October 1, 2025 • 36 mins
Hour 1 of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show kicks off with Clay Travis flying solo while Buck Sexton travels in Taiwan. The hour centers around the ongoing U.S. government shutdown, its historical context, and the political motivations behind it. Clay argues that shutdowns are cyclical and often overblown, citing that since 1976, the federal government has shut down 20 times. He emphasizes that the current impasse stems from Democratic efforts to extend COVID-era healthcare subsidies, which Republicans argue should expire now that the pandemic is over.
A major segment of the hour is devoted to a deep critique of the American healthcare system, which Clay describes as inefficient, opaque, and anticapitalistic. He shares personal anecdotes to illustrate how insurance often leads to irrational pricing and decision-making, and how the system penalizes those who try to do the right thing. He calls for a complete overhaul of both the healthcare and tax systems, likening them to unstable buildings built on broken foundations.
Clay is then joined by Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who passionately discusses the need to ban Congressional stock trading, citing suspiciously well-timed trades by lawmakers like Nancy Pelosi. Burchett advocates for legislation that would restrict members of Congress to mutual funds and blind trusts, arguing that insider access is being abused. He also shares his personal hobby of building and selling skateboards, humorously noting the ethical hurdles he faces compared to the lack of oversight on stock trading.
The conversation shifts to political hypocrisy, particularly targeting Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for reversing his stance on shutdowns due to pressure from progressive challengers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Burchett speculates that Schumer’s actions are driven by fear of losing power, and criticizes the broader culture of entitlement and insider privilege in Washington.
Toward the end of the hour, Clay and Burchett engage in a light-hearted debate comparing bad decisions—Nico transferring to UCLA versus Kamala Harris selecting Tim Walz as VP—with Burchett humorously siding against Kamala’s pick. The segment closes with listener calls, including one from West Los Angeles lamenting UCLA’s football woes and coaching instability.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome in Wednesday edition Clay Travis Buck Sexton Show. I
hope all of you are having fabulous weeks so far.
We are here hopefully to make that a bit better
than it otherwise would be. The government is shut down,
what is the impact we will discuss. Buck is not
(00:20):
shut down, but he is in Taiwan right now and
he is continuing to travel around over there. He'll be
back Monday on the program, just to FYI, so you
have got me as you have on Monday and Tuesday
solo for the rest of this week, we will take
your calls, we will take your talkbacks. We will dive
(00:41):
into a variety of different pertinent subjects. We're going to
be joined by Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett. He was listening
to our discussion about why congressional stock trading is not
banned and he has some strong thoughts on that. I'm
sure we'll talk about the shutdown as well. And then
(01:02):
at two o'clock our friend Tutor Dixon. I just saw
her last week speaking when I was speaking up in Michigan.
She will join us. She's part of the Clay and
Buck podcast network. We had a really good time hanging
out up at mckinaw Island where the Michigan Republican Party
was having there by annual event at the Grand Hotel
(01:23):
up there. So that was a lot of fun, and
I was there last week. I think I was there
last week. Everything runs together, but I guess it was
two weeks ago. We will dive into a lot of topics,
but off the top, the shutdown is underway, and I
got to be honest with y'all. You know, and I
think Buck and I have talked about this quite a
(01:44):
bit on the program. We are not of the opinion
that the shutdown is ultimately that big of a story,
because eventually it will get resolved and we'll just add
on more debt. But I do want to give you
some historical analogy of where we are. Since nineteen seventy six,
(02:05):
the US government has shut down twenty times. So if
you were out there and you're thinking, this just feels
like the same plot over and over again, Groundhog Day,
in many ways it is. There were no shutdowns between
nineteen ninety five and twenty thirteen, but three have occurred
(02:25):
in the twelve years since. The longest one was in
Trump one point zero and that lasted thirty four days
back in twenty eighteen. Really, the essence of this shutdown,
just so you know, is a battle over whether there
should be an extension of COVID healthcare policies, which were
(02:49):
put in place by Democrats as part of their massive blockbuster,
out of control spending bills that they forced through in
the COVID era. And the reason why this spending cost
is up now is because they pegged it for a
relatively short period of time so that it did not
(03:10):
continue to cost money going forward. Now, this is me,
and you have heard me go off on this quite
a lot. The healthcare system in the United States is broken.
Every single one of you listening to me right now
is nodding along because it is just a broken marketplace.
It makes no sense the way we have designed it.
(03:33):
It is the most inefficient and the least effective part
of I would argue the American economic system. It is
anti capitalistic in many ways. It is profoundly broken. This
spending package that the Democrats are insisting on continuing would
(03:54):
add up over the next decade, according to the Wall
Street Journal editorial page, to a round four hundred and
fifty billion dollars, and much of it is a subsidy
that is in a large extent unnecessary. And so this
let me give you a little bit of a background
of exactly what's going on, try to simplify this for you.
(04:16):
So we begin with the foundational point that the healthcare
system in this country is broken, and anybody who's ever
had to get on the phone with their insurance provider
knows exactly what I'm talking about. Studies suggest that one
reason our healthcare system is broken, probably the primary one,
(04:38):
is nobody has any idea what anything costs, and so
you can't make a rational decision in your life about
whether or not you need an MRI, or whether you
need a need to go to the hospital or not,
because a lot of times you don't have the information
as you're not a doctor, as necessary. And what has
(05:03):
happened is doctors wildly over prescribe because much of this
is paid for by insurance and patience to a large extent,
are not making choices that are rational. I'll give you
an example that happened recently in my family. I think
it was a few years ago. My wife was in
(05:25):
a car accident. She was fine, she was able to
get to the hospital and make sure everything was okay
without needing an ambulance. But the ambulance the police officer
told her, Hey, the ambulance can take you, but it
will end up costing you thousands and thousands of dollars,
(05:48):
or you can take yourself to the hospital on your own.
How many people actually make that choice? How many people
actually in much of your life? And I've talked about
this in my own life. When it came to having
our kids, we went to go tour the hospitals. Nobody
(06:10):
could tell me what a delivery cost. Went to all
these different hospitals, they're competing to see who has the
fastest WiFi. They're competing to see who has bamboo floors,
who has the best flat screen televisions in the delivery area,
what sort of security there is to make sure that
(06:31):
your babies are safe. All those things are fine. They
don't compete on price. I just said to each of them, Hey,
what's this going to cost me? None of them could
tell me. I mentioned to you, I think last week,
because I think it's a really instructive analogy that I
went and took one of our kids when he had
(06:53):
strapped throat.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
My wife took the other one.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
She was on the ball, knew where our healthcare card was,
knew exactly who are health care provider was turned it
over when we checked in, when she checked in, I
didn't have any idea where the healthcare card was. Somehow
I couldn't find it in my wallet. I think we
had switched, and my incompetence meant that we were billed
(07:16):
as not having health care and we paid a fraction
of what my wife paid for the exact same medical
treatment because we had health insurance.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
It's all broken.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
All of it is broken, and I could get on
a pedestal and talk about this forever. The fact that
we run healthcare. As someone who has owned a business
and has had to pay for health care, the fact
that healthcare is connected to employment is crazy. I have
been a freelancer who was not an employee, and the
(07:55):
fact that I had to go out into the healthcare
marketplace and figure out what policy was the right one
one for me was incredibly complicated too. Insurance is the
only thing all of us have to pay for that
we hope to never use, and the entire insurance industry
(08:16):
is totally broken. In conjunction with health care, we spend
way more than any country in the world, and we
do not get the best results. And the data reflects
that you could eliminate half of all medical treatments and
there wouldn't be any change in life expectancy in this country.
