You need to be building shelves in your brain and you need to start with foundations and frameworks.
Welcome back to another T-Rex Talk. Today we're going to be talking about the building blocks of various skills and knowledge and things like that.
This is kind of a follow-up in some ways to last episode, which was a conversation with Dr. Phil Kaiser about rights, where rights come from.
Both rights as they are described in the Bible and rights that are enumerated in the United States Bill of Rights and Constitution.
And there's obviously a lot of overlap in those two different documents.
If you listen to the episode, you get it.
But some people were curious as to why we're spending so much time on this particular topic,
when T-Rex is primarily a gun-related shooting sort of company.
I mean, technically our motto is equipping serious citizens.
So we want to equip people with more things than just shooting skills and shooting equipment.
And I've spent a lot of time thinking about the frameworks that we want to equip people with,
because it isn't all just physical equipment.
It isn't even all just necessarily education, but it is a way of understanding things and building up these fundamentals that you can then later build on.
And this is something we talk about quite a bit at T-Rex as regards to shooting.
We talk about shooting fundamentals quite a bit.
Breaking down the building blocks of shooting so that you can focus on one area and really master it.
And those are the building blocks, the foundations that you can build on as you progress into other stuff.
Once you have mastered, say, your grip or your draw or reloads or, say, trigger discipline and sight-aligned,
but then you can put all of those fundamentals together and actually use those to do other stuff.
It's very simple, very straightforward, very well-trot ground for most of us.
But this concept can be applied to a lot of other stuff besides shooting.
And this is why we have been expanding into different areas of things at T-Rex arms.
Both different areas of physical products, a lot of stuff beyond holsters in the T-Rex shop nowadays,
and a lot of different kinds of content on the T-Rex Instagram and T-Rex YouTube channel
and T-Rex newsletter than just shooting.
And as we brought on the new stuff and wanted to learn about new skills,
we've oftentimes broken things down into those basics.
The fundamentals and the frameworks that we can build on.
Now, at the same time, I will confess to you that oftentimes I don't do that.
I actually dive right into the deep end and it doesn't go super well.
You can't actually reverse engineer the fundamentals and those basic building blocks
when you're doing something super complicated and advanced.
Now, there is sometimes value in diving into the deep end because what you can reverse engineer sometimes
is which building blocks you don't have.
So, for example, if you were to go and shoot any kind of competition, three gun, two gun pistol, whatever,
you would not be able to on the fly work out the fundamentals that you need,
master them, combine them and continue on.
You have a very limited amount of time.
You're under the gun.
There is pressure and you got to do a bunch of stuff at once.
But what you can do pretty easily once you do that, and I highly advise this,
you can see, ah, these are the building blocks that I don't have.
This is what my accuracy was.
Clearly, I need to work on these things.
I lost a bunch of time and I reloads.
That's a building block that I need to work on.
So, there is value in jumping straight into the deep end to see which building blocks you don't have.
Then you get back to the drawing board and you work on those.
But even that requires that you have some level of framework.
You actually understand how to define those blocks in some ways and work backwards from what you were trying to achieve.
And this goes even beyond what we're trying to do here at T-Rex.
I think about this a lot when it comes to the education of my kids.
How do you and I talk about this quite a bit?
We're trying to give our kids more frameworks than anything else.
My concept of teaching and learning stuff has changed over the years as I have, you know, learned stuff.
And I have this sort of visual picture of building shelves in my brain.
I also have this visual picture in my brain of me building shelves in my brain.
But this idea that I need context so I can create the shelves in my brain so that as I learn facts,
I know where to put them in my brain so that it's organized and I can actually, you know, have that framework.
I can learn a fact and determine whether or not it's sort of a fundamental based on the other facts they already have in my brain
and I already have a shelf to put it on, probably.
A lot of this is thanks to my parents working very hard to give me lots of context.
And a lot of it is stuff that I have learned from wiser older people over the years who have explained to me how things work.
And oftentimes that has stuck with me a lot better than just stuff reading in a book.
I actually don't learn super well from reading.
