If you are listening to this podcast, we want to hear from you about what you want to be hearing on this podcast.
Welcome to T-Rex Talk. This episode will be pretty short. I know that I've said that before and it hasn't been, but in this case, I think it will be pretty short because this episode basically just exists to ask for input.
A few weeks ago, we made a YouTube video on our YouTube channel and Lucas asked the people on YouTube specifically what they wanted from the YouTube channel.
They want more long videos. They want more short videos. They want more of this or more of that. Did they want multiple channels? What did they actually want?
And interestingly enough, a bunch of people on that YouTube video commented that they wanted a podcast.
A bunch of you guys very helpfully chimed in and said, there already is a podcast.
And we tried to stay pretty plugged into the T-Rex YouTube channel comments and the T-Rex Instagram comments so that we can make sure they were answering questions.
Here what people are actually doing, here what people are actually asking for, but podcasts don't really have that.
So I'm asking you to go out of your way to take the trouble to write us on e-mail.
I think that is probably the best way for us to interact and for you to tell us what you thought about a specific podcast episode or what you actually want from the podcast.
And a bunch of you have written in to team at T-RexArms.com to tell me stuff that I asked about on the podcast.
I've asked some people for input about this or that. And many of you have indeed written in.
But there isn't a way for you to just kind of naturally, organically like, subscribe, hit the bell, all the terrible platform things that I hate.
You can't do that with our podcasts. You can kind of do it on Spotify, but I'll get there in a minute.
And there's no easy way to simply and easily comment on an episode.
So I'm asking you to more deliberately go out of your way to let us know what you want the podcast to be.
Now the T-Rex podcast I realize is pretty broad in its variety.
Even though it is mostly just me talking, there have been a bunch of episodes where we have had a bunch of interviews.
We have interviewed people from a pretty wide spectrum of areas on a bunch of different topics.
We've interviewed people who are building their own rockets at home.
We're interviewing people who are theologians. We're interviewing people who have started to drone departments.
We've interviewed people who are in the gun industry. We've interviewed people who are not in the gun industry,
but they're in the tech industry and they're looking in on the gun industry.
There are a bunch of interviews that I think are fascinating, but they also don't have a whole lot in common.
Huge amount of variety. Our diversity may not be our strength.
Their diversity may be a bunch of episodes that you don't want to listen to,
and occasionally an episode that you do want mixed in.
And even the episodes where it's just me talking, sometimes it is history.
Sometimes it is politics. Sometimes it is behind the scenes T-Rex stuff.
Sometimes it is a book review. It's just all over the map.
And I enjoy that. There's also the episodes about maps. I enjoy those too.
But what is it that you guys actually want?
Now the way that the T-Rex podcast works is I like running it kind of the old fashioned way,
where we host it on Buzzsprout and you guys download it using your RSS feeds.
No talking to Amazon. No asking permission of Apple.
Even those of you who do listen to this podcast on iTunes just download the MP3 straight from us.
It's a nice old fashioned web 1.0 kind of experience.
But about a quarter of the listens happen on Spotify.
So would you guys prefer to listen to this podcast on Spotify?
Would you prefer to listen to this podcast on YouTube because you're already there?
There's a whole bunch of things that I would love to hear from you.
Would you prefer to listen to this podcast on Spotify if it had video attached?
Because that's something that Spotify lets you do, but only if you pay them money.
And I'm willing to pay Spotify money if that's the feature that you guys want.
But I'd much rather not give Spotify money just in general.
But one of the things that Spotify gives me is it gives me a little bit better insight into listeners.
There's a way for you guys to answer questions on there. Almost nobody does, but a few people do.
But it also shows me that every episode gets about 10% of the subscribers.
So what that means is either 90% of the Spotify subscribers never listen to the show,
or all of the Spotify listeners listen to every 10th episode.
Which kind of makes sense. The variety of the show, the topics they're so broad,
I could very easily see somebody wanting to listen to every 10th episode.
There's a whole bunch of podcasts that I subscribe to. I don't have that much time to listen to podcasts anymore,
but they will have a number of yeses in every 10th one I want to hear from.
So if that's going on, I would like you to write into Team At Trekstash, arms.com,
and find out how we could make this podcast better for you.
Do you want longer? Do you want shorter? Do you want more interviews? Do you want more monologues?
Do you want more fancy social media platform features like the one that Spotify offers?
