you tell these guys who are set to make big money? They're getting like $800 an acre for the year and it was a 20 year lease. So if they got 100 acres, I mean, look at the money on this, 1000 acres, you're talking life changing money. How do you tell them no? So I struggled with that.
00:33:33 Kevin
Right. Yeah, that's when it comes hard, it comes when it when it comes, what is it? When it comes when it comes good, it also comes bad, right? Then that the
00:33:42 Kevin
It's one of those phrases that people use. And it's like, you all of a sudden you hit it big, right? You're Eddie Murphy and you just got your first big movie. And like you can do what Eddie Murphy did and just keep banging them out. You just do every movie you can while you can be making that money. Because before you know it, you get canceled. And you're, you know, you do a movie and you do 10 years of it. And then all of a sudden you're Robert Downey Jr. and they're canceling you for doing Blackface and Tropic Thunder.
00:34:12 Ryan
Yeah. You know what? I never understood that. Like, it's one thing if you go, if you go to like Halloween party, I guess, like Trudeau, but dude was playing a role in a movie. Like playing a role in a movie, bro. Like, like that is wild. Like Robin Williams will be next for Mrs. Doubtfire. Like, I never understood them canceling Robert Downey Jr. for that.
00:34:34 Kevin
Yeah. Like.
00:34:36 Kevin
Cancel him for Allie McBeal in the late 90s.
00:34:43 Ryan
Yeah, there's other stuff we could cancel.
00:34:44 Kevin
Yeah, cancel him for like even just being the boyfriend of Allie McBeal in the 90s. Like, That's funny. Yeah. That was during the time that like, I remember being just, man, I probably wasn't even old enough to watch the show. It was just on. And it was one of those, it was just on. And it was like,
00:35:05 Kevin
It was one of those like he just kept popping up in every news feed, just and it feed news channel, right?
00:35:13 Ryan
Like every news channel. We didn't have feeds back then. Yeah.
00:35:16 Kevin
We didn't have feeds back then. No, they had he had this he had this way about him where all of a sudden there's like every day I'd get home from school. I'd watch like the Drew Carey show while I do my homework. And then all of a sudden it'd be like, later tonight, we're going to discuss Robert Downey Jr.'s next DWI. And you're like, man, he's popular.
00:35:34 Ryan
Yeah, he was everywhere.
00:35:36 Kevin
Yeah.
00:35:37 Ryan
He was everywhere.
00:35:40 Kevin
So you got a big camp. How does your election structure work? Like every state's different, right? So you guys, you have a primary in June, I'm guessing?
00:35:50 Ryan
No, it's May. So the way the council works for my position, when I won the county council, there's seven of us, right? Four of them, there's four districts, one, two, three, 4.
00:36:02 Ryan
And then there's three at large. When I won, I was an at large candidate, meaning everybody in the county voted for those at large. Well, those are every four years, but they're staggered with the other, the four districts that are every four years too, but they're staggered. So you have an election every two years for one of those council seats. So I didn't want to wait four years to come back around the at large. You know, I wanted to run.
00:36:27 Ryan
What's funny, my opponent is my neighbor across the street. Great guy. Malt is my leaves, right? I told him, I'm running against you. I'm going to take your seat. Nothing personal, but I need, if I'm going to lose, I just want, I just want you to beat me. I don't want no shady shenanigans. How do people cross over like that? If I lose on my own, I can live with it a little bit easier, you know, because I left a bad taste in my mouth a little bit, how they did it. And so
00:36:57 Ryan
So that's why we're doing that one. It's in May. And again, if I get through this one, then we should be home free in November. But yeah, that's how it's structured.
00:37:07 Kevin
Okay. Well, that's cool. So should be home free because you're doing a primary, right, in the Republican side?
00:37:15 Ryan
Yeah, I don't see a Democrat one in November. And that was another reason why I picked the district one is my district is mostly rural.
00:37:28 Ryan
So all those Democrats, we have a college town here, it's Ball State. And a lot of those Democrats that crossed over came from the city. So I feel like I'll have a lot less of them. There's still be a handful of them that can cross over, but not as many. You know what I mean? In that district race. And yeah, so I don't think that'll be as big of a problem having to deal with those guys with that. So yeah, that's the decision that we went with.
00:37:58 Kevin
So you keep talking about the city, right? So Delaware County. What like what is your big metropolis?
00:38:07 Ryan
Muncie, Muncie, Indiana. We're the home of Garfield and Ball State. Garfield and Ball State, Ball Jars. That's what we're known for. Ball Jars, Garfield, Ball State University.
00:38:20 Kevin
I was going to say, I
00:38:24 Kevin
I googled it and what they don't have maps anymore. Oh, there they go. You got to go hide. You got to go find it. I also pulled up that we have 77,000 people in Cattaraugus County.
00:38:38 Ryan
Oh, yeah. A little smaller county.
00:38:40 Kevin
Yeah. So but we've got a lot more legislators than you do.
00:38:44 Ryan
Yeah. Well, do you guys have is your county city combined?
00:38:50 Ryan
So you have a city county government where it's all one government.
00:38:56 Kevin
No, like we have, we have our county government and then we have our, we have each city or township will have their town boards or their city boards.
00:39:09 Ryan
So we have, we have a city council that's nine members.
00:39:12 Ryan
and a mayor, and then our county council for the county. And then we had three commissioners, which three commissioners are like the mayors of the county. So it's a little different structure. And then we're in how each state does it differ.
00:39:24 Kevin
Yeah, So yeah, I was going to say, so because you keep talking about how you had a mayor that was indicted like five years ago, right?
00:39:31 Ryan
Yeah.
00:39:31 Kevin
Is that like, was he the mayor of Muncie or was he the mayor? Okay, gotcha. So he was a mayor, not a commissioner. Okay.
00:39:40 Ryan
Oh yeah, he was the mayor.
00:39:41 Kevin
Because I've heard of some counties actually having a mayor, right? Like our county has an executive who essentially like, it's like a school board, superintendent. Like his job is to just execute the will of the school board.
00:39:58 Ryan
I tell everybody who doesn't, who's not familiar, even my own friends, they'll be like, oh, are you running for city council? I'm like, county council. You know, they mix them up. So I get it. Nobody pays that much attention. But
00:40:09 Ryan
When people ask what commissioner, because people, I was going to run for Congress and then I was going to run for commissioner.
00:40:14 Ryan
I still may run for commissioner at one point.
00:40:17 Ryan
But our commissioner, you guys remember the show Dukes of Hazzard?
00:40:21 Ryan
Yeah.
00:40:21 Ryan
Remember Boss Hogg?
00:40:23 Ryan
Boss Hogg was a county commissioner.
00:40:27 Ryan
Boss Hogg was a county commissioner.
00:40:29 Ryan
So that's what a county commissioner is.
00:40:31 Ryan
You run the county, you're the mayor of the county, but there's three of them.
00:40:35 Kevin
Gotcha.
00:40:36 Ryan
Pretty powerful job.
00:40:37 Kevin
Right, So they just have, each one of them has a district or they're just kind of like a legislative body in that they do it over, they're just a group of people that run the executive branch.
00:40:49 Ryan
They're the executive and legislative and the commissioners.
00:40:52 Ryan
They do both.
00:40:53 Ryan
They have a tremendous budget available.
00:40:55 Ryan
They have a tremendous amount of freedom.
00:40:57 Ryan
That's where the corruption can come in.
00:40:59 Ryan
You know, they make the decision.
00:41:01 Ryan
If I want you to be my HVAC guy, they're going to make it.
00:41:04 Ryan
Or maybe they say, let's, we need an excavating company.
00:41:09 Ryan
You got any friends that can create an excavating company?
00:41:12 Ryan
Yeah, I got a guy that, okay, you got the job.
00:41:15 Ryan
You know what I mean?
00:41:16 Ryan
So there you have a tremendous amount of power.
00:41:19 Ryan
In fact, when our mayor went to prison and our building commissioner went to prison, that's what he was doing.
00:41:25 Ryan
He was creating an excavating company and he was tearing down these dilapidated houses.
00:41:30 Ryan
And he got so greedy, he was just turning these invoices at the Board of Works meeting and they were rubber stamping them.
00:41:38 Ryan
And he got so greedy, instead of actually dealing these houses and inflating the numbers, he would go around and giving them the address of already vacant lots.
00:41:48 Ryan
and give them an invoice for 15 grand for tearing down a house.
00:41:52 Ryan
And they would just rubber stamp it, not even ask questions.
00:41:55 Ryan
And that house had been torn down 20 years.
00:41:56 Ryan
There's no house there.
00:41:58 Ryan
And you got incredibly sloppy.
00:42:00 Ryan
And some citizen watchdog who, you know, asking for public records requests or whatever, he caught them.
00:42:07 Ryan
And then they tried to retrovally cover their tracks and go back and back date, you know,
00:42:14 Ryan
the quotes and all this stuff.
00:42:15 Ryan
Several of them got caught up.
00:42:16 Ryan
Several of them went to prison.
00:42:18 Kevin
And it's those watchdogs out there, man.
00:42:20 Kevin
Those are the those are those are the people out in the crowd with those with those lighters, just like you and me out there being public officials.
00:42:26 Kevin
It's like, hey, it's my job with my flashlight to disinfect this ****.
00:42:31 Kevin
And that's what you need.
00:42:32 Kevin
You need those.
00:42:33 Kevin
That's how most cops solve their crimes.
00:42:35 Kevin
It's not, you know, it's yeah, sure.