So my general proposition is, I don't want to take anything.
(08:38):
I know tilan always in the news, I get made
fun of. I don't want to take any drugs. I
don't want to take anything. I feel fortunate. I've been
pretty healthy in the grand scheme of things, and I
think that they wildly over prescribe and over medicate us
as a whole. And yet simultaneously, the people who actually
do need health care, the people who are actually sick,
(09:00):
the people who are in desperate need of healthcare, cannot
get it, and the people who don't need it don't
feel like we're getting any kind of rational healthcare that
makes common sense. Okay, So that's where we really are,
and in essence, much like our tax code, because I
would say number one broken system in America's healthcare number
(09:24):
two is tax code. They're both so fundamentally broken that
you would actually do better if you just tore them
both down and built a functional, rational healthcare system. And
tax policy. Instead, we have just continued to add layer
upon layer of a broken foundation. And as a result,
(09:45):
if you want to use sort of a building metaphor,
we have constantly shifting in the winds, tall buildings with
no structural stability, and they'll fall over all the time
and they make absolutely no So God, hey, happy optimistic Wednesday, everybody.
We've got two hugely broken systems that threaten the very
(10:08):
fabric of our democratic republic because as we have an
aging population, the costs that we're going to have to
put out for health care is going to be borne
increasingly by a dwindling number of young people in America,
and the budget and the math just doesn't add up.
So all of that is the foundational issue that is
(10:31):
in play here. And one of the real unfortunate aspects
of our democratic republic is once something is created, once
the government creates a project, it almost never leaves. It
just goes on the ledger as a cost long into
(10:52):
the future. And Democrats want to provide healthcare for as
many people as possible, including many different illegal immigrants, and
ultimately this is paid for by all of you out
there that are working hard every single day. They're reaching
into your pocket, they're taking your money out, and they're
giving it to someone very often who is not even
(11:15):
an American citizen. But this is all part and parcel
of a broken healthcare system. Obamacare is collapsing, by the way,
because it's predicated on giving insurance companies more money, and
the entire concept of insurance is they have to get
tons of people who are never going to need it
(11:36):
in order to pay for the people that actually do
need it, and young, healthy people, a lot of them
just say I don't need health insurance, and as a result,
the insurance companies don't get that money. And as we
have an aging society, the profit margins of insurance companies
going down in the future. But I just come back
to that analogy. I would be paying far less for
(12:00):
health care if I had no insurance at all, so
would most of you. That is a broken system. And
my analogy there of walking in with a kid who
has strep throat one day after we got insurance for
the kid who did have a strep throat, I paid.
My wife knows the exact dollars because she's still fed
up about it, because my incompetence actually benefited the family
(12:22):
because we had to pay less money, but we paid
a fraction as uninsured walking into a clinic patience of
what a health care insured family would pay. So it's
not only that the system is broken, it's that people
who are actually trying to do the right thing are
(12:43):
getting gouged, and people who have no interest whatsoever in
buying in at all, they're essentially getting free health care.
You pay a lot, many people pay virtually nothing at all. Okay,
So that is the essence of why we have a
government shut down, because Democrats want to give more people
(13:03):
who do not pay taxes free health care, and Republicans
are saying, wait, that was a COVID era policy that
we put in place. It should expire, thankfully now that
COVID is over. So that is the essence of what
is going on, and we will see exactly how long
it takes for this to be resolved. I suspect that
many of you out there will be like me, and
(13:26):
there will be absolutely no impact to your life whatsoever
by the fact that the government has shut down. In fact,
a lot of you are saying I wouldn't mind the
government shutting down for a long time. First time I
heard the stat it didn't make a lot of sense,
but when you dig into the details, unfortunately it's very true.
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Speaker 3 (14:44):
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Speaker 1 (14:55):
Welcome back in Clay Travis buck Sexton Show. Okay, after
that open on the fact that we are now in
the midst of a government shutdown, and I bet, by
the way, most of you are actually at your jobs
because you don't get to just have a shutdown and
get paid. This is what's going to happen. By the way,
government employees are just not going to work and they're
(15:19):
eventually going to get paid for all the time that
they didn't work. So you just basically get an additional
vacation week or a couple weeks, and then they'll eventually
vote in the fact that all of them are going
to get paid. Honestly, I think every time the government
shuts down, Congress should get their salaries cut in half.
If you can't manage to keep the government open, then
(15:43):
there should be a bill in place that everyone who
works in Congress, that's all the representatives, all the senators,
they lose half of their salary for the year every
time there's a shutdown. You know what I would happen.
I bet would happen. There would never be a shutdown
because if they actually had consequences themselves when the government
(16:04):
shuts down, they would get the job done and they
would never actually shut down. I'm just saying, if somebody
wanted to pass a bill that said, hey, anytime the
government shuts down, Congress loses everyone in Congress loses half
of their salary, there would never be a government shutdown.
But Chuck Schumer is such a hypocrite onusdown shutdowns that
even CNN is playing a montage from him in the
(16:28):
past talking about government shutdowns.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Chuck Schumer cut one here. This was CNN.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
What if I persuaded my caucus to say I'm going
to shut the government down. I Am going to not
pay our bills unless I get my way. It's a
politics of idiocy, of confrontation, of paralysis. Shutting down government
over a policy difference is self defeating. We can never
hold American workers hostage again. While the CR bill is
(16:55):
very bad, the potential for a shutdown has come, so
Quins's for America that are much much worse. Therefore, I
will vote to keep the government open and not shut
it down.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Yes, Chuck Schumer so terrified of AOC challenging him in
a primary and probably beating him and ending his political
career that he is now a huge hypocrite. That was
Chuck Schumer about never shutting down the government over policy differences,
and now Chuck Schumer has shut down the government over
policy differences. I will tell you this too. When Buck
(17:35):
and I started this show, I thought to myself, you know,
I bet well, there's a lot of congressmen and women,
and a lot of senators who are super sharp, super smart.
