The Josh Innes Show - Random Sunday Musings Part 1

Episode Date: March 1, 2026

I'll be honest...I just turned on the mic and started talking. 45 mins later, I had a podcast. First off, let's get into things I get in trouble for saying on the radio in Detroit. Somehow, this leads to thoughts on kids learning how to shoot guns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to March. Can we get some listeners? Can we get some fucking downloads? Can we get this thing cooking? And look, a lot of that's on me to get more people to listen and to pay attention. So I get that. I respect that. It is what it is.

Cool. Fine. But let's get this thing smoking, man. Let's get it going. Let's get people listening. And a lot of times I find myself not knowing which direction to go with this thing. Like sometimes a little bit more political or social, whatever. Sometimes I'm talking about dumb.

shit. And I think people like that. I think people get what I'm doing. I think people are okay with what I'm doing. I think, you know, the reality is, and I'm not against sports or anything, but like, if I'm going to do this on a daily basis, there's just not a lot of sports shit that's going to occupy my brain. Because it's like, what the fuck? We got the combine. It's just not, it's not something I'm interested in, right? So, and I understand that niches make riches when it comes to podcast you need to kind of narrow down what you talk about on a podcast and I get that and maybe that's why this thing will never you know blow up and be a huge moneymaker for me although you know there have been some really good months for it financially but um we talk about this a lot

I just don't I don't hammer out enough I do a lot of content for it but I don't do enough social for it I don't post enough links to it and that's on me and I get that that's on me and that's kind of part of fucking life but there are days like let's put this first of all Let's play a couple commercials and let's get into some stuff. There are a lot of days when I'm on radio and my boss here tells me to not dive into political shit. And by the way, when I say political shit, I'm not getting on the radio or on a podcast trying to be like some sort of pundit for any particular group. But I think that there are stories that are interesting. And at times, they are stories that lean into a political thing.

But that's the kind of shit that get people interacting, right? Like, where I'm struggling is getting people to interact with what we're doing on the radio, getting people to call, getting people to text, getting people engaged in what we're doing, getting people wanting to engage with what we're doing. And my boss will say, you know, there's not enough callers on the air. I'm like, well, they don't call. These people are not calling for what we're talking about. I've done like two or three topics in the eight months that I've been here, however many months I've been here. I guess it's seven months. No, eight months, I guess.

It was in July. This will be eight months. In the eight months that I've been in Detroit, I've done a couple of topics that have actually gotten the phones ringing consistently. And each one of them is a topic that if you really wanted to hammer out whether or not it was political or not, you could make a case that it is political, right? One of them was a topic about, and I think this was based in Nashville's where the story was. But it was a story about there was a school that was having kids learn gun safety, firearm safety, which I think is a really interesting. interesting topic because while I don't think, you know, some 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 year old kids should be walking around with a Glock or something.

I don't think it's bad that somebody know how to use a gun so maybe you're less afraid around guns. I think that's important. Like, I don't have a gun, right? Like, I don't want to dive into the topic here. But, like, I don't own a gun. I don't plan on owning a gun. It's not something I want to do, mostly because my mom has told my wife that I'm not

allowed to own a gun. Like, my wife has legitimately gotten conversations or talks. from my mom like, don't you let him have a gun. Like, Mom, I don't want a fucking gun anyway. But my mom's like, don't you let him have a gun, Julie. Like, I would be weird with a gun. I don't want to have a gun. It's something I'm interested in.

But I did take gun safety classes and I learned how to shoot a gun. And I've probably forgotten some of that now because it was three or four years ago. But, like, I was interested in that. Like, I think it's important for people to at least understand the power of a weapon, how to load a weapon, how to put a safety. on a weapon, like the proper way to hold a weapon. Like, I think there are a lot of things that are beneficial to people to understand that, especially in this era where real talk, the bad guys will always fucking have the guns. It doesn't hurt to at least know how to use a weapon.

And I think it's good for kids because, I say kids, but, you know, 10, 11, 12, I'm not saying like a four-year-old kid or something. But, like, if it's important to understand how to be safe with a weapon because guns are fucking scary. You want some real talk? A gun is fucking scary. And I've shot the thing. And you'd be amazed if you've never shot a gun, which I'm going to guess many of you that listen to this podcast have. You'd be amazed by the power. Like we watch a movie or you watch a TV show and you see somebody shoot a gun on a TV show. We're in a movie and you're like, holy shit, that seems easy. And the guy's like turning it sideways and delivering kill shots to people. And like you don't see

anybody like kind of like their bodies jolt back when they shoot a gun you don't see that kind of like backfire on it you don't see that like if you hold the gun in the wrong way you'll fucking get a burn or like a like a pinch on your you know in between your thumb and your pointer finger like you don't see any of that shit in a movie so movies leads you to believe you grab a gun you just you know cock it and you turn it sideways or shoot some guy or make my fucking day or whatever you don't experience what happens when you actually shoot a gun and I did when I was in Nashville I took all those classes at the gun place. I've got the name of it now.

The Glock store that I did all the lessons and it was very cool. And I learned how to do it. Coming out of that, didn't want to own a gun. But I thought it was cool like learning how to shoot a gun, learning how to put the safety on. There's a lot of things that went into that. And I thought it was fucking cool. And now it's something that I didn't know before that I do now.

Like I'm a big proponent in learning how to do shit just so you have it in your arsenal, man. Like not enough people want to learn how to do different shit. Not enough people just want to learn shit. Like don't you want to have knowledge? I know I'm all over the place here, but don't you want to have fucking knowledge? Don't you want to know things? Like I feel like we're just around too many people now who are so willing to be stupid, even though there's no reason to be stupid.

