Based Camp - Ben Shapiro's Crumbling Empire： How The Daily Wire Lost its Audience

00:00:00.000 Hello, Malcolm. I'm excited to be with you today because the Daily Wire is having a moment. Around

00:00:05.960 May 1st, they laid off around 13% of their staff, but this is just according to a company spokesperson.

00:00:13.080 Candace Owens claims that 50% were laid off, and Layoff Hedge, which is a third-party tracker,

00:00:19.240 estimates that approximately 100 jobs were cut in 2026, and that is about 50% of their 1.00

00:00:25.700 approximately 200 remaining oh no candace owens coming in with truth nukes here i mean well she's 1.00

00:00:31.840 people are leaking to her from the inside and i think that's entirely plausible it's not like she

00:00:35.700 doesn't have any remaining friends there you know she worked there for a while their decline in

00:00:41.120 viewership that makes perfect sense because you don't want to cut when you're in the middle of

00:00:45.980 a decline like the daily wire is right now you don't want to cut to your existing level because

00:00:51.240 you've got to presume that it's going to continue to decrease going exactly so maybe they're kind

00:00:55.580 of preemptive cuts and keep in mind this is this is their second round of layoffs this there was a

00:01:00.800 25 staff cut in april of 2025 so last year and that was a year also in which they shut down

00:01:06.700 their bent key children's entertainment division so their team is down over 60 as far as anyone can

00:01:12.440 tell yeah and the changes coincide as you alluded to an 85 drop in ben shapiro's youtube viewership

00:01:19.020 in 2023 at their height he had over 170 million monthly views and now that's down to 18 to 28

00:01:26.320 million and then also ben shapiro and team daily wire are very publicly splitting from very major

00:01:32.440 right-wing influencers after a very long history of sanctimonious gatekeeping they were like the 0.77

00:01:38.000 regina george of the conservative space and now they've been deposed by some upstart redheads from 1.00

00:01:44.440 africa what sorry you are quoting some girl book here that people are who's regina george who's 0.88

00:01:51.060 the queen being mean girls from what oh from me i love your skirt where did you get it thanks 0.75

00:01:59.200 that is the ugliest effing skirt i've ever seen 1.00

00:02:03.080 yes she is malcolm girl pair of tits you need to be more girly 1.00

00:02:10.920 okay yeah our fans will love that right you know hold on right oh god what brian gnome is doing it 1.00

00:02:17.540 you can do it too okay this is an addition i should say to the insanely stupid financial

00:02:23.060 indulgences made by the daily wire like dumping 10 million dollars on a fantasy series that nobody

00:02:28.500 asked for and i will share more information about that one oh my god what i want to get into but one

00:02:34.660 what's kind of cool about where ben shapiro is right now the daily wire is more broadly is like

00:02:38.880 they're falling into like our territory and viewership if they're a million we're growing

00:02:46.000 pretty quickly and we're now you know regularly over i want to say like a half a million to like

00:02:52.780 you know 0.75 million for various sources and so yeah that's still like more than 10x lower than

00:03:02.480 him but like that's a that's a measure like we were 10x smaller a year and a half ago right you

00:03:08.800 know if we look at like where we're going and where our movement is going which i think is

00:03:13.560 really telling one of the things i want to throw out there with the daily wire is because i think

00:03:20.740 that this is really telling and you're going to go into some of it but ben shapiro really attempted

00:03:25.340 to control the direction of the conservative movement and if you are an inside baseball player

00:03:30.900 like a conservative influencer person right over the past however many years you are aware of this

00:03:37.760 so uh there's the crazy emails that went out from charlie kirk and it's particularly crazy i don't

00:03:43.420 remember these can you bring me up to speed yeah so these leaked from candace owens or somebody

00:03:49.360 tied to candace owens and she has been such a great source of gossip and and look this is the 0.98

00:03:55.300 thing about candace owen leaks candace owens like when she makes a mistake was a leak or something 1.00

00:04:00.980 like that right it's makes a mistake it's a crazy way of misinterpreting it like charlie kirk will

00:04:07.640 say something like i feel like an alien sometimes oh yeah and she's like he's an alien time traveler

00:04:12.540 yeah and then he's like yeah and i feel like i came from the future and she's like then she goes

00:04:18.140 out to everyone because see he came from the future but we don't actually have any evidence

00:04:22.620 of her manipulating evidence she has never faked i think she's a very earnest person she's just 0.62

00:04:29.180 going a little schizo even when she gets evidence wrong she'll like pull out flight logs and be 0.76

00:04:34.360 like these flight logs the real flight logs it's not that they're not fake yeah and then people go 0.99

00:04:40.020 they don't say that at all i'm just saying this so we can know that this is probably an accurate

00:04:46.220 text exchange between her and charlie kirk okay okay so charlie says again like ben has been going

00:04:52.360 on like i'm gonna pick up the bloody microphone that charlie dropped really like he's gonna carry

00:04:57.740 on the movement for charlie and it's like ben you were anti-charlie kirk behind the scenes so let's

00:05:04.060 he said the bin thing involves me more than he wants to admit he knows john snow is stronger as

00:05:10.440 the dragons fly higher candace says a hundred percent it pisses him off charlie says two

00:05:15.360 reasons you've always been a threat to him and because you're smarter candace says he and he is 0.89

00:05:21.380 sending his incestuous brother to go try and kill us charlie says now of course he's referencing

00:05:27.520 game of thrones here this is all an analogy but wait did she like interpret it other people have

00:05:34.360 i to me this is clearly a game of sir but anyway yeah i mean oh look i it's a little on the nose

00:05:40.500 and he views you as responsible for me and then charlie says it's worse he views you as my slave

00:05:47.860 100 control her is what he was trying to say to me when he called you are bigger than bin now

00:05:53.740 walking into the white house yesterday i realized that and then she says i know he hates it and then

00:05:58.800 he says we just have to treat him like noise he wants you to punch down to him his respect amongst

00:06:07.240 movement fighters is quite low so note here he's saying that like actually like conservative

00:06:12.400 influence and i've seen this as well and this is something we're going to be talking about in

00:06:15.540 another episode we'll be doing but even if you look at like raw view count nobody gives an f

00:06:20.920 what ben shapiro has to say anymore who's like an on the ground operative in conservative politics

00:06:26.060 at this point and in fact he's sort of seen among the operatives i know as a boomer entertainer

00:06:33.320 like that's the only people that's actually yeah it's one of the themes if you look and it's not

00:06:37.900 just him i think it's it's some of his colleagues at the daily wire co-founders etc who are pushing

00:06:43.620 in that direction but it is definitely a an older more stagnant boomer ish and by boomer i just mean

00:06:49.480 stagnant unwilling to change with the times not not flexible mindset that is leading to the

00:06:55.220 downfall well hold on would classically abby be his incestuous brother because he is he's

00:07:01.700 hasn't he really commented i actually thought that episode was really fascinating so just a

00:07:07.640 quick aside go check out this episode if you're interested on classically abby but he had this

00:07:11.720 sister who he decided he was going to promote for a period and she was like all over youtube when

00:07:16.420 they were trying to promote her oh yeah i mean like i don't you couldn't go on youtube without

00:07:19.820 seeing her promoted content i i was shocked by it yeah yeah it was it was everywhere the amount

00:07:24.920 of money they went into trying to ask her to her and it didn't work remotely her channel has since

00:07:30.240 shut down but i mean if you look at like her regular view counts you know they were you know

00:07:35.160 like a two thousand three thousand views per video like like nowhere and i actually think

00:07:42.520 that his failure with her as well as his attempts to control people both represent

00:07:49.860 his disconnect in understanding the modern conservative movement and how the movement

00:07:55.740 is changing as well as his intense arrogance in it because everybody's like it's just the

00:08:03.440 like what does he represent in attempting to control the conservative movement they think

00:08:07.440 of it as just like a jewish influence right like just like a pro-israel influence when the reality

00:08:12.740 is is that his attempt to control the movement was incredibly more damaging than just his israel

00:08:19.520 stuff yeah i think people are overly focusing on his pro-israel stance being the element of

00:08:25.140 his downfall when really it is a constellation of mean girl gatekeeping behavior that's very petty

