B.E.E. - Community's Jim Rash - 4/21/14

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Today on The James Altucher Show. First off, we have a great guest coming up, Buck Sexton. He was a CIA officer. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a counter terrorism guy. And now, for the past bunch of years, he has a very, very successful radio show and I wanna talk to him about that and what his opinions are on the current situation. But and this is related to the podcast. I wanna talk for a second what it means to be a centrist. Throughout most of my life at least, it was okay to be down the middle, to be, you know, on some issues, you might be a little bit more conservative, on some issues, you might be a little bit more liberal, and that was considered a centrist. So Bill Clinton was famously an extreme centrist when he was a governor. He was head of the Democrat Southern Council, which is a very almost conservative Democrat group. And, actually, George h w Bush was considered a very liberal republican. So a lot of people didn't want Reagan to choose him as vice president because he was too liberal, I. E. For him, that meant centrist. And in fact, while he was in office, he raised taxes and, you know, did other things that are normally considered liberal policies. All I'm saying is I'm a centrist, which means I believe and I'm happy to talk about what I believe. I believe in human rights for all. I'm actually probably a little bit more isolationist than most. I don't really think we should need a huge I don't think we need to be the world's police force, and I have people on both the left and the right who disagree with me on that, including some some very popular guests that come on the show very often. And but if I'm if I say I'm a centrist, people yell at me from both sides. Like, people will say, oh, don't bring your snowflake ideas over here, you know, if you're a centrist. Or or or on the alt left side, people will say I'm a people will literally say I'm a racist if I say I'm a centrist. Now, I happen to work on a lot of projects that I can't really talk about that very much exploring issue of systemic racism and how to solve it and how to think about it and what is it because a lot of people don't really know. They throw these words around without knowing, but that's for another time. I just wanna say it's important to be open to all ideas. If you've been listening to this podcast, you've heard extremely liberal alt left people on the podcast. You've heard extremely conservative alt right people on the podcast. You've heard centrists on the podcast. You've heard democrat and republican congresspeople or governors or whoever. Tons of, actually, democrats and and republicans from presidential candidates on on down or on up. Had on the libertarian candidates, Joe Jorgensen and Spike Cohen. So I I use this all as a preface just to make sure I'm not trying to persuade anyone politically to be different except for this. There are issues in life more important than your political stance. So for instance, it's no good if you're political and if you have a strong opinion if you're not healthy. It's no good if you have a strong opinion if you're arguing with your spouse or arguing with your friends or arguing with your family all day long, because then your mind and your politics are gonna be distorted. It's no good being political if you're not exercising your creativity muscle or your idea muscle, Because then, how are you gonna have how are you gonna add to the conversation? You're just gonna be told what to think, and you're not gonna be able to think for yourself, which is what I see from most people left or right. They it's sort of like they believe in one thing, and then they have to believe in the entire menu of red or they have to believe in the entire menu of blue. So if you believe in higher taxes, then you're against hydroxychloroquine, which have nothing to do with each other. But isn't it amazing how 50,000,000 people who believe those two things and 50,000,000 people believe the exact opposite of those two things? So all this is to say is think about what's in your life that is more important than who's president, and believe me there are a lot of things more important than who's president. There are a lot of things more important than what your neighbor believes politically or what or what you believe politically. It's okay to not know the answer on some issues, but not just blindly accept what everybody else tells you. Like, I don't there's a lot like, for instance, health care. I honestly do not have an opinion because if you think about it, Obamacare, I believe, was like a 900 page bill when it was passed. I haven't read the bill. I don't know what all the issues are. I don't know what the ramifications are of what, for instance, Trump is doing right now with trying to lower drug prices. Does that make insurance companies raise prices for insurance? I I just don't know these things. I don't know all the ramifications. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about it. So, anyway, about to interview Buck Sexton. He's a friend of mine. He's a popular conservative radio show host, podcast host. I've been on his show particularly to talk about my New York City article, which was very much fact based and not political at all. But this is the point, is that it's important that any reasonable political system, particularly one as sophisticated as America, is important for people of many different opinions to have discussions with each other so we could build some form of consensus that takes us forward instead of constantly battling and fighting. All the fighting does nothing but take us backward. So we have to figure out how to work together. And the first step in that is listening to people who have different opinions and being open minded, not about their opinions, but be open minded first about what you don't know. I always think about things I don't know. And sometimes I find myself, like, my kids will ask me something and I'll start answering, and then I'll just realize, you know what? I actually don't have a clue what I'm talking about. Very fair to understand when you don't have a clue of what you're talking about. But Buck Sexton knows what he's talking about. Here's the podcast. So, Buck Sexton, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, James. Appreciate it. Is Buck Sexton your real name? It almost people must this is not a new joke, I'm sure. It definitely sounds like a porn name. Yeah. That was literally the joke that Bill Maher made when I did his show the first time, so I I cannot give you originality points for that one. I well, and I wasn't asking for it. I even said someone's used this before. It's oh, no. Not just not just one person. Right. I think since I was in kindergarten, or act just people that know what porn stars were then. But you know what I mean. Like, people have been making fun of my name a long time. Yeah, man. I've, I've had the the name Buck for my whole life, so there you go, since I was a little kid. And where are you from? I'm from New York City, man. Born and raised here. Born and raised in New York City? Well, then alright. Tell me this is what I really wanna know. What's the path to the CIA? How can a young, smart, intelligent person get into the CIA? Why did you wanna get into the CIA? And then we'll get into later, if you're allowed to talk about it, what you did in the CIA, who you killed. A lot of memos, a lot of coffee. It's really way less sexy and exciting in real life than than a lot of people would think. But it's still cool, though. I still think, oh, he worked in the CIA. That it's in your bio. Like, if if if you had to list 3 or 4 things in your bio, that's, like, the first thing. Yeah. I mean, there's there's some cache to it, although I think that's been really dampened in the last few years because of, what's going on with all these people. You know, it used to be well, I'll get to that