How Big is Your Community?

How big is your community and how small a disaster are you prepared for? That's today's topic. Welcome back to TxTalk. My name is Isaac Botkin and this is what we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking about what your community actually is, some different concepts for community. We're going to be talking about disaster preparedness and management, maybe in some smaller terms than we're used to. And I'm going to reveal to you one of the deep, dark, ulterior motives behind starting T-Rex arms, which I don't know if we've talked about publicly before. I'm sure it's come up in live streams here or there. But that's what we will be covering. And I'm going to be bringing all this together basically around something that happened over the weekend. All of this thought and this conversation that we've had internally in the company brought about by something that happened this past weekend. Now, one of the things that I think is really good about the firearms community overall, using the word community there, is that there is a lot of conversation about community. But we need to figure out what we're actually talking about. I think that it is great that this is a conversation that's been going on for a while. I don't want to take anything away from that. I think it's great that as Gun Culture 1.0 has become Gun Culture 2.0 and is becoming Gun Culture 3.0, there's been a focus, a shift away from just personal defense, which is important, but towards public defense as well, which is also important. So there's been a lot more conversation about the defense of others, as well as personal private self-defense. And there's a larger, proper community that kind of overlaps the gun community. And there's been, for many, many years, a focus on being prepared for difficulties and disasters. Again, I think this is great. I don't want to take away from the concept of preparedness at all. I just want to expand that a little bit and focus on smaller disasters. So the opposite of expansion, I guess. Because when the gun company usually talks about disaster preparedness, we're talking about total collapse, zombie apocalypse, robot overlords, alien invasions, complete mad maxification of the entire world. And that's all well and good, but there's a lot of bad stuff that happens on a much smaller scale that we should be ready for. And of course, you know this T-Rex cell stuff that's going to be a lot more useful in a car accident on the side of the road, say, than like intergalactic war for the fate of the planet. But I think that we all know that what we're thinking about and training for and learning, researching, experimenting with is for something that is a lot more close to home. And I think that our community needs to be a lot more close to home as well. I know that you are probably watching this podcast or listening to it someplace very, very far from Hickman County. And I really appreciate the fact that you are doing that. And we have the opportunity to use the internet to talk to people literally around the world. We get emails from people in much, much rougher parts of the globe than Tennessee. And they talk about how a lot of this stuff that we sell at T-Rex Arms, a lot of the training that we've discussed, a lot of the things that we are researching and experimenting with now, in the hopes of being able to use it in the future. A lot of the folks in rougher parts of the world, they're using this stuff right now. They're using some of that equipment right now in the kind of situations or scenarios that some of us are thinking about for the future. So I love the fact that there is a global community of people who are talking about personal responsibility, talking about different skills and different skill sets. But I also think that we should not lose our focus on our local communities, who is actually around us both as assets, as allies, but also as people that we're going to need to help. Not just, again, when the robots uprising happens, but when little stuff happens. So let me get to the example from Hickman County last week. It was nothing major. We had a windstorm. Now that Winnie the Pooh is in the public domain, I can say that it was actually a very blustery day. The roof blew off of my shed, the roof blew off of the newspaper office, the Hickman County Times. And it apparently may have damaged one of the larger buildings on the Cinterville Square. These are old brick buildings made in the 1910s, 1920s, depending on which side of the square you're on. And one of the buildings was damaged to the point that it is structurally unsound and unsafe. This happened, I believe, on a Wednesday, engineers came out on a Thursday and said, you got to get everything out of this building. We're closing it down. We're condemning this building. You got to be completely out and we're going to coordinate off on Saturday. And we heard about this particular situation on Thursday. So on Friday morning, when we'd been thinking about it, we got together some of the T-Rex guys and we said, hey, Friday is a pretty slow day for us. We have a box truck and a bunch of people and T-Rex arms stocks things that would be useful for this particular evacuation scenario. Gloves, for example, we recently started carrying gloves at the T-Rex arms store. So I'll just quickly put in a plug for some kinds of gloves and some kinds of colors and some kinds of sizes at treks-arms.com. Go and look at them now. If you are watching this podcast or listening to it in the middle of March when it comes out, he's just way to find those is on the new tab. Otherwise, you can just search for it. It should be pretty straightforward. And our idea was pretty straightforward too. We're going to get a bunch of people who are not super busy on a Friday. We're going to get the box truck. We're going to get some gloves and some other things we're going to drive down to the square. We're going to help unload everything out of the buildings that are about to be cordoned off. Obviously, that would be very helpful for the people who are there. The little old ladies that run the thrift store, all the folks who have stuff at the Hickman County Chamber of Commerce, Bates Law Offices and the things upstairs. There's a bunch of stuff in those buildings that is important to people who are not part of the gun community, but they are nevertheless part of our larger Hickman County community. And in case you're wondering, if I'm bringing this story up so we can pat ourselves on the back because we're able to swoop in and help out, I can tell you right now we were not able to help out. This is part of the lesson. We completely failed to be of assistance to anybody. Because when we showed up on Friday morning, David went down there, started to talk to the folks. The engineers showed up on Friday morning and said, look, we know we said that you had until Saturday to get all of your stuff out, but we've been thinking about it. We're pretty sure that it's too dangerous. The buildings are closed as of right now. So the fact that we spent a long time thinking about the fact that we wanted to help out and how we could help out meant that we did not actually get to help out. An obvious takeaway is that our response time needs to be shorter. We need to be quicker when we hear about situations like this. Opportunities to help other people to be of service to them in a scenario that we had never really thought about before. Yeah, we need to be quicker to actually make that move. We knew that we wanted to do it, but this wasn't something that we'd spent a whole lot of time thinking about. So it took us all Thursday afternoon and evening and summer Friday morning to actually figure out how we wanted to help into what we would do. And that was just a little bit too long. So in addition to, I think all of us needing to