Security Halt!
Welcome to Security Halt! Podcast, the show dedicated to Veterans, Active Duty Service Members, and First Responders. Hosted by retired Green Beret Deny Caballero, this podcast dives deep into the stories of resilience, triumph, and the unique challenges faced by those who serve.
Through powerful interviews and candid discussions, Security Halt! Podcast highlights vital resources, celebrates success stories, and offers actionable tools to navigate mental health, career transitions, and personal growth.
Join us as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, proving that even after the mission changes, the call to serve and thrive never ends.
Security Halt!
From Green Beret to Regenerative Farming: Patrick Samuels' Next Mission
In this inspiring and eye-opening episode of Security Halt!, host Deny Caballero sits down with Scott Campbell, a visionary entrepreneur who turned his personal health struggles into a mission to change the food industry. Scott shares his powerful journey from overcoming health challenges to founding Loving My Tummy Foods, a company dedicated to providing clean, high-quality, and healing-focused food solutions.
This episode dives into:
✔️ The growing demand for healthier food options & the rising chronic health crisis in America
✔️ How food can be a tool for healing, recovery, and improved mental health
✔️ The entrepreneurial challenges of launching a food brand & disrupting dietary norms
✔️ Why community support and service are vital, especially for veterans and first responders
✔️ The intersection of health, business, and mission-driven impact
Scott’s story is a must-listen for anyone passionate about food, health, and making a difference. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, veteran, or advocate for wellness, this conversation will leave you inspired and motivated.
🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube! Don’t forget to follow, like, share, and subscribe to stay updated on veteran entrepreneurship, food healing, and innovative health solutions.
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Chapters
00:00 From Military to Farming: A New Journey
05:51 Building Community and Trust in Agriculture
12:00 Education and Entrepreneurial Spirit: A Comparative Analysis
17:57 The Reality of Military Service and Recruitment Messaging
18:54 Embracing Core Competencies
19:34 Reevaluating Military Engagements
22:32 Navigating Life After Service
25:00 The Power of Nonprofit Work
29:39 Creating Community Impact
37:20 Real Change Through Local Action
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Produced by Security Halt Media
Security Hot Podcast. Let's go. The only podcast that's purpose-built from the ground up to support you Not just you, but the wider audience, everybody. Authentic, impactful and insightful conversations that serve a purpose to help you. And the quality has gone up. It's decent and it's hosted by me, Danny Caballero, Patrick Samuels welcome to Security Hall, man. How's it going? Good? How are you, brother, Doing? Well? I love stumbling across other individuals from our background. They're doing exciting and remarkable things in the entrepreneurial world and when I saw you were also involved in regenerative farming. That's something that I like to show and talk about because it is vital and it's important and it's something that many of us probably don't hear enough about and think that as an option when we get out. So today, man, like I, want to dive into your story, not just how you became a green beret and your military travels and everything, but your background, how you found yourself in this chapter. Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, long stories for sure. But yeah, how I found myself being a Green Beret is after high school I went to West Point kind of classic officer route went to West Point. I graduated from West Point and was an infantry officer for a while and then decided to give it a shot and go to selection, got picked up and I made my way through the Q course and then went over to fifth group and then did a few years over in fifth group and so that's kind of the really short version of how I became Green Beret.
Speaker 2:And then, kind of coming out of military service, we were kind of looking at a variety of different things. I had some interest in kind of starting a business and we put together a small real estate investment firm and you know, for me that was kind of like a way to pay the bills, but it wasn't something that I like was necessarily super passionate about or super excited about. And during COVID we had actually started doing some research. I think everybody kind of started looking into like the food system and where does our food come from and why are pharmaceutical companies like all of a sudden nobody can trust a pharmaceutical company and then you can't trust a food company. And then it kind of leads you down the rabbit hole, you know, and I think a lot of people started to kind of do their own research.
Speaker 2:And we were one of those people and my wife had kind of always been into, you know, healthy living and kind of natural living and that kind of thing. I never really cared, you know. I was like give me a rip it and some ramen or whatever and I'll be fine. But yeah, so we started to do a little bit of our own research and just really started to learn a lot about the food system and that led us to want to just kind of do the homestead thing and so kind of on our way out of the military we bought a little homestead. We've got like nine acres out here. And where are you? At Kentucky, just north of Fort.
