GXT Interview - Jim Boothe - Homesteader and US Patriots Corps GXT-I-EP07

Matt Marshall: 0:00

Well, Hey there, Gen Xers welcome to another interview with gen X talkin' on being prepared. I'm Matt Marshall, overall preparedness enthusiast, here to help guide people to respond well and recover faster. Let me introduce my co-host, Ed.

Ed Wasson: 0:15

Hey. I'm Ed Wasson

Matt Marshall: 0:16

In today's show, we have a really interesting fellow. I've had the pleasure of working with for the past couple of years. Over that time, I've grown to respect where he's coming from his experiences past and present we feel can really provide some life lessons for our audience. Without further ado, I'd like to welcome to Gen X talkin' Mr. Jim Boothe

Jim Boothe: 0:37

Hello everyone. First off, thanks Matt, Ed for having me on today. I grew up around the Omaha area and Nebraska. Did some work on farms in the summer and had always wanted to go into the military. And my junior year in high school, I took my ASVAB, went and talked to the Navy recruiter and they offered me this CB occupational field as an electrician, and it kind of fit what I wanted to do. So two weeks after I graduated high school, I went in the military where I spent the next 20 years. I got to do some amazing things as a CB that nobody else has ever done. Probably the biggest key and highlight is my time in Guantanamo bay, Cuba, I've been there twice. I was there in 1992 for six months during the Cuban Haitian migration and I got to help support that. But then I went back at 1999 spending five years there pre and post 9/11. I got to see a base that was being drawn down into what they call the caretaker status, minimal staffing, because the primary mission of the base is migrant operations. The secondary mission was a recalling station so ships that would come in could get fuel, food, and some minor repairs. When I was there in 1992, the permanent station base population was sitting close to 8,000 to 10,000 just before 9/11 happened. We were down to 2,500 people. Life was quite amazing there. So then 9/11 happens. What I was doing there in Cuba is I was maintaining the base communications, either doing a repair on a line or installing a new phone line somewhere in the building and I'm up into this tiny little crawl space and I get a call over the radio that I needed to go back to the office now, no questions asked. So I crawl back out through my small little 10 inch by 10 inch hole and back I go just in time to see the second plane hit the other tower. That's when the realization happened being in a critical facility, every four hours, we had to go in and check on the facility. And it was a week long thing. I happened to be on duty that week. So you got to go and wake up every four hours at night and plus work a full-time day. It drew hard on me and we ended up having to do some shifting with that. We went back to the states for Christmas. And when I came back, that's when I found out exactly what we would be doing. We find out that we're going to be building up a prison, bringing in a huge operation, and we've got to upgrade all of our infrastructure. From January until August, we brought in augmented teams. We had a contract company come in and install a new telephone switch. We had four central stations. We redid all of them. Plus put in four remote stations that came off each one of those exchanges. We installed about 50 miles of fiber optic cable burying it and terminating it. We did not contract this out with any major contracting company. We did all of this in house with national guard and reserve help. I can remember for the first four months, I did not get a day off. I was working 10 -12 hours days. I had a team of four guys and we installed and terminated just a little over 250,000 feet of Cat 5 cable. We installed an OSI 48, fiber distribution system in four different locations. We cut over those four switches. We stood up camp x-ray. If you've seen that, then you've seen my work. cause I did the communications I've also done some of the communications at the tribunal building and at the same time, my command was pulling out all the active duty from there except for the CBs. I worked two complete man years, through 2002. And my youngest son was born in 2002 as well. All of that happened when they pulled out everybody, we needed, a contact manager, an EKMS manager. So I filled that role. They had to pull some special permissions cause it's not our normal jobs. So I did that my final year there. Gitmo was probably the most fulfilling time and next to that would be the four years prior that I spent at JCSC in Tampa, Florida. I went to Lamaddalina, Italy for a couple of years, ran the IT shop there, settled out in Virginia Beach, retired out of Virginia Beach, and then lived there until I got the call to come down here to Charlotte, to work a couple of years ago. As a lot of folks in the military you ended up being married a few times. I am on my third marriage and I have kids out of my first two marriages. So I have three boys. The oldest he'll be 30 in April. The middle son he's 28 now. My youngest that just went into the army, he is 19. My wife has three children. Her oldest is 35. Nikki is 33. And Amanda will be 31. Out of those six kids, we have nine grandchildren that range from the age of Colston will be one in March all the way to Kyrie who's 10 she'll but 11 in September. So our first 4th of July at this house, we're in now we had every single person there, 22 people. It was awesome. Trying to find space for everybody is a little bit more difficult with a two bedroom house, but we've got a camper so we were able to handle some overflow.