00:08:32.520 which he did to us by the way for people who don't know when we started rising in the conservative

00:08:36.780 space he like dedicated a huge part of an episode to us and basically sent people out to like harass

00:08:41.900 us because we got harassed heavily after this episode where he called us basically insufferable

00:08:46.080 nerds uh and i'm like yeah we're taking your spot bro you used to be the right insufferable nerd

00:08:53.640 but now we're coming in with actual nerd cred no it's funny because he just sort of like

00:09:01.680 learned a nerd right like he looked no no no i mean to be clear like his he he rose really early

00:09:10.740 and and it wasn't oh it was never really nerd it was like young wunderkind because keep in mind

00:09:17.000 he was 17 years old in 2004 when he published his first book brainwashed while he was at ucla

00:09:23.820 yeah so like he he was this this early 2000s teenage author and columnist who was like whoa

00:09:31.600 who's this young kid coming out of nowhere and that that is i think where people get you like

00:09:37.040 we get the the nerd thing because like in general you don't get like a little duty hauser like like

00:09:43.520 brilliant little like genius and also don't think they're nerd like grown-up doogie hauser in a kid's

00:09:48.480 body and everyone's fine and i see that's the problem it's like you can't maintain that branding

00:09:53.040 successfully into your mid-40s but yeah it's so it's it's that combined with a model they made

00:10:01.040 a couple key bets that were really poorly thought through. So they, they decided, well, what we're

00:10:08.000 going to do with the daily wire to a certain extent is bet on all these like rising stars

00:10:13.560 or sign all these rising stars before it became super obvious that you can just go off on your

00:10:20.600 own. So that's when you get people like Candace Owens and Brett Cooper spinning off and just

00:10:25.880 doing their own thing. Cause they're not idiots. Cause they know they can do better and get more 0.99

00:10:29.280 money and have more creative control and have better work-life balance if they just work on

00:10:34.300 their own and they can get the same number of views, if not more, because they're not being

00:10:37.940 held down by this dead weight of the daily wire and their creative control. And then beyond that,

00:10:43.260 a lot of things just changed in a much more technical, less interesting algorithmic way,

00:10:47.960 where ways that they used to grow viral on Facebook and on YouTube shifted, and they did

00:10:53.840 not adapt with the time in their format, in their title cards. They didn't shift to shorts the same

00:10:58.780 way they didn't go for the same sort of a clickbaity viral content that got people a lot of

00:11:04.740 views like candace owens and to a lesser extent like brett cooper i mean i i want to argue it's

00:11:09.280 more than that like i want you to lay out your arguing because you did a bunch of research on

00:11:12.420 this but i i actually think the core problem is that his politics never evolved well that too

00:11:17.880 yeah it's it's in general a failure to evolve is is the problem yes right like like he didn't need

00:11:24.600 to join like if you look at the online culture war in the right there are multiple interesting

00:11:32.420 factions at play he's just not aligned with any of them he represents in many ways the last of

00:11:40.740 the old guard and it's because that was the faction that he rose appealing to and so nobody

00:11:46.480 likes that because the modern conservative movement is intrinsically a rebellious movement

00:11:50.740 fighting against entrenched institutions but continue with your theory and then i'm gonna go

00:11:55.700 with mine so go yeah so just again because it seems like you weren't super aware of like the

00:12:00.840 full background he he he rose as as a teen as a kid and then his his national breakout happened

00:12:07.900 around 2012 to 2016 via viral campus speeches verily very charlie kirk ish there was one that

00:12:16.320 was super super famous like facts don't care about your feelings i'm sure you'll vaguely remember

00:12:20.820 this and then he worked with breitbart for a while but then resigned in 2016 amid trump tensions and

00:12:26.800 then he launched he didn't just resign i need to put some context on this yeah so steve bannon said

00:12:32.900 that ben shapiro was pushed at like he had to aggressively push ben shapiro out because as

00:12:38.720 ben shapiro was was in breitbart he aggressively tried to control the organization and controlled

00:12:45.020 the brand of conservative politics that it was pushing which is very much his mo yeah we're

00:12:50.520 gonna get into how he's done that more in in the case of another person later we're gonna get there

00:12:56.100 i promise but yeah so then he it's funny that he like didn't learn from his his own actions

00:13:03.280 because he you know just as he left breitbart and then went on to found the the brett sorry

00:13:10.140 I'm getting ahead of myself the Brett Cooper show but no he founded the Ben Shapiro show

00:13:15.260 and then it was syndicated and it was on 200 stations and then it peaked at its influence

00:13:20.840 from 2016 to 2020 and then he launched the Daily Wire in in 2015 along with Jeremy Boring and he

00:13:29.560 also got really like prominent seed funding building on this post Breitbart momentum just

00:13:35.180 as like a little sign he should have learned that oh having major talent you know as as a larger

00:13:41.640 company like Breitbart you know is kind of risky because that major talent just like I did can just

00:13:47.080 you know bustle off and make their own money he didn't learn from his own you know kind of

00:13:52.640 predatory or maybe selfish behavior whatever which is fine like I think it's fine that he did that

00:13:56.660 anyway one thing that's really important to note here in terms of why they saw have seen a drop

00:14:02.100 is they perfected this very facebook era form of virality with super clicky headlines like sjw

00:14:09.340 owned and little debate clips again very charlie kirk style and he was one of the most linked news

00:14:15.400 domains on facebook and a very big powerhouse during the trump and early covet years and then

00:14:21.200 so the oh my gosh okay let me give me one here there so in 2023 is really when all of it came to

00:14:28.420 its beautiful height, which is really, I mean, ultimately quite recent, right? That's three

00:14:32.400 years ago when his YouTube reached 170 million. And this is especially during the October 7th

00:14:40.700 sort of huge crash out in the media amid all the Israel Hamas coverage. They, the Daily Wire that

00:14:47.240 is, claimed revenues around 100 million annually by 2022. And then at that time, like, well,

00:14:54.260 around the pandemic, they expanded in with their Nashville eight headquarters. They launched

00:14:59.360 daily wire plus in 2022. They, they launched a bent key in 2023. That's, that's the kids

00:15:05.380 production arm, which they then subsequently shut down. And then basically things started

00:15:10.420 falling off. So the, the, the layoffs I already mentioned starting last year and then continuing

00:15:15.920 this year, they really centered around their Nashville headquarters, which they again had 0.97

00:15:20.920 founded in 2020, which seemed to largely have just been kind of a stupid idea. I think they 0.99

00:15:25.560 made a lot of hiring they never should have made. And in 2024, this is also key and not something

00:15:31.520 discussed a lot, is Facebook changed its feed significantly, which deranked, newsed, and just

00:15:38.240 gutted the daily wires traffic. So it completely collapsed for them. Facebook as a key distribution

00:15:44.460 engine that had made them look super unbeatable in the mid-2010s. So that's one-

00:15:49.560 fascinating and we never really distribute so for people who know we distribute on rumble

00:15:54.040 substack podcast networks and youtube but we never were able to successfully distribute on facebook

00:15:59.820 because their spot checks on video clips which i include in a lot of episodes to be entertaining

00:16:06.360 are just way too restrictive for this show to operate yeah yeah i was actually thinking should

00:16:10.140 we look at syndication i don't know i i feel like that's too old school so no but i mean you know

00:16:17.560 if someone knows about it and thinks we should chime in in the comments because we read the

00:16:21.220 comments and thank you for everyone who comments because yeah if anyone knows how interesting

00:16:24.360 things to say i didn't know if somebody was willing to take over that for us and it made

00:16:28.360 some money i'd be willing to do profit sharing with them yeah totally yeah i mean we're we're

00:16:33.420 definitely if that like youtube by the way yeah anyway in terms of their youtube channel

00:16:40.300 independent youtube analytics like vidiq and some others show that his that is to say ben

00:16:45.700 shapiro's channel views are down 70 to 85 percent from their 2023 they're like it went way up it was

00:16:53.100 amazing but it has gone way down i mean so but but you've got to keep in mind simone that 70 to 80

00:16:58.900 percent reduction is not even on the platform where they've been hit the hardest which is facebook

00:17:03.540 so just across platforms he's being destroyed 100 yeah and it's not like at the same time you