Speaker 1:Campbell, nice, so you stayed in the area.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, with our real estate investment company we own a bunch of real estate down in Clarksville and so we kind of stay local and, yeah, we've got a business down in Clarksville, so we stayed close. And then, yes, we bought a little bit of land and started kind of just doing our own little homestead thing and doing some meat, chicken, some egg layers. We've got a few cattle out back um and started doing a little bit of the regenerative practices where we would, you know, multi-species grazing and then rotation, rotating them around pasture, kind of controlling their movements, that sort of thing, trying to to rebuild the soil a little bit, because whenever we bought this place the land was like completely bare. It's literally like bare earth. They had over the guy, uh, previously had had over pressured it a little bit and so, um, it was just there when we bought it. So we're trying to kind of bring, bring it back to life a little bit here.
Speaker 1:did you have any foundational like knowledge about farming, or just just winging it the green brayway that yeah, that that's the.
Speaker 2:I think that's. Just life sometimes is like this is kind of interesting and then just you know, for me I'm I'm gonna just like dive head in kind of guy, and I kind of always have been, and I think most of us are. And no, I, you know, on going out of the military, leaving the military, you know, before I kind of started to do my own research and that kind of thing, I knew nothing about real estate and I knew nothing about farming. I grew up in Indiana, where there's plenty of farming, and actually whenever I was really really young, my dad had worked on some farms and that kind of thing, but he probably stopped doing that when I was around like maybe three, and so I never really had exposure to farming and if I did it was, it was almost all like monocrop or like big feedlots for cattle and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:It wasn't, you know, it wasn't small scale, it wasn't regenerative, it wasn't working multiple species, it wasn't, and it certainly wasn't bringing any of those products to market either. You know, which is its own challenge. It was kind of just like hey, we're, you know, this guy's a farmer for one of the big, big companies out there, and so, yeah, we, yeah, but I, yeah, I knew nothing about farming and so everything I, I, I have some I'm really close with, like an Amish community up here by us down the road, and you know, those guys have been farming their entire lives, you know, and they get a chunk I tell them all sorts of stories, you know, when the cows get out of the fence or whatever it is, you know I tell them all sorts of stories and they just crack up about all the problems.
Speaker 2:I have trying to trying to start a farm from scratch here, but that's an interesting like community to be like next to.
Speaker 1:Oh it's fascinating?
Speaker 2:yeah, they are, they are. It's a pretty interesting community here because they're fairly progressive and so they all have, like, cell phones, their businesses have computers, they drive tractors. They're not allowed to drive cars but they drive tractors and so, yeah, it's a really progressive community and so they've kind of opened themselves up to outsiders like me a little bit more, and then some of the families actually help us out with our nonprofit and some of the work that we do and they've gotten kind of a little bit more plugged into the outside world. And then, you know, I've been fortunate to kind of get plugged into their world too.
Speaker 1:I see a lot of similarities with by, with and through. Oh for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I've got. I'm in, you know, classic. I'm in like a group chat of all former 18 alphas or whatever from across the regiment and that's what I was telling him. As soon as I started like making relationships with these guys, I was like I've already, whenever everything, when shit hits the fan dude, I've already got my g-force ready to go, like I've got food I've got. Yeah, I've got it all. They're all there. Yeah, I've got it all up there, man, they're, they're the perfect course that that is.
Speaker 1:That is remarkable man, that that's a testament of being able to build relationships with anybody and, uh, finding that common ground, dude and you're better to help you in this endeavor than somebody who's an entire family lineage is being involved in land and looking at the way that they do farming, is it completely opposite to the way that you know our american industrialized farming operations are?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, yeah, it's been well. I'll say it's a mix. You know some of them. I would say some of the Amish prefer the kind of older methods where it's a little bit more natural and that sort of thing. But then some of them have been probably co-opted by some of these big corporations and you see that a little bit too, where, you know, maybe they just they grew up doing something closer to regenerative agriculture but then now that these big corporations came in and provided them a contract to do something that's maybe not quite as close to what they used to do, it's actually been really interesting For a little bit there. Right whenever I left the Army, I worked for a little bit for the largest organic pasture-raised egg company in the world. I did that for.
Speaker 2:I don't know for like nine months, and one of the things that was really interesting to me was 90% of their supply base, 90% of their farmers, were all Amish and Mennonite right, and time and time again I could see the company not understanding that culture and, as a result, having a lot of friction with their farmers.