Do you want to watch stuff on YouTube? Do you want to continue to listen to things
on your own open source podcast downloader like antenna pod so that you can save the MP3s
for some sort of sensurious future or present.
Should we lead more into ideology? Shall we lead more into technology and practical application?
Should we go just more into the gun industry? That is what I'm asking you
because this podcast exists so that we can target it more directly to the people who want it.
And so now that thousands of you are listening to this podcast and thousands more
are listening to every 10th episode, we want to hear from you.
What is it that you want? What is it that you want to hear about? Who is it that you want to hear from?
And we will figure out how to do that.
If you're listening on Spotify, I will attach some questions to this episode.
We'll see if that works. But if you consume this podcast in any other way,
probably the best thing to do is to email team at trex-arms.com.
That will get you in touch with our customer service team.
They will be on the lookout for these emails. And together we will figure out how to make this podcast.
Would you want it to be, you know, within reason.
That is your homework assignment for this week.
And we will revisit this relatively soon.
Next week, I'm sure that I will be talking about red flag loss stuff at the state level.
If you're still listening to this podcast, I will give you a brief update.
If you're on our email list, you probably already saw this.
But the Republicans have kind of given up on using red flag as a catchy phrase.
But they haven't given up on some of the underlying things that actually make a red flag law.
A whole bunch of the things that are on the governor's proclamation that actually calls the special session out.
Still asking for red flaggy type stuff.
It's not called an enhanced protective order.
It's called something like a temporary mental health restraining order.
And it says that it won't be used improperly.
But we haven't seen any actual bill language yet.
So we will see all of these things on Monday.
And the discussion and the debate will happen on Tuesday.
By the time the next podcast comes out, there will already be a whole bunch of stuff going on.
We're already seeing a ton of people filing bills.
I'm not sure that they can file bills until the session starts.
But releasing their bills into the public, sending them to reporters so that they can be reported on,
adding them to the capital.tn.gov website so that we can see,
very least, the caption of what the bill claims to do.
Some people are planning to file up to 10 bills during the special session,
which, you know, it's not going to help things move, particularly smoothly,
or the clarity of what's being proposed.
But yeah, there's already going to be a gallery packed with protesters.
There's already going to be bull horns.
There's already going to be signs.
Clarity wasn't really an option.
Rumors say that Michael Bloomberg could be here himself in person
to witness his handy work.
And Gavin Newsom will definitely be here.
He's not going to show up on the 21st for the beginning of the special session, probably.
But he will be here on the 25th to help the Democrats of Tennessee fundraise.
And the main thing that Gavin Newsom is talking about right now, of course, is gun stuff.
So it works perfectly for him to have the special session going on,
while he is fundraising here in Tennessee on gun confiscations.
The main thing that he is trying to push through is a amendment to the Second Amendment,
an actual constitutional amendment to modify the Second Amendment.
That is what he is doing.
Now, I think we know that there's a very small chance that he would actually be able to accomplish that.
But what a national agenda does for Gavin Newsom is,
it gets him out of California.
It lets him get on the road and travel through all 50 states,
making political connections and fundraising for other people and fundraising for himself.
And potentially positioning himself for a more national political role.
If there were an upcoming election, there were like a national election,
he's probably testing the waters right now.
That is the, I believe, very self-serving purpose of this mission that he is on to amend the Second Amendment.
It basically gives him an excuse to get out there and talk to people very nationally about a thing that will never happen
so that he can blame the Republicans and the Democrats who are weaker than he is for some sort of future political agenda.
That's my guess.
And he'll be here in Nashville.
He'll be here in Nashville talking about why guns are bad at the same time that we have our special session talking about why guns are bad.
Everything is working perfectly for these guys, and so happy for them.
If you have sent emails to any of the Tennessee legislatures, thank you very much.
I don't believe that you have to be a Tennessee citizen to weigh in on this particular issue,
because lots of non-tenancy citizens like Michael Bloomberg and Gavin Newsom, they're weighing in right now.
So I would say go ahead and send them an email.
There's going to be a link in the description of this podcast so that you can really easily send an email to them with just a couple of clicks.
And we'll have an update next week.
So thank you so much for listening this far.
Thank you so much for your comments that you're going to send into team at trex-arms.com.
I do want this podcast to be worth your time, even these shorter episodes, which we finally have one.
So I'm going to count that as a win.