Clay Travis (2:35)
Welcome back in our number two final show of the year for either Buck or myself, and Buck is already on Christmas vacation. I will soon be joining my family on Christmas vacation. The boys, the Travis boys are all out of school and super excited as kids are to be out of school. I'll mention this again in the third hour, but I wanted to make sure I didn't forget to do it here. Thank you guys. From both Buck and myself. We started this show, this ride with you guys in 2021. So we've been with you in 2021-2022-2023-2024, and now 2025. So that is parts of five years. And next year when we go into 2026, that will be six years. And I know a lot of you out there are thinking to yourself, there's no way that's true because as you age, the years move by super fast. And so I'm kind of blown away by that, too. But we have enjoyed every single moment. We hope that we have helped to make the country a little bit better than it otherwise would have been. And we are certainly honored every single day to sit down in front of this microphone that Rush Limbaugh made famous and to help to speak sanity into at all too often an insane world. So we thank you for this opportunity, this privilege, and thank you guys for, for letting us move into a sixth calendar year with all of you starting next year. And it's been another really good year for growth. I've mentioned this before, but I think it's worth noting when we came in in 2021, we had 350 stations nationwide. As we are finishing 2025, we now have over 550 stations nationwide. So we have grown by 200 stations over the course of the past four or five years. And that's a credit to you guys because you're listening all over the country in all 50 states. And certainly we, we love all of you that are listening right now on the podcast. But you can imagine a lot of people, when you step into shoes that are this massive, say there's no way on earth these two knuckleheads are going to last any time at all. And it's credit to you guys that not only have we lasted, we have thrived. And I think it's quite clear that we love hanging out with you every single day for three hours. So thank you. All right. Opposite of thriving. I teased this last hour, and as I was reading and getting ready for the show today, I couldn't help but go through my usual review of the stock market to see how things are moving there. You guys know I love to, to update you as as needed Sometimes more often than some of you care on what's going on in the stock market, what's going on in the media landscape. And this morning Nike stock is tanking. And I know some of you probably have Nike stocks, so I'm not trying to add to your misery here in the holiday season, but Nike stock has now dropped below $60 a share. I wrote seven years ago in September of 2018 that it was a bad idea to buy stock in Nike because Nike had moved from a company that embraced the meritocracy. This was really a large part the thesis of my book Republicans buy Sneakers Too from a company that's goal was to speak to sports fans everywhere and sell them sneakers and sell them gear. Michael Jordan was right. He's now admitted that this was a quote. He was asked in the 1990s, why aren't you political, Michael? Why do you not speak out on so many different issues that confront the country? And his answer was Republicans buy sneakers too. I love that answer. Because sports is a unifying force and it should be the case and I really believe this, and I founded much of my career on it that when you're in a stadium or an arena and your team wins, you shouldn't be thinking about anything other than high fiving the person around you. And Jordan got that. And it's why to this day, sorry for all the people in Salt Lake. The most watched game in the history of basketball was game six, 1998 NBA Finals. When Michael Jordan, yes, he pushed off Brian Russell a little bit, stepped back and hit a jumper to win the sixth title for the Chicago Bulls in eight years. Over 30 million people watch that game. It is the most watched game still in the history of basketball in America. Never have more people watched a game. Lots of other sports have set new record highs. Super bowl for instance, that we just watched. Many of us in in February of this year was the most watched football game that's ever aired in the history of the United States. So the NFL has continued to set records. The NBA hasn't. Why? It's because Nike decided to go woke. I'm going to play an ad for you from back in 2018 in a moment. But think about when you grew up. Nike epitomized athletic excellence, the meritocracy. If you remember, if you grew up around my age, you will BO Knows. Do you remember the BO Knows commercials that were so great? If you remember all of the Michael Jordan ads for Nike. If you are around my age and you remember how every time a new Air Jordan Sneaker came out. We all couldn't wait to see them. We hoped that we might be able to afford them. Heck, some of y' all are out there right now and you're sneaker heads to this day because you grew up on Air Jordans. Great stat for you. Even to this day, Michael Jordan's Air Jordan brand outsells every current NBA player, sneaker combined. Think about how wild that is. That's how beloved Michael Jordan was when they released that documentary, the Last Dance During COVID when there were no sports going on, more people watched the documentary about the 1990s Chicago Bulls than watched the actual NBA Finals with LeBron James in them that year. People would rather watch a documentary about Michael Jordan than an actual game featuring LeBron James. Why? Why did all this happen? Because deep down, American DNA craves excellence. We want to be the biggest, the best, the baddest ass that has ever existed. That was Jordan. Now, can it come with pratfalls? Yeah. Most people who are driven to be the best at something, they also have a few flaws. Elon Musk, right now, I think, is the greatest American capitalist of all time. If you look at what he's done with Tesla, if you look at what he's doing with SpaceX, if you look at what he's doing with X and Xai, the Boring Company, all of them are extraordinary successes, the likes of which. And I'm. I don't think I'm exaggerating here, it's the greatest capitalist ever. Susie Wiles talked about this in the Vanity Fair, but he's also a bit of an odd duck. He's got a lot of kids by a lot of different women, 14 kids, I think, by a lot of different women right now. It's probably not always really easy to get along with Steve Jobs back at Apple. Really difficult to get along with. You know when you say, like Steve Jobs did, my job is not to give people what they want. It's to give people what they aren't even aware they want yet. I've got to create that. It's kind of cocky. And so if you're looking at that and you're saying, yeah, can there's a downside to it. But if excellence is the standard, Nike made its focus the meritocracy. The best man or the best woman. They wanted their sneakers on you. They wanted to convince you that you would run faster, jump higher, that you would in some way emulate the successes of the people that they put on the Nike brand. It was all about excellence. The meritocracy Nike wanted the best man or the best woman. Not the best man pretending to be a woman to win. And then a record scratch moment happened in 2018. I'm going to play this ad for you. Suddenly, Nike decided instead of Kobe Bryant, instead of Michael Jordan, instead of the greatest athletes of their era representing the brand, they were going to pivot, they were going to go woke. They gave millions of dollars to Colin Kaepernick. And they said, this is the new Nike. And this aired seven years ago.