The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening.

00:01:11.000 Today I'm speaking with authors, entrepreneurs, and the stars of Duck Dynasty, Willie and Corey Robertson.

00:01:19.680 We discuss faith and family values as they were presented in the show, and how they were preserved behind the scenes.

00:01:27.420 We also explore the balance between reality and fiction, structure and playful spontaneity that was captured on Duck Dynasty,

00:01:36.560 and the true positive impact the show had on viewers, as well as the general culture of the United States and abroad,

00:01:43.440 during and since its phenomenal 11-season run.

00:01:47.060 So, why do you think that what you did struck a chord with people so deeply, and one that was able to be maintained?

00:01:58.900 Well, I think there's probably a couple of reasons for that.

00:02:02.340 I think people saw parts of their family in our family, and so I think it resonated, especially across generations.

00:02:13.260 Just had a lot of people say, wow, my dad's similar to your dad, or my mom's just like your mom, or we've got a crazy uncle.

00:02:19.940 And so, I think that was one of them.

00:02:23.080 I think it was funny, and so I think people like to laugh and have fun.

00:02:27.460 And I also think the faith aspect was a big part of it with the prayer at the end.

00:02:33.120 It wasn't overtly religious, but it was wholesome, I guess.

00:02:37.780 So, what role do you think the faith played?

00:02:40.140 I actually think it played a really big role.

00:02:43.920 I think that, you know, we ended every episode around the dinner table, and we said a prayer.

00:02:50.640 And we really didn't have any grand scheme for that.

00:02:53.760 We just did it because it's kind of what our family does.

00:02:57.300 And so, we said a prayer, and that just had such an impact on people.

00:03:02.380 I feel like that's the most common thing people commented on whenever, as we've traveled the world and seen.

00:03:08.900 That's the most thing people commented on.

00:03:10.680 It was just this—one, it's just sitting around the table and being grateful for what's before you.

00:03:16.800 You know, it was just this idea that, you know, we would submit to God and give gratefulness, give thankfulness to Him before we have a meal.

00:03:27.160 And I think it also—Willie mentioned that nostalgia.

00:03:30.340 I think there was this kind of like, oh, back to something that we've lost as a country, as a people.

00:03:36.880 And whenever we did the show, I think that, you know, the network and the executives thought that, you know, we were going to look at—be this, like, Louisiana family that's so different and unique and that we hunt for a living and we eat squirrels and all this.

00:03:51.520 And that people would maybe look at us and be like, oh, they're so different and outside of the norm or whatever.

00:03:58.900 But instead, people actually looked at us and were like, oh, that's like my family or that's like my family used to be.

00:04:05.480 Or that is something that I long for in our family is to be able to kind of come together at the end of the day around a dinner table.

00:04:12.400 Well, particularly, like, I think in the aspect when you say that's what we used to be, if you're sitting around a table where we ended every episode, I think people would see that going, wow, we never sit together and eat.

00:04:25.480 You know, we're always running and gunning and grabbing fast food.

00:04:28.300 And so I think they saw them and were like, wow, maybe we did that at a holiday or growing up.

00:04:32.620 And so that was one of the parts where I felt like they were like, oh, or maybe they didn't say a prayer or maybe they used to or maybe they heard about it.

00:04:39.340 So I think they kind of really enjoyed that kind of like, ah, we, like, even if they don't do it, they could, they saw some of them did and said, hey, we've changed our whole structure.

00:04:50.860 And now we sit down and we eat together.

00:04:53.020 And so, but they could kind of see that.

00:04:55.200 And so I do think it was kind of a throwback, you know.

00:04:58.280 It was really interesting to me because I think we made this, it was a funny show.

00:05:03.440 It was like a sitcom, you know, it was a funny show about our family, but it impacted people in really powerful ways.

00:05:09.340 People would, you know, come up in tears saying like, now my family eats dinner together because of your show.

00:05:15.500 Or my husband goes to church now because he saw real men that just love God and can be normal people, you know.

00:05:22.700 And things like, or I watched it with my dad, he had cancer.

00:05:26.780 And it just brought us joy and laughter and positivity and hope in a time that was like a darkest time of our life.

00:05:33.600 Hi, everybody.

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00:05:56.540 We've sold out the seats that we arranged to have opened already, and now we've opened up more seats, and maybe we can fill the entire place, which would be quite the remarkable occurrence.

00:06:09.320 Anyways, that is on November 1st.

00:06:12.300 If you want to come to the O2 and hear our discussion, do so.

00:06:18.100 Get your tickets.

00:06:18.880 I remember I read a couple of years ago, I think, that 30% of people in the UK, 30% of households now have no dining room table, so people don't eat together.

00:06:30.520 And as a psychologist, it's very interesting to me to consider the role of the table in the union of families and in the socialization of children.

00:06:42.960 I mean, first of all, people, human beings do something very strange at a table, and it's so normal in some ways that no one notices it.

00:06:52.280 But human beings are really the only animals that formally share food, and it's a very strange thing to do.

00:07:00.400 I mean, even if you have a dog that loves you, he's generally not that happy if you try to take his bone away at his dinner dish.

00:07:07.980 I mean, the carnivore comes back out, and so the fact that people can actually share food and that they can do that even when they're hungry, that is really quite the miracle.

00:07:18.360 And so the fact that—and then it's also the case that at the dinner table, let's say, that's when you get to share your day.

00:07:28.080 You each get to talk and to listen.

00:07:31.720 That's a very good place to inculcate manners into your children.

00:07:35.360 It's a good place for everybody to keep track of everyone else and what's going on in their day and their week and so forth.

00:07:42.220 And it's a good time for everyone to come together and discuss the separate elements of their life, right?

00:07:50.060 And in the Old Testament, there's an immense emphasis on hospitality as the grounds of morality itself and the hospitality to a stranger.

00:07:58.620 But the same thing applies within your family and so—within our family.

00:08:02.100 And so, you know, it's interesting, you know, you said that your producers were convinced that you, your family, in some sense, would be an oddity, you know, out of the norm.

00:08:16.200 And I guess one of the things they didn't consider was that not only in some ways were you guys not out of the norm, but the actual norm.

00:08:25.020 But even more than that, you represented a kind of nostalgic ideal.

00:08:29.060 And obviously, that was centered at least in part around the dinner table and around prayer.

00:08:34.620 And then you said also that it gave you a chance, like the mealtime prayer, it gave you a chance to be grateful.

00:08:43.460 And that really struck me as interesting, too, because one of the things that people don't really understand about prayer,

00:08:51.620 they think about it as a kind of a wish, let's say, is that it's actually a practice.

00:08:56.900 And you can practice being grateful, and the reason you should practice being grateful is, first of all,

00:09:03.700 then you notice what you have to be grateful about.

00:09:05.940 And if your foot isn't caught in a bear trap while you're dying of cancer, you have plenty to be grateful for.

00:09:12.040 And so practicing that makes you much more aware of it, but it is also a really good way of staving off resentment.

00:09:18.680 And so it's striking to me that how much impact the fact that you guys sat around the table and all talked together,

00:09:31.420 and that you started that off with, let's say, a prayer of gratitude.

00:09:35.000 It's really striking to me how much of an effect that had on your audience and the fact that also people used that as a model.