00:17:09.880 have had some huge algorithm change this is i think to a large extent memetic but also i'm not

00:17:15.500 really changing their format with the times and title card with styles and stuff but to be clear

00:17:20.140 it's very common for flagship channels that get a lot of investment to have a slump like it it

00:17:26.020 happens but online commentators like philip defranco have noted and like they know better

00:17:31.420 about this stuff than i do that this is not this change of traffic is not a slump this is a collapse

00:17:36.440 like this there's no way to be like oh it's fine and to be clear the the daily wire team is like

00:17:42.380 oh well you know revenue year over year has been up under my leadership that's what mr boring has

00:17:47.660 been saying but just because your revenue is up doesn't mean you're actually doing well it could

00:17:51.360 just mean that you're like spending it massively but i mean their layoffs indicate clearly that

00:17:56.240 they've gotten over their skis on on their social data another really interesting thing about his

00:18:00.820 youtube that i'm noticing by looking at videos yeah the view count is wildly inconsistent

00:18:06.060 oh a lot of them get around like i want to say to like 16k to like 50k views and then occasionally

00:18:14.180 like every seventh one or something gets half a million views bizarre super bizarre oh i see why

00:18:21.500 why wait why it's a different in format the ones that do really well are the ones that have the

00:18:29.900 word been on them and appear to be about an hour long and the clips don't do very well

00:18:34.760 so yeah they're really bad eclipsed apparently so after we recorded this episode we recorded

00:18:41.140 an episode where we went deep into how botting works and how to spot when something is heavily

00:18:45.060 botted and unfortunately ben shapiro's channel has all the hallmarks of being almost entirely

00:18:51.360 botted by what i mean by this is the videos that are getting the half a million views are the long

00:18:59.320 form hour plus long videos whereas the videos that are getting the you know 12k views those are the

00:19:06.700 shorter piffier videos in like the 10 to 15 minute range that doesn't make a lot of sense when you

00:19:13.640 consider how the youtube algorithm works it should be the shorter videos getting more views and the

00:19:19.000 longer videos getting fewer views like this is difficult for me to explain to someone who's not

00:19:23.360 a youtube creator but basically it just makes absolutely no sense it would never happen at

00:19:27.580 least not at this order of magnitude difference which implies to me that he sees his long-form

00:19:34.220 content as the important content so he bought that and he doesn't bought the other content which also

00:19:39.020 makes sense when i think about the number of people i've talked to who genuinely seem to have

00:19:43.060 watched a ben shapiro anything in the last i don't know six months i'm not talking about in the

00:19:49.480 distant past you know people used to watch him i used to watch him in the distant past i'm talking

00:19:53.380 recently. And so, yeah, my current intuition is he might have a smaller regular audience than we

00:20:01.560 have at this point. To word this in another way, it would make sense that his long form podcast

00:20:07.500 got orders of magnitude more views than his shorter form content if it was being hosted

00:20:13.460 in other locations. So like somebody said, oh, it gets orders of magnitude more than the YouTube

00:20:17.300 content. That makes sense. It doesn't make sense that it's getting orders of magnitude within the

00:20:22.100 YouTube platform, because that would require some like alternate audience that just knows to tune

00:20:26.880 in whenever the long form thing is coming out. And YouTube doesn't really work that way. In addition

00:20:31.740 to that, even if it was the case that it was working in that way, right, that for some reason,

00:20:39.160 YouTube just knew that this long form content algo wise did much better, their company would

00:20:44.400 stop posting the short form content within the same channel, because if it was a short, okay,

00:20:50.740 that doesn't affect the algo on the long.

00:20:53.540 So sometimes people will post shorts on channels

00:20:55.500 where shorts don't do well.

00:20:56.640 It doesn't really matter.

00:20:57.720 But if it's like a 15 minute video

00:20:59.600 and they're often doing orders of magnitude higher,

00:21:02.920 multiple hour videos, okay?

00:21:05.180 Or like hour and 30 minute videos,

00:21:07.360 that those short videos would be nuking

00:21:10.020 the longer videos in the algo.

00:21:11.580 Like you just wouldn't have those in the same channel.

00:21:13.600 You'd put them on a different channel

00:21:14.800 unless you were botting.

00:21:17.200 So a couple other notes here,

00:21:18.800 just so people aren't confused.

00:21:20.180 When I say his short-form content, I'm not talking about short-form vertical videos.

00:21:24.200 Those run on a separate algorithm and wouldn't be hurting the long-form videos.

00:21:27.740 I'm talking like 10 to 15-minute videos, which would severely hurt the long-form videos if they're this underperforming.

00:21:33.500 In addition, Candace Owens has said that the channel heavily bots.

00:21:37.980 Given that she worked for them, she would likely know this.

00:21:40.720 But I think the most important bit of evidence that we can look at here is let's look at our video from yesterday.

00:21:47.180 yesterday. So this video has only been out for a day. It has 13,229 views and 934 comments.

00:21:57.080 Okay. Now let's look at Ben Shapiro's video from the other day that presumably has 200,000 views.

00:22:07.820 okay so more than 20x what ours got around all right it has 860 comments literally fewer comments

00:22:17.720 how is that conceivably possible that does not make sense now here you might be saying okay

00:22:25.780 malcolm maybe maybe but why don't we look at some other metric to try to understand if he's

00:22:33.240 Why don't you look at the most liked comments on each of the videos to look at the variable interaction?

00:22:38.240 Because maybe people just don't comment on his videos, but they spend time liking the comments on his videos.

00:22:44.240 Okay, so we'll go to our video.

00:22:47.240 Top not pinned comment, 239 upvotes, next 186, next 122, next 89.

00:22:54.240 Okay, now let's go to his top comments.

00:22:58.240 First, 219.

00:23:00.600 Hmm, that makes sense.

00:23:02.240 Then 10, 42, 86, 41, 37?

00:23:08.700 Excuse me?

00:23:10.660 Excuse me?

00:23:13.340 Come on, guys.

00:23:15.220 Presumably looking at a video here that's getting around 20x the number of views,

00:23:20.020 but getting around 20x lower engagement?

00:23:25.080 Explain that to me.

00:23:26.580 Does that make sense?

00:23:28.020 Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense.

00:23:30.300 None of this makes sense.

00:23:31.780 So a Redditor had looked into this more,

00:23:34.880 so I'm putting the image on screen here.

00:23:36.580 Notice how the recently released Ben Shapiro episode

00:23:38.960 has under 100,000 views.

00:23:41.120 The Ben Shapiro from the day before has 300,000 views,

00:23:44.760 and the Ben Shapiro episode from 48 hours before that

00:23:47.240 has 500,000 views.

00:23:48.780 Keep in mind, because I checked a few hours ago,

00:23:51.100 and this is what I found.

00:23:52.460 Notice the pattern again.

00:23:53.740 The video from today is at 100K views.

00:23:55.740 the video from yesterday or 36 hours ago is now magically at 500k views and the video from 48

00:24:02.140 hours before which was at 564k views has now magically only gained 4k views in the 24 to 30

00:24:10.300 hours so basically normally so for people who aren't aware you get your biggest viewership

00:24:14.800 right after the episode is released that is not what ben shapiro is seeing right after the episode

00:24:20.380 is released he's not getting that much a bump in views it's like the day after he gets a linear

00:24:25.580 large jump in views up until the video hits 500,000 views, then it completely drops off.

00:24:32.920 He also notes, and I'm not going to go into how we calculated this because it's boring,

00:24:35.780 you can look it up yourself, but that during the period of slower interaction, that beginning

00:24:41.740 period, he's getting one comment for every 30 views. During the period of quick growth that

00:24:47.900 doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, he's getting one comment for every 500 views.

00:24:51.860 But they pointed out something else that is very indicative of viewbotting for the Ben Shapiro episode videos, is that they almost always get around exactly 500,000 views.

00:25:03.440 That's not normal. Normally, on like your bigger videos, you're going to be going up, you know, 30% sometimes, down 30% sometimes, have an occasional episode bomb, have an occasional episode do really well.

00:25:15.780 So if we go outside of the episodes that he appears to currently be populating to five days ago, right?

00:25:21.400 And we'll just go through the final view counts on the Ben Shapiro episodes.

