Global Turmoil, Local Mindset

The headlines won’t slow down, but we can. This week, we unpack rapidly shifting reports around the Iran strikes and show how to turn global uncertainty into practical, local action. From rumors about a closed Strait of Hormuz to the real role insurers and naval escorts play in keeping oil moving, we track what’s confirmed, what’s probable, and what’s noise—then translate it into steps you can use to protect your time, budget, and peace of mind.

We also get blunt about the fog of war: deepfakes, clipped videos, and the pressure to share “breaking” posts before facts land. You’ll hear a simple verification workflow for social media claims, how to label uncertainty in real time, and why patience beats panic when algorithms reward outrage. We dig into recent domestic incidents often miscast as sleeper-cell attacks, outlining how to stay vigilant without swallowing speculation. If you carry legally, we talk training and legal context; if you don’t or can’t, we share layered safety habits that work anywhere: exits, rally points, communications, and situational awareness that doesn’t wreck your day.

Finally, we demystify what happens after police use of force: administrative leave, evidence handling, internal reviews, and grand jury steps. Knowing the process keeps you from being yanked around by hot takes and helps you plan for slower, verified information during high-stress events. By the end, you’ll have a tighter news intake checklist, a smarter fuel and supply plan for energy shocks, and a calmer approach to fast-moving crises.

If this helped you cut through the noise, tap follow, share it with a friend who doomscrolls, and leave a quick review so others can find the show. Your support expands our reach and keeps practical, level-headed prep at the center of the conversation.

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Transcript

Cold Open And Show Reach

SPEAKER_00 0:02

You are listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper. This is my duct tape. The real duct tape. It fixes everything except that decision. Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America. From border to border, coast to coast, and all ships at sea. Here is your host, Keith.