Matt Marshall: 5:55

so this is, this is actually a good transition because in the last few years you and your wife, made a decision to move to a more homesteading type living. Would you want to share a little bit about that, your homestead and what that decision might've been like?

Jim Boothe: 6:09

Sure. As I was talking about growing up in Nebraska, detasseling corn, and what we called rogueing beans or just pulling weeds is really all we did. I never wanted to have any part of that life ever again. Then six or seven years ago, I was like, I'm tired of the city life. I'm tired of this hustle bustle. The house I sold in Virginia Beach was in a development with one entrance. And I lived six houses into that entrance of 531 homes. I had over 2,000 cars pass my house every day. It took me an hour and a half to drive 23 miles. I was done with it. I wanted out of the city. I'm not a beach person. I think in the last three years I lived in Virginia Beach, I went to the beach three times. My wife is from the Hudson Valley area in New York. And she's always lived in the city. I started taking her camping and she really started liking it. I started taking her on hikes on the Appalachian trail, which she's good for like a two day hike, but she's not going to survive anything more than that. So she says, if you're ever going to do another hike, it's on your own, which led to conversations of having a lot of property. And we got to looking into this, we've learned the term gentleman's farm, which means that you get all the farming benefits. It's just, you're not making any money off of it. You have all the animals, the garden, and you're doing all of these things. It's just not your business. So we got to talk about it. And we started looking at moving into Central Virginia. I actually had a couple of very large properties marked around the Charlottesville area that we were going to start looking at. My son graduated from high school last year. We're going to sell our house and live in the camper we have now for the last year and a half or so of his high school, we were going to buy a property, go out on the weekends or whatever, pull the camper, go fix and do whatever we needed to do and then go back into town and work until he graduated high school and then that was going to be our full-time thing. Well, about the time we were getting ready to make all that decision, I get the phone call to come here. It was a big decision to move six hours away from all the grandkids that were used to being around the corner. It was rough at the very beginning, but it's gotten better. Honestly, we probably see our kids more now than we did living around the corner from them. So we started looking in the area. The very first house we looked at is the one we're in now. We've got 37 acres. I've got a five acre pasture that is my hay production. I've got another pasture that's five acres that we kind of use as a go-between with the horses. We have two horses. I'll let one grow for 30 to 45 days, and then I'll send them over there to graze while the other on the other side of the driveway is growing and send them over there to graze and in the winter time I have to buy hay or if I can get somebody to bail my pasture, I could be self-supportive in that nature. We have a Creek that is part of our property line. It's about a mile long. I've got about an acre of a pond. It's sits right up in the front and the driveway. I don't really get to see it. So it's there and I always wanted a pond, but in hindsight, it should have been in the back where I could see it and/or enjoy it a little bit more than what I do. The price point of where we ended up moving at, what we sold our home for, and what we bought this for was the difference of a hundred thousand dollars. We're in process of learning as we go. It is a learning process. I know a few things about gardens and some livestock and things like that, but there's still a learning process.

Matt Marshall: 9:46

The term homesteading implies a lot of different things and most definitely it requires knowledge beyond growing up near a farm or having a garden at home. I really liked that term, gentleman's farm. I've never actually heard that.

