Valuetainment - June 18, 2026


＂We Grew After Firing Candace Owens＂- How The Daily Wire Survived Losing Its Biggest Stars


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

189.58

Word count

2,308

Sentence count

155


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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00:00:30.000 You took it as the CEO of the company from zero to a billion.
00:00:32.960 It's not easy to do.
00:00:34.300 And in the media space, we're now looking back, you know, for others that are going into the space.
00:00:43.480 How do you process?
00:00:45.120 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.
00:00:51.080 But he wasn't talent.
00:00:52.560 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?
00:00:57.480 not the reporter, but what do they call it on TV?
00:01:01.080 The anchor.
00:01:01.880 The anchor, not the anchor.
00:01:02.980 The anchor is not the talent.
00:01:04.180 It's the story, the story.
00:01:05.460 So the anchor needs to talk very much like a Walter Cronkite.
00:01:08.560 Today at 6 p.m., John Doe walked through the building,
00:01:11.780 and he was shot, and all of a sudden, instead of,
00:01:14.620 I cannot believe, you know, it's more of an animated.
00:01:17.560 So is it really worth building a media company with a podcasting model,
00:01:22.700 knowing, like, if I look at everybody at Daily Wire, okay,
00:01:26.080 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.
00:01:37.480 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.
00:01:43.000 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.
00:01:50.040 Michael Knowles, phenomenal job.
00:01:52.080 Matt Walsh, incredible talent.
00:01:54.820 You know, Jordan Peterson.
00:01:56.420 You got all these different people that you have.
00:01:59.020 Now looking back, do you think it's a model that works?
00:02:03.200 Because say you sign up for three years.
00:02:05.740 These are people that can leave you and go create content on their own.
00:02:09.960 You know, like what's her name?
00:02:11.720 Cooper.
00:02:12.560 Brett Cooper.
00:02:12.920 Brett Cooper went.
00:02:14.260 Nice channel.
00:02:14.880 I think she's at 2 million subscribers.
00:02:16.800 Candice went.
00:02:17.520 She's at, you know, whatever, 6, 7 million subscribers.
00:02:20.040 versus on TV, some of them can't translate to digital.
00:02:24.860 You know, I won't say a lot of the names.
00:02:26.760 A lot of the TV guys, 90% of them,
00:02:28.540 I don't think they can go build a podcast in Excel.
00:02:30.920 So do you think it's worth building a media company
00:02:32.760 with podcasting digitally?
00:02:35.080 Yeah, I mean, well, we had a great run, right?
00:02:37.540 Ten years at the Daily Wire,
00:02:38.820 our revenue grew every single year, year over year.
00:02:41.480 We went far beyond anything that we could have imagined
00:02:45.060 when we first started the company.
00:02:46.720 but we were always aware of that of the challenge that you're talking about you know we
00:02:51.440 when we started we really started with two shows we started with ben shapiro and
00:02:55.820 andrew clavin and then we had our editorial department a bunch of writers covering the news
00:03:01.480 and in those early years ben took off like a rocket ship and now that was by design i mean
00:03:06.740 ben and i had been working together on ben's brand for many years before daily wire ever started we
00:03:11.100 had a sort of proto daily wire company that we had built within a conservative non-profit called
00:03:16.440 the David Horowitz Freedom Center. It was called Truth Revolt. And I had sort of early on seen
00:03:22.920 in Ben what I thought was generational talent. And that instinct obviously bore out. I think
00:03:30.660 Ben's the most important political commentator of his generation. But not many people saw it at the
00:03:35.440 time that I saw it. And they didn't see it mostly because it was old guard, linear media guys. Ben
00:03:40.040 didn't have an obvious voice for radio. He didn't have an obvious face for television. He talked
00:03:44.740 too damn fast. And I was running an organization called Friends of Abe, which was like a kind of
00:03:51.260 Hollywood secret society, basically. Alcoholics Anonymous for... Yep. Very familiar with those
00:03:56.500 guys. And so I had access to all of this Hollywood talent, and I would do things for people. I'd
