Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - The Wild Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of a Rapper Turned Politician

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

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Not available in all states. I was Jesus Christ. I was walk a fuck of flame. When they raided me, saw the Grim Reaper that night. Lights would beam out from my eyes and they would light up and I would see something that was inside of them that wasn't there. When I was 12, things started to change. Flashing cop lights, mom and dad beat the crap out of each other, loud music to the morning.

Like, what's going on? The kids at school, like they don't go through this stuff. So something was happening. Their marriage was falling apart. Mom had been a powder addict since she was 16. I just found that out a few years ago after she passed away. It helps looking backward, looking at her behavior, her undiagnosed minimum illness, like, how belligerent she was, how violent she could be on the way that the family fell apart that she was chasing an addiction, trying to support her habit. Dad lost his job at the plant.

You know, he was a maintenance supervisor at a plant. And I guess he rode around in a camper for like a month, hung out down at the river a lot, acting like he was going to work, but wasn't. So when my mom found out, she's like, hey, you're going to go to North Carolina. It's not good. You are hearing about that. the guys that like will leave and act like they're going to work like don't you think that's going to catch up with you it did yeah i mean i know but i mean to me it's i can't blame him because he's probably got socked in the mouth if that was the truth when it came out and he did get socked my mom beat this shit out of my dad a lot there's only one time we're going to fast forward to this wild story and we were at the beach in north carolina for some kind of work retreat for my dad

and dad came back from the event early because they were down there drinking or whatever mom had gotten loose she likes to dance and cause a scene you're like you know I'm going to speak up a little bit. I'm like, I don't want to start acting like my mom here. So he comes back into the bedroom. It was me, my brother, my brother-in-law. And I just remember waking up. And dad was like in the bed next to me. I'm next to my brother.

And mom came in. And out of nowhere, she was just like, what are you doing, Scott? You know, butt screwing your son. Where did that come from? So she goes in and she gets in the shower in the hotel room. And he gets up out of bed, like sauntering because he was probably hung up drunk. And he walks in the bathroom. And next thing I know I hear,

and he got quiet. And he comes out of the bathroom, storms out, lays back in bed, and starts mutter him to himself. The next thing you know you hear, oh, oh, mom started crying in the shower. The first time I ever knew that he'd hit her. Before you know it, she comes out of the bathroom screaming,

you mother, and dad hops up out of the bed, and she's windmill punching. We always called her windmill after this. She was throwing these windmill haymakers at dad. And like, I stand up, and I'm like, mom, stop it, stop it. and dad's like, you know, bowing up at her.

I'm in the middle of this. And mind you, I'm like 11, 12 years old. And I think about like the way I respond to violent or loud situations now, not even violent, just loud situations now. I think it takes me back to that moment. So there's definitely some deep PTSD stemming from my childhood. We ended up going to North Carolina. Dad got us a little trailer in a trailer park down there.

And it wasn't, you know, just a few months that we were left at that trailer. Nobody was there. We didn't have food. Me and my brother. and my sister showed up from my grandma's house, and she recognized we didn't have food, so she brought us food. And she's like, come on,

you don't need to come over to grandmas with me. So we did. I didn't know what was going on at the time. Like, it was just somewhat normal. I mean, I wondered where they were, but like, okay, we're cool with the trailer. Did you have a question? I was going to say, are you still 11?

Yeah, like 12, probably. 11 or 12? My brother would have been like 12 or 13. Okay. Yeah. Well, what was happening is that dad was out getting belligerent drunk or smoking. Rock.

and mom was out at the pool hall. She met who eventually became my stepdad and boyfriend at the time who was powder dealer. So mom ran out on dad, found a plug. Dad left in sorrow because, you know, he had uprooted his life to come and try and make the marriage work and it was never going to work. Right.

It wasn't working for years beforehand because she had this addiction. Like dad was working full time and she was, you know, finding her dope and making sure that she had what she needed. And someday she was a good mom and she was there for us. and I really love and respect her for doing her best, you know, in the midst of that addiction. And then other times, you know, it just took hold of her. And she was chasing dad through the house as he would, like, grab her bag and run from her. And it was just anyways, yeah, it was definitely a turbulent childhood up until that happened.

And it remained pretty chaotic. He went back to West Virginia. I stayed in North Carolina. We went back and forth a couple times. It'd be three or four months at this middle school, three or four months at this middle school. So it developed a network in eastern North Carolina that I saw. still have some friends with this day. Didn't you question?

No. Oh, okay. No, it just sounds like chaos. But it also sounds like your dad had an issue too. Yeah, yeah, he was an addict for sure. He was a functioning. More functioning. He definitely has been able to pick it up and set it down.

I mean, he definitely leans it to it as a crutch, but not in the same way that mom did. He could definitely function better. So he goes back and he's living with his mom in West Virginia because his life has fallen to pieces. And I go up to visit him one summer. It was before like eighth grade and freshman year. and I remember we're sitting on the front porch of my grandma's house on the steps

and we're smoking some cron out of this little bolt that was a one hitter. And I started to smoke a grass 13. My brother, he was selling. He got caught with a quarter pound in his trunk when he was 17. So the example I had set before me was, you know, sell drugs, right?

Traffic drugs get high. It's the last person in my immediate family to start using drugs at 13. So me and dad were sitting on these porch steps and we're smoking. and I'm talking about, hey, I miss you. It's good to be with you. I'm not really looking forward to going back to moms because it's chaotic down there.

He said, we don't have to. He said, you could stay here if you want and go to high school at St. Mary's, a small school. But you have to stay for all four years. So I moved from North Carolina, left my brother and my mom and my sister behind and moved in with dad. We lived with my grandma for several months. He ended up getting a job at my uncle's body shop, Gaties Customs, and making $250 a week. and we had a single wide trailer that we moved into, and it was just me and dad.

You know, we did the best we could. You know, we had a barely good life together. The fact that he bought my cigarettes, and we would, like, I would find friends at school to get brass from their parents or their connections, and we would smoke on the couch together. And, you know, I would go out and drink on the weekends, maybe he'd help me to get alcohol.

That's okay because it was normal to me. I mean, you know, I'm sure dad doesn't feel proud of those decisions, but in his eyes he was doing the best he could at the time. Over time, obviously wasn't good enough. It wasn't going to work out. I wanted to go to college. Further my education in my life, get away from that. And I remember one day I was sitting in trade class in high school.

And like, I couldn't really read the problems. I didn't know what was going. I was always a stellar student. You know, captain of the science bowl team, on the academic team, you know, probably scored top of the PSAT in my class, top of my AP language exam, all this stuff. but I couldn't pass the trick test, couldn't do the trig. So I said, I wonder why.

Probably because I've been smoking grass. On the weekends. So I run out the hall down to my counselor's office, collapse in her chair, and I say, Ms. Haught, this is what's been going on. It's still tough to me to this day to get on shows like this or get on stage and speak about my childhood because it feels in a way like I'm diming out my parents

or diving out my friends or past like that. But in reality, I came from a lifestyle that I should have never been in in the first place. Right. So we ran an intervention. Now we got my aunt, my uncle, my tennis coach, my cousin sitting around a table that my counselor had brought together. And dad walks in because she'd agreed to move me in to give me an opportunity. Dad walks in.

Move you in where? Her house. Yeah, she agreed. She agreed because I made the decision. We made the decision that, okay, this environment isn't working. Where did the intervention happen? At the high school. Oh, okay.

Hey, dad, were you coming for this ambiguous meeting? Right. He walks in and he knew something was up. He did. I can still remember the look on his face. I shouldn't say I'm sure, but I feel like he still hasn't completely forgiven me for this. Because I heard him, right?

Like, even though it was messed up, even though I wasn't wrong for doing that, I know that I hurt him, and I'm not proud of that, but it was definitely the right decision. So she welcomed me in. You know, she said, not that we don't love you, dad.

And it's not maybe forever, but right now Reed needs some support and structure. What's funny, though? is that even with that support and structure, I ended up getting my my sweetheart at the time, my high school sweetheart pregnant, and my aunt had caught us messing around one time. And I remember I went out to my exes to support her

why she was sick or something, and I got into this argument with my aunt about leaving because it was past 7 p.m. and a school night. And I could tell when we got into it, I wasn't going to be able to come back. And when I came back several days later, my cousin was waiting there with trash bags, said, get your stuff, you're not welcome here anymore.

And I packed up my stuff, threw it in the back my 2000 Mercury Cougar, and boom, I was homeless at 17. I didn't know what to do. Back to my guidance counselor's office, I said, hey, I've messed up. And I got what I needed and got what I wanted and I wasn't able to do what I'm supposed to, and now I'm homeless. And I still want to go to college. I still want to succeed academically and get away from this.

But, well, I'm, I don't know where I'm going to stay. Luckily, my aunt had been saving the money that the state gave her to take care of me for custodial care. And she gave that to the guidance counselor. they put me up in a boarding house for a month or two, which was a unique experience. I'm staying in there with some guy that works in the oil field, and then a guy who's 80 and looked like Gandalf.

He was cool, but he sat in the living room and smoked cigarettes all day, and it was very his area. So I didn't really have access to a shower. It was just a dirty bathtub, so I wouldn't really bathe in it. I would just wash my hair. Luckily, after a couple months there,

this community outreach apartment became open. And typically it was for adults for a month to get them back on their feet. They pay 30% of their income, But they found that about my situation and decided that, hey, Reed, if you're going to go to school and you're going to graduate, you can stay here until you graduate. So I had an apartment of my own main street, downtown St. Mary's for seven, six, seven months, part of my first semester and then the last semester my high school career, which was awesome in some ways. I mean, what high school student doesn't want their own apartment. I had worked since I was 15.

I was involved in a lot of those extracurriculars. So I had some sense of responsibility, but I also had that habit of I smoke, grass. You know, I drink. I was a drug addict, you know, did pills. And that was in some ways the priority escaping from that uncomfortable reality that I was separate from my family, that I was, you know, in this adverse condition, wasn't sure if I was going to be able to graduate high school or not. I remember I brought mom up for Christmas one year. She was there for like two or three days. And she was so difficult to deal with that we got into some form of argument. I wouldn't take to the pharmacy maybe to get alcohol or something.

And she was cussed me out. I said, listen, you're not going to talk to me. Like, this is my house. I want you here for Christmas, but stop acting like that. She called her boyfriend from North Carolina, you know, the dealer that I mentioned. And he drove all the way up from North Carolina to West Virginia to pick her up. And she bailed out. And I'm thinking, wow, what a surprise.

How unfortunate. Over the next months, it took months, Matt, that I would be in my closet or lifting up some old dirty clothes or under a couch. There were American honey liquor bottles all over my apartment, like a dozen of them. Like it was incredible how many stashed liquor bottles were in my apartment that I didn't know about. And this was a Christian outreach apartment. I wasn't allowed to have alcohol. Right. I mean.

And these are empty? Is she gone through them? She smashed them all. She drank them all. Okay. Yeah. And she drank them all and hid them. So she was drunk most of the time she was up there.

So I ended up missing like 45 days of school. And it's really serendipitous. It's kind of beautiful when I think about the homeless liaison who helped by I made hygiene products and gave me the East Bay catalog to give me my pink Kool-Aid Reebok shoes so I had some tennis shoes or helped me get a tennis racket for tennis or took me to get my hygiene products. The homeless liaison was also the truancy officer who took me to court to be seen for this truancy case, but she was also the academic and the science bowl coach.

So she knew I would come in at 7 a.m. I'd ridden my bike to school. My long hair would have been frozen and we would go to these science bowl and academic team meets and we were pretty successful. we got second in the state one year. So for her to be supportive of me and the adverse aspect, but also to see me excel academically. And then when I come home from prison,

which we'll get to four years ago, she's very involved with the Boys and Girls Club, and I've kind of dedicated my heart to give them back to that arena. So for her to see me transform my life, it's been a super big blessing. Shout out. Sorry. That's okay.

No, what was your question? I was going to say, how are you doing science contest, but you're not going to school? Great question. I mean, so I missed 45 days, which wasn't all the days. How do you miss 45 days? You just stopped going? I thought you wanted to go to college. Some day, right, good question. And part of me did. And the other part wasn't capable. So, I mean, maybe that was the onset of the mental illness that I've dealt with. You know, the depression was on setting. I definitely laid my bed a bunch and just tried to avoid reality. And then when I was awake, you know, smoking, drinking was a good escape. But I went to school as much as I felt like I could, as much as much as I was able to. And there's a good question because apparently I didn't want to go to college.

Even though I got accepted into West Virginia Wesleyan and I went because that was the magistrate edict is, well, if you graduate, you don't miss another day and you graduate and you go to college, we'll drop these charges and they did. And I went to college and I dropped out two months afterwards. And I've gone to college two times since and dropped out, well, dropped out one time after a day and chose drugs and my toxic X instead. And then one day I was too strung out to even make it the orientation. So college isn't what I wanted. It was some vision for somebody else's future, and I haven't needed it to be successful. Graduated, St. Mary's High School was the first person in my,

of my sibling group to graduate. My brother dropped out at 16. You know, he got caught with some prescription drugs in school. And then my sister, she was pregnant at 16, so she dropped out because of that. Even though I missed 45 days and dropped out of college, I made it with that diploma. And when they told me that I could stay at this apartment,

something in my brain was just overly literal about it. The day that I graduated afterwards, I went back and I slid the key under the door and I locked it behind me and boom, I was homeless again. I'll try walking to Camp Horseshoe, which Camp Horseshoe is part of the Ohio, West Virginia, YMCA, announced the Youth Leadership Association. And they've been around for decades, bringing kids from the region together to teach them leadership skills, fundraising, community involvement, civic engagement. And when I showed up there when I was 16, you know, my counselors, Ms. Hott and Ms. Helmick had provided this opportunity. I'm thinking, well, business what I have at Camp Horseshoe. Eventually, you know, they talked me into going. And I'm glad that I did because I was surrounded by over 100 kids who they didn't see the drugs and the alcohol and the smoking.

