NPM 13: The Common Sense Practical Prepper

Lucky 13, is it? Day 13? We'll go with that. National Preparedness Month. Lives. Here we are. Here we are. This is our second PM live. If you did not see the de-evolution of last night's live stream, you can go listen to it at PrepperBroadcasting.com in its audio form. I'll probably post it in video format. We brought Judson Carroll on last night. I told him, let's do about 15, 20 minutes. And an hour and a half later, we wrapped up. And no hard feelings because I owed that guy a long time anyway. But tonight, dear friend of the podcast, fellow prepper camper, fellow Richmonder, common sense practical prepper is with us. And we're going to do something that we haven't done We've had him on the air many times, but we haven't really gone into his podcast in detail. So that's what I want to do tonight. Keith, how you doing, my man? I'm doing all right. How are you, James? You know, in the shallowest of ways, great. The Eagles won. That was fun. So I was happy about that. It's been a great weekend, you know. If I'm ever complaining, we got real problems. Just remember that. Gotcha. I shouldn't have anything to complain about. Right. So. I'm bringing you on today not to bitch and moan about our governor, though. There's plenty of that to go around. That is true. Talk about what you do, man, what you do on the Common Sense Practical Prepper side of things. And I'm going to bring up your Buzzsprout site on the live here. Oh, cool. Just so everybody can get a peek at it and get a peek at some of the shows. Because I have not listened to your 9-11 one yet. That looks really good. Yeah, so I've been podcasting, oh my goodness, four and a half years, I believe. Been prepping a little over five. And I started the podcast just for kicks and giggles, really, with no clear direction, just talking into the microphone. And for the longest time, I pretty much was talking to myself. But it has evolved, and I'm very, very happy with what has happened in the last... gosh, probably six or eight months. That's great. Yeah. I don't do gear reviews. I always tell folks, if you, you know, if you want the latest and greatest water filter or the coolest generator or the best solar panel out there, you know, YouTube it, you'll get, you know, you'll get 250 opinions. It's just, it's, it's all over the place and that's fine. Nothing against gear reviews at all, but I just look for something more. Maybe the prepper mindset is, human behavior, I guess, a lot of people that I've listened to before. Yeah, I was a cop for two. I was a police officer for 26 years. So, you know, kind of a street psychologist or street social worker, I guess you could say. Most certainly. And that's basically what I concentrate on is just no doom and gloom, no zombie apocalypse just yet, but just Just the basics. And I think that the premise I started out with was prepping does not have to be complicated, does not have to be expensive. Anybody can do it. If you just got two nickels to rub together, you can start prepping. There's a lot of free stuff. Yeah. Just start small, do what you can, when you can, how you can. And once you get seven days of food and water, safe to say you're probably better than 75% of the population out there. So- You are well ahead of most other people. And yeah, it just kind of evolved. I started a little post-apocalyptic audio book and this was truly, I just truly pulled this out of left field. I'm a big fan of Tom Abrams and he has been writing books for years and years and years. And he does a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff as do a lot of other authors. And I I can't even remember how I happened upon his, um, his feed through, uh, through audible, but, um, it's kind of patterned after that. And I think I've done 15 episodes. I drop one about every week and a half, two weeks, just whenever, whenever you get around to it. The lone man on the ridge. Lone man on the ridge. Yeah. It's just something here on the show. Yeah. And it's, and again, that's just, that's really expanded. Um, I got a lot of emails from folks saying they really enjoy it. And that's basically the only reason I do this. You know, I'm not going to get rich being a podcaster. I'm not Joe Rogan or anything like that. But I just pass along just some very basic information. 