Posted: 7/23/2025 5:44:28 PM EDT
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I recently got a new - and well reviewed - survival and prepping book, and got some decent ideas and opinions from it. BUT, then came to section on home security and the author advised getting a KelTec shotgun because the high capacity and short length makes it the “perfect HD firearm”. His opinion spiraled after that nugget of information. What’s some of the worst EXPERT ADVICE you’ve seen. |
why, oh why GOD WAS I BORN IN CALIFORNIA..
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If you think it's bad now, just wait until AI really starts rocking and rolling. It's already increased the noise ratio to unreal levels, but in a year or two? whooboy. Not to mention the Youtube channels with "survival" info. I'm waiting until those get regurgitated by AI content. That'll be entertaining also. |
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Most of the newer "prepper" books written past about 2010 are absolute trash. Find you some old skewl stuff like "Live off the land in the city and country", "Tappan on Survival" and Bruce Claytons nuclear book- IIRC Surviving doomsday. In a fit of stupidity... I bought a more recent book on "building bunkers", what an absolute pile of prepper trash. Clearly the guy has zero experience actually doing any of this. Laced with all this crazy stuff like "this item goes in bin #7 in storage area 3" of his NON EXISTENT shelter he admits not having... That's OCD to the clinical level and it's going to crush him if he (probably never will) ever builds his dream bunker and realizes his bunker gets mold and moisture in there (he was certain it wouldn't). |
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The smarter you get on the subject, the more this is gonna happen to you. You have some people out there that are true experts, some that have great ideas on specific things, and other folks who are just excited to share the little they know. I've found that finding the true experts is the fastest way to improve your knowledge/skill. As always testing things out for yourself is gonna be important to verify. |
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| I dont read survival guides. I read a blog from some guy who lived through the siege of Sarajevo. To me that was far more useful than anything else because it was a person's first hand real world experience. I would read books from people like that, if there are any. |
why, oh why GOD WAS I BORN IN CALIFORNIA..
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Originally Posted By WantGrape: I dont read survival guides. I read a blog from some guy who lived through the siege of Sarajevo. To me that was far more useful than anything else because it was a person's first hand real world experience. I would read books from people like that, if there are any. |
RIP Tamurand a damn fine Rhodesian Ridgeback 02-09-14
RIP Kaya, an equally fine Yellow Lab 06-08-2015
RIP Millie the Destroyer, AKA ShitTrumpet, WCCorgi 12-21-2015
NORCAL CALLSIGN: YODEL
Happy to be in ALASKA!
RIP Kaya, an equally fine Yellow Lab 06-08-2015
RIP Millie the Destroyer, AKA ShitTrumpet, WCCorgi 12-21-2015
NORCAL CALLSIGN: YODEL
Happy to be in ALASKA!
|
The most useful information for survival I received was from my grandfathers. However I did get a survival guide back in the late 80’s when I attended a seminar with the Louisiana Wild Life and fisheries and it has so much great information about survival and self rescue. It is full of instructions and diagrams and sketches. A lot of the instructors and Survival guides now days want it to be complicated so they can be “different or better” than the other guys. |
Gonads & Strife
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For outdoor survival books I go straight to the chapter on fire and immediately I will know if the author is full of it or not. Most just regurgitate what others have done as there is very little that is new -- pretty much everything is repackaged. I pay particular attention to the context too -- "The Cherokee used this plant for.." vs "The Cherokee used this plant for xyz, and in my experience..." There are some real practitioners out there, but way more posers who take information from others and pass it as their own. YouTube is the worst too for a host of reasons. |
why, oh why GOD WAS I BORN IN CALIFORNIA..
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Gotta say that I pay quite a bit more attention to older "survival" books. The stuff that was regular knowledge for outdoorsmen, back when. Now it's termed "bushcraft", which I guess is sexier sounding and great for marketing. Kochanski. Brown. Colin Fletcher. Kephart. Old Boy's Life magazines. Local and regional ethnographic stuff. Talk to homeless folks. Discuss stuff with SERE and survival instructors. Backwoodsman magazine (the older ones), and their print days are over I guess since they can't afford it anymore. But that just gets you started. Get out there and freeze your ass off for a few nights, stay wet for days, get cold or hot, run out of water, sleep on hard ground, get the shits, have that axe nail your shin when it glances off, and on and on. Nothing beats getting out there and doing. Look to the old stuff. More betterer. |
RIP Tamurand a damn fine Rhodesian Ridgeback 02-09-14
RIP Kaya, an equally fine Yellow Lab 06-08-2015
RIP Millie the Destroyer, AKA ShitTrumpet, WCCorgi 12-21-2015
NORCAL CALLSIGN: YODEL
Happy to be in ALASKA!