00:04:03.920 help this writer get a job on this show every now and then, or that sort of thing. And I started
00:04:07.960 saying, I thought there was an opportunity for Ben to become the successor to David Horowitz.
00:04:12.560 It's high intellect, Jewish, fighter by nature.
00:04:17.920 And so David was getting older.
00:04:19.620 His foundation needed an heir.
00:04:22.660 David's son is the guy that's worth $4 billion honors?
00:04:24.720 Yeah, the same.
00:04:25.340 He wrote the book called The Hard Things, about hard things, I think.
00:04:29.940 I don't know if you know about that book or not.
00:04:31.320 It's a phenomenal book.
00:04:32.160 So that's his son.
00:04:33.240 That's his son.
00:04:33.800 Okay, got it.
00:04:34.780 I had him on one time, I think 10 years ago.
00:04:36.940 David.
00:04:37.320 David.
00:04:37.620 Yeah, and David wrote one of the most important books of the second half of the 20th century
00:04:41.660 for conservatives called Radical Son about his journey from not just the left, but the radical
00:04:47.040 left. I'm talking about, you know, being involved almost in criminal race type stuff and, you know,
00:04:53.800 real communist type subversions and then becoming this champion of the conservative movement.
00:05:01.460 So from my position in Friends of Abe, I was able to kind of influence the board a little bit and
00:05:04.720 get them to think differently about Ben. And then I worked with Ben. I, you know, I sent someone over
00:05:09.140 like Queer Eye for the Straight guy. I sent a Hollywood stylist over to clear out Ben's closet
00:05:13.480 and help him learn how to dress for camera. And we would strategize together every single day
00:05:20.040 about ways for him to break out in media. And we wanted to prove the old guard wrong. We knew that
00:05:26.680 there's this new opportunity, that Ben's skills really lent themselves to what new media could
00:05:31.120 be. There's a great moment early in Daily Wire, first year. Ben was hosting six hours of talk
00:05:38.400 radio at that time he had a three-hour show in seattle and a three-hour show in la and i went to
00:05:45.040 salem who uh for whom he did the la show and said you know we want this show to be nationally we
00:05:51.760 want ben to have a nationally syndicated show and daily wire 2016 okay so 10 years ago 10 years ago
00:06:01.200 2015 2016 and i i said you know we will pay for the show to be syndicated but we'd like you guys
00:06:07.240 to syndicate it and the the head of programming at Salem said Ben Shapiro is not national talent
00:06:14.980 you know guy goes on to be the biggest uh podcast in in the conservative movement for almost a
00:06:21.940 decade and and we earn and deploy a billion dollars worth of revenue you know it wasn't
00:06:27.000 national talent but I say all that only to say that we we knew by 2018 that we had a bit of a
00:06:34.560 problem on our hands which is that ben was breaking away from the business the ben shapiro
00:06:40.460 brand was becoming much bigger than the daily wire brand it wasn't lost on ben and i for example
00:06:46.180 that because ben and i to some degree owned the owned ben show at that time separate from the
00:06:51.600 company it kind of complicated what business relationship between all the pieces at that time
00:06:55.920 that we could go take the show away from the daily wire daily wire knew that that that would
00:07:00.240 be the end of the company. We resolved all those problems through negotiation and ways that we
00:07:06.520 structured the business to be mutually beneficial. But then we realized, well, now the problem is we
00:07:11.120 were owners of Daily Wire itself in a way that we hadn't previously been.
00:07:16.260 So it's bad for us. What if Ben gets hit by a bus and he's incapacitated for six months,
00:07:20.180 the company can't survive that. And so we started very methodically trying to build the Daily Wire
00:07:26.780 brand to be able to lose any one of its hosts, up to and including Ben, which obviously would have
00:07:31.840 been a catastrophic loss to endure. But if you're going to be a steward of this brand, the Daily
00:07:38.100 Wire, it has to be able to endure even the loss of its core talent. And that's when we started,
00:07:43.580 we brought Michael Knowles on and developed a show around him. We launched, we brought Candace on,
00:07:49.740 you know, as the years went on. We brought Jordan Peterson on. We launched Morning Wire.
