Hello, thank you guys for joining us.
This is an all-access that we're doing for a particular reason. Our five-year anniversary
is a show and the three thousandth episode of the show, according to certain metrics that I believe. We have three thousand episodes which is kind of crazy. Every now and then we talk about this. I can't believe where we are and how much time and stuff we put in the show because it doesn't feel like we've loved doing the show. We wanted to take the next half hour to maybe longer than that to talk a little bit about some of the behind the scenes with the show, the
history of the show, but also really to take your questions and and try to give you some answers.
“And just hear from you guys some and respond to that. So that's what we really wanted to do because”
in the end the show exists because you guys tune in. We are constantly amazed at when we meet
people that listen to the show. It never gets old. We've said this before in the show, but it never
gets old to learn that somebody actually listens to the show every day and we appreciate some of you guys that have been there from the beginning. In fact we want to figure out a way to find the people that have been there from the beginning and do something. I don't know what I can't make any promises. But we want to find out who's been there from the beginning. No matter what if you just started tuning in, if you've been there for a long time, we really appreciate you guys. And we
love our jobs. I think part of the thing with the five years and the three thousand. It went fast. Yeah, it doesn't feel like that at all. Until I start remembering some moments from this and then
“it does seem like it all. And then it's like a long ago memories. Yeah. So we, you know,”
one of the things we're also going to hear from Cabot, we're specifically wanted to cue up Cabot Cabot's been a major part of the show. You'll hear from him pretty soon. He cannot be on tonight. Usually he's on our all-access episodes because it's fun and we love the three of us love each other. It's it's easy. But he can't be on a night. He's got a prior engagement so he can't be here. But Georgia, so your biggest sort of response to three thousand episodes, five years,
what's the main thing that kind of comes to mind? Well, one that time flies into, I feel a lot of gratitude to do a job that is like such a dream job. I mean, I feel like we have fun every day. There are some bits that are like the hard work and, you know, there are moments of some stress. But I would say like, I was an ER nurse before this. Some people have asked that. I would say like, we don't really have life or death stress here, which is kind of nice.
I feel that sometimes with Georgia. But I'm glad you know, Georgia is it's so funny. Georgia is
really chill and like mostly, but I am the, I'm the guy's wrong one because I'm always like,
oh my gosh. Yeah, that's something's going to go wrong. He's such a workhorse that he, he fills that role. I was queuing that up, thank you. Yeah, so we, gratitude. Yeah, gratitude is my maintenance.
“Gratitude. I, you know, I think that's what it is. Every time we see ourselves on the charts,”
so we debuted at number one on the news, Apple charts, and we kept waiting for our ranking to fall. Guys, we have been pretty much top 10 for five years. I mean, somehow, like we were like 11 and 12 sometimes, but it's like the craziest thing that we never left the charts. Yeah, we, and we should talk, let's talk about that. So some of the history, quick, some people have heard this before, if you've been in all access, you've heard parts of this before, I'm sure. If you're new to this,
maybe you haven't heard some of this stuff, the history of the show is kind of interesting. It is, you said, surprising. Like, a lot, almost every element of the show to me personally is, is surprising. Neither of us, you weren't hired exactly to do this, you were hired, you weren't hired for a very specific person. You're hired as like, maybe she's going to be on screen talent or do something or maybe she can be a journalist. We don't know. I was actually weirdly a part of the hiring
process. I was editor and chief at the time. Jeremy Boring reaches out to me and he's like, hey, will you interview this girl we're looking at hiring? I have no background knowledge. I don't know anything about her little viral video, her little viral video that got millions. Your viral video, I didn't know anything about it. I just talked to her through Zoom. It was like, she seems super smart. I mean, I don't know. He's like, I don't know what we're going to use her for,
but just see if, do you think that she's somebody that's a good hire? And I said, it seems like a domain. But at this point, there was no specifics on what Georgia was going to be doing. There wasn't like, oh, she's going to do morning wire, which didn't even exist.
Well, also, I didn't even know that I was being considered for a job either.
that was viral around September of 2020. And Jeremy asked me to come in for a meeting, and I didn't know Jeremy was. So I just thought maybe I would come in and someone from daily wire wanted to talk to me about my video, maybe do a little article. And they were like, do you want to like
read off a teleprompter for a few minutes? This is seriously how it went. I've never heard this before.
