BUCK: I just had Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas come right into the studio here in EIB NYC. We got EIB Nashville, EIB NYC going strong — or actually today, it’s EIB Key West.

CLAY: Not a bad place to be.

BUCK: Not a bad place to be hanging out this time of year. They brought me a… Congressman Gohmert and, of course, our team here — Ali and Crash and Greg — all brought me a gluten-free, believe it or not, smores cookie pie.

CLAY: That sounds amazing.

BUCK: So, I’m going to look more like Santa in time for Christmas. That is the good news. I got the beard coming back and the beer belly. So it’s fantastic. Thanks, everybody, for all the birthday wishes and Christmas wishes.

CLAY: You’re 40 years old on, what, the 28th?

BUCK: Gonna be 40 on the 28th, yeah — 40 on the 28th.

CLAY: What are you actually doing on your 40th birthday? Do you have an actual plan?

BUCK: I’m gonna be on the beach in Miami with some friends taking naps and drinking. That’s it. That’s all. I’ll probably go out to dinner. I’m very low-key. I’m not a big birthday guy. I’ve thrown big birthdays for other people.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: I have never been a big birthday guy myself.

CLAY: Forty is a big one. It’s kind of a line of demarcation in many ways. Like, were you nervous when you went 29 to 30? Did that feel like a big step to you out of your twenties?

BUCK: I don’t really remember that one very well. So maybe that’s part of becoming 40 is you forget these things.

CLAY: Yeah, I remember thinking 29 to 30 felt like a bigger deal than 39 to 40. By the time I was 39, I was so busy with all the kids and everything else that it didn’t… I felt like a super adult, right?

BUCK: I feel like in your twenties, it’s whatever you want. You do your thing. You’ve kind of found out what you want. In your thirties, you are building, and in your forties and your fifties and your sixties, you are playing the hand that you pulled together.

CLAY: You are a man in full. Yeah.

BUCK: Yeah, exactly. That’s kind of how I’m feeling about it, and you know I was gonna go beardless for the 40th, but, man!

CLAY: You got some negative reviews.

BUCK: I wouldn’t like to think of them as negative, Clay, but just the preference was made clear for bearded Buck. I was like, “Really?” I didn’t even think it made that much difference, and all the guys listening to this are like, “Buck, we don’t care. Talk about the news,” and they’re right.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: My birthday is coming up on December 28th.

CLAY: Not just your birthday, your 40th birthday. That’s a big one.

BUCK: You’re making me feel older every time you say it.

CLAY: There are some people who are obsessed with their birthdays and, like, “Hey, you’re gonna be 44 this year, you’re gonna be 30,” and those numbers really don’t matter. But the big round numbers, I think, are significant mileposts and cultural signifiers. So, 40 is a big deal. So, we’ve got you maybe the greatest 40th birthday party present that has ever been given. You just got it during the break.

BUCK: EIB NYC just unveiled a brand-new, souped-up, ready-to-rock electric scooter for the Buckster to replace the one that was so shamefully stolen from me right before Thanksgiving. So now I’ll be scoot-scooting all over New York City, although it is really cold on a scooter when it’s sub-50 degrees, sub-40 degrees, so I might wait a little bit on that one.

But it’s very kind of the team here. Thank you all so much for that — and maybe I’ll get a helmet this time. I’ll definitely get a better lock, that’s for sure, a better lock for the scooter. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get me so the decals for it, some flames. Maybe throw some hydraulics on the scooter. I don’t know. I got a whole bunch of things. I’m gonna try to avoid putting a basket on the front of it, although it would be very convenient.

CLAY: Do people age out of scooters?

BUCK: There are people wearing —

CLAY: I don’t know, in New York City.

BUCK: There are people in New York City you’ll see flying around in full on scooters, like jacket and tie, on their way to their jobs on these scooters now all the time because your alternative, the subway here, is like a scene from Mad Max.

CLAY: Yeah. I’ve seen.

BUCK: The subway is a mess, it’s dangerous, it’s super slow. The subway’s in bad shape these days. I was just on it last week, and the street traffic is horrible. So if you want to get through Midtown Manhattan, I will say it is a good way. This is true of a lot of cities. Look, Nashville, which is like Disneyland for bachelorette parties, they’ve got those scooters all over the place.

You just pick one up and just go. They’ve got the scooters share program. They have them in Austin, Texas, too. I think they used to have them in Miami. I don’t know if they still have them in downtown Miami or not. In L.A., there was a big anti-scooter move because there were so many on the streets on Santa Monica and Venice, and the only thing they want on the streets are tents and waste and vagrancy on the streets. They don’t want scooters.