00:09:41.100 What did you conclude from that?

00:09:42.540 It must have been surprising to you, right, to have that have that impact.

00:09:46.780 It really was.

00:09:50.120 Because to us, it just seemed like a small part of life that we've done thousands of times.

00:09:57.500 So I didn't really—I guess I thought most people would be like, oh, they're saying a prayer, and that's what we all do.

00:10:03.780 And so what was striking to me is that a lot of people didn't do that.

00:10:09.680 And so, or like I said, they used to do that, or they didn't do that.

00:10:13.360 And I was like, wow, that's—and it had this big impact on them.

00:10:17.780 You know, it was like, that's really helped our family.

00:10:20.320 And I was like, wow, that's, you know, what seemed like just a small thing.

00:10:24.980 But that—but the dinner table was a big part to us.

00:10:28.640 Even growing up, that was a big part of, you know, just our whole family.

00:10:34.900 It's where we, you know, it's kind of—it was almost like a big TV show now that maybe the—like,

00:10:40.660 he would all sit around that to us, that was dinner.

00:10:43.020 One, because we were hungry.

00:10:44.560 And I'm not sure, Dr. Peterson, we—me and my brothers were a little more animalistic.

00:10:49.120 I don't know that we'd like to share food.

00:10:50.800 So we were more like canines, like trying to—I remember when Corey and I started dating,

00:10:57.420 she was like, I've never seen anyone eat as fast as you.

00:11:00.480 And it was because I was like, you better get it quickly because it'll be gone.

00:11:04.680 And so she was like, you can slow down.

00:11:06.480 We can just eat and enjoy this.

00:11:08.540 They had four boys and not a lot of money growing up.

00:11:11.940 And they ate, you know, they ate all the home-cooked meals because they lived on the river.

00:11:16.400 And he said whenever they would order pizza, which was like a treat to get pizza,

00:11:21.660 they would lick the pieces.

00:11:23.380 Well—

00:11:23.880 I'm telling on you.

00:11:25.740 They would lick the pieces so they—

00:11:27.540 You had to have—you could only have one hand on one piece while you were eating.

00:11:33.180 So that was it.

00:11:33.900 And we would just lick a little—because something about licking the food made no one else want

00:11:40.180 to eat it at all.

00:11:41.080 So that was some kind of animalistic thing, yeah, that we figured out.

00:11:46.940 Yeah, I remember I invited one of my friends over from—he was from a backwoods town up in

00:11:54.000 northern Alberta called Crooked Creek, man.

00:11:56.240 And it was quite the place.

00:11:59.400 It had been scraped out of the prairie just about 40 years previously.

00:12:03.140 And there were feuds going on in that back country.

00:12:06.400 And he'd grown up in kind of a competitive eating environment as well.

00:12:10.460 And I invited him over for Thanksgiving dinner once we moved out east.

00:12:14.320 And I invited him over to Montreal.

00:12:16.440 And the poor guy, he filled up a pretty major Thanksgiving plate because we had quite a feast.

00:12:22.260 And I think he was completely done eating before everyone else had even filled their plates.

00:12:27.800 And I'd often seen him polish off a hot dog in two bites.

00:12:31.500 And he was in the same unfortunate circumstances as you were, surrounded by brothers who were

00:12:36.520 going to devour everything ravenously every chance they got.

00:12:39.720 So the poor guy, I don't think he ever tasted anything.

00:12:42.640 It just went immediately from tooth to stomach without any intermediating enjoyment.

00:12:49.940 So anyways, hopefully things have slowed down on the eating front for you guys.

00:12:54.860 Now, you also mentioned—and this is something, you know, that I've noticed about a couple

00:13:01.380 of other shows I really like.

00:13:02.960 I like The Simpsons.

00:13:04.520 I was a great fan of The Simpsons.

00:13:06.160 Their first 13 seasons were staggeringly brilliant and comedic as far as I was concerned.

00:13:10.760 And I also like this insane, vulgar, horrible, brutal, nasty Canadian show called The Trailer

00:13:18.800 Park Boys, which is like a working class phenomenon in Canada.

00:13:23.560 And, you know, it's rough and it's funny, but both those shows, and they're both satirical,

00:13:29.700 one of the things that holds them together is that the characters in the shows have a genuine

00:13:34.800 bond of familial love.

00:13:37.360 So Homer Simpson, for all his flaws, and he's pretty much 100% composed of flaws, is someone

00:13:44.040 who truly is, in his bumbling way, as devoted as he possibly can be to his family.

00:13:50.320 And in The Trailer Park Boys, these three ne'er-do-well criminal types, basically, who the show

00:13:57.260 is about, and their two enemies, they're bound together, too, by a filial bond that's actually

00:14:04.620 quite genuine.

00:14:05.620 And one of the things that made both those shows popular is that strange combination of

00:14:11.480 satirical humor and the ability of the characters, in some ways, to tear at each other, but also

00:14:18.220 to be bound inside this genuine, what would you say, structure of love and mutual regard.

00:14:28.120 And I guess it's something like the optimal balance between cooperation and competition,

00:14:33.760 you know?

00:14:34.400 And the humor, humor seems to play on that proper balance as well, you know?

00:14:40.980 And you can tolerate a lot of biting humor, which is a really nice thing, if you know that

00:14:45.260 the people that are joking at you and prodding at you do have your back and actually like you.

00:14:50.560 So, your show seems to have that sort of element as well.

00:14:57.240 I hope I've got that accurately represented.

00:15:00.980 I think so.

00:15:01.720 I think that's probably exactly right.

00:15:03.780 I think there was a profound love for each other.

00:15:07.940 We had our back.

00:15:08.800 However, we try not to take ourselves very seriously, and so we really—we can see someone

00:15:16.960 and go after that person, but like I said, there's a love there.

00:15:23.760 In fact, we did it so much so that when we would be out in public, like people would come

00:15:28.940 up to me and be angry with me and be like, how dare you say that to your mom or your uncle

00:15:35.120 or, you know, I'm just just like, we're fine.

00:15:38.720 We're good.

00:15:39.460 Like, we think it's really funny, but some people would be like, wow.

00:15:44.480 But we've always—I guess the Robertsons, we've always kind of had that.

00:15:47.480 We can make fun of ourselves and really go after each other.

00:15:53.200 And I don't know whether it was to prepare, you know, because, you know, when you're at

00:15:56.620 school and when you're in the world, you know, people are going to say all kind of nasty

00:15:59.940 stuff, and so we just kind of were like, I don't know if we were preparing each other

00:16:03.320 for that, but like, it's common, so.

00:16:05.200 Well, also, I think we kind of got together as a family, not kind of.

00:16:09.540 We actually did.

00:16:10.280 We sat around the table together as a family before the show started and just kind of laid

00:16:15.220 out some things.

00:16:16.040 And one, I think, yes, we were surprised by the impact, but also we did really pray about

00:16:21.980 the impact.

00:16:22.740 You know, we actually did come together as a family and said, like, we hope that this,

00:16:26.660 you know, brings glory to God.

00:16:28.100 We hope that this is a beautiful, like, blessing to families and to our family as well.

00:16:33.160 And if it's not, just take it away.

00:16:34.820 You know, we actually kind of went into it with that intention.

