A Grounded Off Grid Documentary

0:02SPEAKER_01: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_00:Hey everybody, it's Keith again with the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast. September the 26th, 2026. Fresh off my business/slash work trip to the Windy City, the city of Chicago, got back in late yesterday afternoon, had a chance to briefly look at a bunch of emails that y'all have sent over the past week or so. I will get to those as soon as I can. Couple notes about Chicago. When I was growing up, much, much younger, like grade school, middle school, and the first year of high school, I lived in the suburbs of Chicago.

0:57SPEAKER_00:Well, my team and I, this trip, we stayed in downtown Chicago, right on the North Loop, two, three blocks from Lake Michigan, two blocks from the Bean, if you're familiar with that, and a bunch of other stuff. And I do not like the big city. It is just too impersonal. We did walk to from the hotel, we did walk to the office, our corporate office there, and it was about five blocks, everybody with headphones on, earbuds in, walking to work after they got off the train, head down, no eye contact, just so impersonal.

1:32SPEAKER_00:And that's something I do not like. I like a much quieter, slower pace. But regardless, it was a lot of fun. And I don't talk about what I do. I I mentioned it briefly during one of my presentations at Prepper Camp 2026. I work for a company, and what I do along with the rest of my team is we do uh global logistics, global supply chain, which is why I talk a lot about supply chain. We had a chance to go to a rail yard and take a very in-depth tour of this rail yard, talk to all the folks there.

2:12SPEAKER_00:They did a fantastic job and really learned a lot, even more than I already knew about intermodal trains and supply chain logistics. Very, very eye-opening, very, very enlightening. And maybe one day, if I get a chance, we'll go into a little more about train logistics, but it's rather boring, and I'd rather not put you to sleep. I'd rather talk about a few other things. So, with that said, since I got off the plane, I've been writing my butt off.

2:41SPEAKER_00:Episode 17 for Lone Man on the Ridge is done. I will get that recorded, if not Sunday, meaning tomorrow, Monday. But I ran into something. I don't watch a lot of TV, I don't have cable, I do watch a couple streaming services, I watch YouTube, Prime, a couple things like that. But for the most part, I don't watch a lot of television. So I do not recommend things very often. And if y'all have been listening to this podcast more than a week, you understand that.

3:17SPEAKER_00:I do not do a lot of gear reviews. I turn down up to this point all of the sponsorship offers that I receive. And I received four more just in the week that I was in Chicago. So I'm very careful about telling you to go buy this or watch this or check this out. Because, and I mean, and that's on purpose, because the day I start pointing out every shiny little object that lands in my inbox is the day that you stop trusting me. And your trust in the things that I say and my opinions that I pass along are the only thing that keeps this podcast on.

3:58SPEAKER_00:Because if you all didn't keep coming back to listening to me yammer on about all the things I yammer on about, then I wouldn't have any downloads. I wouldn't be listened to or downloaded all across the globe. So that is super duper important to me that I just provide information because I am never gonna come on here and say the coolest tri-fuel generator is the champion XR6000. And I guarantee that when the SHTF comes, it's gonna power your house and you're gonna survive.

4:32SPEAKER_00:Never gonna do that because that is just not what I do here. So, when I provide information, when I tell you something that it's worth your time, I really want it to mean something. So with this podcast, I am gonna recommend a documentary that I found quite by accident on Prime Video last night. It's called Living Off the Grid. Came out in 2025, runs just under one hour, directed by a guy named Larry Sims. Larry with one R. L-A-R-Y. First time I've ever seen Larry spelled with one R, but Larry, you do you.

5:15SPEAKER_00:And I'll tell you up front, it's definitely worth your time. So here are a lot of the takeaways from this. Most preparedness shows and movies are ridiculous. So much of what gets made about prepping and survival and living off grid is so over the top, so sensational, so cranked up for the cameras that it does the entire preparedness community a disservice. And you know what I'm talking about. The show where everybody's convinced that society is going to collapse tomorrow, where every person has a bunker and a gas mask and 10,000 rounds of ammunition.

5:50SPEAKER_00:Not saying there's anything wrong with having 10,000 rounds of ammunition. They have these huge bug-out vehicles that look like something out of Mad Max, the music's very ominous, the narrator is breathless, and every episode is building towards some kind of doomsday. That's entertainment. I get that. And I understand that's the purpose for making some of these shows or documentaries in that fashion. Fear sells, drama sells, titles and extreme storylines get clicks.

6:25SPEAKER_00:A calm, reasonable person quietly rotating their pantry does not make for very exciting television. But here's what that kind of media actually does. It makes preparedness, it makes preppers look a little crazy. It takes the average person, the person who maybe should be a little more prepared, look at that and go, oh no, that's not me. Those people are nuts. That's a bunch of paranoid extremists living in bunkers in the woods. So they don't do anything.