later, like, the deep state and all that stuff, if you wanna talk about that. Yeah. But they're hurting the brand value of these things. As for, how you get into it, it's kind of a weird pathway for a lot of different people. It's usually a little bit of the most boring bureaucratic process imaginable. I mean, did they approach you, or did you approach them? I initially approached them and heard nothing back, and then they, I believe, separately approached me later on. But I was working at Mideast think tanks already, and I was already enrolled in Arabic, although I speak, I think, 5 words of it now. But I was enrolled in Arabic classes before 911. So there was a little bit of an all hands on deck attitude, and it's, like, oh, you wanna work the intelligence community and go chase some terrorists? Here we go. So, yeah, that was that was how it worked. But, yeah, I mean, you you people apply for it, like, you apply for any there's recruiting events on colleges. You can have the CIA booth, and they don't do any cool karate chops, or you don't get a flamethrower pen or anything like that. You're not like Jason Bourne? You're not part of, like, some secret project that I mean, first of all, like, Nat Damon in a fight. Like, really? I mean, about as credible as Ralph Macchio doing karate. But, yeah. No. You you don't Particularly in Cobra Kai, which I thought I thought the choreography was the worst part of the of Cobra Kai. I don't know if you've seen it. The worst part of all the Karate Kid movies is the karate, which is just unbelievable. Like, I don't understand how hard is it to make that a little bit cooler, a little bit better. Although, you know that, Johnny Lawrence played by, what's his name, Zapka? Yeah. Billy Zap is this Billy Zapka? He actually got a green belt. He actually learned some karate after the Karate Kid movie because he felt like, well, why not? Ralph Macchio, on the other hand, too cool to actually know karate even though he's the Karate Kid. I mean, power to both of them for re I mean, I haven't seen either of them since The Karate Kid, so I don't know if Ralph Macchio's really been in anything else. He could've been a good I feel like he had good TV star kinda qualities if he went that route, but he he never went that route. I tell you a super fun random fact. Yes. My mother was in a bubblegum commercial with Ralph Macchio 3 years before he was in The Karate Kid. You're kidding. They were, like, dancing together. It was a big commercial at the time. Yeah. It's actually still on YouTube. And was your mom, like, a big commercial actress? Yeah. She did commercials. I mean, she was a working actress at the time. Yeah. What'd your dad do? He's a stockbroker. So it's, like, very New York City. Like, you you you hit the acting. You hit the Wall Street. You grew up, went to the schools. Where'd you go to college? Amherst College in Massachusetts. And then, you were taking Arabic. Did you did you major in Middle Eastern studies or not? Political science, pretty standard stuff. I mean, they didn't have a Middle Eastern studies major because it was a liberal arts college, but I I did a lot of Mideast Studies stuff. I was actually interested in it because I figured for energy and, you know, being on, like, the oil trading desk or something, you know, I was thinking about it from a commercial perspective, not a, you know, going to fight against the jihadists kind of a thing. And and then obviously after September 11th, which happened while I was in college, it was like, oh, there are other reasons to be interested in what is happening in that part of the world. Well, what okay. And you said you worked for a Mideast think tank before the CIA. I always wondered, what is a think tank? Like, people use that word all the time, and I guess it's a place that is funded by rich people that Mhmm. Think about things and put out white papers. Does anyone listen to the white papers? Like, does anyone ask a think tank to think about things? So this is an excellent question because think tanks only have influence in Washington DC, and it's very questionable how much influence they even have in DC. It depends on which one. Right? Some of them are these, institutions with, you know, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in their endowments. I mean, some of them, the Council on Foreign Relations in these places are there's a lot of very rich people that donate a lot a lot of money to them. The way that they have influence, really and it's changed, but but the Internet has completely, in my opinion, kinda broken their business model, so to speak. I mean, now it's it used to be, if you needed a paper on what would happen to a certain oil field in a part of, you know, I don't know, Syria or Jordan or something, oh, you gotta go to the think tank to figure that, you know, there there was a little bit of this this niche and specialization stuff they had going for them. But now, I mean, you can find this stuff everywhere. But the thing that they do provide is for the administration I'm sorry. For the, political party that's out of power, that's a place it's like a holding tank more than a think tank for people that could be the next secretary of state, or that will staff those 2nd tier positions, you know, the deputy assistant secretary of and the then the, you know, the acting assistant sec not acting. That would be weird. But you know what I mean. The the people that are at that other tier, a lot of them come out of the think tank. So Oh, that's interesting. So it's sort of like a government in waiting. Yes. That I mean, like, Brookings, if you go to Brookings and are running the, you know, the Mideast practice there or whatever it is, and the the think tanks I worked at were the Council on Foreign Relations. So I don't know how many Alex Jones fans you have out there, but, you know, CFR running the world, the queen of England, the Illuminati of Bilderbergs. That's a good invitation. Of course. I did radio. But thank you. And, I worked at CFR, and I worked at a place called the Washington Institute For Near East Policy, WINEP, w I n e p. But yeah. And, and I spent a little time at AEI, which is another very well known one, but I was kind of on loan there. But the the big thing techs like Brookings, they really it's almost like a a policy social club. That's the real access and influence that it has. So it's not really so much that anyone gives a crap about the white paper on whatever because they don't. It's more that they'll have a luncheon on their at their office on Massachusetts Avenue or whatever it may be. And then, you know, from there, they will maybe have a connection to the new administration, and so that's really think of it if you think of it like a like a social club for policy nerds, that's what a lot of the think tanks in DC are all are all actually about. And why did you wanna go to a think tank? Did you see it as an, a ticket to somewhere else? I just thought it would be I thought it would be interesting. Think tanks are horrifically boring, and I I it was it was just strictly a I did internships, and I was never a real a real employee. I did summer internships, then I went into the CIA after college. And I think one of the reasons I wanted to go to the CIA was I was like, well, I don't wanna just write papers. I mean, I'd actually like to help blow up the bad guys in some way. But again, memo writing, not really blowing. You wanna do if you wanna do really interesting badass stuff, you gotta go into the military. There's no other version. You did do tours of duty as intelligence officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and you were, in the counterterrorism. I learned a lot of cool stuff. Yeah. For sure. For first off, when you get into the CIA, was there, like, rigorous training, kinda like a Navy SEAL sort of thing? Not even close. Not even I I am I disabusing you of all these notions? I feel like every spy movie you've ever seen, you're gonna think, no, man. I mean, it's