They just saw me for my potential and who I, like the energy that I emanated. And I felt accepted and I felt like I belonged somewhere. So when I came back from Camp Horsesu the first year and I went to tell my dad how awesome it was and he wasn't home. And I figured he was at the bar and then I went back to Domino's to share with my friends there. And then reality hit. and we just got high together. All of that faded away, and then I'd go to fall conference

or youth in government or back to Camp Horseshoe. I was like, man, if I could just have a life like these kids have, that would be good. So when I graduated and was homeless again, I figured, what if I just made it back to Camp Horseshoe? So started walking.

Converse, skinny jeans, bandana around my head. I gave a guy $10 to take me from the park out to Ellenborough on Route 50. and dark clouds started rolling as I'm trucking down this highway alongside the highway and boom the biggest rainstorm I've ever been in I mean just chunks of rain falling out of the sky wind blowing and I'm trucking a mile up a hill mile down a hill mile up a hill for hours and hours and it gets dark and it's a three and a half hour car ride to camp horseshoe there's no way I'm going to make this on foot eventually I get tired so I'm trying to sleep

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And I thought, what if I could get in one of these? Well, it was unlocked. So I just boom, I'm in the mobile home. And there's a little flag laying next to the wall. So I wrap up with that. Daylight comes. I'm back walking again with my knee hurts and I'm dirty and I'm hungry. I see this exit for West Union and wandering to town, limping, looking disgusting.

And I find this library. I walk in and the woman gives me my logging information. I get on there. I message my ex at the time, my sweetheart at the time, on Facebook. And I say, hey, I'm stuck in West Union. Nowhere to go. Trying to walk the camp horse you. Could you call them and tell them I need help?

All I remember is waking up on the front steps of the library. And then boom, there's David King, who I'll refer to today is my grandpa, my mentor, and has been my guardian angel. And he says, you hungry? He takes me the diner. I eat everything on the menu and then takes me back to Camp Horseshoe. And I end up working there for the summer as a camp counselor and helping with grounds and in the kitchen.

And I end up getting enrolled in West Virginia Wesleyan. And I get enrolled as a community service scholar. And now I'm on the tennis team. And things are really looking up. But as I mentioned, it was a glimpse into a different. world when I went to camp horseshoe. David King was a different man than I had a relationship with when I was a child. He was so much different than my parents. Wyatt's soft-spoken, very traditional, conservative, very professional. So part of me needed that when you say, did you really want to go to

college? How come you didn't do what you needed to? Good question. Now you have an opportunity to learn from this mentor. It took me a long time to take advantage of that. It took me going to prison, and getting off drugs and coming home to realize, wait a second, if you really want this life that you say you want, you're going to have to be a different person. And I've worked hard to become that. So when I ended up going to Wesleyan, and I had that opportunity, you know, the old me really, really took hold and dropped out.

I had my best friend, Valley Smith, who's passed away from overdose. He came and picked me up and wrote around smoking blunts for, I don't know how long. David King, my mentor, he, I reached out when I realized I needed a place to live. and I told him what I had done, I dropped out. And he said, well, what are you going to do? I said, I don't know, but give me time. I'll figure it out. And living on the Ohio River there in between West Virginia and Ohio,

you always see barges going up and down the river, and you kind of wonder and fantasize, what would it be like to be out there? So boom, there's a deckhand training school right down the road. And my grandpa, David, happens to know a guy that works in the river industry. He said, you know, you want to go to that training school get certified, I can help get you a job. So I went, got certified as a deck hand. You know, you're carrying like 60 pound ratchets on one shoulder and 125 pound wires on the other shoulder

and learning about safety and your life vests and different rivers and what it means to lock through and what a to knee and a capstan are. It was pretty cool. Worked 20 days on, 10 days off, Bramhurst, Madison, Cole out of Charleston, West Virginia. And during my 10 days off, the second time, I was at the locker room, Marriette, Ohio. You know, What's the right word? It's where all the young kids go to be young in an area that doesn't have a lot of options. YMCA? No, no, no.

It's where the young criminals go to be young criminals and turn up, drink, dollar shot night on Wednesday night. It's the party scene. It's the biggest party scene, party bar in the area. So I went out there to dance, hang out, and a girl ends up coming up to me and takes me home and spend the night with her and I wake up the next day. And she says, don't leave. So I didn't. I, in that moment, quit that job on the river. I had no idea what I was going to do.

No income. No place to live. No trajectory. But I like being with this girl. So maybe spent a couple weeks there. It was interesting. So her brother apparently was on probation because we got raided while I was there. Out of nowhere.

Probation officer comes up, knocks on the door. answer the door. We were inside. We've been, you know, chieffing on stuff, smoke everywhere. And he was looking for a brother, Danny, boom, not home. And it was just an hour or two later. And the whole SWAT team comes back. Bulletproof vests, salt rifles, hollering, shouting, you know, they were coming in, search warrant. They have a search warrant. What are they doing here? We're just hanging out with this chick. What has she done? Come to find out that was the reason. So they searched the place, maybe found a little bit of bud. And luckily, I didn't get in trouble. she got taken to jail

and why'd she get taken jail because it was her house it was her lease and there was a little bit of drugs okay yeah she was mad at me for that I don't know if she wanted me to like take the hit for

I don't know I just that's what I was wondering I was like this is your spot is your brother be mad at him for putting this address there not letting us know or not showing up for probation

anyway man do you stay there or you leave probably for a period probably for several days until I figured out where to go next. I know I ended up above this barbershop with my friend Alex Dunn

and he's still in prison. Many years later, he got caught up in drugs and I ended up shooting a guy with a 22. So he's serving time for that still. Yeah. Yeah, they frown on that. They do. I'm sure his family is probably still mad at.

Alex. Alex saw the dude, very loyal guy. He was a good friend than me. So I was living with him. We're going back and forth to the locker. room like every night. This girl I went to elementary or middle school with in North Carolina, a sweetheart of mine, Jesse. She was having some birthday party, Wilmington, North Carolina, which is funny because I'm flying there tomorrow, tonight, actually. Not for her birthday party, though, or to see her. And I just remember on Facebook, the event was the Red Bulls, Red Wings

Girls are going to be here. I said, y'all talking to my buddies there in Williamstown, West Virginia. I said, we got to go to this party. This is my sweetheart for middle school. I haven't seen her in so long. The Red Bulls, Red Wings girls are going to be there. So we rented a car, scrounged enough money to rent a car, and that we're like five deep, rolling down 77, drinking, carrying on, so much so that we missed the exit to turn into Wilmington, and we end up in South Carolina, out of gas, broke down. Luckily, I think I call my grandpa, we call his AAA. What year is this? This is goodness. It's had to be 2012. I was 19 still. I mean, they've got, like, you know, the map thing, right? Like you can do, what is it? Google Maps,

Do you not drink? Have you ever, have you ever been hammered drunk before? I've never drank. I've never drank. I've never drank alcohol. I've never smoked a cigarette. What happens when you get hammered drunk is you kind of just lose awareness. So we were in the moment, turned up, partying, and completely disconnected from where we're going, obviously. Five of us so messed up that we weren't paying attention to where we're going until we run out of gas. And now we're at this truck stop.

I'll never forget playing the quarter machine with the last $40 or $50 we had thinking that I was going to double up out of the quarter machine. And so we call AAA, we get some gas. We make it to Wilmington the next day after the party's done. I remember walking into her suite, her college suite, like the dorm. And there was this big bucket, like a tub full of beer that had left over from the keg. So I'm in there with a solo cup. You know, we're all smashing beer, having a good time. And she has three roommates.

We have no frame of this is other people's home. We're just there for the party still. It wasn't long before my buddy said, hey, man, I've got to be back in West Virginia. I said, we just got here. I'm here to visit, here to catch up. I said, you go on without me. So I go back out to the car, grab whatever clothes I have in my wallet,

and they take off the West Virginia. And now I'm in Wilmington, North Carolina at 19, at my friend's house where she lives with three other girls, thinking that everything's okay. And they're probably like, Jesse, what the hell? Is this guy doing here? Who is he? And this was the onset of the first time I developed mania.

I had a manic episode in psychosis and was delusional. This was when this began to happen. I could tell. Sleep was disrupted. of these crazy, risky, impulsive decisions. And it was there for a couple days. And finally, we reached out to my friend, Jenny. She was at UNC Chapel Hill.

And Jesse takes me from Wilmington up to Chapel Hill to UNC. And now I'm in another dorm staying because I'm not having anywhere to go. Why am I supposed to go? I dropped out of college, didn't really have a home. So I spent several days with Jenny there at her dorm. And I could tell there was some resistance because the person she shared the dorm with ended up just not being there. So I could sleep there. But she got frustrated eventually.

And I'll never forget, I was wandering around downtown Chapel Hill, and there's this guy I met named Mike Trues. And he was selling CDs. Hey, what are you doing, man? I'll just selling these CDs, what you got. New future records, cash fortune. Oh, sweet. So apparently, at least in my experience,

when I get manic, I think I'm the world's best rapper. It's just part of my persona. Yeah, you'd never guess. Look at me, right? And so I listen to the music. I'm like, oh, dude, this is awesome. I can help you sell CDs. Let me help you sell these CDs, maybe cut me a dollar or something, a CD, but also I rap.

So I'm rapping for the guy selling CDs, convince him to take me back to the music studio. He introduces me to KiloG and Flash and these guys that are on the record label. And I'm trying to convince them that I should join the label. Now we're going to Shaw University and we're singing their singles on campus. And I just am acting like I'm part of the group singing along. Can't make this up. I remember Waka Flocka, apparently. Do you know who Waka Flaqa Flama is?

I've actually heard the name. Yeah, he was big for a time. So he was coming into Raleigh to do a show, and this big stretch Hummer comes down an alley when I'm walking around downtown homeless. And I, for some reason, knew that it was him. I don't know why, but I'm yelling at the Hummer rapping, and this woman, she sticks her head out the window,

and she's rapping back at me, part of his posse. So my dad always jokes when I talk about being homeless in Raleigh that I was walk a fluk aflame. It's an inside joke between us. So, yeah, this experience in Raleigh was crazy. Bouncing all over the place. I just know I ended up with no shoes at one point.

And I was standing outside the convenience store. And this woman, she says, you ain't got no shoes? I said, no. She said, hang on, I got you. So she goes back to her car. And she brings me these nice, you know, vans. So now I've got some shoes that's come up. I'm standing out there talking to everybody who knows saying what the people.

And this guy comes up and he's baldhead, scrawny, tattoos, tell he's had a hard life. I'm like, yeah, where's the butt at? he's like, you look? I'm like, yeah, you know, I don't even think

I had any money. And I told him that. He's like, his shoes are nice. I said, what you want? He's like, yeah,

so he trades me as Jordan slides for the vans that she gave me and agrees to like give me 20 bucks worth of bud.

And we end up going back to this guy's house. I walk in and there are cornhole boards boards in the living room, stripper pole in the bedroom,

beer cans laying around everywhere, and then a tattoo gun with aluminum foil foot pedal. You can tell it's right out of prison it looked like. And that's where I got this super sweet tattoo. I don't know if you can see it or not,

but it says 304 head buster number one. What I didn't realize at the time is upside down. It says, ho. I'd asked him. I said, man, do you give tattoos? He's like, no. He said, that's my roommate. So I said, have you ever?

He said, no. I said, would you? He's like, yeah, you would just have to draw it. So I said, okay, cool. He said, what do you want? I said the infinity symbol. So I'm trying to draw the infinity symbol. and it looks like trash.

I can't draw. So I said, screw it. Like, just put 304. So he puts 304 and it's just those numbers. And it looked-304. Yeah, it's the area code for West Virginia. That is where we are finest with our white trash pride is that we all have 304 tattooed on us.

So now you know, if you see anybody 304, West Virginia, baby, let's go. And but it looked like trash. So I said, man, we've got to put some parentheses on it. So boom, he puts parentheses. And I said, man, there's all this space underneath of it. let's put something down there and he looks up at me. He said, you look like a headbussing to me. Like a what?

A headbusser. What's that mean? It's a good question. I said, what's that? He said, it's a prison gang. I said, but I haven't been to prison. I'm not in the gang. He said, it's all right.

I said, screw it, put it. So boom, now I'm officially a headbuster crowned by this guy. I met on the streets of Raleigh with no shoes. And I was going to have him put an exclamation mark, had him put the little star on it, looked like trash still. I said, you know what, turn it into a number one, and we've got one of the world's trashiest tattoos still on my wrist. And I thought about getting it removed, right? But there's just something about paying homage to that time of my life that I was able to endure and make it through that and where I am now that I don't want to get rid of that memory.

Because it speaks to whether you could be mentally ill, you could be homeless, you could be affected by poor choices. You can still overcome it, and you don't have to make choices to alter your body to please other people. Yeah, that looks like that's one bad choice after another. That was a series of six of them. Yeah. Maybe keeping it's a bad choice. Who knows? So where are we?

We're in Raleigh, homeless, right? Right. And you got some Nike slides or something on. Yeah, Jordan slides. And I remember he'd cut like the foam out of them so they're hurting my feet. I don't even know why this dude was wearing these bummy sandals. So I remember I stopped at this internet casino so I could use the internet. and I messaged my friend Rory Beck.

