Define The Disaster Before You Stock The Shelf

A flamethrower under the tree might grab attention, but the real spark comes from learning where fun gear ends and practical preparedness begins. We kick off with two gifts that teach bigger lessons: a grill-safe flamethrower that reinforces responsible use, and a GRAYL water filter that proves simple, field-ready purification beats complex systems you won’t maintain. From there, we pivot hard into what most people get wrong about prepping: buying more is not the same as being ready.

Silver surging toward $80 and copper punching higher can mess with anyone’s head. We unpack what price spikes, tariffs, and speculation actually mean for everyday resilience, and why stacking metals rarely fixes household weak points. Instead, we drill into a method: define the disasters you’re likely to face, right-size your pantry to those timelines, and turn storage into savings with first-in, first-out rotation. We clear up expiration date myths, explain when a can is truly unsafe, and share how freeze-drying and oxygen absorbers can extend useful life for the foods you’ll actually eat.

The turning point is mindset. Preppers often chase safety like it’s cardio—one more battery, one more radio—until the shelf looks like a warehouse. We offer a reset with a simple audit you can run this week, including shelf-life realities for rice, honey, freeze-dried goods, and frozen meats. To make it stick, we test two barcode-friendly inventory apps—Sortly and Out of Milk—that speed up tracking, prevent duplicate buys, and align the pantry with your grocery list. We close with a sober look at threat intel, why multiple sources matter, and how to prepare without spiraling into panic.

If you’re ready to swap fear-driven buying for a calm, measurable plan, this conversation is your roadmap. Subscribe, share with a friend who’s getting started, and leave a review so more people can build resilience without breaking the bank. What’s the first item you’ll audit today?

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Chapters

• 0:09 Welcome, Holiday Gifts, Show Kickoff
• 0:56 Flamethrower And Water Filter Chat
• 2:18 Silver Price Spike And China Tariffs
• 3:25 Copper’s Rise And Stacking Realities
• 4:41 Why Mindset Beats Endless Gear
• 6:03 How Much Is Enough For SHTF
• 9:22 Smart Pantry Use And Rotation
• 11:37 Define Your Risks And Focus
• 13:47 Inventory Tools: Sortly And Out Of Milk
• 16:04 Avoid The Prepper Panic Loop
• 18:37 Threat Intel, Sources, And Skepticism
• 20:25 Closing Thanks And Listener Support

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

The National Middle Summit position is a very thunderstorm warning. To the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, where prepping doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Coming to you from a well-defended off-grid compound high in the mountains. Coming to you from his Florida room in Richmond, Virginia. Neither off-grid nor well-defended, unless you count as chickens and cats, here is your host, Keith.

