Prepare For Weather; Prepare For People

PBN Guest Spot - https://youtu.be/ygJEGdGD-jg?si=L4lMdNP3R6O8QD8G

Cold can be predicted. People can’t. That simple truth frames a wide-ranging conversation that starts with a frozen Richmond morning and ends with a blueprint for staying calm when tempers run hot. We talk about the little miss that becomes a big headache—letting a propane tank drift to 40 percent right before delivery schedules jam up—and the simple systems that keep you out of the panic queue. If you’ve ever wondered how to turn “I should’ve checked that” into a habit you won’t break, this is your playbook.

From there, we face a tougher prep: human volatility. We unpack disturbing videos of medical professionals advocating harm and ask a practical question—how do you protect yourself when authority and emotion collide? The answers aren’t flashy. Strip politics out of asymmetric situations. Choose routes that bypass flashpoints. Keep your car kit simple and ready: water, calories, gloves, thermal layer, eye protection, and a charged power bank. When protests clog a city grid, patience, planning, and quiet exits beat bravado every time.

Amid the noise, community proves its worth. We share how the show’s growth came from listeners, not “growth hacks,” and how real preparedness grows the same way—one honest connection at a time. Build small circles. Offer help before you need it. Share principles, not inventories. And when the forecast wobbles between blizzard and blue sky, use it as a stress test for your routines: fuel checks, safe space heating, room consolidation, and pipe protection. Prepping isn’t about fear; it’s about removing avoidable surprises so you can live more freely, even when the world gets loud.

If this resonates, subscribe, leave a quick review, and share the episode with one friend who needs a nudge to check their fuel and tighten their winter plan. Your support keeps this community strong and growing.

https://augasonfarms.com?sca_ref=9315862.VpHzogdDNu

Augason Farms
Support the podcast. Click on my affiliate link and use coupon code PODCASTPREP for 10% discount!

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Chapters

• 0:00 Cold Snap And Storm Outlook
• 2:06 Propane Check And Heating Gaps
• 3:10 Audience Growth And Spam Pitches
• 4:29 Soapbox: Professional Ethics And Threats
• 9:45 Political Risk And Personal Safety
• 13:46 Protests, Agitators, And Urban Hazards
• 17:31 Community, Trust, And Adaptation
• 19:45 Ice Streets, Thanks, And Giveaway