Jim Boothe: 10:05

So the first time I ever heard that term gentlemen's farm, I was watching an interview with the actor that plays Negan on the Walking Dead and he owns a gentleman's farm in Virginia and he used that term. I actually had to look it up on the internet after I heard that, too. So we spent the last couple of years getting things ready. What our ultimate goal is, is to be self-sustaining. We go to the store to get the things that you can't grow, the wheat, the sugar. Everybody needs some kind of human interaction so you go into town to get that. I've been making my own jelly for the last four years. I've got five different flavors in the house right now. I bought a pressure canner this year. So now I can soup for the first time. I grew butternut squash. I had no idea that that one butternut squash plant takes up as much real estate as it does and I bet we pulled off of just one vine 40 butternut squashes. But we made a soup and I canned it. That was six months ago and everything is still good with it. I've got tomatoes canned that last me through the season. We also discovered we want to increase the size of our garden. We put a fence around the garden and it was mostly to keep the dogs out. And we're going to make it bigger. I just replaced my breed of chicken. So I haven't had a chicken laying egg since September, but I still have eggs. There's a process that you can do to store an egg for up to a year. You take a big mason jar, you get some pickling lime, the one key factor is you can't wash the eggs upon delivery, they can't have any excrements or any debris on them. You put them in this jar and you can store them up for a year. So when a chicken lays an egg, they put a natural coating around the egg and you can actually lay set a fresh egg on the counter probably 30 days without it going in their refrigerator. And it's fine.

Matt Marshall: 11:58

This is one of the things that I think is so valuable to people. They have no idea if it comes in its natural state I always thought to myself though, putting them in that jar with the lime in it would make it taste different.

Jim Boothe: 12:12

No, because of that natural coating so an eggshell is naturally poureous but the film that is on an egg that coating covers up all those air holes and it's a good egg. I've got 20 chickens sitting in my freezer so I'm good for chicken meat. We took two of them just recently, put them in the pressure cooker and made chicken broth and then took the chickens out and shredded out the meat. Those are the kinds of things that we're doing and what I did is I went to a larger chicken. I went from my Rhode Island red breed to a Plymouth rock breed. They're a larger chicken. Egg production is about the same. I should be getting eggs any day from them. Around February time frame, I'm going to start incubating eggs. And it's about a 21 day process. So every 30 days, I'll be incubating about 21 eggs or so. I'll start reproducing my own chicken and being self-sustained. The goal is to never have to buy chicken again.

Matt Marshall: 13:11

One quick question I had around that, what was it originally that caused the chickens not to lay?

Jim Boothe: 13:17

That delay is because I bought them as chicks. It takes 22 weeks for them to start laying. Like I said, I completely changed out the breed. So I bought my chickens from a company in Texas and they mailed them to me. We learned the hard way you want to try and maintain about a 10 hen to one rooster ratio. We had almost two hens to a rooster ratio and it's a brutal situation. When you got six roosters and one hen, You feel sorry for them. So what the roosters did is they get a hen, one of them would get on a hand, and then all the other five roosters would to circle that hen and when one rooster was done another one would instantly jump on it. So all six of them had taken their turn with one hen. Chickens are interesting. It just happens to be one of the farm animals that extremely familiar with so it was a natural transition for me to bring chickens in and raise them up. I know people who will give a chicken, all their table scraps and then you've got people that turn chickens into pets. My grandkids, when they come to the house, they know you don't go in the chicken coop. Those are not pets. They are food. When you're eating breakfast tomorrow morning, it's because of them and you need to leave them alone. You need to quit stressing them out. When a chicken gets stressed you get blood in your eggs. So when a chicken is stressed, the yolk splits and separates a little bit from the white part there. And it causes blood vessels to break and you get red spots in your chicken eggs. A lot of people have that false sense of what the visual should be and this is actually what it really is if you do it on your own. Chickens are very easy to maintain. We put shavings to kind of help with the cleanliness of the coop about once a month, we'll go in and clean it out and refresh it. It takes a couple hours. You gotta feed them once a week. I've taken five gallon buckets and I've created feeders and waters out of it. But if we do need to go away for a couple of days, it's not an issue. They've got plenty of water. In the summertime, they'll drink about 10 gallons of water a week. Now that it's gotten cool, 10 gallons last about two and a half weeks. We'll throw just to add some protein into their diet some crack corn about a quart in their for them a night. We'll throw leftover bread. I'll throw grains and fruits in there, but I know people who throw cooked chicken nuggets and throw the eggshells back in there. I don't like doing that. They can eat their shells as long as you wash them and it adds calcium into their diet and it makes the shells stronger for some chickens, but with my Rhode Island reds, I didn't need to do anything special to their diet. The shells were fine.

