Stella is a widow living in St. Louis, a city that sees its fair share of severe weather. She’s terrified of storms, so when she heard that a group from Pikeville was handing out 1,000 free Midland weather radios, she headed right over.
“I’m just scared to death of storms. I do appreciate it; you have no idea. I just don’t like storms,” she tearfully told a representative from The Y’all Squad, the foundation arm of Ryan Hall’s YouTube channel, Ryan Hall, Y’all.
Stella and the 999 others who received free weather radios that day were helped because Hall decided to channel his love of weather into a hobby that eventually became a nationally known internet sensation and a philanthropic enterprise that has raised more than $1 million to help storm victims across the country.
Born This Way
“I just got an incredible fascination with weather,” Hall said from his Pikeville “Weather House.” “I really like weather. I like being out there. But I also like the analytical side and what I do now—interpreting weather through digital data and then turning that into something that’s understandable for the public. So, I kind of lucked out that I’m just very interested in both of those things. That’s a big gap that needed to be filled in today’s infrastructure, with how media is done.”
Ryan enrolled in Big Sandy Community and Technical College and started working at WYMT-TV in Hazard doing janitorial work to get his foot in the door. He immediately befriended then-chief meteorologist Shane Smith, gained an internship, and eventually did the weekend weather segments.
“I had spent so much time in the weather studio helping Shane with his forecast,” Hall said. “And every chance I got, I would get on the green screen and practice.”
While working at the station, he started online meteorology courses with Mississippi State University, but then he quickly realized television was not the career path meant for him.
“I worked in pretty much every sector: doing camera work, writing stories—even sports—and I just realized over time that I didn’t like that,” Hall said. “When I decided that I was done at WYMT and that wasn’t the future for me, I stopped going to school as well.”
Upon leaving WYMT, he and his childhood buddy, Dalton Stevens, launched a marketing company to help local businesses increase their digital footprint on social media, including YouTube.
“I’ve always had a knack for editing videos and doing stuff online,” he said. “So, we figured we would do that and then actually got really successful, and it did really well.”
But the weather kept calling his name.
Right Place, Right Time
Hall left the marketing business to his friend, a move that didn’t surprise Stevens.
“When we were kids, Ryan was always a fan of two things, which is YouTube and weather. I think we all naturally saw a progression of where his life was going to go,” Stevens said.
Hall converted an extra bedroom in his and wife Stephanie’s Pikeville home into a weather studio, complete with computers, monitors and microphones—equipment dedicated to bringing the latest weather happenings to fellow “weather nerds out there who will listen to me talk about weather.”
By late 2021, Hall was gaining viewers as he followed severe weather situations, warning folks when to seek shelter or how to prepare in case severe weather is heading their way.
On Dec. 10, 2021, a massive tornado outbreak hit Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky, causing catastrophic damage to numerous communities, one of the hardest hit being Mayfield, Kentucky.
“Everything changed. All of a sudden, instead of 500 people watching, there were 10,000, and I didn’t really understand why in the moment,” Hall said. “A lot of the national media wasn’t focusing on this, and then somebody in Mayfield—or one of these towns over there—shared my stream on Facebook, and it just kind of went viral in these local communities. We had 10,000 people in the line of fire who were watching me.”
Hall said the next day, his email inbox was full of testimonials from people thanking him for his updates and giving him credit for saving their lives.
“That’s when I was like, ‘Wow, this is not just me doing this as a hobby. This is something that people need and people could depend on,’ ” he said.
More rooms in the Halls’ house were converted, and more people were hired to help handle the channel’s rapid growth.
“There were just so many people coming in and out that my wife was like, ‘You got to get an office,’ ” he said. “It’s really hard to find office space here in little Pikeville … So, I kicked my family out of our house. But we moved just down the road.”
Hall now has 3.31 million YouTube subscribers, 10 full-time employees and 30 contractors. One of them is Brad Arnold, who joined Hall’s team right after the Mayfield tornado.
“I saw his coverage on Mayfield and thought, ‘I think this guy’s got something that could actually work,’ ” Arnold said.
That “something” is his on-air knowledge and his message of preparedness.
“The chance of seeing a really big tornado is very low, but when people hear ‘tornado,’ they immediately think of a big, scary, life-threatening situation,” Arnold said. “I like the way [Hall encourages viewers] to be prepared. If you’re prepared for [tornadoes], if you have a plan in place, then your chance of survival is very, very high.”