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:17

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_00: 0:41

Hey all it's Keith, and welcome back to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, January the 29th, 2026, coming to you live from the frozen tundra of Richmond, Virginia. It is bitterly cold with some more snow on the way. I am not so worried about the snow. I'm more worried about the freezing temperatures. It got up to 33 today, which was a high. I don't think it's gotten this warm in the last week, but that's going to be about it. Now, as far as the snow coming in this weekend, Richmond maybe one or two inches. The forecast is kind of all over the place. The Outer Banks and other parts of North Carolina and southern Virginia, potentially 8 to 12 inches with blizzard conditions. Now I learned what blizzard conditions mean. It's a combination of snow and wind. So six inches of snow and a light wind is not a blizzard. Six inches of snow, 30, 40, 50 mile an hour sustained winds, that's what a blizzard is by definition. So we might luck out here in Central Virginia this go around, but on the other side of this storm, we're still looking at single digits for the lows and the highs next week might be 32, maybe 38. Then it's 38. I'm gonna break out the cargo shorts and the Hawaiian shirt. I'm about to lose my patience with this deep, deep cold, but weather's weather, not much you can do. So along the weather front, I checked my propane cylinder, the 100-gallon. I'm gonna call it 100 gallon. Who knows if it's a hundred gallon or a hundred pound? The big ass propane tank in my backyard. I checked late last week, should have checked it sooner, and it was at 40%. Now I have gas logs, on-demand hot water heater, so that is certainly a miss on my part. So I'm just under 40%. I called the gas company today, knowing the answer I was going to get, and they said it's gonna be at least a week before they can get to me to top off the tank, which is fine, I guess, if I had checked, and this is my fault, if I had checked earlier, maybe the week prior to last week's snow, they could have come out, topped it off, and I could have run my gas logs as long as I wanted to, and not have to worry about, oh, do I have enough? That sort of thing. So that's on me, but I have alternate heating sources, so we'll be fine. It's just that something I didn't really think about beforehand. So another big thanks to everybody who has been listening to the podcast, sharing, liking, subscribing, and leaving reviews. A couple weeks ago, and I'm not a big numbers guy, but I like to track the podcast just to see how I'm doing and the audience reach. A couple weeks ago we were number 85 in Apple Podcasts in the hobby section, which is where most of the other prepping podcasts live. I'm happy to report that today we are number 26 in no small part to everything that you all have done. I know I thank you all the time, and I'm gonna thank you again. Now, since we got down to this low number, I'm getting a lot of emails. Some might be spam, some might be legitimate. One was, hey Keith, we noticed the big jump from 85 to 25 on Apple Podcasts. My name's Joe Schmoe, and I run podcast blah blah blah.com. And with our proprietary software and only$50 billion a month, we can guarantee that we're gonna move you from number 25 to number five. Whatever. I'm good. As long as I have people listening, sharing, liking, subscribing, reviewing. That's all I need. I don't need somebody's fancy software. Not that big of a deal. But again, thanks for driving the numbers and getting us into the 20s. I'm over the moon. I really didn't think it would move that quickly, that much, but you have my gratitude for that. So continue to like, share, wake the neighbors, call your friends, all that good stuff. So I'm gonna get up on my soapbox just for a few minutes. I promise to tie it into prepping like I always do. You know, we prep for everything under the sun: EMPs, zombie apocalypse, storms, supply chain disruption, grid down situations, the fragile electrical grid. So basically, we prep for things that we don't have much control over so we can provide some sort of normalcy in the event the poop hits the fan. So here's something else that apparently we're gonna have to start prepping for. All these people that are opposed to the ICE intervention in Minneapolis, right or wrong, I'm not here to talk about that. But what I am here to talk about are people that are posting videos about how, if they ever come across federal law enforcement, the bad things that they are going to do. I'm talking specifically about a former nurse at the Virginia Commonwealth University Hospitals here in downtown Richmond, Virginia, who provided resistant tips to some of her followers on what she thinks they should do if they run across an ice agent. So she was telling folks to hurt ice agents, take a syringe with a paralytic that I'm not going to pronounce because I'll butcher it, poison ivy water in a squirt gun, aim for the face, aim for the eyes, aim for the hands, go on a dating app, sit you up a profile, look for ice agents, and then spike their drinks with laxatives so they can't make their next shift the next day and they're stuck on the crapper. She did this with her name in her scrubs. She was suspended and then she was fired. VCU Health came out with a press release that she has been terminated. Can you imagine the level of hate and the level of vitriol she has that she is going to show her face and tell other healthcare professionals, people that went to school and she was a nurse anesthetist? Did I say that right? Making about 300K a year. She just flushed her career, at least temporarily, right down the toilet because she is so upset that federal law enforcement is enforcing federal law. I was a police officer for 26 years. I'm a conservative. I voted for Trump. Not afraid to say it. Can you imagine, as a cop, if I got on video and made a video in uniform, sitting in my cruiser going, man, I can't wait to find them Hillary stickers on the back of those BMWs? I can't wait to find, I don't know, an Obama sticker on the next SUV that passes me because I'm gonna pull them over and I'm gonna give them 15 tickets. I don't even care if they're speed, I'm gonna make some stuff up. Can you imagine? Doctors, nurses, police officers, judges, lawyers, all these people are in positions of authority. Police officers, and I always said this before, police officers have a very, very heavy responsibility. They have the ability to take