00:42:37 Kevin
It's like, you know, having a head on your shoulders, but it's also like relying on the community.
00:42:42 Kevin
That little old lady who had her grandson put the ring doorbell in or the little old lady who likes to smoke cigarettes out on her porch and saw the guy break into the neighbor's house.
00:42:49 Kevin
Right.
00:42:50 Ryan
Like that's people watch things.
00:42:52 Ryan
People watch things, people see things.
00:42:53 Ryan
And it's incredibly tempting when you're doing a job like that and you do it for long enough.
00:42:58 Ryan
I was talking about earlier where people do the job for long enough, they find the gray areas.
00:43:03 Ryan
It's real easy to go, well, damn, I have to hire somebody to do this.
00:43:07 Ryan
You know, why do I have to pick you?
00:43:09 Ryan
I can have my sister do it or I can just create a company and, you know, have it.
00:43:13 Ryan
It's easy to do.
00:43:15 Ryan
It's very tempting.
00:43:16 Ryan
It's very tempting.
00:43:18 Ryan
And a lot of people fall victim to it.
00:43:21 Ryan
You just, anytime I would, lose my mind for a moment and would ever start to, eat the sauce, if you will, or drink the Kool-Aid, I would remind myself of what it was, what I said when I first got in.
00:43:37 Ryan
we grew up not trusting politicians and all those dirty ******** they're ruining the city above all.
00:43:44 Ryan
If we could ever do something about it,
00:43:45 Ryan
here I am now in a position to do something about it.
00:43:48 Ryan
So anytime I thought I was somebody important, I would remind myself of that.
00:43:52 Ryan
What would I do if I was sitting home reading a paper?
00:43:55 Ryan
You know what I mean?
00:43:56 Ryan
About this guy.
00:43:57 Ryan
And that's how I would make my decisions.
00:44:00 Ryan
Same way I never changed how I spoke.
00:44:02 Ryan
They would get so ****** at me and go, oh, that's not, you know, becoming of a councilman or you can't talk like that.
00:44:08 Ryan
I'm like,
00:44:09 Ryan
I don't do that.
00:44:10 Ryan
I don't change things just because I'm in this position now.
00:44:14 Ryan
I'm the same exact person.
00:44:16 Ryan
I do it the same way.
00:44:17 Ryan
If you don't like it, I don't know what to tell you.
00:44:21 Ryan
I think that's the beginning of, yeah, you can be professional, but when you start altering and self-censoring your own actions because you're in this position,
00:44:31 Ryan
That's the beginning of just changing who you are in general.
00:44:34 Ryan
So I would always catch myself self-centering and override that.
00:44:38 Ryan
I would never be okay with it.
00:44:40 Kevin
So when I got into politics, I probably wasn't as loud as I became.
00:44:45 Kevin
And then I kind of, you become confident.
00:44:47 Kevin
And then all of a sudden I was like, you know what?
00:44:49 Kevin
I'm just going to be me.
00:44:51 Kevin
And I was the, I was the, my dad raised me on Howard Stern.
00:44:56 Kevin
So it was like,
00:44:58 Kevin
So it was always shock jock, right?
00:45:00 Kevin
Like I don't support anything that Howard Stern does nowadays, but as a kid, you're like, yeah, just got to do the wham right in your face kind of stuff, right?
00:45:07 Kevin
And that's what I was the alderman who smoked pot on YouTube on 420.
00:45:13 Kevin
That's.
00:45:15 Ryan
Awesome.
00:45:16 Kevin
That's great.
00:45:17 Kevin
There's a video on my channel of me just ripping a bong and then like.
00:45:20 Ryan
That is amazing.
00:45:22 Ryan
I can't smoke.
00:45:22 Ryan
I haven't smoked bots in 2014, but because my job, I wish I could and I would have definitely done something.
00:45:29 Ryan
That's great.
00:45:31 Kevin
You know what's funny is I?
00:45:32 Ryan
Smoked the next kickback for that.
00:45:34 Kevin
Oh yeah.
00:45:34 Kevin
No, the Channel 4 news came down from Buffalo.
00:45:38 Kevin
They want to talk to me.
00:45:39 Kevin
He's like in the same week.
00:45:42 Kevin
like the Notre Dame, like fire happened, right?
00:45:46 Kevin
Like the cathedral burnt or whatever it was one of the, and my buddy, I was like, I was looking at him.
00:45:52 Kevin
He's like, so what's going on?
00:45:53 Kevin
I was like, well, I don't get high.
00:45:54 Kevin
Like I don't smoke.
00:45:56 Kevin
So like, it doesn't take much like 1 little baby bong rip and I'm done.
00:46:00 Ryan
Like I'm like Elon on Joe Rogan.
00:46:03 Kevin
Yeah.
00:46:03 Kevin
Oh, yeah.
00:46:04 Ryan
I just start taking it for the moment.
00:46:06 Kevin
Yeah, I just, yeah.
00:46:07 Kevin
It's like, man.
00:46:08 Kevin
And so
00:46:10 Kevin
the next year I smoked pot on YouTube and then I ended up going like, I did it with my buddy who was also, I got him to get on the Common Council with me.
00:46:18 Kevin
And so now there's two Aldermen smoking pot.
00:46:20 Kevin
That video went nowhere.
00:46:22 Kevin
Nobody gave a flying **** about it.
00:46:24 Kevin
Yeah.
00:46:24 Kevin
And that was the last time I smoked.
00:46:26 Kevin
2019, 420 of 2019 was the last time I ever smoked pot.
00:46:30 Kevin
And it was like.
00:46:31 Ryan
Oh, they made a big deal about me cussing.
00:46:33 Ryan
Jesus Christ.
00:46:35 Ryan
They lose their mind by smoking weed.
00:46:37 Kevin
Yeah, man, everybody lost their **** over that.
00:46:40 Kevin
And I was like, because then all of a sudden my buddy was asking me, he's like, he's like, so what do you think about the fire?
00:46:45 Kevin
I'm like, fires happen.
00:46:47 Kevin
Like I just was showing disregard for things because I was high.
00:46:51 Kevin
You were chilling.
00:46:52 Ryan
Yeah, no big deal.
00:46:53 Kevin
And he's like, Kevin, your eyes are getting pretty squinty.
00:46:55 Kevin
And I'm like, Konichiwa.
00:46:57 Kevin
And then apparently the guy at the newspaper or the guy from Buffalo News really thought that was racist and offensive.
00:47:04 Kevin
So
00:47:05 Kevin
He was questioning, he was like grilling me over it and was like, all right, man.
00:47:09 Kevin
Hey, I was high.
00:47:10 Kevin
Like, what do you want from me?
00:47:11 Kevin
Like.
00:47:12 Ryan
It's all right.
00:47:12 Ryan
We're just, we're making jokes.
00:47:14 Ryan
That's funny because they tried to kick, I had my biggest uproar.
00:47:17 Ryan
They tried to kick me off the council six days after my term started because it was, it was January 6th, you know, obviously 2020.
00:47:28 Ryan
I sworn in on January 1st.
00:47:30 Ryan
Yeah, I haven't even had,
00:47:33 Ryan
our first meeting yet.
00:47:35 Ryan
And, or no, we had a procedural meeting on like January 2nd or 3rd where we made all our board appointments.
00:47:41 Ryan
That was it.
00:47:42 Ryan
Not an actual meeting.
00:47:43 Ryan
That comes the third Tuesday of the month or whatever.
00:47:45 Ryan
So January 6th, you know, chaos going on.
00:47:48 Ryan
Well, early in the chaos, I made a comment on Facebook.
00:47:53 Ryan
I said, you know, 200 years ago or 250 years ago, they called those guys terrorists.
00:48:00 Ryan
And, you know,
00:48:03 Ryan
terrorists and something else too.
00:48:04 Ryan
And now we name all of our elementary schools and parks after them.
00:48:08 Ryan
And I said, it feels like 1776, So I didn't know how it was going to end up.
00:48:13 Ryan
This looked like they were going to storm the Capitol.
00:48:15 Ryan
Man, they lost their **** over that.
00:48:17 Ryan
They come and...
00:48:19 Ryan
They showed up by the damn near 100 people at the council meeting, demanding that I be removed at his first meeting.
00:48:26 Ryan
Remember, no one's teaching me nothing.
00:48:28 Ryan
No one's showing me.
00:48:29 Ryan
I'm literally just sitting there, having to listen to all of it or whatnot.
00:48:32 Ryan
So I got pretty accustomed to him getting outraged at something that I said.
00:48:37 Ryan
And then
00:48:38 Ryan
all coming into the meeting and flipping out.
00:48:41 Ryan
And my fellow council members, they'd get irritated by it because they had to sit in there and deal with it.
00:48:45 Ryan
And they want them to censor the meeting and all that stuff.
00:48:47 Kevin
They're trying to hide money.
00:48:49 Kevin
They're putting money into their sack.
00:48:50 Kevin
They don't want attention on this.
00:48:52 Ryan
They're like, stop.
00:48:53 Kevin
What are you doing, Ryan?
00:48:55 Kevin
*** **** it.
00:48:58 Ryan
Hey, you know, it is what it is, but I was a tough guy.
00:49:02 Ryan
I wasn't going to hide it.
00:49:03 Ryan
And yeah, whatever.
00:49:06 Kevin
They tried to, they tried to censure me.
00:49:08 Kevin
I did, I did the prayer one time and I was like, we have a lot of like, we had, we have some Muslims in our community.
00:49:17 Kevin
We have some, we have, we had a synagogue in our community.