Yeah. And so we did a practice morning wire read. So I was literally like, okay, let me put up this teleprompter. I'm going to read it for a little bit. I had no idea what I was coming. So they used one of the drafts of the non-existing morning wire show that we had initially done when we tested cabbably. And Jeremy was like, yeah, we were thinking about maybe a morning show at some point. And I was like, all right, you know, that's wild. Yeah. That's great.
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morning show has been there for at least six years in the daily wire, Ben and Jeremy at different points had talked about this. They looked at the most popular shows in podcasting and of course New York Times the Daily which infuriates all of us. New York Times the Daily is number one every day, every year, all that stuff. And we looked at those, we looked at up first in PR show and said, look, these are obviously people want news and they want it in the morning. There should probably
be a daily wire news focused offering. So in 2026, I mean, I'm sorry. This is 2019. 2019, I'm totally getting the time screwed up. But anyway, before 2028, hey, wire, we started looking at this idea and started testing around some ideas. And we eventually said, look, let's just bring in some possible talent and maybe give a couple of options that would be something like a morning format.
“So we brought in a number of people. I won't name them all. I can't remember everybody. But one of”
them for sure was Cabot Phillips. And one of them actually was Isabelle Brown. And both of them were total standouts. But we tested, we had them right segments. We had them right intros. We had them test out a couple of different formats. Still not even sure what the heck we're trying to accomplish. But eventually decided, look, we're going to hire Cabot. We wanted to hire Isabelle. The whole idea of the show then suddenly vanishes. Okay. So this is the kind of thing that can
happen at a complicated company like this where it's very multifaceted. We have a lot of things going on.
It kind of died.
All that stuff. I moved my whole family up here. At some point, I was, I became the editor in chief. So my focus was like the website and all that stuff. But we finally got Georgia in here. And a couple of other people started filling in the Nashville office. And some time early in 2021.
“So it was, we just saw it in 2021. I don't remember how fast the edict came down that we needed to”
like make the pilot. But I know that our first episode real episode went out July 19th. And I also know that we had, I think it must've been July 1st that we did our first fake episode. Because we did. Yeah. I think 19. But anyway, it might have been late June that we wanted to practice and like hone the show. Yeah. And yeah, we did. It was so it would have been June of 2021 that we started
making these sort of like fake episodes that never went anywhere. I'm sure we could find them.
We, you know, we looked at it. It was 19 or 20 fully produced episodes that were never released that we did as a test for like just figuring out the skill set. Both of us learning how to be hosts. For me, this is not the best. I was even, oh yeah, that's right. I even decided to be the host work. Yeah. I'm jumping ahead. Yeah. So we did, we did a test. So the idea, the, the,
“the core concept was, news you need to know, let's make it 15 minutes or less. This is something”
that NPR's up first did well at some point in the distant past. And before they start doing it terribly. And we probably need two hosts, at least there's ideas of having rotation of hosts, or even sure. So we start doing these tests. Georgia and I are obviously central to the test, Cabot, Ian Howard was also involved in this. And so we were all testing out seeing who should be the host. How does it work in terms of working with the reporters? How scripted should the show
be, how much should it have live interviews, all those kinds of things? Every year we didn't even have any live interviews. I don't think that. We really went like heavily scripted. And part of the reason is we wanted to respect the time of the listeners and their minds. And so what we wanted to do is can we actually create a show where there's not, there's almost not a single fluff sentence in the show. Every piece of the show informs you and you feel like you appreciate the efficiency
of the show. And so we really, we really focused in on that. And so that was part of the idea of creating this like very tightly controlled show. We've since moved into more and more organic interviews and live interviews. Partly because we've realized it just in the editing process, all this stuff. You can still have a very tightly produced show that's very, very much informative, but can also be a little bit more enjoyable and have some more human elements that it used to have.