RIP Kaya, an equally fine Yellow Lab 06-08-2015
RIP Millie the Destroyer, AKA ShitTrumpet, WCCorgi 12-21-2015
NORCAL CALLSIGN: YODEL
Happy to be in ALASKA!
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Originally Posted By czechsix: Selco wrote a book or two on that Originally Posted By czechsix: Originally Posted By WantGrape: I dont read survival guides. I read a blog from some guy who lived through the siege of Sarajevo. To me that was far more useful than anything else because it was a person's first hand real world experience. I would read books from people like that, if there are any. Interesting, I will have to check them out. |
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I think every area of Youtube is like this. I'm an amateur sawyer on the side, and I can't tell you the number of people who purchase a new sawmill, start a youtube channel, and proceed to "teach" you how to run a sawmill business starting with their first log........... Everyone wants their 5 minutes of fame. Doc |
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I haven't read a survival book- aside from Army and USMC publications- since I bought Lofty Wiseman's SAS Survival Guide, which is worthwhile. Not a survival guide per se, but following any of the advice in Che Guevara's seminal work Guerrilla Warfare is a good way to arrive at a point where one no longer needs to be concerned with survival. Seriously, it's a trash book. |
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"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." -H.L. Mencken
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Originally Posted By Ambridge77: Traveling in the 3rd world advice. If I listened to it, I would have had a boring, generic tourist vacation.  Hahahaha, not just adivce from guides. According to the NSA, our trip to Costa Rica pretty much put us at risk of being robbed, taken hostage, left for dead in the jungle, and would compromise national security  We had a great time and were mostly off the beaten path For most "survival guides", the one area they gloss over is security or self-defense and they often whitewash their recommendations mostly because a lot of readers don't have firearms or live in areas where defending one's self is more dangerous than just suffering an attack from a perp.  The few I've read often go with best case and more restrictive case scenarios; at least they're realistic. Don't gaslight my ass that post-SHTF situations can ignore security or defense of self/home and expect a successful strategy of surviving. What annoys me the most are the more modern guides that are just regurgitation of open-source military manuals. From a purely "outdoors survival" perspective, there some decent authors, but their stuff has been out there for decades. What I haven't really seen is updates to E&E type survival with respect to drones, thermal, night vision, etc. both use and counter-tactics. Youtube (yeah, not the best source) is often where such cutting edge TTPs are being shared if know the more reputable sources. ROCK6 |
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" - Thomas Jefferson
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Tangent to the survival community is the homestead community. While there’s a lot of noise there, there is also a lot of people actually doing and learning. If you think of homesteading as the stable long term survival, it makes some sense. It’s more than just acceptable to the loopy white women farmers market crowd, it’s practically an addiction. The point is there are a ton of local homestead groups, not so much for the survival prepper groups. Local homestead groups meet regularly and are active doing classes like butchering chickens or other animals, etc. I did a class on solar and another on water catchment. The local prepper group meets once a month at the Golden Corral. lol. You do have to filter out some wackadoo stuff but overall it’s a lot more experience based |
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Most Americans aren’t living in a survival situation and probably never have. Lots of Americans are living a homesteading lifestyle and doing and learning new things. Lessons learned from homesteading are often applicable to survival/prepping. Even basic survival books and videos are still useful. The issue is, as you gain knowledge the basic stuff becomes….basic. No kidding. Every topic in the world is like that. I’ve worked on cars for years. Buddy of mine wants to learn. He asks a lot of very basic questions. No kidding….he doesn’t know a lot but is learning. I would have asked those same questions once upon a time. That’s a problem on forums. Long term posters like to talk down to and ridicule newbies who are asking basic questions because they consider themselves “experts” and forum “celebrities”. I have put down many books and stopped watching many videos because they failed to maintain my interest. Doesn’t mean they aren’t useful to someone…..it’s just that they aren’t useful enough for me to maintain my attention. |
"It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things."
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
why, oh why GOD WAS I BORN IN CALIFORNIA..
