The Graybeard Advantage

0:02SPEAKER_00:You are listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper, sponsored by 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.

0:21SPEAKER_01:Hey everybody, welcome back to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast. October the 11th, 2026. Kind of a cool, rainy Sunday here in central Virginia. We're getting the remnants of the hurricane, a little bit of wind, a little bit of rain. So not going to complain compared to the damage and devastation and loss of life down in the Gulf Coast. So, with that said, Lone Man on the Ridge episode 19 is currently online. Uploaded that earlier today.

0:56SPEAKER_01:Had to do several edits in that. It ended up being a lot longer than I wanted. So I had to break it up into separate episodes. Episode 20 was going to be the last chapter, I guess you could say, in the book, but it looks like we're going to have to run it out to 21. So episode 20 and then 21 should be the conclusion. What I'm looking to do for the actual manuscript, I guess, for the book is I want to add other information. I simply don't want the paperback to be a word-for-word copy of everything that I've done up until this point with the episode via the podcast.

1:36SPEAKER_01:I want to add extra things. I don't want folks to go out and purchase the book and go, oh, this is exactly what he was saying in the 21 episodes before. I want to add a little to it, maybe a little background, prologue, epilogue, some other logs that writers do. I'm not really a writer, so I don't know how many logs we can do, but that's that's the plan. So this will be the second episode uploaded for today on Sunday, the 11th. I do have one more episode.

2:06SPEAKER_01:I have some really cool announcements I want to get to. I'm putting the touches on those. I'm going to have a brand new website, and I'm getting the last little bit of that episode squared away. I may be able to post that later on tonight, like late, late tonight. If not, it's definitely going to be a Monday afternoon type of episode. So what I want to talk about in this episode in particular is what they call graybeards. The inspiration or the credit for this episode goes out to the local prepper.

2:38SPEAKER_01:You can find him on the socials, you can find him on YouTube. He bounces between Carolina and Virginia. So check him out. He was doing a series of episodes with a bunch of older gentlemen, and I think they all have beards, and most of them are gray. So I think he jokingly called it like the Council of the Graybeards. So that's a term I'm familiar with, but until he put it all together, I came up with an idea for an episode. So, with that said, I believe that with the internet and AI and a few other things, that there is an entire generation of knowledge that is not being taught, that is basically just being ignored.

3:21SPEAKER_01:The skills that our grandparents never thought about twice, gone within two or three generations. Not because someone decided they didn't matter or they were not important. We just stopped passing them down. That kind of knowledge is disappearing. And I think we need to keep that information fresh. We need to keep passing down that information, I guess you could say. A quick sidebar. A long time ago, I spent a lot of time in Scotland. And in Scotland, they have these stone fences or stone dikes.

3:58SPEAKER_01:And they're made of just large stones. And there is a science. There are people like cobblers and thatchers that do roofs. There are people who made these stone fences back in the day. Well, there are very few people in Scotland making fences in the traditional way of their ancestors. So that is a skill, like many other skills, that are just kind of disappearing. So when we talk about gray beards, you can have gray beards and prepping, IT, carpentry.

4:33SPEAKER_01:Anyone can be a gray beard, I guess, if you've been around long enough and you know a certain amount of information and you speak from experience. So in the prepping world, a gray beard is an old timer. One of the folks who've been around before it even had the name of prepping, before it was a hashtag, before there were TV shows, YouTube videos. Graybeards like myself, and I was very young during the oil crisis in the 70s, but I do remember that.

5:02SPEAKER_01:Y2K scare, ice storms, and blackouts that came along before the internet made anything about it feel permanent and safe. Weather reports that we got back in the day were just the evening news at 6 and 11, and that's basically all you had. So a gray beard, it's a term of respect. It's not a derogatory term. A graybeard is someone who earned what they know. And the important part is it's never really about age. It's truly not about age. It's about experience and it's about scars.

5:34SPEAKER_01:It's about the things that you learned because there was no other way to learn them. You learned them by doing, many times doing them wrong and paying for it, either in scratches, cuts, broken bones, concussions, black eyes, whatever it happens to be, and you did it until you got it right. In a crisis, you can recognize a gray beard. More than likely, they are the ones with a quiet resolve, I guess you could say. They are not the loudest voice in the room.

6:03SPEAKER_01:They're not the person running from car to car. They're the person that does not panic. Because they've thought through the scenario a dozen times. They have a plan. Just because they aren't running around like a maniac does not mean that they are not prepared. A lot of the time it means just the opposite. The work has been done before the emergency hit. So in looking at Gen X and Boomers and Gen Z, I never can get this straight. Apparently, I'm the hinge.