We were in theater together in high school, and he got me involved in tennis, and he said, how's it going? And I said, good, just homeless down here in Raleigh. He said, what do you mean? I'm like, yeah, just down here enjoying being homeless in Raleigh. Are you okay? Yeah, I'm okay.

I'm finding food, and God provides, right, pursuing my rap career because I'm awesome. Oh, my God. And he came back. It was an hour and a half later. He'd been quiet. He said, here's your bus ticket. Sorry, I can't do more.

He'd give me a confirmation for a grant. Hound ticket that was going from Raleigh back to West Virginia so I could maybe make some better decisions. So I asked some guy on the street, where's the Greyhound station? He walks me all the way down to the bus station and now I'm back in West Virginia. The homelessness ensues. The manic episode worsens. Psychosis develops little hallucinations maybe or at least delusions. I thought that I was Jesus Christ. I thought that I was the Messiah. I was on my cell phone talking to AT&T about their arbitration clauses arguing with them about how it doesn't make sense. And you wouldn't believe. You wouldn't believe.

So can you explain, I guess, within your manic episode, like what are some things you're doing? Like, you said you think you're Jesus Christ, like, what are you saying? Like, are you telling that to people? Are you walking the street? Yeah. Like, what's... Absolutely. I remember being in an alley in St. Mary's, and I was looking up at the power line.

And it's just getting daylight, and you could hear all the birds chirping. But since I had been awake for who knows how long days, it looked like the trees were blurry, like a kaleidoscope. They're all blurring together. And I just remember one bird flew out from the tree onto the tree line. And I knew that that was a symbol from God telling me that I'm the Messiah to carry that message and to minister to the nations. So the woman came out from her house that morning. And I said, good morning.

She said, good morning. How are you? I said, I am great. I said, can I talk to you a minute? She's like, yeah, sure, what's up? I said, here's what just happened with your power line and the birds. I'm clearly the Messiah. Do you believe that this could be true?

She said, well, no, I believe there's only one Messiah, and that's Jesus Christ. I said, I don't know. He's called me to be one. So, yes, I'm talking to people about my firm beliefs that are completely irrational, completely classic for bipolar disorder. I remember when I was homeless in Clarksburg, seeing into the souls of people, I would look at them and lights would beam out from my eyes, into their inner eye or their inner heart and they would light up and I would see something that

was inside of them that wasn't there. I was tearing pages out of, out of my Bible. I remember I was in Point Pleasant, and I had hopped this train from Point Pleasant to Huntington, which is like an hour drive, so who knows how long of a walk. And I'm up on top of this rail cart, the middle of the night, just swaying back and forth, having my moment with God and the moon and the stars, and it stops, and I hop off the rail and I'm walking alongside the road and I've got my Bible box with me. Always had my Bible box with me. It was folded up with bandanas and different trinkets and I would keep rocks in it. And I think that I saw the Grim Reaper that night.

I thought that I saw the Grim Reaper sitting alongside the road on the ditch. And at first I was scared because it's the Grim Reaper, but then I said, no, the Grim Reaper has no power over me. I have the power of God inside of me. So I started singing my own original prayers out loud, looking into the scripture, trying to power in that to repel the Grim Reaper. And then I was pulling pages out of the Bible and putting them in people's mailboxes, thinking that they needed that word specifically because it was divinely inspired through me as some profit. Oh, it was bananas. If you had met me, that same night, I ended up walking into a trailer court. And there were these buildings there.

When I lived at the Clarksburg Mission, they had a thrift store. So people would call with their estate sales. People from the mission would go out on the truck. I would volunteer. We would load up their stuff and they would sell the stuff at the thrift store to help create revenue. So when I'm three in the morning, I'm walking alongside the road into this trailer court. And I'm looking at this building that could be a thrift store, maybe. I'm thinking, wow, I wonder who owns this right now. So I knock on somebody's door repeatedly, three in the morning. And finally somebody comes.

They're like, can I help you? I said, yeah, I'm just with the Clarksburg mission wondering if you guys are interested in selling this building because it would be a wonderful thrift shop for the mission. Three in the morning. three in the morning, he said, excuse me? I said, yeah, yeah, just they're doing a lot of good work up in Clarksburg. They really helped me a lot of in volunteering. And I really want to help support them. Maybe they could expand and grow out here. Like, are you selling this building? I think I saw for a sale sign. And we kind of got into an argument. And he said, kind of wait here. And next thing you know,

there's this big 350 pound guy that comes out in his sleeping shorts, in a T-shirt. And he's holding a pistol. And they're like, you need to get out of here. And I said, why? I'm just here inquiring about this property, sir. I said, know you need to go. And he took me by my arm and he spun me around and I remember pivoting and planting my foot and I was so mad that they wouldn't listen to me that he put his hands on me. And I snarled back at him and I remember looking at him. But he was also 350 pounds with a loaded pistol when it was three in the morning. So I carried on. Glad he didn't shoot me, right? I mean, I think he was a deputy sheriff in retrospect. That's why

the guy called him. So yeah, the degree of my manic tendencies during that time were just, you know, It was pretty eye-opening, pretty humbling looking back that I survived it, that I'm able to be mentally stable today. Like, I still take a mood stabilizer in the morning because there's been a couple of times I've stopped taking it. And when I stopped taking it, over time, I become manic again. So we got to take the pills. So that's when the first stint of homelessness occurred. Eventually, I got committed. This whole time, I'm wondering, why is nobody calling the police?

Yeah. And if you're in someone's neighborhood and you're behaving like this, I would think somebody would call the police and say, listen, I don't know. No, you might need to come out here. This could go bad. Better than calling the police, I took it to the police. Okay. I was texting this morning, Officer Jeremy Rhodes, who was so kind to me. I walked down, it was that same morning that I thought I was the Messiah that I talked to that woman,

that I walked down to the police station knocked on the door and I said, do you believe in God? I had to share this message with people. And it was five in the morning? He said, should come back in a little bit. I said, all right. They get somebody over here from the hospital. He comes back and there's four or five other cops there. And they're questioning me and I'm showing them like the smartphones and the bandanas and the trinkets and stuff in my Bible box.

Minister to him and in retrospect looking, they're like, what are we going to do with this guy? What's wrong with him? A lot of them thought that I was on drugs. But I think a couple of them knew that something was wrong. So Jeremy Rhodes, I think talks them into letting him take me down to Parkersburg to Westbrook Health Services, the mental health agency that they did this intake at that I would end up being committed.

But I'll never forget, Jeremy first took me to Subway and fed me. And I smashed a whole foot long sub in 30 seconds. So he didn't have to do that at all. You could just take me straight down. So now I'm sitting in Westbrook, across from a lawyer and a case manager, telling them how I think I can levitate

and all these fascinating things that I've learned about that they need to know are true. And now I'm at Cam the Clark. And I just want to be clear. So the manic episodes, they're not fueled by, like, drugs or alcohol, or are they? Is that like what kicks them off? Or is it just kind of like your chemical makeup that's, you know, causing this? That's such a great question.

So it was not fueled by the drug use, although the drug use accelerated the onset of it. Typically, in type 1 bipolar disorder, the onset is during that age. So young adults, young men from 19 to 25 is when the men. mental health onsets, the mental illness onsets. So the fact that I had my sleep disrupted for a period of time, that I had an inconsistency environment and structure, all of those things would have accelerated as well, just like some of the lighter drugs, whether it was brass thinking, but it wasn't like I took a psychedelic drug and that's what led me to be mentally unwell. And if I stopped taking the drug, then I wouldn't be anymore. If I had never done the drugs,

I wouldn't be mentally ill. This is kind of a classic case of, and it may be hereditary from my mom, to that I had the mental illness. It manifested during this time. And the drugs surely didn't help it or make it any better, but they weren't what solely caused it. Yeah, I'll use drugs to also kind of cope, right? I mean, is that. Yeah, that is a part of it.

Yeah, drinking would calm me down and help me sleep. I had a hard time sleeping. And I had watched a, like, a documentary one time about people with schizophrenia, and they were talking about how, the worst thing about the disease is that they said it happens between the ages of like 17 and like 22 or 23 or something and they were like and the problem is a lot of these people are smart that they go to college so you go to college and it happens around people that don't really know you and so you get in Europe in college you get in trouble and the people around you

are like is this normal behavior the way this guy's acting your family's not there because they would right away be like, what's wrong with you? And so you're left your own devices, you know, who knows, three states away from anybody that really knows you. And so, you know, it tends to run its course and get in trouble and get arrested or getting whatever. And so they have to call back to your family and say, hey, look, your son's in jail or he's in a, you know, he's been Baker acted or whatever. I don't know, every state, is every state, is Baker acted just statewide? Florida is. Florida is Baker acted where you're acting like you might hurt yourself or someone else.

And so they lock you up for three days. They, you know. So, yeah, so, the bipolar thing, I didn't know that kind of sounds. It seems like it falls in that same realm, right? Like in your late teens, early 20s. It's very similar to schizophrenia. The only difference, main difference is the severity, intensity, and frequency of hallucinations. You don't have to have hallucinations to have type 1 bipolar.

but you can have hallucinations and have type 1 bipolar and psychosis. Schizophrenia, you have to have psychosis and hallucinations. So thankfully, I don't have those, or if I were to have them, you know, it would be periodic within an episode. And then I would recover, remit from them, people who deal with schizophrenia often live with them pretty regularly. I wrote a book on a guy named Frank Amadeo who was a rapid cycling accent. that's a five or level five bipolar with features of schizophrenia.

And he has said, when I interviewed him for the book, he had said that he felt like, who knows if this is true, but he felt like he's always, well, it's hard to talk to him about it because he'll tell you, so his delusion, is that he is preordained by God to be emperor of the world, and that he's had these visions since he was in his early teen.

But then you don't really know if that's true. That's something that now he's manifesting, but at least in high school it was happening, because there are reports from girlfriends and people in high, school who talked about how he would talk about this in in middle school in high school so but he um yeah he he you know he'll have these manic episodes that that happened very quickly they don't last like some people will last like hours and hours right his are very quick they'll he'll have a manic episode and then literally within a minute or two sometimes 30 seconds or so who right back down

and he'll he'll be spouting just straight insanity and then he'll come back down and he'll go okay so what I was saying is it's just like holy and everybody around him's like you'd be around him and see him spike and he would start talking about when his legions march on Washington they're going to burn the constitution the president will nail at my feet and you know the first time I saw it I looked at the guy next to me and he was like don't don't don't and they all everybody just kind of froze and within a few you know 20 seconds after he went on his little rant he came back down and he turned and he was like okay I'm going to need you to get your transcripts I'm going to need you to go ahead and call so and so.

And they were like, okay, and they started talking. And I was like, fuck was that? They were like, it's okay. It happens sometimes. He's got a condition. I was like, oh, my God, that guy. He was doing my legal working in prison. He was a disbarred attorney.

But he's brilliant. As unfortunately, what tends to go along with guys like that is that they're super smart. They just happen to be. There's a price. Yeah. Yeah, they just happen to be. But, I mean, I think all mental illnesses like that. I always talk about, like, you know, people,

with, you know, narcissists. Like, I'll bet you 90% of the CEOs are narcissists, right? Like, like most of these people that have these grandiose ideas and think they can do anything, they're narcissistic. And unfortunately, that's what it takes to believe that you can, you know, change the world or do these amazing things. You have to be this, you have to have this kind of mental illness. But it, like you said, it takes its toll in other parts.

Like they're narcissists. They'll do amazing things and they believe their own, you know, hype. But you don't want to have a personal relationship with this guy because it's totally one-sided. It's all about him. Nothing about you. You're simply there to support him. But he'll do amazing things. He'll be a billionaire.

He'll change the, you know, you take, you know, there's tons of guys like that, right? Like most president, like, you know, like Trump, you know, definitely narcissistic, but also kind of a guy that's done a ton of amazing things. someone like Elon Musk, you know, like, okay, you're, you know, you've got some real issues, but you're brilliant, but he's also had five wives. You know what I'm saying? And it's not, it's not because they're the problem, you know, so that tends to happen with most guys like that that are like big CEOs that they'll change, you know, look at Steve Jobs, you know, what a visionary, what an amazing individual, what a, what a brilliant mind. But you don't want to, You don't want to have a personal relationship with him.

You know, he degrades people. He talks down to him. Everybody's an idiot. Every relationship he's ever had, failed. But, you know, he'll change the world. Do great things, right? Right, exactly. People like their iPhones.

I look at narcissism, you know? You know what I'm saying? It's stuff that works out like that. You can't have that balance. Well, I look at, you know, my experience and what it cost me, who I am in general, but also the opportunity that it's given to me. It's like there are all these things that you've been through. things that you've done, parts of you that maybe you don't like about yourself or you like

to change, but also those put you in a position to uniquely serve. Like, that's why I believe that God has a special purpose, not just for me, but for everybody to lean and discover whatever gifts are there. If your gifts are, you know, creating big things or developing grandiose ideas, leaning into that. The balance is, though, being a classical or clinical narcissist versus leaning into your narcissistic personality traits, balancing that with humility is, I think, where real success can come from. I look back when I ran for office this most recent time

back in the spring for board education and I knew exactly what the strategy was to win that I would follow, that I knew that I would put it all out of the line, right? You map out, how many votes do you need? Where do they live? What's their information? How many doors are you going to knock per day?

How much money do you have to raise? What's your advertising strategy? And then you just go out and you hammer it. Everything else in your life goes away. Yeah. You just have to make good decisions to take care of your health as best you can because you have to have the energy.