Speaker 2:And so now it's kind of interesting as I get our egg company up and running, I have not called well, maybe one person I think I reached out to, but for the most part we have farmers just calling me who have said hey, I heard from a farmer over in this area that you were starting up this egg company. I wanted to get into eggs but I don't want to go with one of these big corporations. Would you be interested in us working with you and everything. So far, and particularly in the Amish Mennonite community, everything is reputation and so if one Amish guy tells another Amish guy like, hey, you should work with this guy, he'll work with you and vice versa. You know, if they tell him, hey, I've had a bad experience with this corporation, well then you'll lose access to that entire community in a heartbeat and everything is word of mouth.
Speaker 2:It's very informal, but they trust each other inherently, and so they would much rather trust the word of another local Amish or Mennonite guy than they would just some sales rep coming into town who says like, oh hey, I've got this great looking contract for you. So, yeah, it's been really interesting to see the contrast between how that previous corporation that I worked for approached them and then how we've kind of been able to do things a little bit differently, and an example of that is like whenever they were recruiting farmers, almost all of their money and resources were allocated towards trying to recruit farmers through social media, and it's like 90% of your supply base is Amish and Mennonite and you're putting money into social media to try to recruit more farmers. That's not how you get Amish and Mennonite farmers.
Speaker 1:Gosh, that is so like instantly, I'm just like fire that person. Yeah, classic.
Speaker 2:And that's what classic Green Beret problem set is like. We just look at a problem and we're like, wait a minute. To some guy who's been in business for his whole life, who lives out in New York, has never lived or worked on a farm, it makes plenty of sense to, hey, just post a bunch of ads on Facebook and try to get more farmers. That makes a lot of sense until you understand the people that you're working with. And that makes a lot of sense until you understand, you know the people that you're working with. And then, yeah, you would immediately see like, oh hey, I'm not going to have social media?
Speaker 1:So, yeah, no, absolutely not. But you know, shout out to my, my buddy, elmer, uh, a little person who left the Amish community, oh, yeah, season five. Shout out to you, elmer, we gotta bring you back on the show, the work ethic. Like, oh yeah, is it's insane like they grow up knowing like, okay, like I'm gonna be a hard worker through and through, no matter what, no matter what the thing is like, whatever you have to do to make sure that the family's good and everything in our community is solid, we are going to work. Yes, yeah, so it makes perfect sense. Like that there's a green beret that can find itself in this community and be like, hey, I can work with you guys, because I too like to work really hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, I think we found a lot of similar values for sure, and, like you know, for example, my wife and I we don't have a television. You easy mesh for us to blend in with them. You know, I still I don't shave my mustache yet, but maybe we'll get there, but uh truly a simulate.
Speaker 1:Hey, that's the thing we did back when I know a shout out to Jim Gant he, uh, he tried getting us to simulate a little more. Yeah, that's right, you know yeah we, uh, we could have been there, we could have owned it, we could have been really part of the communities, but yeah, anything to get brought in closer into the fold.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and you brought up how hard they work. The other piece of that too is, I think they only go up to an eighth grade education. They don't go past eighth grade, and it's kind of interesting to compare what is normal and expected in their communities, where they have less of a quote unquote education. But then because of that they self-teach themselves a lot and what you see is they get involved in business a lot earlier. And so as soon as they finish eighth grade especially if you're a boy, basically as soon as you finish eighth grade, you go and work for your dad's company or your brother's or your uncle's or somebody. You go and work in business as just kind of a laborer, so you gain all the skills and understanding of that particular industry. And then you know, as soon as you turn 20, 21, 22, you're like ready to go out and start your own business. And so from a very young age they're kind of inculcated with entrepreneurial values and the ability to do it and they just kind of watch everybody around them as kind of just already starting their own small businesses and having having generally success with it. And the other piece of that is their community supports their own small businesses, you know.
Speaker 2:But, um, yeah, if you just compare that to kind of like the normal education system in america, where it's like, hey, sit in this classroom until you're 18 and then, uh, for most people it's like, well, the goal is to get, then go sit in a classroom for four more years, uh, and then just go work for somebody else at a big name corporation or whatever it might be, you know, if you compare and contrast, um, the the two different cultures between, like, what's normal in america and what's normal, uh, in the amish, it's like, well, I think we would almost all agree like we'd actually rather see the end result that we see in the amish than we would see then we would, we would want to see the end result that we see in most of america, you know so absolutely patrick, I gotta tell you the the education system, even higher education, is absolute, complete garbage.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, it's just like it blows my mind. Currently in college, right now, and the amount of coursework that is not related to a degree that you have to take, that is just absolute, complete garbage. Like we're talking just things that you could just throw random words at a wall and that's probably a college class 1900s. Dracula literature, that's the thing. Comparing the themes of Star Wars to modern day political friggin parties, like all the stupid shit that makes no sense. Why, why are you going to the school to get a degree in gender studies? Makes no sense. What are you gonna do with that? Yeah, and starbucks.