it's But this is but this is the whole thing. It's like, we all have seen all these spy movies and read books and read newspaper articles, and look at me. I'm I don't know. I actually don't know these things which are which are talked about all the time. So the way I explain it to people is that the CIA is not now look, I was an analyst, and people will say, well, if you were a a case officer, which is the term that people use for what they'll say, it's like a field agent or a field operative or whatever, but case officer is the real term. I mean, case officers have meetings, but, you know, they're also writing a lot of memos and sitting in a lot of desks too, and people don't realize this. That unless you're talking about operations in a war zone or an area where there's really extensive counter terrorism or counterinsurgency operations going on, you know, it's really about information. It's just about information, the collection of information from sources, and and then the analysis of that for the policy community to make good decisions, one of the things that you learn, and that was in in total from 2005 to 2010, one of the things you learn is that a very small number of people make the meaningful decisions in the government, and they can be influenced by a person who, you know, wrote an editorial in the New York Times that morning, every bit as much as whatever they read in the president's daily briefing. That's just a fact. That's reality, and everybody who knows how the game works will tell you that. So we'd like to think because we have all this secret stuff, we're, we're much better. I mean, people used to make fun of the agency as CNN with secrets back in the nineties. Some of this stuff does get kinda classified, and that's more not because it's so sensitive. It's because even if it's not sensitive, sometimes they'll punish people just to make an example of them for saying stuff they're not supposed to talk about. Meaning that there's no actual harm to anyone or anything, but they're like, hey. You weren't allowed to say that. So all of us get a little bit, they tense up, especially with the overseas stuff because that's where actual interest like, and look. I did what I did as an analyst in Iraq and Afghanistan was more interesting than what 95% of analysts who preceded me before 911 would have gotten to do in their jobs. And after a while, I still was kinda like, meh. I'd rather run this place than be one of the people working in it. And if you wanna run it, you gotta go out in the in the real world and make a name for yourself and and build connections and profile. You can't be a little worker bee sitting in your cubicle typing away on your computer with all your reports. When you started in 2005, did you get a sense so this is, like, 4 years or three and a half years after 9/11. Did you get a sense that, between 911 and 2005 or maybe even after that, were there a lot of activities that could have turned into huge terrorist acts that the US stopped, after 911? Like, there was always this fear that there was gonna be more terrorist attacks after 911. And then there was also this kind of idea that maybe the US government was stopping uncountable amounts of terrorism that we just never heard about. I mean, yeah. I I I think that there were a lot of attacks that could have been mass casualty incidents that could have been really, really bad. I mean, there's tons of the ones that are out in the public domain. I mean and I always remind people, if the terrorists weren't generally completely incompetent morons, we would have had a with the exception of 911, you look at all the other incidents, we would have had many times more people dying from terrorism in this country. I mean, think about here's just one example. I mean, Farooq Abdulmutallab, the underwear we call him the underwear bomber. Right? Even, you know, that's what his people know him as. He was close actually to building a device that could have brought down that plane on Christmas Eve in the 1st year of the Obama administration over Detroit, killing almost 200 people on Christmas. Think about what the beginning of the Obama administration feels like if that happens. And it wasn't like he was stopped before he could, he just messed up a little bit in how he tried to ignite this thing. He could've blown a hole in that plane and brought brought the whole thing down. There are countless examples like that of fortunately, these guys are morons. I mean, what's his name? Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber. I was on the NYPD's intelligence division, at at the time when that happened. So I actually got called in for that. And, I mean, if that guy just knew a little bit more about bomb building that he quite honestly probably could've figured out from reading stuff on the Internet a little bit more, he could've killed a 100, 200 people in Times Square on that day, but he messed up in the in the building of the bomb. So there's a lot of that. In terms of the plots that we thwart, that's tougher to get all that excited about because I mean, for the public. Because usually, when you get these guys, you wanna get them you don't wait until they've, like, pulled up to the gate with a trunk full of explosives. That that's too dangerous. You're gonna get them in their home when they've told some guy, okay, like, the wedding is next week. Like, I'm I'm going to get all the cakes together. I mean, one of the things is these guys, their code they use when they're talking about planning a terrorist attack is, it's not always slick. How how much of this is done by, like, artificial intelligence now? So you you notice some, you know, you have AI that notices some weird bank transactions, some weird, you know, email chains or whatever. I don't know what they look at, but, you know, how how deep is kind of the, kind of cybersecurity part of this in terms of deflecting terrorism and other threats? I mean, look, the intelligence community is so vast, and there are so many technically, when you add in all the different contractors and clearances, I mean, there's that I think it was the New York Times report a few years ago that said there were, like, over a 1000000 people that have, you know, a high level clearance. And then, I mean, there's so many people that are working in this stuff. And you really have to think of it like different disciplines, almost like intelligence is this whole other version of academia. And there are, you know, in academia, it's like, okay. There are geologists. There are they're, English literature professors, they're and they're in academia, but they're doing very different things. In the intelligence community, that's true too. I mean, you've got people who are, specialists in technology, and and in the more scientific side of it. They do what's called signals intelligence, which is where you're picking up, you know, people's phone calls or emails or whatever. And people know a lot more about this now because of a lot of the Snowden stuff. I think that's what's brought it to people's minds more than anything else. You got the people that run the human sources, which if you've seen enough cop dramas, you understand it's kinda the same. You either induce them or use leverage against them to get them to tell you information that you need and that they generally don't wanna give. I mean, that's the whole that's the whole it's running sources for law enforcement, running sources for intelligence officers, very similar. When you when you were in Iraq or Afghanistan, were you were any of your sources people on the ground, or was it mostly, like, you know, news there? Or how do you define a source when you're when you're on the ground there? No. I mean, there's a there's a lot of of sources in countries. But in a war zone, it's particularly different too because you have you have, you know, the the channels that you'll read that are military channels. So you'll see, you know, what's this special forces unit