6:34SPEAKER_01:I'm old enough to have learned it the hard way, but still young enough to watch the hard way become optional. My generation might be the last group that learned all of this before the internet made it a choice. So I'll say something from the beginning. And don't take this wrong. I'm not saying younger folks out there are soft. I am not. What I'm saying is some of the younger folks never had to be hard, if that makes any sense. And it's not their fault.

7:04SPEAKER_01:Nobody handed them a cheap plastic compass and told them to walk into the woods. The world just changed. We have cell phones, we have apps, we have satellite messengers. The hard way or the difficult way stopped being the only way a long time ago. And here's the thing that a lot of people don't want to say out loud. The hard way is still there. It's still there waiting in the wings. And someday, the easy way is going to fail. And when it does, the hard way or the more difficult way is the only way that's going to be left.

7:40SPEAKER_01:So I'll walk you through a short list of the things that we've lost. The map and compass. You could navigate anywhere with a paper map and a compass because that's all you had. There was no option for a GPS. GPSs are great, don't get me wrong. Right up until the moment they do not work. Signal drops, battery dies, grid goes down, and a whole lot of people won't know how to find their way home. Not because they're dumb, but because no one ever took the time to teach them.

8:10SPEAKER_01:Dead reckoning, which is something I'm not very good at, but dead reckoning used to sit right there next to learning how to find directions with the compass. Speed, direction, and time. From those three things, you can figure out where you were without a phone. That's the math and the practice. It's nearly gone. Same with the sky. Old farmers could tell you when a storm was six hours out by how they felt in the morning. Now we check a little icon on our phones, we look at the radar and somehow we still get caught in the rain.

8:47SPEAKER_01:Starting a fire with one match, not a lighter, not a ferro rod, just one match. In the real world, where the wood's a little damp and the wind won't quit, you had to learn which type of wood burns even when it's wet, which bark makes good tinder when it's dry or even when it's wet. How to lay a fire so it catches instead of smoking and then dying on you. And you learned by failing, you learned by being cold, you learned by being frustrated, then you did it over and over, maybe twice, maybe twenty times, until you got it right.

9:25SPEAKER_01:And knowing your neighbors, and I think that might be one of the biggest fails of all. And I mean really knowing your neighbors, not their name from a Facebook group, their name because you stood at the end of your driveway and you just talked. You knew who had a generator, who had a well, who was a nurse, who was a mechanic, who had the truck, who had a chainsaw. And that's not on a network that you can download or look up. That's the network that you build with personal interactions over years, over weeks, one conversation at a time.

9:58SPEAKER_01:And the last thing, fixing things. Food from scratch, those matter too. Before everything was disposable, you fixed your toaster, your mower, the car in the driveway. Our grandparents could take a garden and turn it into meals that lasted the entire winter. That's the knowledge that was passed down at the kitchen table. Now, a lot of that lives in a video on YouTube that just needs a working internet connection to watch. We'll get practical on that another day.

10:28SPEAKER_01:Today the point is much simpler. Speaking of the internet, the internet gives you answers. It does not give you judgment. And those, obviously, are two different things, two very different things. You can look up how to treat a wound in about ten seconds. Great. But you cannot look up whether to trust the stranger that's standing in front of you offering to help. You cannot look up whether the water in front of you is actually safe to drink. You cannot look up whether that sound out in the dark in the woods behind your house is a deer, the wind, or something you might need to worry about.

11:10SPEAKER_01:That kind of knowing doesn't come from a search bar. It comes from experience, from being wrong, sometimes being wrong several times, from making a bad call and living to carry the lesson. It becomes one of those scars. And I've lived long enough to learn things the hard way or the difficult way. I could teach you when it comes to law enforcement, we could talk about procedures all day and all night. And you'd have a very good understanding of certain laws and procedures in a weekend.

11:43SPEAKER_01:Checklist, steps, stuff by the book, but trusting your gut, the thing in your stomach that tells you something is off before you can explain why. That just takes years, and that just happens. That took being wrong over and over and paying for it. You can't hand that to somebody after they've watched a video. And here's where the time goes. Society right now lives and dies by the sound bite, the Facebook reel, the YouTube short, the TikTok video, 30 seconds, a face in a ring light, a line built to make you mad or make you laugh or make you feel like you already know the entire story.

12:24SPEAKER_01:Everybody's busy, and I get that. But a lot of that busy is spent looking for something to be offended by. Scrolling until a stranger's opinion feels like a personal attack, then arguing with somebody on the internet, then going after the next argument. That time is not free. That is the same half hour you could have spent learning a new skill, or sharpening a skill you already possess. One match, a compass, changing a tire, how to plant a garden, have a conversation in the driveway.

12:54SPEAKER_01:None of those fit in a little Facebook reel. All of them will still be there when that reel is gone. So here's where we are. Younger folks have all the answers, all of them. They're in their pocket. What they don't have through no fault of their own is the scars, is the experience. And the scars are the thing that turns information into wisdom. I'm not saying younger folk are lazy. I'm saying that in many times, not all, they are untested, and there's a difference.