00:49:21 Kevin
And this is probably something I probably more or less, I don't know, regret as I'm getting older.
00:49:30 Kevin
But it was one of those like,
00:49:33 Kevin
My dad was a big like separation of church and state, right?
00:49:35 Kevin
So when I was growing up, I was drinking more of the Kool-Aid when it came to like the ACLU stuff, right?
00:49:41 Kevin
So it was like, well, you know, if it's government, it should be like, you know, the non-binary of religion.
00:49:48 Kevin
which to me made sense.
00:49:50 Kevin
And so I was like, we're always just doing some prayer.
00:49:53 Kevin
And it's like, when I think of a prayer I from the government, I would think of, like speeches, right?
00:49:59 Kevin
Like give me some, give me some quotes from like Lincoln or ask not what your government can do for you.
00:50:05 Ryan
Not a religious prayer, right?
00:50:07 Kevin
Exactly.
00:50:07 Kevin
And so that's where I was coming from with it.
00:50:10 Kevin
And now I'm like, I've seen so much stuff that's anti-religion that I'm like, you know what?
00:50:14 Kevin
I'm not even drawing a line in this hand anymore.
00:50:16 Kevin
If people want to say a prayer, say a prayer.
00:50:18 Kevin
People don't want to say a prayer.
00:50:20 Kevin
But I ended up going up there and being the shock jock that I am, I was like, all right, you know what I'm going to do?
00:50:25 Kevin
I'm just going to sing this.
00:50:27 Kevin
I'm going to give this Pastafarian prayer.
00:50:31 Kevin
You ever follow the Pastafarian?
00:50:34 Kevin
No, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
00:50:39 Ryan
No, I'm familiar with that.
00:50:42 Kevin
Yeah, they're Pastafarians.
00:50:43 Kevin
They believe in, they believe that we're descendants of pirates because pirates actually have more similar DNA to us than apes.
00:50:54 Kevin
And so like, it's a satire religion.
00:50:58 Kevin
And so like, they also believe that heaven has a beer volcano and a stripper factory.
00:51:03 Kevin
So I just gave this big
00:51:07 Kevin
Pastafarian prayer.
00:51:09 Kevin
And then I was like, at the end of it, rah men.
00:51:12 Kevin
And it happened to be the night that like the head of the zoning board commission, like she was retiring that night after 30 something years.
00:51:23 Kevin
And it like every single like high school student happened to show up for their participation in government class.
00:51:31 Kevin
And so all of a sudden I'm like, oh boy, this one's going to go over well.
00:51:33 Kevin
And I read it and everybody lost their minds.
00:51:36 Kevin
And it was like, how dare he?
00:51:38 Kevin
And I was like, I should have stuck with JFK.
00:51:40 Kevin
I should have done the JFK speech, damn it.
00:51:43 Ryan
That's funny you said that.
00:51:44 Ryan
Cause when I, when I trolled the lids and, you know, I come out and identified as the woman of color, man, they lost it.
00:51:55 Ryan
They showed up in droves to the council meetings.
00:51:59 Ryan
So it turned out one of my fellow council members had died.
00:52:04 Ryan
She was an old lady, sweet lady.
00:52:06 Ryan
And they were going to do this, whole memorial thing to her and dedicate everything to her and everything.
00:52:12 Ryan
And the whole council meeting got hijacked by these lunatics coming in there, just irate bunch of ******** and, you know, rainbow warriors.
00:52:22 Ryan
And they were in there just raising hell.
00:52:24 Ryan
And so my fellow council members was irritated that the memorial council meeting for our fallen
00:52:32 Ryan
co counselor had had been hijacked by my antics again, which again, I didn't, I didn't bring these people in.
00:52:40 Ryan
Right, right.
00:52:41 Ryan
They just happened.
00:52:41 Ryan
I said, I think it's a good thing more people are seeing government meetings, but you know, whatever.
00:52:47 Ryan
There was a whole group of high school kids that came in and everything.
00:52:50 Ryan
So it was a big deal.
00:52:52 Kevin
And that reminds me because I don't think so for like, I followed your, like your antics, like, and so.
00:53:03 Kevin
For a lot of my audience out there, I don't think they went down the rabbit holes that I did during 2020.
00:53:08 Kevin
So just to reiterate, like your previous antics, like the big one, the one that puts you at least on my map was that you identified as a black lesbian woman, correct?
00:53:23 Ryan
Yeah.
00:53:23 Ryan
Well, yeah, I changed it to a lesbian woman of color.
00:53:28 Ryan
And I said, I said, because people are like, you're not black.
00:53:31 Ryan
I said, but I'm native, I got a Native American in me.
00:53:35 Ryan
And I said, I'm a lesbian because I love my wife.
00:53:39 Ryan
I'm still attracted to my wife and I don't ever change.
00:53:41 Ryan
So, you know, I'm a lesbian woman of color.
00:53:45 Ryan
And
00:53:46 Ryan
They lost their minds.
00:53:47 Ryan
They went crazy.
00:53:48 Kevin
Yeah, that's really popped up on my radar.
00:53:51 Kevin
So like, actually, that was, that's probably something we probably should have opened with, but.
00:53:54 Kevin
Yeah.
00:53:54 Ryan
Oh yeah, because that's what most people talk about.
00:53:58 Ryan
And you know, the funny thing is so much of that, that interview I did about Walsh, they think that's all like satire, satire, whatever.
00:54:05 Ryan
That's all true.
00:54:06 Ryan
Like when I said that my great, great, great grandfather was the Cherokee chief, chief walking stick of the Cherokee Nation in North Carolina.
00:54:16 Ryan
That's true.
00:54:17 Ryan
I said, courtesy of ancestry.com, I found out my great, great, great grandfather, one of the greats, like four or five greats, is actually Chief Walking Snake of the Cherokee Nation.
00:54:27 Ryan
That's not made-up.
00:54:28 Ryan
That's actual.
00:54:29 Ryan
That's real.
00:54:30 Ryan
I got documents to prove it.
00:54:32 Ryan
And my grandmother on my dad's side, she's full bloody Cherokee.
00:54:36 Ryan
Her name was Anna Savannah, Carolina, Tennessee, Church Will Web.
00:54:42 Ryan
That's true.
00:54:42 Ryan
I mean, this **** all sounds made-up, but it really is real.
00:54:46 Ryan
And people just thought that was me like keeping the stick going.
00:54:50 Ryan
But no, that was like real stuff.
00:54:52 Kevin
Yeah.
00:54:52 Kevin
I think you were telling me the other day that you like you had to, you did it all in one take.
00:54:57 Kevin
No laughing, straight faced.
00:54:59 Ryan
Yeah.
00:55:00 Ryan
If you guys get a chance, if your audience out there, watch the Matt Walsh interview.
00:55:03 Ryan
It's got over 100 million views.
00:55:05 Ryan
Matt flew me out to the Daily Wire in Nashville.
00:55:08 Ryan
It was like top secret on the location.
00:55:11 Ryan
I had to sign a NDA.
00:55:13 Ryan
And so
00:55:16 Ryan
He basically gets there and he says, the only rule is, don't laugh.
00:55:20 Ryan
It's no problem.
00:55:22 Ryan
And we rip it for like, he starts asking me these questions.
00:55:24 Ryan
I don't know the questions he's going to ask.
00:55:26 Ryan
And I'd already made my mind up when I did that first Jesse Walters interview.
00:55:30 Ryan
I'm going to do this dead serious, stone-faced the whole time.
00:55:34 Ryan
And I did most of my interviews that way.
00:55:36 Ryan
And so I'm answering Matt's questions.
00:55:38 Ryan
He's coming back with some good ones.
00:55:41 Ryan
And finally, after 45 minutes, Matt just starts cracking up laughing.
00:55:44 Ryan
And he's like, this is ******* awesome.
00:55:47 Ryan
He said, we can definitely use this.
00:55:49 Ryan
And that was that.
00:55:51 Ryan
was the end of it.
00:55:52 Ryan
I didn't know how much they're, I didn't even know what they're gonna do.
00:55:54 Ryan
And two weeks later, it pops off, my phone starts going insane.
00:56:00 Ryan
And I told my wife, I said, something's happening because my phone's just beeping left and right.
00:56:04 Ryan
And they had released the interview on Instagram and Matt had tagged me in it.
00:56:08 Ryan
So all these people were following me on Instagram, my phone's just going crazy.
00:56:12 Ryan
And, but they edited down to like 13, 14 minutes.
00:56:16 Ryan
And one of the things in all the comments, by the way, that ended up being the number one viewed
00:56:22 Ryan
interview for all 2023 and Dan Bongino named me the number two-story of the year, right?
00:56:29 Kevin
There you go.
00:56:30 Ryan
And for that, for that deal.
00:56:32 Ryan
So anyway, people would say it on their online, man, I would give anything to see those blooper cuts.
00:56:39 Ryan
And I would tell people, I would say, listen, there are no blooper cuts.
00:56:42 Ryan
We did that whole thing in one take.
00:56:44 Ryan
And you guys only got to see the 13 minutes of it.
00:56:47 Ryan
Like I don't even remember what all the rest of it was, but that was all funny as hell too.
00:56:51 Ryan
He could release a part two.
00:56:53 Ryan
And it was pretty hilarious as well.
00:56:55 Ryan
And we were just winging it.
00:56:57 Ryan
I was trying to, I was winging it, but I was trying to not make it too crazy.
00:57:01 Ryan
Like when I told him I thought they may name a park after me or something, I didn't want to go too far with it.
00:57:06 Ryan
Right.