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Originally Posted By ROCK6: ... Youtube (yeah, not the best source) is often where such cutting edge TTPs are being shared if know the more reputable sources. ROCK6 |
RIP Tamurand a damn fine Rhodesian Ridgeback 02-09-14
RIP Kaya, an equally fine Yellow Lab 06-08-2015
RIP Millie the Destroyer, AKA ShitTrumpet, WCCorgi 12-21-2015
NORCAL CALLSIGN: YODEL
Happy to be in ALASKA!
RIP Kaya, an equally fine Yellow Lab 06-08-2015
RIP Millie the Destroyer, AKA ShitTrumpet, WCCorgi 12-21-2015
NORCAL CALLSIGN: YODEL
Happy to be in ALASKA!
|
Originally Posted By gixxer_sixxer: I recently got a new - and well reviewed - survival and prepping book, and got some decent ideas and opinions from it. BUT, then came to section on home security and the author advised getting a KelTec shotgun because the high capacity and short length makes it the “perfect HD firearm”. His opinion spiraled after that nugget of information. What’s some of the worst EXPERT ADVICE you’ve seen. Bad advise is never as bad as BAD writing. Overwhelmingly the “authors” of survival/prepping books can’t write to save their lives, so the merits of what they’re trying to advise you on gets lost just trying to decipher their, ah, …. word salads. I mean,the basic stuff: proper sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. |
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Originally Posted By Nick_Adams: Bad advise is never as bad as BAD writing. Overwhelmingly the “authors” of survival/prepping books can’t write to save their lives, so the merits of what they’re trying to advise you on gets lost just trying to decipher their, ah, …. word salads. I mean,the basic stuff: proper sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Originally Posted By Nick_Adams: Originally Posted By gixxer_sixxer: I recently got a new - and well reviewed - survival and prepping book, and got some decent ideas and opinions from it. BUT, then came to section on home security and the author advised getting a KelTec shotgun because the high capacity and short length makes it the “perfect HD firearm”. His opinion spiraled after that nugget of information. What’s some of the worst EXPERT ADVICE you’ve seen. Bad advise is never as bad as BAD writing. Overwhelmingly the “authors” of survival/prepping books can’t write to save their lives, so the merits of what they’re trying to advise you on gets lost just trying to decipher their, ah, …. word salads. I mean,the basic stuff: proper sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Bad advice is different from a difference of opinion. And, if you notice on this board, there are lots of people who have very strong opinions about firearms. OP says he got some value out of this book until he got to something firearms related he disagreed with and then all of a sudden the book is bad (I don’t know if the book is bad or not as I don’t know the name of the book and may not have read it if the OP were to post the name of the book). Everyone has an opinion on things. I do too. But, something that I like and prefer might not be ideal for someone else. And, that’s ok. It’s not the exact same thing but…I have the book Patriots. Frankly, it’s a very poorly written book both from a literary standpoint as well as a prepping standpoint. Rawles really isn’t a very good writer…actually he’s a terrible writer. But, if it motivates someone to get started prepping, good for them and glad the book was put to good use. My main complaint with many survival writers is lack of writing about financial preparedness in their preparedness books. I wish that was more common. Good chance you will never use your stored stuff in a survival situation but almost everyone will need financial preps. Posters like @frozenny have been posting financial topics for years and they get little interest usually because financial preparedness isn’t a “cool” topic. Most people on this forum have never needed their stored up stuff but lots of posters on this forum have experienced financial hardships. There are a few posters on ARFCOM when it comes to financial advice, I read and consider what they have to say. I don’t always agree with them but they know a lot more than I do and it’s rare for me not to learn something from their posts….even if I don’t agree 100% of the time. |
"It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things."
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
| Shelter, water, food, defense. 80% of the survival books out there are FOS. The writers obviously have never even camped out overnight... When we ran the Northest Campouts we ran once a month year around in north central PA. Nothing beats experience, like waking up with your boots frozen to the floor of the tent. 14 below zero.... you learn quickly. Inserting one Walmart 40* sleeping bag into another will keep you warm down to near zero. Draping an old OD parachute canopy over a tent keeps it much warmer. Headlamps are indispensable. I could go on...but you get the idea. |
Another old guy
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They’re a lot like diet books. Everybody is trying to have a twist that makes them unique and better, and invalidates what the other guys say. Usually that “twist” is nonsense, if you give it any scrutiny. Common sense, talking to non-zealots with experience, and doing it yourself to find out what works beats all. I’ve seen “survival guides” that sounded like the authors had never spent more than a weekend not sleeping in a bed in the air conditioning. |
Not fly enough to be halal....