But if I'm reading about something that I've already tried to do or already had explained to me or already attempted,
I already have some shelves in my brain to put the stuff that I'm reading and then it just gets organized and actionable a lot better.
So when it comes to our own kids, we talk about the fact that even though they all have very different learning styles
and not all of them can read yet, providing context and fundamentals to them are very, very important
because that framework of how to think about stuff is really helpful.
And this isn't just something that I have tried to figure out by examining my own learning style or talking about my own kids.
This is something that I have talked about with a lot of different people.
People who train folks here at T-Rex, people who have trained folks in other capacities and other companies,
people who are training older kids.
And these fundamentals and the ability to determine what fundamentals are so we can focus on those
and build strong foundations is I think really, really key.
We all know that when it comes to shooting and I think that there's ways where we can focus our efforts on some other important skill sets.
I'm just going to throw a few of them out.
These are really, really basic things, but I think they are really important.
One of them is technology.
You live in a world that is increasingly shaped by technology.
It's inescapable that you live in a world that is increasingly digital.
The information that people use to gather information and make decisions is increasingly digital.
Whether those people are policy makers or whether those people are just regular folks on the street.
Your everyday average Joe spends a lot more time in the digital world now than five or ten years ago.
It has a far greater effect on his life.
And the things that control his life, like banks and politics and telecommunications stuff like that, that's all digital.
So it's kind of unavoidable at this point.
You must have some level of fundamental understanding of how computer-y things work.
I don't even know exactly how to categorize this.
I don't even know how to tell you how to start.
I don't know what the bare minimum should be.
But in general, this is something that you should be more knowledgeable about and be more familiar with.
You should start building some shelves in your brain that help you understand computer stuff.
And the more stuff that you know, the more stuff that you understand, the easier it's going to be for you to intuit other stuff.
I was very fortunate in that I grew up at the very beginning of the Internet revolution.
And I wasn't super involved in it.
But because I was doing video production work, we had computers.
Because I had computers, I had to learn some basics.
And because I learned those basics, there's a lot more technological development happening today that just kind of makes sense.
Or at least I know how to research it.
Or understand the frameworks that it is built on.
And in this increasingly digital world, where the tools of both liberty and oppression and everything in between run on computers,
I think this is kind of important.
And I remember thinking this about ten years ago.
When we had the Patriot Act and mass surveillance starting, the level of understanding that people actually had
when it came to mass surveillance was extremely low.
I had a number of conversations with people who were very conservative and wanted a small government.
But they were really not troubled by the Patriot Act or the way the Patriot Act was being used,
because their actual data wasn't being spied upon.
It was only the metadata.
They'd heard various talking heads talk about data versus metadata, and they decided that metadata was not really important.
It wasn't really private information.
It wasn't really what mattered.
And so it didn't really matter that the government was taking it and just kind of having all of it.
But if you understand a little bit about computers, you understand that metadata is actually really, really important.
In fact, if you want to grab a huge amount of context and understanding of an issue, the metadata is often far,
far more important than the data itself.
And in many ways, if you want to misuse information, the metadata is far more useful than the data.
You might be having a totally above board completely innocent conversation.
And you would be able to prove that if you had the entire data of the conversation.
But if all you have is the metadata, you only have, let's say, circumstantial evidence that you're doing something that could potentially be up to no good.
There's actually a lot of danger in all of your metadata being collected and assumptions being made on it.
And it was really obvious in the early 2000s that people did not understand this concept.
And today, there are incredible data analytics tools and machine learning and AI things that are happening
that are going to have a massive impact on what your data and your metadata actually can accomplish.
And that's why I think it's important that you have at least a basic understanding of some of these fundamentals.
So that when you read articles about machine learning or AI, you listen to podcasts about the Restrict Act
and some of the things that it might accomplish, you'll be able to intuit a little bit of what the impact for these things might be.
I realize that AI is a black box. Nobody really understands what's going on inside.
Nobody really understands what the ramifications of it are.
But you could be, you know, maybe just a little bit more prepared, a little bit more informed.
Build some shelves on your brain for the facts as they emerge.