‘Just Didn’t Feel Right’
Hall said that after the Mayfield tornado, people started donating hundreds of dollars and buying the merchandise he was selling to pay the bills.
“At the end of the day, I actually made a lot of money from Mayfield, and that just didn’t feel right,” he said. “We need to take that attention that we have on us, and people’s willingness to contribute, and not let that go to waste.”
The Y’all Squad became a nonprofit 501(c)(3), and Stevens, Hall’s childhood buddy, joined him in a new entrepreneurial adventure.
“He called me in late 2024 and was like, ‘Hey, this thing is getting crazy big,’ ” Stevens said.
Stevens officially started as chief operating officer of Hall Enterprises and The Y’all Squad. “I believe we did somewhere north of $1 million in donations in 2025,” he said.
“We need to make sure that every single dollar that gets donated gets back out into the community in every way possible,” Stevens said. “And we’re making as much of a difference as we can.”
Hall said once a severe weather situation is over, Stevens and The Y’all Squad pack up the trucks, head right to the affected communities, and work with local emergency officials to see where help is needed the most.
“We’ve kind of figured out what people want and what people are already going to get from other organizations,” Hall said. “We’re small fries compared to FEMA and Red Cross, but there’s stuff that they won’t do, and there’s stuff that insurance sometimes fails on, and we have figured out what we can do to help fill that gap.”
In March, The Y’all Squad arrived in Lake Village, Indiana, where severe storms and tornadoes had wreaked havoc. Local emergency officials told Stevens their greatest needs were generators, chainsaws and heaters, since temperatures were going to drop into the single digits overnight.
“We went to Home Depot an hour and a half later and spent $25,000 on generators and heaters,” Stevens said. “The next morning, we woke up and spent another $15,000 on chainsaws and all the equipment that comes along with that, along with shovels and rakes and brooms and all the things that these people needed to help start the clean-up process, because that’s just what they didn’t have.”
The Y’all Squad also has been known to replace a storm victim’s demolished car, put families up in apartments for a year, help pay for funeral expenses, cut checks to help with daily expenses—anything to help ease the burden from the results of Mother Nature’s destructive storms.
“I’m just glad that we’re taking a lot of that attention, a lot of that momentum, and we’re putting it back into the communities that didn’t ask to be the star of our show whenever we’re doing severe weather coverage,” Hall said.
‘With Respect’
Hall does have his detractors. A YouTube search for “Ryan Hall” will result in a page full of thumbnails with areas of the country brightly highlighted and full of warning. Critics—many longtime meteorologists—call Hall’s operation “clickbait” and sensationalism in order to gain more viewers and ad revenue, rather than disseminating vital weather information to the public.
When asked how he responds to such criticism, Hall’s answer is simple. “With respect,” he said, “what I’m doing … it wouldn’t be possible without them. The current weather infrastructure in America is so good. We’ve got the Storm Prediction Center [of the National Weather Service]. We’ve got all this radar. We’ve got so much good stuff going for us, and it’s all based on that legacy.”
Hall stressed that he never runs ads during a severe weather livestream, and he collects ad revenue on his outlook videos, sponsorships and merchandise sales.
As for the “clickbait” accusation, Hall doesn’t see a problem with that.
“[I’m] displaying complex information in the simplest way to try to get somebody’s attention, in my opinion … We will make a YouTube thumbnail that’s maybe a little bit too hyperbolic because that’s what works,” he said. “Our goal is to try to get as many views as possible on YouTube. We’ve got a core message that we want to get in front of as many people as possible, because we know that message saves lives.”
Stevens said that message is at the heart of everything Hall does.
“You can just tell by talking to him that he genuinely has a passion for what he does, and he finds personal fulfillment in—I don’t want to sound cliché—but literally in saving lives,” Stevens said. “That is his overall goal—just to truly make a difference in a space where he saw a gap.”
Deep Roots
With millions of subscribers, national recognition (good and bad) and a thriving philanthropic foundation, such success would lead many to venture out of a small mountain city such as Pikeville to a larger metropolitan area. Hall said he has considered it.
“But at the end of the day, I’ve got three boys. Our family is here, and growing up in this environment is so much more important than anything else for my kids,” he said. “My family’s been here in this county since it became a county. I’ve got deep roots here. I think I’ll always get pulled back.”