SPEAKER_01: 0:41

Hey all, this is Keith, and you're listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast for December the 26th, 2025. I hope everybody had a good Christmas. I hope Santa brought you everything that you asked for. I had two gifts that are really super cool. One is a flamethrower. Yes, a flamethrower. In full transparency, it should be used to light your grill or light the bonfire, trash pile, whatever it happens to be. It's kind of shaped like a Tommy gun. It's got a stock, it's got a trigger, which is the igniter, it's got a handle in the front, and you screw on the small propane bottles, like you take camping, like for your Coleman stove. That's what you screw on to the bottom. And if you really crank that thing up, it shoots flames a good two or three feet. I can think of a lot of really cool things to do with this flamethrower outside outside of what the instructions recommend you should use it for. As I mess around with it, I will let you know how things go. And the other is a Grail water filtration system, G-R-A-Y-L. Several different models. Go ahead and look them up. Basically, it's it's like a fancy French press. You put in the Ookie water, you press the filter down, and the filter is at the bottom, and it pushes the dirty water up through, gets all the dirty water, all the contaminants out, and then what you have is the clean water in the container. G-R-A-Y-L. They have plastic, stainless steel. They can be a bit pricey, but they're well worth it. Check them out and see if it's something that you want to add to your preps. Let's talk about the price of silver, and it went up again today. And I looked at it, silver ended up just short of$80 an ounce. I think it climbed$6 in change just today. Like I've mentioned before, I've read several different articles, and I think I may have dialed in on what might be the real reason. People are talking about market manipulation, the suppression of the price for several years or several decades, whatever it happens to be. Now, what I do know is China has a lot of the world's silver still in the ground. There's a lot of rumblings that come January 1, China is going to tack on additional taxes, tariffs, however you want to spin it, that will increase the price. And of course, that's passed on to consumers. It'll cost more for EVs, data centers, solar panels, and the like. Like I've said before, the price is really outside of my budget. I will not be purchasing any silver rounds anytime soon. Let's talk about copper. Copper is like the left-handed, red-headed stepchild of precious metals. Reading some articles today, copper reached$5.90 per pound. Not per ounce, but per pound. Now, manufacturers purchase by the ton, and it's roughly give or take$12,000 a ton. Now, two articles. Goldman Sachs. Copper prices will not stay above$11,000 per ton for long. Article right behind it. Bank of America projects copper prices to surge well past$12,000 a ton in 2026. So there you go. One article says this is just a little blip, it's gonna drop back down. Another article says it's gonna continue up. The odd thing about copper is if you wanted to stack copper like silver, it's relatively cheap. But for the average consumer, there is a huge markup. There's a huge premium, much, much larger than it is on silver. If you're thinking about copper, do a lot of research. I would do more research about stacking copper than I would with stacking silver. But if you're interested, take a look. I'll do some additional research and see if it's viable as a barter item in the future. If you guys want to get a hold of me, practicalprep podcast at gmail.com. I'm always open for suggestions on different topics to talk about. I don't do a lot of gear reviews. In all honesty, you can punch in Grail on YouTube or Grail on X or any social media site, and you'll find dozens and dozens of people that have done extensive testing or gear reviews on Grail, solar panels, flashlights, ham radios, all the different things that preppers use. I don't want to waste your time doing a gear review when it's not going to be beneficial. I do appreciate everybody stopping by here to get your information, but what I like to talk about more is what I'm doing, mistakes that I've made, successes that I've had, as well as the prepper mindset or the mentality and current events, what I see going on that may or may not trigger a small or significant SHTF situation. And in that same vein, I like to talk about the prepper mindset or the methodology, however you want to phrase that. I think there comes a time as a prepper when you have to tell yourself you've reached a point to where you have your prep squared away. The crazy thing about SHTF situations, there's so many different ones, there's so many different degrees. Power goes out because a nasty storm came through. Okay, your power will be back in 12, 24 hours. Hurricane, three, four, five days. Significant grid down situation, eight, nine, ten days without power. Now we're talking about a substantial SHTF situation where a lot of your more detailed preps are going to come into play. But there has to come a time when you say, I've got it. I've got what I need. And again, prepping is not about being paranoid. It's about being prepared for any given situation. So you kind of have to pick your poison. We don't want to become hoarders. We don't want to walk into our pantry and see 16 years of rice and beans and August and Farms peanut butter powder. I have to try some of that. August and Farms peanut butter powder in these number 10 cans stack floor to ceiling. You can only use so much peanut butter in an SHTF situation. So you walk into your pantry and you need to decide, have I done enough? And with all the unknowns out there, it's very easy to say to yourself, well, no, I need 15 more bags of rice, or I need six more gallons of olive oil, or I need 32 more cans of tuna, because 222 cans of tuna just is not enough. You have to get yourself to stop. You'll end up driving yourself crazy. And we all want to be, let me put it this way. I believe preppers have a type A personality. They're about resilience, self-reliance, and they don't want to be left behind. They don't want to not have something. They don't want to just survive, they want to survive and they want to thrive. But there has to be a stopping point. So let's talk a little bit about