Global Audience And Growth

Strikes On Iran And Fallout

Fog Of War And Deepfakes

Strait Of Hormuz And Oil Flow

Domestic Threats And Vigilance

Separating Terror From Speculation

Police Shootings And Due Process

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Everybody, this is Keith, and welcome back to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, March the 3rd, 2026. And as you can tell, I'm a little bit under the weather. I have a little bit of my voice left. So I'll go ahead and record this for y'all tonight. This is going to be pretty much off the cuff. I had a script ready, but with things changing in the world so quickly, almost by the hour, I'm just going to go ahead and give it to you off the cuff. First, I want to talk about the reach of this podcast and how much the reach of this podcast has expanded in the last 45 to 60 days. And I have everybody to thank for that reach. Now I post my links on X, but it gets very little traction, 10, 20 impressions, no likes, no retweets, favorite very few times. So this comes from you sharing, liking, subscribing, and providing reviews. So again, I can't thank you enough. So here are a few of the countries that have reached out and downloaded this podcast in the last month or so. Almost every country in the Middle East has checked in. Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel. I could go on and on. This podcast is listened to in 100 countries and 4,012 unique cities. Here's the top three cities Dallas, Texas, Charlotte, North Carolina, and as I said before, Sydney, New South Wales. The next most downloaded city, I guess, is Chicago, Illinois, but they are far, far behind the folks in Sydney. So you guys can probably guess what I want to talk about tonight. Politics aside, and again, I was going to wait for the dust to settle figuratively and literally when it came to the strikes against Iran. Whether you agree or disagree, it makes no difference to me. And whether you agree or disagree really has nothing to do with this podcast. So I'm not going to go into any details. Everybody knows when this happened late, late Saturday night East Coast time. That would have been early morning or mid-morning in the Middle East. Eventually it was determined that the Supreme Leader was killed in an airstrike, along with many of his cabinet council, whatever they're called, as well as many commanders of the Iraqi Republican Guard. So over the last, gosh, we're going on day three now, three and a half, a lot of the military infrastructure has been destroyed. We know how that works. About an hour ago, I read that when the Iranian leadership or what's left of the leadership was getting together to vote on who was going to be the next supreme leader, that building was destroyed. Now, Iran has over nine million people, and it is an enormous country. They have obviously retaliated against U.S. bases. I think last I read six U.S. military personnel have been killed. They struck the Fifth Fleet headquarters, our naval base in Bahrain. They've struck Saudi Arabia and several other Middle Eastern countries and cities. There is all sorts of misinformation out there. All sorts of misinformation. They call it the fog of war, whatever term you want to put on it. There is almost as much good information as there is bad information. I've said a million times. Double check and triple check your sources. In addition to the misinformation, or as part of the disinformation campaign, there are deep fakes, AI videos that are getting better by the second. There are people that will look at the first few seconds of a video and make a quick reaction response without really looking into it. Again, we have very short attention spans and we scroll all day, so we don't have time to watch the entire 30-second video. We don't have time to scrutinize the video because we need to swipe left or right or TikToking or Instagraming or whatever we're doing to move on to the next cool video of cats singing or dogs dancing or whatever's going on as the latest craze. But if you don't take a moment and stop, if you don't take a moment and engage your brain, if you don't take a moment and become a critical thinker, I'm a critical thinker. Sometimes I overthink a lot. Being skeptical and being critical or being a critical thinker, I think, I believe are good things. And that's probably a whole different podcast. But in the day and age where information flies at the speed of sound or the speed of light, we want as much information as we can. My Twitter feed is full of the exact same post. If the president says something, or the UN Secretary General says something, breaking news, I'll scroll and it's the same video. Everybody wants to be first, breaking. This just in. On and on and on. A lot of it is done for clicks. It's done to earn a few pennies. It's done to increase engagement, clickbait. There's all sorts of words for it. Just to get you to click on it, just to get you to like it, just to get you to share it, just to get you to reply. A lot of this misinformation is again meant to divide us. If you're inundated with 15 different headlines about what's going on in the Middle East, and you don't take a second to actually read it, you're doing yourself a disservice. You're not getting the truth, or you're not getting as close to the truth as you can. There was a lot of conjecture out there that the Strait of Hormuz was closed. It was not closed. The Iranian Navy no longer exists. All 11 ships or 11 boats are now sitting on the bottom. In the years past, Iran was able to block the Straits of Hormuz. It's a very, very narrow strait. But what happened, the insurance companies, Lloyd's of London and all these big insurance companies who insure these tankers full of crude, when they heard the straits were closed, they told the tankers to stop. Every second a tanker is not moving to the port to pick up or from the port to drop off, cost tens of thousands of dollars. So these insurance companies told the tankers to stop. Mayersk, Hopadloyd, they told them to stop. Now apparently the U.S. Navy is going to escort those tankers through the straits. So now oil is flowing again. When and if those tankers are struck, more than likely it'll be by drones. We haven't got all the drones, we haven't got all the missiles, plenty of Iranian military out there, so this could go on for a long time. I have no idea how long. Several days, several weeks. I have no idea how much armament the Iranians still have or their proxies. So the price of gas here in central Virginia jumped 45 cents just on speculation or just on reports that the straits were closed. All right, fair enough. Oddly enough, the dollar is doing incredibly well and has a quick sidebar, which has led to the drop in the price of silver. Talk about that some other time. I've spoken about this before, and it's widely known, and it's been reported that there are approximately 18,000 known terrorists that are currently in the United States. They're often referred to as sleeper cells. Regardless, they're here. Whether they're actively planning something, that's up for