Speaker 2:I saw that a little bit at west point too. You know, you can imagine like I think almost all west pointers come out of west point thinking in themselves like wait a minute, am I ready to actually go into the? I know nothing about the actual Army. I know a lot about whatever my major was, but I don't know how the Army functions. So you show up to a platoon as an infantry officer and you're like dude, I don't know what everyone does here. I don't know how all of this functions. You don't know anything about training calendars. You don't know anything about all of that. You basically understand how to do patrol operations with a platoon, and that's the extent of your knowledge. And then everything you learned at West Point was just academic Wasted opportunity.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:Well, it really is. And because of all that, I actually almost left West Point after my sophomore year.
Speaker 2:I was teetering on leaving because I was just like and this is kind of why I ended up leaving the military in some regards too, but I almost left after my sophomore year because I was just like, what am I doing here? Like I signed up to be in the military and serve my country. You know, that was kind of my, my idea at the time definitely not doing that right now here, sitting here in college, you know. And this is whenever ISIS started kind of kicking off a little bit too and and but definitely wasn't doing that. And then, you know, I've always kind of had this interest in in the non-profit space and that kind of thing and I was just like I'm really having no tangible value to the world, like sitting here in this class right now, uh, learning. You know, as a political science major I was taking calculus too, but then I was going to go be an infantry officer.
Speaker 2:You know, none of those things really nothing I was doing was was going to help me be a good infantry officer. Maybe political science, you know, and understanding you know, especially as I, you know, longer, longer term. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know probably a lot of different things. I think part of it was, you know, I had a mentor at the time who you know definitely was influencing me to just kind of, you know, stay committed to my original mission and that kind of thing. And the other piece was, you know I I had some probably insecurity of just like, how am I gonna like survive, you know, if I yeah, I didn't really sense it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I didn't like come from money or anything.
Speaker 2:So it's like, well, if I don't have a guaranteed job as an infantry officer, leaving the academy, I'm going to have, you know.
Speaker 2:So there was probably a lot of uncertainty, I think too, and insecurity about leaving, kind of going and doing my own thing, and so all that to be said, you know, I think life works out the way it's supposed to work out. But that did definitely still had that kind of desire to make like a real tangible impact on the world. And I really did not see that, certainly while I was at the academy, even, you know, to much of an extent, even while I was in the military, and part of that is probably, you know, I came a lot later than than maybe some of you guys did. But yeah, that you know, and that kind of drove why I got out of the military as well and and um was I, you know, for me, I just felt like I could have a much more visceral impact on the world and a positive impact on the world outside of the military or outside of, you know, at game year or whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:it's true, man, the um g-watch experience that we promoted through the filter of social media, tv shows and it really drew a lot of people in. Yeah, and then when guys get in there whether they go straight into the sf pipeline or go to conventional military units they get there and they realize that there isn't this giant vacuum that's sucking everybody into afghanistan and iraq and you're constantly in combat. It's like wait, no, like some guys aren't going straight into combat, some guys are going to do grtc rotations and NTC rotations and they may not get that combat role, that combat experience, and that's a hard pill to swallow and that's why I think we fail to send the right message and recruitment needs to really understand this. You need to start, like, amplifying the message of service what it?
Speaker 1:means to serve, what it means to be in the military, in the Marine Corps, in the Army, in Air Force like championing the idea that service is a wonderful and amazing thing to do and you're going to be part of an amazing team and you're going to get to do great things. And maybe you're not going to get the Afghan experience, but you will get an experience. You will get something you can be proud of. I started seeing that in the teams myself. Guys are like, yeah, I'm ready for Afghanistan. I was like all right, young buck, you may not get that.