that mentality and we'll see if this makes any sense. If your pantry is in your garage or a section of your garage, or maybe there's some folks out there that their entire garage is their pantry, more power to you. But when you open up your pantry door, you open up your garage door, and it looks like Costco and REI had a baby, you might want to dial it back a little bit. The thing is, preppers chase safety like it's cardio. We never feel like it's done. We don't necessarily feel like it's accomplished. Think of like a weightlifter, oh, just one more rep. Or a runner, oh, just one more mile, or I need to run this marathon next week. I need to trim off three minutes and five seconds for my personal best. But this is where common sense should kick in. Okay. Common sense with me has kicked in when it comes to preps. And the best thing to do to find out where you are and where you need to be, or how much further you need to take your preps, is to simply do an audit. Rice lasts 30 years if sealed correctly. Honey is immortal. I wasn't calling you honey. Honey is immortal. Your freeze-dried food, 20-year shelf life. Your little chest freezer you have in the garage that's full of pork chops and chicken and all sorts of things. I'm going to say two or three years. Initially, I thought, well, if you vacuum seal it nice and tight, it should last forever as long as you keep it frozen. That's not entirely true. You're still going to be able to eat it a couple years, but I hope you have some really good, really strong teeth because it's probably going to be a little chewy. So as I walk into my pantry today and I start looking at things, I'm trying to figure out what I need to steer away from as far as purchasing more, and then what I might still need. Went into my pantry today and looked at some chicken breasts, the canned chicken breasts that I purchased at Costco, I forget when. I looked at the expiration date. The expiration date is rapidly approaching. Now, I've said this before. Just because the expiration date is January 1, 2026, that does not mean you have to throw out the chicken breast or the pickles or whatever it happens to be. Take one of your canned items, you have the expiration date. It's going to last far past that. If you have a can of corn, a can of green beans, and it starts to bulge, definitely throw it out. Open up the can of beans that's six months past the expiration date. Take a look at it. Open up the corn that's one year past the expiration date and take a look at it. Don't throw it away just because it's a couple days or a couple months past that expiration date. I've said before, what I'm doing with some of my canned vegetables that are past the expiration date, I am freeze-drying them. Putting them in mylar, putting it in mason jars, adding an oxygen absorber. To me, that's going to extend the shelf life. So when you look at your preps as a whole, first we need to define what we're prepping for. And this is this is a wild card. Are we prepping for a hurricane? Are we prepping for the zombie apocalypse? A significant grid down situation? Are we talking about the electricity out for multiple days or multiple weeks? Again, depending on what country you're in, and depending on what part of the country you happen to be in, some of these SHTF situations are completely irrelevant. If you live on the East Coast, down in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, hurricanes are a very real possibility. Speaking of hurricanes, 2025 was the only year, I believe, since they've been keeping records that a hurricane has not made landfall in the continental United States. I think we just got lucky. So decide what you're prepping for and then tailor your preps towards that. Now, I'm not saying you should only prep for power being out a week and not prep for a significant grid-down situation, a significant supply chain disruption. I'm not saying that, but you need to try to focus your preps and not end up having way too much of anything that ends up spoiling because that is an absolute waste of money. I shop out of my pantry. If I need corn or green beans, I go to my pantry and I grab a can. I don't go to Kroger, I don't go to Walmart, I don't order it off Amazon because I don't have to. I've talked about the corn index before. The corn that I bought a few years ago was 48 cents a can. That same corn now is 60 cents, 62 cents a can. So why pay 62 cents a can today when I can go in my pantry and grab one that I paid 48 cents for? I'm rotating it, I'm consuming it, first in, first out, and I actually saved 10, 12, 15 cents, whatever the price difference happens to be. So let's talk about auditing your pantry. Auditing what you have, whether it's a super small pantry, and there's nothing wrong with that, or whether it's some gargantuan monster pantry because you have five people in your family, and you have extended family that are going to make their way to your little compound, aka your house or apartment when the poop hits the fan. The way that I have done my inventory in the past is a pencil, a clipboard, and a piece of paper. I would then transfer that over to an Excel sheet that I print. I'm not an Excel expert, but I would print the Excel sheet out and then I work off of that. There are apps out there to help you. And I'm trying two of these currently to see which one fits my situation the best. So I guess technically this is a gear review. Is it is an app a gear? Okay, we're gonna call, we're gonna call an app a piece of gear. So I'll be doing a gear review of these apps. The first one is called Sortly, S-O-R-T-Y. You can get it on the Apple Store, the Google Play Store, so you can have it for your Apple and your Android devices. You can enter things manually, but the great thing about these apps is you can use the scanner or your camera on your phone. You take a picture of the UPC and it brings up a little photo. So I did it the other day just for kicks and giggles, and I scanned a can of green beans that I got from Amazon through Amazon Fresh. Instantaneously popped up and it says, Is this the 12.5 ounce can of French cut green beans or whatever it is from Amazon? I'm like, yes. I click yes, then I put in the quantity. Okay, I have one, two, okay, I have 10 of those. You can add a field for expiration date. A very good option. This can be used for preppers, or it could be used