Ed Wasson: 15:54

Do you think in that community with those people if we were to try to eventually get to that stage of life, but also still have Omaha steaks come once a week.

Jim Boothe: 16:06

Here's where I see the downfall of something like that. We have some farms in our area that raise cattle and sell off the meat because you're raising on such a smaller scale your cost per pound is higher. I've found where the meat prices are $3 or $4 more a pound then on the commercial side I don't feel that the quality's any better.

Ed Wasson: 16:32

So you could be kind of hurting the community.

Jim Boothe: 16:35

I don't know if you would be hurting the community. I think the community would have to make a different adjustment. The idea of an Omaha steaks kind of aspect, I don't think you'd see that

as much as: 16:47

Hey, Ed, I've got half a hog, but I don't have any beef. I'll trade you my half a hog. That's what I see more of. When we first started talking about gentlemen farming, homesteading, my whole idea with doing this living in Italy, they have a thing called an agriturismo. It's a farm to table restaurant. Everything you eat is raised on the farm. I wanted to do something like that. But I also wanted to have a store up front of a co-op nature or other area farmers bring in their canned goods, their crafts, their goat cheese, their handles, their soaps, all of these things that they would need to come in and they could sell them there. And we could make a general store on a kind of more where I have the store front for you. I really don't need much, you just kinda maybe pay a little rent for a space. I've kind of shifted away from that and wanted to be more reclusive so to speak. There's two major downfalls to going and doing what we're doing. First one is my location, I have zero cell phone signal. I am 15 miles from the closest towns. Nobody wants to bring in a cable broadband to my house. My internet is through the satellite. The other downfall is the money to get started. We had to buy a tractor. We had to buy implements for the tractor. We had to buy the materials to build the chicken coop because there wasn't one there. For some people, the learning curve is bigger than others. For me, it's not as large, but I mentioned earlier about our garden. I'm used to having very fertile soil. So gardening isn't that difficult in Nebraska. In South Carolina with this clay, it's very difficult because it's a different soil consistency, different conditioning. I gotta figure it out. And then we thought we had a big enough garden, it turns out we didn't. Now we got to make it bigger. So right now animal wise, we have two horses and we have the chickens that I spoke of. In the spring the next big project is to fence off a large area and look at getting cows and pigs. So with the pigs, do we buy a bore and a sow and start breeding our own and having piglets once or twice a year or do we buy a cow and a pig twice a year and take them out and butcher those and fill our freezer that way? You can't just jump into it unless you can just pay for all of this stuff. Or you're in a situation like mine where you got to work a full-time job because this stuff isn't cheap, it's not free and you got to pay for it. Plus you got to have the time to build up everything that you got to build up because the infrastructure just isn't there. You have to write down on paper everything that you want and prioritize.

Ed Wasson: 19:35

So this is a buildup process to get it to where when you get to your retirement and post retirement, you will be a lot more self-sustained.

Jim Boothe: 19:47

That's exactly what the endgoal is.