00:25:25.960 489,000 views.

00:25:28.360 478,000 views.

00:25:30.300 517,000 views.

00:25:32.120 517,000 views.

00:25:33.980 571,000 views.

00:25:35.760 582,000 views.

00:25:37.380 504,000 views.

00:25:39.200 612,000 views.

00:25:40.640 480,000 views.

00:25:42.440 529,000 views.

00:25:44.140 605,000 views.

00:25:45.780 541,000 views do you see how absolutely insane this is this is very clearly viewbotted and if

00:25:53.280 you look at like i mean the title cards aren't bad like i'm looking at this it looks a lot like

00:25:56.940 one of our title cards like here's the most recent long form episode here's how china spies

00:26:01.980 on the u.s hmm wonder where they got that idea from are they watching our episode from like three

00:26:07.860 days ago i bet one of their writers is just like oh no it was it was a major headline the the i

00:26:13.880 think it was what the london times had been really this this this young woman who had been spied on

00:26:19.360 um i think it was elsa but we had to delay our episode like a week after we filmed it so it's

00:26:23.920 weird that he right well they they're also produced and edited it takes him a while to

00:26:29.040 get stuff out too like everyone needs time so you know i don't know but anyway social by data shows

00:26:34.860 daily wire's youtube subscriber base has plateaued or shrunk in 15 of the last 16 months since early

00:26:41.780 2025 and their website traffic by march 2026 was about half of what it had been a year earlier

00:26:47.780 and shapiro has admitted that revenue is down from 2024 even while insisting that cash flow

00:26:53.220 remains strong relative to critics expectations what is he getting cash flow from probably like

00:26:59.180 daily wire plus subscriptions like they're trying to be the christian disney you know and i'm going

00:27:04.120 to talk about that too yeah i want to talk about that because what's interesting is they tried so

00:27:08.200 hard to create all of these alternate forms of conservative media and yet when we look at the

00:27:14.240 conservative media creators that i think people are actually watching there's really two of them

00:27:20.380 that stand out for me and and they've both been really excellent sort of coming on the conservative

00:27:24.220 media scene one is freedom tunes uh freedom tunes is excellent excellent show just in terms of

00:27:32.720 entertainment yeah there's like sure the other is babylon bees media yeah but no they're they're

00:27:38.020 literally they're trying to make just generally conservative and christian like shows this is

00:27:45.540 nobody wants shows i know i know when we live in a market very saturated with shows also in which

00:27:51.700 time has collapsed people are watching stuff stuff from like 1968 they're watching stuff from 1992

00:27:56.920 to like it no one needs we really don't at this point need more serialized content in the same

00:28:03.900 way that we did before and we've we've talked about this in other episodes anyway that's why

00:28:08.500 i mentioned freedom tunes specifically because i think freedom tunes delivers content to the right

00:28:14.560 in a way that the right wants to consume content right like it is funny it is irreverent and i

00:28:23.100 think we're beginning to see the bubbling of and guys like i'm i'm i'm predicting this now

00:28:30.380 what is coming out of the the skybrows cinematic universe uh which is like a collection of content

00:28:38.820 creators who have just created some amazing songs i'll play one from like a kirsha song on here

00:28:44.900 right now this is from the holy ball which isn't even skybrows it's like a skybrows inspired guy

00:28:48.820 Well, but I love Holy Balm. Yeah. His, his style's my favorite, I think.

00:29:18.820 yeah and then you've got obviously like the leaflet stuff which is doing pretty well these

00:29:28.120 days oh my yeah amazing and then this is like her music videos right like which are

00:29:33.380 some of them are very clearly inspired by our podcast which is fantastic because it feels like

00:29:38.180 you have this virtuous circle of you know we have an idea that we take an hour to say and then she

00:29:44.580 makes it into like a two-minute music video that is really catchy and then you know it

00:29:49.680 spreads and normalizes right

00:30:14.580 or one of the things i found really crazy recently have you seen the asthma gold going

00:30:30.200 back over the onion videos from back in the day to show how right they were that sounds really

00:30:35.360 fun i will play one yes here but anyway continue hey author christine eckard is here to show us

00:30:42.540 some exercises to reduce stress.

00:30:44.260 The first thing I like to do is imagine my money-related stress

00:30:47.600 as the most disgusting, terrifying creature I can think of. 0.99

00:30:51.420 I like to imagine an ugly, greasy little creature 1.00

00:30:54.240 with a hooked nose and oily black hair. 1.00

00:30:56.500 Oh, he is scary. 0.99

00:30:57.980 I call him the Grabbler because he's a greedy little monster 0.98

00:31:00.400 who wants to grabble up all my money. 0.98

00:31:03.080 Now, close your eyes and picture the Grabbler.

00:31:05.700 He invented interest rates like the ones on your credit card. 1.00

00:31:08.780 He's taking the jobs because Grabblers only hire their own kind. 1.00

00:31:12.540 Now imagine the grappler slowly disintegrating like a pile of ashes blown away by a purifying wind. 0.84

00:31:20.580 What a relief. I feel so relaxed.

00:31:22.640 Right. So let's talk about stumbles other than YouTube.

00:31:25.420 We just need to go over the fact that there were some extremely prominent splits, both in terms of from the team, but also memetically.

00:31:34.200 So you had Brett Cooper leave in December 2024 voluntarily.

00:31:38.860 it was a you know conscious uncoupling but she clearly understood she could do better on her own

00:31:43.960 just like ben shapiro himself did also with candace owens it was mutual jeremy boring announced that

00:31:51.320 their partnership ended was for mutual reasons but it was amid really public feuds like candace

00:31:58.520 posted this christ is king post and defended kanye west's anti-semitism basically and

00:32:04.720 shapiro was like dude if you're unhappy just quit so she quit and called herself finally free and

00:32:10.980 the rest is is history you you already know she's she's posting receipts she's leaking stuff

00:32:17.400 even now but i mean ben shapiro has been one of the i might say the single most like if you

00:32:24.740 consider all humans that have lived maybe in the past 25 years maybe even 50 years ben shapiro is 0.88

00:32:34.140 probably what the the single worst for the long-term safety of the jewish people the the number 0.86

00:32:40.660 of almost every prominent anti-semite was basically minted by ben shapiro's let's talk about that yeah

00:32:48.540 so i'm gonna i'm just gonna pull some quotes from the tucker carlson interview with nick fuentes

00:32:53.020 where like you really get a good succinct layout of the the manner in which almost it seems like

00:32:59.300 brett shapiro is personally responsible for the anti-semitic radicalization of nick fuentes

00:33:06.160 i think this also represents an ideological split yeah no really and i'm linking this on

00:33:12.480 the show notes i have show notes if you go to patreon or substack and by the way thanks for

00:33:16.180 everyone who supports us so you guys are amazing and we love you you can find the video linked

00:33:20.200 along with all my other sources he he talks about how basically way before he was a big deal at all

00:33:26.240 He's just like this college student posting online. Ben Shapiro gatekept and belittled him

00:33:31.640 even, you know, when he had no reason to. He describes, Nick Fuentes describes first publicly

00:33:37.860 criticizing Shapiro in the Daily Wire over Israel. And not in like a, like, I hate Israel way,

00:33:44.300 but in a like, oh, like, do we need to support them this much? I'll just quote him. Nick says,

00:33:48.920 I tweeted Ben Shapiro. I said, you know, I've never seen anything on the Daily Wire that's

00:33:52.500 actually critical of israel and he quote tweets me and he says to accuse a jew of of dual loyalty

00:33:59.400 is the surest sign of anti-semitism he immediately called you an anti-semit semite said tucker

00:34:05.380 so i'm driving to christmas eve mass with my family and i see on twitter the notification

00:34:11.080 comes up ben shapiro quote tweets me calling me an anti-semite and then i said something like

00:34:15.480 if you're gonna if you're gonna if you're china first you should live in china if you're mexico

00:34:19.920 first you should live in mexico if you're israel first maybe you should go live in israel which is

00:34:23.920 a really great rejoinder and again he quotes tweets nick and says you're an anti-semite the

00:34:28.780 same night and then fuentes in the same interview with tucker frames chapiro's deciding really early