6:57SPEAKER_00:The sensationalism doesn't just misrepresent preparedness, it actually pushes normal, reasonable people away from it. It turns something that should be more common sense into something that looks like a fringe obsession. So that's the backdrop that I watched this documentary against. And this is why it stood out. Living off the grid does not do any of the things that I just mentioned. There is no doomsday clock clicking in the background, no breathless narrator, no music trying to convince you that the world is about to end, no prepper stereotypes cranked up for the camera.

7:35SPEAKER_00:It's just real folks. Real people living out west here in the U.S. who made a choice to step away from modern utilities and live more self-reliantly, and the film follows them. They built their homes, they gather water, generate power, and working the land. Very simple concept. And what you get is something that you don't see very often in this in this prepper media space, if you will. And that's honesty. These are not people that are performing for a camera crew.

8:08SPEAKER_00:They're not trying to sell you a lifestyle or scare you into a mindset. In fact, I don't remember even one of the people they spoke to say, oh, my solar panels come from Signature Solar or my backup batteries come from EcoFlow or Blue Eddie. I don't recall anybody throwing a brand name out there. These folks are just out there and they're just living. And the film is patient enough and honest enough to show you what that actually looks like. And that's the whole difference.

8:39SPEAKER_00:Most prepper media is trying to make you feel something. Usually it's fear. You've seen the headlines. What if the world ends tomorrow? This should be the first five things you buy if X, Y, and Z happens. But this documentary, it just shows you something and it trusts you to draw your own conclusions, which is exactly the premise on why I do this podcast. So for this podcast, built on the idea that preparedness is common sense and not paranoia, watching something that treats the subject with this kind of honesty was very refreshing.

9:15SPEAKER_00:So let me talk about the realism on display in this documentary, because that's the first thing that grabbed me. When these folks show you their setup, they're not showing you a fantasy. They're showing you the reality. And the reality of off-grid living is that it is a tremendous amount of work. And I've said that before. The Instagram pictures show you the solar panels, but it doesn't show you the maintenance, doesn't show you replacing cables, removing the snow from the panels.

9:44SPEAKER_00:It might show you a beautiful garden, but it doesn't show you the weeds. It shows you the sunrise over the mountains, but it doesn't show you the 6 a.m. trip out to the cold to deal with something that may have broken. The documentary shows you the weeds. It shows you the people and how they get water. It shows you the systems they have and how they keep them maintained. They show you things that break and what they've done to fix that. The constant low-level problem solving that comes with being your own utility company, your own water department, your own maintenance crew.

10:16SPEAKER_00:We've talked about this before. And it doesn't present that as a tragedy. It presents it as a trade. This is what you give and this is what you get. And that's honest. That's the conversation we should have when we talk about being self-reliant. Not here's how easy it is, and not here's how the world is ending, but here is a real trade you're making with your eyes open, doing your due diligence with the information that you've had. If you listen to my episode a while back about being off-grid, this is the one where I talked about how nobody is truly independent, how it's a spectrum and not a switch.

10:55SPEAKER_00:This documentary is almost a visual companion to that idea. These people aren't living some fantasy of total independence. They're living a deliberate reduction of dependency, and they're doing the work that comes along with it. So here are some of the useful information that I found. A lot of this kind of media is all vibe and no substance, big feelings, dramatic shots, and nothing you can actually take away. They talk about water collection and water purification.

11:26SPEAKER_00:They show you how these folks capture water, how they store it, how they make it safe to drink. And if you listen to this show for any length of time, you know that I believe water is the single most important thing on your preparedness list. You can go weeks without food, but only days without water. Solar power. You get to see a couple real off-grid power systems. Panels, batteries, charge controllers, the whole thing. And more importantly, you get a sense of what these systems can and cannot do.

11:59SPEAKER_00:What it actually takes to run a household on sun. What do they do on cloudy days? This is the stuff that I talked about in the off-grid episodes. The difference between owning a solar system and actually being self-reliant with that solar system. And food. They talked about that in the end: food preservation, food preparation, a little bit about canning. They do a very good job. Canning is a genuine skill, and I by far am not an expert on canning.

12:32SPEAKER_00:And that's a skill that I need to improve upon. And here's the thing about actually watching it versus reading about it. When you see someone's actual system, the tanks, the panels, the canning setup, water catchment, it lands differently than a diagram in a book. You see the scale of it, you see what it takes, you see the connection between systems that I'm always going on about, how the power system is also a water system, and how one failure cascades into another.

13:02SPEAKER_00:So what I am not saying, I'm not saying that you're going to watch this documentary and suddenly know how to build your off-grid homestead because you're not. But you're going to come away with it with some understanding of real components of self-reliance, food, water, and power. I actually learned something. I am a person that loves to continue to learn. I do not like being stagnant either mentally or physically. I'm always moving. And I learned a few things.