Ed Wasson: 19:50

Jim I had a question. Cause matt told me something about a forging process that you have. I've seen this scenario, especially with a lot of former military and veterans. They reach out to material providers. They're not just forging, like making their own knives, but they seem to be making like their own web gear, their own backpacks. Is that your process with forging and how's that going for you?

Jim Boothe: 20:14

We go back to the homesteading aspect of the money. It's not cheap to get started in forging and I'm still building my equipment. Ultimately, what my goal is with forging is to coin, the young kids out there, it's my side hustle. And just something to supplement my time. I've been doing it long before the popularity of things like forging and fire. For me, it's about the art behind it and that artistry and that craftsmanship going back to what you were talking about before, Ed. It goes back to one of my previous statements of the difficulties I had with separating from the military. These guys are their own bosses. They don't have to deal with a lot of the difficulties that I had, but also they know what it's like in those communities, the lack of the gear. But they also know that folks like myself really want some more of that gear, but we can't get a lot of times the NSN or the national stock number's equipment. So that's why they're starting their company's: what didn't work for me? What would I have rather like to seen and they start building their own stuff. These guys see where there's that niche and make gear that isn't going to fall apart after two deployments. Since 9/11, and around the 2008-2009 timeframe, there's a lot more support for veteran owned businesses than there ever was before. So guys, aren't afraid to jump out and start doing these things. The VA has some amazing programs to help get started with businesses, with loans and helping you with that. There's a lot more of that entrepreneurial aspect than there was when I retired. I retired out of the military in 2008. The economy was crashing. Federal jobs were nowhere. People were too scared to start their own businesses. So you kind of had to take what you got.

Matt Marshall: 22:21

I think a big part of our audience, the intention for us anyways, is that it would be former law enforcement, military and so on. That is a big part of who we talk to. So it's important information. Let's go ahead and jump into now talking about the organization that you're representing today.

Jim Boothe: 22:39

The name of this organization is United States Patriots Corps. I don't want people to get lost in the name of Patriots Corps, we're not a Patriots type organization. We're actually a bunch of veterans who have gotten together and it was started by some state guard individuals who no longer are able to serve with the state guard, but still wanted to serve the state. They got together and created this organization. Our primary mission , is to assist the state with search and rescue during disasters and things of that nature. We are a 501C nationwide organization. Our main membership and our headquarters is right here in Chester, South Carolina. We have a group that is growing in Mississippi and we have one in New Hampshire. Like I said, we do search and rescue. We do have ranks. You do have to fill out an application. It does require a background check. We do wear a uniform. We've got our own patches, but our base camouflage uniform is that of what the army wears. Next year we're going to really start getting our training going and getting ourselves established as that support model. In March, we're gonna get CPR qualified and get that training from the American heart association. In June, FEMA's coming in to teach a big course on wide area searches. Some things we want to do down the line is get more involved with honor guard where we're helping with funerals. Here in South Carolina state guard, there's only one team and they're located in Columbia to support the entire state and most of the time they can't do it. And there's no other organizations to do it. So that's where we can come in and assist with that. We have a fundraiser going on right now to get a draft horse. I'll give you the link to Facebook if anybody wants to donate to this for law enforcement and military.

Matt Marshall: 24:33

When you talk about that specific component, security for certain areas, is that working alongside of FEMA or red cross?

Jim Boothe: 24:40

Yes So we did an event, a recruiting event yesterday. While there, we met up with a smaller town that the fire chief is also the police chief, but in talking with him, if I didn't known you guys existed, I could have used you for our Christmas parade cause I didn't have enough officers to support it. We can go in and assist, provide traffic control, crowd control and not in a force protection type, you know, we're armed kind of way, but just that presence. We did have to take a brief pause in our efforts with events that occurred . Not due to what we are or anything, but just due to our name, we took a step back and felt it was best for everybody involved. From what I saw yesterday, there's a lot more people interested in this than I had originally thought. We want to target veterans more so than anybody else. We have a board of trustees. We have a board of directors. All of us are veterans and we all have that unique skill that would love to bring in if you guys have experienced, especially you Ed, but I know as far as me is, I still want to help the community. And this is one way that I can do that. We also have less bureaucracy behind supporting this, it's easier for us to get out and assist. So that's what the United States Patriots Corps is all about.

