BUCK: I really hope for many of you who are gonna be flying, including myself here, that everything goes smoothly —

CLAY: Oh.

BUCK: — with staffing and all.

CLAY: It’s not. Spoiler alert. I hate to ruin it for everybody.

BUCK: I know. I’m hoping our people happen to be all okay and that none of our people listening to this show are gonna be the ones that are gonna have their flights canceled or rerouted or heaven knows. I feel like one of the worst ones these days is, I’ve had… I think this happens now almost every time I fly, even when everything goes smoothly: Waiting 30 minutes for a gate agent/team, whatever it is. So your plane has landed and stopped but you’re about 50 yards from being home free and the pilot comes on, “I’m sorry. We’re gonna have to wait for about 30, 40 minutes here. Sorry, folks.” You’re just sitting here, like —

CLAY: It’s infuriating to wait for a gate to open. In all seriousness, I know these January 6th investigations are never going to end. But we gave a lot of taxpayer money to airlines during covid to try and make sure that the airlines didn’t shut down. I want Congress to investigate what’s going on with the airline industry right now. I mean this honestly. They’re going to be doing investigations. Why is it that it feels as if every airline doesn’t have enough employees? Is it related to covid shots?

Is it that there were suddenly just a lot of people who decided to leave, pilots and staff during covid and never come back? Why is it that the airline industry cannot function like it did precovid? And I don’t understand the argument that covid would have really changed that much in terms of how their business is done. Does that make sense to you? For a long time, I was willing to give airlines a pass because of all the ravaging of their industry that happened with covid when there were a lot less flights and they were having to not use them. But how is that occurring now when we’re at, sort of it feels, like record travel levels?

BUCK: That’s such a good question. I see over 400 flights for this weekend have already been canceled, and this was as of, I think, this morning, and 1700 were delayed.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: I always have this thing in my mind where you can usually, when you get one delay, it might only be that. But once you get to delay number two and three, now you’re in The Matrix and there’s no escape. They’re just gonna keep you there as long as they want, and you’ll be delayed for hours and hours. I spoke to Carrie’s dad, who —

CLAY: Came on the show.

BUCK: — came on the show, who’s a retired Top Gun instructor. He was actually playing the role of enemy fighter trying to train the guys. I think that’s… Wait. I got it wrong. He was Viper, not Merlin. Right?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Viper, not Merlin. Sorry about that one, guys. But, anyway, he’s in the airline industry, and I was trying to ask about this. Apparently, they haven’t really… They had a lot of pilots retire during covid.

CLAY: Yeah. That’s one of the excuses they use.

BUCK: Been a lot of pilots retired then, ’cause they didn’t know how long it was gonna go, didn’t know what going on, and they haven’t really… The pipeline takes a while to fill up. But, you know, I’m certain that’s all true, but I also… Why is it that Delta Airlines, for example — just to give one — before the pandemic, I think the stock was if not an all-time high, close to it, and there was some big dividend for employees of the company. It was doing really well. So it felt like the airline industry was working really well as of 2019. What happened? The pandemic happened, I know, but why can’t they bring it back?

CLAY: Again, I gave them a lot of space. And you and I, we travel a lot.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: What was the first time you were on a plane postcovid? Like covid hits in March. Do you remember the first flight you took after covid hit?

BUCK: Such a good question. I think it was to Miami.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: I can’t remember awhile what it was. Now, I’ve been to Florida so many times in the last two years that it all blends together in my head.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: I’ve flown a lot.

CLAY: I was flying up to before they even put the mask mandates back. Southwest in May of 2020 instituted the mask mandate for the first time, and that was when it was still early enough that they were passing out masks for you to get on the airplane. So I was flying within, I don’t know, seven weeks or six weeks of everything shutting down.

BUCK: Can we also get them to stop with the little hand sanitizer thing? Did we…? This was never required, but did we all learn? The hand sanitizer, if you’re concerned about covid, it does nothing. It does nothing. There’s zero efficacy to the hand sanitizer, ’cause I still get on plane, they want to give you the little hand sanitizer, and I understand for the weirdo that’s three people behind me in line who’s got the two masks and the face shield, that looks like it’s a really important thing to have the hand sanitizer. But for the rest of us, what are they doing? It smells. I don’t like it.

CLAY: Buck, I took my kids, in December of 2020, to Universal Studios. And this is one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. Every time you got on a ride, they insisted that you hand sanitize.