These are the people leading our nation. I'm going to
be really impressed by all of them. There's a lot
of morons. I'm sorry. Many of y'all are much smarter
than the people on Capitol Hill. You know it, but
(17:57):
it's just pathetic to see they're not leaders. They're cowards,
and many of them are also morons. Moronic cowards is
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(18:56):
back in Clay Travis buck Sexton Show. We are joined
now by Congressman Tim Burchett of the Great State of Tennessee.
Government is shut down. We're going to get into that.
But Congressman, you wanted to come on because you're as
fired up as Buck and I were about the amount
of stock trading that some of your colleagues are engaged in,
(19:19):
and not just stock trading, some of the best timing
that has ever existed in the history of the world.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi is Warren Buffett level investing savant.
Isn't this just even if it's not actually improper, it
certainly has the appearance of impropriety, which I think demeans
(19:42):
the overall value of trust in public servants.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
I think you probably agree. It's kind of crazy, isn't it.
Speaker 5 (19:50):
I agree with one hundred percent, and thank you so
much for letting me come on with you. It's an honor.
Congress is broke, and it is crooked as a dog's leg, brother.
There is no other explanation when a congressman can make
six hundred percent return on their investment, and you know,
and day in and day out, or three hundred or
(20:12):
two hundred or whatever. I mean, just go on the
Unusual Wales website and read the top hundred. It's unbelievable.
It is unfreaking believable. I mean, people are making a
living now of just following Nancy Pelosi's stock trades. Ye
Warton Buffett needs Warren Buffett needs to go to the
go to the front porch and sit there and play
with his grandkids or something, and just turn it over
(20:34):
to Pelosi. It is unbelievable. And we can't even get
the bill in committee, neither party. They're gutless. They are gutless,
and it is shady as all get out. And you know,
I have a I had a twelve thousand dollars portfolio
that my buddy Tommy Siler managed. Everybody needs a bad
(20:54):
gum mutual fund, and that's what that we ought to do.
And I get sick and tired here in people in
Congress say, oh, I'm sacrificing so much, Well that gumm
it go home and let somebody else do it. That's
not sacrificing so much. America is tired of this garbage.
It is broke. You've called it out. We've called it out.
(21:16):
And here's what's going to happen if we do get
this bill before and Luna has represent Annapolina Luna, she's
going to try to if we don't get this bill
out that everybody's been working on, which is a little
too big and a little too beautiful in my opinion,
but still she's going to take my bill, which is
a clean bill, just says no stop trading them, you know,
(21:37):
for members of Congress unless it's a mutual fund and
your and your siblings and your wife and spouse whatever,
and that's it. That should be it. You know, make
the dad gum sacrifice. It's crazy, you know, I make skateboards.
It's and I'm sixty one years old, and I haven't
broke my neck yet. I made one for Tulca Gabbard
(21:58):
a couple of weeks ago and she loved it. But yeah,
I always tell people that when I work on these skateboards,
it's cheaper than a psychiatrist. It's good therapy for me.
But people want to buy them, so I'm trying to
sell them. I went to the ethics people and I
literally have to get I'm getting a business plan together.
I've had to hire an attorney if I want to
sell skateboards. But dad, gummut, if I want to do
(22:21):
insider trading, just become a member of Congress, and it
rains on you.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
It is wild.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
And you know I was going off on this congressman
because my thing is I now have resources. I've been
in a position where I had nothing and actually owed
a lot more money. Go to law school. It's not cheap.
I owed a lot more money than I had assets
for a while. But just doing what you're saying is
actually really good advice. By s and P five hundred
(22:49):
index funds, by big groups of stocks. We're not even saying,
certainly that members of Congress can't own stocks it's just
don't trade in individual stocks like this is having a
blind trust and just having a large basket of mutual
funds or index funds is actually really smart advice for
(23:10):
anyone out there listening to us right now. And it's
crazy to me that, first of all, your job should
be pretty busy, the idea that you should be pulling
out your phone and doing individual stock trades anyway, it
feels it just feels blonkers to me that this is
going on.
Speaker 5 (23:27):
Well, some of them do hundreds of hundreds, I know,
trades in a year. And can I give you one
example that everybody can follow and can understand. Nearing the
Biden reign of terror, when he decided to give our
missile defense system to Ukraine, which I don't vote for
any more any I haven't vote for any dollars for Ukraine.
I'm sick of that. But anyway, that's another story. Well,
(23:50):
it turns out that members of some of our military
committees that had access to that information had bought stock
and guess what full defense companies over just some of them,
a couple of weeks prior to it. Now, why you say,
what does that mean? Well, we had to replenish ours
in a no bid, multi billion dollar contract with these
(24:13):
companies overnight, So you see their stock prices would go
up dramatically. And yet that's common practice in Congress. They
can watch the trends. You're in the meetings, you know,
you hear about COVID, You hear I was in the meeting,
you heard about COVID, and I remembered I had had
bought Denny Stock, and all the left accused me of
(24:35):
some kind of insider trading. I left the DAD meeting
because the Democrats wouldn't let any of the They had
all their staff members in the seats and we couldn't
get any seats. But anyway, I've just come to the
conclusion that we've got too much information and generally the
vast majority of the people up there probably aren't doing
(24:56):
something incredibly shady. But we know that this time in
and time out, when they just seem to just defy
all logic, every odd and the odds of trading, and
every month they turn in these huge gains. And it's
shift baffling to me that we allow that to go on,
and we can sit here and tell the American public
(25:18):
that nothing's going on.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
How does this shutdown end up ending Congressman? Like, where
does it go from here?
Speaker 5 (25:26):
When Schumer sees his polling numbers declining, I think what's
really behind it? And this is my theory. I've put
it on people, and they've agreed with me. Schumer is
looking in his rear view mirror right now, and all
he sees is AOC and that big grin of hers
bearing down on him. He knows that she can raise
(25:47):
millions of dollars overnight. Just that was me snapping my
fingers overnight, Hollywood. All the elitists, they'll be throwing the
money at her. And all he's doing is watching that
New York mayor's race, where literally a Marxist communist will win,
probably unless something lets God Shine's favor upon the poor
(26:11):
folks in New York that don't know any better.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
By the way, God shining favor on the poor folks
of New York actually means Andrew Cuomo should win.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
That's how bad of the situation they're in.
Speaker 5 (26:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well that's that's You're very accurate, You're
very accurate. But the truth is is that that Schumer
is watching his review mirror. He knows his polling numbers,
and the reality is he needs to go back to
flipping raw cheeseburgers on his grill and playing with his
grandkids if he has any, and get out of this
(26:45):
thing he has left. You know, he was he wasn't
a moderate, but he was just an old classic liberal
and now he's just turned far left as you can get.
And all it is is about staying in power. And
that's what Washington, d C. Is truly about leadership. They
love the suburbans, they love the you know, four deep
(27:05):
with security, they love the spotlight, they love never standing
in line. They love the security. They love the access
and yes, the access to the inside information. And when
they're out of leadership, it's gone. It's gone. All that
is gone, and they can't stand it. And his time
has come and gone, like a whole lot of them
(27:26):
that need to be out of there, but he is.
