Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt on Her New Children’s Book

BUCK: We are here in-studio with Ainsley Earhardt of Fox News. You all know her from Fox & Friends in the morning. She has a new book out, I’m So Glad You Were Born: Celebrating Who You Are. Ainsley, first time in with us. Thanks so much for joining us on the program.

EARHARDT: Hey, Buck. Hey, Clay. Thank you all so much. I’m so proud of you all. You’re doing great.

BUCK: Thank you. We have a lot of fun.

CLAY: We do.

BUCK: We are a little tired after last night, which I know you’re never supposed to say on the air, but we were out quite a bit. I went home.

EARHARDT: Are you talking about what happened last night?

BUCK: I went home. We had a little bit of an engagement party here in New York, and Clay, I must admit, stayed up. Clay is married with three kids; he stayed out later than me. He outpaced me. I got sent home early by the fiancee.

CLAY: We had an awesome group of people, and it spiraled into an Irish pub from the engagement party, and it was just a really fun time.

BUCK: We took over an Irish pub, apparently.

CLAY: We did basically take over an Irish pub.

EARHARDT: So for people who are listening that don’t know, the Irish pubs, they’re everywhere in downtown. When I started at Fox News, there was an Irish pub. Before it was torn down for a parking garage, there was this one Irish pub that everyone went to and we had, like, a back room, and that was where all the Fox people would hang out, but those are the early years at Fox. It was so fun.

CLAY: When did you get to Fox for the first time?

EARHARDT: It was 2007.

CLAY: So, you came to Fox from where?

EARHARDT: San Antonio, Texas.

CLAY: So, was it a culture shock for you to suddenly be in New York City?

EARHARDT: Well, I’m an East Coaster. I grew up in South Carolina, worked there for five years after college. Came to San Antonio, and I always wanted New York. That was my dream.

BUCK: What’s San Antonio like as a city? I always hear people say great things about it like — super safe, family friendly, quality of life very high.

EARHARDT: You would love it. There are big parties there. There’s the fiesta there.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Clay would have to carry me on his shoulder but, yeah.

EARHARDT: Right. A year ago, you would have, like, now you’re engaged and —

BUCK: I’m slowing down a little bit, you know.

EARHARDT: I’m glad. I’m proud of you.

BUCK: Yeah.

EARHARDT: No, it was so fun because they love their faith, which is important to me, and they love to party, which is important to me. So, it’s the best of both worlds.

CLAY: You went to South Carolina.

EARHARDT: Exactly. Went to a southern school.

CLAY: Yeah, we’re SEC double grads here.

EARHARDT: Yeah. I can’t stay out as late as I used to but I like to have fun and the faith aspect is great. It was a wonderful place.

BUCK: So, we have this fabulous book here —

EARHARDT: Thank you.

BUCK: — that is in studio with us: I’m So Glad You Were Born: Celebrating Who You Are. It’s a kid’s book.

EARHARDT: Yes.

BUCK: Clay has copies. His kids are a little old maybe for the book?

CLAY: The 8-year-old I think could handle this a little bit; so, second grader. I’ve got 14, I’ve got 12, and I’ve got 8. Just had a couple of birthdays, so I gotta make sure I got that right.

EARHARDT: I tell you this: This message, though, even if you don’t read this book to them, “I’m so glad you were born,” is something our mom said to us on our birthdays, which if you think about it means a little bit more than just happy birthday, even though happy birthday is great; it’s something you hear every birthday and everyone hears it. “I’m so glad you were born,” it’s like, “Okay, wait a minute. I have to stop and think. It’s pretty cool that I was born on this day and I’m gonna make a big difference, and I can change the world.” God can use me and change the world.

CLAY: You have a young daughter.

EARHARDT: I do. She’s six and a half.

CLAY: How much did that motivate you to want to go write a children’s book?

EARHARDT: You know what it’s like as a parent. You have three boys.

CLAY: Yeah. That’s right.

EARHARDT: So six and a half. My first two children’s books were lyrical and like sappy sweet when I was going through when I was pregnant, I was so glad I had her and we had gone through a lot, I tried to get pregnant, I had a miscarriage and then three months later I conceived Hayden; so I knew why I’d gone through that bad place ’cause I wouldn’t have Hayden if it weren’t for that really tough time. And this book is just about now I’m six and a half years past that and how much I love being a mom. It’s so fun. I just want her to come home. You know, we all grew up in the generation where our parents were so tough. And I grew up in South Carolina. There were spankings, you know, not too hard. I was a girl, and —

CLAY: You know what a switch is.

EARHARDT: Yes, I do. Take it out, right? Actually, my mom used a fly swatter and my dad one time on me used a belt, usually was his hand, and it hurt him more than it hurt me, and I saw that; I knew that. But it was rare. My brother, however, probably every day. But now –

CLAY: (laughing) He probably deserved it too.

EARHARDT: He did, he did. Now that’s just not the way that we punish our children. It’s more time-out. I’m grateful that I have a really fairly easy child to raise. So and then just kind of raise my voice a little bit, she calls it “the dark voice,” I feel like Darth Vader. And then she starts crying. But I love her so much. And we just have fun. We have dance parties in the kitchen; so she picked out the illustrator for this book. We put all the pictures on the floor of the illustrators that the publisher sent me that were available at the time. And so I said, Hayden, which one do you like?