99% of it is my opinion. I stay away from politics because nobody wants to talk about politics. But in the same vein, it's difficult to talk about current events and have politics not sneak in every once in a while. But yeah, I don't, it's not a left, right. Even just not, I just, I leave that for other people, for other political, you know, pundits and podcasters, but I'm happy. I'm happy with, with the way it's growing and a pretty wide audience. Again, I really don't have anything to compare it to. Really. I can't, I don't have any other metrics, so I can't, I can't really tell how I'm doing compared to other podcasters out there or other preparedness podcasters out there. But I basically just do it for fun. I get emails from folks. They seem to like it, and that makes it worth it to me. I know it sounds really cheesy. If I could only help one person, but that's kind of the way I look at it. Well, if you've done more than three, what is the weird– there's a weird podcasting stat. if you make it past like five episodes or something, you're already in like the top insane percentile. You know what I mean? I'd say the fact that you're getting emails from listeners is a whole, that's a whole nother like metric that is, you know, a serious success metric, right? Because you have people who are listening and engaged enough to reach out and be like, Hey, thanks for what you're doing. Oh, sure. That's a big thing. I listen to podcasts all the time and I, gosh, I can't tell you if I've ever really, maybe a couple, yeah, maybe a couple of email or a note here and there, but yeah, exactly right. The fact that they took five minutes out of their day to agree, disagree. I like, I don't like, what about this? What about that? And I guess, I guess that tells me something. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know what you got, man? That's really, I mean, it's an important thing in the prepping world is you like probably one of, Dave Jones, I think, might be the most approachable dude in history. But you're up there. You know what I mean? You're up there. You listen to a podcast, your demeanor, your voice, the whole thing. There's no sense of like, do I belong here? You know what I mean? Which it still is. It's still a tactically militant dominant sort of world when you really get into the prepping world and who are kind of like at the top of the heap and that kind of thing. Right. It's nice to have a voice like that for people who are like, you know, they want to learn a little bit more about the beans and band-aids and a little less about the bullets, right? Yeah. And I think that's huge for people. You know, you can color yourself in a way like you do where you don't necessarily have to. I don't it's definitely not important to cover up the political side, but it's cool that it's not, you know, you're the first thing you mention when you get through the door. Right. Right. Which is another level of accessibility. Yeah. I'm just me. You know, what you see is what you get. And, you know, it's very valuable these days, too. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And just, that's just what I put out. I just put out my opinion of what I think, what I see, what I hear. You know, everybody has ears and eyes and we, we go about our day and we see things and we hear people and we observe and, you know, whether it's the current situation with, with society or whatever happens to be going on. And I just give folks what I see, what I observe, what I hear. And then, you know, how I, how I relate that to being prepared. Yeah. And you live it, you do it. And that's a big piece of the puzzle too, right? Yeah. Where were you and what were you thinking when you were like, well, the podcasts are cool, but I got this story brewing in me too. I got this man on the ridge thing inside of me. Yeah, that way it was just, it was just really just for kicks. I, I, you know, it rolled around in my little pea-sized brain for a couple of weeks and I'm like, you know, does it, Do people even want to hear? And I'm thinking, well, I'll do one. I'll do two. And, you know, it just it just kind of caught on. And I got kind of excited because literally I don't know how real authors work or anything like that. So I don't know if they just this is really just when I say episodic, I haven't really put a whole lot of thought into episode 16, I think, is what I need to draft this week. I really haven't put I don't have an end game I don't know how many episodes I don't know how this is going to end I don't know if the the hero is going to get going to get off I have no idea ultimately what's going to happen and literally I don't know what I'm going to to start off episode 15 with I. Know can I show you something I want to show you, I want to show it to you. I don't want to take up a lot of the time because it's a little self-promoting, but it's so it's where you're at right now. Right. So let's take a time machine back to 2014. Right. And I'm operating a website called, uh, I am liberty show.wordpress.com. And this, what you're seeing right here was a web series that I was writing. Didn't, it wasn't audio like yours. It was just a web series. Right. Um, and this guy, uh, we're not going to go into the backstory, but whatever. If you're into my writing, you'll, you'll buy the book anyway. But this was just a web series. I started very similar, like same sort of concept. Like, I don't know exactly where we're going to go with this thing, but I had some ideas in the beginning and I don't know. I don't remember the date. One of the things that's really hard to remember is dates of like when things happen and become the next thing. Um, But suffice it to say that at some point, probably in 2015, I published the book, man. I collected it all. I'm just telling you so I can give you an idea of how to end it. I collected everything that I had written to a point and then crafted the end of the book as off of the site, off of all that, and said, all right, let's figure out how we end the book. And it's a fun read, man. Just like yours, you know what I mean? I think you're in that position to bring a really great story to life. