Clay Travis, Buck Sexton Build On Limbaugh’s Legacy Five Years Into Syndicated Show.

A new Wall Street Journal profile examines the rise of Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, who have spent the past five years establishing their own identity in conservative talk radio after taking over Rush Limbaugh’s former time slot in June 2021.

“The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show” airs weekdays from noon-3 p.m. ET and is carried on 550 stations. Premiere Networks says the program reaches approximately 7 million monthly listeners. The hosts have built the show around a conversational style they compare to the energy of a “buddy-cop movie,” mixing politics and current events with sports and entertainment.

That approach has expanded into podcasting, where Travis and Sexton now have eight shows. Their programs have regularly appeared near the top of podcast charts based on iHeartMedia metrics. Their radio backgrounds, however, have sometimes placed them outside conversations surrounding the online conservative “manosphere.”

The hosts regularly tackle cultural and political issues prominent in conservative media. In an August segment following Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, Sexton criticized the candidate’s campaign ties to online commentator Hasan Piker, saying the Democratic Party was “making plenty of room for the ultraprogressive commie maniacs.”

Travis, who just inked a new deal with iHeartMedia/Premiere Networks, has also made sports and cultural issues part of his programming. During a WNBA season marked by controversy surrounding transgender athletes, he challenged the reigning WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces to play a state-champion high school boys’ team, offering $10 million to the winners. The Aces have not publicly responded.

Other segments address traditional conservative topics including taxes, regulation, property laws and the electability of political candidates.

The hosts say they are attempting to reach listeners who may be uncomfortable with fringe political ideas or some of the more unconventional elements of competing conservative media.

“How do we compete against the crazy?” Sexton said, describing a question that can arise around the show.

Travis said long-term success requires avoiding extreme positions that might generate attention but eventually damage credibility. “There are flash-in-the-pans where you can get a lot of attention, but over time, if you’re constantly wrong or if you’re constantly crazy, I think you fail.”

Sexton, 44, previously worked as a CIA analyst specializing in counterterrorism and served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an intelligence officer. He later worked for the New York Police Department before joining Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze in 2011.

Travis, 47, grew up near Nashville and is a lawyer with a master’s degree in creative writing. He founded sports commentary site OutKick in 2011 and sold it to Fox for approximately $100 million in 2021. Fox Corp. and News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal, share common ownership.

Both hosts have said they grew up in families that were not particularly political. Sexton said he identified with conservative politics from an early age, while Travis described himself as a moderate liberal when he was younger.

Travis volunteered for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign and worked on Tennessee Democrat Jim Cooper’s 2002 House campaign. He has said Donald Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate he voted for, in 2020.

“I don’t think I’ve really changed that much,” Travis said. “I think the world around me has shifted substantially, and I moved from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans.”

The duo is also expanding beyond traditional radio. In July, they livestreamed their show on YouTube for the first time, while Travis launched Sport & State in August, a digital platform focused on sports, politics and pop culture.

Despite the growth, Sexton said audience size is not the only measure of success.

“We’re not trying to necessarily just be the highest on the Nielsen rating,” he said. The goal, he added, is to attract “good guys that they would want to have as neighbors, not just guys that they listen to for entertainment value.”