00:57:09 Ryan
I just don't think that shit's funny, man.
00:57:11 Ryan
I watch it every now and then to get a good laugh.
00:57:14 Kevin
Yeah, no, that's the nice part about having stock footage and having like, you know, it's almost like, it's like mug, it's mug shots.
00:57:23 Kevin
It's like your, what are the head shots that actors get?
00:57:26 Kevin
You can kind of like go peruse your book, your portfolio.
00:57:29 Kevin
You can look at all the movies you were in.
00:57:31 Kevin
And that's kind of, that's the nice part about, you know, some of the stuff nowadays.
00:57:36 Ryan
Let me tell you a quick, funny story if I could with that.
00:57:39 Ryan
So I told you when we talked on the phone, we ran this for about five, six weeks.
00:57:44 Ryan
It was crazy.
00:57:45 Ryan
Finally, my wife had it off of it.
00:57:47 Ryan
She wanted it to die down.
00:57:48 Ryan
So we made the story die down.
00:57:51 Ryan
We could have kept it going, but we let it die down.
00:57:54 Ryan
And they were trying to kick me off the council.
00:57:56 Ryan
So I had to stay straight fake.
00:57:58 Ryan
No, I'd be dead serious.
00:58:00 Ryan
And I did that for like six months.
00:58:03 Ryan
Finally, after six months, I come, I made another post.
00:58:05 Ryan
I said, listen, I've come to my senses.
00:58:08 Ryan
I lost my mind for a moment.
00:58:10 Ryan
I went down the rabbit hole.
00:58:11 Ryan
I blame social media.
00:58:13 Ryan
I kind of went crazy for a minute.
00:58:15 Ryan
But now I'm coming back, I'm fully a man, and I'm identifying as a man.
00:58:19 Ryan
Well, that was our Channel 8, Indianapolis, Channel 8's top story for three days that I switched back to a man.
00:58:25 Ryan
And it could have been longer.
00:58:28 Ryan
I quit looking after three days, right?
00:58:30 Ryan
Well, so people are constantly coming up to me wherever we were at, and people want to take pictures.
00:58:36 Ryan
I was getting recognized everywhere.
00:58:38 Ryan
Well, I live just north of Indianapolis.
00:58:41 Ryan
A year later, a lot of your guys don't know I drive a truck.
00:58:44 Ryan
A year later, I'm driving up in Detroit, going between Toledo and Detroit.
00:58:49 Ryan
And I get pulled over by this trooper.
00:58:51 Ryan
And he comes up to me and he wants me to get me out of the truck, walk in the back of the truck.
00:58:56 Ryan
We're on the side of the interstate, I-75, I think.
00:58:59 Ryan
And he goes, don't get alarmed.
00:59:01 Ryan
There's a couple of guys back here.
00:59:03 Ryan
So as we walk the back of the truck, there's two border patrol agents, full SWAT gear.
00:59:08 Ryan
I don't know, they were looking for something.
00:59:11 Ryan
So they watch me while this trooper climbs in the back of my truck and starts searching.
00:59:15 Ryan
Well, I have my America's councilman hats and this and that.
00:59:18 Ryan
I saw merchandise all over the world, big in Australia for some reason.
00:59:23 Ryan
And they're kind of looking at each other talking.
00:59:26 Ryan
And one of them goes, hey, are you Ryan?
00:59:28 Ryan
I said, yeah, I'm Ryan.
00:59:29 Ryan
And he nudges, but he's like, I told you that was him.
00:59:32 Ryan
I told you that was him.
00:59:33 Ryan
And then they start quoting quotes from the Walsh interview back and forth with one another.
00:59:39 Ryan
Hey, they're like, they're like each repeating different quotes from our interview a year earlier.
00:59:44 Ryan
And we're cracking up.
00:59:46 Ryan
They're like, we take a picture.
00:59:48 Ryan
I'm like, hell yeah, I'll take a picture.
00:59:50 Ryan
This is all on the side of the interstate, car zipping by.
00:59:52 Ryan
Well, at Trooper, he's in a truck.
00:59:54 Ryan
He don't know anything about it.
00:59:55 Ryan
He turns around.
00:59:56 Ryan
We're taking pictures, selfies.
00:59:58 Ryan
He don't know what the hell's happened.
01:00:01 Ryan
I see, look, they were guarding me while he searched this truck.
01:00:05 Ryan
And he's like, what's going on?
01:00:06 Ryan
They're like, oh, he's so-and-so.
01:00:08 Ryan
And he could give a 2 ****.
01:00:09 Ryan
He couldn't care less.
01:00:11 Ryan
He's probably a Democrat, but it was funny that those guys, powering you 400 miles away, a whole year later, still recognizing and remembered that.
01:00:20 Ryan
And I still get people every now and then all recognize it.
01:00:23 Kevin
So I recognized, yeah, so when I first watched the, like, I can't remember if it popped up on Facebook or if it was part of like the Morning Wire.
01:00:33 Kevin
I don't know if Morning Wire existed then.
01:00:35 Kevin
I believe they started in like 2021.
01:00:39 Ryan
I don't know.
01:00:39 Ryan
This was, I think, 23 or 24, 23, I think.
01:00:45 Ryan
But I did.
01:00:46 Kevin
The Walsh interview was 23, right?
01:00:48 Ryan
Yeah, the Walsh interview was, I think, around May.
01:00:53 Ryan
I think this popped off around April.
01:00:56 Ryan
And then, yeah, Walsh interview aired in May.
01:00:58 Ryan
The very first interview I did was with Justin Waters.
01:01:02 Ryan
And then, you know, Gutfeld and all of them, Pierce
01:01:05 Ryan
Morgan, Glenn Beck.
01:01:08 Ryan
I did a bunch of them.
01:01:09 Ryan
And then I started cutting off the interviews just because, you know, it was just one thing after another, whatever.
01:01:16 Ryan
It was a lot of fun.
01:01:16 Ryan
We had fun with it.
01:01:17 Kevin
But I caught it on a news podcast and all of a sudden, like I listen to Matt Walsh every day.
01:01:23 Kevin
So I listened to Matt and Ben Shapiro and all those guys like daily.
01:01:27 Kevin
So all of a sudden I was like, holy ****.
01:01:30 Kevin
I was like, my wife would care less about any of the stuff that I listen to.
01:01:33 Kevin
I'm like, honey, this guy that I just saw on a news thing like a month ago, he's getting interviewed by Matt Walsh.
01:01:38 Kevin
This is the craziest **** ever.
01:01:40 Kevin
He's a.
01:01:42 Ryan
I was figuring out when Jesse Waters went into the interview.
01:01:44 Ryan
And I told him, if Matt Walsh calls, I'm going to lose my ****.
01:01:48 Ryan
And I opened up my Twitter, I think it was, and I had a private message from him.
01:01:54 Ryan
And he was saying, hey, I'd like, we should do an interview.
01:01:56 Ryan
Probably should be in person.
01:01:59 Ryan
Hell yeah, I got the green light for my wife.
01:02:01 Ryan
She was like, go do it.
01:02:03 Ryan
Got my boss.
01:02:04 Ryan
They were cool with it.
01:02:05 Ryan
They flew me out, you know, into Nashville or whatever.
01:02:09 Ryan
And, you know, Jesse Watterson, the crew of the house, all the other videos were Zoom.
01:02:14 Ryan
besides Jesse sending the crew and Walsh flying me out.
01:02:17 Ryan
And it was a pretty cool thing.
01:02:19 Ryan
It really blew up when Walsh got a hold of it because he covered it on his show a couple of times.
01:02:23 Ryan
Everybody covered it.
01:02:24 Ryan
Tim Pool, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles.
01:02:27 Ryan
I'm friends with Michael Knowles on Twitter.
01:02:29 Ryan
A lot of those guys follow me now, Riley Gaines and Michael.
01:02:33 Ryan
And Rogan, Joe Rogan sent me a text and stuff.
01:02:36 Ryan
And we kind of went back a couple of times with texts.
01:02:38 Ryan
My kid thought that was a cool thing.
01:02:40 Ryan
But you know who didn't?
01:02:41 Ryan
I never,
01:02:43 Ryan
I heard from him and I never saw him say anything about it was Charlie Kirk.
01:02:49 Ryan
I don't think Charlie ever touched it.
01:02:50 Ryan
Every single conservative commentator did something about it, but I don't, at least I never saw it.
01:02:57 Ryan
Never seen Charlie do anything about it and I never heard from him.
01:03:00 Kevin
Yeah.
01:03:02 Kevin
He had a good run.
01:03:03 Kevin
It was a good run though.
01:03:04 Kevin
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
01:03:05 Kevin
You never know when you're gonna go viral, you know?
01:03:09 Ryan
Yeah, it was.
01:03:10 Ryan
And it probably wouldn't have if I wasn't an elected official that way.
01:03:13 Ryan
I'm sure that boosted it.
01:03:14 Ryan
And it didn't hurt that the number one video they took off was the Channel 8 news lady.
01:03:21 Ryan
I told you this earlier when they called NAS for a statement.
01:03:25 Ryan
I wrote them a response declining to do this interview.
01:03:29 Ryan
And they wouldn't use that as my statement.
01:03:32 Ryan
So they do their top stories.
01:03:33 Ryan
She's reading this thing.
01:03:34 Ryan
And
01:03:35 Ryan
she's like being dead serious, this black lady talking about me being a transgender woman of color, and it's so funny is that she's happened to read it with such a straight face.
01:03:46 Ryan
I think that's what made it take off is her reading it like it was real and happened to pretend she knew it was ********.