Aside from that, forget about your personal relationships. If you are too tired or upset or irritable to talk to a voter, you have to go to sleep. But if somebody isn't a voter, I don't really have the time to talk to him. I remember I was talking to two voters on their porch and I talked to one guy for like an hour and his wife was there and she said,

you should talk to the people next door, they're great people. And I look at my phone and they're not on my voter list. and I made the mistake of saying, well, I can't. They're not registered to vote. She said, oh, no, no, no, no, you need to talk to them too. And I'm like, well, yeah, in theory, I do. And I'm going to represent them.

And I do care. Maybe I'll come back after the campaign to listen. But if they're not voters, and then I talk to them, and it's the two votes that I could have gotten during that time to win the election. I have to singularly focus on this goal that I've locked into. So they're, you know, sacrifices you're willing to make along the way.

But you have, in some ways, narcissistically convinced yourself that that purpose is greater than the harm you're going to cause. All right. Let's go back, though. Yeah. So you remember where you're at? Mm-hmm.

Okay. Yeah, I was about to get committed. Jeremy had just taken me to Westbrook. I'm sitting there talking about levitating to the lawyer and the case manager. They take me to the hospital. And I'm chatting up with the nurses, having a great time, super social when you're manic. Are you realizing what's happening? I know that I'm at the hospital and they want to help me.

Okay. And I'm arguing with them that I need help, but I'm like, whatever. It's going to be easier if I just go along with this. Sure, try to help me, whatever that means. I'm the real enlightened. And they take me up the elevator, and I change clothes, and I walk through this door, and everything's groovy until the door locked behind me. And I said, that's a pretty substantial lock.

Like, what, why did that do that? And they said, to keep the floor secure. I said, what do you need to keep the floor secure? They're like, well, so people don't leave. Why don't you want them to leave? She said, well, there's a lot of people on this floor that are committed, and they have to get stabilized until they're healthy and the doctor has to approve them leaving.

I said, well, what if I want to leave? Said, well, you know, we'll have to talk to the doctor first. I said, what do you mean? What if I want to leave right now? I said, no, no, it's okay. Let's get you some medicine and you can talk to the doctor when they come in tomorrow. Boom, traumatized.

I'm institutionalized. I didn't even know it. Right. What a shocker. That was more traumatizing than going to jail or prison because I just lost my freedom. And I found that I was committed for 14 days, minimum, up to 28 days, depending on the doctor. And, yeah, 14 days on a unit.

What was the reason, though? Because I was a danger to myself for others, even though. Had you said that? No, but judging by my mental instability, they made that judge. Okay. Yeah. That doesn't quite seem. I mean, you can be mentally, I don't know, but the term is unstable, but you could be delusional.

and not be a harm to yourself. You know what I'm saying? So I don't, I don't, that doesn't really. I didn't like it either. I've got the papers from it and they talk about the psychotic features and the delusions and stuff, but it was never. But I'm not going to harm anybody. I'm not, you know.

They probably tried to draw out homicidal or suicidal thoughts out of me. Sometimes they'll try and lead you in that if they think that they're going to be helping you. That's one of the standard. Like, have you considered this? Have you thought about this? Have you this? And it's, you know, I was going to say no, no, no, no, no.

Hard nose. Learn that the hard way. Not, not. Well, sure, everybody does. Oh, that's a bad one. That's a bad one. Not in months. Well, sometimes people will make me mad.

I have a quick glimpse of smashing their head. Okay. Noted. That's it. Yeah. That's it. They got me. It's 14 days in there.

Lithium, Depico, Clonopin, who knows all of the drugs that they gave me? And I was sedated. I was stabilized, as they would call it. And, you know, that slew, that cocktail of medications would lead me to become like 260 pounds over time. Zyprexa. There was a class action lawsuit against this specific medication. Billions of dollars.

Whole firms dispatched to take down this, you know, whoever created Zyprexa. I never got a settlement. I'll say, what do you weigh now? Like 200? 200, 205 maybe, yeah. Because you're like over 6 foot, right? Yeah, I'm like 6 foot 1. Change, yeah.

I got stretch marks. I got stretch marks on my arms. I've got loose skin still, stretch marks on my belly from where I was ballooned up from the medication. Yeah. So there were guys in prison that would walk around. There was a medication that was given to people that had schizophrenia. Risperdahl? And they do something with their jaw.

Mm-hmm. How'd all. Is that? Probably. And so you, and this is like apparently after. So they've given it to people for a decade or something before they started realizing. this was something that long-term usage was causing. And, of course, I don't know what it is.

It's called Tartive dyskinesia. There's two or three guys on the compound who are walking, exactly, that are walking around doing that. And I was like, this guy's always doing this. You know, not always. I mean, there are times he wouldn't do it. But if he was, because if you stopped and kind of talk to him, he'd just talk to you. But then as he's kind of walked away, he would start, you'd see him doing that or he'd

stand there. Whenever he was not engaged, he tended to do that, not all the time, but half the time. And then I noticed another guy doing it. So anyway, there was a doctor that was locked up with me one of the time. And we were walking by one of those guys. And he said, you see that guy? You know, there's another guy. I said, oh, there's three of them. And he said, yeah, and he told me exactly what you. He said, yeah, that's such and such and such. He goes, he's been on this medication before for mental illness. He's probably suffering from. They named off a couple different things that you would prescribe it to. And I was like, here is. Yeah. And that is, and he goes, oh, they went like a decade before they start, put it together that these guys, he said, just to think about it.

They're not in a position to file lawsuits or put it together themselves or understand that what's happening. He said, so it went forever. And he said, oh, yeah, you got, they're all over the place. And I was like, so I'm sorry. Thankfully, I eventually got taken off of them and stopped taking because I remember reading through the side effects. Whether it was Topamax or Howdaw, Tart of Disconnesia, your face could get locked like that. the fact that the guys were able to talk regularly some some people get their whole face disfigured and never get it back i remember when i went from jail to prison which you know we'll

get to in a bit but the doctor because i was on in vegas as stint it was an anti-psychotic and he said we're going to take you off that i'm like what do you mean he said yeah we think that the physical health risks outweigh the mental health benefits i said i've been on this for years you don't know what will happen when i stopped taking this antipsychotic i don't want to get schizophrenic or psychotic while I'm here. So he tapered me off for like a week and they still took me off of it. And I'm glad that they did because I was able to lose the weight and get some of my personality back because you're just sedated. You can't talk or socialize to people. So where were we're on the unit. Came to Clark 14 days. I check out. I'm stable on these medications. In comes my mentor and I go

back to his place and I have a place to stay. And I remember he gave me this binder and he tried to get my birth certificate and my social security card together and keep me organized. But there was a cover letter on the front of this binder that explained the boundaries of the relationship. You know, you're welcome to stay here as long as you wish if you're not drinking or using drugs or smoking. And you do what the doctors say. He said, I'm willing to be, you know, family to you kind of the degree that you wish because I recognize you can use this support.

So I thought, well, this is really profound. I wish all my relationships laid everything out on the line up front. You make the decision. No expectations. So boom, he's my adoptad dad. And he has been since. He's been a godsend to me. So I'm staying at his house, going and doing what the doctors say.

And that's good advice for a support person. It wasn't good for me in terms of being successful or discovering my identity as a young person or getting an education or finding my career choice. I ended up laying in bed for who knows how many hours a day, sleeping as many hours as I could, then watching TV the rest of the time eating hot pockets and little debbies. And that's what I did for who knows how long.

Until I got a call for my stepdad down in North Carolina, of the one that my mom left my dad for, that she met at the pool hall. He said, read your mom, broke her neck. She's paralyzed in the hospital. I need you. How should break her neck?

Funny story. She was sitting on the porch. She got a friend named Pedro, real flamboyant, and he's, you know, I guess hilarious. So she was sitting on the back porch, and he said something that was real funny while she was drinking a margarita,

and she kind of choked and trottled on it, and she was coughing and coughing and coffin, and I guess she blacked out and she had sat down on these two centerbox that's all the higher it was fell over, landed on her neck and she broke C4 and C5 in her neck and was paralyzed in the hospital. Yeah, just from sipping on a margarita.

Oh. Who knew? So be careful whether you're sitting down or drinking. And I'm thinking, he said, I need your help, Reed, to help take care of her. I'm thinking, I can't take care of myself right now. I'm a vegetable. And then I talked to my mentor about it.

He said, well, you've only got one mom. It's a really profound statement. I said, yeah, you're right. So I told Rick, that's my stepdad. I said, I can't take care of myself right now. I'm on disability. My therapist had convinced me into applying to disability and getting disability. So I had, you know, just a fixed income and was not able to work.

He said, don't worry, I'll take care of you. We'll get you at house with your mom and, you know, I'll make sure you got everything you need if you just come down to help. I said, okay. So now down North Carolina again, sleeping, you know, on the bench next to her, next to her hospital bed. And when I walked in, I'll never forget her just laying there, the neck brace on. She was legit paralyzed. When he said that she broke her neck, I thought maybe she had died. So the fact she was paralyzed and alive, great, better than dead, but still shocking to see your mom that vulnerable.

And what really broke me is the fact that he would bring in powder for her because she was an addict and she had to have it. And I remember one time she said, Ridi, help me get a bump out of this bag. I said, no, you're paralyzed in the hospital. I had a severe accident. If you want your neck to heal, you probably shouldn't do dope here. All right. So my sister would come, and they'd be in the bathroom for 20 minutes and giggling and stuff. And better her to do it than me.

Right. Over time, over the next couple weeks, she would gain some mobility bag. So she was able to get into a rolling chair and electric chair and go outside and smoke cigarettes. I'm thinking, mom, probably not a great idea to smoke cigarettes while you're recovering from your neck being broken. but whatever. What do I know? No doctor. He ends up getting us an apartment and move in with mom and she gained some mobility. I remember helping her put her makeup out on the bar. We got the house set up and decorated so I'm hanging pictures for, getting everything set up. And I did my best to help take care of her. We also during that time would do all of her pain pills together. And I would push her in the wheelchair up to the store and we would get wild hours rows in 40s and cigarettes. and we'd get hammered together. Because, you know, as I told you when I was a teenager at 13, that was the culture.

They'd been getting messed up their whole lives. So that's just how we live. And eventually, five, six months later, she got as much mobility back as she was going to. She was able to walk with a limp. She was able to use her hands, but limited. And we weren't getting along naturally. I'd stopped taking my medications when I moved down there.

Stop seeing the doctor, didn't get into a new doctor. And I was getting a little irritable and aggressive. and I remember one day that I punched a door and it shattered because it was a thin glass door. She was like, that's enough. And I realized at that time I didn't want to feel that angry towards my mom that I needed to go. It's not a healthy place. I don't want to be snorting Roxy's off the bar, you know, the rest of my 20s. So reached out to my dad, hey, man, need a place to stay.

I want to come back home. I want to get a labor job, save up some money, go back to college maybe. And step that was taking me to the airport to fly in. and we got a call. And I remember when a step that got off the phone, he said, well, weedy, he always called me weedy. I don't know what to tell you. He said your dad said you can't come right now.

Apparently his wife at the time, he'd remarried, didn't want me to come, which, I mean, I just told you how mentally ill I'd been for a while. No wonder she didn't want me to be associated with the family, you know, not known. I was unpredictable and such. So, but it hurt me. I'm like, why would you tell me I could come up there if I can't?

Well, he reached out a couple months later, and he had said that I could come up to a cabin. It wasn't his cabin. It was next to his cabin. His cabin, he had a phone at, electricity at. Decent. The one next to his that he looked after, I had no running water, no telephone, nothing.

It didn't have electricity, so there's lights, which is cool. But he said, you can come stay at this one that I look after, even though it's not mine. So I'm in, like, a bando living out there, kind of cut off from the family because they don't know what to expect. I'm a wild card at this point, and I'm hanging out with the holler crawlers. My homies out in sticks.

We're playing moonshine, playing beer pong with moonshine, and I'm riding four-wheelers and we're getting high. And it's a good old days again. During that time is when I developed my second manic episode, running wild, all of that, not having a sleep schedule, not taking my medicine and seeing the doctors. Trying to think, goodness,

I ended up homeless again in town. I remember I rode a canoe seven miles down the creek just to get to town, because I was tired of being stuck out there with nothing, no food, nothing. and I would take a bucket down to the creek to haul water back to the camper just so I could, just so I could flush the toilet. I would take baths in the creek and wash my hair and stuff.

But that was okay. Like I was happy to have my own place, have my own space. It should be no surprise that it led to me not doing so well. So I'm homeless again down at Parkersburg, West Virginia. And gosh, I was living at the mission, pursuing my rap career, you know, just talking to people. I'd lost my mind again. And I remember one night I'm at J.R.'s Donut Castle and talking to the guy that works there about, I bet you these bar stools could really be polished up if you had some steel wool. If I did that for you, would you give

me some food? He's like, I want you just take this trash out? You can have a donut. I knew in that moment that I had gone over the edge again, that I had lost my mind again, that I should probably go get some help. So I picked up the pay phone. I dial 911 and I'm like, psych risk, red alert, come and get me JR's donut castle the ambulance comes what the heck is going on I'm showing them

my magic card collection talking about you know how there's spiritual meaning and the essence of these cards and lootado do to do they take me back to Camden Clark I already know the demo they locked me through that door again

I'm on the same unit I did 14 days at previously and I said can I leave voluntarily and they're like no you have to stay and that tore me up and I spazzed out I remember slapping my arm

saying I need two milligrams of Atavans stat to call me down. They gave it to me. They'd strap me to a table, shot me up with Atavan, and I woke up. The deputy sheriff was there to transport me to a higher security mental institution. It was like a satellite facility of our state hospital, and I got committed, did another 14 days there. Got baptized while I was in there for the first time. The Gideans came in. They had a little tote and they pour the water over your head. So that was beautiful. and when I got out of the hospital, thankfully my mentor, David King, was willing to take me in again.