Speaker 1:That may not be your thing Be excited about your J set your, your seed admissions like your, your actual like core competencies, what you do as a green beret, and that goes to everybody. I think that was a. That was a hard thing for a lot of people. That were very excited. It's hey, you're still going to do great fucking things. Oh yeah, you still got to be excited.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I, you know I was fortunate I went to fifth group, so of course, you know I still got my Iraq rotation and the regiment as a whole is. I think we're missing a lot of opportunities trying to get involved or stay involved in places like Iraq and Syria, where we could be doing things on maybe the more low-vis side in foreign countries. I just think that our expertise could be leveraged in a lot better way by the US government, particularly at a smaller scale and a lot of sort of fringe countries, and that would probably provide a lot more value to guys than even an Iraq rotation. Because it's like you go over to Iraq right now and it's like what are we here? Iraq and Syria, both is like what are we doing here? We've been here for 20 years, we're not winning. We're not. You know. You and everybody can do their own research about. You know why we got into iraq and afghanistan and you know how we ended up doing a 20-year war. That should have been, you know, maybe a one-year operation, special operations, uh, mission, but uh, you know and so, but you go over there and you're just like, what like are we doing? We're doing something, but we're not doing anything that really provides real value to definitely not to any of those places, but even to the United States government.
Speaker 2:There's such a capacity for Green Berets, I'm sure, just like you, I've met so many Green Berets. I'm just like, wow, this dude is a. I mean, he is wicked smart. You know, super charismatic, great guy. I would love to. He'd be fantastic. You know, anywhere you put him in the world he'd be fantastic and he would crush it. And you know, we're having him sit on a fob in Syria right now just getting rocketed by some Iranian militias. You know, and it's like, well, is that really the best use of that skill set is to have him just sit there and eat rockets? You know like, yeah, I don't know. I feel like we could leverage, you know, both from from. You know, finding purpose within service perspective and also just value to the united states government is like we could find a much better way to to leverage the entire regiment.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that's, yeah, my two cents, it's true. It's funny when you wake up, sort of speak, and you realize, jesus, what the fuck are we doing? Like we're the we're the adults in the room. Now it's like it's one thing to be a young guy in the rank and file, but when you're in leadership and you're like, all right, this is kind of fucked up, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're like trying to convince the guys like, no, this matters guys, I promise it matters we. Yeah, I'm gonna throw some buzzwords in to make you think it matters.
Speaker 1:yeah, let's just read the kana. That's right, man, and so you know a lot of us, um, if you're on the outside, you tend to think that every, every soft guy ends up doing like 20 plus years, and that's just not the truth. A lot of us, um, if you're on the outside, you tend to think that every, every soft guy ends up doing like 20 plus years, and that's just not the truth. A lot of times, we do have those hard moments where we have to look at our life, look at what we value, look at the, the things we want to really do, and, in your experience, when you came up to that point like, how did you go about transition? Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 2:I think, you know, one of my, my sort of big points for guys who are getting out, I think is is you need to decide what matters to you and then create your entire life around whatever that is, rather than getting out and kind of falling into what everyone else is doing and then trying to just like, do what matters to you on the weekends or in the evenings, you know, and and a big piece of that is like family, you know, is a great example. It's like, well, if you really really value time with family and you want to focus on, you know, a lot of us work on so much for a lot of our kids' lives and that kind of thing, and you know. And so let's say, you want to spend time with your kids. Now it's like, well, don't, don't want to spend, you know, don't claim that you want to spend time with your kids and then get a job where you know you're a contractor again and then you're gone. You're gone six months out of the year. Again back for a few months, destiny, and saying like, okay, what truly matters to me, and then creating your entire life around that system. And so I've been pretty fortunate to do that On my way out of the army we started a real estate investment company and so we own some rentals and then we do flip sales and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:It was taking us a little bit longer to get that to a point where that would pay all of our bills than I expected. And so whenever I left the military I was running that business. And then I got a job for for this egg company, the Tasterace egg company that I worked for for a little bit and but even still, you know, like that job allowed me to work remotely, allowed me to work from home, so I could kind of run my business here at home, work for that company, still kind of have our little homestead and spend a lot more time with our kids, which was really important to me. And then simultaneously all of that, we were starting a nonprofit here in town and, yes, that really one of my big things was I wanted to be able to stay local. I wanted to be able to.
Speaker 2:I have a lot of different interests, like I think a lot of us do, and so I wanted to be able to kind of manage all of those interests from one place, kind of like, you know, my own little headquarters here at the house and and so, yeah, you know that my sort of transition focused on allowing me to stay home and manage everything that I was interested in, you know, work with business partners that I have in real estate, uh, work, I've got a partner that helps with a nonprofit, you know, and I kind of manage it all from here and do everything at home. And yeah, and that kind of was my leap into, I guess, the entrepreneurial world was starting that real estate company and that was my first experience starting a real, larger scale business. We've got about a half a dozen of us on the team between my business partners and the guys on the crew, and so that's a very real and growing business and that was my first experience with that. And then, like I said, simultaneous to that, we were starting a nonprofit here in town and you know I can go into the story of how we started it, but oh, absolutely, man Sure.