01:03:55 Ryan
She had to read it like it was real.
01:03:57 Ryan
And they all had to read it like it was real.
01:04:00 Kevin
Yeah, because what if you truly believed that?
01:04:03 Ryan
That's what it's ended up being.
01:04:05 Ryan
everybody, we set their movement back so far because a week before they were saying all you had to do was just say it, declare it, make it so, and you are.
01:04:18 Ryan
You're a woman, you're a man.
01:04:20 Ryan
All you have to do is declare it and feel it.
01:04:22 Kevin
Right, you're a Cobb salad.
01:04:23 Ryan
That's right.
01:04:25 Ryan
Well, fast forward to me doing it.
01:04:27 Ryan
They all of a sudden set back their own movement two or three years by saying, no, you can't possibly be because you haven't done no hormones.
01:04:35 Ryan
You haven't changed your documents.
01:04:36 Ryan
You haven't done the social stuff or told your family.
01:04:39 Ryan
I said, wait a minute, what are all these, you know, things that you say has to meet this checklist?
01:04:46 Ryan
You guys just said that you didn't have to do anything.
01:04:49 Ryan
You've set your own movement back.
01:04:50 Ryan
So it was a real beautiful moment to hold the mirror up to them.
01:04:54 Kevin
Well, yeah, you could be lying.
01:04:56 Ryan
The contradiction of their ideology was so apparent and they knew it.
01:05:00 Ryan
And that's what made them so mad.
01:05:02 Ryan
They knew that it was exposed to them.
01:05:05 Kevin
Did you get any death threats?
01:05:07 Ryan
Oh my God.
01:05:08 Ryan
I still get death threats.
01:05:10 Ryan
I get death threats all the time.
01:05:11 Ryan
You know what I mean?
01:05:12 Ryan
All the time.
01:05:13 Ryan
And yeah, we had to increase our security.
01:05:16 Ryan
Bunch of them, like 4 carloads of people showed up one night at 2:00 in the morning and all jumped out next door, dumped 2 trash, bags of trash all over the front yard.
01:05:25 Ryan
They got my little old neighbor's yard.
01:05:26 Ryan
They thought it was my house, mailbox, but it was my next door neighbor.
01:05:30 Ryan
And so we had our security.
01:05:33 Ryan
I carry my pistol with me everywhere I go.
01:05:34 Ryan
And
01:05:36 Ryan
The sheriff's department had to have several more officers at the county council meeting because they were all threatening me on Reddit.
01:05:42 Ryan
They had to, you know, I come in through a different door, all this ********.
01:05:46 Ryan
So some of them were annoyed by that, but oh yeah, we definitely got some death threats.
01:05:51 Ryan
Yeah.
01:05:52 Kevin
Man, that poor little old lady.
01:05:55 Ryan
She was ******.
01:05:56 Ryan
She got beaten on my door at 8 in the morning crying.
01:05:59 Ryan
Ryan, what did you do?
01:06:02 Ryan
I'm.
01:06:06 Kevin
Sorry, Miss Jenkins.
01:06:07 Kevin
I'll be right over.
01:06:08 Kevin
I'll get it cleaned up.
01:06:09 Kevin
Don't worry.
01:06:10 Ryan
Yeah, I felt bad.
01:06:11 Ryan
It just broke.
01:06:13 Ryan
It's funny you said that because just about a month ago,
01:06:17 Ryan
I went out, I had to go to a candidate's breakfast where I was doing a speech.
01:06:23 Ryan
So I was rushing.
01:06:24 Ryan
I walk out the door, my whole, and it's windy because a rainstorm's going to come in.
01:06:30 Ryan
My whole front yard had been toilet paper rolled, right?
01:06:34 Ryan
But not just my yard.
01:06:35 Ryan
The next four houses, they had to have used 75 rolls of toilet paper.
01:06:39 Ryan
There was so much toilet paper.
01:06:41 Ryan
And then I thought, because it was so windy, I'm like,
01:06:44 Ryan
okay, did they get my yard and all the wind blew in all them?
01:06:47 Ryan
Or did they get one of them and they all blew to me?
01:06:49 Ryan
And then I thought, well, it's probably me.
01:06:53 Ryan
They got and then I found like 4 hole rolls in my yard.
01:06:55 Ryan
So I knew it was me.
01:06:57 Ryan
But then it all blew down to the neighbors.
01:06:59 Ryan
I had to leave.
01:07:00 Ryan
The rain's coming in.
01:07:01 Ryan
So my wife had to get out of bed, go out there, clean it all up real quick before it rained.
01:07:05 Ryan
But that was just a month ago.
01:07:07 Ryan
So yeah, You still got a lot of fans out there.
01:07:11 Ryan
When I leave every morning, 5 a.m.
01:07:13 Ryan
I walk out that front door.
01:07:15 Ryan
I got my, I don't have my gun in my way.
01:07:17 Ryan
I have my gun in my hand.
01:07:19 Ryan
I still do this to this day.
01:07:21 Ryan
My gun is in my hand.
01:07:22 Ryan
I walk to one side of the house.
01:07:24 Ryan
I turn to look.
01:07:25 Ryan
I go to my other side of the house.
01:07:26 Ryan
I walk in between my car, my wife's car.
01:07:29 Ryan
I look around the, I look all around, open up the door, gun in, I get in, and then I close the door.
01:07:34 Ryan
Then I put my gun up.
01:07:35 Ryan
I do that every single day.
01:07:38 Ryan
Nobody's gonna sneak up on me if they get it.
01:07:41 Ryan
Cause they,
01:07:42 Ryan
They stalked me.
01:07:45 Ryan
They wanted to know where I worked.
01:07:46 Ryan
Somebody followed me to work, staked me out.
01:07:48 Ryan
I leave for work at 5 A.m.
01:07:50 Ryan
And they finally figured out where I worked, put it on Facebook.
01:07:54 Ryan
And they were all, these ******* ******** Democrats were organizing by the hundreds and calling my corporate office, trying to get, put pressure on them to fire me.
01:08:05 Ryan
They were trying to cancel me left and right.
01:08:09 Ryan
I told you they all signed me up for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails, like companies.
01:08:14 Ryan
Like who has that kind of time?
01:08:16 Ryan
You know how long it takes to sign up for an e-mail list?
01:08:19 Kevin
Well, actually, you mentioned that the other day.
01:08:21 Kevin
There's actually spammers that do that.
01:08:23 Kevin
So my, somehow my e-mail got like hacked.
01:08:28 Kevin
And so like somebody found out that like my account like on Amazon had three, had two different emails.
01:08:34 Kevin
And so whoever comes in, they actually sign you up to a bulk list.
01:08:38 Kevin
they actually have programs, which now are called AI, right?
01:08:42 Kevin
Like they sign you, like the AI will sign you up for like these huge spam lists.
01:08:48 Kevin
And it'll be so much that it'll overrun like Google and Yahoo that they'll actually like lock your account out.
01:08:56 Ryan
They were signing me up to stuff that they had to pay money for.
01:08:59 Ryan
I got a thing that was like some devil worshiping club that thank you for your $10 donation.
01:09:04 Ryan
And I just did.
01:09:06 Kevin
Yeah.
01:09:07 Ryan
And I'm like, all right.
01:09:08 Kevin
So this might act a little different.
01:09:09 Ryan
Yeah.
01:09:11 Kevin
Right.
01:09:11 Kevin
I was going to say, oh, sorry.
01:09:13 Ryan
No, you're good.
01:09:15 Ryan
It was a lot of lesbian stuff and gay stuff.
01:09:18 Ryan
I'm sure there was some spam stuff in there, but it turned on a dime.
01:09:22 Ryan
I mean, and I had my county e-mail, you know, my e-mail and my campaign e-mail.
01:09:27 Ryan
So 3 emails at least.
01:09:28 Ryan
And I mean, I've had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds every day, every day.
01:09:34 Ryan
So that's probably the most annoying thing out of all of it.
01:09:37 Kevin
So what they'll do is they'll figure out how to crack one or two of your emails.
01:09:41 Kevin
If they can crack an e-mail, what they'll do is that's when they'll spam it.
01:09:45 Kevin
So once they get it, they send the receipt over, they reset your e-mail password, and then they spam it so that you can't even try to get in because now it's locked out for 48 hours and you can't get in.
01:09:59 Kevin
the meantime, they're using your e-mail to get into your Amazon, ordering off Amazon gift cards with your credit cards.
01:10:06 Kevin
they're going through and then they're getting the Amazon gift card shipped to wherever or just getting the codes emailed to your e-mail, pulling them down.
01:10:15 Kevin
And that's when they go through and just now you're locked out.
01:10:18 Ryan
So these people, these people were the most.
01:10:22 Ryan
disgusting, hate-filled, deranged people you could ever meet.
01:10:26 Ryan
They think they're so loving and so considerate and compassionate.
01:10:30 Ryan
And they were just filled with hate constantly.
01:10:33 Ryan
I mean, they would talk about, I hope your kids get raped and killed.
01:10:38 Ryan
And you're, you know, I mean, just the most disgusting foul things you could ever say.
01:10:42 Ryan
I posted a picture of my kids having to do with political.
01:10:44 Ryan
They would go crazy on there.
01:10:46 Ryan
And you know, when you're elected official, you can't block people, right?
01:10:50 Ryan
My wife would be like, just block them.
01:10:51 Ryan
And I'm like,
01:10:52 Ryan
not allowed to block them.
01:10:53 Kevin
I don't block anybody.