00:16:38.500 And then also, we said, we won't take ourselves too seriously.

00:16:42.220 And, you know, you know how reality shows can be, and there's these interviews and things

00:16:47.580 like that.

00:16:48.100 And we just said, we're not going to get offended by anything anybody says.

00:16:51.280 We're just going to have fun with this and let it be fun and not get offended.

00:16:56.220 And I don't think anybody ever did.

00:16:57.820 There was nothing on the show that anybody ever said to one another or about one another.

00:17:03.360 Got offended by it.

00:17:04.360 We just, we had fun with it.

00:17:06.020 But it was a unique reality show where it was shot like, according to the show, it was

00:17:09.360 shot like a sitcom.

00:17:10.740 So it wasn't just run and gun cameras.

00:17:13.220 Like, it was, it was, it was like a sitcom.

00:17:15.280 Like, I would enter the office and, hello, I'm here, you know.

00:17:18.240 And so it really was shot like that, but we were, we're really ourselves.

00:17:23.560 And so it was a strange mix of how to do it.

00:17:26.560 But it was, it was fun because we always kind of knew like, okay, we, we, you know, we got

00:17:30.980 to have a beginning, a middle and an end, like a sitcom.

00:17:33.740 Like, life doesn't happen like that.

00:17:35.920 So it was just kind of a smash of reality with kind of playing along some and maybe I

00:17:43.020 used to call it.

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00:19:22.780 So how did you manage that combination of scripting and spontaneity?

00:19:31.900 It seems like a very difficult thing to pull off, especially, I presume, that before you

00:19:37.120 engaged in the Duck Dynasty series, you guys weren't actors, and you didn't have a lot of

00:19:45.260 experience while certainly producing like a half-scripted family sitcom.

00:19:50.340 So how did you manage to keep it funny and spontaneous at the same time that you managed

00:19:58.040 to impose some sort of narrative structure on it?

00:20:00.540 And who was responsible for that?

00:20:02.520 How did you do that?

00:20:03.700 It was just talent from God.

00:20:08.180 Humility.

00:20:09.460 Is that the right order?

00:20:13.380 I mean, for me, it was about I'd watch shows, and so what I thought was funny,

00:20:20.340 and like Seinfeld, or, you know, I'd watch shows, and I was like, oh, it's really funny

00:20:24.920 how they did that.

00:20:25.880 And so I tried to just do that, remain in myself.

00:20:31.220 I kind of had to stay in one spot.

00:20:35.220 I'd talked to a lady at A&E who was just brilliant, and Lily, and she wasn't even from America,

00:20:42.120 which blew me away that she's from Argentina, came here, was working with American television.

00:20:48.560 To not even grow up here, but to figure out the nuances of people from the South and how

00:20:54.500 that's funny that would go across America really just blew me away.

00:20:58.540 But she always said, like, you're the boss, which I am, so you have to be the boss.

00:21:04.540 And so I couldn't stray very far from that, because that's what makes it funny, because

00:21:09.940 people get in trouble.

00:21:11.640 And I would be like, oh, I want to goof off.

00:21:14.380 And she'd be like, you have to, you know, you have to be the boss.

00:21:17.600 And so I would come in there.

00:21:19.320 So really, there was that dynamic that really makes comedy.

00:21:22.860 Kind of like when you're in school, and someone says something that you're not supposed

00:21:26.580 to laugh at, or church, and it's so funny.

00:21:28.700 You can't help but laugh.

00:21:29.880 And so it was kind of that idea.

00:21:31.940 And so once we kind of got that dynamic, which was a real dynamic, I mean, I was the CEO

00:21:36.960 of the company, but I'm not the oldest.

00:21:40.280 And so it wasn't my father.

00:21:41.640 So there were some kind of strange things there, the dynamics of the company, because

00:21:45.920 it was like dad's company, but I was the boss.

00:21:48.020 And that's what they walked in with.

00:21:49.480 It's like, what do we got here?

00:21:50.920 Okay, Willie's running it, but I'm the third from the top as far as siblings.

00:21:57.900 Dad's not in charge.

00:21:58.920 Dad's kind of doing his own thing.

00:22:00.980 And so once we got the dynamics, and then we just kind of plugged it in and said, y'all

00:22:05.960 go.

00:22:06.360 You know, what would happen if—and we would talk about frustrations where the guys would

00:22:09.960 want to fart around, or they always want to go hunting.

00:22:12.860 They didn't want to be up there actually making the duck calls, which was a common theme.

00:22:17.000 And then we just kind of went with that and just, you know, took off with it, and then

00:22:20.760 mixed in with family life or whatever.

00:22:22.620 So that was kind of the—that's kind of how, I guess, we did it, you know.

00:22:26.620 It reminds me a lot of two things.

00:22:30.600 It reminds me again of this show I mentioned earlier, The Trailer Park Boys, where each

00:22:35.840 of the people who are involved have adopted a pretty stable character.

00:22:39.940 You know, you know more or less what their role is and what to expect from them.

00:22:43.520 But then that gives them tremendous latitude to improvise.

00:22:46.760 And so The Trailer Park Boys, in some ways, like your show, is a mock documentary.

00:22:55.000 In principle, this camera crew is following these ne'er-do-wells around all the time.

00:22:59.080 And a fair bit of it's scripted, but a fair bit of it is spontaneous.

00:23:03.180 And it's often extremely witty.

00:23:04.860 I also know that Guy Ritchie, you know, the British film actor who's—or director who's

00:23:10.300 made a number of brilliant, absolutely brilliant films.

00:23:12.900 You know, what he does is he—I've talked to him about this—he sets up the stage and

00:23:18.940 the set, and he primes the actors, and they know the story, and then they improvise the

00:23:24.660 dialogue.

00:23:25.280 And that's so cool, because one of the things that really makes Ritchie's movies remarkable

00:23:29.500 is the brilliance and harshness of the dialogue.

00:23:34.380 And, you know, he gets his actors to play along, and he really likes to work with the

00:23:38.900 actors that can do that.

00:23:40.020 And then the other thing that it reminds me of is what children do when they pretend.

00:23:46.040 You know, so children start to pretend play when they're about three years old.

00:23:50.920 That's when they start playing with other children in a real manner.

00:23:55.060 And the way they'll do that, you know, is they'll take a scenario that's somewhat typical,

00:24:01.180 like a household structure, because children often play house, and they'll assign rules,

00:24:08.880 and they'll basically lay out a script idea that everybody has to agree on, and then they

00:24:15.820 improvise, and that's actually what the pretend play is.

00:24:19.080 And if the kids—if it's going well and the kids are friends, they can get right into

00:24:24.120 it, and they can do that for hours.

00:24:25.700 And what they're doing is simulating reality and experimenting with roles and also trying

00:24:31.340 to be funny and amuse each other.

00:24:32.900 And so I wonder, did you have—I don't know if the pretense, the child pretense idea has

00:24:39.860 ever occurred to you before.

00:24:41.000 Did you ever have any sense that—you said what you were doing was fun and it stayed playful.

00:24:47.080 Did you ever have any sense that you had returned to the sorts of things that children do when

00:24:51.900 they're very young?

00:24:54.320 I love that analogy, because I do think that's—it sounds exactly like really what we did,

00:25:00.560 but I never thought of it that way, but yeah.