That is why he's going to wreck this country. It's
just to keep himself in power. And a came. You know,
he's out there talking about something nobody's paying attention to him.
He's saying, how the House Republicans are shutting government down.
We voted to keep the Dad given government open. Only
one Democrat voted with us. And you know, the whole
(27:48):
thing is just it's so obvious. And as soon as
he's polling data flips on him, he'll be at the
table with Trump. But he won't be till then.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
We're talking to Congressman Tim Burchett at Tennessee. How did
you get into skateboarding and making skateboards?
Speaker 5 (28:04):
Well, I didn't smoke pot and I didn't drink, although
since I've become a member of Congress, I've fiercely considered
taking on crack cocaine just to take off the edges.
But but no, I just always liked it. I liked
I liked the physics of it. And and I'm an inventor.
I've always just make stuff. And I had a little
(28:24):
piece of ply wood and some old skates and I
put it on there and I would just and you
could that's those are death traps, you know. And and
I never and you know, my dad would challenge me,
if you can get to the end, to see if
you get to the end of the driveway or something
that you know eventually I would and then and so
I and I'm just I've always been fascinated by bamboo.
(28:47):
It's the poor man's carbon fiber. I read an article
on it in nineteen eighty in a national geographic and
so I started just I've always done stuff and tinkered,
and now that I've got some equipment to do it.
And my major was technological Adult Education, certified to teach shop. Basically,
I can weld and build engines and I can burn
(29:11):
your house down if you want me to wired. I'm
not very good at that, but I can do all
those things. I can do casting and just all the
stuff around the machine shop. But I just like it.
And then I'm a capitalist at heart. And I read
somewhere that there's a I think it's a five billion
dollar industry in this country. Now I don't want all
(29:31):
five billion of it, but I wouldn't mind shaving a
little off the edge. And so you know, I make
it out of ricycled stuff, mainly because I'm cheap. I
guess I'm fiscally smart. But you know, I use old
palettes and I've been using banana fibers off of banana
plants that I've grown, and I'm just just all over
(29:52):
about it. I just and and skateboards something you can
make small and you can transport easily and kids. And
when you see a sixty one year old out there
with his vans on skateboarding on a board that he
built himself, it's kind of cool and it's good to
bring up conversation, and you know, and I like it.
(30:12):
And again, as I say, it's cheaper than a psychiatrist.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
We're talking to Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee. All right,
I got the ultimate controversial question for you here to
close up the interview, Congressman, all Right, better decision, Who
made the better decision? Who made the worst decision? I
know you are a big University of Tennessee football fan.
Nico going to UCLA transferring from Tennessee going to UCLA.
(30:41):
UCLA is now lost every game. His head coach has
been fired, his offensive coordinator has been fired. Sorry UCLA
fans out there catching astray. You didn't expect this. Okay,
Nico to UCLA? That choice or Kamala Harris picking Tim
Walls as her vice president?
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Who made the worst decision? Who made the better decision?
You're on the floor.
Speaker 5 (31:08):
I'm gonna say Kamala because she was a train wreck anyway,
and she just picked a bigger train wreck. I almost.
You know, they always stick somebody who I always feel
like somebody that's not going to overshadow him a lot
of times. But I the JD Vance, as we say
(31:29):
in East Tennessee. He kicks the ass. I like JD.
He's strong and he's a kind of a buddy of mine,
I guess. But yeah, that gum when they call him
tampon tim or something, I don't like saying it, but
he is just a he's a knucklehead man. He just
can't get out of his own way. I don't know
(31:50):
who he was running against to get elected governor out there,
but that gum must have been a convicted fella and
getting ready to go to the electric chair or something.
I'm not sure the Republicans put up against him him,
But yeah, Nico, I mean, he just took some mad advibes.
But he's he'll get a little bit of a paycheck.
And if he's he can just get all his groupies
and family away from him, he might be okay. He
(32:12):
might be able to salvage something in the Canadian Football League.
But yeah, that's where I'm at. Where I get myself
in any more trouble.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Well, I'm already thinking The headline for the New York
Times is going to be Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett praises
Nico for his move to UCLA. Hey, this is this
is a lot of fun, and I would argue I
love the Tim Walls. You may have seen the meme
Congressman where it shows Barack Obama and he says I
need someone dumber than me, as VP Joe Biden. Joe
(32:43):
Biden says I need someone dumber than me as VP
Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris says I need someone dumber than me,
and it's Tim Walls. There's a lot of truth to that.
And we have seen a rapid descent and intelligence across
the board there. We appreciate the time. If people want
to get the skateboard, by the way, where do they go?
Speaker 5 (33:04):
Well nowhere Yet I'm okay, I got a business plan.
I got to put it on ethics and so they
can approve it or not.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Hey, if Hunter can sell paintings for five hundred thousand dollars,
I would think you could probably sell a skateboard for
a couple one hundred bucks.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
But what do I know?
Speaker 5 (33:23):
Well, the Biden family couldn't spell ethics. So I just
want to be the man my little girl thinks I am,
so I must try to follow the rules here. I
get my lawyers involved and we'll get it all worked
out eventually, hope the end of the year. Hopefully in
time for Christmas.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
That's the goal, just in time for Christmas. Hey, we
appreciate the time. Go big Orange and we'll talk to
you again soon.
Speaker 5 (33:47):
Thank you, brother, appreciate y'all.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Man he is great.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee, let me give you a
good news. Gold's up forty percent this year.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
Now.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
The downside is that's because people are like, I don't
know if I have a lot of faith in the
US dollar right now, because government's spending so much money,
Inflation has skyrocketed, and still it's kind of lingering around
out there, and a lot of people have decided, as
has been the case for centuries, that gold is a
safe repository for your money because it's always going to
(34:23):
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(35:08):
today with Perch Gold.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Want to begin to know when you're on to go the.
Speaker 6 (35:14):
Team forty seven podcasts trump highlights from the week some
days at noon Eastern in the Clay in Buck podcast
Speed find it on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Welcome back in Clay Travis Buck Sexton Show. Appreciate all
of you hanging out with us. Doug in West laws
In Doug, I'm sorry if you're a UCLA guy, that
was a fabulous question. I thought the Congressman tried to
dodge it a little bit there, and I know he
enjoyed it. He's a huge college football fan. But what
do you got to tell us about UCLA?
Speaker 7 (35:47):
Well, not only was coach Foster the head coach fired,
and the defensive coordinator parted ways of the team, the
offensive coordinator yesterday. The defensive coordinator left, so it has
not been a good season.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
And the.
Speaker 7 (36:06):
Quarterback from Appalachian State transferred to UCLA for one quarter
and then he's now the quarterback at Tennessee.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Oh yeah, and he's leading the entire sec and passing yards.