01:10:55 Ryan
You block me.
01:10:56 Ryan
Right.
01:10:56 Ryan
And so, they were doing all of those disgusting things and saying all these things and they, were trying to make it unsafe for me.
01:11:07 Ryan
So they actually coordinated.
01:11:09 Ryan
I, one day I pushed back.
01:11:11 Ryan
I took a list of the 10 most,
01:11:14 Ryan
most rampant lunatics.
01:11:16 Ryan
And I put their ******* pictures, their profile pics out.
01:11:18 Ryan
And I was like, these are the crazy ******** who were threat to my safety, blah, blah, blah.
01:11:22 Ryan
Well, I have a lot of followers too.
01:11:24 Ryan
So my followers.
01:11:26 Ryan
turned on all of those people.
01:11:27 Ryan
And then they started freaking out.
01:11:29 Ryan
Oh, he's sick these people on me.
01:11:30 Ryan
He doxed us, blah, blah, blah.
01:11:32 Ryan
He said, I doxed the kid because one of the ladies profile pic, she had like her 17 year old kid in the picture with it, which I didn't notice that, but whatever.
01:11:41 Ryan
It's not like I gave her address and her name and it was her public profile pic.
01:11:44 Ryan
But so they'll say that I doxed some kid.
01:11:47 Ryan
Well, anyway, long story short, when I did that,
01:11:50 Ryan
They said I threatened their safety.
01:11:51 Ryan
So 10 of them, no, 14 of them got together.
01:11:55 Ryan
They made a plan and they all 14 went and filed restraining orders against me.
01:12:00 Ryan
And I wouldn't know these people.
01:12:01 Ryan
They were sitting next to me right now.
01:12:03 Ryan
And they, their plan was because they would, they would talk about it.
01:12:08 Ryan
They would all have like four or five different accounts.
01:12:12 Ryan
And my wife would see 50 people saying these things.
01:12:17 Ryan
to this many people really hate you.
01:12:19 Ryan
And I'm like, that's not that many people.
01:12:21 Ryan
That's really like nine people.
01:12:23 Ryan
They just all have like four or five accounts.
01:12:25 Ryan
And they would go and alternate between their accounts and keep making comments in the newsfeed to make it look like there was 40, 50 people.
01:12:31 Ryan
And then finally my wife seen one of them say, oh, he blocked me and he bought me on all my accounts.
01:12:37 Ryan
So then she was like, you're right.
01:12:39 Ryan
They really do have all those accounts.
01:12:41 Ryan
And I told her, I said, I know these people.
01:12:42 Ryan
I've been dealing with these people.
01:12:44 Ryan
I know them like the back of my hand.
01:12:45 Ryan
And what they said on one of their pages was they filed those restraining orders, hoping one of them would get through.
01:12:52 Ryan
They knew most of them would get tossed.
01:12:53 Ryan
They thought if one of them got through, then I wouldn't be allowed to carry my gun anymore.
01:12:58 Ryan
That was what they were hoping to achieve by that.
01:13:01 Kevin
Right.
01:13:02 Ryan
And I couldn't file restraining orders against them because I was an elected official and they had the freedom to criticize their government.
01:13:09 Kevin
Right.
01:13:10 Kevin
Yeah.
01:13:10 Kevin
Isn't that great?
01:13:11 Kevin
Yeah.
01:13:11 Kevin
I hope your kids get raped is criticism of a government official.
01:13:15 Kevin
Like, I mean, I guess they can hope, right?
01:13:17 Kevin
Like, it's like, man, just.
01:13:21 Kevin
And I was talking to somebody the other day and it was like, there's so many people that are like stuck in their ideology.
01:13:26 Kevin
They're stuck in their way of thinking of the world.
01:13:28 Kevin
And it's like, if you just, I said, it would be great to just interview a zombie.
01:13:32 Kevin
Like just get somebody dressed in zombie face and just like, you know, tie them to a chair and be like, I want to know what your thoughts are on, you know, like, I don't know, the current, you know, the current Iran war.
01:13:45 Kevin
And they'd be like, and just start like just foaming at the mouth and be like,
01:13:51 Kevin
Yeah, What do you think about Trump?
01:13:53 Kevin
Like, I was like, man, you guys just, you guys can't control yourselves.
01:13:59 Ryan
Oh, they're in their bubble, that's for certain.
01:14:01 Ryan
And they think I'm in a bubble.
01:14:02 Ryan
They say,
01:14:04 Ryan
you're not open-minded.
01:14:06 Ryan
And really what they don't understand is I think I'm one of the most open-minded people that there is.
01:14:10 Ryan
I'm just rational.
01:14:11 Ryan
I told you briefly earlier, I had met there's this one transgender and I can meet with you if you're transgender and I can be respectful.
01:14:19 Ryan
I'm not going to do the pronoun thing.
01:14:20 Ryan
And I'm not, I mean, if you want to go have a beer, we can have a beer and have a good time.
01:14:24 Ryan
But the second you start saying, okay, Ryan, now I need you to refer to me as a woman or I'm not going to play that game.
01:14:30 Ryan
I'm not going to do that.
01:14:31 Kevin
And they're going to entertain your mental health problems.
01:14:34 Ryan
And they know that, but we can be respectful.
01:14:36 Ryan
So I met with this one reporter.
01:14:40 Ryan
I didn't know it was a training until I got there.
01:14:42 Ryan
We met at Canara Bread or whatever, and it's a transgender kid.
01:14:46 Ryan
And we had this really respectful interview.
01:14:50 Ryan
And at the end of it, he thought it was going to be this hit piece.
01:14:52 Ryan
He was writing.
01:14:53 Ryan
He's got this newspaper that he writes for.
01:14:55 Ryan
And he tells me at the end of it, he says, you're not what I thought you were.
01:15:00 Ryan
And I
01:15:01 Ryan
I told him, a lot of people say that to me.
01:15:03 Ryan
They get the internet version.
01:15:05 Ryan
They see what people have repeated in the local community groups.
01:15:08 Ryan
They think they know who I am.
01:15:09 Ryan
And then they'll sit down with me or they'll meet me and they'll go, you're not what I thought you were or you're not what I thought you would be.
01:15:16 Ryan
He come away with that experience.
01:15:18 Ryan
I have another one I'm about to do tomorrow night when I get home.
01:15:21 Ryan
Another transgender that said,
01:15:25 Ryan
on one of my comments, I think I made a post that I was endorsed by the lieutenant governor.
01:15:30 Ryan
And we were at the White House on Monday, right?
01:15:34 Ryan
It was at the White House on Monday.
01:15:35 Ryan
Did I tell you that?
01:15:36 Ryan
You've seen that.
01:15:37 Kevin
I saw it.
01:15:37 Kevin
Yeah, so I was like, you know what?
01:15:39 Kevin
I should reach out to Ryan, get him on the show.
01:15:41 Ryan
So we were at the White House and I do a video at the White House, tell them what I'd done on my campaign.
01:15:46 Ryan
Well, it's got hundreds of negative comments.
01:15:49 Ryan
Like out of 112, like three are positive, right?
01:15:51 Ryan
They're all just people hating.
01:15:53 Ryan
And this person said, I would actually sit and talk with you, but I don't think there's any room for love in your heart.
01:16:00 Ryan
It's just hate or something along those lines.
01:16:02 Ryan
And I remember that first transgender I met with, and I said, you know what?
01:16:07 Ryan
If you did sit and talk with me, and most of these people I don't respond to anymore, but this one I did.
01:16:12 Ryan
I said, if you did sit down and talk with me, we would probably both find out that we both agree on more than we disagree on, and that we can be respectful of one another.
01:16:22 Ryan
And at the same time, just agree to disagree on the things that we don't agree upon on.
01:16:28 Ryan
And I said, I think we could do that.
01:16:30 Ryan
Where would you like to have a beer?
01:16:33 Ryan
They sent me a private message.
01:16:35 Ryan
And I thought it was a woman at first, but once I, because I never clicked on the actual picture, but once I look, it's a dude.
01:16:40 Ryan
And so anyway, we're going to go have a beer tomorrow and we're going to have a chat.
01:16:45 Ryan
And I expect more than likely it'll be similar to the other situation.
01:16:50 Ryan
They may not come away as one of my biggest fans.
01:16:53 Ryan
They may not come away.
01:16:54 Ryan
They still may not even like me that much.
01:16:56 Ryan
But I don't think it'll be the vitriol that they currently have from what they see on Facebook that they think is there.
01:17:04 Kevin
They think that they gotcha moment.
01:17:05 Kevin
Like I'm going to get the in-person gotcha moment with this guy.
01:17:09 Ryan
Yeah, we're going to have a respectful conversation.
01:17:11 Ryan
I'm not going to be rude because you know, if I'm talking to a training, I was a supervisor building locomotives and we had a transgender in there and
01:17:20 Ryan
There's ways around that.
01:17:21 Ryan
I just won't use language where I have to say, he or her, I use your name, I use your whatever.
01:17:26 Ryan
I'm not going to go down that road, but at the same time, I'm not going to blatantly rub your nose in it and try to disrespect it to your face like that neither.
01:17:33 Ryan
And I would do the same thing with this person.
01:17:34 Ryan
When we chat, we'll talk and I will do everything I can to not use he or she, because
01:17:42 Ryan
If I do the right, what I want to do, then they're going to be offended by that.
01:17:46 Ryan
And I'm not going to do the way they want me to do it.
01:17:49 Ryan
So the only alternative is I will just do it differently and call you by your name.