00:25:04.040 Really, that is true.

00:25:05.540 And I think with this show, you had some really strong personalities, and so you had some—probably,

00:25:12.340 you know, if you were kids, you'd be like, you're the bad guy, you know, and then you're

00:25:15.460 the good guy, and you're the horse, or whatever it would be.

00:25:18.780 So with this one, you had some just great, really strong, defining characters.

00:25:23.680 So like, you had my father, who was like—

00:25:26.980 The patriarch.

00:25:28.040 But really strong, but not just, you know, he's not goofy dad.

00:25:31.820 Like, this guy's like really strong and really opinionated.

00:25:35.520 And then his brother, my Uncle Si—

00:25:37.780 I don't need a knife.

00:25:39.020 I don't need a sense of direction.

00:25:40.540 I don't even need clothes.

00:25:41.760 He's so funny and just the most—one of the most unusual guys I've ever seen.

00:25:46.020 Like, as far as—and the quickness he has and how he tells stories is just epic.

00:25:51.660 And so you had him that—you just never know.

00:25:54.000 You could almost play off him.

00:25:55.600 Like, he could kind of just do whatever he did.

00:25:58.880 So it was like, he would do that.

00:26:00.120 Dad would do that.

00:26:00.860 And then I would go like, oh, this is perfect.

00:26:03.400 You know, I'm just going to come off this.

00:26:05.760 And, you know, if Dad's really overplaying it, you know, I'd be like, you know, Dad, that's—we can't do it.

00:26:11.920 You know, so I could just kind of play off of where they went.

00:26:14.920 Or Uncle Si.

00:26:16.000 But Uncle Si, you could like—like, I would feed him a line, like, say, you know,

00:26:19.800 especially with pop culture that wouldn't make sense that he would know that.

00:26:23.440 And he was so brilliant.

00:26:24.900 He could just take what he would hear, and then he would throw it in there like he thought of it.

00:26:28.540 You know, he would say like a—I remember one time, like a Beyonce song.

00:26:32.600 And I said, Si, Si, say, if you love it, you better put a ring on it.

00:26:36.900 And Si would be talking to me like, hey, Jack, if you love it, you better put a ring on it.

00:26:40.980 And he would just come in there, and then the editing would stop.

00:26:44.020 It's like, did he just say that?

00:26:45.740 And it was so brilliant.

00:26:46.860 And then if he screwed it up, it was even funnier.

00:26:49.760 One time I gave him a song called This Is How We Do It by Montel Williams.

00:26:55.440 And then Si goes, hey, this is the way that we do it, which was totally incorrect, but it was so funny.

00:27:03.380 Because then the audience, like, he tried to do it, but he didn't do it.

00:27:06.820 But we really thought, you know, he just came up with that or whatever.

00:27:11.860 And, you know, I think I was talking to Bill Clinton one time.

00:27:17.300 And Bill Clinton, like, he pulls me in, you know, and I understood why these guys can become president.

00:27:24.500 Because he, like, he puts his hand on my shoulder, and he said, I love Duck Dynasty.

00:27:30.940 And for whatever reason, I said, you don't watch Duck Dynasty.

00:27:34.120 I don't know why I took that aggressive, like, opposite approach to it.

00:27:37.840 And he looks at me, and he goes, you want to know why that show worked?

00:27:43.860 And I was like, yeah, I would love to know why Bill Clinton thought this show worked.

00:27:48.620 And the answer he gave was not just the best political answer ever, because he covered every deal.

00:27:56.140 He said, because it was real.

00:27:58.700 And he's looking at me, he said, it's real.

00:28:00.440 And I was thinking to myself, and I went, and he went, but if it wasn't real, we thought it was real.

00:28:07.920 And so I was like, there you go.

00:28:09.300 So he was like, that's why we bought into it.

00:28:12.940 And if it wasn't, you fooled us.

00:28:15.220 We got it.

00:28:16.340 Well, also, I think that as we were doing this and playing these roles, we were also having to play ourselves.

00:28:22.480 So we were like, oh, I have to walk around as Corey.

00:28:25.720 So I have to, it has to represent who I am.

00:28:28.640 So that first season, there was a lot of kind of fighting through, okay, what pieces of this is storytelling

00:28:35.340 and is pushing the story along and what pieces of it are us and who we are.

00:28:41.500 And so I do think that was a fine line to try to find.

00:28:44.680 And, you know, early seasons, I remember one specific scene.

00:28:48.140 There was a scene where Willie and the guys were supposed to come to the kids' school.

00:28:53.760 Instead of doing that, they skipped out and went golfing.

00:28:56.240 And so they come in for that evening, and we're with Phil and Kay, Willie's parents, and my sister-in-law and I are sitting there.

00:29:03.440 And in the scene, the plan was for us to just kind of let our guys have it, you know, because they had skipped out on what they were supposed to do.

00:29:12.020 They're coming in.

00:29:12.760 And it just, we couldn't do it because we're like, we would never let our husbands have it in front of their parents.

00:29:21.340 Like, we just wouldn't do that.

00:29:22.640 And they wouldn't do that to us.

00:29:24.160 Like, they wouldn't, you know, when they came in in front of our parents, they wouldn't just lay into us, you know.

00:29:29.160 And so, you know, as it plays out, the directors are like, come on, just let them have it.

00:29:34.920 Aren't you mad that they, you know, skipped out?

00:29:37.120 And I was just like, we just, we wouldn't have this conversation right here.

00:29:41.240 We can't do this.

00:29:42.280 You know, this is who I am, and I can't do it.

00:29:45.440 And so we ended up just kind of, like, scrapping that scene.

00:29:49.580 And they said, well, what would you do?

00:29:50.600 Well, they caught y'all with some dirty, y'all just gave us dirty looks.

00:29:53.040 Yeah, we gave us some dirty looks, yeah.

00:29:54.420 They said, what?

00:29:55.180 They edited a bunch of dirty looks.

00:29:56.500 So they were like, what would you do?

00:29:58.660 And I said, well, we'd have this conversation that night in our own home, you know.

00:30:02.900 And so we come that night, that evening, and we filmed a whole other scene in our kitchen

00:30:08.400 where Willie walks in, and I kind of tell him a little bit what I thought about it.

00:30:13.220 And there was a lot of discussion back and forth with the producers, you know, as we were making it.

00:30:17.800 Because you've got to be open, you know.

00:30:19.700 You can't just say, this is it.

00:30:21.520 So you've got to be open.

00:30:22.960 Because even back to the beginning of the show, Corey said, she said, I think your family should do a reality TV show.

00:30:29.960 And I was like, we're just normal people.

00:30:31.660 Like, I didn't see it at all.

00:30:33.700 And Corey's like, Willie, y'all aren't normal.

00:30:36.240 Like, the yard.

00:30:37.480 Because I appreciated that, because she married into this family.

00:30:41.320 I was like, y'all aren't normal.

00:30:42.380 So I was like, so you've got to have an open ear to go.

00:30:44.480 And, okay, other people can see this differently than what you can see yourself.

00:30:48.600 And so you had to be open to producers.

00:30:50.540 But I think where the dynamic got a little strange was that their idea of family,

00:30:55.140 or their idea of what family is, was really different than ours.