saying is going on in this part of the world. But you you you read everything, man. I mean, you know, you'll have the whole intelligence world is built upon having local on the ground sources, and there's generally an assumption that that's that that's better. And it is more granular, but there's also a lot of risk in that because, you know, you don't wanna ask one warlord what he thinks of this other warlord because all of a sudden, he may tell you, oh, yeah. That guy's totally a part of Al Qaeda. He wants you to knock out his competition so that he's more able to sell, you know, heroin in the in Kandahar or something or in Helmand. Right? I mean, that that's what ends up happening. So you have to do a lot of of source vetting. And also there are a lot of people that just are are looking for either access or attention or money or whatever. So look, man. It's it's a giant messy world, and I gotta say, I think it's dramatically underperformed in a lot of ways. You know, we we missed 911, obviously, but even and then there was the WMD thing. On some of the really big issues, you know, you could spend all the money you want on this stuff, but, ultimately, if you don't have people that have good judgment, and if you don't have people that really have expertise in the area, and have the humility of knowing that they're not as smart as maybe they think they are, you're gonna come up with bad bad analysis, bad outcomes. And there's been there's been a lot of that in the community. I know people like to hear that, but it's true. Like like, what's an example? Well, I'm out. I mean, I've been out for a long time now. So the good news is I don't really know anything super secret anymore, so that's nice because I don't have to worry about that. But, I mean, if you're looking at stuff that's that's just happened in I mean, look at the disaster that was Syria, and, you know, without I I don't know what aspects of that. I never worked the the Syria issue as part of the civil war there under the Obama administration. I was already gone. But, I mean, you just see our there were these news reports about, you know, the Pentagon trying to train parts of the Free Syrian Army, and they spent, like, $500,000,000 and trained a total of 4 dudes. I mean, you know, just a total mess. Now that's the Pentagon, but, you know, the Pentagon has DIA. It has its own intelligence operations and wing going on, and, you know, it it all kind of meshes in together too. Like, the government there's a lot of, stuff that the government relies on that comes from multiple multiple different agencies and sources. And so there's actually so much information that just sifting through all the garbage is a huge part of the job. You left the CIA in 2010, and you you're right now, syndicated radio host. You have a radio show that's syndicated in a 100 different markets. What happened? Like, you got out of the CIA. You you have this great resume. You have a good voice for radio. You had all this knowledge. What was the next step? How'd you break into, media? So I I took the job in New York at the NYPD. I was technically on rotation from the CIA, and it just sounded cool. And quite honestly, I just missed New York a lot and and my friends and family here, and I was sick of DC after, you know, almost 5 years. So I came back, and the idea was I'd apply to business school and also just sort of keep my my eyes and ears open for any opportunities here. I mean, it was kind of the classic thing of just show up to New York and figure it out. I had a great network here because I was from here, and I know I know a ton of people in New York City, as I know you do too. So I I just was like, I'm gonna make something happen. I actually ended up, I was gonna go to, to b school, to business school, just to sort of hit the reset button and transition into something else. And then I got an email, it was my last week. I'd already gave them my resignation last week from the intelligence division, the NYPD, and I was gonna go start b school. And, I got an email from someone saying, hey, my boss heard about you at a women in technology conference through a mutual friend who knew me very well, who was a woman in technology, because, apparently, they were discussing, and she she was trying to staff up for this new website called theblaze.com. Oh, so Betsy Morgan. It was Betsy. Yeah. I know Betsy. Yeah. Betsy was the one who hired me. Oh, wow. So, yeah, I knew her at CBS, at Huffington Post, and then at The Blaze. Yeah. Betsy email Betsy's assistant emailed me and was like, Betsy wants to have a coffee with you. And, I sat down with her, and to Betsy's eternal credit, she was, like, you shouldn't go to business school. You should come work for us. You'd be really good at this. And that was it. And I and then she had me go talk to Glenn, Glenn Beck, who, you know, was the owner of the Blaze, and he said, yeah. Come work for us. You you don't wanna come on. What are you gonna do? Go to business school? And I was like, you are correct. It was really honestly the I've always wanted to work in media. I never thought about actually doing it. To me, it was almost like joining the circus. But here they were, like, the circus, you know, ringleaders or whatever who were telling me to come along. And, also, that b school debt, man, mm-mm. Yeah. That's a not made like fun. A 100% better decision than b school. So you start off with the Blaze, but then, eventually, you leave the Blaze to have this radio show, which, I did not know this, but it was previously hosted by Megan McCain, your show. Yeah. When it was called America Now. Now it's the Buck Sexton Show. Mhmm. And what does it mean that it's syndicated in a 100 markets? Like, do you get money from each market? Like, what's the economics of that? Yeah. Well, I'm I'm syndicated. It's a 180 total stations, probably about a 130 individual markets, and then also you add on top of that. Some of them have an AM and an FM station, so that's why the number gets to 180. But, you know, it's funny because the radio syndication game there's a lot of people that'll say they're nationally syndicated, and and then they wanna tell you what the number of stations is just because that's usually a way for people to but it's much more about the quality than it is about the quantity. So most of my audience, and this is true for anybody on on radio, is gonna be in the top 50 metros. So when someone says to you, like, there are plenty of people that have 60 or 80 radio stations, but most of those stations probably have a listenership that's honestly so small it can't even be measured. So and and they won't pay for measurement. So it's a station, they're playing it, but no one even knows I'm being serious. No one even knows that they're listening. I've always wondered about this. And, again, these things seem obvious. They've been around forever. But whenever I've asked radio people, oh, you know, somebody has a show on some AM station in, you know, wherever in the middle of Oklahoma and wants me to go on, and I ask, oh, how many people listen? Oh, you know, enough people listen. I never actually get a clear answer. Yeah. Well, I mean, the way it works is you'll have, you know, one like, I'm on WRNYC. Right? And that's probably the biggest it's number 1 or number 2, depending on the metrics, I think, but it's the biggest talk radio station in the country. So just being on WOR for me, which is the big New York talk station for Iheart, is going to be a larger audience. That one that one is gonna be a larger audience than some people who will be on 30 or 40 stations syndicated have from all of those stations together. Right? So if you're asking, like, how does the game work? I mean, you you essentially sell advertising based upon your cumulative audience size, and the cumulative audience size is determined by the Nielsen ratings in these different again, is this, like, to do your listeners I mean, should we be talking about, like, how to, you know, how to