01:17:53 Ryan
Because I'm not going to, you know?
01:17:55 Kevin
Because you're there for substance of a conversation.
01:17:57 Kevin
You're not there to just, you know, get in a fistfight.
01:18:00 Kevin
Like there's, you can.
01:18:02 Ryan
I'm not there to validate your feelings and contradict where I stand on my moral ground either.
01:18:09 Ryan
I think we can both have our own moral ground
01:18:12 Ryan
without either one of us giving up where we stand on the issue.
01:18:17 Ryan
If that makes sense.
01:18:19 Kevin
Yeah, no, and then, yeah, but you're there for the substance.
01:18:22 Kevin
You're not there to get in the ******* match.
01:18:24 Kevin
So like you want to have a conversation.
01:18:26 Kevin
Like this person wants to talk to me, they want to talk to me.
01:18:28 Kevin
We're going to talk about real things.
01:18:30 Kevin
I'm not going to, you know, I'm going to just step aside all the nonsense they're going to try to entertain.
01:18:34 Kevin
And you'll be like, no, let's talk about real things.
01:18:37 Ryan
My wife is a little nervous because she's always nervous in these people.
01:18:42 Ryan
She's worried to my safety all the time.
01:18:45 Ryan
You know, they come up to me in the stores and they'll put their phone on my face and things like that.
01:18:49 Ryan
And, you know, I'm pretty well known around here.
01:18:53 Ryan
And
01:18:54 Ryan
I've always said that if anybody ever makes a move on me, it'll be one of these ******** you know, somebody in the transgender community, I guarantee it, because they're the ones that are the most batshit crazy.
01:19:05 Ryan
So when I told her, hey, that girl I told you I was going to have a beer with, turns out it's a transgender.
01:19:11 Ryan
So that made her a little uncomfortable.
01:19:13 Ryan
But you know what?
01:19:15 Ryan
We'll see how it goes.
01:19:15 Ryan
And yeah, hopefully it works out.
01:19:19 Ryan
Okay.
01:19:20 Kevin
Yeah, for sure.
01:19:22 Kevin
We're getting to the hour and a half mark.
01:19:23 Kevin
You got to put your, you got to call your daughter and put her to bed or something, right?
01:19:26 Ryan
So yeah, If you want, if you have any specific questions you got, I can do another 10, 15 minutes if you want, but yeah, I'm going to call and Tucker in, but I don't want to just cut you off if you have anything that we haven't gotten to.
01:19:37 Kevin
No, nothing I can think of.
01:19:38 Kevin
I'd love to have you back on the show.
01:19:39 Kevin
I've got a lot of repeats.
01:19:42 Kevin
You know, so like a lot of times this is kind of
01:19:47 Kevin
My podcast was started like to like, it was like all the crazy stuff that like you've experienced too in your life, right?
01:19:52 Kevin
Like I was like, you know what?
01:19:54 Kevin
I need to Ed TV this ****.
01:19:55 Kevin
I need to Truman show my life.
01:19:57 Kevin
And that's how it started.
01:19:58 Kevin
Then it became like, all right, Kevin's ranting about this.
01:20:00 Kevin
There's local politics.
01:20:01 Kevin
There's a post about this.
01:20:02 Kevin
There's an interview with a cool guy named Ryan from Indiana.
01:20:07 Kevin
You know, like I've like last month, was it two months ago?
01:20:11 Kevin
We had
01:20:13 Kevin
We had Jackson Laymire on the show.
01:20:14 Kevin
He's running for, he just announced last week, he's running for state senate for Oklahoma.
01:20:22 Ryan
Oh yeah.
01:20:23 Kevin
So, you know, we had him on the show.
01:20:26 Kevin
I've got like two of his books.
01:20:28 Kevin
He keeps writing like 2 books a year and then they send me his books to review and read.
01:20:32 Kevin
And so.
01:20:33 Ryan
Very cool.
01:20:34 Kevin
Yeah.
01:20:35 Ryan
That's very cool.
01:20:36 Kevin
Saturday we got Kenny Paul Carey coming on the show.
01:20:38 Kevin
So.
01:20:40 Ryan
That's funny.
01:20:41 Ryan
It's funny, the whole podcast thing.
01:20:42 Ryan
I've got people, even my wife said it to me today about starting a podcast.
01:20:46 Ryan
And I just, I'm not familiar enough with it to do it.
01:20:49 Ryan
I got a lot of good stories to tell.
01:20:50 Ryan
I tell everybody, like I've got, you think of the top three or top five story in your life.
01:20:57 Ryan
And I've got 45, 50 of those.
01:21:00 Ryan
Like I've lived a lot of lives.
01:21:01 Ryan
I've got a lot of wild **** that I did back in the day.
01:21:05 Ryan
Like
01:21:06 Ryan
I'm just, I'm writing this book, writing this autobiography book about, I just wrote down, I sit and I thought about all these different stories.
01:21:12 Ryan
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to sit down and do 15 minute segments telling each of these stories.
01:21:18 Ryan
And I got about 45 to 50 of them.
01:21:20 Ryan
And when it's all done, I'm going to take those audio, you know, clips and
01:21:26 Ryan
create those and make them a book.
01:21:28 Ryan
And I thought that's the best way for me to do it is to tell the story and then use that audio and make it into a book.
01:21:33 Ryan
But I've done a lot of things, man.
01:21:35 Ryan
You know, a lot of people don't realize I come.
01:21:39 Ryan
It wasn't always, I was an addict for five years.
01:21:41 Ryan
You know, I've had four motorcycle crashes.
01:21:44 Ryan
I've almost died several times and got addicted to pain pills and, you know, went down that path, was in the streets.
01:21:51 Ryan
I sold drugs back in the day for years, you know, for like 15 years, selling drugs and just living a street life and coming out and now get my **** together and, you know, then become,
01:22:05 Ryan
It's really a success story.
01:22:06 Ryan
Then you get to become an elected official and all these things.
01:22:10 Ryan
So I would go work in the jail with these jailers because I would go around all the department heads and spend time with them, go on sheriff ride-alongs.
01:22:19 Ryan
And they would have these guys in jail.
01:22:21 Ryan
And I would tell them, like, I've been in this jail.
01:22:25 Ryan
Like, you can still make something.
01:22:28 Ryan
You know, if you haven't went too far,
01:22:32 Ryan
This could just be a setback.
01:22:34 Ryan
I mean, I know you get a photo of useful things, but I was able to climb out of that.
01:22:39 Ryan
I got a great life, great wife, and if you'd have looked 10 years ago when someone would have pointed at me and asked, Do you think I'd be where I was today?
01:22:49 Ryan
No one would have took that bet.
01:22:51 Ryan
No one, no one, because it just didn't look like it was gonna work out that way, and I've been blessed to do it.
01:23:00 Ryan
So yeah, I've got a lot of great stories and I'm going to figure out a way to tell them.
01:23:04 Ryan
But yeah, if you ever need to raw, man, it's not the most flattering.
01:23:10 Ryan
My buddies have already said, do not use my real name because they were all there with me.
01:23:15 Ryan
One of my buddies is a sheriff's deputy.
01:23:17 Ryan
He's in half the stories with me and now he's a cop.
01:23:20 Ryan
You know, he didn't have the wild **** with me.
01:23:23 Kevin
Yeah, no, if you ever need help like with a podcast or anything like that, just let me know.
01:23:27 Kevin
Like I've like, because like I do distribution on it now.
01:23:31 Kevin
Like, if my podcast isn't huge, you know what I mean?
01:23:34 Kevin
Like 3,500 followers on YouTube and like the same on Facebook.
01:23:40 Kevin
Like it ain't huge, but it's one of those things.
01:23:42 Kevin
It's like, it's my release to the world.
01:23:44 Kevin
Like it's like, man, this is my hobby.
01:23:47 Kevin
This is the thing that I enjoy doing.
01:23:48 Kevin
This prevents me from like snapping and, you know,
01:23:52 Kevin
being a raging alcoholic.
01:23:53 Ryan
Like, everybody should have something like that.
01:23:57 Ryan
It's like a diary.
01:23:58 Ryan
You're like doing a diary, but you're doing it to the world.
01:24:01 Kevin
Right.
01:24:02 Kevin
Yeah.
01:24:02 Kevin
Cause and I want to be honest with people.
01:24:03 Kevin
People are like, well, who's Kevin?
01:24:04 Kevin
It's like, you've got the, you've got the autobiography right here, baby.
01:24:09 Kevin
And like, I would love to write an autobiography someday or just write a book in general.
01:24:12 Kevin
Like there's tons of things I would love to do if I had the time.
01:24:15 Kevin
But it's like, I mean, I and so my guest on Saturday is Kenny Paul Kerry and he's like a financial analyst and he was on
01:24:22 Kevin
on Wall Street for 30 years.
01:24:23 Kevin
And I've even told him, because he was like, because he does his podcast on Substack.
01:24:28 Kevin
He releases his Substack and he's got YouTube videos and then he shares them onto Substack.
01:24:32 Kevin
And I'm like, you know, if you ripped them into audio, you could reach more people.
01:24:36 Kevin
Like, I'm not a big audio guy.
01:24:38 Kevin
Like I will listen to Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro every day.
01:24:42 Kevin
And I'll listen to them, but like it's playing in my pocket.
01:24:45 Kevin
Like my phone screen might be off, but the video is still playing.
01:24:49 Kevin
So like I'm a video podcaster, like I don't typically go out of my way for audio only, but if like, if I'm like 90% of it is me listening to it.
01:25:00 Kevin
And so like, but people love audio.