00:31:00.420 And so that's, I think, sometimes they have more of that stereotypical, the dad's a goofball.

00:31:05.920 He's just, you know, all he must do is watch football or drink a beer, you know.

00:31:10.300 The teens are rolling their eyes at their parents.

00:31:11.260 Mom's the smartest one.

00:31:12.840 Kids are, like, on their phones, like, we hate this, you know.

00:31:15.380 And so we broke that because of, and we wanted to.

00:31:18.720 We were like, not all families are like that, you know.

00:31:21.900 So there's respect, and there's, you know, like, my children would not roll their eyes at me and say,

00:31:27.180 whatever, Dad, you know, we hate this.

00:31:29.360 And, you know, so, and Dad has a brain, and he can think outside of, you know, whatever those things are.

00:31:37.000 So sometimes there was, you had to be open, I think, to listen and be like, oh, that's really funny.

00:31:42.320 But also not just go down the path that I think a lot of sitcoms, I mean, honestly, so many of them are just the same, you know.

00:31:49.400 And so that was—

00:31:51.400 And I think that's the mold that we really broke out of because before that, reality TV was, it was all about the fight.

00:31:56.640 It was all about, like, the train wreck.

00:31:58.280 What can you, like, the big scenes are the ones where the tables are flipped, and everyone's fighting, and everyone's arguing,

00:32:06.380 where, for us, the big scenes where the family is around the table.

00:32:10.100 And there's that, like Willie mentioned, we mentioned twice, I think, respect, you know,

00:32:15.780 that respect for one another and for the kids and their parents and kids and their grandkids.

00:32:21.800 And there was another scene where Phil, who was the granddad, you know, was having the grandkids clean a football field, a clear field.

00:32:31.300 And they just expected that the kids would be arguing, complaining, upset about it.

00:32:37.440 You know, we didn't want to do it.

00:32:38.800 But instead, our kids were, of course, you know, their pet ball, ask them to clean a field, they'll clean a field.

00:32:44.300 And so it was just this, like, this dynamic that we had to kind of work through early seasons to say, like,

00:32:52.260 oh, no, that's just not who we are and not what we do.

00:32:55.680 So there was a part of it that was playful, but then a part of it that was also us kind of saying,

00:33:00.620 no, this is who we are, this is what our family is about, and it's going to look different than maybe what you expected or what's out there on television right now.

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00:34:18.020 Okay, so there's a couple of bunch of things there that you guys drew out.

00:34:22.120 So you have the Clinton comment, you know, that Duck Dynasty was popular because it was real,

00:34:29.720 or because we thought it was real.

00:34:31.980 And you said, well, that's real interesting on the political side,

00:34:35.480 because I suppose you could say the same thing about Clinton and about many politicians.

00:34:39.180 But there's also a really interesting grain of truth there that also pertains to play.

00:34:44.500 Okay, so, you know, you said and insisted that you guys had your characters and your characters

00:34:51.580 actually reflected your actual personalities, and that one of the decisions you made was to stay in character.

00:34:58.520 And so that means that when you were fictionalizing your life and it wasn't real,

00:35:05.540 it was still real because you weren't willing to play out roles that actually weren't reflective of your character.

00:35:11.860 And I would say that actually characterizes appropriate pretend play with children, too,

00:35:18.260 because if two little kids are playing house, and they can do that very, very seriously,

00:35:22.920 if there's any falseness in the game, it's no longer a good analog of reality,

00:35:28.820 and the kids will get bored with it right away.

00:35:31.160 If any of the players start to step out of character and break the implicit rules of the game,

00:35:38.060 it's no longer fun, and it's because they're not simulating reality properly.

00:35:42.100 And so while you guys are playing and elaborating on your characters,

00:35:47.420 even if that's scripted, if you're staying in character, it's not false.

00:35:51.200 It's actually reflective of a deeper truth.

00:35:53.620 And then another thing you pointed out that's absolutely fascinating, I think,

00:35:58.200 is that, you know, you said, for example, that it's typical in a sitcom,

00:36:02.280 and you see this in advertisements, and this has really been true,

00:36:05.620 I think, since the mid-60s, that increasingly male characters in sitcoms,

00:36:10.700 especially fathers, are presented as bumbling buffoons, right?

00:36:15.320 They're presented as the sort of people that children can roll their eyes at.

00:36:19.980 Now, you know, there's a very detailed research, a body of research,

00:36:27.600 laying out predictors of divorce among couples in psychotherapy.

00:36:32.480 So maybe you come from marital counseling.

00:36:34.720 If one or the other partner or both rolls their eyes during the sessions,

00:36:39.920 which is a sign of contempt, there's a 95% possibility, probability,

00:36:45.980 that that couple will be divorced in the next year.

00:36:48.580 Like, contempt is a very, very bad emotion.

00:36:52.900 And the idea that kids can roll their eyes at their stupid father,

00:36:58.200 that's a really, really bad idea.

00:37:00.560 And it reminded me of something.

00:37:02.520 Today, I was writing, I'm writing this book called We Who Wrestle With God,

00:37:06.460 and I was writing about Noah, the story of Noah today, you know,

00:37:10.240 and there's a scene after the ark comes to rest after the flood.

00:37:14.680 Noah plants a vineyard, and I guess, you know, he's had kind of a rough time.

00:37:19.000 So he plants a vineyard, and he brews up some wine, and he gets pretty rip-roaring drunk.

00:37:24.000 And one of his sons comes into his tent, and Noah's there passed out, and he's naked.

00:37:29.900 And instead of covering him up and shutting the hell up about it,

00:37:33.240 this son called Ham goes and tells his brothers that, you know, dad's made a fool of himself

00:37:40.060 and sort of gets them to come in, hypothetically, to poke fun at him.

00:37:44.200 And instead, the other brothers come in with their backs turned and cover him up.

00:37:48.700 And then, so the story goes, the descendants of Ham become the slaves,

00:37:54.340 the servants and the slaves of the sons who covered up their father.

00:37:57.660 And the idea there, no, this is kind of far afield from what you pointed out,

00:38:01.780 but the idea there is that if you don't have a certain degree of respect

00:38:05.320 or even reverence for your father, despite his shortcomings, which we all have,

00:38:11.780 then you're doomed to a useless life, and people who are respectful will dominate over you

00:38:17.720 because they'll be, you know, their lives will go right

00:38:20.440 because they're in accordance with tradition.

00:38:22.180 So the fact that not only you stayed in character in your play,

00:38:27.820 no, that reflects the kind of deeper reality that obviously people were viewing in your show,

00:38:32.600 but it also reflects the fact that you presented to people something like an appropriate relationship,

00:38:39.880 say, between fathers and sons at a time when that's become increasingly rare.

00:38:45.340 And then the last thing I was thinking about is recently we've seen a strange phenomenon,

00:38:52.520 and I think you guys were probably on the forefront of this,

00:38:56.040 is that as our culture has become more and more obsessed with kind of an impulsive hedonism

00:39:04.480 and an areligious viewpoint, the shows that have a core element of faith in them

00:39:12.220 have become absurdly popular, and you saw this in the last couple of years in particular

00:39:17.300 with the success, for example, of The Chosen, which was phenomenally successful, right,

00:39:23.200 that long series about Christ's passion and his life,

00:39:26.520 and then more recently with this film, The Sound of Freedom.