pick up chicks or something? Like, I just feel like, really? This is okay. I mean, I'll I'm interested. I'm interested. Okay. So, because you'd have to teach me about about about that, by the way, because in the COVID I actually have a girlfriend now, but in the COVID pandemic, I I can't imagine what it's like for people who are trying to make things happen. Anyway, the, the the yeah. You add together all the metro stations, and so for me, it's really, you know, the most of the audience is in you know, I have a great station in Denver, San Diego, Austin, Texas, Baltimore, Maryland, obviously, New York City, Boston. Like, that's where your audience in terms of overall numbers really are. There are a lot of little stations in in towns that most people couldn't find on a map. I love those people. I love that they listen because they go to the cumulative numbers, but those stations, have far just far fewer listeners. And will will regular radio survive versus, you know, podcasts and digital and streaming and everything else? Like, when I when I wanna listen to stuff now, I just go to YouTube and listen to whatever I wanna listen to. Yeah. I mean, it's been it's been dying for 1 of your 30 years, meaning that still, you know, it's a very slow melting iceberg, is what a lot of people I know who follow the industry say. I mean, look, radio numbers are still really healthy. It's a big business with a big audience, and, you know, Rush Limbaugh is enormously influential on the right. You know, Sean Hannity has a huge number of people listening to that show, and, you know, that some of these other big names, I mean, they have audiences. And remember, it's an audience that's listening to really just one person for, in many cases, 3 hours a day. So your connection with that audience is is really powerful. It's really strong. The, you know, the the digital mech the way so, like, here here's what I do. I push a podcast and a radio show, and I'm on YouTube, and I'm on, you know, god, I was gonna say Tinder, Rumble, not Tinder, which is this new, video platform that's that's competing with YouTube now. Right? And I'm on YouTube. Like, I'm on I'm on all these things. And, you know, that's you know, the idea is that you just try to expand your audience as much as possible and have as many folks as possible listening to you. Because as long as that radio audience is still like, people are very habituated. Like, why do folks still even pay for cable TV? There's so many ways around it. A lot of people are just used to it. They're like, I like I like the cable. The same way they're like, I like listening to the radio. I think people still pay for AOL dial up. They're still customers for AOL dial up services. I I knew I knew some until maybe 5 years ago, and that was they may or may not have been 1 or 2 members of my family, and it's pretty amazing. Alright. So now, current environment. I feel like the media has become so I mean and I'm sure you've had this discussion a 1000000 times before, which is why I was hesitant to get into this topic. But I'm just fascinated by how polarized everything is getting. There's no coming together anymore. I kinda feel like it's over in in terms of any sort of unbiased media. By the way, historically, media has always been biased. I think there was a brief period where you could have hoped for the best in sort of unbiased media. But I I do pretty much think that, you know, you're either on one side or the other unless you're the AP. Yeah. I mean, I'd even argue the AP is biased, but that's me. But, yeah, this is this is the reality of the world that we live in now where, there there is and the notion of an unbiased media is a fiction, and people who are still peddling it are doing so with the agenda that they think that it they think that they are covered by that neutral journalism umbrella, and therefore, they're allowed to share their opinions without ever having to deal with defending them? Because they're just they're just journalists, man. They're not really in the fight. So there's a lot of cowardice. I mean, you see a lot of that at CNN. You see a lot of that at some of the, you know, ABC News. I think everyone kinda knows MSNBC is liberal, including MSNBC. I don't think they really. CNN is the worst offender in this regard, where they still will tell you they're a news network. I mean, they're really an an anti Trump network. They're actually devoted to the the beating the Trump administration over any and beating Trump himself over anything anything else that they do. But then you have, like, websites, like, that are even more extreme and because their listeners want them to be. I'm not even accusing them of anything, but, like, daily cost on the liberal side, daily caller on the conservative side. You know? So you have, you know, these websites also get more more and more polarized. And if you wanted to find out real information, I can't really trust any side if I wanted to get, like, data. I mean, there are sources for data on the Internet, but you have to kind of dig now. Well well, I'll tell you this. I think that I think that this is a little bit overstated from people where they say, oh, well, now, you know, who knows where you can go to get facts. No matter who you are, what side you're on, if your facts are wrong, it's gonna look bad for you. So the incentive is always to have accurate factual information. Right? Like, the the the president, you know, if you report that the president's going to suspend his campaign for the next month, and then 3 hours later, you have to say, oops, sorry. Like, that doesn't doesn't matter whether you're for him, against him, it looks bad for you. Right? So the facts are always gonna be it's in the interest of the reporter to have the facts right, but it's everything else where the fight actually happens. Right. And I feel like they omit facts too. They might say, oh, you know, either side might say, oh, so and so's a racist because of this, but they'll take things out of con you know, the the words will be correct, but and I'm not even just talking about Trump. You could be talking about Biden also. The words will be taken out of context. Videos are edited. Interpretations are put on top of the facts. So, you know, also just calling I I noticed, like, in the debate, both sides were calling each other a liar. You can't really fact check just random opinions like that. Well, yes. Well, fact checking opinions is something you'll see people do, especially these fact check organizations, which is pretty outrageous because they're they're they're very much now part of the left wing media ecosystem. And and then, you know, look, I I I think it's better for everybody to just understand that that people come at all this with an agenda, and and that they're telling you what they're telling you for a reason. That there's never really been such a thing as objective media. It's an American, a recent American construct. If you go to the origins of the mass media in this country, and if you even go to the American founding, newspapers were known as being affiliated with a political party and being pro one candidate or the other, and that's certainly the case in the UK. You have a Liberal paper, a Tory paper, you know, Labour, etcetera. And and it just would be just much better for everybody here, I think, if if that was actually the way that we we approach this stuff. Right. So so for you, like, do you get how how would you go about building you know, let's say you wanted to be, like, a Rush Limbaugh. You wanted to have 10, 20,000,000 people listening to you. How would you go is it possible now to build a radio empire like that? The game has changed a lot because of all the digital, and and now so just to give you a sense of how much it's changed, I almost started doing podcasting back in 2015 instead of going into syndicated radio because it's very hard to get a job in syndicated radio. There's just so few spots. Because what ends up happening is that