And thankfully she picked the one I was really drawn to. So, this is our illustrator, Kim Barnes, and Hayden loves this one picture in the book. Hayden, we talked to the illustrator about the dance parties and how important they were to share the dance parties in the kitchen, ‘cause that’s where we have ours and kind of they trail off into the living room. But this illustrator drew a picture of a fence in the backyard, in their backyard, and she lets her children paint, use real paint on the fence. And it covers the whole backyard. Like, my dad would have —

CLAY: Lost his mind.

EARHARDT: I definitely would have gotten the belt for that one, right? But, yeah, so, my daughter said, “I really want to do that,” and I’m like, “Well, we rent a house out in Long Island from one of my friends, and she probably would kick us out if we painted her fence.” So, we’re not doing that. But I just love the illustrator, I love the message, and at the end of the book the children yell out, “I’m so glad I was born.” You’re about to go through this. You just got engaged.

BUCK: No, I know. Give me a copy because —

EARHARDT: Yeah, I’m gonna.

BUCK: — I’m gonna start leafing through this. I do have a… It’s actually perfect ’cause I was talking before about my 2-year-old nephew.

EARHARDT: Awww.

BUCK: His name is Ryan, and he is absolutely amazing, and I’ve never really spent time around —

CLAY: Kids that age.

BUCK: — a small person like that. Oh, it’s so much fun.

EARHARDT: Is it?

BUCK: The best thing — and this is actually true — I sent Clay the video to prove this. My mom, she’s very proud. She has a little poster from one of our events, you know, sometimes we do these radio events, they have a little poster with our faces on it, the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, and little Ryan walks past it and points and goes, “Uncle Buck,” which is obviously very exciting, and he also goes “Uncle Clay.”

EARHARDT: Awww. Oh, he did?

CLAY: I’ll take it. That’s good.

BUCK: We’ll throw it in there, we’re gonna give him honorary —

EARHARDT: You’re starting him early. He looks at you all every day?

BUCK: He just knows from the photo at my parents’ house, like yes when he asks who it is, he learned. I don’t know if he’s listening quite yet. We’re gonna get him on that.

EARHARDT: He’s smart.

BUCK: He’s a little patriot for sure, yeah. We know that much.

EARHARDT: He absolutely is.

BUCK: We’re excited.

CLAY: So, you are from South Carolina.

EARHARDT: I am, yes. We’re watching this weather.

CLAY: We’re watching this right now on Fox News. We’ve got — and you have your sister, I think you said is in Charleston. You were going to do a book signing in Charleston.

EARHARDT: Yes, yes, on King Street right in downtown Charleston.

CLAY: So, what are you hearing from people in South Carolina as they prepare for Hurricane Ian, which is now making landfall?

EARHARDT: No one at home can see this but I’m getting all these text messages and all these pictures and people who left their cars in their driveways. But everything looks okay. To be honest with you, I don’t know one person that left and he were with all panicking. This is our immediate family in our family text chain, and my sister finally wrote us back because we were all on her, like, “Get out, move your car, garaging is free right now, you can move your car into one of the, you know, third, fourth floor of the garage.” She just wrote us for the first time in, like, 15 hours, “All is well here, car is fine, just without power.” So, my dad writes back, “Good. Answered prayers. Next time leave!!!”

CLAY: (laughing)

EARHARDT: She’s a schoolteacher there, and she’s with all of her friends. You know, we interviewed Rick Scott this morning. He’s not leaving. I mean, he’s a senator, he can’t leave ’cause he wants to take care of his people. He said his mom was staying, he bought his mom a house and he became a senator and had enough money, which is a sweet story. So, she said he and his mom were saying, was gonna pick her up, my sister’s staying, my sister is actually in Mount Pleasant, so downtown Charleston, that peninsula, go over the Cooper river bridge and then you run into Mount Pleasant and she’s right there. But she’s two stories up. She lives in an apartment building.

CLAY: For people who haven’t been to Charleston, they’ve seen certainly that there’s a very low sea level in many parts of Florida. Charleston is almost underwater, below sea level.

EARHARDT: I just looked it up before we got here and I don’t know if this is correct ’cause this is just a Google search, but it said eight feet above sea level. The surge is supposed to be like between seven and nine.

CLAY: Yeah.

EARHARDT: So it could go above. My sister when she lived downtown, she was driving through the streets just to try to get to her house and her car was completely flooded. She lost the car. It was my mom’s old car. This was right after college; she left her car there in the middle of the road and had to walk out of her car. So even with a minor storm, it floods. Hopefully people got out of Charleston at least and went inland to Mount Pleasant.

BUCK: With Florida, we know that they’re always thinking about and ready for hurricane season.

EARHARDT: Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.

BUCK: When was the last time?

CLAY: Hugo? Would it have been Hugo that really ripped us?