I remember one of the things that Georgia, people would be like, "Is this a real human? Is Georgia how a real human?" And we were going to do some social media jokes about her like actually downloading at night and stuff like that. But you know, more and more, we let more and more mistakes in the show like deliberately. It was actually kind of an interesting reverse process for compared to a lot of different shows. Anyway, so did that. We immediately like Georgia said that the shock for
all of us is the launch of the show. And like you said, we actually went all the way up to number one,
we're like, "Okay, look, when you first launch something, it's all about the velocity of new
followers." That doesn't actually tell you about the success really of the show in terms of actual downloads. So we kept thinking, it's going to plummet, it's going to plummet. And week after week went by and we started, we would like edge down to four and five, seven. And then we've kind of hovered at an average of 10, some days will go, you know, higher, some days will lower it over the weekends, or whatever it is, but we've fluctuated. But that was Jeremy said it at the time he said,
"This is actually the most successful launch of anything we've ever released as a first, as a show." >> With no marketing FYI. >> With no marketing at all. >> Basically for five years, practically no marketing, so yeah. So anyway, again, not to like, "Oh, because we're so amazing and it's going on in horns." But obviously, there was a desire for this kind of show. The leadership of the company was exactly right. People want news, they can trust,
people want information that is useful to them, relevant to them. And that to me is like,
we can never ever forget that about the show. Well, we've always talked about that. It's not about
us as hosts. It's not about the people we bring on exactly other than they need to be people
“that are trustworthy people that you can, you feel like they can inform you. >> Well, I think part of what”
makes that a good show is like, we're not really a big part of the show to be honest. You know what? I mean, like, we really try to keep like the information as the main part of the show. And I think, I think people busy people who just want their information, they appreciate that. >> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
about the history of this. I don't know if we talked about this. But we launched with the goal of
“this going to be five days a week, Monday through Friday. Great. And by week two, Jeremy goes,”
can you do six days a week? So we by the second week of the show, we then were six days a week.
And within, I have to look at this. But within weeks or months at worst, we added the seventh day. And the way that we started figuring out how can we even do a weekend without all of us burning out instantly was, we can do longer form interviews, topical type things that are news adjacent. Sometimes it can be newsy, but most of the time it's going to be like news adjacent type stuff, we can do that. That's sustainable. So we added that as just sort of a, if people want content from us,
we'll see if they keep wanting to listen to it, we'll add weekend interviews. So that's where some of the interview concept came. And then, at some point, we added afternoon update is what we called it. And the, the whole reason we did that was probably what we were years ago? I don't know. Why do we do that? Two or four years? There was a breaking, there was a developing news story. There was some major developing news story. And we're like, dang it, man, we can't hit this
until tomorrow. That's a bummer. Maybe we drop a special news update. And so we, we dropped it in the afternoon. It was some special news update on something very important. And the numbers on it were really good. And so we thought, maybe we try that again. And then eventually I went in and asked for a approval of like, can we actually just do this every day? Maybe we can do it like headlines that
“you need to know on your, on your way home. It's like a drive home update. And we, we just kept it going.”
So one of the things we found is you start something, this is something you have to be careful with podcasting. You start something you offer something that, yeah, you can't take it away. You put it out there, you're like, oh my gosh, we got to keep going, which is what we've done. We've tweaked everything, but we tried to keep a lot of that going. And then the big thing, I'm interested in your perspective on this when we launched video. So that was a little over a year ago. April of 25. How have you,
how has that changed things for you? Have you enjoyed that? Yeah, I like video. I think
it forced us to be more efficient. At first, you know, it feels like you're adding in an additional
thing. So you think about like walking and chewing gum and all this, we used to just literally have to like talk into a mic like this. And then we had to start actually having good posture and like looking presentable as we were as we were presenting. And so that was a little stressful at first. And then I very quickly forgot that anyone was watching. And you know, now it's like I don't even think that much about it. But I do probably maintain the posture. I still think some about it.
I had to get over it. To me, it was like a psychological. I had to like get over a lot of self-consciousness. I'm much more self-conscious than people probably think. And just because I'm like, I'm a weird bipolar in terms of confidence and lack of confidence. But I've had to like learn to be on camera and just like get over it. You had been on the camera more than me. Well, like earlier today, when we were recording and we will get to what time we record because people asked that,
I realized halfway through the shows. Like my shoes are fully off and they're like floating out here where they where they can be seen in the wide. So like there are moments where I do notice and I'm like, and I start having some self-consciousness. But I don't know what's happened before it'll happen again. One thing I was thinking about, you know, with the format we've talked about this. The format of the show, the approach has changed with video in that we've emphasized
live interviews or organic interviews more with it because it is a better viewing experience.
“And so that's something I think that has tweaked the show. I think in a way that's positive.”