00:39:30.400 And both of those are very fundamentally faith-based

00:39:34.040 without, you know, hitting you over the head with it,

00:39:36.620 because the story in both cases still takes precedence by far over any expressions of evangelizing faith,

00:39:46.500 but I think it also speaks to the fact,

00:39:48.360 and I think you guys were early to the market with this, so to speak,

00:39:51.740 is that as the family disintegrates, as there's more and more fatherless kids,

00:39:57.300 as the divorce rate skyrockets and the birth rate plummets,

00:40:00.560 all of those things are very negative, people have a longing not only for family,

00:40:06.180 but for more traditional families, say, gathered around the table,

00:40:09.460 and for a traditional family that's based in something like faith.

00:40:13.760 And so, well, let's talk about, let's talk about first about this idea of filial or paternal respect.

00:40:24.040 You know, you speak of your father with a certain degree of respect,

00:40:27.560 well, an immense degree of respect, you certainly don't regard him as a buffoon.

00:40:32.320 He started the business, as far as I know, that propelled you guys into the reality TV domain.

00:40:38.780 So what do you think about your father and the way he was portrayed in the show,

00:40:43.440 and why do you think that portrayal was successful and accurate?

00:40:48.020 Actually, I would have to say my father wasn't really portrayed.

00:40:52.040 He just was doing exactly what he was going to do.

00:40:57.860 So, in fact, he didn't understand the show.

00:41:03.820 I don't know that he still understands what we were trying to do with the show.

00:41:08.260 And so he still was like, this is the silliest thing I've ever seen.

00:41:12.220 And so one of my favorite scenes of him was my son, John Luke, was dating a girl,

00:41:21.720 and he was going to get dating advice from his papaw Phil.

00:41:25.240 And so they're in a boat, they're on the water, and my dad sits him down and said,

00:41:30.560 I want to explain some things to y'all.

00:41:34.680 Gonorrhea, syphilis.

00:41:36.480 And he just starts listing sexually transmitted diseases.

00:41:39.920 And I'm watching, because I wasn't in that scene, so as I'm watching on TV, I'm just belly laughing.

00:41:52.840 This is the funniest thing I've ever heard, because it's the same exact speech that I heard when I was his age.

00:41:59.560 Like, Phil just went straight to the sexually transmitted diseases.

00:42:04.500 He left out one, and he was so upset, so I went up to him, and I said, Dad, I saw the scene with you and John Luke,

00:42:13.200 and I said, it was so funny.

00:42:14.560 And Dad's not smiling.

00:42:15.480 He went, Will, I'm not joking.

00:42:18.100 I said, I know you weren't joking.

00:42:19.660 That's what made it so funny.

00:42:21.300 And he said, I forgot about chlamydia.

00:42:24.100 He was still, like, bothered that he forgot one that he left out.

00:42:28.000 So I don't know that the show portrayed—I mean, I think Phil was exactly what he wanted.

00:42:35.260 He wanted more.

00:42:37.460 He told me, he said, I think we should have more preaching on the show.

00:42:40.820 And I said, Dad, that's—there's another Robertson family that has a show.

00:42:45.660 It's the 700 Club.

00:42:46.720 They preach.

00:42:47.460 We're just—let us do this.

00:42:49.400 And if they want more, they can come later.

00:42:51.540 And so—but the dynamics of the show, as far as when we talked about the show, Phil just did what he did,

00:42:57.160 and we just worked around it, which I thought was so funny because for a lot of dads,

00:43:01.160 especially, you know, older guys were, you know, especially his age,

00:43:04.940 where they just do what they want to do.

00:43:06.520 They say what they want to say, and you just deal with it, you know?

00:43:09.900 So why in the world was he willing to go along with this at all?

00:43:14.220 Because it's so absurd.

00:43:15.360 It's so preposterous, right?

00:43:16.920 I mean, it's like your family—you wouldn't have confused you guys with the Kardashians,

00:43:21.700 and I'm not trying to, you know, throw out gratuitous insults to the Kardashians,

00:43:25.620 but you wouldn't have confused your family with the Kardashians,

00:43:28.400 and you wouldn't presume that your father was the sort of person who would decide

00:43:32.440 that a reality TV show for his family was really a good thing or something he wanted to participate in.

00:43:38.060 So why did he—why did he go along with it?

00:43:41.320 And what made him successful at it?

00:43:43.920 Well, I think he—I mean, I think—there were two things.

00:43:48.040 I mean, one part was because Dad said,

00:43:51.000 I don't think people are going to watch his show.

00:43:52.860 You know, why would they watch us?

00:43:54.140 And I said, well, Dad, there's a bigger platform I think we could—

00:43:59.160 because he's passionate as we are about sharing the gospel.

00:44:04.040 I said, there's a bigger platform, and I think you'll be able to share the gospel

00:44:06.900 with more people with this platform as opposed to around here, you know, like in our little—

00:44:13.800 and so—and Phil did.

00:44:15.400 He was like, hey, if you think it'll help—if you think if we can get the gospel out more,

00:44:19.920 then I'm willing to do it.

00:44:21.840 That wasn't it.

00:44:22.880 I mean, also, I was like, Dad, I think they'll pay us money.

00:44:26.700 Like, I think we can make good money, and we can—and so that was part of it.

00:44:30.200 I mean, my dad was in his mid-60s, so he's like at retirement age,

00:44:35.140 and we didn't have a lot of money, and he was like, well, this could be—

00:44:38.320 this could be, you know, something to do, and so—

00:44:42.040 I will say, though, interestingly, Phil—so Phil was the one who started actually filming himself.

00:44:47.600 So back in like the 80s, we had a hunting business, and he thought,

00:44:52.700 I wonder if people would want to watch our hunts, and literally bought a video camera.

00:44:57.460 The sound guy from our church filmed them hunting in the duck blind.

00:45:01.840 We didn't buy one.

00:45:02.700 We borrowed one at first.

00:45:04.100 Barred one, yeah.

00:45:05.060 The first ones we borrowed, and then we bought one.

00:45:07.760 And so made—yeah, made a DVD of our VHS tape, actually, of the hunt, and it was—

00:45:13.620 It was like duck hunts, which it was kind of like—it was pretty much Clint Eastwood or Josie Wells duck hunt,

00:45:22.620 if he duck hunted, and it was—Dad was like really into Clint Eastwood.

00:45:26.440 Like classic rock, because he's all like old rock and—

00:45:29.920 Yeah, classic rock.

00:45:30.000 And he was very irreverent, like, back then.

00:45:32.240 He would like—we had a spitting scene.

00:45:34.000 Like, everybody would have, like, giant shoes at the back, and like, he'd be slow-motion spitting.

00:45:39.320 It was—but there was like a grassroots people that were like, we love this.

00:45:43.700 It was kind of in your face for like the proper—and I think my dad was always kind of anti-wealthy, proper,

00:45:51.220 and so he was kind of always fighting the system.

00:45:53.600 And so to him, he was like, this is how we do it.

00:45:56.820 It was in your face.

00:45:58.000 It was like raw, gritty hunting and kind of working man's type of hunting.