BUCK: No! (laughing) Come on. (laughing)

CLAY: I swear they had somebody standing there with a monster tub, basically, of hand sanitizer, and every time you went and got on a ride, they made you use hand sanitizer. I tried, at one point, to walk past to get on one of the Harry Potter rides, and they were like, “Sir! Sir! You must hand sanitize.” You had to wear a mask. I was just glad they were open. (laughing) But they had some poor 17-year-old standing there squirting hand sanitizer in every single person who was getting on the ride — and you had to do it every single time you got on the ride, and you could only take your mask on when you were sitting down eating. If you were moving — like sipping out of a drink or something — they would chase you down, stop you, and make you pull your mask up.

BUCK: What was your…? Do you have a memory of what your all-time — when you really thought during the entirety of the pandemic, with all the airline rules, everything — moment for you that was the most, You’ve gotta be bleeping kidding me”?

CLAY: Well, so yes. Because my wife was, like, very nervous about it. We were on an airplane, and I could tell… This is — I don’t know — relatively early in covid, probably like January, before we did this show together. And there was sort of a hawkish flight attendant obsessed with masks and making sure that he have been had their mask, you know, fully up. Mine had dipped down a bit below my nose at some point, and it happened a couple times.

The stupid mask. I don’t know, maybe I have a bigger nose than most people, but it didn’t stay on, right? So you’re sitting in a chair on a airplane and it would slide down a little bit. I think she corrected me five or six times, right? It was a cross-country flight or something and she’s walking by, and at one point I was like, “Sorry. Sorry for endangering the whole airplane.” like I just kind of said that after like the fifth or sixth time, and my wife just hit me like with an elbow (laughing), ’cause her concern was ’cause I was so anti-mask that I was gonna get us banned from the airline just by being sarcastic. But that was close to a breaking point for me.

BUCK: If we made me dictator of the universe, hyperaggressive, mask-vigilant airline attendants would all be sent to Gitmo. I have not forgiven or forgotten what went on there. There were the ones who were like, “I’m sorry.”

CLAY: It’s my job’ I don’t want to have to do it.

BUCK: I’m like, “It’s cool. I’m not about to call the Feds on you or something.” The others are like, “I saw nostril, sir! Do you want to be expelled from this plane at 30,000 feet?” Like there were some of them who were completely out of their minds. For me, it was actually one… It wasn’t what — ’cause the plane thing they could always fall back on, “It’s the government; it’s not our fault.”

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: I was in my neighborhood in New York in Midtown sitting down at a very kind of well known, cute little wine bar with a friend. This was pretty early on the pandemic, and I was told — actually I can’t even remember when it happened — I don’t know. Maybe it was last summer, maybe it was about a year ago. Anyway, I was told, though, when I sat down… I had to put the mask on to sit at the table — to walk to the table, I mean. So I had to mask up for the walk. That was everywhere, which was the dumbest thing on the planet.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Everybody who thought it wasn’t dumb, should be ashamed of the lack of cognitive ability. But I walked, sat down, and then I was told, “No, you have to keep the mask on sitting down.” I’m like, “Well, guys come on. Now is when we eat. So I don’t understand how this is gonna work. “ They’re like, “No, no, no! You have to keep it on until you get your first food or drink brought to the table,” and I said, “Is that really your policy?” and they said, “Yes,” and then I said, “There’s a glass of water on the table. Why doesn’t that count?” and it was like I had crossed the streams and Gozer was about to explode.

CLAY: Yeah. I was so excited that we had NFL games taking place and college football games but they limited capacity to 25% and they made employees walk around outdoor football stadiums. And you were socially distanced. The Titans stadium, for example, in Nashville where I live they had zip tied all the other chairs that were anywhere near you so that no one could sit next to you. So you had like three seats and then there was like 12 around you that weren’t occupied.

And they had people walk around and still say to you, “Sir, you’re not wearing your mask correctly,” and that was also another thing. Literally, you zip tied all of the chairs around me. I’m here with my family. I’m gonna be in a car with them driving to and from the stadium, we’re outdoors, and you’re concerned about whether or not my mask is full upside down or not?

BUCK: It really was the closest thing that we’ve experienced in America to our society being transformed into a bio-fascist state or a medical fascism state very quickly, and so I just… As we go into the Independence Day weekend, I’d say this for everybody: Because Democrats love power more than anything else, the good news is that we’re pretty much out of the worst of this now with regard to all that craziness.

But how much out of it we are and whether the masks come back on planes and all that stuff is gonna be determined by, I think how this midterm election goes, right? So that’s ’cause they’re not entirely psychologically done with it. But at least now we can breathe a little bit easier, literally and figuratively, knowing that we are away from the grip of the Fauciite madness in the meantime. We just have to keep it that way.

CLAY: And that’s why I keep saying it: November has to be a Red Tsunami.