01:25:03 Kevin
And I learned that doing this kind of being in this hobby.
01:25:07 Kevin
And like, so I use transistor and I push out everything and it hits like
01:25:13 Kevin
I'm, we're on, I'm on Apple Podcast.
01:25:15 Kevin
I'm on Spotify, you know, Pandora, iHeartRadio.
01:25:19 Kevin
It pushes it out to a whole bunch of like different apps in Lebanon.
01:25:24 Kevin
Like.
01:25:25 Ryan
That's wild.
01:25:26 Ryan
Well, you know, that's funny you say that because
01:25:29 Ryan
I just like to tell stories.
01:25:31 Ryan
I just, I feel like I've lived such an adventure.
01:25:34 Ryan
And I tell my wife, this could be a motivational story for somebody.
01:25:38 Ryan
And she's like, yeah, but you gotta, she's, you know, the embarrassing stuff.
01:25:42 Ryan
She wants to leave out, selling the drugs, going to get arrested.
01:25:45 Ryan
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a felon.
01:25:47 Ryan
I've never been arrested for nothing crazy or anything like that.
01:25:50 Ryan
A couple times here and there and never convicted of anything or anything like that.
01:25:56 Ryan
You know, doing drugs and doing all these things.
01:26:00 Ryan
You know, she's a nurse, but I told her, but you can't have the comeback without being down first, right?
01:26:09 Ryan
Getting to the top, not that, you know, being a local official at the top, but, you know, moving that direction doesn't mean anything if you aren't down here at one point.
01:26:18 Ryan
And I didn't start there.
01:26:19 Ryan
I was up here first.
01:26:23 Ryan
I was riding high.
01:26:24 Ryan
We made a ton of money, man.
01:26:26 Ryan
Granted, some of it was drug dealing, but I mean, lots of money and houses.
01:26:31 Ryan
I had a bunch of rental properties, all this stuff.
01:26:33 Ryan
And then I got in the motorcycle accidents and I got an addiction, lost all that.
01:26:37 Ryan
Me and my first wife split up.
01:26:38 Ryan
So boom, down in the gutter.
01:26:40 Ryan
I met my first, my wife I'm with now.
01:26:42 Ryan
I had just crashed my fourth time, my motorcycle, fourth time.
01:26:46 Ryan
I laid up, busted up.
01:26:48 Ryan
I mean, I'm busted up, broken legs, ankles,
01:26:51 Ryan
peg went through my leg.
01:26:52 Ryan
I'm rashed up.
01:26:53 Ryan
I met my wife 3 weeks later.
01:26:55 Ryan
And I tell that great story.
01:26:58 Ryan
It's a love story because I was at my dad's house.
01:27:02 Ryan
No, I was at my dad's house recovering.
01:27:04 Ryan
She wasn't a nurse then.
01:27:05 Ryan
She worked for people with disabilities.
01:27:07 Ryan
And my dad didn't have cable.
01:27:09 Ryan
So I'm bored as hell and you ain't got cable.
01:27:11 Ryan
And I'm on Facebook and I've seen my buddy.
01:27:13 Ryan
He's got like
01:27:14 Ryan
800 more friends than me, he's dead now, you OD'd.
01:27:17 Ryan
And I'm like, who do you know that?
01:27:19 Ryan
I don't know.
01:27:19 Ryan
So I find my wife's name and I think it's a different girl with the same name.
01:27:23 Ryan
And I look and she's attractive.
01:27:25 Ryan
It wasn't a girl I thought of it, but she's hot.
01:27:27 Ryan
And I'm like, they were like the Ball State Homecoming.
01:27:30 Ryan
So I sent her a message.
01:27:31 Ryan
I said, did nice.
01:27:33 Ryan
at the Ball State homecoming game this weekend.
01:27:35 Ryan
And she's like, yeah, I was there.
01:27:37 Ryan
I didn't know that.
01:27:37 Ryan
I'd seen her on her Facebook.
01:27:39 Ryan
And so we go back a few times and she goes, you'll have to forgive me, but I don't think I know you.
01:27:45 Ryan
And I was like, you know, you're right.
01:27:46 Ryan
You don't know me.
01:27:47 Ryan
What do you say?
01:27:47 Ryan
We talk about it over lunch.
01:27:49 Ryan
And she ghosts me for like 6 hours and then she comes back and says, let's do it.
01:27:53 Ryan
But I've been with her ever since.
01:27:55 Ryan
But when I got with her, I had this crash.
01:27:59 Ryan
I'm an addict.
01:28:00 Ryan
I'm going through a divorce to my first wife.
01:28:02 Ryan
I'm living.
01:28:03 Ryan
I was living on my buddy's couch.
01:28:05 Ryan
Now I'm at my dad's house recovering.
01:28:07 Ryan
I've wrecked my motorcycle, no insurance.
01:28:09 Ryan
So I don't have no vehicle.
01:28:11 Ryan
Now I don't have a job.
01:28:12 Ryan
I'm basically a ******* bum.
01:28:14 Ryan
You know what I mean?
01:28:15 Ryan
I tell her nowadays, I say, I really question your judgment because I don't know what the **** you were thinking.
01:28:21 Ryan
For, you know, go and saying yes to me back then because I was not a catch.
01:28:26 Ryan
And she says, I ask myself that all the time.
01:28:28 Ryan
And the only thing I can
01:28:29 Ryan
and come to terms with is the Lord had a plan to put us together for me to save you, pull you out of that.
01:28:36 Ryan
And that's exactly what happened.
01:28:38 Ryan
And two days before I met her on that Facebook, I was at my dad's house alone.
01:28:44 Ryan
And I don't remember what it was, but I literally dropped on my knees.
01:28:49 Ryan
I had crutches, but I dropped down and I cried out.
01:28:52 Ryan
I was the only one in the house, yelled it out to the Lord to, I was tired of this way I was going.
01:28:59 Ryan
Show me a different way.
01:29:00 Ryan
And I met her two days later and it completely changed the trajectory of my life.
01:29:04 Ryan
Got me good, got me off opiates, painkillers, got me, you know, good jobs.
01:29:10 Ryan
I always excelled whenever I was in a job somewhere.
01:29:12 Ryan
So once I got my foot in the door, boom, shoot to the top in management.
01:29:16 Ryan
Then I become an elected official.
01:29:17 Ryan
We're making great money again.
01:29:19 Ryan
And the rest is history.
01:29:21 Ryan
But I had to get to that bottom point to really appreciate where I'm at now.
01:29:27 Kevin
Yeah, you can't really you can't really do the ascension, right?
01:29:29 Kevin
Like when you're when yeah, you're.
01:29:31 Ryan
Just a guy who has a good job and was an elected official, but you don't know what it took to get here.
01:29:37 Ryan
Right.
01:29:37 Kevin
Yeah.
01:29:38 Kevin
But if you're, you know, if you're JFK's kid, right?
01:29:43 Kevin
You know what I mean?
01:29:43 Kevin
Like,
01:29:45 Kevin
Or you're JFK, right?
01:29:46 Kevin
Like you just, you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth.
01:29:48 Kevin
You know what I mean?
01:29:49 Kevin
Like, and like, oh, well, you just went, you know, from here to here.
01:29:52 Kevin
Well, like, no, we want the Vivek Ramaswamy story.
01:29:56 Kevin
We want all the way here, like poor immigrant parents all the way, all the way up.
01:30:01 Kevin
Just, you know, prove himself.
01:30:02 Ryan
And for me, it's even one step because I was here and then I went down here and then back up.
01:30:08 Ryan
So I was rocking it before I fell into the addiction.
01:30:12 Ryan
Dropped all the way down and then was able to fight my way back up.
01:30:16 Kevin
Yeah, it's definitely that trajectory.
01:30:18 Kevin
People follow the trajectory.
01:30:20 Ryan
So I'm hoping to be able to somehow share that without opening old wounds, you know, and embarrassing anyone.
01:30:28 Ryan
But we got to be humble.
01:30:29 Ryan
We do some embarrassing ****.
01:30:31 Ryan
We have to own it.
01:30:31 Ryan
Yes, I did some **** **** you know.
01:30:35 Kevin
And it's good mental health, man.
01:30:38 Kevin
When you do stuff like this, it's great mental health.
01:30:40 Kevin
That's the kind of mental health stuff that like actually like makes transgenders realize like the path they're on and they start reversing course.
01:30:47 Kevin
So.
01:30:48 Ryan
And when I do that stuff and they try to bring it up, oh my God, he was arrested.
01:30:52 Ryan
Yeah, what do you, we've already talked about that.
01:30:54 Ryan
Well, that's old news.
01:30:55 Ryan
You take that away from them.
01:30:57 Ryan
Nobody can criticize you about that because you've already put it out there.
01:31:02 Ryan
If you take away their ammo, they don't get to use that no more.
01:31:06 Kevin
Right, yeah.
01:31:09 Kevin
I get it.
01:31:10 Kevin
I get it, man.
01:31:11 Ryan
I, But I'd love to come back sometime.
01:31:13 Kevin
Yeah, for sure.
01:31:15 Kevin
Well, stay in touch.
01:31:16 Kevin
I've got your number.
01:31:17 Kevin
And from there, guys, let me do, let's do, we'll do our sign out.
01:31:21 Kevin
So gang, I hope you enjoyed our podcast today with our new friend Ryan Webb, who is America's councilman from Delaware County, Indiana.
01:31:31 Kevin
And we'll catch you guys next time on Life 22.
01:31:36 Ryan
Yeah, you guys can.