00:34:33.660 i want to point out here um for jews who are unaware of this you cannot throw around the

00:34:39.740 word anti-semite for non-anti-semites if you do that is an extremely loaded term yeah and he was

00:34:46.600 just saying like by the way nothing on the daily wires is has ever you know been like hey you know

00:34:52.420 israel and israel is an imperfect country there are quite and there are many people in israel who

00:34:57.060 fight for israel who die for israel who question the way that it's governed like it's not wrong

00:35:01.560 for him to point that out you know and it is weird within a certain perspective like ben wanting to

00:35:09.240 come ben thought he could just shut it down like any criticism i can shut it down because i have

00:35:15.520 the cultural power and what he seemed well i mean whether or not he's aware of this or not we'll

00:35:20.980 talk about why he's so blinded to this but he's wheeling woke weapons um and woke weapons

00:35:27.280 radicalize right-wing people against whatever faction is using them yeah he's trying to be

00:35:33.240 like how dare you say that you're an anti-whatever phobe and and as such i'm going to attempt to

00:35:39.880 deplatform you which he did do to to nick fuentes continue yeah and to us keep in mind like the

00:35:44.960 reason i believe all this for nick fuentes is he did the same to us right and we weren't even

00:35:49.200 anti-israel we were just too nerdy for him too we didn't even tweet at him we didn't even criticize

00:35:54.300 the daily wire we were just talking and he yeah anyway we're just talking yes nick says in his

00:36:00.320 interview it turned out that cassie dylan she texted him earlier and she wanted him to take

00:36:05.480 me under his wing and he goes i'll take a look and so i guess the two of them were kind of grooming

00:36:09.740 me in a sense they wanted me to go maybe be a daily wire guy or something looking at me as a

00:36:15.100 potential conservative activist or influencer and they started paying attention to me that this is

00:36:20.300 totally believable in my opinion um because they've cultivated other talent to have on their

00:36:25.340 platform it's part of their business model he continued and the more critical of Israel I was

00:36:29.640 I started to get this really intense pushback from the both of them and from a lot of the people at

00:36:34.000 Daily Wire. For them, it was easy to say if they detected that a promising young guy was going to

00:36:40.100 become anti-Israel in the conservative movement, they could crush that person easily and grind 0.93

00:36:44.420 them under the heel. So they sort of were alerted, oh, there's a precocious young guy that isn't on

00:36:49.420 board with Israel. We'll keep an eye on him. And if he gets too vocal or popular, we'll cut him

00:36:53.380 down. We'll crush him. Basically from then on, it was just this escalating series of blacklisting 0.99

00:36:58.300 censorship hit pieces, rumors to try to ostracize me from the movement. And he goes on to

00:37:03.920 link shapiro and the daily wire and their circle to efforts to isolate him and get him fired um and

00:37:10.700 i'm not going to go into like the full quotes on all this it involves this clip from media matters

00:37:14.520 and then we went over this in our episode on nick fuentes the first one we did on him the big one

00:37:19.280 um and then he yeah ties shapiro's attacks to his own radicalization and then turn against the

00:37:26.020 conservative establishment he says looking back with uh with that 2020 hindsight i mean ben shapiro

00:37:31.840 seems like a big part of your political evolution. You went from a fan acolyte to an opponent and

00:37:37.040 then just pivoted against everything he believes. That's what Tucker said. Nick said, yeah, it was

00:37:41.940 because it was this new dialectic that Trump forced. So once you accept that, a lot of the

00:37:46.560 way of doing things becomes impossible to support it or justify. The contradiction becomes apparent.

00:37:52.180 I realized that the conservative movement was completely bankrupt in a way that became very

00:37:55.880 radical. Anyway, it was a very, you should go watch the interview if you haven't. But speaking

00:38:01.280 of which um the i think i want to point out he's done this to us too like it is loud and noticeable

00:38:10.800 when him or the daily wire are involved in a conservative event we are blacklisted we don't

00:38:17.640 get approved we don't get invited they have never it is weird that they've never reached out to us

00:38:22.320 or done anything with us given that like almost every major conservative influencer has done

00:38:26.940 something with us like but but anyone who is remotely tied to the daily wire just completely

00:38:33.780 well and you're you're so right in that they're using a very leftist tactic because a very common

00:38:39.120 leftist thing attack is like oh you spoke with this bad person that makes you bad there's this

00:38:46.020 like contamination accusation and that is exactly what shapiro did with tucker carlson after tucker

00:38:52.040 Carlson had this interview with Nick Fuentes. Shapiro blasted Carlson as an intellectual

00:38:57.180 coward and moral imbecile for interviewing Nick Fuentes and echoing anti-Semitic tropes 1.00

00:39:02.480 on Israel and influence. And then Carlson retaliated by slamming Shapiro's many attacks 1.00

00:39:07.020 on Jesus and immigration views and pro-Israel states as bigotry and cruelty, especially

00:39:12.100 on Iran policy. And this just deepened their rift. And so now you have Ben Shapiro even

00:39:19.180 radicalizing tucker carlson further and then like you i know i know jews you gotta understand this

00:39:26.500 if you call someone an anti-semite when they're not being an anti-semite the standard american 0.78

00:39:31.480 cultural reaction is well i guess i just hate the jews yeah like if i'm gonna get called it anyway

00:39:37.940 like it actually takes a lot of mental effort on my part to not have that reaction when it happens 0.87

00:39:45.100 to us because it is the standard reaction that an american culturally speaking is going to have

00:39:50.980 so another example of ben shapiro going after anyone who touches the bad person right again

00:39:57.780 this is i said regina george from mean girls at the beginning of this because he's he's doing

00:40:02.140 he's being a high school mean girl because now when so so even after all this right so now he

00:40:09.180 hates tucker carlson and he hates candace owens because they've turned on him and then at turning

00:40:13.840 point usa's america fest in december 2025 ben shapiro called megan kelly a charlatan for for

00:40:21.180 platforming candace owens and tucker carlson megan kelly used to be his friend and helped him a lot 0.85

00:40:26.300 in gaining his public recognition well and to your point just like you are she fired back accusing

00:40:31.600 shapiro and barry weiss of fueling anti-semitism by suppressing israel criticism and she defended

00:40:36.380 her neutrality and friendship with owens calling shapiro israel first because he is and she she

00:40:42.480 was and again he she wasn't like defending their stances she was simply having discourse with them

00:40:49.360 and he in that very leftist way is like oh by talking with them you're platforming them you're

00:40:54.680 no bad that's such a woke sentiment right like everyone i know yeah but like okay so i want to

00:41:03.540 before you go further here because you're not getting potatoes so i'm gonna get to some meat

00:41:06.820 and potatoes okay okay why did he actually lose his audience because i don't think he lost his

00:41:12.160 audience because of all of these missteps he lost his audience because his brand of conservatism

00:41:17.700 doesn't make sense in a modern context he's going out there with a very like you know anti-porn

00:41:26.760 like like specifically for widespread pornography bans trad wife like women don't have a job you

00:41:33.680 know stay at home take on a traditional role their role is raising the family you know very anti oh

00:41:40.560 you know malcolm and simone are too nerdy to to be in all of this you know what are they doing

00:41:45.320 here and we go through with every one of these you can watch our episodes you know he's video

00:41:49.680 games and and lewd things are terrible you know all of the the traditional things here and there's

00:41:55.180 a way to do something like this that is at least entertaining but he just comes off as like morally

00:42:01.660 policing and like the driest old lady sort of a way that you can and what makes it so perverse

00:42:11.620 and i think turns people so strongly against him is at least if he pretended to live out the

00:42:18.500 lifestyle that he was preaching people would take it seriously but he's here promoting

00:42:23.940 a woman's job is to raise kids and his wife is a doctor and he can't help it it's very much 0.96

00:42:31.060 fits the trope of the the jewish person who is attempting to infect a culture with ideas that 0.83

00:42:38.740 they know will eventually destroy that culture and not follow them themselves and i think that 0.90

00:42:43.880 a lot of people functionally see it that way and are really disgusted by it right like so for

00:42:49.980 example him attacking us for being too nerdy and everything like that like obviously you're a giant

00:42:54.540 nerd like ben like just maybe maybe a little more old school maybe a little more prestigious with 0.63

