＂We Grew After Firing Candace Owens＂- How The Daily Wire Survived Losing Its Biggest Stars
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
4
sentences flagged
Toxicity
1
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of the podcast, we sit down with the founder of Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, to talk about how he built a media company from zero to $1B in less than a decade, why podcasting is more important than ever, and what it takes to be a successful media company.
Transcript
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You took it as the CEO of the company from zero to a billion.
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And in the media space, we're now looking back, you know, for others that are going into the space.
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Because if we look at the history, I've read the book, They Call Me Ted, how Ted Turner, OG, built CNN and what happened.
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And even in the book at the end, he says the news must be the talent, not the, you know, what do they call it?
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not the reporter, but what do they call it on TV?
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So the anchor needs to talk very much like a Walter Cronkite.
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Today at 6 p.m., John Doe walked through the building,
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and he was shot, and all of a sudden, instead of,
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I cannot believe, you know, it's more of an animated.
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So is it really worth building a media company with a podcasting model,
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knowing, like, if I look at everybody at Daily Wire, okay,
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And let's take Daily Wire as the, you know, the largest conservative, you know, digital media company, whatever we want to put it out there.
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Right. You guys are not on TV. It's not like you're on, you know, you have like your own channel like Fox News, Newsmax.
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That's not the business model. But when you get the talent that comes in there on YouTube, yeah, you do some products, CT, all this stuff.
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You got all these different people that you have.
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Now looking back, do you think it's a model that works?
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These are people that can leave you and go create content on their own.
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She's at, you know, whatever, 6, 7 million subscribers.
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versus on TV, some of them can't translate to digital.
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I don't think they can go build a podcast in Excel.
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So do you think it's worth building a media company
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our revenue grew every single year, year over year.
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We went far beyond anything that we could have imagined
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but we were always aware of that of the challenge that you're talking about you know we
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when we started we really started with two shows we started with ben shapiro and
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andrew clavin and then we had our editorial department a bunch of writers covering the news
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and in those early years ben took off like a rocket ship and now that was by design i mean
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ben and i had been working together on ben's brand for many years before daily wire ever started we
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had a sort of proto daily wire company that we had built within a conservative non-profit called
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the David Horowitz Freedom Center. It was called Truth Revolt. And I had sort of early on seen
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in Ben what I thought was generational talent. And that instinct obviously bore out. I think
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Ben's the most important political commentator of his generation. But not many people saw it at the
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time that I saw it. And they didn't see it mostly because it was old guard, linear media guys. Ben
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didn't have an obvious voice for radio. He didn't have an obvious face for television. He talked
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too damn fast. And I was running an organization called Friends of Abe, which was like a kind of
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Hollywood secret society, basically. Alcoholics Anonymous for... Yep. Very familiar with those
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guys. And so I had access to all of this Hollywood talent, and I would do things for people. I'd
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help this writer get a job on this show every now and then, or that sort of thing. And I started
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saying, I thought there was an opportunity for Ben to become the successor to David Horowitz.
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It's high intellect, Jewish, fighter by nature.
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David's son is the guy that's worth $4 billion honors?
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He wrote the book called The Hard Things, about hard things, I think.
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I don't know if you know about that book or not.
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Yeah, and David wrote one of the most important books of the second half of the 20th century
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for conservatives called Radical Son about his journey from not just the left, but the radical
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left. I'm talking about, you know, being involved almost in criminal race type stuff and, you know,
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real communist type subversions and then becoming this champion of the conservative movement.