00:07:52.880 We moved into entertainment. We started making movies. We moved into children's entertainment.
00:07:57.300 All of that was a way of making sure that the Daily Wire brand itself was robust enough that it could survive.
00:08:04.460 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.
00:08:11.720 The first movie added as many subscribers just on itself as we had added in five years of just being a podcast company.
00:08:17.160 by the time...
00:08:19.320 How many did it add, by the way?
00:08:19.960 What would the number be?
00:08:21.100 You know...
00:08:21.840 50,000, 100,000,
00:08:23.140 like that kind of number?
00:08:23.900 Just sub 100,000 the first year.
00:08:26.360 From the movie?
00:08:27.340 Well, yeah.
00:08:27.660 The first five years,
00:08:28.880 we added about sub 100,000.
00:08:31.060 Oh, got it.
00:08:31.380 And then the movie added another 80,000
00:08:33.820 or whatever it was, right?
00:08:34.780 Like, basically doubled.
00:08:37.200 By the time I left,
00:08:38.700 you know, we had more than 10X subscriptions
00:08:40.600 based on the entertainment play.
00:08:42.560 Now, the entertainment play includes the movies
00:08:44.480 and it includes Matt Walsh's documentaries,
00:08:46.960 right, which were huge. How much did that add? Because I've heard some numbers with that one,
00:08:52.240 like a few hundred thousand. We did very well on what is a woman and am I racist? I probably can't
00:08:58.420 disclose now that I'm not the CEO exactly what those numbers were. But somewhere between a hundred
00:09:01.240 to a half a million. We did very well on that. We did very well on most of our entertainment
00:09:06.260 properties. You know, the Terror on the Prairie, the Gina Carano film paid for itself within three
00:09:12.400 days of announcing that we were doing it you know the lady ballers the last time i was here i think
00:09:18.060 was to promote lady ballers you know lady ballers added more subscribers than we had had in the first
00:09:21.620 five years of the company the movies were very lucrative so lady ballers brought a hundred
00:09:25.720 thousand subscribers and it was all based on this idea we can't be the ted turner idea how do we deal
00:09:33.360 with the fact that talent can go independent or even if they don't go independent terrible things
00:09:36.940 can happen you know people get hurt people uh fall off what do we do and in that in 2024 it all came
00:09:45.620 to uh um sort of fruition because candace owens who is one of our largest hosts you know we parted
00:09:52.100 ways with her and we grew you know the year that i fired candace owens we ended that year better
00:09:58.580 than we started it why what is because the brand because the brand was scribership or revenue yes
00:10:04.640 Both?
00:10:05.140 Yes.
00:10:05.740 After Candice left, you grew in subscribership and revenue?
00:10:08.260 Of course.
00:10:09.240 Wow.
00:10:09.960 2024 is the best year of subscriptions and the best year of revenue in the history of the company.
00:10:14.840 I don't know that.
00:10:15.560 Yeah.
00:10:16.360 Why do you think?
00:10:17.960 Well, because the plan worked.
00:10:19.600 The plan was to build a company that was robust enough to absorb those kinds of losses, and we succeeded at it.
00:10:24.780 Okay, so then how about when Brett Cooper left?
00:10:26.600 Was there an impact there or no?
00:10:27.960 No.
00:10:29.700 Candice and Brett are distinct.
00:10:31.060 Candice was primarily a YouTube sensation, incredibly talented, but appealing to sort of a new audience for Daily Wire, mostly a YouTube audience.
00:10:42.120 Wasn't really yet an integral part of, like, subscriptions or an integral part of revenue.
00:10:48.280 Very successful show.
00:10:49.660 I think it would have gone on to do enormous business for us over time.
00:10:53.560 And obviously she's borne out that she's a real talent and can be independent and has done very well on her own.
00:11:00.000 But Brett wasn't a, I sometimes hear people,
00:11:03.040 primarily young people and primarily on YouTube say,
00:11:05.140 Brett Cooper was the biggest show at the Daily Wire.
00:11:07.380 Of course that isn't true.
00:11:09.040 Brett was a huge, rapidly growing, emerging talent,
00:11:12.840 but she wasn't in any way a central part of our subscription
00:11:15.900 or revenue engine at that point.
00:11:17.880 Brett wasn't.
00:11:18.440 Okay, so.
00:11:19.660 Candace, of course, was.
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