So I'm sorry for Bruin spe Thank you for the call,
by the way from West La. I'm sorry for everybody
out there in Westwood, all of the UCLA fans. This
is a dumpster fire of epic proportions. So it's right
up there with Kamala picking Tim Walls. I mean, it
(36:36):
is a tough one to decide who made the worst
decision when we come back. I think I mentioned this
a little bit yesterday, but I want to really kind
of dive into it because I do think it's incredibly
impactful in the larger culture. Remember that Sydney Sweeney jeans ad. Yeah,
American Eagle is printing money as a result.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
I'll tell you why it matters next
Welcome in Wednesday edition Clay Travis Buck Sexton Show. I
hope all of you are having fabulous weeks so far.
We are here hopefully to make that a bit better
than it otherwise would be. The government is shut down,
what is the impact we will discuss. Buck is not
(00:20):
shut down, but he is in Taiwan right now and
he is continuing to travel around over there. He'll be
back Monday on the program, just to FYI, so you
have got me as you have on Monday and Tuesday
solo for the rest of this week, we will take
your calls, we will take your talkbacks. We will dive
(00:41):
into a variety of different pertinent subjects. We're going to
be joined by Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett. He was listening
to our discussion about why congressional stock trading is not
banned and he has some strong thoughts on that. I'm
sure we'll talk about the shutdown as well. And then
(01:02):
at two o'clock our friend Tutor Dixon. I just saw
her last week speaking when I was speaking up in Michigan.
She will join us. She's part of the Clay and
Buck podcast network. We had a really good time hanging
out up at mckinaw Island where the Michigan Republican Party
was having there by annual event at the Grand Hotel
(01:23):
up there. So that was a lot of fun, and
I was there last week. I think I was there
last week. Everything runs together, but I guess it was
two weeks ago. We will dive into a lot of topics,
but off the top, the shutdown is underway, and I
got to be honest with y'all. You know, and I
think Buck and I have talked about this quite a
(01:44):
bit on the program. We are not of the opinion
that the shutdown is ultimately that big of a story,
because eventually it will get resolved and we'll just add
on more debt. But I do want to give you
some historical analogy of where we are. Since nineteen seventy six,
(02:05):
the US government has shut down twenty times. So if
you were out there and you're thinking, this just feels
like the same plot over and over again, Groundhog Day,
in many ways it is. There were no shutdowns between
nineteen ninety five and twenty thirteen, but three have occurred
(02:25):
in the twelve years since. The longest one was in
Trump one point zero and that lasted thirty four days
back in twenty eighteen. Really, the essence of this shutdown,
just so you know, is a battle over whether there
should be an extension of COVID healthcare policies, which were
(02:49):
put in place by Democrats as part of their massive blockbuster,
out of control spending bills that they forced through in
the COVID era. And the reason why this spending cost
is up now is because they pegged it for a
relatively short period of time so that it did not
(03:10):
continue to cost money going forward. Now, this is me,
and you have heard me go off on this quite
a lot. The healthcare system in the United States is broken.
Every single one of you listening to me right now
is nodding along because it is just a broken marketplace.
It makes no sense the way we have designed it.
(03:33):
It is the most inefficient and the least effective part
of I would argue the American economic system. It is
anti capitalistic in many ways. It is profoundly broken. This
spending package that the Democrats are insisting on continuing would
(03:54):
add up over the next decade, according to the Wall
Street Journal editorial page, to a round four hundred and
fifty billion dollars, and much of it is a subsidy
that is in a large extent unnecessary. And so this
let me give you a little bit of a background
of exactly what's going on, try to simplify this for you.
(04:16):
So we begin with the foundational point that the healthcare
system in this country is broken, and anybody who's ever
had to get on the phone with their insurance provider
knows exactly what I'm talking about. Studies suggest that one
reason our healthcare system is broken, probably the primary one,
(04:38):
is nobody has any idea what anything costs, and so
you can't make a rational decision in your life about
whether or not you need an MRI, or whether you
need a need to go to the hospital or not,
because a lot of times you don't have the information
as you're not a doctor, as necessary. And what has
(05:03):
happened is doctors wildly over prescribe because much of this
is paid for by insurance and patience to a large extent,
are not making choices that are rational. I'll give you
an example that happened recently in my family. I think
it was a few years ago. My wife was in
(05:25):
a car accident. She was fine, she was able to
get to the hospital and make sure everything was okay
without needing an ambulance. But the ambulance the police officer
told her, Hey, the ambulance can take you, but it
will end up costing you thousands and thousands of dollars,
(05:48):
or you can take yourself to the hospital on your own.
How many people actually make that choice? How many people
actually in much of your life? And I've talked about
this in my own life. When it came to having
our kids, we went to go tour the hospitals. Nobody
(06:10):
could tell me what a delivery cost. Went to all
these different hospitals, they're competing to see who has the
fastest WiFi. They're competing to see who has bamboo floors,
who has the best flat screen televisions in the delivery area,
what sort of security there is to make sure that
(06:31):
your babies are safe. All those things are fine. They
don't compete on price. I just said to each of them, Hey,
what's this going to cost me? None of them could
tell me. I mentioned to you, I think last week,
because I think it's a really instructive analogy that I
went and took one of our kids when he had
(06:53):
strapped throat.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
My wife took the other one.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
She was on the ball, knew where our healthcare card was,
knew exactly who are health care provider was turned it
over when we checked in, when she checked in, I
didn't have any idea where the healthcare card was. Somehow
I couldn't find it in my wallet. I think we
had switched, and my incompetence meant that we were billed
(07:16):
as not having health care and we paid a fraction
of what my wife paid for the exact same medical
treatment because we had health insurance.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
It's all broken.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
All of it is broken, and I could get on
a pedestal and talk about this forever. The fact that
we run healthcare. As someone who has owned a business
and has had to pay for health care, the fact
that healthcare is connected to employment is crazy. I have
been a freelancer who was not an employee, and the
(07:55):
fact that I had to go out into the healthcare
marketplace and figure out what policy was the right one
one for me was incredibly complicated too. Insurance is the
only thing all of us have to pay for that
we hope to never use, and the entire insurance industry
(08:16):
is totally broken. In conjunction with health care, we spend
way more than any country in the world, and we
do not get the best results. And the data reflects
that you could eliminate half of all medical treatments and
there wouldn't be any change in life expectancy in this country.
So my general proposition is, I don't want to take anything.