other people to decide. But again, I've spoken about this before, and I'm going to err on the side of caution. You can look up Sarah Adams. She's on YouTube. She has a new channel called The Watch Floor. Very informative. She's the foremost expert on Benghazi. I don't think she's a sensationalist, and I trust what she has to say. She backs up what she puts out. She's talked about the plot against the homeland. She's provided information. I believe it's legit. Now we fast forward to Austin, Texas, super early Saturday morning, when somebody drove around the block several times and then started shooting at a crowd of people at a bar, first with a pistol, then apparently he exited the vehicle and had a rifle. Two dead, fourteen injured. Law enforcement showed up within a minute, I believe 57 seconds, and stopped the threat. Killed the attacker. Now people were quick to speculate this was a sleeper cell. It's been activated. Well, it's definitely an act of terror. He was wearing a hoodie that said property of Allah. His t-shirt under the hoodie had an Iranian flag on it. So it's safe to say that was an act of terror. Later that day, Sunday afternoon, here in Northern Virginia, there was a fender bender, road rage, and one of the vehicles involved, a guy pulls a knife, stabs a bunch of people, kills a lady, kills her dog. Virginia State Trooper shows up and kills him. All sorts of speculation. My goodness. Absolutely crazy the speculation. People were saying, well, it's rather evident he was Muslim because he killed the dog. And people just globbed onto that. I read it, put it in the back of my mind, and went about my day. Come to find out, wasn't Muslim, not terror related. In Cincinnati, a mass shooting at a concert. I believe it was a concert for a DJ, a local DJ. Somebody snuck in a firearm, passed metal detectors, shot several people. Immediately, sleeper sell this, sleep or sell that. Not terror related in that sense. That's not to say we should not be vigilant. That's not to say we should not be situationally aware. You should take whatever steps necessary to protect yourself and your family. Here in the United States, most people, if able to legally, will be armed. It's just that simple. Folks in other parts of the world where firearms are not as available, you do not have the same rights as we do here in the United States under the Second Amendment. You have to be hyper-vigilant. You have to be very well aware of what's going on if you do not have the ability, I'm talking about a firearm, to protect yourself or loved ones. Again, whole nother podcast. So here's one more example of hyperbole, people going crazy, taking one bit of information and running with it without thinking about what is really going on. Let's go back to the shoot against Austin. The three police officers that discharged their weapon that took care of the threat were placed on administrative leave, leave with pay, and there's going to be an investigation by whatever their department calls it. And my department was called like the shoot team, critical incident, whatever they call the team at that particular department, Austin PD. As with any police department, federal, local, what have you, the officers are placed on administrative leave while the investigations, an internal investigation, is launched, as well as an investigation by the local prosecutor's office, the DA, whoever happens to be the entity that brings criminal charges and tries criminals in court. This is how it works in Virginia. If there is an officer involved shooting, let's just say my department, my old department, I have investigated parts of those. I have not myself been involved, but I have been part of the investigative team that would then interview the officers involved and just get the initial report. Before, in this case in my department, internal affairs and a section within internal affairs would complete the investigation. So technically, somebody was killed. People are saying that these three police officers in Austin are being charged with murder. Not how it works. And by department, the officer is placed on administrative leave. His firearm is seized as evidence. And in the case of my department, he is issued another firearm. He or she is on paid leave. They're free to go about their business. They are required to cooperate with the investigation. And we can get in, we can get real deep in the weeds. They can certainly get outside counsel, all that stuff. I get that. But just the basics are firearm taken, given a new firearm. They cooperate with the investigation. The police department then gives their findings to the prosecutor's office, who then takes those findings in front of a grand jury. Now, every officer-involved shooting that I am aware of, and there's probably others out there that I'm not, I don't want to say it's a rubber stamp. I don't want to say they just go through the motions because there have been bad shoots, don't get me wrong. But they do this to show one, the department's being transparent, two, to cover them to cover their butt civilly, in case there's a lawsuit, and normally there is, so they can say, we investigated the shoot. It's a good shoot. The officer was protecting themselves, the citizen, whatever the situation is, we are not bringing charges of murder against the police officer. That's how that works. Nobody is saying that the Austin police officers were involved in a bad shoot. But if you go on the internet, dear lord, you would have thought these officers were arrested and are going to be hung by their necks until dead. I can't believe this. I'm calling my senator. This is ridiculous. We're going to boycott the city of Austin. Folks, unfortunately, there's officer-involved shootings every week here in the United States. And that is the procedure. But again, you see the headline and you immediately get this visceral reaction. How dare they charge those police officers for protecting the public? And they just run with it. They get the clicks, they get the responses, they get everybody all ginned up. And for all I know, there's a bunch of people with signs picketing outside the Austin PD. Free the officers, let the officers go, or whatever's going on. Just another example of how you need to engage your brain before you engage your mouth, or in this case, engage your fingers, and start typing. I'll get off my soapbox, go get some warm tea with honey, try to get rid of this cold or whatever I have going on. But folks, please be careful. Get your information from multiple sources. Practicalprep podcast at gmail.com. Again, I'm on the Twitters, Common Sense Practical Prepper, Prep underscore Podcast. Don't forget about prepper camp. I am presenting at Prepper Camp. And when I get my voice back, oh, I think I just went through puberty there for a second. When I get my voice back, we'll talk more about prepper camp and what I'm doing. All right, folks, as always, please be careful out there. Take care of one another. And until next time.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

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