Same set of rules, no drugs, no alcohol, do what the doctor says, and I got stable, but it was back to us sleeping all day, sleeping all night. Why don't these guys make you get a job? Because you can't get a job. Because I'm on disability.

The therapist had me convinced that I'm not supposed to work. This is only temporary until we figure out the medication and we get the right combination to where you can function. At least having a job would give you something to do

and not sit around all day eating and and you know we're doing what the doctor said yeah even i was going to say i would tell you to do something like i argued with her i argued with her when i was 19 when i first came out of the hospital for the first 14 days i said i don't need disability there's nothing wrong with me i can work she said no no this is just temporary i'm not saying it's not there's not anything wrong with you i'm saying anybody a job is good just to keep you focused and it keeps it gives you purpose right You know, because there's too many hours in the day to not work. Absolutely.

What didn't serve me for a long time. And luckily, God sent my best friend. He called me. He was my buddy Randy from high school. He was my doubles partner on the tennis team. What are you doing, Randy? I'm down in Nashville. I'm with the electricians union down here doing well.

Why don't you come down and visit? Because he asked me, what was I doing? I said, I'm doing nothing, man. I need out of here. I'm on all these medications. I'm fat. Can't talk. this is bad he said come down and visit i said okay he said you can really come down and move if you wanted

to so let me start with a visit well come down visit had a good time ended up staying you know we're drinking in the evenings just a couple months later because he was watched him go to work every day and he was also encouraging he didn't really believe minimalness is a thing he didn't understand the mania that i'd gone through um that's kind of separate than the fact that work would be good so eventually i said you know what maybe i could work and then what if i couldn't then i would learn at least if i tried. So I got a job at Little Caesars, walked up the hill. The Little Caesars every day started off as a crew leader, showed up so much so consistently for extra shifts that they promoted me to an assistant manager. I was so consistent in going to the liquor store next door after work that

he offered me a job. And I said, well, now all I was doing was drinking at night and working. What if I could work twice as much and drink more? So I took the job. And now I'm drinking excessively so much that the owner of the liquor store. He let me run up a tab. I could run everything up on a tab. He said, I think you're drinking more your paycheck than you're spending. I said, yeah, that's the point. Doing powder in the bathroom, doing Adderall, just kind of strung out. I remember when I was working at Little Caesars, I think I skipped over the part of the story, Matt, when I first took powder. And with my mom, when I was 21, it was my 21st birthday, and we're in the living room. And I knew my stepdad, it brought her over some. And I said, Mom, I want to try that. So she gave me the bag.

with a straw in it and put my nose in the straw, snorted it. And I guess I did the whole bag because she came back in and she's like, where is that? I was like, I did it. Like you said, the whole bag. I said, yeah, was I not? She got so mad. She's like, that's half a gram. I don't know how much that is.

It was enough for me to be super stone, like the highest I'd ever been at that point. And I like that feeling. So I would do as much coke as she would let me do, but not a ton because she was protective over hers. So that was my dipping the toes in the water with that drug during that time. But obviously when I was with David, getting adapted to all these medications again, I wasn't doing drugs. But when I was on my own in Nashville and I had my own job, two jobs, there's this dude across the counter coming in to get his hot and ready pizza. And I could tell, you know, he was jeweled up with his flat bill. And I said, man, where's the, where's the girl at? He's like, I got you.

So now I found my plug and I'm doing as much as I can, you know, several nights a week. So kind of strung out, drinking all the time. At least I'm working though. At least I go fund my habits. And I finally decide that this isn't what I want either. I don't want to be living like this. I was isolated socially, had no network, no purpose. It was just working and getting high. I said, what if I could go back to school, right? School's always the beacon of something productive you can do. So let me go back to West Virginia. Maybe I'll work a labor job, save of money, and go back to school. Become a research scientist. Study molecular and cell biology. Study aging and longevity. That's what I wanted to do. At least I told myself that's what I wanted to do. So I come back and I get a labor job and all I'm doing at this

point is drinking and take in clonopin. Snorting those, which is pretty mild for my tendencies. And I was at Go-Mart one night and there was this cute girl that was there real charismatic. And I asked her, I said, what are you doing for New Year? She says, what are you doing tonight? So she comes out to the camper. You know, my dad had bought like a $500 airstream camper in the front yard of his cabin and that's where I stayed. And she comes out and we're talking about, you know, our drug use history and just, just chatting. And out of nowhere, she's like, have you ever tried that? I said, no.

And if you try smoking that shit around me, you know, we're not going to go for that because my brother's strung on on that right now. And she said, no, no, no, you don't have to smoke it. You can snort it. And she knew that because we had already talked about different stuff. So I said, well, what's it like? Oh, it's, you know, like a stimulant. You know, if you're ADHD, it'll calm me down.

I said, well, that's me. I haven't been able to find Coke because that doesn't really exist in West Virginia, not my experience. So boom, put it up my nose and then down the rabbit hole I went. And it wasn't two years later that I would end up getting arrested for drug trafficking, you know, seven felony accounts of aggravated trafficking in drugs, aggravated possession of drug within the vicinity of a school having weapons under disability. And who would have thought that I would ever even encounter that drug?

I never grew up thinking that I would become, you know, an ice addict. And here I was slowly. And the first six or eight months of using it, people couldn't tell. It made me more social. It just made me happier in general. But eventually it takes its toll on your body and your mind. Eventually, at least in my experience with that type of an addiction, I didn't want to work anymore. I just wanted to sit around and be high.

Right. And I got it. accepted in a WVU tech. And it was the day of orientation and my best friend's parents were going to meet me down there and welcome me into the community and I woke up that morning

and I was so strung out that I couldn't go. So strung out that I couldn't go to college. Quit my job because I was supposed to go to college and now what? So I was peddling just enough to where I could fund my drug habit.

But I had this lapse in income. My brother, he died in 2017. from an opiate overdose. You know, he was injecting opiates. And during that same time, apparently this girl that worked at a gas station, different girl, she had lost her husband in a timbering accident.

And a good friend of mine, he was a mutual friend of me in Valley Smith, the kid that I said that we had lost to overdose. He worked at that gas station too, so he had this pamphlet for my brother's funeral and there was a poem inside of it that apparently it stood out to my ex, and she was prescribed subutex.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. It's like a replacement for people who have heroin addiction is a prescription taper. Like a suboxone? Yes. So it's without the naloxone and it's in tablet form so you can crush it up, snort it or inject it. You cook it with. Yeah. People pay $50 a tablet for it.

Right. Addicts like it some more than the real thing sometimes. Right. I was going to say it sounds like it's just replacing it. It's a legal drug deal. It's disgusting. So she was prescribed them and my dad has an opium addiction to or at least he did. I don't think he does anymore from being prescribed things after surgery.

I find out she has these sub-utacts. She was needing to sell them because she moved from the camper that her and her husband were staying in because she couldn't take care of it into this one-bedroom apartment that, like, customers I find out had helped her get into. And she was trying to pay the bills to get the utilities turned on. She said, could you help me sell these? I said, yeah. So now I plug her subutex into my dad. It's a win-win for everybody.

She's getting your utilities on. I'm building a relationship with her, maybe getting cut in a little bit, and dad's getting what he needs. And in the midst of that, us both having lost somebody, you know, us having our own addictions,

me not being able to work or at least not choosing to, I kind of leaned into that, let it be love. And, but what am I going to do? I've got her subutex that I could sell. I'm on meth.

I'm selling enough of it to get more. What if I could get a better deal on it and get more of it? What if I could help my friends who were doing it with me get more? Or maybe they could sell it to their friends or maybe I could, whatever. So I start networking and figuring out like where is it at. So questions, phone calls, nights on the streets, just running around from place to place trying to figure out who's the plug. And eventually, you know, a friend of mine takes me to his plug.

You know, she would get in wait. they would get in wait. And I remember the first time I was over at my plugs house. Look at me. She thought I was the police. She's like, who in the hell did you bring over here? And unfortunately, the guy that brought me over there is now dead. He overdosed and died.

It's crazy how many people we've lost to addiction. You bring over here. Who is this? No, no, it's good. You can trust him. You trust. Made me smoke rock for the first time. and I said, I'm not doing that.

And I realized if I wanted to get a bag of dough that I was going to have to do that. I said, I don't know how to. So she comes over, lights the stem. She's spinning it for me. You know, I'm huffing on this thing. Next thing you know, I'm high. I'm like, bye-bye.

First I only thought I smoked it. And after that, you know, she sold me my first big bag of ice. and to me it was big when I was in the joint when I was in prison I realized that it was nothing and I was paying more guys kind of laughed that I could even get busted on that amount with the charges I did it was a half ounce 14 grams retail $1,400 you know you sell it for a hundred bucks a gram I was paying $400 so there's a thousand dollars a bag worked out for me you know I had several grams I could use and you make 500 plus you know per bag and I'm making a couple thousand a week. That's much better than being on disability or being unemployed. It's enough to

pay the bills of the apartment. It was enough to buy our drugs, our household stuff, pay for the gas, and to stay high. And that's really all I wanted was to be able to stay high, support her, have a relationship, and it was just some semblance of normal to me. That was normal. I'd learned how to sell drugs since I was 16. I'd watch my, no, since I was 13 or 14, I watched my brother bag up nickel bags. There's no different for me to do it with a different substance. Like, I'm good at it at this point. Like, I was an honest drug deal. I never looked at myself with somebody's going to go around and, like, bust people's heads and make them buy drugs from me, or like I'm doing it at the peril of other people, like wishing them doom and stuff. It, to me, was a way to help people who I knew

and cared about get the thing that they wanted anyways. That sounds awful. It is awful. I should have never enabled them and supported them in their addictions. Now I get to help people into recovery and set aside their addictions and set an example of what's possible once you choose sobriety. But back then, I don't say I didn't know any better, but I chose, I chose the wrong way. And I chose something that led to worse sickness, worse illness in people, a more dark community. And I paid for it. How long does this go on until you get busted? Nine months.

And I'll tell you why. I didn't know enough people that did it. So now I'm out here networking trying to find people who my friends might know that want some And you get into this culture and this demographic of people who you shouldn't be associating with that also don't care about you It wasn't long before I recognized that I was being watched followed and I told my ex at the time I said what are you going to do when they come and take me away? I'll stay Will you? Sure She told on me too. She told the cops that I was willing to get into a shootout with them. It was in my discovery packet

she said yeah he's got all these guns in here he was willing to get into a shootout with you not denying the fact that when they raided me when they came in and i heard washington county you know major crimes task force open up we've got a search warrant boom they kick in the door flashbang it's all overwhelming i look over at my nightstand at my 357 sig and i look over at her and she's got a 380 on the counter that i made sure that she had and she looks at me and she says don't you dare because I was ready to go that way. I was like, all right, this is fine. I'll go out this way instead of doing however much time that I was going to have to do. But out of respect for her, because I knew that we would get shot up if I picked that pistol up. I ended up coming

to the edge of the bed because the dude came in there and with the assault rifle, you know, fully tacked out. And it pulled me off the bed, shoved his knee in my back, handcuffed me and drug me out. Well, how did they get to, I mean, you're saying they follow you. Like, how do they following you doesn't like somebody has to have a wire or something yeah yeah i got to control buy oh yeah yeah there's multiple control buys multiple informants and even outside of the control buys and informants my buddy that i you know would help him get a deal on weight and he would go and take care of different customers and we were kind of in cahoots together he got pulled over the night before man i can't make this up in my discovery packet it named him he got pulled over

in West Virginia just across the river. He was pulled over by a deputy sheriff that I went to school with. We played on the same basketball team. They found an eight ball and scales, digital scales, underneath his driver's seat. He said, those aren't mine.

Those are Reed buyers. He's right across the river in Newport, Ohio, right now, and he has a big bag of ice in his apartment. The next morning at 5 a.m., boom, there they are. Yeah, they had already developed a case against me.

Right. They had three different CIs who had done control buys on me. a neighbor who would come into my home and I had taken it to his house, a girl that worked at the gas station who had set up my ex. Actually, I had her deliver it because she's the one that knew this girl. And she explained that it went sketchily. And then another guy who's dead who I worked that labor job with.

And we did that stuff together, I think, for the first time for him. And he got so spun out that it just ended so bad for him. I remember one of the times he tried setting me up. We were to do a deal at Walmart. It doesn't make any sense. He's like, come in to the bathroom in Walmart. I'm like, I'm not coming into the bathroom and doing this under a stall.

Like, really? And I ended up bailing on the deal because as I, like, pulled into the parking lot, I could, there was a synchronization of some vehicles at the right time while he was texting me. I knew something was off. So he tried to set me up at Walmart. He got hit by a,

semi-truck. And I can't remember if this was before I got arrested or while I was in jail, I found that about this. But those control buys were no good because they lost the informant. Now, I thought that maybe it was some John Gotti stuff and they had just planted him. He wasn't actually who he said he was. He was an undercover detective and they're saying that he's dead so that they can hide his identity. No, he really got hit by a truck. His car broke down. I don't know if he hadn't jumped in front of it or they lost control, but he got splattered by a truck. on 77 south right outside of Parkersburg. And because of that, he wasn't able,

they weren't able to prosecute those two control buys that they had, even though I was indicted on them. So yeah, they had a plenty of control buys. It was just, you know, my buddy that got pulled over that told on me explicitly, lied.