Ed Wasson: 25:58

It's interesting. You said you had to take a step back. There was a lot of fringe movements that were trying to espouse the name Patriot. It was getting polarized, but Matt and I talked about this on a different podcast. I didn't know this until I moved to Texas, but we went out near Galveston beach one day. And we were talking to the residents there and they said this last hurricane, they evacuated for a little while, and then they came back and then the hurricane came in. There's actually a whole bunch of gangs of looters coming in, basically counting on you, not being in your home.

Jim Boothe: 26:37

It's great you brought that topic up Ed and going back to that protection element that we want to hopefully be able to establish later, it's for that very thing. Our founding members when they were part of the guard were involved with hurricane Matthew, were involved with some of those other hurricanes that have hit South Carolina and they saw all of that firsthand. This FEMA training that's coming up in June, we're partnering with our local fire departments and the local police departments to also get in and enjoy this training. And it's free.

Matt Marshall: 27:10

I got to ask, is this TEEX from Texas A&M? I belong to CERT, community emergency response team and that was one of the things they did for us, this wide area search training. It was that three-day training class and it emphasizes the lost person behavior book. It's a fantastic course.

Jim Boothe: 27:30

Yeah, then another course and it's an acronym and I don't know what the acronym stands for, but it's called Raiders. It's more of a higher level survival type training that is geared into this wide area search where you're going to be placed into situations. It could be were assisting local law enforcement in finding somebody who's lost in a wilderness environment. And that's what that Raiders course does to be able to help augment that searching of lost individuals. And it doesn't necessarily have to be from a natural disaster. It could be a hiker who gets lost and we could go and assist with that. I wish I could devote more time to it. There's too many other things going on, but as I said, we're a nationwide organization. We do have our 501C and the end goal is for us to become a contractor for FEMA and actually get paid to assist.

Ed Wasson: 28:29

there's so many purposes and uses for such a group on the Southwest border states. We also had a group called Ranch Rescue and they are there to help people that actually have ranch property right on the border and their property is being exploited by a lot of migrants that are coming over. So not only protecting the private property of people in the community, but also segway into that finding a lost person. Cause you could be trying to find somebody that was a migrant trying to cross over and they don't know where they are. And it's harsh territory out there.

Matt Marshall: 29:05

Jim, have you had any opportunities or has the group had any opportunities to work with those agencies yet?

Jim Boothe: 29:11

Were still in the building phase and the training phase. I've done an honor guard ceremony on veterans day. I knew I was going to do I flag presentation I didn't really know much more than that it was for this organization Quilts for Heroes. It's in partnership with Lowe's in this area and they pick X number of veterans. They make them a quilt and they present it to them in this ceremony. And we did the flag aspect for that. So there's a local company here in South Carolina in Gaffney that makes American flags. In the star section and the blue section, if there's a blemish with the star, of course they can't put it out on the line. They give it to this company and they've taken those stars and turned it into a meaning. So if it's missing a star, it represents those who have fallen and if it's missing a blemish in it or something, it represents those wounded veterans that have returned. And so that whole quilt has a meaning.

Matt Marshall: 30:12

Is there a particular direction or a way that you'd like to see this organization grow?

Jim Boothe: 30:17

We would be wanting to look at it as different companies in the states with a brigade headquarters and branching out where groups of people in each state can assist that state but if it's something bigger, we can pull from our other companies in detachments to assist and to be able to provide the support that a natural disaster or something of that nature would require.

Matt Marshall: 30:44

Obviously there's multiple other ways that you can serve in your communities and such, but the search and rescue piece, especially in an area like, you know, north and South Carolina, there's a lot of people who they have no idea what they're doing when they go out to hike into these mountainous areas, and they tend to get lost.