I think this is good. And also we've gotten more and more people from the outside over the years. This is kind of happened at the same time as going to video. We're trying to get it more and more experts. We love our internal reporters as much as we can feature them, too, of course. But there's just times it makes sense to have experts from the outside. That's been something I think has changed in the last year and a half. And then we did have a pause for a little while
with the evening wire when we first launched the video and people got all upset with us. So we had to quickly get evening wire back. We actually rebranded it from afternoon update to evening wire. So that's something, that's a little history of where we came from, where we're going, if people have more questions about that, we'll gladly answer those. Before I forget, though,
I need to play a video from Cabot. So Cabot was essential to the launch of our show. He has been
Anybody who's been listening for a long time.
probably hear him talk more than you hear us talk. He's been at least, I think, 2000 of the
3000 episodes, probably easily. By far, the most featured reporter and played a huge role in helping shape the show. He's probably said more words on this show than we have.
“There's truly, I think that's accurate. I think it's totally accurate.”
So he did give a, he could not show up tonight. So we wanted to play this video real quick. And we're going to watch it along with you guys. So let's watch this statement from Cabot. Sorry, I'm not there live with you guys, but I had the jump in. You know, I'm going to take any opportunity, John, to be on camera. It is crazy to think that we've been doing morning while our for five years, especially crazy to think just how much the show has grown. I remember
six years ago, actually, going out to LA and doing these auditions for this morning news show, where the details were kind of murky and and Bickley was telling me, we don't really know what it's going to be, but it's going to be a morning news show. And I thought I flopped at the audition because I got a call back saying, hey, we're actually not going to do this show and did up getting hired by the day they were anyway. And like the moment I got hired, John was saying,
they don't want to do this show, but we still need to do this show. Let's find a way. And so John
“and Georgia and I and some other folks who were with us way back in the day, I think one of the”
cool things about the show is just how much collaboration there was in the early days where we were finding empty studios at the day they were and recording these pilot episodes that ended up going nowhere. I remember times where Michael Knulls would come in and he would start recording his show and we'd get yelled at and we have to be quiet because ours wasn't actually show yet and we were
just kind of hold up in these random corners of the office. And that first week when the show launched,
none of us really knew if anyone was going to listen and to see the way that it succeeded early on. It's not that hard to climb the charts your first day. It's very hard to stay there for years. And I think it's a testament, not just to the work of our production team and all of our honor talent and guests and our recurring favorite contributors but also to our audience that they believed in what we were doing and that's been one of the coolest things has been not just to grow with
with you and Georgia and the rest of our team but to grow with our audience. It really does feel like a family and that consistent support that we have felt from you guys who listen has been just such a special thing to feel like we're a part of your lives, you guys are a part of our lives and it
never gets old. There's never been a day. I can truly say where I've sat down to record an episode
from morning wire and have grown and thought I have to do this all over again. It's a special thing to get to do. We realize how privileged we are and it's thanks to our audience and doing this for five years now. It's taught us all so much about the news about each other. I feel like we're all family at this point and here's to five more years. Thank you to everyone who has made this show possible. Once I stop weeping, we continue on again, man. Can I have it? Love him. One of the best
hires we've ever made at this company. So this is a lot. We are going to take some questions and let that shape what it is we talk about. This was really enlightening. I did not know that about your story. Neither one of us came from a talent background so it's easy to be like why would anyone want to listen to me or like watch me on a screen. You know? Is there a morning wire episode that you've covered or story that you covered that has stuck to you? That's a great one. I had my recent one
I talked about. What's your favorite kind of cake and why is it vanilla? Oh my gosh. Daily wires where I'm reading all the time. We just went off. That's so fun. We're the dark us. When do we get a real of blueprints to enjoy and can we commit to an all-access blueprints reveal? There's gotta be some good Georgia ones right? Oh there's tons. So they should have made a mistake though. I mean maybe I shouldn't be saying this. If you enjoyed that conversation and want to hear more
head over to dailywire.com for the full version of this podcast where we dive deeper into the
“stories behind the show and answer questions from our members. And if you want to ask questions yourself”
head to dailywire.com/subscribe to become an all-access member. As an all-access member you'll get the full dailywire library plus exclusive access to our all-access live streams and you can chat with us in real time and ask your questions there. You'll also get to listen to our show ad-free every day. We'll see you there. [Music]