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, I got an email last week. Someone said, you ought to publish a book. Yeah, I think you ought. To. Whenever this ends, however many episodes, I may have to call you and pick your brain and then go on Amazon and be like, I don't know. I don't think it's as easy as make my book and you press a button, but it's probably not much more difficult than that. It's pretty damn easy. I've been doing it for years. It's actually gotten easier. Once you get close to it, definitely give me a call because there's a tool out there you can download. I don't remember exactly what it's called, but it's a KDP tool and you just dump your writing into it and it formats it. And that was half the battle back in the day. Formatting the book was the battle. Yeah. I catch myself going back into other episodes because I'm like, what was that guy's name? Or what did he do in the other? Because I can see myself doing something completely different than somebody's going to catch it. Somebody, a listener is going to be like, but didn't he already, or he didn't have that gun the first three episodes. Where did he, I'm like, Oh, you know, so I got to try. Oh, but yeah, you, you, yeah, you've got creator and author's license and all that. You can do all kinds of stuff. You should be like, he did not have that gun, but what you didn't know is that blankety blank happened off the page. Right. You know what I mean? You can make anything happen with that author's license for sure. But I love that you're going down that route, man. And then having fun doing it because it is fun, you know? So in terms of like, you know, what do you see on the horizon, holiday travel prep, what kind of stuff are you thinking about getting into as we head into the, this last quarter of the year, man, which is hard to imagine. Yeah. 2026 just started. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I'll tell you what, after, I mean, you can attest to this after so many years doing this, you, You start to run out of topics. I don't want to say you start running out, but you don't necessarily want to repeat yourself. So what I've found. Myself doing- You only do so many water shows. Yes. Yeah. So many generators and so many solar panels. But I think what I found was I'm going back and looking at some other episodes where I did little bits and pieces and I'm kind of like doing a deep dive. So if I spoke about backup power, oh, these kind of generators or solar power or whatever it happens to be. I'll go ahead and pull one thing out and then maybe do a dedicated episode on that. Oh, yeah, yeah. But then the human behavior part just keeps popping up. I was working on a script that I kind of threw it into the circular file, threw it into the trash can that I'm going to probably bring back just real quick. I went to the gas station the other day. Gas was 419. I pull into the gas station. Terrible. And some technicians are putting yellow tape, like construction tape, around the pumps so that the pumps are not working. Right. People are sitting there like two and three deep trying to get the technician's attention, asking him when the gas pumps are going to be working again. Instead of me, who's maneuvering, going to the gas station down the road, these people are just sitting there. It took me back to May of 21 when I was in the Outer Banks. Remember that was the Colonial Pipeline hack? Oh, the ramp. Oh, no, that was the gas. Yeah, the gas when they're bringing trash bags full of gasoline and plastic bags. Yeah, it took me back because I was in the Outer Banks and it took me back to that where, you know, people are creatures of habit. I get it. But I would love to know how long this lady just sat in front of this gas pump, you know, waiting for the technicians to finish. It was just really, really odd. So that gets me to think about human behavior. I tell you what, it's just, it's, It's interesting and it can be scary at the same time. Yeah. Any more of these stories, they just, there's so much like this sort of like, make sure you're raising your kids right, Jim. You know what I mean? Like in the back of my head, that's all that I think about when I hear these stories. My kids are getting to the age where they're going to be at a gas pump one day and be like, huh, should I stand here and stare at this or should, you know what I mean? And I think they're already at that point, but it's just, I see kids and everybody all the time. When I, when I hear about those stories, like I'm