00:46:02.600 This is not your, you know, buy all your property and—you know, because they grew up super poor.

00:46:08.500 And so, yeah, so Phil did do that.

00:46:10.620 You know, he had these—

00:46:10.760 He started there.

00:46:11.480 He had the videos that went into TV on Outdoor Channel, and then—so when this came, it was, you know—

00:46:19.340 I think he was more open, but I think he thought, man, this is going to get a lot bigger,

00:46:23.400 and the production will be bigger, which we knew it would.

00:46:26.220 So that's kind of how he—I guess we talked him into it, and he agreed to it.

00:46:32.380 Okay, so that's cool in three ways, you know, for listening to this from a Canadian perspective.

00:46:38.420 I always feel a bit like an anthropologist when I'm in the United States, because your

00:46:43.780 culture is similar to ours, but it has very interesting differences.

00:46:47.580 And there's something extremely American about the story you just laid out, because

00:46:51.360 first of all, there's that—you talked about Clint Eastwood—there's sort of that

00:46:55.240 backwoods rebel thing going on that's really a powerful part of American culture.

00:47:00.860 You know, the alienated cowboy who's really a solid guy at heart, who's an anti-establishment

00:47:07.200 figure, but also a traditionalist.

00:47:09.020 I mean, that's an unbelievably deep American trope and an extremely successful one.

00:47:13.480 And then, you know, you said your dad, too, was interested in this—in doing the family

00:47:19.560 series, partly because he had some interest in evangelizing, right?

00:47:25.160 Now, you said that you guys didn't want to take that to any extreme, and I think, obviously,

00:47:30.100 that was an extremely good decision, because if your show would have ever got preachy, people

00:47:34.000 would have just shut it off, right?

00:47:35.680 That faith had to be something implicit and displayed, but not something that you were

00:47:40.340 beating people over the head with to convince them, because who the hell wants to watch propaganda,

00:47:45.240 which is something that the entertainment industry is going to have to figure out again.

00:47:49.280 And then you have this interesting additional aspect that's also deeply American.

00:47:54.360 You know, you said, well, your dad also thought this was probably, at least in potential,

00:47:59.100 a good way to grow the business and to make money.

00:48:02.320 And, you know, you think about how American it is for those three things to meet.

00:48:06.480 There's the Clint Eastwood, you know, alienated, lone, backwoods cowboy with his middle finger

00:48:12.220 up to the system.

00:48:13.620 There's a bit of Protestant evangelizing mixed in there.

00:48:17.440 And then the last of it is, you know, this eye to the market and to entrepreneurial activity.

00:48:23.980 And all three of those things, those American characterological elements seem to come together

00:48:30.520 in your show.

00:48:31.540 You know, I bet your father really secretly enjoyed all this.

00:48:35.260 I don't imagine he would let on, but my guess is that there was part of him, too, that was

00:48:39.900 thinking, this is actually pretty cool, although I'll never tell my damn sons that.

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00:50:04.040 Yeah, spot on.

00:50:05.700 He's actually still doing it.

00:50:07.120 He's got a podcast that he does four days a week, and he loves it.

00:50:10.700 And also, yeah, it was fun to see, actually, Phil and Kay and Uncle Si, how they all, like,

00:50:16.480 became younger as we were doing it, because they had fun with it, and the family was all

00:50:21.300 together.

00:50:21.840 You know, it was such a blessing that our kids got to be with their grandparents and their

00:50:25.980 aunts and uncles and all that on just a daily basis.

00:50:29.380 Like, we were, you know, when you film, you're there a long time.

00:50:33.100 It's a long time where things are happening in your filmings.

00:50:36.660 There's a lot of sitting around where they're setting up lights and cameras.

00:50:39.100 And so, we just got to be together as a family even more.

00:50:43.020 We've always been together as a family a lot, because we just kind of do life like that

00:50:46.720 and live, you know, live in close proximity and have meals together.

00:50:51.300 But when you're filming, we were really together.

00:50:54.880 And it was fun.

00:50:55.860 It was a blessing to get to do that.

00:50:57.560 It was a blessing, I think, for our kids to get to have that time with their grandparents.

00:51:02.160 That was even a more intimate time together.

00:51:04.260 Yeah, there was like these odd combinations of family members, whatever scene you were

00:51:08.560 in.

00:51:11.080 But you're having to, like, I'm depending on my eight-year-old nephew, you know, during

00:51:15.720 this scene.

00:51:16.300 I'm like, come on, buddy, we got this.

00:51:18.380 And so, or maybe depending on my uncle or someone else.

00:51:22.100 And so, it was kind of, you would be stuck here for hours, you know.

00:51:25.040 But it was really fun.

00:51:25.900 I think that's what we, you know, kind of miss.

00:51:28.400 And, but you're right, dad would, dad would gripe about it.

00:51:32.600 And this is, you know, he would gripe.

00:51:34.300 But then the minute our show ended, he was doing a podcast the next week, like, and he

00:51:40.300 was out there filming in the woods.

00:51:42.120 And he does like four hours a week, which is mind-blowing to me to be doing that much.

00:51:47.880 And so, it is funny, you know, he would, he would complain about it on one hand.

00:51:51.520 But then, but he, you know, he certainly thinks, you know.

00:51:54.460 No, Willie's mom, on the other hand, this was her chance to be a star.

00:51:57.500 And she had a blast.

00:51:59.140 She loved it.

00:51:59.860 She would carry in her purse, like, headshots of herself.

00:52:03.260 Different headshots.

00:52:04.200 So, she would lay them out, like, at the grocery store for someone to pick from.

00:52:09.340 And I, and she would say, Willie, everybody recognized me.

00:52:14.000 And I said, Mom, your shirt said Miss K.

00:52:16.200 Like, every, like, you're wearing, like, a shirt, like, with your face on.

00:52:20.460 And of course, they recognized you.

00:52:22.840 And so, it was just fun watching them kind of have this complete different lease on life,

00:52:28.380 you know, when, like I said, when they thought, I think, you know, I mean, when we took over

00:52:32.880 the company, I remember my dad told me, he said, I think everybody has a duck call.

00:52:37.020 Like, it's over.

00:52:38.060 And this is 10 years before the Doug Nashi happens.

00:52:41.360 I was like, well, there may be something left of this company.

00:52:44.360 And, but he had kind of thought, that was it.

00:52:46.140 You know, we did good.

00:52:47.000 And from where they came from to where they ended up, I thought they felt successful.

00:52:52.500 But they had no idea of the wild ride that was coming within the next couple of decades.

00:52:58.860 So, Corey, you married into this family.

00:53:01.820 And we discussed earlier the observation that, well, it was a two-pronged observation that,

00:53:09.120 on the one hand, the Duck Dynasty family was far from normal.

00:53:13.040 But on the other hand, they actually represented a return to a kind of traditional norm and ideal.

00:53:18.640 So, there's a paradoxical mix there of idiosyncrasy and peculiarity in the best sense,

00:53:26.040 but also grounded in something that's really recognizable and traditional.

00:53:30.520 And one of the things that struck me, you know, my family has ridden a wave of notoriety and popularity,

00:53:37.680 I suppose, that's lasted now probably, it's almost 10 years since it really started.

00:53:42.680 And that places all sorts of opportunities in front of you, but also all sorts of stresses.