(08:38):
I know tilan always in the news, I get made
fun of. I don't want to take any drugs. I
don't want to take anything. I feel fortunate. I've been
pretty healthy in the grand scheme of things, and I
think that they wildly over prescribe and over medicate us
as a whole. And yet simultaneously, the people who actually
do need health care, the people who are actually sick,
(09:00):
the people who are in desperate need of healthcare, cannot
get it, and the people who don't need it don't
feel like we're getting any kind of rational healthcare that
makes common sense. Okay, So that's where we really are,
and in essence, much like our tax code, because I
would say number one broken system in America's healthcare number
(09:24):
two is tax code. They're both so fundamentally broken that
you would actually do better if you just tore them
both down and built a functional, rational healthcare system. And
tax policy. Instead, we have just continued to add layer
upon layer of a broken foundation. And as a result,
(09:45):
if you want to use sort of a building metaphor,
we have constantly shifting in the winds, tall buildings with
no structural stability, and they'll fall over all the time
and they make absolutely no So God, hey, happy optimistic Wednesday, everybody.
We've got two hugely broken systems that threaten the very
(10:08):
fabric of our democratic republic because as we have an
aging population, the costs that we're going to have to
put out for health care is going to be borne
increasingly by a dwindling number of young people in America,
and the budget and the math just doesn't add up.
So all of that is the foundational issue that is
(10:31):
in play here. And one of the real unfortunate aspects
of our democratic republic is once something is created, once
the government creates a project, it almost never leaves. It
just goes on the ledger as a cost long into
(10:52):
the future. And Democrats want to provide healthcare for as
many people as possible, including many different illegal immigrants, and
ultimately this is paid for by all of you out
there that are working hard every single day. They're reaching
into your pocket, they're taking your money out, and they're
giving it to someone very often who is not even
(11:15):
an American citizen. But this is all part and parcel
of a broken healthcare system. Obamacare is collapsing, by the way,
because it's predicated on giving insurance companies more money, and
the entire concept of insurance is they have to get
tons of people who are never going to need it
(11:36):
in order to pay for the people that actually do
need it, and young, healthy people, a lot of them
just say I don't need health insurance, and as a result,
the insurance companies don't get that money. And as we
have an aging society, the profit margins of insurance companies
going down in the future. But I just come back
to that analogy. I would be paying far less for
(12:00):
health care if I had no insurance at all, so
would most of you. That is a broken system. And
my analogy there of walking in with a kid who
has strep throat one day after we got insurance for
the kid who did have a strep throat, I paid.
My wife knows the exact dollars because she's still fed
up about it, because my incompetence actually benefited the family
(12:22):
because we had to pay less money, but we paid
a fraction as uninsured walking into a clinic patience of
what a health care insured family would pay. So it's
not only that the system is broken, it's that people
who are actually trying to do the right thing are
(12:43):
getting gouged, and people who have no interest whatsoever in
buying in at all, they're essentially getting free health care.
You pay a lot, many people pay virtually nothing at all. Okay,
So that is the essence of why we have a
government shut down, because Democrats want to give more people
(13:03):
who do not pay taxes free health care, and Republicans
are saying, wait, that was a COVID era policy that
we put in place. It should expire, thankfully now that
COVID is over. So that is the essence of what
is going on, and we will see exactly how long
it takes for this to be resolved. I suspect that
many of you out there will be like me, and
(13:26):
there will be absolutely no impact to your life whatsoever
by the fact that the government has shut down. In fact,
a lot of you are saying I wouldn't mind the
government shutting down for a long time. First time I
heard the stat it didn't make a lot of sense,
but when you dig into the details, unfortunately it's very true.
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Speaker 3 (14:44):
Clay, Travison, buck Sexton mic drops that never sounded so good.
Find them on the free iHeartRadio app or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Welcome back in Clay Travis buck Sexton Show. Okay, after
that open on the fact that we are now in
the midst of a government shutdown, and I bet, by
the way, most of you are actually at your jobs
because you don't get to just have a shutdown and
get paid. This is what's going to happen. By the way,
government employees are just not going to work and they're
(15:19):
eventually going to get paid for all the time that
they didn't work. So you just basically get an additional
vacation week or a couple weeks, and then they'll eventually
vote in the fact that all of them are going
to get paid. Honestly, I think every time the government
shuts down, Congress should get their salaries cut in half.
If you can't manage to keep the government open, then
(15:43):
there should be a bill in place that everyone who
works in Congress, that's all the representatives, all the senators,
they lose half of their salary for the year every
time there's a shutdown. You know what I would happen.
I bet would happen. There would never be a shutdown
because if they actually had consequences themselves when the government
(16:04):
shuts down, they would get the job done and they
would never actually shut down. I'm just saying, if somebody
wanted to pass a bill that said, hey, anytime the
government shuts down, Congress loses everyone in Congress loses half
of their salary, there would never be a government shutdown.
But Chuck Schumer is such a hypocrite onusdown shutdowns that
even CNN is playing a montage from him in the
(16:28):
past talking about government shutdowns.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Chuck Schumer cut one here. This was CNN.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
What if I persuaded my caucus to say I'm going
to shut the government down. I Am going to not
pay our bills unless I get my way. It's a
politics of idiocy, of confrontation, of paralysis. Shutting down government
over a policy difference is self defeating. We can never
hold American workers hostage again. While the CR bill is
(16:55):
very bad, the potential for a shutdown has come, so
Quins's for America that are much much worse. Therefore, I
will vote to keep the government open and not shut
it down.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Yes, Chuck Schumer so terrified of AOC challenging him in
a primary and probably beating him and ending his political
career that he is now a huge hypocrite. That was
Chuck Schumer about never shutting down the government over policy differences,
and now Chuck Schumer has shut down the government over
policy differences. I will tell you this too. When Buck
(17:35):
and I started this show, I thought to myself, you know,
I bet well, there's a lot of congressmen and women,
and a lot of senators who are super sharp, super smart.
These are the people leading our nation. I'm going to
be really impressed by all of them. There's a lot
of morons. I'm sorry. Many of y'all are much smarter
than the people on Capitol Hill. You know it, but
(17:57):
it's just pathetic to see they're not leaders. They're cowards,
and many of them are also morons. Moronic cowards is
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(18:56):
back in Clay Travis buck Sexton Show. We are joined
now by Congressman Tim Burchett of the Great State of Tennessee.
Government is shut down. We're going to get into that.
But Congressman, you wanted to come on because you're as
fired up as Buck and I were about the amount
of stock trading that some of your colleagues are engaged in,
(19:19):
and not just stock trading, some of the best timing
that has ever existed in the history of the world.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi is Warren Buffett level investing savant.
Isn't this just even if it's not actually improper, it
certainly has the appearance of impropriety, which I think demeans
(19:42):
the overall value of trust in public servants.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
I think you probably agree. It's kind of crazy, isn't it.
Speaker 5 (19:50):
I agree with one hundred percent, and thank you so
much for letting me come on with you. It's an honor.
Congress is broke, and it is crooked as a dog's leg, brother.
There is no other explanation when a congressman can make
six hundred percent return on their investment, and you know,
and day in and day out, or three hundred or
(20:12):
two hundred or whatever. I mean, just go on the
Unusual Wales website and read the top hundred. It's unbelievable.