a show becomes popular, and then it's a proven commodity. And it's, like, how do you if you're a guy who's just kind of starting out, how are you gonna compete with a show that's already in 350 markets and making 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars a year? What program director is gonna say, yeah, I'm gonna push off that proven commodity that's making me money and give you a shot? Even if the show is, like, not that great and everybody knows it, as long as it's financially performing, they're not gonna wanna get rid of it. So it's very it's very difficult. I mean, radio, I always tell people, is trench warfare. You know, it's slow, grueling, day by day, take you know, just building your audience, taking more territory. There's no, oh, you're on you're on 50 stations? Now you're on 300 stations, and now you're like a millionaire. And, but the way that the model works is you do radio, and you also have a podcast, and you also have a YouTube channel, and you have these other arenas because you're also going after a younger audience. Right? Radio is a very specific demo. It's mostly people in their fifties and above, and depending on the market, but I mean, it's mostly when I say radio, by the way, I'm talking about talk radio, not z 100 or these things that are, you know, music stations. Talking about talk radio stations. But podcasting skews younger. And TikTok, which I know, like, I'm not supposed to do this because of Chinese espionage concerns, but TikTok skews even younger. I might start a TikTok channel just to try to get people in their twenties. And one thing you've seen is some people have built really big digital audiences, and I was going to go the podcast digital route first, but then I got the job in syndicated radio. But you got you've got a pretty big, digital audience. Like, you have, you know, almost half a 1000000 Twitter followers, and, like, you you is that from the radio? Is that, like, just your listener? Just for me firing off tweets that that go viral. I mean, radio I think the radio to Twitter transition is very, very challenging. It's not the same audience, really. Maybe less than I'd say less than 5% of my audience actually even has Twitter on radio. That's just a guess, but I've seen some numbers to put whereas Facebook, you know, Facebook was amazing for a while, and I didn't leverage as much as I should have years ago, where you had over 90% of your audience was on Facebook, even on talk radio. Facebook was great for conservatives, but now that they've put in all these new restriction Facebook's now a pay to play, platform. So if you're not willing to pay, I mean, you're you're just wasting your time. I mean, Facebook is, I'm surprised that this hasn't had more of a negative impact. But really, what it does is crowd out idea people and political people on the right. But, you know, if you wanna sell, tea cozies or something, you know, you don't care as long as you're getting the return. So that's what Facebook has turned into. So now from your perspective, you know, you're you're on the the right side of media, and you have you've talked to a lot of people. This is the one where I have with with this election coming up. What do you think are the odds? And, again, this could sound like a stupid question. What do you think are the odds of a secession, any state seceding after this election? Because and I feel like a year ago, this would have been a ridiculous question, but now it's actually a possibility. I think I think the odds of secession are are almost 0 to the point where I think that nothing is totally 0. So, I can't say that, but I I'd put it less than 1%, and here's why. What we're really seeing is that people will do what they're told in this country no matter how stupid, cruel, contradictory, or insane. The government has a lot of influence over you. And, you know, I even think about this in my own building in New York where I'm I'm I was sort of not as as freaked out about all the mask stuff as everybody else over this over just the summer months when we had basically no cases in New York at all. And I find out that this has become some kind of a problem, and people think I'm making some big political statement. No one told me, but but I found this out later. They're complaining to the building management. And, I'm like, what the heck is wrong with you? There's there was no COVID in New York City to speak of for the entire summer, and people were still masked up all the time, all day long, everywhere. And it's because they do what they're told. So, you know, as much as I could imagine people talk about a secession movement, let's look at the reality. People who are after the election, the moment anyone starts saying, oh, we're gonna secede or whatever, they don't wanna deal with that. That's a hassle. They wanna get their check. They wanna watch Netflix. They wanna stay home. People people don't have the they're not willing to do it. They're not willing to make these kinds of decisions anymore. That's what I see. You know, it's it's weird because I always used to think of the US as, like, you know, the screw the government country. Like, you know, you'd become a teenager, and then it's like, oh, people over the age of 30 are evil, and, like, the government, politicians are all corrupt. When did we suddenly become, like, this docile population where, you know, basically I mean and this is not a political statement on the lockdown. I always have to clarify that I think there are more important issues, honestly, than politics and, you know, the issues the many of the daily issues that people are worried about. But the lockdowns clearly affected tens of millions, if not 100 of millions of people. You see this in New York City. The economy is is falling apart. The economy might fall apart, you know, all over the place. Who knows? But one thing for sure is it was almost every amendment, every part of the constitution was violated during this pandemic period. And you see this because the all all the state supreme courts are ruling against the economic lockdowns. So why do you think this happened? Why do you think it was just like, okay. Let's all roll over and play dead literally play dead? I think we've gotten too fat, happy, and comfortable as a country. I I just think that as long as the Internet's on and people have food to eat and and, you know, their their political allegiance has become a huge part of of individuals' identities, so they they also have the tribalism around all the lockdown stuff has been amazing. I look at all these Democrats. I'm like, what about the Democrats who are losing their stores, losing their livelihoods? Oh, well, you know, I guess it's the price they the price I have to pay, you know? I mean and people are nuts. But, you know, I I I think that the the polarization that we see, you know, that I used to do conflict management studies or whatever they used to call it. It was originally conflict resolution, and they realized that they never resolved anything, so they changed it to conflict management, you know, with international in international relations studies. And one thing they would talk about sometimes is how, you know, you think that getting a ceasefire is always this great thing because of people. But there's also the phenomenon where sometimes you create a ceasefire, and all that happens is both sides arm up more, maybe their borders open a little bit, they get, you know, better munitions, and then they just go right back at it after, you know, whatever it is, 2 weeks, 30 days, 6 months. I I think we're at a point now where one side has to really win and one side has to really lose. There is there is no common ground anymore in our politics. And you see this with I I think and I know this might sound like exaggeration. You see this with the Kavanaugh situation, but it's true. Kavanaugh radicalized a lot of people on the right because it was just so stupid and so vicious what they were doing to that guy and