00:42:59.400 your lord of the rings nerdiness you can go hang out with stephen colbert i'm sure you guys would

00:43:03.940 get along great instead of your your anime and whatever nerdiness but like when he tried to make

00:43:10.280 his sister work i think he perfectly showed how much he didn't get the modern conservative audience

00:43:15.540 because what he presented her as was this non-salacious perfectly presentable rule follower

00:43:25.200 right it did she never mentions that she's really into warhammer tabletop gaming she totally should

00:43:33.060 have yeah like again she led with that and it was a big the boobed whatever lady the doing tabletop 0.97

00:43:40.840 miniature painting while talking about you know like the nerdier parts of conservative politics 0.97

00:43:46.560 and like yeah the busty warhammer conservative mom people would have loved that come on oh people

00:43:51.260 would have been so into it right yeah um yeah but no he thinks you need to pretend to be this sort

00:43:58.900 of fake thing that the internet hates more than anything and and and this is the thing it there

00:44:05.320 are like we are fighting a meaningfully annoying deontological faction that is like genuinely

00:44:10.340 you know taking blows and fighting back but this faction leans in on all of this like

00:44:17.540 curmudgeonly pearl clutcher stuff but does it in either a profoundly entertaining way like they're

00:44:25.780 they're being over the top about it they're being nick for just falls into this category to some

00:44:29.780 extent right like at least when he complains in the sort of the oh the the whatever anime nerds

00:44:35.660 and video game right like he'll attack them in a way that's entertaining right and over the top

00:44:40.740 and vitalistic instead of just like well don't do this it's weird and you're weird for doing it and

00:44:46.160 i don't like it or they are and i don't like this faction much either but they are growing a lot

00:44:51.680 they're uk boring typically former leftists who have adopted a lot of boring there's a special

00:44:59.440 brand that is uk boring yeah there's there's yeah uk vanilla and you bite into it and you're like

00:45:06.560 oh my god this is just like filled with unprocessed vanilla beans like

00:45:11.380 uh that's what i like when i i bite into like but i think that that's being replaced by the 1.00

00:45:19.040 reform party because the reform party yes when they're like we need to melt down nigerians to 0.98

00:45:23.760 fill potholes like that's an elected representative i'm like okay you go boy 1.00

00:45:28.060 okay continue continue right well let's go into their conservative disney boondoggle

00:45:35.320 and yeah let's get a thing so a lot of this comes down to ben shapiro's co-founder and the former

00:45:42.140 ceo of the daily wire jeremy boring who pursued this breitbart style politics is downstream of

00:45:49.620 culture vision pouring money into kids content though of course they shut down that branch

00:45:54.160 feature films and merch like anti-wocal razors and chocolates and he was trying to build this

00:46:00.760 conservative hollywood in nashville and you can tell by the pattern of their layoffs that like

00:46:05.760 they're quickly discovering that no one wanted this and it's not making any money he's no longer

00:46:11.740 the ceo of the daily wire but he is leading creative stuff still so i don't know if they're

00:46:16.540 going to keep throwing money at this but he's not gone he should be gone his name what did you want

00:46:22.600 to say though i'm sorry determinism um oh well what i was gonna say was if we look at this sort

00:46:30.980 of content like conservative kids content why doesn't conservative kids content do well because

00:46:36.280 i show my kids conservative kids content and it's cartoons from the 1980s and it's free and it's on

00:46:42.540 youtube and i can just push play and it's on forever and i can show them gi joe where american

00:46:47.760 soldiers go and shoot a bunch of people with a lisp right like that's what we're all about as 0.79

00:46:54.360 americans you know it's such a gay theme song though in the best way i mean that i mean that 0.99

00:47:00.420 in a good way well yeah we teach kids the gi joes are a little you know there's some gay 0.97

00:47:05.680 they're extremely gay and it's wonderful they're not faggy about it okay they're basically like 0.97

00:47:12.400 sea spray and i gotta play this from like the venture brothers right like this is a 0.96

00:47:16.360 but no it's it's fantastic right you don't need to be overly puritanical about this stuff and he

00:47:24.860 feels you need to be and there just isn't like when i'm like okay what conservative content do

00:47:29.540 i want to see more of like i was like okay i want to see more like explicitly conservative media to

00:47:35.360 shape ideas right yeah honestly it's just more cinematic skybrows universe stuff like there was

00:47:40.960 There's a feature Link's anime made about Leaflet and Powder, and it's literally like 60 minutes, huge, it's got a fight scene, and then the CEO of Twitter tries to trap them in a crystal, and they end up battling him and breaking out Asmogold, who teaches them to not destroy him or whatever, you know, it's fun, it's very well done, but like, that's entertaining.

00:48:10.960 Why?

00:48:17.960 This woman in anime is voiced by Asian now. I guess I unbanned her. 1.00

00:48:27.960 Quang! 1.00

00:48:31.960 Do you know why I'm here, Quang? You unbanned another 2D cutting board chess VTuber without my approval! 0.93

00:48:40.960 and i think you know we're a year away two years away from like full

00:48:56.200 links anime being able to be easily made from these sorts of systems and you know the moment

00:49:04.240 that that stuff gets out there this sort of cinematic universe that we've begun cultivating

00:49:08.680 and i want to be honest i've had like a realization and a change in how i see the

00:49:12.300 world in the wider conservative scene part of it was hugely influenced by your recent appearance on

00:49:17.560 chris williamson part of it was hugely influenced by the growth of leaflet and her stellar humanist

00:49:24.260 philosophy and by the way for people's humanism all the way oh she gets it she's huge you know

00:49:30.020 she's like on twitch like a third bigger than kirsha on on youtube she's like which gives me

00:49:34.900 help for humanity yeah man yeah but all she feels like we got to get to the stars we got to get to

00:49:40.200 the stars this this fun not overly deontological set but the thing is is like you're up there and 0.92

00:49:46.580 you're next to all these like all the other leaders of the pronatalist movement but there's all the

00:49:50.900 like stodgy you know the statistic pushers and everything like that and they're all like well

00:49:56.540 if we can move the numbers here and here and here and you're just like oh you you know it won't work

00:50:04.020 you know it won't work and it doesn't even matter why are we even trying to save these people they

00:50:10.360 hate us they are in opposition to everything we care about let's just breed spread our culture

00:50:18.440 to the future and we'll replace them and then within the parts of the conservative party that

00:50:23.780 are still breeding but are not technophilic they're also not particularly long-term economically

00:50:28.740 relevant right so like why am i even stressed about fighting them just cultivate our movement

00:50:35.700 cultivate our wider ideological movement keep it fun keep it light and don't don't worry about

00:50:43.640 the conservatives that are eschewing technology and whining about this is bad and that's bad

00:50:48.160 because they're falling out they're crashing out of the slipstream like it's like we're we're

00:50:52.880 warp speeding into the future you know like a time machine or something and somebody falls out of a

00:50:58.040 time thing and they like were rapidly wither and turn to dust like that's what's repeatedly

00:51:02.700 happening right we don't need to worry about all of them because we know we're in the driver's seat

00:51:08.420 in this okay and all we need to do is keep going and keep working our hardest to do what's right

00:51:14.960 for humanity and uh i i have a feeling that we're doing that and there is no large faction that has

00:51:22.580 that seems to have a place in the future that isn't on our wider team so like why am i even

00:51:27.360 stressing about these people right anyway continue right you were talking about all the cool skybrow

00:51:34.740 cinematic universe stuff that we love that we enjoy you're talking about freedom tunes well

00:51:40.900 what does the daily wire think that people want the daily wire thinks we want pen the pen dragon

00:51:46.060 cycle the rise of merlin i sent you the preview you don't need to watch it but i sent you the

00:51:50.640 preview on whatsapp all of this is an illusion an echo of a voice that has died

00:51:59.140 and soon that echo will cease

00:52:03.400 it just comes across as like

00:52:15.160 the game of thrones reboot that nobody wanted and they're like like cribbing game of thrones hair

00:52:23.380 and just like people wafting around in costumes and it just it just looks oppressive it's the

00:52:29.420 conservative version of woke media yeah but like no one i i just don't under i don't i don't

00:52:35.120 understand why anyone wants it the series now is live it's available it premiered on daily wire

00:52:41.480 plus this january all seven episodes were released they spent 10 at least 10 million dollars on this

00:52:49.480 with a minimum of 1 million per episode for this seven episode season and this is this is not like

00:52:57.100 conjecture this comes from jeremy boring marking it as the company's most ambitious production to

00:53:03.100 date they filmed it in italy and hungary it's this huge thing and i mean i don't think it's

00:53:09.820 It holds an IMDb rating of 7.9 out of 10

00:53:13.340 from over 2,400 votes on Rotten Tomatoes.