think about larger communities, smaller disasters, we also need to move faster. Now, I will admit that helping evacuate a bunch of the clothing out of a small town thrift store is not exactly the sort of thing that the gun community gets really excited about. It doesn't really get our juices flowing. It isn't really the thing that we practice and we train for. And yet, that was the thing that on Friday would have been the most helpful for our community. And not the community of like-minded guys who like to go train in the woods and expand our skillset and get better with radios, but our neighbors, the people that we interact with and live near who are usually the ones most affected by these kinds of difficulties. We had some power outages as a result of the windstorm. And a lot of the folks who are in the larger T-Rex community were fine because we have a lot of tools in our homes. We have a lot of extra supplies. We've thought through what we're going to do and the power is out, etc. It's the people that haven't done that level of preparedness that most need the help. And oftentimes those are the people that, yeah, they're not really as close to our community as they probably should be. And so we're not as quick to be prepared to help them. So I would say that it's really important that we get to know our neighbors and think about this in a bigger way. And T-Rex has been a huge blessing in this regard. As T-Rex has grown and we've hired more people and we've gotten to know their families and their neighbors, I have a much better understanding of what our community looks like in Hickman County than I did even just like five or six years ago. And once you get to know folks and have these kind of relationships, you'll just interact with them more. So that is the thrift store that we shop at. Partly because there's no thrift store in town. In the last 10 years, I've known a huge amount of people inside of that block of building. That's where the pharmacy used to be. One of my brothers lived in the apartments on that side of town shortly after he was married. A friend of mine started a gun business, a gunsmithing business in one of those buildings down there. It's street level. And yeah, Chamber of Commerce, I am good friends with I think three people on the chamber related to one of them. So again, this is our community just as much as say people listening to this podcast. And I think that it is really important that you build those kind of relationships so that you find out about the difficulties and the small disasters like the unstable building, the evacuation. You find out about this stuff because you have relationships and connections with these folks. And then you get prepared to move faster than we did on Friday. I realized that you have a busy life. I also have a pretty busy life. Things are pretty busy around T-Rex. We have a whole bunch of different projects. We're right in the middle of the legislative session. So we have people at the Capitol building right at probably this very minute. Probably haven't left yet. And one of the things that we want to do is this larger community thing. And that really caused us to take our eye off of our actual neighbors. People right down the street from us that had this particular need suddenly. And it was a need that we were fortunately pretty prepared to deal with. We just hadn't thought through how we would react. And it took pretty long to do the thinking. So as you think through the various scenarios that involves banking, collapse, artificial intelligence taking over the entire internet, alien invasion, zombie uprising, etc. Also be thinking about the smaller stuff, the stuff that is close to home. You should be doing some kind of site survey of your community. So you know where the railroad tracks are that trains might come off of. Where the really important electrical stuff is that might fall over. Where some of the people who are most at risk of flooding are. This kind of thing. So that you actually have done a lot of the preparation ahead of time. If we had thought through what it would be like to help out the little old ladies at the thrift store, we would have been able to help them out on Thursday. But that idea gradually trickled in through all of the other competing thoughts and processes slow enough that. Kind of missed the window. But I will say that T-Rex was prepared in other ways. And so I do want to talk about that ulterior motive that I mentioned before. T-Rex exists to equip people to inspire them to educate them and to equip them with physical tools, with education so that they can learn and grow. How to do certain things, hard skills as well as soft skills and some ideological content as well. We want our customers to be better prepared for emergencies. We want our customers to have life saving equipment when their lives are at risk. But we also really like the idea of T-Rex having a warehouse that is full of emergency equipment when Hickman County has emergencies. This is another great argument for decentralized businesses inside of communities as opposed to gigantic global ones. There's economies of scale and efficiencies with gigantic centralized operations. But there's also a lot of value in having decentralized operations, having warehouses full of useful equipment, food supplies, etc. In smaller communities, potentially, stuff happens. If trains get derailed or windstorms destroy buildings or bridges get washed away in the flooding, you have a lot of stuff locally. You have those supplies, even for people who didn't prepare for that sort of situation because they aren't part of your Instagram gun community or they're not part of your online prep community. So these are the takeaways and this is the homework assignment for everybody. We need to expand our view of community to a smaller geographic area. More people closer to you. And I think we need to expand our idea of disasters to things that are smaller incidents that are more likely to happen. And once we do that and really think through the ramifications of that, then we can do the important thing, which is shorten our response time. Be faster at coming to the aid of those folks. That's the homework assignment. Start thinking through that and start thinking through some of the aspects of community and disaster preparedness so that you are better equipped. Not just for the situations that affect you, not just for the situations that affect your very like-minded friends in your squad. But your neighbors around you who run the thrift store. And someday are going to be a situation where they need to get that stuff out of there. At the end of the day, it's not worth a lot, but it's worth a lot to them. And being able to move from one side of the square to the other and continue to do the business that they're doing is something that matters to them. Which means that being able to help them do that is a very important thing for those of you that want to strengthen your community and be there for other people. And this is a lesson that I need to learn as much as anybody, so I hope that you learn from our failure over the weekend to be better prepared for these things. But we can, I believe, really get better at this pretty easily. And the effects of that are going to be huge for a lot of people. I know the tendency, especially considering that this podcast goes out to a wide group of not very many people on the internet who are extremely like-minded about very specific things. As great as that is, and as much as I appreciate you listening, we need to be focusing a little bit more on our geographical area and people who are not necessarily like-minded. That is going to have a significant cultural impact helping us accomplish the things that we want to, but it's also the right thing to do. Thanks for watching! Thanks for watching! Thanks for watching!