And I think that's going to be a pretty big deal.
And none of us really want to be computer nerds. We don't really want to specialize in any of this stuff.
But as the power of these tools grows and whether they're going to be used against you or they're going to be tools that you are going to need to use to protect and defend yourself
and control your own digital life and destiny a little bit.
Yeah, it's worth, it's probably worth putting some time into.
Another area where you must have a basic understanding of the fundamentals is money and economics.
Now when I was a kid, my parents had a book called Biblical Economics in Comics, which was written by a guy named Vic Lachman.
This book written in the mid 80s. And this was a phenomenal book for me to grow up reading.
It's ridiculously simple, especially at the beginning.
It's a cartoon book about mice, building economies, little villages and towns.
And then the very beginning is just the division of labor.
Mouse number one starts building tools and is able to trade those to mouse number two who is a farmer so that mouse number two is able to produce more and pay mouse number one for better tools, etc.
But it gets increasingly large and deals with increasingly complicated economic issues in this really accessible cartoon style with these little mice.
And then eventually there is a whole mouse country that is running and they're developing various economic policies regarding taxes.
And then they have tariffs and things because there is a country of cats that's on the other side of the water.
And a lot of really solid principles get explored in this really simple book.
And at the very beginning of my time reading this book, I was extremely young.
I didn't understand all that stuff, but I was reading the stories of these mice and these cats.
And then as I got older, I got to have a little bit more insight into the economic concepts that we're being talked about.
This is a book that built a lot of shelves in my brain.
This is a book that created a lot of framework for future economic stuff that I would study.
And it prepared me for a lot of economic arguments that I would come across later as I talked to people on that relatively new internet.
And I would be able to say, hang on a second, that doesn't gel with how I know that money works.
That doesn't gel with how this works.
I've already read a book that explains why Vandals destroying property forcing people to spend money doesn't actually create wealth and value inside of the economy.
I already know the fundamentals here.
And that was an incredibly useful thing.
So that's a book recommendation, but it's also just an area where you need to be building some fundamentals.
And now my kids are reading that book.
The kids who can read the words, the kids who cannot read, look at the pictures.
I think it puts us in a much better place to have conversations about the economic stuff that's going on today.
Although I will point out America's economic system is so big, so overgrown, so complicated, so full of unequal weights and measures and things like that.
The fundamentals may not actually help you understand where things are today, but you can understand that they are way out of whack.
Which brings me to another point, which is theology.
Ultimately, I believe that God has created the reality that we live in and a bunch of rules for that reality.
Some of these are physical laws like gravity, but there's a bunch of other laws that are extremely important.
And that book, and that book, Biblical Economics and Comics, the title kind of gives away the fact that it gets its economic model from Scripture.
And this idea that there is a moral framework, a pre-existing moral framework that we need to understand in order to do things properly, is one that I agree with wholeheartedly.
And whether or not you agree with me that the Bible is the transcendent Word of God that provides this to us, it is nevertheless the standard by which
Western civilization has used, the standard that the founders used when they built the Constitution of this country,
and they built the Constitution based on the idea that we were going to continue on using the Bible as that moral framework.
And Scripture itself does a wonderful job of boiling things down to really simple foundational principles and then building on those.
The Ten Commandments are really simple and easy, and even those can be boiled down to two very distinct principles.
Loving the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul, that's the first table of the law, and loving your neighbor as yourself is the second table of the law.
And then there are case laws that go into how you apply all of the different Ten Commandments in different situations.
And building these kinds of frameworks or building on these kinds of frameworks allows you to not only have a place to put organized information so that it's applicable and useful,
but it also helps you to be consistent. And consistency really, really matters.
And it's really, really hard to do without that framework, without that system.
I personally know a number of people, and by the way, these are friends, these are acquaintances, these are not made up straw men.
These are people that I know and love and appreciate who are very inconsistent when it comes to a lot of issues.
For example, I know people who believe that it is morally okay to kill babies in the womb, but it is not okay to kill convicted murderers who are on death row.
But it is okay to kill attempting murderers in self-defense.