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So from my position in Friends of Abe, I was able to kind of influence the board a little bit and
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get them to think differently about Ben. And then I worked with Ben. I, you know, I sent someone over
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like Queer Eye for the Straight guy. I sent a Hollywood stylist over to clear out Ben's closet
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and help him learn how to dress for camera. And we would strategize together every single day
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about ways for him to break out in media. And we wanted to prove the old guard wrong. We knew that
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there's this new opportunity, that Ben's skills really lent themselves to what new media could
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be. There's a great moment early in Daily Wire, first year. Ben was hosting six hours of talk
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radio at that time he had a three-hour show in seattle and a three-hour show in la and i went to
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salem who uh for whom he did the la show and said you know we want this show to be nationally we
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want ben to have a nationally syndicated show and daily wire 2016 okay so 10 years ago 10 years ago
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2015 2016 and i i said you know we will pay for the show to be syndicated but we'd like you guys
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to syndicate it and the the head of programming at Salem said Ben Shapiro is not national talent
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you know guy goes on to be the biggest uh podcast in in the conservative movement for almost a
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decade and and we earn and deploy a billion dollars worth of revenue you know it wasn't
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national talent but I say all that only to say that we we knew by 2018 that we had a bit of a
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problem on our hands which is that ben was breaking away from the business the ben shapiro
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brand was becoming much bigger than the daily wire brand it wasn't lost on ben and i for example
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that because ben and i to some degree owned the owned ben show at that time separate from the
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company it kind of complicated what business relationship between all the pieces at that time
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that we could go take the show away from the daily wire daily wire knew that that that would
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be the end of the company. We resolved all those problems through negotiation and ways that we
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structured the business to be mutually beneficial. But then we realized, well, now the problem is we
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were owners of Daily Wire itself in a way that we hadn't previously been.
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So it's bad for us. What if Ben gets hit by a bus and he's incapacitated for six months,
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the company can't survive that. And so we started very methodically trying to build the Daily Wire
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brand to be able to lose any one of its hosts, up to and including Ben, which obviously would have
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been a catastrophic loss to endure. But if you're going to be a steward of this brand, the Daily
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Wire, it has to be able to endure even the loss of its core talent. And that's when we started,
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we brought Michael Knowles on and developed a show around him. We launched, we brought Candace on,
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you know, as the years went on. We brought Jordan Peterson on. We launched Morning Wire.
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We moved into entertainment. We started making movies. We moved into children's entertainment.
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All of that was a way of making sure that the Daily Wire brand itself was robust enough that it could survive.
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And that bore out. When we launched our first movie, we doubled the size of our, you know, we were five years in at that point.
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The first movie added as many subscribers just on itself as we had added in five years of just being a podcast company.
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Now, the entertainment play includes the movies
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right, which were huge. How much did that add? Because I've heard some numbers with that one,
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like a few hundred thousand. We did very well on what is a woman and am I racist? I probably can't
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disclose now that I'm not the CEO exactly what those numbers were. But somewhere between a hundred
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to a half a million. We did very well on that. We did very well on most of our entertainment
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properties. You know, the Terror on the Prairie, the Gina Carano film paid for itself within three
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days of announcing that we were doing it you know the lady ballers the last time i was here i think
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was to promote lady ballers you know lady ballers added more subscribers than we had had in the first
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five years of the company the movies were very lucrative so lady ballers brought a hundred
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thousand subscribers and it was all based on this idea we can't be the ted turner idea how do we deal
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with the fact that talent can go independent or even if they don't go independent terrible things
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can happen you know people get hurt people uh fall off what do we do and in that in 2024 it all came
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to uh um sort of fruition because candace owens who is one of our largest hosts you know we parted
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ways with her and we grew you know the year that i fired candace owens we ended that year better
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than we started it why what is because the brand because the brand was scribership or revenue yes
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After Candice left, you grew in subscribership and revenue?
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2024 is the best year of subscriptions and the best year of revenue in the history of the company.
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The plan was to build a company that was robust enough to absorb those kinds of losses, and we succeeded at it.
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Okay, so then how about when Brett Cooper left?
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Candice was primarily a YouTube sensation, incredibly talented, but appealing to sort of a new audience for Daily Wire, mostly a YouTube audience.
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Wasn't really yet an integral part of, like, subscriptions or an integral part of revenue.
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I think it would have gone on to do enormous business for us over time.
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And obviously she's borne out that she's a real talent and can be independent and has done very well on her own.
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primarily young people and primarily on YouTube say,
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Brett Cooper was the biggest show at the Daily Wire.
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Brett was a huge, rapidly growing, emerging talent,
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but she wasn't in any way a central part of our subscription
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