＂The Project Was Orphaned＂ – The Pendragon Cycle Almost BROKE The Daily Wire
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
2
sentences flagged
Toxicity
5
sentences flagged
Summary
On this episode of the podcast, we sit down with the founder of The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro is a film producer, screenwriter, producer, executive producer, and co-founder of Pendragon, a media company that has built a name for itself as one of the most influential companies in the entertainment industry. In this episode, Ben talks about how he built the company, how he got to where he is today, and what it takes to be successful in the film industry.
Transcript
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In regards to the movie that you did, what was the name of the movie that you did, the big one?
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Were you going for, like, was that your strategy to say, you know what, screw it, I'm going to go for all the marbles,
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because if we nail this, this could be our house of cards.
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This could be our, you know, this could be our show that's going to bring us from whatever,
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2 million subscribers to 10 million subscribers.
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You know, if you look at the history of the films that we did during my tenure at The Daily Wire,
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you take bigger and bigger risks because you can't you can't run the same play twice you know
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the first play was to acquire a movie that we didn't make dallas sonnier's run hide fight
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written and directed by kyle rankin it's a fabulous film we're very lucky to get it and we got it
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because uh dallas kind of got canceled in hollywood after having made this film and it didn't have a
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home and you know it was ben who actually saw the opportunity ben uh had interacted with dallas in
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the past and he spoke to dallas and heard about the challenges dallas the dallas was dealing with
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with run hide fight and he called and said hey you need to talk to this dallas guy i think there's
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you know this could be a movie that we could pick up and and it had always been part of our strategy
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to move into making culture not just criticizing culture and then immediately after that i tried
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to acquire another film and it didn't move the needle for us at all kind of same budget range
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also an acquisition a licensing deal didn't move the needle for us so now we need to now we have
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And we produced Terror on the Prairie with Gina Carano.
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But I sort of learned by then, well, you've got to continue to...
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And it's that in a certain kind of company, this isn't true for every company.
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Like, you couldn't do this if you had an accounting firm.
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But in certain kinds of companies, part of what you're selling to the audience
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there is a future where conservatives aren't losing.
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There's a future where we have political power and cultural power.
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and some of the things we did in consumer goods,
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where we're also represented in the consumer goods space,
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where every single company isn't against you all the time.
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The vision has to be ahead of where you are because it has to inspire.
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Elon's, you know, I'm sure you've got a deposit in on a Roadster or whatever, the Tesla Roadster.
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Yeah, because that's the other thing you have to do.
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So you're always making a promise that's a little further ahead than where you are.
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And you can keep that going as long as you come along behind it and deliver.
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So we sold the Gina Carano movie before we made it.
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We sold the kids' platform, Binky, before we made it.
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The model is, if you want us to do this, come help us support this, or what is the sequence?
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Well, we never use support because we don't want people to think of it as donations.
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It's a for-profit business, but it is like, come alongside us and help us build the future.
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Your subscription gets you everything that we are now,
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but your subscription is also going to get you the things that we will be
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We told the audience about Pendragon when we first acquired the rights.
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We took them along on the journey with us as we made it.
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And, yeah, it was bigger than anything we had ever made.
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It's bigger than anything any conservative media company has made in my lifetime.
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I've been gone for a year when they released it.
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post you yeah it's post you yeah okay were you in it at all or just so you know i know nothing
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about the story are you in the movie are you not in the movie i directed um two of the episodes
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and i was what you call the showrunner okay so i oversaw the writing room i oversaw the set
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you know i didn't oversee the set from the point of view of like dallas sonia who's running the
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crew but i was that i was the lead creative on set so i was in eastern europe for i was in not
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I was in Hungary and Italy and Romania for six months
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Do I think it was as successful as we had hoped it would be?
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in the same way so many other projects were orphaned.
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You know, when the CEO and founder of the company,
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who was also the creator and showrunner of the project, leaves,
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of course that project's going to be orphaned to a large degree. The company changed even the
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strategy that it was pursuing. But Pendragon made perfect sense as the next step in the strategy
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that we had been running for the last five years. It was the next big step. We had released content
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that had made the kind of money that Pendragon would have had to have made to pay for itself.
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So it's not as though we got so far ahead of ourselves that we would have to achieve a success
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But it was certainly a bigger bet than any that we had taken up until that time.
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Do you think that brought unnecessary pressure on the company?
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With you being gone six months, Romania, all of that,
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where you're not doing the day-to-day operation at the headquarters?
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What I'm trying to find out is purely strategically.
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Like, was it better for you to be at the home office
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operating and hiring somebody else to run that show?
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is I would have taken my executive team with me.