He even lied. You could have just told him that I had the, you didn't have to say that that was mine. How bizarre. There's no reason for both of you to go jail. He went to jail anyways, right? He didn't know he was going. Why,

yeah, why did you? Yeah. So yeah, they drug me to jail. And they had the search warrant address wrong. Remember I was sitting on the porch and I looked at the warrant and they had the number of the place wrong. And I pointed out to him.

I wanted to see the warrant was the first thing. I looked at it. Do you know why we're here? No, take me to jail. Because I thought I could get off because the address was wrong. Come to find out it wasn't substantial enough. And you and I may both know, I don't know, you know, how closely you've paid attention to the justice system throughout all of this,

especially on a local level. But the public defenders only have so much pull. The law doesn't matter as much as the relationship. Well, you know, you watch law and order and, hey, the warrant, the address on the warrant's wrong, and they get thrown out. You go free. Like, oh, but that's not really what happens.

It's close and they still got the right guy. His name was right. It was just the wrong address of the thing. We knew where it was. you went in and you found the drugs, you're good. Like, yeah, it was off a little bit. That's fine. Because if the judge would let a armed drug trafficker go

and the prosecutor would not prosecute the case, then would they get reelected? Because we have elected prosecutors and judges in that area of Ohio. So anyway, yeah, I sat in the county for seven months, and it was probably three or four months waiting on that indictment. And when the indictment came back, I couldn't believe that it was so lengthy. I didn't know what they had on me.

Seven felonies. Some of them were F-1s and F-2s, like first-degree and second-degree felonies, which carried mandatory prison sentences. If you maxed out all of these crimes, it would have been 28 years. I'm thinking, goodness gracious, my life is over.

Luckily, and I ended up only doing two years, I got offered a blind plea deal, which is you plead out to these two control buys, the F-3s within the vicinity of a school, because they measure the distance to a school as a crow flies. It's not down the street, down the block, down the street, down the block. It's if a crow flew from your house to the school, how far is it?

972 feet. How close does it have to be within a thousand? Okay, y'all really wanted to hammer me with that. But fine, I did it. Definitely did it. There were no kids involved in the crime, never selling drugs at the school. Just happened to be the- Just happened to be the neighbor.

Yeah, the whole, there's one school in the entire community, and basically every house is close enough. So, plead out to these two. two F3s, but you don't know what you're going to get. They carry a one to three year sentence, but they're not mandatory. So in theory, you could get probation, a big suspended sentence,

four, six, eight years, and drug court. Which is what I wanted. It was a first time offense. It wasn't violent. I mean, there's a lot of guns in the apartment, but it wasn't violent. One of the control buys, you know, the guy documented that I had a pistol on me,

so that wasn't good. And that was the judge's concern. It's like, why, you know, my biggest concern is you were armed doing all of these. You know, it was danger. You're riding around through the, the community with all these guns on you and selling drugs. Okay, that's valid.

So hopefully I was going to get drug court probation did not work out that way. It hit me with two years. I was devastated at first, but then the guys were telling me they're like, man, if you were black, you would have got eight for sure. They said two years is a sweet deal. Yeah, not a bad deal. Not a bad deal. How much time do you do on two years?

20 to 21 months. Oh, you're still doing 85. It's like 85%. That's like the minute you can't get any less than that. Okay. Not in Ohio. So I got good days for becoming a certified plumber. And taking a horticulture class.

I got certified as a tutor while I was in there. I was doing AA and NA like five times a week. Bro, being a plumber, tons of money is. Plumbers make fucking bank. Yeah. You know, every six years easy. Florida being a plumber in Florida. Not much new constructions going on.

I don't know what it is in Ohio, but Ohio is cold, bro. Like I would hate to work around water and be cold. I wouldn't mind working around water in Florida because it's typically warm. You know, new construction plumbers, they just, they come in before everybody lay everything. You're there like three times. So could have done that, yeah. So anyway, got me some good days. And man, the guys in jail always told me that prison was sweet.

They're like, I'd rather do a year in prison than 30 days in the county. I would. why you're saying the county was better? No, the county was awful. It was a worst seven months. I was going to be in prison than the county. For sure. It was like summer camp. You're out on the yard hours and hours a day.

I mean, when I was in the county jail, the guys, they kept saying, man, I just want to get sentenced to go to prison. And I was like, why does everybody keep saying that? I was like, isn't prison worse than this? They're like, hell no. Like in prison, you can get ice cream, you can watch TV. You can go, you can go play handball, you can play video games. Like, they had all these things that they were going to be able to do.

I was like, well, I want to, I want to be sentenced to go to prison. I don't believe that at all. I thought they were full of shit. Right. But then you go and you're like, wow, ultimate frisbee, soccer,

bacon cakes, I'm the captain of a kickball team. Yeah, did they have karaoke? We had karaoke, karaoke Tuesday. Open word, spoken word poetry for black history months.

Yeah, yeah. And they would, listen, and you had a couple of, like a flaming, what do they call them, punks,

a bunch of punts and trannies and shit, would do karaoke? Magic the Gathering. It's amazing. Did you just play magic? while you're in there? I don't know. It's a card game.

It's a trading card game. It's like Pokemon for adults. Oh, no. We would play risk. Okay. Yeah. Nice. So I played spades and hearts.

You know, I learned how to play those games. Those were fun. Did a little gambling doing that. It was a good way to pass the time. But, you know, I was 240, 250 pounds when I left the county. Eating honeybuns, sleeping, depressed, trying to put off, you know, reality. And did that for a couple months in prison, too.

But finally, you know, my ex was out of the picture. I realized I would be coming home. I was sober for once. She didn't wait for you? I said even five or ten years you would wait. She said, of course. Of course I will. No, she didn't wait.

Back in 20 months, you'll be here? Of course, I'm going to be here. Of course I'm going to be here. So glad she wasn't. Put money on your books. I'm going to come see you. Yeah. So, I mean, best thing that ever happened to me was going to prison because first day I said,

I don't want to live this life anymore. Drugs have led to every problem I've had my life. If I could just stop doing drugs today, maybe I could have a chance at a future. And it was true. So I'd set the drugs behind. My mentor was coming twice a month to visit me. You know, he kept speaking to me positively, showing me that I might have a purpose to share my story,

to witness, you know, to overcome these things, to maybe talk to people who are in positions of power who want to reform the prison system or reform the community so we don't have more people getting arrested. And I just caught fire. He said, you know, if you're scared about coming home and using drugs, relapse in, you know, committing crimes again, what would it take for you to have the life that you wanted? So I sat down. I was working the 12

steps too, but I sat down and created a plan, you know, mind, spirit, body, relationships, career. What are the things that I want? What do I need to do to be the person I want to do? And I just mapped it out and I had this big plan. And before I even came home, I started working on it. Well, I want to lose the weight. So I started walking. I walk a mile. And I'm walking three miles a day. Now I'm walking nine miles a day and I started running we had as a big bowl out there. It's one of the two big biggest prisons in Ohio. You got noble county and chila coffee and there's like 2,400 guys there, huge. And on the prison yard there was a bowl, we called it. And there's like a 30 foot, 40 foot hill that goes down into it. I'll never forget the guys pushing some guy in a wheelchair down the hill willingly

just for wreck like he's going down a slide. But that same hill, guys would bear crawl up. They would crab crawl up it, they would walk and run up it. And I hadn't exercised and who knew how long, but a friend of mine, and I said, well, don't you come run a hill or two with me. So we did. And I sprinted this hill and, you know, sat down afterwards and felt like I was going to die. I said, man, my head hurts. He said, yeah, it's called no exercise. So I was walking every day, started running these little hill sprints, paying attention to the scale. I had changed up what I was eating. And I got down to, I don't know, maybe 205. And I, you know, started doing pushups and lunges and squats, Lee, you know, the dude that slept next to me, and so he showed me how to

work out a little bit. So I'm doing bicep curls and chest press and leg day with them. And eventually I run my first mile. And, you know, over those last six months I was there, I went from 240 to 190 and came home. I was in great shape. I remember I was doing insanity at 5 a.m. for the last like three or four weeks that I was there with a couple of guys. I did yoga for the first time when I was in prison. I had, you know, not talked to all the negative people in my life for a long time. I've been going to A, like I said, Chapel, and I came home and was just a completely different person. And my life's been incredible ever since. I mean, I just told you I flew down from Connecticut, down here to Tampa, about to fly up to Wilmington, North Carolina. And you just did Ian Bick?

I did just do Locked in with Ian Bick. Shameless plug there. Shout out to Kyle Overmire, since we're on the subject of introducing, yeah, good old. old Sandusky County Sheriff, right? Yeah. He introduced y'all to? He did. We had lunch up in Columbus. He's like, you know, let me introduce you to Ian and Matt. So they got some shows.

They might like to head here. Ian and Matt. I'm going to talk to him about that. Uh-oh. If you have Matt, you don't need Ian. Oh, okay. That's what that conversation is going to be. So, yeah, came up from prison in 2020 during COVID. And I remember watching our little TVs, COVID happening.

I thought we were all going to die. It looked so bad. It did, man. They're like the pandemic. You got to wear masks. It's so deadly. So we had to stay on our racks. And we had to wear masks.

And it was awful. I remember when we were allowed to get off of our racks, we still had to wear masks. We were playing poker one day on third shift. And I was like a few weeks from going home. And Johnson, he was a third shift CEO. He came over. He said, Byers, pull your mask up because I had pulled it around my neck because I couldn't

breathe. Imagine wearing a mask for hours. So I pulled it down All right, I pulled it up He walked away He's gone Pull it back down Trying to breathe

He saw it again When he came back To tell me again I knew that It was not good So I was like All right I put it back on

He's like Why did you take it down In the first place I said because I can't breathe He said okay And the way he took off walking I knew he was going back To my rack to tear up my house

I said oh no no No you're not going to do that So I get up I walk I said what are you I said you're going to go Toer my house I said don't worry I got you

So I go back I grab my lawn bag. I started throwing it in the street. I grab my box. I turn it upside down. I'm dumping pretzels and soups and tuna pouches all over the floor. I said, is that good? Is that what you wanted to do? He's like, yeah, that's good. So I grabbed my uniforms and I throw them in the floor. I was like, you want the bed too? And he's like, yeah, I got. So I pull my sheets off my bed, throw them in the floor. I said, you want the TV? Is that good? He's like, no, that's all right? Everybody, 120 people deep in the dorm, silent looking over at me, what's happening? You're the

clang into the box, right? You see all this happening. Who is talking to a CEO like this? Like, is that buyers i was pretty quiet and soft spoken for an amount of my bid just trying to stay out the way why is he crashing out because i'm about to go home what's he going to do send me to the hole i did a calculation i can sit in the hole for three weeks so what you're not going to talk to me like this anymore i'm about to be a free man hey listen three three weeks in the hole might not be so bad you know what i'm saying like every time i've gone on the hole it's been like it's just me in a room with a bunch of books like i got a well in federal president they actually have the shower they have a you know they have the sink toilet come

But you also have a shower in there. It's like, I'm good. Like, I can, three weeks in the, that wouldn't be bad. Wouldn't be bad at all. No. I don't have to hear all these people screaming and yelling all the time. Yeah, the whole thing. They're going to bring me my food?

Super loud. And he, you know, he was so wishy-washy. Some nights he would be cool and other nights he would be disrespectful. And I couldn't stand that because I couldn't really say anything. I mean, I guess I could have said whatever I wanted to. If I wanted to get kicked out of D1, which was the honors dorm where dudes could work outside of the fence. The lights were off all day. and we were able to stay up 24-7 other than count time to play cards.

So you could be up at 1, 2, 3 in the morning out there in the day room playing cards are working out. And I thought that was sweet. So I didn't want to lose that. So I had to tolerate this dude being disrespectful. The lights were off. You could take a nap. I was able to sleep whenever I wanted to. It was a bit more quiet.

So it was a easy way to bid. I had it made being in the honors dorm. So yeah, I crashed out. Like I said, I came home. Came home a different person during COVID. That's right. And I thought that, again, it was going to be so bad. So when I came home and everybody wasn't dying from this severe disease that was crazy to me.

I was being safe wearing a mask and doing hand sanitizer after the gas station. But my grandpa, who's like 77 at the time wasn't, I said, are you not going to take care of yourself? I stopped doing it too. And then I paid attention. And I realized it was not as serious as they were making it out to be. And here I am fresh home from prison. I'm running around. It was a bad cold.

The bad comic I had it. I've had it multiple times. That it multiple times, you know. I mean, in the end, I wonder exactly what the true death count was. You know, it was, they was, the numbers were so embellish. People died, but how many of them was it from COVID? People died, what is it, 40, 50,000 people every year die of the common cold. You know, so if you triple that, 150, you know, and what is, it's more like two, it's a couple hundred thousand, but are those numbers actually accurate?

Right. Because they were giving the hospitals in. incentives to save COVID. That's my take. Maybe I'm completely wrong. I just know that it was not what it was made out to be on the news when I was in prison. Right. And I got sick with it.