| sadly, over the summer, this content has gone from humorously bad to simply unconsumable with it now being 90+% AI generated. "Hey chatGPT, make me a 45 min long video on how to survive. be sure to narrate it in the monotone AI voice. Give it a scary click-bait title." |
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Originally Posted By taliv: sadly, over the summer, this content has gone from humorously bad to simply unconsumable with it now being 90+% AI generated. "Hey chatGPT, make me a 45 min long video on how to survive. be sure to narrate it in the monotone AI voice. Give it a scary click-bait title." Are you talking about videos on YouTube? There are many good channels on YouTube with good stuff but no one channel with everything. Some channels are “gear queer” channels. There is probably far better survival videos on YouTube on homesteading type channels vs actual survival channels. The issue with survival channels on YouTube (and forums like this one) is they tend to be all doom and gloom. “The collapse is coming”, “Russia is going to nuke the world”, The dollar is going to disappear” etc. Most of the homesteading type channels are less doom and gloom and more practical info….which also works well in survival type situations. |
"It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things."
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
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Originally Posted By Lowdown3: Most of the newer "prepper" books written past about 2010 are absolute trash. Find you some old skewl stuff like "Live off the land in the city and country", "Tappan on Survival" and Bruce Claytons nuclear book- IIRC Surviving doomsday. In a fit of stupidity... I bought a more recent book on "building bunkers", what an absolute pile of prepper trash. Clearly the guy has zero experience actually doing any of this. Laced with all this crazy stuff like "this item goes in bin #7 in storage area 3" of his NON EXISTENT shelter he admits not having... That's OCD to the clinical level and it's going to crush him if he (probably never will) ever builds his dream bunker and realizes his bunker gets mold and moisture in there (he was certain it wouldn't). Agree that the newer stuff is trash and looking for books by Old School ‘survival’ authors like Tappan is the way. Ragnar Benson’s books are also good if you can find them. Maybe eBay? |
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Originally Posted By Nick_Adams: Agree that the newer stuff is trash and looking for books by Old School ‘survival’ authors like Tappan is the way. Ragnar Benson’s books are also good if you can find them. Maybe eBay? Agree on Ragnar Benson. I think I own most of his books. He was a doomer as well and most of his predictions have never come true. But, based on his writings, he had a lot of practical experience so his recommendations, while a bit dated, are still solid |
"It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things."
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
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Originally Posted By ColtRifle: Are you talking about videos on YouTube? There are many good channels on YouTube with good stuff but no one channel with everything. Some channels are “gear queer” channels. There is probably far better survival videos on YouTube on homesteading type channels vs actual survival channels. The issue with survival channels on YouTube (and forums like this one) is they tend to be all doom and gloom. “The collapse is coming”, “Russia is going to nuke the world”, The dollar is going to disappear” etc. Most of the homesteading type channels are less doom and gloom and more practical info….which also works well in survival type situations. Names or links? Any particularly good episodes? |
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The guy who wrote "The Owner Built Home" (and series of related books) died during the collapse of his self-designed dwelling. Link |
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Originally Posted By ColtRifle: Agree on Ragnar Benson. I think I own most of his books. He was a doomer as well and most of his predictions have never come true. But, based on his writings, he had a lot of practical experience so his recommendations, while a bit dated, are still solid Thought I had read 95% or more of Ragnar's books, never saw any reference to dates or "predictions" of any kind. Would love to see a pic of one of Benson's books with a date set prediction, maybe I missed it!!! The 1970's survivalist literature/books like Howard Ruff's were full of actual predictions, things like "to be ready for the economic collapse that will most certainly happen by December of 1980". Or Steve Quayle and James Lloyd's "prophecy" that the US "will be nuked by July 4th, 1996". THOSE were predictions. Just talking about preparedness for certain events is NOT a "prediction" it's called being well rounded in preparedness and being willing to look at various scenarios instead of being a pollyanna who just wants to avoid thinking about certain scenarios. Akin to the "if a nuke comes I want to be right under it" dumb shit... versus actually planning and preparing for that as a possible scenario. |
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IMO, there's information to be gathered from all sources whether book or screen, just have to use your best judgment on vetting it and the real world applications. Some people are indeed best left as examples of what not to do. That being said, screw AI. If I start watching or reading an article that's obviously AI'd, it gets closed. I'm just not supporting it. |