00:53:16.420 It has an audience score of 86 to 88%,

00:53:19.260 which is okay, but I'm like,

00:53:21.220 I don't feel like watching this.

00:53:22.440 That's pretty good, Simone.

00:53:23.120 It ranks moderately at number 2,181 out of 35,000 shows.

00:53:29.760 So yay, top.

00:53:31.520 That's pretty good for what they were doing.

00:53:33.500 Look, they tried to-

00:53:34.720 I don't care about that.

00:53:35.900 I don't want to watch that stuff anymore.

00:53:38.180 Well, yeah.

00:53:39.420 Yeah. And some outlets, to be fair, they call it uneven or terrible.

00:53:43.560 Of course they would, because the Daily Wire did it. I don't care what some outlets say.

00:53:46.680 That's true.

00:53:47.560 I bet it's fine. I bet it's fine and boring.

00:53:51.440 But financially, it's unclear as to whether it has been a financial boon for them. And I doubt,

00:53:57.600 I highly doubt that it is. But I think the really big things that when you roll all this together,

00:54:03.220 What you have is this shift from their strategic shift from in-demand, inexpensive content, heavy on AI, heavy on clips, heavy on being, you know, bombastic and fun and flexible to not highly demanded, highly produced content, you know, creating this Nashville headquarters and we're going to do all these productions and we're going to make culture and you're going to want it and watch it instead of just watching 90s cartoons like everyone else.

00:54:30.000 And I feel like Pendragon is really the symbol of the Daily Wire drifting from just cheap high margin podcasts and political commentary, which just, I mean, from a business standpoint is way more sustainable into this expensive streaming style production that there's a lot of competition there.

00:54:46.940 They didn't have any particular, like, moat or special ability that, you know, would make them uniquely good at entering this space in which they have no head up or, like, sorry, like, advantage.

00:54:59.220 And then also their failure to evolve, you know, as social platforms shifted towards short-term and live streaming, Ben Shapiro didn't.

00:55:08.400 And their pacing didn't change.

00:55:11.540 They are just being left in the dust by people like Candace Owens, who's all about her live

00:55:18.180 high drama streaming.

00:55:20.220 They have a very brittle model in that they wanted to sign talent and then build their

00:55:24.460 audiences and then monetize under them with this Daily Wire umbrella.

00:55:30.080 And then it just became trivial for like their true stars to just walk away while all these

00:55:36.100 people they tried to manufacture from like classically abby to reagan replacing brett

00:55:42.500 cooper just not really working out and then you have on top of that all the sanctimonious mean

00:55:47.540 girl leftist woke gatekeeping it's no wonder that the daily wire is winding down at this point i

00:55:55.820 don't know if there's any coming back for them yeah it's it's it's sad to see where this is going

00:56:01.620 but at the same time as they have been falling apart our movement's been growing yeah and i'm

00:56:07.440 excited to see this because it's fun our movement is fun and their movement was boring and sad and

00:56:14.300 stodgy and i'm done with it i am i am so done with even even the culture war stuff i'm like why even

00:56:22.040 care about it right we're we're fighting against people who don't matter they either don't have

00:56:27.240 kids or don't have technology yeah it's boring and not engaging so why would we care even if

00:56:32.700 they're attacking us it's like like come at me with something more interesting please you know

00:56:37.280 yeah oh so why why listen to somebody about a trad lifestyle who's not living a trad lifestyle

00:56:44.380 right like why you know why when we come at you when we're like this is how you should structure

00:56:49.900 your marriage this is how you should you know have kids and raise kids we live it yeah nobody

00:56:55.720 people are like oh you're doing it wrong which is fine but nobody doubts that like we sincerely

00:57:01.860 believe what we're saying and are trying it and change our mind when presented with evidence we

00:57:07.180 find compelling we had a really sweet letter recently about the whole sword and shield marriage

00:57:11.940 thing you know the wife doing the the safer stuff and the husband and it really was big for me

00:57:17.280 because it showed i think a lot of people when we did that video people were like well not everyone's

00:57:20.620 trying to change the world in the way you guys are trying to change the world not everyone can

00:57:24.760 want to save humanity and everything like that but in the way that they were implementing it

00:57:29.840 the wife was managing you know the safe stuff right and the husband was managing trying to

00:57:35.600 recreate sort of use sports in a way that wasn't super costly so you don't need to travel between

00:57:40.820 states and everything like that and that it's actually focused on fun and kids and not creating

00:57:45.820 show ponies for rich parents and the moment i heard that i was like oh obviously this is so

00:57:50.720 something that's needed in our society right now and and and obviously so many parts of our world

00:57:57.520 have become broken you don't need to empower your husband to save all of society but to become a

00:58:04.380 force for good within your community that is durable and not something boring and perfunctory

00:58:10.780 like serving in a soup kitchen or something that's exciting for a lot of people and and we

00:58:15.920 present a way that you can do that and then other people go with it and they're like oh this is

00:58:19.540 great. This actually really makes me feel a lot better about being alive because I'm trying to

00:58:24.180 make the world a better place. Right. And I'm not going to step back from this. And people who are

00:58:27.480 like, well, not everybody wants to make the world a better place. And I'll try not just with your

00:58:31.820 family, but like, we all have a responsibility to fix our society as it crumbles around us.

00:58:37.840 Yeah. Anyway, that's my spicy take. Honestly, it's enough. I think, I think it's plenty to,

00:58:44.320 to fix your family to to make a good a good family to raise kids well i think that that is

00:58:51.940 a very honorable thing to do i think that's a good place to start but when your kids are you

00:58:57.000 know teens or whatever and you're i think for a lot of people i i do want to encourage this i know

00:59:02.100 it's it's spicy when your kids are teens and you work on matchmaking and you work on setting them

00:59:05.840 up for their careers and then you work on helping them raise their grandkids i think people being

00:59:10.200 part of our audience, but I'm going to say, I do think it is good for men to focus on civic

00:59:17.840 engagement. No, it's true. And I think, you know, what I'm hearing a lot of people discuss,

00:59:22.820 I think this is coming up more and more, for example, the all in podcast and among that

00:59:26.940 class of people talking about this idea of basically having a tour of duty, you know,

00:59:32.460 serving for a certain number of years, maybe four years, maybe eight years in government,

00:59:36.780 in politics to try to improve whether it be your your local area or on the state level or on a

00:59:42.140 national level depending on your resources i think that's fine if you want to go into politics that's

00:59:46.520 fine but there are other things you can do too but like yeah to have a tour of duty in civic

00:59:50.640 engagement in some way to help your community and that the wife's job is to support the husband in

00:59:56.080 this tour of duty yeah yeah it's more effective when you have that support yeah you can do more

01:00:00.900 with one well-supported person than two not at all supported people working separately or the

01:00:07.240 husband's role to support the wife if your husband is is doing the day job and the wife at home was

01:00:11.960 the kids do some tour of duty civically um and i know it's extra work but i i promise you

01:00:18.900 or i don't promise you i can't i can't promise anything but i i believe based on the evidence

01:00:23.880 i've seen that both you and your husband will feel better about your lives if you have been

01:00:29.020 successful in at least attempting some form of ambitious civic engagement that is my spicy

01:00:37.540 take that's going to get people mad at me oh well oh well love you simone i thought this was

01:00:45.920 fantastic i think it's fantastic that ben shapiro is losing his influence he's been

01:00:49.360 as as steve bannon called him i don't even like steve bannon i see steve bannon as a swamp

01:00:54.480 creature you know look at his epstein rehabilitation takes but ben shapiro is a cancer and you know

01:01:01.920 fortunately the cancer is in remission heavy remission i i don't i wouldn't go that far

01:01:09.480 i think he's a well-meaning person who played a game who lost some agility or really just

01:01:17.180 he's spiteful he may have aligned goals with us but he's kind of i don't think he has aligned

01:01:23.760 goals with us. Yeah, actually. I mean, I think weirdly a lot of people, I feel like they just

01:01:34.360 are all very, they'd be very happy with each other because they kind of just love hating on

01:01:38.640 other people. Like both he and actually, you know, nevermind. I'm not going to say this. I

01:01:43.440 think Nick Quintus is a more, a more inclusive person in the end. He made troll and hit on

01:01:48.140 people. Nick Quintus is made more inclusive than, yeah, than Ben Shapiro's. Yeah. So yeah.