Jim Boothe: 31:01

As I mentioned earlier, I've got three sons and my two older ones actually live in the Gulf port, Mississippi area. And they were there for Katrina. This happened to be when I was stationed in Italy. So it was 30 days before they got their telephone restored, but there were some lessons learned out of that, but it was 30 days before I could even talk to my kids. And the military wouldn't let me go to the area because they didn't want other people getting lost and I understand some of that aspect behind it, but it was a very tense 30 days for me because I couldn't talk to my kids. So we were there March last year and where the houses were along the coast, they still haven't even started building up on that yet. Look at just what happened over the weekend in Kentucky and Tennessee, all the tornadoes. In the middle of the night, nobody knew for four or five hours the amount of damage that was done. Growing up in tornado alley, I am very familiar with the destruction of a tornado and then having spent the next 20 years or so in hurricane regions, I'm very familiar with how a natural disaster can affect a community. Knock on wood, I've never been in a place where I've had to deal with something that major. The closest I ever came was in 1999, when that F-5 ran through Oklahoma. I was in Wichita Falls, Texas where the F five ran from Lawton, Oklahoma, almost to Tulsa and then it went north into Kansas.

Ed Wasson: 32:37

That's the year, Matt, I told you, in one of those podcasts, I was driving a truck at that time. I parked off the side of the road and I was going to end up going through Oklahoma and Tulsa, and my boss called me up and told me park under an overpass. Even then the wind was blowing the truck back and forth and that was a truck that was loaded with vehicles. And I woke up in the morning and I went around the circle of Oklahoma city. And there's this wasteland out there.

Jim Boothe: 33:06

In those types of situations, the federal side of the house, they don't have enough people, the national guard, our law enforcement and firefighters, what is their primary job going to be? To go out and support that. So now the national guard is short of people.

Ed Wasson: 33:20

It's manpower and it's warm bodies and it's extra hands to do anything. And it's a community effort. In those groups, like you said, when Katrina hit, they even called the New Mexico army national guard to go out there. So you had Louisiana national guard, mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, they're all pushing national guard troops out to help in Katrina.

Jim Boothe: 33:43

So Virginia set national guard troops there, the city of Virginia Beach has a very, very good cert team that has some national recognition. They were called to support the Pentagon on nine 11

Ed Wasson: 33:56

If a lot of that community effort is there, it might help curtail a lot of the looting that occurs during those things. Because what a lot of people don't know is that some of the richer people in areas like new Orleans, when Katrina hits, they hire Blackwater to go in there and Blackwater ain't messing around. Those guys if they catch you looting, they'll probably just shoot you.

Matt Marshall: 34:20

What is a way that the audience might reach out to y'all?

Jim Boothe: 34:23

We have a website. You can go to the unitedstatespatriotcorps.org, and in there you can fill out an online application. We'll contact you and have a conversation. We do have an age limit. We have set an age limit to 70 years old.

Matt Marshall: 34:36

It makes sense if a valuable part of what you do is actively moving up and down mountains and serving people in struggling situations. Very difficult for certain people to respond to that physically.

Ed Wasson: 34:52

the parting shot that I have for this is again, going back to a core mindset of preparedness, whether it's an individual, a family unit or the community effort with something like this. You see the weaknesses in the government. I mean, the US is a great country but you just can't rely on the government for everything. You do have to have some sort of self-reliance and self-sufficiency and when there's a community effort involved in it as well, it helps alleviate a lot of problems and issues that a lot of people just don't know are out there. Like I said, after Katrina hit, blackwater, went in there and set up headquarters operating out there according to a journalist Jeremy Scahill and what they were doing out there operating in that type of private security realm that they do, it goes towards if you're going to have something going on in Kenosha and do residents and business owners have a legitimate reason to want some group outside because the law enforcement and the core of first responders and public safety are going to be stretched out. And we live in a free country and you have a right to defend your property. There's a lot of issues to talk about with this kind of stuff, but to a lot of the core of Jim's conversation, he's segwaying towards retirement. It's a great conversation on a lot of learning points. There's a lot of investment in time, effort and money, but at the end of the day, if you can get yourself in that mindset and baby steps towards those kinds of things, you can become more and more self-reliant, self-sufficient. And when something happens, you're more ready for it. That's all there is to it.