EARHARDT: We’ve had some others, but Hugo was the big one. And what we learned about Hugo, as devastating as it was, there is… Have you all ever been to Isle of Palms or Wild Dunes or Sullivan’s Island right outside of Charleston?

CLAY: Yes.

EARHARDT: — What we learned, it wiped out those beaches. And those were, like, it was so fun. Old-school beach houses, like, where you would go and there’s, like, grit and sand on the floor and just old if you are not. Those were all demolished.

CLAY: Yeah.

EARHARDT: And they built these monstrosities on that property and many people made a lot of money because they sold their houses and made these, built these huge properties. They built them higher. So, they’re on stilts. You park your car underneath the house and then on the first floor are the bedrooms and the top floor, kitchen, then, and all that you can overlook the ocean. Now it’s beautiful. Those, you know, $50,000 houses are now multimillion-dollar houses.

CLAY: That’s happened all over the South in many different beach communities where they initial built like the old-school —

EARHARDT: Yes, yes. You know. You live in the South.

CLAY: — like down in Florida, like, along the Florida Gulf Coast used to be the Redneck Riviera, those things didn’t cost anything and now they’re all gone, it’s multimillionaire mansions.

EARHARDT: Is it 30A. Is that 30A?

CLAY: It’s 30A, yeah. Buck’s gotta come down down there. He’s never been. You know, Buck had never really been to the South at all. I’m talking about like Alabama.

BUCK: Hold on a second. My family is from Virginia here, from like Charlottesville, not from like Northern Virginia.

CLAY: I’m talking about like Alabama, Mississippi, that’s still kind of… I mean, Florida doesn’t count. It depends on what part of Florida you’re in, it can —

BUCK: Spent some time in these places but only on military bases, but —

EARHARDT: Well that means y’all are a good team. You represent all of America.

CLAY: I’m getting him down now for college football so he’s finding out.

BUCK: If you’re on a southern military base, you definitely know you’re in the South.

EARHARDT: Can I brag on Buck a little bit? Buck went to high school at — y’all don’t know this in the South — the hardest school to get into in the city. And it’s all scholarship, and you cannot get in unless you’re top of your class. I know people out on Long Island that commute in, high-schoolers that ride the train for an hour to get into the city just so they can go to Regent.

BUCK: I’m getting the rough stuff from Clay over here so she throws me a lifeline.

CLAY: I will say, you know who also went there?

EARHARDT: Who.

CLAY: Dr. Fauci.

EARHARDT: (laughing) You’re kidding me! Get out.

BUCK: Class of 1910.

CLAY: (laughing) He really did. He and Buck went to the same high school.

EARHARDT: Oh, that’s great. That’s great.

BUCK: A hundred years ago. So, yeah, Fauci was there. Ainsley, the book looks awesome.

EARHARDT: Thank you.

BUCK: I’m So Glad You Were Born: Celebrating Who You Are. Go get a copy today, folks.

EARHARDT: Can I just say one thing. My mom had a stroke four and a half years ago, and she doesn’t have a voice anymore; so I don’t know how many days we have left with her. She’s kind of slowing down and she lives in our basement with 24-hour care, and this is something she said to us. She was a schoolteacher for 4- and 5-year-olds for 33 years retired — reluctantly, my aunt talked her into it — because she had diabetes and she said, “I don’t know how long you have,” and mom retired; she travelled with my dad for about 10 years, had the stroke, dialysis, kidney failure, and now her voice is gonna be heard and carried on for generations.

CLAY: That’s so awesome.

EARHARDT: Mom, I love you. I’m sorry I gave you a hard time.

BUCK: That’s amazing. Thank you for the copy. I’m going to give it to my nephew.

EARHARDT: You’re welcome. If you all want to buy a signed book, it’s AinsleyBook, and then if you want to go to my website, you see where we’ll be. We had to cancel the thing tonight at Charleston, I’m so sorry. But we’ll be in Florida on Sunday. It’s AinsleyE. No one knows how to spell Earhardt. AinsleyE.com. So AinsleyBook and AinsleyE.

CLAY: Awesome.

EARHARDT: Thank you so much for having me on. I’m so proud of y’all.

BUCK: Thank you so much.

EARHARDT: I know Rush would be so proud of y’all.

BUCK: We’re trying.

EARHARDT: Love y’all.

BUCK: We’re trying. Thank you so much.

EARHARDT: You’re doing great.

BUCK: We appreciate it.

EARHARDT: Fox & Friends too. When will y’all come on again?

CLAY: I’ll be on Wednesday, I think.

EARHARDT: Okay.

CLAY: I’ll be on tomorrow morning.

BUCK: He’s better about getting up in the mornings. I’m really bad about… Yeah, I gotta work on that one.

EARHARDT: You’ll be there in about 10 years, five years, when you start having the babies.

CLAY: You’ll get up early.

BUCK: I’m used to getting my single man sleep. It’s gonna be very different with the wife and the kids now, but not yet. It’s coming in the future.

EARHARDT: Congratulations on your engagement.

BUCK: Thank you.

EARHARDT: You’re gonna love being married and having babies.

BUCK: I’m very excited about it. Very excited. All right. We’re gonna come back here in just a second close out, everybody. Thanks for being with us.