01:01:53.600 Nick Fuentes' audience, when we were growing, so I want to contrast Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes, and people know I do not like either of their politics, and I think Nick Fuentes is an active harm to the right.

01:02:04.860 Despite all of that, the one thing I will not say about Nick Fuentes is he is not gatekeepy.

01:02:10.500 Yeah, he's really not, actually.

01:02:12.520 first started rising in influence this was around the time when ben shapiro crashed out about us

01:02:17.700 nick fuentes is like a wider circle reached out to us included us interviewed us nick fuentes

01:02:24.480 during that period talked about us positively thought oh maybe there are people i can win to

01:02:30.360 my ideological faction these things are things that uh i i want to say very clearly as much as

01:02:37.420 i disagree with his political orientation and his strategy for the conservative movement which i do

01:02:45.020 not see that it's i mean he's really a democrat at this point even he says that he still is not

01:02:51.140 somebody who snipes at ducklings as they come to shore like ben shapiro is the guy where all of the

01:02:57.140 little the turtles are coming to shore all the little baby conservative influencers are coming

01:03:00.880 to shore and he's shooting them with a sniper rifle whereas nick fuentes tries to help them

01:03:05.740 through the the the the the bird attacks and everything like that even though they may not 0.62

01:03:10.860 always be on his side yeah no i agree and i would still love to have dick wendis on our show though 0.96

01:03:18.060 he never maybe eventually you know we've been warned don't do that everyone will hate you

01:03:23.340 no people like that'd be great look it's it would be i would love i would love to interview him i

01:03:28.600 would do it yeah if he wants to come on i mean we've been you know for mutual fans i mean obviously

01:03:32.380 the show's gonna be boring because the whole time i'm gonna be talking about like catholicism

01:03:35.640 or something it's gonna be totally different i don't know it'd be amazing to see him just nerd

01:03:40.120 out about catholicism for a bit and not do his like normal things but anyway i don't know whatever

01:03:45.700 maybe i'd actually be very interested in that like theologically like what's what's his plan

01:03:50.200 oh my god yes i'd love to know like his stance on his different like theological stances and stuff

01:03:55.180 yeah and then yeah what i'd really like to have if we got him on the show is where does he want

01:03:59.700 america to be in 100 years like what's his 100 150 year 200 year plan for our species yeah i'd

01:04:07.320 love to see that too yeah come on ah someone make it happen help us out here someone has it in i

01:04:13.940 mean i guess don't donate 50 to him on his stream though and tell him that there's a woman present

01:04:18.660 on this podcast because that's not going to work he's not going to feel like he can fart on stream

01:04:22.100 if i'm there so yeah oh my god a woman a woman we've heard sorry we did a clip recently of his

01:04:29.260 where he crashed out on a fan who donated

01:04:31.060 $50 to him because the fan

01:04:33.240 had all-female children. 1.00

01:04:35.080 And you can't fart and burp around daughters 0.98

01:04:37.280 apparently, even though our daughters 1.00

01:04:38.880 constantly fart and burp around us.

01:04:42.500 God, I love her.

01:04:43.200 Apparently Octavian farted in the doctor's

01:04:45.340 office today. Is that something that happened?

01:04:47.060 Octavian was like, yeah.

01:04:49.360 I farted in the doctor's office. He was really

01:04:51.080 proud about it, I guess. I didn't see it.

01:04:52.980 They were so

01:04:54.020 amazed at how much they all helped each other.

01:04:59.260 much they all like did their thing they tried to give him all the information he needed they were

01:05:04.520 very worried when they found out that indy had to get a shot and they wanted to octavian oh my god

01:05:10.120 you want to know how sweet the kids are like i don't even know how i get there this week when

01:05:13.780 they were going to give octavian the shot octavian like no octavian goes to indy and like looks her

01:05:18.660 in the eyes he goes i'm gonna sing a song for you and so he sings a song for indy while they're like

01:05:24.820 prepping and doing the shot so she doesn't notice and she actually didn't notice

01:05:29.380 oh my god noodle i love these kids why are they so good they are simulated that's all i can

01:05:40.780 believe because i'm not that good a person or maybe i have like maybe fundamentally i'm actually

01:05:45.600 like a pretty nice person yeah fundamentally you like actually are who knew after a lifetime of 0.96

01:05:52.880 being told, oh, you're a demon child. Oh, you're crazy. Oh, you're so problematic. Malcolm, 1.00

01:05:57.520 Malcolm, Malcolm. Yeah, actually. You've been around my family. Yeah.

01:06:03.800 Malcolm, Malcolm. Oh my God. All the ways, all the ways of your voice are your name being

01:06:09.120 pronounced. This is why you're so resilient online. No one's the cruelest comments ever

01:06:15.300 made about us. Don't, don't come anywhere close to the things that come from your own family.

01:06:21.260 and i'm not just talking like one mean person no like everyone in my family constantly belittling

01:06:29.120 me oh my god anyway i love you bye bye well after this you can tell my parents who are very

01:06:39.480 generously offering to order in what you might have in terms of preferences

01:06:46.600 is so very rare exciting opportunity to eat from a restaurant we do really live in an area with

01:06:55.560 some quite good restaurants well and a non-trivial number of people who listen to the podcast live

01:07:02.880 around here like eventually we're gonna have to host a local meetup it's gonna have to happen

01:07:07.780 it's a good place to live just saying maybe some people do one in philadelphia that could be kind

01:07:14.580 of fun there was that one cool restaurant that reminded us of like british pubs do you remember

01:07:19.420 the one i'm talking about the multiple floors and the cool chairs yeah it was nice but you know i

01:07:24.120 don't know if i want to go to a city again simone that's that's not an arm never again you're just

01:07:28.080 quitting cities forever i'm quitting cities yeah i think i'm done with them i i don't i don't think

01:07:33.280 that they're good never again never again i'm just done i'm just done cities are over is that

01:07:40.360 are we allowed to have this opinion well what about edinburgh edinburgh is over i'm sure it's

01:07:47.380 stop don't you ever say that i hear it's full of you know people who weren't there a few years ago

01:07:55.980 dare you no that's all that's like more no scotland is more progressive than the rest of

01:08:05.200 the uk you like know that right like it's seen as like by far the most progressive part

01:08:08.960 i don't know that honestly like just from meeting random locals in the process of doing all of our

01:08:17.640 wedding planning i know that was ages ago now but like they were just normal honestly they

01:08:23.160 reminded me a lot of just normal local pennsylvanians but with a fun accent actually

01:08:27.500 pennsylvanians also have rural people and it's the city dwellers who are the danger

01:08:32.160 well no i was dealing with city dwellers i'm getting things like you know hairdressers and 0.96

01:08:36.520 and cake makers in the city yeah you're being a silly a silly goose people in scotland are amazing 0.96

01:08:42.860 and you were just dealing with the bougie international students at the saint andrews 0.98

01:08:47.540 so you don't even know what you're talking about oh i don't is this the type of scolding i get from

01:08:53.940 a wife who pretends to love me the ball and you what what is psychotic to love you as soon as you

01:09:01.520 as soon as you married me i had to stop pretending right well of course you decided to write into

01:09:05.740 our vows i don't promise to love you so it was never even part of the contract never even part

01:09:11.580 yeah all right all right you ready okay let's go okay

01:09:18.460 what are you guys doing

01:09:33.660 Octavia don't you'll get wet

Based Camp - May 14, 2026

Ben Shapiro's Crumbling Empire： How The Daily Wire Lost its Audience

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