Matt Marshall: 36:37

This is one of the reasons I wanted Jim to come on the show he has a lot of information, but there's some interesting points that you made one right off the top was entering into the homesteading, you and your wife sat down and said, what are the priorities we have? We know we kind of want to get away from the city. So you create a couple of different plans that will help your family. Maybe even your community to respond well and recover faster, right. I really respect the fact that you're trying to build an organization similar to something that I already belong to, the cert organization in that the point is you're trying to help people. There's a series of shows that are out there. One in particular goes into the Olympic bomber. and the fact that at some point in time, he goes up into the mountains and he hides in North Carolina somewhere and the militia from that area wind up protecting him initially. Because they don't know him. They don't know what type of person he is. And once they find out what type of person he is, they go, Okay, no. We're with the government now. We're going to help. Jim, the organization that you're in if you guys approach it in the right way and you're coming alongside these agencies and helping, that's an honorable thing. Definitely appreciate what you guys are doing there. That's my partying shots for today.

Jim Boothe: 38:03

In what we were talking about in our topics today, you and Matt have highlighted some of the things in my head with the homesteading piece, an individual who wants to do that, you have to have the mindset of do it yourself. I have seen and heard about folks who lived in the big city and, oh, I can start a farm. And it was a couple and the other half of the couple can't leave the city they didn't realize how much it was going to cost. They went in and took on more than, one, what their knowledge could handle and, two, what their checkbook can handle. Now they're in a situation of, if I can't do this by then, I'm done and now I've got to sell everything, and I've seen that happen a lot. So financial planning and the financial aspect of it is a huge, huge part of that. We're we're looking at what's going on with our government now in the inflation, the cost of doing business has gone up. For instance, a roll of hay. It costs me $40 last year. It's over $60 a roll this year because you can't afford to fuel the vehicle to cut the hay. But the hay is necessary to put a steak on your table. So the cost of doing life, you have to understand that cost. If you don't understand it, you're not going to make it in that homesteading. Also with the homesteading, you have to learn how to do a lot more stuff yourself. For me, I can't call Uber eats and get wings from my favorite joint delivered. It's just not going to happen. You have to also learn to give up some of those comforts that you have that are right around the corner. And you have to plan more ahead. Now granted you could homestead a little closer to town, but still it's not around the corner. If you're beyond the city limits, a lot of times you're not getting a delivery pizza. What are you going to do for your pizza? Learn how to make it. Just make sure that you've done your research. We did two or more years of research and planning before we made that move. With the Patriots guard thing, my parting shot is don't judge the organization by the name in most cases. We chose Patriots Corp because we are U.S. Patriots. We are veterans. Patriots go way back to the civil war. Patriots were Minutemen and patriots are what helped us defeat the British and chase them away. Patriot is not a bad word. We need organizations like ours to help in those times of need. And those people that don't want us today, all of a sudden are supportive of us because they need us. If your organization is doing amazing community work, then it's a good organization. And that's what we're building.

Matt Marshall: 40:54

Well, then let's go ahead and conclude just with a reminder to the audience. Always be learning to respond well and recover faster. Thanks again to our guest, Jim Boothe for joining us. Thanks, Jim.

Ed Wasson: 41:05

Thank you, Jim.

Jim Boothe: 41:06

Thanks.

Matt Marshall: 41:07

And until next time, this is Matt Marshall signing off.

Ed Wasson: 41:10

Ed Wasson signing off. Thanks for being with us, Jim. Well, we greatly appreciate your time.

Jim Boothe: 41:15

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.