It was pretty severe. I chose to not get vaccinated. And I feel good about that choice. And I felt like if I was a weaker individual or older individual, I had comorbidities, maybe it could have killed me. But I knew that no matter what was happening, it wasn't worth getting the vaccine to me. So anyway, as we a divergent of it. to COVID times. Yeah, now I'm home from prison. I'm 27 years old in the best shape of my life off drugs. And I thought I was going to be a truck driver because you mentioned the loud noises and

stuff. I was so burnt out from being around people. I said, what if I got a job driving a truck, make good money, be away from people? That's not about John either. So I went to get my CDLs and I knew just sitting in the room with the guys that were getting their CDOs. Something spoke to me that I didn't want to do that. So I didn't. And I was still getting my medication and case management from Westbrook, which is a place that committed me back when I was 17. And I told my case manager that I dropped out of CDL school. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I had heard about peer recovery stuff while I was in prison. You know, you get the certification based on your lived experience with addiction. She said, we have positions like that here. Really? So next thing, you know, I'm a youth peer recovery supporter helping kids 12 to 25 with their mental illness and addiction challenges. The same place I've received services at for 10 years. So it was full circle. It was another indication to me that like God did have that purpose that as I leaned into those experiences, I would find the way to serve. And I have meaning. It was my first office job.

So I took it super seriously. I was dressing up, you know, buttoning up, setting an example. I tried to live a life of who do we want our children to be like. And I tried to be that person. It was a great experience. Did that for six months. Found out I'm not meant to be an employee because I want to affect change. And organizations aren't generally set up to do that.

Right. So I, 30 hours a week, it's like be on the Zoom training or do nothing. If you want to make a difference in a unique way and you ask, They say no, and I spent maybe five hours a week with my clients. So in a perfect world, I'm spending 30 hours a week with clients, maybe doing some training and then creating new innovative solutions in the other time. That just wasn't going to happen. So I stepped away and decided I was going to start my own nonprofit,

providing youth recovery support so I could do it on my own and make a difference. I remember going around a local philanthropy leaders and asking about this, they said, when people come to us and they ask to start a nonprofit, we ask them two things. They said, is there a need in the community? Naturally, there is a ton of need in the community for youth recovery. Is there somewhere else that is doing something similar that you could fit in underneath? I said, good question. In that moment, though, it didn't click with me that the reason you're starting the nonprofit in the first place is so you can do it on your own and then build up, create your vision.

So you don't have to work with other people from the founding that can, you know, slow the progress. But I went out and I was talking about this with my therapist, come to find out that they had a nonprofit that had programs that kind of supported their clients in their for-profit counseling business. And I said, would you be willing to, you know, host this idea here? And they came back with a 1099 contract as a volunteer that I would be responsible to build this organization and then it would only get paid through it once it was funded, which is fine. So I spent six to eight months building how to save a life, this nonprofit program, to provide, you know, family-friendly events, a youth running club with mentorship and

youth recovery support. And it was an incredible experience, you know, got involved with Rotary Club and Chamber in Parkersburg Jacey's and was volunteering all the time and raised the money for self-harm prevention. I was wondering if it got funded. Yeah. Okay. That's a great question. I had the Bob Boone with the McDonough Foundation.

He went to bat for me. He had all the funders together and they discussed this idea and they were willing to fund it at a pilot level for 50K for the first year. So I thought that was incredible. But I said to Bob, I said, hang on, don't pull the trigger yet because when I did the math and I thought about I was broke, basically. So I was barely enough to pay you. I could, I only was written into the program as youth peer supporter. So I would make $16 an hour for the hours I spent with clients, maybe 15, 20 hours a week. So to further develop the project as an executive director, fundraise it, build it, and execute as the peer supporter.

That's 60 plus hours a week. And I would only get paid $16 an hour for 20 hours a week. So I sat down with a whiteboard and I tried explaining to the founders of the nonprofit that there's not enough time for, me to make enough money to live and do this. And they said, well, maybe you could get a job at McDonald's. I think, you know, you think you're missing the point. So I said, Bob, I said, something in this isn't right.

There's a lot of ego involved. I wasn't a great fit to work with them. This wasn't the right time. And said, don't pull the trigger. So built the organization, had the idea there. The program was there, went on to other things, and ended up doing a title abstracting property research. for a couple months. I'd gone on actually after that to work at the health department with their

opioid quick response team. You know, we follow up 72 hours after an overdose and offer people support services to get them into treatment. So I did that for a number of months. And during that time, I ended up running for City Council in Belpre, Ohio. I'd actually brought West Virginia's first Healthy Kids running series not long after I left Westbrook. So during this time, I was doing a lot of stuff just on fire trying to help brought west virginia's first healthy kids running series now i wanted to make the program as good as i could so i invited the mayor out to blow the air horn the starting line and he wasn't able to make it you invited who the mayor of parkers bro yeah to come out and be a part of the event he wasn't able to make it so i asked his assistant if they would be

willing to write like a proclamation for opening day she said yes ended in so send in the proclamation and i checked the agenda online for the city council meeting to see if it was on it and it wasn't And I said, well, what if they have the council meeting? And then they don't sign it. And then the event comes and we don't get this. So I ended up going to the council meeting. I'd never been to city council before. I didn't even know what this was before I got arrested.

Sitting in the back and the mayor starts with his executive summary and says, you know, somebody reached out about Healthy Kids Running series. I think I saw them here tonight. Reed, won't you come up and tell us about the program? I had never spoken in public at this point. So I went up, talked about it. I guess it went well. I sat back down and I remember, you know, council people, they get their time to talk at the end.

And this older woman, Wendy Tuck, she had spoken out and said, Parkersburg's getting $22 million from the American Rescue Plan Act, COVID money. We want to know how you, your organization, your business, your family have been affected by COVID so we can effectively spend this money. I remember all the other council people were looking at her like, she's talking. And I thought, how rude because as a citizen, the fact that you're asking, asking, what do I think about all of this money tells me that you really care. And I always thought that to be on city council, you'd have to be a lawyer, you'd have to be able to write an ordinance. And I could tell that these were ordinary people with just kind of normal jobs.

So in that moment, I realized if I wanted to, I wonder if I could be a city council person. I reached out to Wendy afterwards. We became friends, organized meetings in the community to solicit feedback from organizations about how they think the money should be spent. We do community cleanups together. Wendy's always had open office hours at like a local sandwich shop so people can come out and talk to her. Just a wonderful example of a servant leader. So I was pondering on doing it over the summer. What do you think the other leaders' problems for?

Or the other city council problems for? I mean, I know all of the city council people in Parkersburg and a lot of them are great people. I think that in my experiences, a board education member recently has taught me that you have to have a lot of time and resource to really give it your all. other than that, it's easy to get a bit, I think, complacent with it in order to drive the type of change that I believe is needed. So if you have somebody in a full-time paid position, whether it's a superintendent or a mayor, it's easier to delegate to the administration versus spending 40, 50 hours a week as somebody who makes maybe $100 a month in an elected position. So Wendy was retired and she spent 40 hours a week. She walked her neighborhood and passed out neighborhood newsletters and engaged with the people because she wanted to do her absolutely. salute best. And not saying that those people didn't do their best, but their best was just

less than Wendy's, how much she worked. So she'd definitely outworked the crowd. And I thought, man, if I got that position, I would do that too. And I did the best I could when I got elected to board education, which is more recent. Made it out to nearly all the schools to visit them. And, you know, a ton of research and learning about policy and financing, going through our budget and seeing how we spent our money. But I realized that it would take me over 40 hours a week to be an effective board member in my opinion and being 32 a young entrepreneur like I need to focus on my business building my online business and my brand and finishing my book and really getting out there and maybe someday in the future I go back in the public service but I'm not a politician I don't want to think about

how are people going to view me if I say this thing I want to speak from the heart the direction I'm called to share and you know the people that are meant for me will be attracted and the people who aren't they'll be repelled but I don't have to sit around and stress about it the goal of politics is to get elected you can run for office your entire life and never get to elected and then you're never an elected official, but you can run for office and get elected, and it requires a certain amount of votes. So the game is to get that many votes. So just naturally run. I ran twice. I ran once for Belpree City Council as a write-in. We pulled 46% of the vote, which my friends in politics say that never happens as a right-in. Yeah, that was going to say a

write-in, that's ridiculous. That's a sure way to get lose. Like it's nobody, you know, they want to check a box. They're not going to remember your name. I have people coming in from other districts that couldn't even vote for me saying, I'm here just to vote for read. They're like, well, you're in the wrong district. So I worked my tail off, knocked on 1,500 doors with sign-waving, passing out newsletters everywhere. Because I really wanted it. I really, when I say it, I really wanted the community to have more windy tucks.

People who are going to show up, open office hours, come to your house with, you know, asking questions about, you know, what do you think would make our community better? So I was on fire about it. Got 46% of the vote. It wasn't a win. And really, man, I was thankful because I could tell that the people on council in that community didn't want me. I mean, there are alleging rumors that I was selling

out of an ice cream truck to seven to 12 year olds. And while the prosecutor did say that I was riding around in my van like it was an ice cream trucked, I didn't say that. It wasn't an ice cream truck. It was a camper van. But it was in the newspaper article, so I think people spun that and said that I was targeting kids. So that was hurtful.

I got flipped off by one of the council members. She said, you know, how do you have all your teeth if you used to do all that dope? I said, well, I snorted it. and she said, but you got nice skin. I said, well, not everybody that does dope looks like they do it. I'm like, why am I dealing with this? So when I didn't get elected, I thought it's nice to not have to sit around a group of people who don't want you there. Right.

Well, and I did it again. I had a guy who was running for governor. He reached out to me and wanted to share his story recovery with me. And I thought it was a spam bot on Facebook or something. And no, sure enough, he had filed it as pre-candidacy papers. It was legit, auto dealer owner in the state. and I drove in two hours to go meet with him. We walked for two hours around the park.

I told him my story. He told me mine. Talked about our vision for the state, helping family and young people. And he said, you know, I think I made a friend this day. And I trusted in that moment. I trusted him. I trusted that he wanted to do what was right and best for the state. And that with what I was trying to do with, you know,

youth recovery and mental health and community development, that he, if the next governor of West Virginia is going to be a Republican, and there are four candidates to choose from. and one of them cares about helping people with adverse past and supporting families to solve that problem. And he solicited your feedback and he's willing to listen. Then that's the person to support this election. So I went all in trying to support him to get elected. And unfortunately, it didn't work out.

You know, it could be the next governor of West Virginia next time. It was his first time running. He's a great person. A good friend of mine. His name is Chris Miller. And it ended up leading me to move to the area that he lived in, not for that reason specifically. I was having a mental health crisis, scared I was going to relapse. My best friend lives in the same area.

So I ended up moving there and got an apartment downtown and took care of my health for three or four months and got turned around. And then I remember something ignited to me that I thought I should run for magistrate. Maybe the best way for me to serve is to sit across from people who were in similar situations to me and make the biased decision of what would be helpful to somebody who's about to go through the system that I've already been through. make it more fairly than the people who are currently making the decisions. You can't run for magistrate if you've got felonies in West Virginia. It makes sense. But then when I was there, I saw on the counter a friend of mine,

Evan Terry, who was running for Board of Education. It's pre-candidacy. So I texted him. I said, hey, Evan, saw you're running. Congratulations. He said, thanks. Yeah, I'm not real sure about it. What do you mean?

You're not sure. You've already filed the run. So we had lunch. I said, let's get lunch. Let's talk about it. Since I ran that effective campaign in Belprey, even though I didn't win, it showed me that what I did, the results happen. My friends in politics

said if you were on the ballot, you would have won. Yeah, the right-in was a that's just a bad yeah. That's a bad, yeah. That's a bad situation. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know if anybody could win on just a right-in. Just people in general aren't going to do that.

No, I have strategy books that say don't do it. Right. Literally. So I sat down and I tried telling him the things it would take to win and I could tell he was ambivalent. I said, you need to go home tonight and decide if you really want this. because the number one thing in winning is you wanting it and believing you can. If you don't want it enough and you don't believe you can, forget about it.

Right. So he came back. He said, yeah, I want to do this. I said, okay. He also explained to me that nobody had filed in my district for this board education race. And if nobody did file that I could run, single vote myself, and that I would win, I didn't really want to run for public office in Huntington. It wasn't something that I sat around and thought this is where my life's passion is.

But I wanted to help him get elected, and I thought he'd be a good candidate. I knew that I could help him if he would do these things. And then I thought, well, what if instead of just telling him what to do, you ran, showed him, maybe ran as a slate, and then you also got the seat, and then you can make an impact through helping the school system, which is an alignment with your mission. You know, you want to support young people and recovery and families. Okay. So I filed to run. I thought about it for 24 to 36 hours and decided to run. Come to find out, he explained it to me wrong, that we were running against each other.

Okay. And I was running against everybody. We were all running against everybody. Okay. So I still tried helping him for a period of time. And unfortunately, I just don't think he was all the way in it. Or maybe he wasn't able to commit for whatever reason. And that's okay.

He's younger than me. He's 27. We all have to learn. But when I realized that the investment of time in trying to support him and help him win needed to go into my campaign and doing what it would take for me to win, I started focusing on that. Boom, build the website. I put together the fundraisers, start getting out there raising money and getting the message out there, social media.

Now I need to get the data for where the voters live that are going to vote for me. Now I need to go out there and knock on 3,000 doors. Hey, I'm Reid buyers, running for the board education. Here's my background. Four years ago, I came home from prison. I've worked as a youth peer supporter. I've served on the board for the Boys and Girls Club, Community Service Council, American Foundation for Self-Harmvention. Started a nonprofit in trying to help young people.

I've started my business, become a motivational speaker, do consulting in the nonprofit arena. And I believe that young people and families who are not your typical traditional family deserve representation too. There may not be anybody on the board right now that understands a broken home or disadvantage like me. And by voting for me, I will stand up, I will fight for, you know, what is right. And I will represent those kids who haven't had a voice. And it was true. And I believe that. And they invested in me and they elected me.