Speaker 1:Nonprofit work is something that I realized is perfectly suited for so many of our guys that just are soft guys. But our infantry brothers, paratroopers, all of our service members, for sure you enlisted to be of service to your nation. And as you go through your career and you get rank and you learn how to run a platoon, learn how to be a first sergeant, you are getting vital fucking hands-on knowledge on how to run daily operations, for sure. And guys are getting out and they're completely forgetting about all the things they did. I just talked to a friend of mine who, sadly, is a command sergeant major Fucking John Waterhouse. Love this dude, but I can even hear it in his voice when he's like you know, like he's doing the right thing. When he gets out of out of time is done, he's going to be taking a knee out of out, of, uh, time's done, he's going to be taking a knee.
Speaker 1:But all of us get this idea that, oh, you know, I didn't really do anything important. Maybe I'll just go teach or go do something small. Like, don't do something small in your second chapter. Yeah, think of how you can be of service to your greater community doing something great, and that's nonprofit work right there, man, they are looking for individuals like yourself so I can get in there and help them get to their target audience, help their organization run effectively and smooth, and I find so many out there are reputable and they're great and, like dude, do your research, look at all of them that are out there and see how you can get there. If not for pay, maybe just volunteer some time. If you did your full 20 and you just want to help out an organization, that's a great place to look for for seams and gaps, as we say, where people need work.
Speaker 2:Yep, for sure. And it breaks my heart a little bit on the officer side because I see officers get out and, uh, you know, like the classic post green beret officer route is like, okay I get out, I go to a top, you know 10 MBA program.
Speaker 2:Uh, I move, I go to, you know, harvard or Wharton or whatever, wherever it is go get my MBA and then I go get a job for like McKinsey or Deloitte or one of these big you know big, big consulting companies.
Speaker 2:And it's like I mean, if, if, if you're just super passionate about like defense consulting or something like that, then sure go that route. But if you're only doing it because that's what everyone else is doing whenever you get out, then it's like bro, you're going to hate your life and I've seen that from guys who were passionate about service and they wanted to give back to the community, they wanted to be involved, they want all the things that we sort of value from military service and the outside. But then that's what they do they go get their MBA and go work for one of these big corporations. You're not going to find it there. Just like you said, there are really really great nonprofits out there who are doing really great work. You're not going to make a $300K salary with a $50K signing bonus whenever you go work for those guys, but at least you'll wake up and you'll be like I don't hate my life and I enjoy what I do whenever I show up to work.
Speaker 2:I don't hate, my life and I enjoy what I do, you know, whenever I, whenever I show up to work. So um, yeah, it breaks my heart a little bit to see guys like transitioning into just you know MBA straight into but you're right, you're, it's um.
Speaker 1:It's the young officer that breaks my heart, cause it's like you have so much potential sir. You can go do do shit like you can literally write your own ticket do amazing shit, yeah. And then before long you see them and it's like their linkedin profile turns grayer and dimmer with the more, the more success they get in that field. It's like you see the life just straight out their face.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like they rejected being a, being a uh major in 04, just to go be the equivalent and you know, and mckenzie or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I see that all the time, man, so fucking true. And to go back to your non-profit. When did you get that idea? How did that come about?
Speaker 2:yeah, to be honest, most people probably won't even believe me when I tell this story and it's going to be a little interesting because I'm not religious, uh, but I'm kind of spiritual, you know, like believe in basically faith in God and that sort of thing, but not like one particular religion. And and one day I was just like out working on the farm and it was just miserable, dude. I was just like everything was going wrong. Cows were getting out, fences break. I was just having like the most miserable day out on my farm. And it was even kind of a weird uh series of circumstances that brought us to Kentucky because we'd planned on living in Tennessee.
Speaker 2:And then we ended up here and and, uh, I was just like I just like sat down and was like God, why on earth did you bring me to Hopkinsville, kentucky? Like I had no plans to ever live in Kentucky. You know like this was not my life plan whatsoever, uh, but it was like very clear that this is where we just end up at the time. So, um, I was just like why on earth did you bring us here, you know? And, uh, I just felt like a, a calling that was like hey, go talk to this non. I had driven by like a week or two prior.