You know? And that was one of the topics, by the way. One of the topics that I did here that got a reaction from people is whether or not kids should have, you know, have gun safety classes. and the other are, I think there were two that really got people going. I think both of them had to do with guns, actually. I forgot what the other one was. But one had to do with guns. I think both had to do with guns.

There was also one about the kids that, you know, they didn't want the kids walking to school because it was too cold. And there was a guy that was an off-duty bus driver who was riding around trying to pick kids up and take them to school. And while I can understand why that looks kind of fucked up, I think his heart was in the right place and he wasn't a bad guy. But it was like negative 10 degrees and these kids are walking to school. then we made fun of the fact that they closed school because it was super cold. And I'm like, what the fuck? Just go to school. And that got some calls too.

But the kind of things that are going to resonate with people and get people to react and make your show not important so much, but we'll make your show have, I don't even want to say have meaning. But we'll make your show impactful and become part of the zeitgeist or become part of the everyday conversation to have you around the water cooler. It's not going to be, hey, we're having a conversation. about some guy that got his dick stuck in a vacuum in Kentucky. Like, that's a funny story. But at the end of the day, no one's going to remember that shit. It's funny and we laugh. But, like, it's the kind of shit that really resonates with people.

To give you an example, you know, we post videos every day. Like, James does a really good job building these videos out of clips. And we post them every day, usually one, sometimes two videos. And the videos that get the biggest reaction and the video that gets the biggest the conversation starting, the comments, the likes, the shares are videos that are about current events. The ones that got the most reaction. Justin Verlander is back with the Tigers. The halftime show at the Super Bowl.

Shit like that. That gets the reactions from people. The hot topics. Nancy Guthrie, I don't give a shit about the old lady anymore. Those kind of videos get the most reaction. We can post a thousand funny fucking nudge. videos of like just random topics on the on the show that are funny funny fucking segments you'd laugh your balls off at these segments and you know what happens no one gives a shit no one cares

and they don't get any reaction and that's what i try to explain to my boss is i'm not sitting here trying to be a super political person but we're in like 17th place and that's where we were when we got here and we've climbed into the top 10 and men which is great and we're i don't think we're in 17th place we're probably like in 14th place or something but like we're not winning it's going to be tough to win and we're not going to win just doing exactly what the other guys are doing who already have a fucking head start on us and have a bigger radio station than we do. We have to do things that are going to set us apart. He says, well, what did you do in Nashville?

Like when you were in Nashville and you had these great numbers in Nashville, what were you guys doing? Oh, you know what we did? We celebrated when they took the fucking masks off. This is at the tail end of the Rona. We celebrated when they said you no longer had to wear a mask to go into the fucking whole foods. We were going to do a mask burning bit. And they actually got signed off on. Like the corporate people were even like, sure, bring your masks out, let's burn them.

Then, of course, we learn that if you burn these masks, it put out, it'll put out horrible fucking toxins into the air and that would kill some people probably, so we didn't do it. But, like, that's the kind of shit that worked in Nashville. That's why I love the fucking South. Like, you can do that kind of shit. You can do some stuff that's sort of semi-political, and it works still. That's why, like, I didn't like living in Nashville. But, like, in Nashville, you could go on the radio and be slightly right of center on the radio. and a lot of people would just be kind of on board.

That doesn't mean people wouldn't call in bitch, but at least they'd call in bitch. Whereas here in Detroit, like, and that's the part that's frustrating about Detroit is, yeah, you can't have those opinions here in Detroit. And I'm like, why? There's people to think this way here. You don't find them.

You don't look for them. But all that said, like the topics that we would do that would get a reaction from people here are shit that they don't really want me to do. I'm like, well, what do you want me to do? How do you want me to advance this thing? I'm not asking to be C-SPAN or Fox News or CNN here. What I'm trying to do is find conversation starters that will really, like, get shit going.

We'll get people talking, you know, like, that's what you have to do. Because otherwise, we're just going to be stuck in neutral. We're just going to remain this kind of, just kind of middling type of thing that's never going to really get a hold of people. And the argument is, just do really funny shit and they'll find you. In 2026, I don't think that's true. I don't think it's as simple as go on the radio, be funny, do funny shit, and they'll find you. Again, I'm not asking to get on the radio and be, you know, Don Lemon or something. I'm not asking to do that.

What I'm saying is you have to broach subjects that are controversial and not just, ooh, we're talking about dildos today or something. Like, if you want interaction and people engaged in the show, you have to find a way to take controversial topics, make them funny, make them engaging, make them powerful. to everyone and get people fucking talking. Because as it stands right now, we're a radio show that is, you know, middling. I think it sounds really good. It's a good show. It's just it's a middling show. And we're up against, you know, five other rock stations.

I know we talk about this a lot, right, about like the number of rock stations we're up against. It is not easy. What we're dealing with right now is not easy. We are up against a massive uphill climb. You know, we're up against a radio station. that's been around for 60 years that has a morning show that has a 20 share. We're up against a sports station that has no competition. So this sports station is second place to them.

We're up against a show that's right next door to us that has huge ratings. We have five rock radio stations in town. Like everything that we're dealing with is difficult. It is not easy to overcome what we're trying to overcome. And I don't believe that just getting on the radio and trying to just go tit for tat with these guys and be what they are and try to fight with them in that way. I don't believe that that's something that's going to result in a big victory for us. Does it mean I have all the answers?

No. Does it mean that I'm positive about what I'm doing? It would be the right stance or the right move to do? No, I don't know that for a fact. But I feel like I'm pretty confident at this point that we're going to have a hard time overtaking anyone just being there and trying to outfony these people or whatever because we're that far behind.