13:30SPEAKER_00:The solar power guy he breaks it down into relatively simple terms. He goes, you know, watts and amps and all that stuff. These panels parallel in series, but he doesn't go so deep in the weeds that you get confused. They don't go so deep in the weeds that you need to grab a pen and paper and start taking notes. But they provide a very good high-level view of what living off the grid might look like. And to me, that is definitely worth one hour of your time.

14:03SPEAKER_00:And something that stuck with me that was not necessarily about the systems themselves, it was the people. Because these folks are very honest, they tell you the good and the bad. And some parts about living off grid are very difficult. So no one in this documentary is pretending it's all lollipop and rainbows. They talk about the challenges and they talk about the work it takes to maintain some of these systems and how you need to choose the systems that are right for your particular situation.

14:36SPEAKER_00:And there's something very powerful in folks being honest about that because it's the opposite of what being sensational does. The sensational stuff gives you the people who are either heroes or lunatics. This gives you people who are just people, people who made a choice, people who are living with the consequences of that choice, good, bad, and different, and who are willing to be straight about what it takes to live off-grid. And that honesty, in my opinion, is what makes this little documentary very useful.

15:12SPEAKER_00:So for a balanced recommendation, I guess, and I'm not here to be a cheerleader, this is a small independent documentary under an hour. It's not going to give you some comprehensive how-to off-grid living setup. It's just a window into living off-grid. It's not a manual, there's no checklist. You're getting a look into these people's lives, not a step-by-step course on how to do it. And that's fine because that's what they're trying to do. But go into it with the right expectations.

15:41SPEAKER_00:If you're looking for a technical deep dive on solar array sizing or water catchment math, this is not the documentary for you. But if you're looking for an honest, human, grounded look at the way this lifestyle actually is, then this little documentary definitely delivers. I'll also say this: watch this as a thinking exercise, which is which is what I took away from it. It's not a blueprint. As you're watching, ask yourself some questions. What would I do differently?

16:14SPEAKER_00:What vulnerabilities do I see? Would this work for me? Would I need to adjust X, Y, and Z? What happens when some of the components fail? What did they plan for? Watch it actively. And I think that's where the real value comes in. So once I watched that on Amazon Prime, I was hoping that maybe the algorithm, you know, you click the little thumbs up icon, we'll we'll send you more videos about this or about this subject. So here's my theory. If enough of us watch a grounded, honest, useful show or documentary, the documentary that treats preparedness like the reasonable thing it is, maybe, just maybe, I'm hoping the algorithm starts surfacing more subjects like that or more shows like that, and less of the sensational doomsday stuff.

17:05SPEAKER_00:And it already did. I watched something this morning, and I'll talk later about that on a different episode. I was currently taking some notes because I couldn't find the transcript to actually dive into it, and I found a lot of really useful information on this other movie that popped up because I had watched Living Off the Grid last night. So consider that a small benefit. Like what you like, don't like it, it moves away from the algorithm. Then maybe you get more of what you really like.

17:34SPEAKER_00:Because previously on Prime and other streaming services, I have searched off-grid, solar energy, and I wasn't seeing a lot. Well, that has to do with the algorithm, how it's tagged into the system, way, way out of my level of expertise. So I'll just rely on the little thumbs up or the little thumbs down and hope it gets me more of the things that I like to watch. And at least with last night's thumbs up, it appears to be working. It certainly cannot hurt to try.

18:06SPEAKER_00:Oh, and one more thing. Watch the credits. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but I noticed on the timer, I was watching it on my laptop. I noticed they finished it and it had about four minutes left. And I'm thinking, what are they going to do with the credits? So watch the credits. It's really kind of cool. You know what I mean when you get there. Let's just say it's very, it has a very independent filmmaker touch to it. So it gave me a good laugh, and I think it might give you a good laugh.

18:35SPEAKER_00:At least a smile, maybe. I don't know. Tell me what you think. So if you watch off-grid living, do me a favor, and I definitely want to hear what you think. What did I get right? What did I get wrong? What would you have done differently? Practical prep podcast at gmail.com. I'm on the Twitter at prep underscore podcast. And if you know of another documentary or film out there that treats this subject honestly, the grounded stuff, send it my way.

19:03SPEAKER_00:I am always looking for new stuff to watch, audiobooks, always listening to new stuff to listen to because I love to keep learning. All right, folks, as usual, thank you so much for stopping by. I really do appreciate it. I know I owe you episode 17 for Lone Man on the Ridge. That is set for Sunday or Monday. And then I am going to go back this evening and take more notes on the little short movie that I was watching earlier today. All right, folks, thanks again so much.

19:37SPEAKER_00:I really do appreciate it. And as always, please be careful out there. Take care of one another. And until next time.