so obvious. And the whole Democratic party was on board for it. And then you also have now I think with these COVID lockdowns, I mean, they're they're really gonna pretend like they weren't telling us in June July, oh, whatever. It's no big deal if thousands and thousands of people gather together and screaming in each other's faces. You know, some have masks, some don't. That's not gonna spread the virus. But now if you're outside without a mask on, you're a bad person. Oh, okay. You think nobody notices? I mean, why don't they recognize their own hypocrisy? Like, is it that much of a cognitive bias? Absolutely. I mean, I think that hypocrisy is a defining characteristic for the contemporary, liberal mind. I really do. I think that they believe that pushing the actions of the collective, is is so much more important and so much more virtuous than their individual action that in fact it excuses it. Right? So this is this is the way they get around things like very rich actors and very rich Democrats, in the in the party and and, you know, across the board will advocate for higher taxes. And then you look at their taxes, and turns out they're paying an army of accountants as much as they can to evade taxes or avoid taxes, evading is illegal, avoid them as much as possible. And they don't view this as hypocrisy because they say, yeah, but it's not about my taxes, it's about everyone's taxes. And it's the same thing you see with, with the lockdowns. It's the same thing you see from the behaviors of people who are always yelling at everybody else. Why aren't you wearing a I mean, mask shaming is mask shaming is really the mark of, like, small minded virtue signaling morons now, but it's all over the place. Okay. So so, playing the devil's advocate, masks supposedly reduce the transmission of the virus. Even if the even if you're reusing the mask, even if you're not using it properly, it will reduce incrementally, you know, some transmission. Although, I agree. The the cases now are so low everywhere that it's hard to say what you're reducing, but, you know, people kinda just wanna wipe it out now. There's no more flattening the curve. People just wanna wipe out the virus. And that's that's the the problem with that is as long you have to be delusional in thinking that you're gonna get a 100% perfect compliance with a policy like this, where I constantly see people who I mean, here's the example. Right? You know, everyone thinks they're such good people. I can't tell you how many Ubers I've gotten into where the driver is sitting there breathing with his mask down, and I get in and he pulls his mask up. Well, guess what? He's been filling that car, if he's got COVID, with aerosolized virus for the last 2 hours. You know? And and now I'm sitting there, and I'm supposed to think that he's, like, doing me a great favor because he pulled his mask up for a second. This is absurd. I mean, this serious people can't you know, in in my building, I'm not allowed to walk through the lobby, and it's a pretty big lobby. You're not bumping into people. It's it's not like some of the walk ups I've lived in where, you know, you're, like, stepping over each other to get through the little ramshackle hallway with all the mail, and and you have to put your mask on to go through the lobby, so then I can go sit in a restaurant with 25% capacity, pull my mask down, and eat for 2 or 3 hours. I mean, de Blasio is pushing ZIP code specific lockdowns now in Brooklyn and Queens. How much dumber can I I mean, this is about as stupid as the people that wear the straight up, like, crocheted masks with the holes in them? Oh, yeah. You know? I think that they're really healthy. Like, that's what but but people it's become a symbol. So even the crocheted mask person, as much of a moron as he or she may be, gets the benefit of the doubt because it's all, oh, at least they're trying. Oh, well, science doesn't care if you try, but that's what we're told. Right. Like, I I always ask people who have already had COVID, and, obviously, a lot of people have had COVID, why are you wearing a mask? You're immune. And, you know, mostly, it's just to they say just to be a good guy. Like, that's the reason as opposed to actually having a reason. Well well, I I can tell you this, and I'm sure, you know, you're a very logical thinker, and I'm sure you've seen this. When people keep changing their their reason for why you have to do something, but every time it's an absolute that this time they know why they're telling it to you, you should be very, very curious and cautious. Right? You should think, keeps on shifting. The absolute rationale for why I must do this thing keeps changing. It was don't wear masks. It was don't wear masks because we'll run out of masks. And then it was, only wear masks if you're sick. And then it was, you wear a mask to protect other people, and then it was, you wear a mask to protect yourself, and then it was, oh, actually, you have to wear a mask outside even though we said you didn't as of 3 months ago. What where are the big studies on this? No. I mean, they just what are they gonna say? We can't stop this thing, and because we can't stop it, all these procedures we put in place mandated by the government. Individual, of course, during flu season and during cold season, people do all kinds of things. They, you know, limit their exposure. They're washing their hands. But the government mandate stuff, look what they've put us through. It is not clear at all that there has been any benefit from the lockdowns. Not I mean, just look at the data. Spain, Spain, France, the UK, and Ireland are, as I speak to you right now, James, all considering elevated lockdowns because of the huge spikes they've had in cases. Is that Donald Trump's fault? Is it because they haven't been wearing enough masks? If you listen to our media, that's all that's that's the problem. That's insane. Why do you think they've had a surge? Not that you're a doctor or anything, but No. But I mean, I just watch these. Look. I mean, also, the other thing is I've I've been around enough doctors to know that doctors can be very wrong. Doctors can be guilty of groupthink. Go back and read about what the Royal College of Surgeons, or whatever the top medical body was in London, when they were looking at cholera outbreaks. And I think it was the 18 sixties or 18 seventies, but I'm my date might be off, so don't yell at me if my dates are wrong because I'm doing this from memory. But the the consensus scientific position at the time was that you got cholera from bad air. And there's one guy who came along who's like, no. It's actually in the water, guys. And he had to plot it out with data to show that it it, sure enough, was was a, a bacteria spread in water. But the scientific consensus in London, which was the most sophisticated, capital of the world at that time, was that it was just bad stuff in the air. I forget what the the term was that they used for it, but miasmas. Is what they call it. Yeah. I think you bring up a great point that consensus is different than pro science. Correct. Like but a lot of people confuse the 2 because pro science might mean the scientific method and double blind test and actual science, like a laboratory experiment that then is broadened out to include a large human experiment. But you look at, you know, another example is, the case of Igor Semmelweis in the 18 forties, I think it was, where he basically discovered that if you don't wash your hands after treating a sick patient, a doctor might get a healthy patient, particularly a a mother giving birth, might get her sick or even, get her to die because you because of germs. So so but but consensus was that that wasn't how diseases were passed, so nobody washed their hands. And even after this guy proved it, the consensus was still overwhelming that everybody thought, oh, no. That's unscientific. Like, the science is you don't have to wash hands. Yeah. I think it was Einstein