And I did. I stood up for what was right. We got an excess levy passed back in November for $30 million. The school district had tried defunding the parks and libraries, which was crazy. The community came for a year and said, hey, give the parks and libraries the money that we voted for through this levy that you've now not sent them for who knows how long.

And the board was like, no. And the superintendent was like, no. And the community came back every meeting. Give them the money. No. So during my campaign as a board of education, member, there was an adjacent campaign to we're going to fail the school levy in May to show you that we're in control of our budget and we will fail it again in November so you don't get it period if you don't give the parks and libraries their money back. Two new board members got elected, me and another woman, the levy failed massively, like two to one, the worst has failed in 70 years, and before I even swore in, the superintendent quit. superintendent's association gave him award for superintendent the year and he went to the biggest

school district in the state across the state and took a new job so we got a new superintendent and as soon as he started you know we got the parks and libraries funded because of that the community trusted we would do the right thing we passed the excess levy so the school system and the parks and libraries have their $30 million now and I waited until we got that pass to resign because I'm moving to be closer to Washington DC to join a network of non-entrepreneurs to get back to writing my book I was working on my book last January and December. When I filed the run for board education, I got sidetracked.

I haven't been focusing on building out my speaking calendar. I would have been down six months ago if I wasn't caught up running for office. And I mean, I truly cared. I truly wanted to help that community. I feel like I did. I did my best. I feel like I did help them.

I'm sorry, I'm not staying. I'm going on to the next thing. You know, we talk about kind of the narcissistic part of the personality. I truly believe that I've been called by God to serve a higher purpose. So the more people I can reach along in that with this positive messages of, of transformation and redemption is possible, despite your circumstance, that the better that the

world would be. So if I have to vacate my post, helping 11,000 students in Cabell County, the 30,000 people that I serve there, then there's probably 120,000 people that I serve there, then that's hard, but it's okay because what are we going to reach? I mean, between this and Ian's podcast and in the social media channels, we'll reach over a million people with his message. And I surely hope. That's the reason I'm here.

that something I've said today or will say today will inspire somebody, whether they're still struggling with addiction, they're supporting somebody with addiction, they have a criminal history and they've not like fulfilled their potential because of that, that God has a purpose for you. You're called to discover that and you're called to share that with the world. I truly believe that that's going to make a difference. And I'm stoked to be here and I appreciate the platform and the opportunity to share that. I mean, you've got any questions to dig up from all of that info?

I actually, I know, I'm sure Colby has that question. I have a question. So when you just, you skimmed right over while you're moving to Washington, you said, oh yeah. You said, I heard entrepreneur and something else, but you said it so fast. I don't understand what that is. What are you doing? Yeah, growing.

Yeah, yeah, growing my online business. Okay. Completing my book. So are you saying you're going to, is there an organization? No, no, I got a tiny. Oh, you've got a tiny. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I thought you were saying.

I was going to join like there's an organization. I see. Okay, yeah. Yeah. So there's a number of reasons I'm moving. I want some peace. I've been in downtown Huntington for a long time. Oh, the years, a long time for me.

So I've got a little tiny home up on top of the hill, overlooking the Shenandoah River. And it's about an hour and a half from D.C. There's a network of entrepreneurs in D.C. called cadre, full of people who I'd like to grow alongside and learn from, to help me expand into my entrepreneurial calling because I've been involved in community engagement and nonprofit and politics for so long. I realized that separating from that

and leaning into a network of people who do. do online coaching, online businesses who are authors is going to lead me to become that myself. So I started, like I said, the book back in December and January. I've yet to complete it. So I need some separation from the noise in the community to focus on finishing my book. I was going to book out my speaking calendar for 2024, but instead I ran for office. I'm going to go back out, book out my speaking calendar for 2025 and get more clear on maybe a rebrand instead of focusing a lot on, you know, mental health. Self-harmonvention, you know, focusing more on empowering people to be better leaders and start their own businesses.

Or we'll see what comes of it. But that's the work that I'm going to do is rebranding and developing my online business. So the first thing I just want to clarify, what exactly was, is it bipolar is what you were diagnosed with, I guess? Yeah, yeah, type one, manic depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, as it's called now. And do you think that is like when you were born, it was already genetically in you? or do you think your childhood and your upbringing is kind of what brought that out? Or is there a way to know? There's a great question.

What the doctors say? What do you feel, you know? Yeah, I think there's probably data available that most doctors don't even have the time to read into because they're so busy practicing. I think science will show over the next five or ten years what that answer is clearly. Historically, there is belief that genetics play a role into it. More recently, people are debunking that. genes dictate your future, that genes are unlocked by your environmental circumstance. The fact that my mom was mentally ill, maybe I'm more likely to develop it mental illness because

of that, but I'm not destined to because of her genes. I definitely believe that her being the way she is and then me having the upbringing that I had played into it. If I was born into the Brady Bunch, would I have developed manic depressive when I was. 19, I don't know, and I would almost wager that the answer would be no, because you think about the food that you eat, the substances you consume, the relationships you have, and then your sleep schedule and structure. If you keep those things consistent, you're much, much less likely, I think, to develop this mental illness. But I often contemplate, is mental illness real? How real is it? And I think that it is real in a way. People's brains, if you talk about Dr.

Aiman, he has the Aman clinic and they do brain specs scans there. People's brains anatomy are much different than your average person who have mental illnesses. And there's a pattern in them. And there's actually different subcategories of bipolar disorder that people can be grouped into. So I think genes may play a role into it. Environment plays a bigger role into it. And we're not definitive. Nobody's definitive on the answer to that. Was there a pivotal moment that kind of like shifted, you know, it seemed like as you were, you know, whatever was 19 to mid-20s, that you were just homeless, kind of, you couldn't, you couldn't get out, get your head above the water. Was there a pivotal moment that shifted your mindset that said, you know,

this is the time that I'm going to change and not go back or something like that? Yeah, hitting that mat in the booking cell. Like, I'm when they, when they raided me and drug me to jail, and now I'm in the booking cell and I go to sleep because I'm strung out and then I wake up and I'm there and all of the consequences from my choices of piled on top of me. And I'm thinking, man, I don't know how long I'm going to do. But like I told Matt, I said, drugs caused all the problems in my life until then. If I could just stop using drugs today, maybe I'd have a chance to the future. And I did.

So that first day in jail was absolutely the turning point. And what advice would you give to somebody, let's say that they're struggling with something similar? you know, hopefully they wouldn't have to go to jail to learn that same lesson. What advice would you give to them, I guess, to help themselves? Or what can they do to help pull themselves out? Is it, you know, finding accountability, getting around, you know, changing your environment based off your own experience? Yeah. So some of that varies on the person.

There has to be a desire to be helped for the person to truly receive it. But if somebody comes to me and they're struggling with their mental illness, I'm going to start the breakdown of mind, spirit, body, and ask them, you know, what are they doing with their food intake? How are they sleeping? What are their relationships like? What's their home life like? And I'm going to try and change all of that.

I'm going to offer that they need to change all of that. And then if they can't in that current environment, then I'm going to offer, hey, I can get you into treatment in Hawaii. Are you really ready to change? Because if you are, we can go tomorrow or next week. and you'll have to stay for a year or two until you change your habits and your identity and you prove to yourself you can do it without it. But it's super possible and I'm an example of that.

Like it was prison for me, but there's inpatient places you can go and have a good life while you're there and completely change. You have to want it. So I try and live a lifestyle that 17-year-old Reed when he was rambunctious and strung out and stuff type of person that he would listen to. So there's an amount of professional success in that, but there's also an amount of like humility and rawness and authenticity from being from an adverse life that he would respect. So I think another thing is that when people offer help, be receptive to it.

Because I look back at the different people who extended a helping hand. And if I had just allowed them to help me more instead of being stubborn, I would have been in a much better situation. But like I said, you have to be willing to receive it. And I think everybody has their journey. So if you're struggling and you've been offered help and you haven't chosen to and you're feeling guilt and shame about that, that's okay.

I love you anyways. You deserve to love yourself anyways. God loves you anyways. And you're going to find the way eventually, the way that it's meant to work out to. Give yourself a little grace. You doing drugs, you having a mental illness doesn't make you a bad person. Run that back. You doing drugs, having a mental illness, being a criminal, that doesn't make you a bad person. We're all created for reason beyond our understanding. And I'm just going to pray that you all have figured it out. And then my last question would be, it seems like, you know, these, you know, you get, you have a lot of substance issues. Substance issues within your own family. Like, how has your relationships been over the last four years as you've kind of gone through this change? Like, how is that with, whether it's your parents, your brothers, your siblings? Like, are they receptive? Like, do they receive the message or like, how has that relationship been? It's been one of the most powerful pieces. of my education, I think, to help people over the past four years.

Zach, my brother, he OD'd in 2017, so he's out of the picture. My life got better when my brother died, especially long term. It was hard at first when I dealt with that grief, but because I didn't have that close negative influence to influence me to be, like, more aggressive or sell more drugs or just use drugs together, the fact that there was an absence of negativity in my close circle was a net positive for me, even though the loss was hard and I would naturally prefer that he would be here. I don't wish death on him.

I'm just saying him being absent from the picture was helpful. Mom died back in 2022. And I've had less turbulent negative emotions related to her since she's been gone. I miss her, definitely. And I wish she was able to see me now. So I just kind of trust that she is and she's proud of me. She told me that several times before she died. But I also had her blocked because she could still be belligerent.

So I had to be very careful to not lean into that too much. My sister, we don't talk a ton. She follows me on Facebook. wish her the best. I've got a nephew who's three or four who I'm going to go see after I leave here. I've got a niece who's 13 now, Lacey. That's my brother's daughter and her mom died a year and a half ago. So Lacey's an orphan. So I've been trying to be more involved in her life and visit her around the holidays to make sure that she does okay. And I got another niece of Krista, my sister's daughter, and she's doing really well. I remember the first Thanksgiving when I came home from prison.

I took a venture and I went to North Carolina, but I scheduled some 5Ks I was going to run at the beach during Thanksgiving. So I had a better reason to go to the beach than visit my family because I felt like it was unpredictable how it would go. And if I went down and I did the races, then the reason I went is for the race is not to visit my family. If I went to visit my family and it went to shit, then that was stupid and you knew better. Well, I stopped on the way back and had Thanksgiving with my sister and my mom. And it was the best Thanksgiving we'd ever had together. And as I was driving back to West Virginia, I thought, what was the difference? The difference was me.

The difference was the choices I had made over the past two or three years to take care of my mind, spirit, body relationships, and to improve and grow and to lean into positive social relationships. And they saw that in me. They saw that in discipline. They saw that in energy and demeanor. And they acted better accordingly. Yeah, were they maybe snorting pills in the bathroom and drinking? Maybe. They pass out on the way back home from the beach.

Maybe. did we end up belligerent punching on each other yelling and screaming? No, and that's an improvement. So I still talk to my dad, you know, talk maybe every couple weeks. I've had him blocked for over six months at a time since I've been home because if I'm going to talk to him and things are going to escalate, then I don't need to put that energy out there. But if he's willing to put in the work and it can be positive, then that door's going to remain open. So really picking my chosen family and reciprocating positive energy for people who come in my life, that's where my focus has been. We mentioned going to D.C., God's open that door, and I'm really leaning into building a chosen family and ideally finding a wife someday that we can have our own family and hopefully I can be a good parent to my kids or our adopted kids or at least continue to be a good person if we don't have kids because, I mean, relationships, man, they'll make you or break you. It's all I have. I'll say that one says a thing about your Thanksgiving.

It made me think of a, there's some comedian or something who said. after Thanksgiving. Like, nobody called, like, the cops didn't show off. It was a positive. The positive Thanksgiving, because the cops didn't show up. Dude, I'll never forget Christmas one year. I was upstairs, and, like, my grandma had came down from Illinois, and I just heard some bickering, and then some thuds, and then a bottle crashed.

And then my mom was screaming, but she was screaming like, her, like she couldn't talk. Thinking, why does she sound like that? So I called the cops, and I'm under her vanity upstairs in her room. scared because all this crashing and thrashing. And I said, well, I don't know what happened. You know, they just heard a bottle crash and maybe mom's got a busted lip. What had happened is mom was talking mad junk to dad per usual. And he was walking out of the kitchen, but she said something super offensive. So he had, I think, a beer bottle or some kind of bottle in his hand. He threw it over his shoulder. And it came back and it cracked her in the neck and ended up

breaking. So she was laying on the floor like halfway paralyzed when the cops came. That was your average Christmas when I was earlier. than 10 years old. Perfect example of what not to do on Christmas, right? Do you have anything you want us to, you know, to mention, like anywhere you want people to go? Yeah, thanks for asking. I'm going to put my cell phone number out there

because I want people to be able to reach me. I've done that in politics and, you know, it's maybe a bit risky, but I think, I think people have an access to me, you know, as part of the purpose. So if anybody wants to reach me and I'm available for speaking engagements too and you know different collaborations 304 952-6555 websites readbuyers.com emails change agent at readbuyers.com follow me on Facebook I'm also on LinkedIn and

Instagram and yeah I look forward to hearing from folks that have been impacted by this story hopefully it makes a difference hey you guys I appreciate you watching do be favor hit the subscribe button hit the bell if you get so you get notified of videos just like this We're going to leave all of Reed's links in the description. We'll leave his phone number and all, you know, all his contact information in the description box. Also, do me a favor. Please consider joining our Patreon. It's $10 a month.

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