for folks that just have a large family or small families that want to be really organized when it comes to going to the grocery store. So if you have a big family and you go through food like crazy, you need to know how many cans of beans, tuna, whatever it happens to be in your pantry, in your fridge, so you can make a sound decision on how many you need to purchase. Only you know how much food your family goes through on a weekly basis or a monthly basis. The other one is called out of milk. And I think that's a really catchy, uh, a catchy name. So out of milk is another one. Kind of the same deal. You can scan it, shows a photo, click yes, click save, and it also has little features that you can add. You can add fields if you want to add the expiration date, where you got it, the price, coupons. There's some really cool features to both of these apps. Now these are free, but there's always the cats, there's always the pro version or the premium version, and it's billed annually. And I forget what the pro version for both of these apps are. I'm gonna stick with the basic free version, unless the pro version has some crazy thing where it scans itself, but I'm gonna stick to the free version. So again, I think it's very important for us to define our preps, define what we need, not go overboard, not get paranoid about do I have enough? Do I need more? Because if you get into that, it's a cycle. You get into it, oh, I need more of this, I need one more crank radio. Oh, what happens if the crank radio I have dies? What about all these batteries? Do I need more batteries? Should I test my batteries? That kind of thing. We need to keep it all in perspective. We don't want to consume our lives or consume our daily tasks or chores with walking into the pantry every day and deciding what do I have to purchase today? You shouldn't have to purchase anything. If you're prepped, you're basically just adding and tweaking your pantry. So, what I'll do, I'll work through both of those apps. I'll report back maybe in a week or two and see which one I prefer, which one fits my situation a little bit better. And again, if you have suggestions on topics for the podcast, if you have suggestions, if you want a gear review, send me an email, practical prep podcast at gmail.com, and ask, hey, have you tried this? Or I tried this radio, or I tried this little flashlight, or I have this knife, and I don't think it's gonna work for me. What do you think? Or the opposite. I got this flashlight, Keith, I got this knife, and it's the best damn thing since sliced bread. I think you should look at this. I think you should purchase this and see if it's something that would fit your preps. Again, it's all about sharing information, and that's the only reason I do this is to share the successes, the failures, things that I see, things that I hear, and how we can better prepare ourselves for an SHTF situation. It's going to happen. It's not one of these if, it's when, and it's the severity level of the SHTF situation when it hits. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but I've talked about Sarah Adams before, the former CIA targeter, and she talks a lot on X and other social media outlets about the impending attack that is going to make 9-11 look like child's play. She backs it up with information, she backs it up with stats. She is on X all the time, either agreeing or disagreeing, even with our own government, the U.S. government, on what's going on. Now, I think in the last 24 hours, we launched a bunch of cruise missiles at ISIS or a bunch of terrorists in somewhere in Africa. The Department of War, formerly known as the Department of Defense, is jumping up and down saying, we killed this person, we killed that person, we set them back so many weeks or so many months. Sarah comes right back with folks, this is nothing but a photo shoot. This is nothing but just spam. The real threat is here. And she names it. So if you haven't listened to Sarah, and again, it's not about being paranoid, it's not about going down a rabbit hole, but she presents this information in a way that's easy to understand. She knows what she's talking about. Now, if you're like me, I trust the government as far as I can throw it. So I need to get my information from multiple sources because what's that meme where the dog is like, oh, it's fine, everything's fine, his hair's on fire, or there's a house on fire behind him, or something like that. In my opinion, I think the government is going to portray a situation like that, and they're gonna downplay it so there's no panic and people don't go off the reservation and start doing a bunch of crazy things. Folks, thanks so much for listening. Thank you so much for stopping by and letting me get up on my soapbox. I have a favor if you would please subscribe, like, and leave a review. Liking and leaving a review does. A lot of good as far as the algorithm, as far as moving the podcast up in the rankings and getting more visibility. Please share the Common Sense Practical Prepper with your friends, your family, somebody that's interested in getting into prepping. Go back and find some of my prepping 101 or my real basic podcast and send that to your friends, a family member, and let them listen. Currently, I am just out of the top 100 podcasts when it comes to prepping. There's all different categories, and depending on where you look, I'm I would love to crack the top 100. I'm just looking to try to expand the audience as best I can to try to get this information out there. So please do me a favor, just like you hear on YouTube, like and subscribe. If you like what you're hearing, send it to your friends. But I really would like you folks to do that. That would really help me out. It would really help me get the message out. And again, I appreciate all the time that you spend listening to me ramble. All right, folks, if I don't talk to you before New Year's, and I probably will, if I don't talk to you before New Year's, everybody have a safe and happy New Year's. Don't drink and drive. Don't eat too much food. No, actually, go. No, eat too much food. Just don't drink and drive. We'll leave it at that. All right, folks, thanks again. And as always, please be careful out there. Take care of one another. And until next time.

SPEAKER_00: 21:56

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