somebody's freedom if they break the law. They have the ability to end someone's life if the police officer is presented with a deadly force situation. That is such a huge responsibility. Police officers, judges, lawyers, doctors, nurses are should be placed in such a high position, such a high regard for authority. To this day, I have no ill will towards anybody who voted for Obama, Hillary Clinton, whomever, local, state, federal. I have no ill will. I don't agree with the current governor. I don't agree with the lieutenant governor, the AG. But because I disagree with them doesn't mean I'm going to actively seek out those who do support them and try to cause those people harm. If you're that kind of person, you need to seek help. There is another doctor, or maybe he's another nurse at nurse anesthetist. Surprised they even pronounced that correctly. Did I even get that right? I have no idea. I'm not even gonna check. I'm on a roll. Winkedale or Winkerdale or whatever, whatever his name is, that nut job. He's doing the same thing down there in Florida. There was another OBGYN nurse, some sort of practitioner in Florida, and Catherine, I think it's is it Catherine Levitt, this the spokesperson for the for the president, the press secretary, she's pregnant. She's gonna have a baby in a few months. This OBGYN provider, again, on video, not trying to hide who she is, so calmly says that she hopes that the press secretary during labor, during delivery, rips from stem to stern, I believe is what she says, that this lady has a very difficult childbirth all because she doesn't agree with her politics. Now, there's millions of people out there that probably think bad thoughts, but they just don't express it. It's one thing to have those thoughts and to harbor those thoughts, to express those opinions for the entire world to see. What are you doing? She was terminated as well. She's not going to be able to practice medicine or her license was polled in the state of Florida. That's going to be a tough one to get hired in another state because the liability is absolutely through the roof. I can imagine, I can imagine the lawyers in all of these cases, the two in Florida and the one in Virginia. I can imagine the legal team with these particular hospitals. Those lawyers are probably, they probably had a kitten when they saw that video when someone from the administration brought it to their attention. Like, what are we going to do? It just baffles me. Absolutely baffles me. You don't have to like the policies of the current administration. I didn't have to agree with the policies of previous administrations. Obama, Clinton, even Bush 43. And I just kind of just shook my head and be like, man, that's that's wrong. I'm going to vote, you know, I hope they get voted out. I hope they don't get a second term. Who do I call? Call my local politicians. Oh, I disagree with this, vote against that. Please don't vote for the whatever bill. But damned, if I would jump up and down screaming and yelling on social media, and even when I have these conversations with friends and co-workers back in the day, either they agreed with me or disagreed with me, it was a civil conversation. We just talked about it. I wasn't some blue hair nose ring wearing skyscreamer just screaming at the top of my lungs, going absolutely bananas. It's it's really, it's really almost beyond comprehension for me. So now, do we have to prep for this? I don't have any MAGA hats, I don't have any t-shirts, all my t-shirts are concert t-shirts and silly t-shirts with silly sayings, and you kids get off my lawn, and those are the kind of printed t-shirts I wear. But let's say I had a Trump t-shirt or Bush t-shirt or whatever. I wouldn't wear that out. I understand I can, my First Amendment, right? But why would I? Why would I put myself in harm's way at this point, knowingly put myself in harm's way by wearing my Bush Cheney shirt or whatever. I don't even think I have that one. Whatever shirt I might have, if I had one of those shirts, I wouldn't wear it. Why put yourself in that position? In a sense, put yourself in danger because that's exactly what you're doing. My doctor doesn't know my politics. It's none of his or her business. My politics doesn't come up in my doctor's visit. Uh, you know, my doc, my my back hurts a little bit. You know, my knees kind of aching. What do you think about that, Bill? They're trying to defund all the money we're sending to the Taliban. What do you think about that? What do you think about those vaccines, doc? Oh man, my neck hurts too. Why would I do that? It makes no- I go to the doctor when I go, tell them what's wrong, and have them fix it. We don't do idle chit-chat about politics. That's not what I'm there for. So do we have to prep when you go out in public? Do you have to prep when you go to the doctor? Do you have to prep when you go to the store? Do you have to prepare yourself for all these mentally ill people that want to hurt in these instances? The press secretary and federal law enforcement. Absolutely shake my head. And speaking of the protests, and then I'll get off my soapbox. Nick Shirley, independent journalist, YouTuber, whatever he is, a few weeks ago went to Minneapolis and uncovered millions, if not billions, of dollars in fraud. That's all he did. His life has been threatened. He has to have armed security wherever he goes. And now, and I'm just talking plain folks, the people out protesting are a bunch of young and middle-aged white people that are out there protesting in the cold in Minneapolis against ICE. ICE is there to remove folks that are here illegally, that have broken the law. Where are the Somalis, where are these folks standing in solidarity with these protesters against ICE? They're not out there because they're not being paid to be out there. These folks are paid protesters, paid agitators. They're bust in, they're flown in from all over the country. It's such a show, it's such a charade. But you have to be prepared for if you live in Minneapolis. Do you drive in these areas downtown, Chicago, LA, all these other protest sites? You have to stay, you can't, you don't know when something's going to happen. You could just be driving down the road sitting at a stoplight, and law enforcement goes to make an arrest on a traffic stop or at a store. You have to be prepared that you could potentially be stuck in the middle of one of these situations. I just don't get it. Part of me wants to think that the governor of Minnesota and the mayor of Minneapolis