It is unfreaking believable. I mean, people are making a
living now of just following Nancy Pelosi's stock trades. Ye
Warton Buffett needs Warren Buffett needs to go to the
go to the front porch and sit there and play
with his grandkids or something, and just turn it over
(20:34):
to Pelosi. It is unbelievable. And we can't even get
the bill in committee, neither party. They're gutless. They are gutless,
and it is shady as all get out. And you know,
I have a I had a twelve thousand dollars portfolio
that my buddy Tommy Siler managed. Everybody needs a bad
(20:54):
gum mutual fund, and that's what that we ought to do.
And I get sick and tired here in people in
Congress say, oh, I'm sacrificing so much, Well that gumm
it go home and let somebody else do it. That's
not sacrificing so much. America is tired of this garbage.
It is broke. You've called it out. We've called it out.
(21:16):
And here's what's going to happen if we do get
this bill before and Luna has represent Annapolina Luna, she's
going to try to if we don't get this bill
out that everybody's been working on, which is a little
too big and a little too beautiful in my opinion,
but still she's going to take my bill, which is
a clean bill, just says no stop trading them, you know,
(21:37):
for members of Congress unless it's a mutual fund and
your and your siblings and your wife and spouse whatever,
and that's it. That should be it. You know, make
the dad gum sacrifice. It's crazy, you know, I make skateboards.
It's and I'm sixty one years old, and I haven't
broke my neck yet. I made one for Tulca Gabbard
(21:58):
a couple of weeks ago and she loved it. But yeah,
I always tell people that when I work on these skateboards,
it's cheaper than a psychiatrist. It's good therapy for me.
But people want to buy them, so I'm trying to
sell them. I went to the ethics people and I
literally have to get I'm getting a business plan together.
I've had to hire an attorney if I want to
sell skateboards. But dad, gummut, if I want to do
(22:21):
insider trading, just become a member of Congress, and it
rains on you.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
It is wild.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
And you know I was going off on this congressman
because my thing is I now have resources. I've been
in a position where I had nothing and actually owed
a lot more money. Go to law school. It's not cheap.
I owed a lot more money than I had assets
for a while. But just doing what you're saying is
actually really good advice. By s and P five hundred
(22:49):
index funds, by big groups of stocks. We're not even saying,
certainly that members of Congress can't own stocks it's just
don't trade in individual stocks like this is having a
blind trust and just having a large basket of mutual
funds or index funds is actually really smart advice for
(23:10):
anyone out there listening to us right now. And it's
crazy to me that, first of all, your job should
be pretty busy, the idea that you should be pulling
out your phone and doing individual stock trades anyway, it
feels it just feels blonkers to me that this is
going on.
Speaker 5 (23:27):
Well, some of them do hundreds of hundreds, I know,
trades in a year. And can I give you one
example that everybody can follow and can understand. Nearing the
Biden reign of terror, when he decided to give our
missile defense system to Ukraine, which I don't vote for
any more any I haven't vote for any dollars for Ukraine.
I'm sick of that. But anyway, that's another story. Well,
(23:50):
it turns out that members of some of our military
committees that had access to that information had bought stock
and guess what full defense companies over just some of them,
a couple of weeks prior to it. Now, why you say,
what does that mean? Well, we had to replenish ours
in a no bid, multi billion dollar contract with these
(24:13):
companies overnight, So you see their stock prices would go
up dramatically. And yet that's common practice in Congress. They
can watch the trends. You're in the meetings, you know,
you hear about COVID, You hear I was in the meeting,
you heard about COVID, and I remembered I had had
bought Denny Stock, and all the left accused me of
(24:35):
some kind of insider trading. I left the DAD meeting
because the Democrats wouldn't let any of the They had
all their staff members in the seats and we couldn't
get any seats. But anyway, I've just come to the
conclusion that we've got too much information and generally the
vast majority of the people up there probably aren't doing
(24:56):
something incredibly shady. But we know that this time in
and time out, when they just seem to just defy
all logic, every odd and the odds of trading, and
every month they turn in these huge gains. And it's
shift baffling to me that we allow that to go on,
and we can sit here and tell the American public
(25:18):
that nothing's going on.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
How does this shutdown end up ending Congressman? Like, where
does it go from here?
Speaker 5 (25:26):
When Schumer sees his polling numbers declining, I think what's
really behind it? And this is my theory. I've put
it on people, and they've agreed with me. Schumer is
looking in his rear view mirror right now, and all
he sees is AOC and that big grin of hers
bearing down on him. He knows that she can raise
(25:47):
millions of dollars overnight. Just that was me snapping my
fingers overnight, Hollywood. All the elitists, they'll be throwing the
money at her. And all he's doing is watching that
New York mayor's race, where literally a Marxist communist will win,
probably unless something lets God Shine's favor upon the poor
(26:11):
folks in New York that don't know any better.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
By the way, God shining favor on the poor folks
of New York actually means Andrew Cuomo should win.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
That's how bad of the situation they're in.
Speaker 5 (26:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well that's that's You're very accurate, You're
very accurate. But the truth is is that that Schumer
is watching his review mirror. He knows his polling numbers,
and the reality is he needs to go back to
flipping raw cheeseburgers on his grill and playing with his
grandkids if he has any, and get out of this
(26:45):
thing he has left. You know, he was he wasn't
a moderate, but he was just an old classic liberal
and now he's just turned far left as you can get.
And all it is is about staying in power. And
that's what Washington, d C. Is truly about leadership. They
love the suburbans, they love the you know, four deep
(27:05):
with security, they love the spotlight, they love never standing
in line. They love the security. They love the access
and yes, the access to the inside information. And when
they're out of leadership, it's gone. It's gone. All that
is gone, and they can't stand it. And his time
has come and gone, like a whole lot of them
(27:26):
that need to be out of there, but he is.
That is why he's going to wreck this country. It's
just to keep himself in power. And a came. You know,
he's out there talking about something nobody's paying attention to him.
He's saying, how the House Republicans are shutting government down.
We voted to keep the Dad given government open. Only
one Democrat voted with us. And you know, the whole
(27:48):
thing is just it's so obvious. And as soon as
he's polling data flips on him, he'll be at the
table with Trump. But he won't be till then.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
We're talking to Congressman Tim Burchett at Tennessee. How did
you get into skateboarding and making skateboards?
Speaker 5 (28:04):
Well, I didn't smoke pot and I didn't drink, although
since I've become a member of Congress, I've fiercely considered
taking on crack cocaine just to take off the edges.
But but no, I just always liked it. I liked
I liked the physics of it. And and I'm an inventor.
I've always just make stuff. And I had a little
(28:24):
piece of ply wood and some old skates and I
put it on there and I would just and you
could that's those are death traps, you know. And and
I never and you know, my dad would challenge me,
if you can get to the end, to see if
you get to the end of the driveway or something
that you know eventually I would and then and so
I and I'm just I've always been fascinated by bamboo.