who was confronted by somebody who said, all these scientists say that you're wrong. And he said, it only takes one to prove me wrong. And that's what people forget about all that. They forget this with climate change. They forget this with everything. And you can tell also by people's actions. I mean, I I just like to be a logical thinker. I mean, I'm not a doctor, but I've also had the experience several times in my life of going to doctors and saying, hey. I have this problem. Can you guys fix it? And their answers were either no or some version of, you know, rub some dirt on it and see what happens. I mean, they have absolutely no idea. Some things doctors can fix, some things doctors can't. They don't like to admit that, though. There's always this, you know, well, why don't we try this? You know, we'll take these 15 things out of her diet and see if that I mean, and and I have celiac disease, so I actually know what it's like to have to go through diet stuff, and and having to change that for yourself. But when you when you see the way that they've shifted continuously I mean, if masks were look. Are masks somewhat effective? Yeah. Sure. If if it stops my spittle from, like, going into your face, I'm I'm sure so in very close quarters. Yeah. I mean, I I'm not I'm not like some, some Luddite who thinks but if this is aerosolized as we have there's just a study out this week that says it's aerosolized and can spread more like 16 to 20 feet for somebody who's really shedding a lot of virus at the time. Do people think that this porous cloth mask that's open at the top I work out with 1 on, so, you know, the air is breathing out from above and below. They think that that's really filtering out enough submicroscopic particles that they're not going to get an infection. That's that that's inter that's interesting thinking. I'm just gonna put it out that way. And, you know, when you have the Spanish flu pandemic with a 5% fatality rate, tens of millions of people dying all over the world back in, gosh, 1918. Right? Yeah. They had masks. They had cloth masks. Yeah. Any any anyone really wanna argue that that, like, that that they stopped that? And trust and with a 5% overall fatality rate, people in their twenties thirties were dropping, like, all over the place with that thing. I'm sure people were willing to wear masks all the time, and they did in places, and it didn't stop. So I just wanna know why. So so let me I know your your time's limited, so so last question. But, again, you see so many different perspectives from your viewpoint. What's a worst case scenario from here? How does like, right now, I feel we're kind of, like, in this, what is it, the the the eye of the storm sort of thing where there's kind of a calm a month before the election, but there's so many different directions where the s**t can hit the fan that I'm legitimately nervous on a variety of different areas. Like, what's what's a worst case scenario for you, and how do you see, is there a best case outcome? I think that there's going to be a a if Trump has more votes on election night, which I believe he will, I think that there will be a a straight up, and I mean systematic or systemic, I guess, either way, refusal to accept the results. I think that they're going to not only drag it into the courts, I think that these, democrat paramilitary types from Antifa and the BLM shock troops and all the rest of them will take to the streets in major cities and paralyze those cities, and and there'll be so much pressure on on the general public and on politicians to go along with this that, I I mean, I think we may have you know, you've had sort of pretender popes or whatever in the past. We may have a a pretender president situation where Biden just won't concede. Then what do we do? And they keep saying, no. It's in the courts. It's in the courts. We have and we have absentee ballot not absentee ballots, mail in ballots, which are absentee, but specifically, these mail in ballots that they're now changing so you don't have to request them. And we can't know. We're still going through them. We're still going through them to delay the whole process. I mean, Saul Alinsky was an evil genius, and all you have to do is read rules for radicals, and you see the way they're gonna approach this election, which is they they will flatly refuse to refuse to accept it. And in a sense, I think, James, they're already saying that because, they're they're saying they won't accept the results of the election in advance. And so it's better if you vote for Biden because at least then we'll have a real presidency. I mean, some have more or less said that out loud already. I mean, could Trump have done something different in terms of just creating I mean, he's very much as as one of my guests put it, he's very much a unilateralist, Meaning, he makes the decisions, he executes them, and that and doesn't care what people think. Is there a way he could have built consensus along the way so that there wouldn't have been as much hate towards him? No. It was just all baked in? All baked in. Hillary was supposed to be the president for 8 years. The the elites in the media, academia, Hollywood, the legal profession overrun with crazy crazy socialist now. It's a they wanna bill you 7 it's just like what I said before about the hypocrisy. They wanna bill you 7.50 an hour, but they're all about, you know, Obamacare. Right? I mean, this is sort of the the stuff that you get from people now. You know, I I I think that Trump was not only was he he hated from the beginning, but there was abuse of process that was used to really hurt his presidency, with the special counsel and all this other stuff that we that we've seen. So, you know, I I don't think there was any look. Is he I mean, this is where people go, come on, but yeah, man. Is he rough around the edges? Are some of his tweets even for me, I'm like, come on, man. Not that. You know? Yes. Of course. But what's so funny is the Liberals, they they live in a fantasy land where they think people like me who support the president don't know that stuff or no. We we know he's we know he can be a little bit of a loose cannon. We know we also don't care. We also think that the, Mitt Romney approach, bend the knee, beg forgiveness, and get a nice pat on the head from the progressives as they steamroll everything in your life. We don't like that. That's not fun. Well, Buck, I know you're you've you've you've you've got to go, so thank you so much for the time. I've enjoyed also being on on your show as well. Can I can I plug the Buck Sexton show now? Because I think, you you know, there's probably about 5% of your audience, which I know is a very robust podcast audience that might be willing to check it out. But for that 5%, look, I'm just gonna say it. The best conservative podcast slash talk radio show you're gonna hear. I'm I'm not shy about it. So And and by the way, even if you're not conservative, just listen to other viewpoints. Like, you'll see what you learn. I learn I listen to all viewpoints, and I've had people from every persuasion on the podcast, and you learn something from from everybody. I think everybody's also just closing themselves off. Oh, you know, what what's their if they're for higher taxes, that means I have to also be, against hydroxychloroquine. Like, it's there's no menu of issues where you have to believe everything. Just as a part of my pitch to your to your audience as well, for the for the Liberals out there, I know a lot of Liberals in media, the really smart Liberals all like me and like to hear behind closed doors what I think about things, so I'll give you that. The smart Liberals like me. It's the the idiot bomb throwers that don't, don't give the Bucks there any love. Well, no no bomb throwers here. Buck, thanks once again. Enjoy, and come on the show again. Maybe after the election, we'll see if your predictions were right. Thanks so much, James. You take care. Yeah. Thanks, Buck.