13:29SPEAKER_01:And the world is going to test them whether they are ready or not. That's just how it's always worked. Their social media feed will not be the thing that gets them ready. A stockpile of food and water that eventually runs out. A skill that you have and that you practice compounds. Sit with that for a second. You can eat your way through a month of food storage. It's a number, and the number goes down, and one day it's zero. A skill never runs out, it gets better the more you use it, and you can hand it to somebody else without losing your own skill.

14:10SPEAKER_01:The best lesson anyone ever handed me was simple. Stop, breathe, work the problem, trust your own judgment over the device. I still lean on that every single week. Not because I'm lost in the woods every week, but because it's the thing that keeps a clear head when everything else is loud. That lesson, whatever the lesson is, has been worth more than anything I could ever purchase. And it cost whomever taught it to me nothing but just a little bit of time and patience.

14:42SPEAKER_01:With me, sometimes a lot of patience. Another quick sidebar. I'm terrible at tying knots. I have tried, but I'm just not that good. I am left-handed. And 80% of the people out there are right-handed. So I need to find a video or I need to find something where there are left-handed people showing other left-handed people how to tie knots because I can't do it backwards. Every time the knot is completely wrong, because what I'm trying to do, if the rope is in the right hand, I'm a lefty, I try to switch it to my left, and then there's the loop, and you put the rope here, and it's a just a complete disaster.

15:20SPEAKER_01:So I need to do my homework and find some left-handed people that can teach me to tie some knots. So here's what I believe. In my opinion, every gray beard out there, regardless if you actually have a gray beard or not, you have a sense of duty, not to preach, not to stand on your porch and lecture young folks about how the world's gone soft. Nobody learns a thing from being lectured. The duty or the role is much simpler and a little more difficult.

15:50SPEAKER_01:Take a younger person, teach them that one thing before it's too late. That, in a sense, is what I'd try to accomplish on the podcast. I have the metrics. If I wanted to, I could look and see like the average age group, male, female, all that stuff. I'm sure that's somewhere on some website, but I'm not going to pay$30 or$40 a month to dig that deep into the metrics. But I would hope, after doing this for as long as I've been doing it, that some folks out there have picked up a few things and decided, hey, I'm going to try this.

16:27SPEAKER_01:I'm sure a lot of people have listened to what I've had to say and say, that guy's nuts. I'm not doing anything that he's saying. But as long as a few people have picked up a few things, that's the important part. So let's make this easy. Here are three skills worth learning before you need them in what each one actually takes. One, find north without your phone, a cheap compass and a paper map of your city or your county, practice in your own backyard, then maybe on a trail you know, or just walk around the neighborhood.

16:57SPEAKER_01:It takes one afternoon to learn, and a few more afternoons to really trust your skills. Two, make water safe. Know how to boil it, know how to filter it. Know how much bleach goes into one gallon. Write it down on a piece of tape and maybe tape it inside the cabinet. If you have a garage like I do, and you have a gear closet where my hiking stuff is, just stick it up there next to the backpack. Or stick a little note in your first aid kit. It'll take 10 minutes to learn and a lifetime of use.

17:29SPEAKER_01:Three, meet three neighbors. I know all the introverts out there are like, are you kidding me? Don't wave at them. Actually meet them. Learn their names. Learn what they do. That costs you nothing but just a little bit of courage. If you live in a city or a densely populated town, you've got neighbors out the wazoo, plenty of folks to meet. So that's it. That's the three things. All of them get better with time every time you use them. And if you're the younger person out there listening to this, same thing applies to you, but in the opposite direction.

18:04SPEAKER_01:Put the reel down, put the YouTube videos down, put the podcast down, take the time to learn something that doesn't need a signal, doesn't need a sell signal, doesn't need internet, or sharpen something you already know. Speaking of sharpen, sorry for another sidebar, but I need to buy a sharpening stone for my knives. So that just reminded me I need to make a note. I need to buy a sharpening stone for my knives. Because the grid is going to fail someday.

18:35SPEAKER_01:Maybe just for an afternoon, maybe for a lot longer. I don't know when, I don't know how, but it will. And when it does, the question was never really whether you'll survive. The question is whether you'll remember how. And whether you taught someone else to remember as well. All right, folks, thanks for stopping by. Practical prep podcast at gmail.com. Of course, I'm on the Twitters, prep underscore podcasts. And don't forget, I'll be making an announcement maybe later on tonight, or if not tonight, tomorrow, about the new website and a bunch of other cool things I got cooking.

19:15SPEAKER_01:All right, folks, as usual. Please be careful out there. Take care of one another, and until next time.

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