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most consequential project it had ever been engaged in.
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it needed all of our best talent to shepherd it and we still had a company to run and it needed me
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to be there shepherding it so what's the answer to that well the answer to that is
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i should have we should have treated it as though not that i went to hungary with dallas sonye to
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make a movie but the daily wire went to hungary to engage in the next huge project that we were
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going to engage to and you might say well that's not scalable over time but i'm not talking about
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over time i'm talking about the first time i have a very different opinion to me it was you were you
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were trying to hit a grand slam and if it goes your your uh reed hastings jr you're a you know
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you guys could have gone from two to 20 million if you're at 20 million now everybody's coming to
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you saying hey what are we doing the 50 million auto movie the 100 million auto movie and i think
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you have to take a risk like that to see if it's going to land or not i'm telling you i remember
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I'm renting this, you know, 17-bedroom property on the top of the hills.
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And before going, there's a guy named Carl DeMoss and one other guy.
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So I go download Netflix, and I'm like, I can't just watch one episode.
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I stayed up all night watching every one of the episodes in season one.
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House of Cards is probably the most successful show of all time.
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Because if you say, how much money did House of Cards make?
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So, you know, from an operator to an operator, I respect that you have the balls to take that kind of a risk.
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But also, if it doesn't hit, you've got to take the heat with it as well, and that's kind of how this thing works.
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You're either going to go or you're not going to go.
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Today, everybody's talking about SpaceX, the biggest, you know, he's a trillionaire now.
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You know, 33 people that are non-executives, non-directors, non-VPs, non-managers.
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Their stock today is worth $200 million to $400 million.
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One guy was like, you know, just a regular job that they had.
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But go back and look at the first three, Falcon, you know,
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the failures that they had back to back to back.
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so if I'm going and doing a $50 million project,
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let's just say three projects, I'm doing $50 million.
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Do I have to have on the back end $200 million ready?
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So if two of them fail, I need the next one and the next one and the next one?
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The Daily Wire grew completely out of cash flow for a decade.
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We took on $4.7 million of investment the day we started.
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And we grew to $200 million plus revenue engine over the course of a decade,
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we knew that if we were going to make these larger entertainment plays,
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was most of our content, not all, most of our content,
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released it, and started monetizing it in the same day.
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in the case of Pendragon, it's a multi-year project.
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So your capital's getting tied up for a lot longer.
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a lot of revenue really fast once you release it,
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So we'd never really been in a business before where we were tying up capital.
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And that's part of what was going on in the last couple of years at the Daily Wire,
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was thinking differently about the structure of the business
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to make it possible to bring on capital in ways that we had never
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And one of the advantages of never having brought on capital in all these years
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is that we had freedom of action, freedom of decision.
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One of the benefits of being able to bring on capital is the founders can get a little
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liquidity, and you can make things that tie up capital.
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You can make whatever was going to come after Pendragon.
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I know The Daily Wire has made at least two movies since I left.
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They're not out yet, but it's not as though they've pivoted out of entertainment.
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They've pivoted away from my sort of strategy around some of that, but they haven't pivoted
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And all of that requires thinking differently about capital, which requires changing how
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some governance works and requires changing how some structure works that's that's a natural
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consequence of some of those changes yeah very interesting you know it'll be interesting to see
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who else comes in does it how especially with now with ai are we going to start seeing guys making
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cartoons takes off subscribership on the conservative side i don't know but uh you know
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to me i do think the model of being decentralized of smaller creators not needing to be part of a
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big company may disrupt the one big, gigantic, conservative company we built.
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Obviously, we live in the moment of the independent content creator.
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My argument is that's just a moment like every other moment.
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This isn't an independent content creator operation.
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I mean, you've built a massive business around your brand,
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extending out from the business that you had already been very successful with before you started this.
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But ultimately, Patrick Bet David is the – you're not Joe Rogan making a show with one guy at your house
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that happens to be the biggest show in the world.
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You're still right now sit here as a businessman who has ambition way beyond the content that you create every day.
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And a lot of the guys who move into this space have those kinds of aspirations,
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but you and I both know how hard it is to do what you do.
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We both know how hard it is to actually build and scale,
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how much risk you actually have to be willing to take,
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how many mistakes and failures and losses you have to make and then recover from,
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even just the emotional ability to recover from major losses.
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There are people who are way better than you and me who didn't succeed
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because they couldn't overcome just the emotional reality of the losses that they had to take.
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We slam our finger in the drawer and we go, well, I'm going to learn not to put my finger in the drawer.
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And then three days later, you slammed a whole different finger in a whole different drawer, you know.
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And so I do think that we live in the moment of the independent content creator.
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