is as corrupt as a day is long, and they're using these protests and this violent rhetoric to take away from the fact that they're up to their knees in this corruption. Certainly a possibility. We'll see ultimately what happens. I would say, I would hesitate to say it's a no-win situation, but it's only getting worse, and I really don't know what the end game is. It's not my decision to make, but just something else we have to prepare for. So when you go to the dentist, don't talk about politics because the hygienist of the dentist might have a differing opinion. So when they give you the anesthesia, when they give you the shot of the Novocaine to pull the tooth or put a filling in, is it really novacaine? They give you less Novocaine, put a little bit of water in the Novocaine. You're probably like, Keith, you're just being crazy. Well, maybe I am. But when you have other health professionals actually out there telling other health professionals to hurt and purposely harm those that are seeking their care, that's beyond the pale. So right before the storm, and then after the storm in the other night, I was on the Prepper Broadcasting Network with James. So we did a pre-storm prep, and then we did kind of a post-mortem, and that was a lot of fun. I put the link at the top of the show notes, you'll see the link to that YouTube video. So go ahead and go back and watch that video. And I want to thank James for having me on. It's safe to say that being on the Prepper Broadcasting Network and giving a shameless plug to the podcast has certainly helped us grow, has certainly helped to get us from 85 to 25 or wherever we happen to be later on this evening. So thank you, James. Thank you, the Prepper Broadcasting Network. I hope to be back on again. That was a lot of fun. It's always nice to get other opinions. There are people that were in chat that asked a few questions. And again, it's all about community. It's all about sharing what you know. Now, as I say that, we talk about the doctors and the nurses and and folks wanting to harm federal law enforcement. You know, part of part of me has always been, you know, you keep your keep your circles small, keep your preps, and keep all the details to yourself. But there's something to say about community. There's something to say about having others in the same boat, having someone across town or a mile away or 50 miles away to have your back. Hey, if the poop hits the fan, you got a place to come to. The power goes out at my house, you're more than welcome to come here. You need some food or some supplies out of my pantry? No worries. Swing on by, we'll get you what you need. So there's always strength in numbers, but hearing about this latest stuff going on about people wishing other people violence, these protesters getting in Ice's face, spitting on them, throwing rocks, frozen water bottles. What are you people doing? Why aren't you taking why aren't you taking all that energy and putting it somewhere useful? It's beyond me. And I just got up on my soapbox and I was gonna I was gonna get off my soapbox a few minutes ago, but I guess I someone threw the soapbox right back in right back in front of me and I stood back up on the damn thing. But anyway, it's a crazy, crazy world out there, folks. I I don't, it's sometimes it's it's difficult to get a grasp on things just when you thought you had it under control, just when you thought you knew where things were going, just when you thought you had the right path, you were steering the ship in the right direction, a bunch of knuckleheads come up and throw you a curveball. But as preppers, we're type A personalities, adapt and overcome, we see a circumstance, we see a situation, and we do what we need to do to work around it. Again, I've got nothing but love for everybody. Left, right, center, black, white, tall, thick, short. I I I love everybody. I trust everybody until they give me a reason not to trust them. And this is coming from a cop. Wasn't always like that. Especially when I was a police officer, I was always on guard. But stepping away from law enforcement when I was off duty wasn't as hyper focused as I was when I was on duty. I got nothing but love for everybody. I love you, I like you until you give me a reason not to. I trust you until you give me a reason not to. And then that trust is gone. Odds are you'll never be able to get it back. Sound like some psychiatrist or something. Maybe I ought to start charging like$50 an hour, like, go, go sit on the leather couch. And so tell me about your mom. Anyway, whatever, whatever people say on the leather couch, I have no idea. All right, folks, if you're in South Carolina or parts of North Carolina, just keep an eye on this storm. Could be a nasty one. My driveway, sidewalk is still an ice rink. A plow came through my neighborhood today for the first time and took up some of the ice, but for the most part, my entire neighborhood is an ice skating rink. You could ice skate or bobsled down my street with no issue whatsoever. Alright, folks, again, thank you for everything. Thank you for all the traction. Thank you for getting me down into the 20s. Congrats to Jeffrey. Jeffrey B and was it Devin Z, the winners of the$25 Amazon gift card. In fact, I think I've got another, I think I ordered too many of those. I think I need to check my queue. I think I have another$25 gift card. I will do that. So I will talk to you guys later on. Let me check into that gift card. If I got another one, we're just going to do another giveaway. So if you want to, go ahead and email practicalpreppodcast at gmail.com. Go ahead and jump in on this one. I'll also go back and re-enter those folks that didn't win the first time. I can't remember how many there were. I have to go and actually add it up. All right, folks, with all these shenanigans going on, cold weather, at least here in the East Coast and the Midwest. Florida, I understand you're gonna be down into the like mid to high 30s. That's gonna suck. Miami, like 40 degrees next week. How bad is that gonna suck down in Miami? Ugh. But folks, if I don't talk to you before the weekend, everybody have a fantastic weekend. And as always, please be careful out there, especially with all the crazy nurses running around trying to hurt everybody. All right, folks, be careful out there. Take care of one another, and until next time.

SPEAKER_01: 20:43

Thanks for listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. While you're at it, help spread the word by leaving a rating and review.