Speaker 2:I had driven by this little non-profit in town here in hopkinsville and, uh, I just felt this like saying like go talk to that non-profit. And I was like, okay, when I up, what am I supposed to? Like just tell them? And it was just like ask them what the three biggest needs in the community are right now. And I was like, okay, okay. So I literally in that moment hopped in my truck, drove down to the this like tiny little rinky dink nonprofit in town, knocked on the door, the door and was like hey, I don't know if you guys believe in god or not, but I feel like he told me to come down here and ask you guys a few questions. And the girl was the girl who, like you know, was there, was like okay, sure, like here's our director, you know and fortunately high on pc.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah for sure, yeah and uh, fortunately that you know that dude, uh didn't just kick me out and uh, he, he took a couple hours and sat down and kind of told me about the history of the city here and what all was going on and pointed out a lot of interesting kind of figures, but one of which is here in this county. The county is so poor that the federal government came in and mandated free school lunch for the entire county, no matter what. So every kid gets free lunch, no matter what, when, when they go to school, because the county is so, so poor. The median income, I think, is somewhere around like 18 or 20,000 in this county, like it is insanely impoverished here in Christian County.
Speaker 2:And so that has led to a lot of problems, particularly with drug addiction. And so I asked him, I said you know what are the three biggest needs in the community, you know? That's what I was kind of there to ask. And number one he said was there were so many people, particularly men, coming out of drug addiction, going into rehab and then having nowhere to go, no support structure, that they were basically just going right back into drug addiction. And so number one was providing housing for guys coming out of drug addiction and kind of like a safe space to live.
Speaker 2:Number two was here in town there's a lot of kind of like small churches that do just like once a week one place will have some food for people, another day of the week another place will have some food for people, but there's not like any sort of like centralized location where people can just like go and they know that if they have a need they can find some food. That doesn't really exist here. And then number three, he said, was education. You know, the education here is just sub-discipline. Kentucky is rated fairly poorly across the nation in terms of education and Christian County is rated poorly within Kentucky, so just across the board. Those were the three big things that he brought up. And so I was already working in real estate and I was like well, finding housing, I can find housing and I can put a program together fairly easily. And so I think I met with him in July of this was July two years ago and by August we had closed on a property to start a little sober living house, and so that's the greenberry approach, right there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, again, that's what I do.
Speaker 2:I just, you know, dive head into everything and that's what that's what I did. Again, knew nothing about you know, other than I grew up around quite a bit of drug addiction and had some friends who have passed away from drug addiction and that kind of thing. But in terms of, you know, solving the problem of drug addiction had absolutely no knowledge of, you know, had had zero knowledge of, and so I just started trying to consume as much information as I could and make as many relationships in the community as I could, and fortunately I got plugged in with a guy who was already doing a little bit of this and so he helps me manage the house day-to-day a little bit. And we had a lot of issues early on, as you can expect, and my approach is probably a little bit different. It definitely is a lot different than some of the other programs out there.
Speaker 2:So guys will come from a rehab and then they'll live in our house and usually whenever you have a house like that, it's incredibly locked down. It's like guys, they have to be in by a certain time. They have to make their bed. If they don't make their bed, they get fined. If they don't do their dishes, they get fined If they don't do X.
Speaker 2:Y is, if you give responsibility to someone, they'll either take it or leave it, and so you can find out within about a week or two whether a guy is serious about his own recovery by just saying Look, here's enough rope to hang yourself with. You're free to go use drugs again if you want to. I'm not going to hold your hand and be your babysitter and not let you do drugs again. If you want to, I'm not going to hold your hand and be your babysitter and not let you do drugs. But if you're serious about recovery, then I will provide a place where you can genuinely recover. And so we took that approach, and because of that, what we do is we use some of the profits from our real estate to basically pay the mortgage on that place, and so the guys who live in our sober living house can live there completely rent-free. And so what that does?
Speaker 2:is that gives them the ability to save up money. They're not putting money towards rent every month and so they can save up money, actually get life under control a little bit for the first time in their lives and then hopefully they have enough saved up for a first month's rent, security deposit, maybe down payment on a car all the things that they need to actually go start their life, because most of them are starting at zero. They've hit rock bottom. They have $0 in their bank account and then they're coming out of a rehab and a lot of these sober living houses will charge them like $500, $600 a month in rent or more to live there and I was just like, well, at that rate they're not going to be able to save any money, you know, because they're getting you know jobs where they're getting paid maybe a couple grand a month. You know they're like they're not making a killing.