(28:47):
It's the poor man's carbon fiber. I read an article
on it in nineteen eighty in a national geographic and
so I started just I've always done stuff and tinkered,
and now that I've got some equipment to do it.
And my major was technological Adult Education, certified to teach shop. Basically,
I can weld and build engines and I can burn
(29:11):
your house down if you want me to wired. I'm
not very good at that, but I can do all
those things. I can do casting and just all the
stuff around the machine shop. But I just like it.
And then I'm a capitalist at heart. And I read
somewhere that there's a I think it's a five billion
dollar industry in this country. Now I don't want all
(29:31):
five billion of it, but I wouldn't mind shaving a
little off the edge. And so you know, I make
it out of ricycled stuff, mainly because I'm cheap. I
guess I'm fiscally smart. But you know, I use old
palettes and I've been using banana fibers off of banana
plants that I've grown, and I'm just just all over
(29:52):
about it. I just and and skateboards something you can
make small and you can transport easily and kids. And
when you see a sixty one year old out there
with his vans on skateboarding on a board that he
built himself, it's kind of cool and it's good to
bring up conversation, and you know, and I like it.
(30:12):
And again, as I say, it's cheaper than a psychiatrist.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
We're talking to Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee. All right,
I got the ultimate controversial question for you here to
close up the interview, Congressman, all Right, better decision, Who
made the better decision? Who made the worst decision? I
know you are a big University of Tennessee football fan.
Nico going to UCLA transferring from Tennessee going to UCLA.
(30:41):
UCLA is now lost every game. His head coach has
been fired, his offensive coordinator has been fired. Sorry UCLA
fans out there catching astray. You didn't expect this. Okay,
Nico to UCLA? That choice or Kamala Harris picking Tim
Walls as her vice president?
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Who made the worst decision? Who made the better decision?
You're on the floor.
Speaker 5 (31:08):
I'm gonna say Kamala because she was a train wreck anyway,
and she just picked a bigger train wreck. I almost.
You know, they always stick somebody who I always feel
like somebody that's not going to overshadow him a lot
of times. But I the JD Vance, as we say
(31:29):
in East Tennessee. He kicks the ass. I like JD.
He's strong and he's a kind of a buddy of mine,
I guess. But yeah, that gum when they call him
tampon tim or something, I don't like saying it, but
he is just a he's a knucklehead man. He just
can't get out of his own way. I don't know
(31:50):
who he was running against to get elected governor out there,
but that gum must have been a convicted fella and
getting ready to go to the electric chair or something.
I'm not sure the Republicans put up against him him,
But yeah, Nico, I mean, he just took some mad advibes.
But he's he'll get a little bit of a paycheck.
And if he's he can just get all his groupies
and family away from him, he might be okay. He
(32:12):
might be able to salvage something in the Canadian Football League.
But yeah, that's where I'm at. Where I get myself
in any more trouble.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Well, I'm already thinking The headline for the New York
Times is going to be Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett praises
Nico for his move to UCLA. Hey, this is this
is a lot of fun, and I would argue I
love the Tim Walls. You may have seen the meme
Congressman where it shows Barack Obama and he says I
need someone dumber than me, as VP Joe Biden. Joe
(32:43):
Biden says I need someone dumber than me as VP
Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris says I need someone dumber than me,
and it's Tim Walls. There's a lot of truth to that.
And we have seen a rapid descent and intelligence across
the board there. We appreciate the time. If people want
to get the skateboard, by the way, where do they go?
Speaker 5 (33:04):
Well nowhere Yet I'm okay, I got a business plan.
I got to put it on ethics and so they
can approve it or not.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Hey, if Hunter can sell paintings for five hundred thousand dollars,
I would think you could probably sell a skateboard for
a couple one hundred bucks.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
But what do I know?
Speaker 5 (33:23):
Well, the Biden family couldn't spell ethics. So I just
want to be the man my little girl thinks I am,
so I must try to follow the rules here. I
get my lawyers involved and we'll get it all worked
out eventually, hope the end of the year. Hopefully in
time for Christmas.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
That's the goal, just in time for Christmas. Hey, we
appreciate the time. Go big Orange and we'll talk to
you again soon.
Speaker 5 (33:47):
Thank you, brother, appreciate y'all.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Man he is great.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee, let me give you a
good news. Gold's up forty percent this year.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
Now.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
The downside is that's because people are like, I don't
know if I have a lot of faith in the
US dollar right now, because government's spending so much money,
Inflation has skyrocketed, and still it's kind of lingering around
out there, and a lot of people have decided, as
has been the case for centuries, that gold is a
safe repository for your money because it's always going to
(34:23):
have value. And if you've never done it before, Birch
Gold can help you convert an existing IRA or a
four to oh one k into at tax sheltered ira.
In gold, you don't pay a dime out of pocket.
This is just your opportunity to invest in gold, physical
tangible asset that has held value for centuries. The best
(34:46):
indicator of the future is the past, and gold has
always been a safe haven. If you want to learn
more about whether gold can make sense for you, text
Clay to ninety eight ninety eight ninety eight right now
to cl your free info kit on gold. That's Clay
to ninety eight ninety eight ninety eight. Protect your future
(35:08):
today with Perch Gold.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Want to begin to know when you're on to go the.
Speaker 6 (35:14):
Team forty seven podcasts trump highlights from the week some
days at noon Eastern in the Clay in Buck podcast
Speed find it on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Welcome back in Clay Travis Buck Sexton Show. Appreciate all
of you hanging out with us. Doug in West laws
In Doug, I'm sorry if you're a UCLA guy, that
was a fabulous question. I thought the Congressman tried to
dodge it a little bit there, and I know he
enjoyed it. He's a huge college football fan. But what
do you got to tell us about UCLA?
Speaker 7 (35:47):
Well, not only was coach Foster the head coach fired,
and the defensive coordinator parted ways of the team, the
offensive coordinator yesterday. The defensive coordinator left, so it has
not been a good season.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
And the.
Speaker 7 (36:06):
Quarterback from Appalachian State transferred to UCLA for one quarter
and then he's now the quarterback at Tennessee.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Oh yeah, and he's leading the entire sec and passing yards.
So I'm sorry for Bruin spe Thank you for the call,
by the way from West La. I'm sorry for everybody
out there in Westwood, all of the UCLA fans. This
is a dumpster fire of epic proportions. So it's right
up there with Kamala picking Tim Walls. I mean, it
(36:36):
is a tough one to decide who made the worst
decision when we come back. I think I mentioned this
a little bit yesterday, but I want to really kind
of dive into it because I do think it's incredibly
impactful in the larger culture. Remember that Sydney Sweeney jeans ad. Yeah,
American Eagle is printing money as a result.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
I'll tell you why it matters next
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