They believe these three facts vary distinctly and independently and very deeply.
But this is not based on a consistent standard.
This is basically taking the issue of abortion, the issue of capital punishment, and the issue of self-defense and treating them as completely disconnected, independent things.
And the guiding force for coming to these conclusions is one of kind of pragmatic convenience, not a basic core principle,
which means that consistency and systematic thinking is going to be really, really hard for these folks.
And it's also going to take them someplace that is morally wrong, at least part of the time.
The biblical principle of sanctity of life speaks to issues of abortion, issues of capital punishment, and issues of self-defense.
Going back to that fundamental gives you something that is really helpful in maintaining a consistent worldview and answers to some really difficult questions in a consistent and systematic way.
If the right to life is your defense of the doctrine of self-defense, you also need to apply that to other areas of life and death.
You can take these core fundamental truths and use them to check your arguments to see if you are being consistent and systematic, or if you are headed down some other track.
And it can be really helpful to work your way backwards from some of your conclusions to see if they take you to a consistent place.
Why is it okay to kill people who haven't murdered you yet but are trying to but not okay to kill murderers who have actually taken human life?
If human life is precious, if it is precious in the sight of God and of man, now you have a building block that you can use to determine other factors.
What is justice? Starting with the sanctity of life.
What is the judicious course of action when confronting potential abortion?
What is the judicious course of action when confronting a convicted murderer?
What is the judicious course of action when confronted with someone who is attempting murder, something who is trying to take away someone's life?
Now things become a lot clearer.
And, just like the shooting example from before, this isn't something that you're going to be able to reverse engineer in the moment.
A really complicated bio ethical question is not going to be the thing that leads you to a source of truth necessarily.
It's going to be the thing that lets you reverse engineer the building blocks that you don't have.
The study that you have to go and do to build a framework so that you can systematically move forwards.
So, to tie everything together, let's talk a little bit about shooting skills.
Obviously, you need to learn the fundamentals so that you are able to build on those to be a better shooter.
But, kind of before that, you've got to build some frameworks and fundamentals when it comes to reality and the world around you
so that you even know which is a good gun to pick.
Is it actually okay for guns to be made out of plastic?
Is there some data that you could use to determine whether or not this model or that model is actually going to be acceptable and dependable?
And prior to that, you've got to build a little bit of a framework economically so that you know what is going to be the best bang for your buck.
If it is, a $5,000 Luego Alien Pistol, is that something that you can actually afford given the financial resources that you personally, presently have?
And then even underlying all of that is this issue of when do you shoot?
How important is it that you actually have the ability to defend life in the kind of situations where you would need this firearm?
Knowing how that moral framework works so that you know when to use the lethal force.
That is a really key, deep underlying fundamental.
Which is why at T-Rex, as we discuss equipping serious citizens, we're going to keep coming back to that one.
Yes, we're going to spend a lot of time on shooting mechanics.
Yes, we're going to spend a lot of time on those physical realities that surround making product and knowing which one is best and which one is the best for our customers.
Yes, we're going to try to make some financial decisions so T-Rex stays in business but this core underlying moral framework is really, really important and key.
And so we're going to keep working on this, not just as content for you guys but because we need it ourselves individually, personally, all the time.
And that's the homework assignment for me as well as for you.
I haven't had a homework assignment in a while but I want you to think about some of the basic frameworks that you have that guide your thinking.
What are some of the shelves that you already have in your brain that you use to organize facts and intuit stuff about things that you don't know and kind of help you organize the things that you are learning and are those frameworks set up systematically?
Do those foundations actually hold weight? Do you have all the building blocks that you need to build from the bottom all the way up to the top?
There's a lot to consider so that's a pretty significant homework assignment I admit.
The good news is that those building blocks are things that you can work on in small, easy pieces and the better you organize those shelves at the beginning, the simpler and easier it is to organize and stack stuff up as you go.
Ask yourself some really hard whys about things that you already presupposed, things that you already assumed, things that you've already started to build upon and see if those foundations are there.
See if there's a few pieces that you're missing and then figure out how you can fill those in.
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