like, somebody let that lady down. Somehow she made it this far in life. And people weren't like, you know, my parents would have been like, screw this place and move on. Like, you know, when I. Was a police officer, I'd be directing traffic at an intersection, you know, overturned car, whatever, a bad accident out on whole street or whatever. And folks would come up and they'd, They're like, well, how can I, how do I get home? Well, I don't, I don't know where you live and it's, I don't, well, don't you know the other way? I always say, no, at least three ways to get to work or to get home. These people, they were just, they were panicking because that's the route they take every single day, you know, up whole street, back home, wherever they're going, you know, they get on the interstate and they don't know any other, any other way to get to work. And just like you said, these people vote. I mean, how do you get yourself dressed? How do you get yourself dressed in the morning? do your socks even match? Um, but yeah, it's human behavior. It's, it's fascinating. It's fascinating. And it's a core element of disaster recovery, right? Like, like all of a sudden you're surrounded by these people and you're trying to help them if you're, you know, a decent person. And yeah, to, to, I guess to see it all coming, you know, that's part of being a prepper, right? You want to see the guy who's staring, who's filling the, filling the plastic shopping bag up with gasoline before he gets too close to you. Yeah. I mean, it is, I would love it. I would dig it. I think it'd be great. You know, don't undersell yourself. You guys. And I talked to a police officer years ago who created, invented a product and he really blew me away because I didn't know this about cops. He was like, yeah, man, I spend like a lot of my time just talking to homeless people. Like, like, Ushering them to and fro, telling them they can't be here, buying them food, buying them drinks. Oh, yeah. And I just had no idea of the psychological sort of like all of the things that a cop already has to do. And on top of that, you got to be a therapist, you know. So I'm sure you've got some some great gems in there for that. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, that's one thing I wish I could definitely write a book. You could definitely read the 26 years. Golly. Of all the stories, the good, the bad, the ugly, and all the things I saw, some of it would just, some of you wouldn't even believe. You'd just shake your head. Just the way people act towards other people. It's just amazing. It's just amazing. Lack of, you know, lack of respect, lack for human life. I mean, go on and on. Well, that's where we generate the sort of worst case scenario that we generate on our shows, right? It's not out of nowhere. Oh no. It's not like we're creating fictitious scenarios, right? With things we've seen and gone, Oh, it can get that bad. Okay. It can get that bad. And the McDonald's is still open. That's true. That's true. You know what I mean? Yep. But, uh, well, so folks, common sense, practical prepper podcast, and it's available everywhere, right? iTunes, Spotify, all that kind of stuff. Yep. Yep. So anywhere you listen to your podcast, you can go find Keith. And like I said, if I mean, I, I meant it. You know, if you're looking for a podcast that you can slide into and not feel like the, the end is near every time you listen to it or, or feel like, you know, you gotta be effective a thousand meters down range with your rifle. You know what I mean? To listen to the show, then, uh, definitely nothing wrong with any of that, but I remember starting out in prepping and, and, I had no skills whatsoever in anything and it always felt like I shouldn't really be here with these people you know what I mean like I don't belong here I don't have anything to bring to the table we all have to start somewhere yeah yeah finding that way in is big and I think you do a great job with that thank you so much Well, all right, folks. I do appreciate you guys hanging out with us for another episode. We are on day 13. We're about to hit the halfway point. It's going to be a big week. Doing a lot of cool stuff this week. So stay tuned. 9 a.m. or 9 p.m. you'll find us. Yeah, man. And you can find Keith on PBN from time to time, too. All right, man. Well, enjoy your night. Thanks so much for giving me some of your time. Anytime, James. We'll talk to you guys soon. All right. See you. When you're off the grid or working in real winter conditions, the basics matter more than anything. Heat Force Pro was designed around a simple idea. One product doing more than one job. Heat Force Pro turns a single heat source into three essentials. Providing warmth, a place to cook, And generating USB power through high temperature thermoelectric technology you can use for charging or powering a light source. It gets the job done cooking, charging, heating, everything from A to B. 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