Speaker 2:And so it was kind of a system I just saw a lot in addiction where the system was designed to keep making money from these guys, as they both while they were in addiction and then even after they were in addiction, and so I kind of wanted to just put our own take on it.
Speaker 2:And yeah, and even just last week we had a guy who was only in the house for, I think, eight months and in eight months he had saved up like 10 grand or something like that and then just moved. He actually moved to an apartment right across the street because he's like I want my own space, but he's like you guys are the only family that I really have right now now, and so I want to be close and still hang out, uh, but I wanted my own space and I want to kind of like move on with life and uh, so it's just like perfect example of of if you use, if you take advantage of what we offer is like in a very short amount of time you can change your life, you know, and um, so yeah, that's kind of what we're doing with the nonprofit at the moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, yeah, and you're so humble about it, but like that, an example right there, man, like you're saving lives and you're gonna, you're breathing life back to a community that's on the brink of death, literally, yeah, and to have those wins, man, that's, that's greater than any combat win it really is like like that's the shit that we need to promote, like this is how we help build our country back yeah, yeah, it was kind of funny.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, in my like outgoing counseling with the bc, um, whenever I like told them, hey, I'm gonna get, I'm not gonna stay in for 20, I'm gonna get out, you know, and they all try to convince you to stay in for 20 um, one of the things he asked me why, and I was like, well, I just feel like, you know, I would have more autonomy to provide real value to the world whenever I get out than I can within the confines of, like, the military structure right now. Uh, and he was like, yeah, he's like, I get what you're saying, he's like, but when I was a major, I was writing policy for sock year. Uh, that was impacting, you know, know, the entire continent. It's like that's, you know, that's an. I was impacting an entire continent, like that's a lot of people or whatever.
Speaker 2:And I was like, no, no, I was like I'm talking about like.
Speaker 2:I was like I'm talking about like real visceral change in, like a human life.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm not talking about just like something like maybe that technically affects more people, but you know, I'm talking about like something like truly substantial and and and yeah, you know, I listened to, you know, a lot of like Jordan Peterson and that kind of thing, and one of the big things that he talks about is like you know, you, you, you're, you're one of your many roles as a man is like to set yourself, orient yourself in a proper direction and then orient your family in a proper direction and then orient your community in a proper direction.
Speaker 2:And in America, I think we see a lot of the opposite, where everybody thinks they like to comment and commentate on national policy or national problems or international issues, and everybody wants to comment on that and we all fail to address the problems within ourselves. And it's like man. If we all dedicated all the time that we spend complaining about Donald Trump or Joe Biden, if we took all of that time and instead just focus it on our own little local communities, where we live and where our feet are, it's like the world would look drastically different than it does right now. You know, and so many problems would be solved by particularly, you know, green Berets or post-military guys, because we do have that desire to like help people and we just don't necessarily know where to do it.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I think it's an opportunity for sure. Absolutely man, one tribe at a time approach, one problem set for one specific group that we're working with. Bringing it back to Jim Gant, yeah.
Speaker 1:Dude, it's so true being able to sit there and have a real world. You can wake up every day and look at the impact you're making and I just I hope more of our brothers and sisters hear stories like this and realize that they can have a huge impact in their local communities when they get out. Patrick, if we want to support you or follow along in your journey, where should people go?
Speaker 2:I mean you can follow me on Instagram, I guess just OfficialPatrickSamuels. Or if you want to follow the nonprofit or help out with a nonprofit, humbleharvestorg, and then our egg company is Sunnyside Egg Co. You can follow all those on social media and kind of track progress and that sort of thing. But yeah, that's kind of where we're at right now.
Speaker 1:Heck, yeah, man, if you guys pause right now, go to the episode description, either on YouTube if you're watching it, or if you're listening to it on Spotify and Apple. Before you check out that description, go on and give us a review, Leave a positive comment, give us some stars. Then go to the episode description and follow Patrick and send him some love on social media and support him and his nonprofit. Patrick, thank you for what you're doing, brother. I cannot tell you enough that you are doing amazing things. I can't wait to have you back on the show. It is absolutely a pleasure to have you today and, to everybody listening, thank you for being here. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you all next time. Until then, take care. Thanks, bro, dean here. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you all next time. Until then, take care. Thanks, jeff.
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