00:53:49.540 Now, you've obviously entered the family, let's say, as an outsider, and you could see their idiosyncrasies.

00:53:58.480 But you've also been able to see whatever it is that's enabled them to pull together and to stay together.

00:54:04.740 And one of the things that's quite remarkable to me, and I've really noticed this in talking to you guys the last couple of times we've talked,

00:54:11.600 is that despite the rapid transformation of your lives in all sorts of unexpected, truly unexpected directions,

00:54:22.380 the family seems to have done a good job of staying together and maybe even getting more closely knit.

00:54:28.880 I mean, that's what you essentially alluded to when you talked about the fact that you got to spend so much time on set, let's say.

00:54:36.020 So, Corey, how do you think it is?

00:54:38.420 What's your observation of why the Duck Dynasty family actually managed to do this without,

00:54:45.900 well, without all turning into like raving narcissistic alcoholics and having everything go to hell in a handbasket,

00:54:52.180 which is, you know, a pretty likely outcome, all things considered?

00:54:56.380 Yeah, I think there was a real rootedness and a groundedness in our place and who we are.

00:55:03.140 And our faith, of course, is the ultimate thing that plays into that.

00:55:09.060 But I think that just we did stay true to who we are.

00:55:13.700 And we stayed in our hometown.

00:55:15.300 Like, we're still here.

00:55:16.180 Like, we didn't move away to L.A. and Hollywood.

00:55:19.280 And that's one thing that I remember whenever we were in the middle of it.

00:55:22.980 And it was crazy.

00:55:24.440 You know, people, like our warehouse, people just started showing up by the thousands.

00:55:28.880 We would leave our place of work every day and there would be just hundreds of people out there.

00:55:34.920 And, you know, it was crazy.

00:55:37.160 But I think during that time period, I remember looking at other celebrities who kind of like moved away

00:55:44.480 and were doing it on their own and being so grateful that we were doing it as a family

00:55:49.000 because we had one another to kind of like be there in it together and keep each other grounded in that.

00:55:56.280 And also, there is a—I think whenever someone reaches this level of kind of fame or celebrity,

00:56:02.860 there's a—it's a strange kind of loneliness that can happen because you do get a little isolated.

00:56:08.020 You can't go out and do the things that you maybe used to do because there is so much attention or whatever.

00:56:15.120 And because we were able to do it as a family and we still had one another and we, you know,

00:56:20.380 could come back to our same church or same school or same friends or same that type of thing.

00:56:26.300 So we could go out into the world and kind of like do these fun things and big things.

00:56:31.280 But then we kind of came back to this home where there was a lot of really deep roots.

00:56:38.780 So why do you think you didn't move away?

00:56:41.280 I mean, you know, famously with the Beverly Hillbillies, as soon as they struck oil, you know,

00:56:46.060 they were off to Hollywood and hilarity ensued.

00:56:48.640 But you guys made a conscious decision, and maybe that was partly to keep the show on the track that it was.

00:56:56.520 Why didn't you transform your life radically and move away?

00:57:00.100 And I presume also you haven't done that since.

00:57:04.060 You've decided that where you're situated and situated in a genuine life that has like a multi-generational history,

00:57:12.580 that that actually works really well for you.

00:57:14.480 Why weren't you tempted to seek, you know, let's say, hypothetically broader horizons?

00:57:21.260 I was never tempted, never tempted to move from where this is.

00:57:26.220 I guess mostly because we have so much family connected, because we're both from here.

00:57:33.060 Corey's parents are here.

00:57:34.180 We have like so many different connections here.

00:57:37.200 And so moving away wouldn't have been advantageous.

00:57:40.180 It wouldn't have been, you know, and actually, if you take us out, like what makes us who we are,

00:57:48.280 it was here, you know, it was being in Louisiana.

00:57:52.860 I don't know that, you know, us being in, living in L.A. or New York, you know, would really make sense,

00:58:01.220 even business-wise or for what we do.

00:58:03.280 I mean, I felt like the show was here, and that's where we needed to be.

00:58:07.940 And so, but yeah, that was one of all the things I've thought about.

00:58:11.500 I've never had any desire to actually move to another place.

00:58:15.340 And yeah, as Billy mentioned, my family's here as well.

00:58:17.920 So in our neighborhood is my parents, my grandmother, who's in her 90s, aunts and uncles and all that.

00:58:24.780 And so we, you know, just feel like that's a real blessing to not take for granted and not to lose.

00:58:31.600 And it's been really neat to see as our kids have kind of grown up.

00:58:34.220 So as the show ended, our kids were all kind of starting college and, you know,

00:58:38.500 moving into this high school years, college years, and they've all gone away to college and come back here,

00:58:43.400 which has been really awesome for us.

00:58:45.820 And now we have grandkids here.

00:58:47.480 So on this street, actually, where we live, there's five generations.

00:58:51.760 And, you know, I think that that's just, it's not the norm anymore.

00:58:57.200 And so it's not something to be taken for granted.

00:58:59.160 So we wouldn't want to give that up for anything.

00:59:02.180 Yeah, and there's nothing in another, like, I hate traffic and I hate so many people.

00:59:07.680 I don't know how people live like this.

00:59:11.260 It's just crazy.

00:59:12.200 And so if you're talking about food, I can cook anything I want to cook.

00:59:17.940 And as far as being in the outdoors, I can get there.

00:59:20.340 And so, yeah, no other city.

00:59:23.580 I just, yeah, every time I'm, I enjoy visiting for a second.

00:59:27.620 And then I always think I would never want to live in a city like this or this big.

00:59:33.160 So, yeah, when I grew up in my small town, Fairview, Alberta, there was about 3,000 people

00:59:40.720 there and it was about 50 years old and it was about 400 miles from the nearest city of

00:59:47.180 any size.

00:59:48.080 It was literally on the edge of the northernmost part of the prairie and in part of the country,

00:59:53.780 part of the North American plain that had been settled last.

00:59:56.420 I mean, I had friends whose fathers had established homesteads there when there were still teepees

01:00:02.200 of Cree Indians on the land and that was in 1937.

01:00:05.640 So, it was really the last edge of the frontier.

01:00:08.120 You know, and it's funny because in our town, people sort of bifurcated into two tracks.

01:00:15.340 There were the kids who knew they were going to leave this small town, Fairview.

01:00:19.420 And we, the kids who knew that probably knew that when they were about 10 or 11.

01:00:23.920 They were going to get away from the little town.

01:00:25.420 They were going to go off to, usually to university, off to the city and then out into the world.

01:00:29.640 And most, many people didn't do that.

01:00:32.720 Many people stayed.

01:00:33.820 And it wasn't necessarily because they were attracted, say, to the kind of family life

01:00:39.820 that you guys are talking about, but because, and, you know, I'm not trying to disseminate

01:00:46.820 characterological assassinations here.

01:00:49.700 They were often people who hadn't really formulated a vision of where they wanted to go in life and

01:00:56.200 didn't leave mostly because leaving would have required planning, you know.

01:01:02.680 But, but it wasn't the case.

01:01:04.580 Like, it seemed to be in our community that if you were headed for something approximating

01:01:10.800 broader horizons of success, you were definitely going to leave.

01:01:15.320 And that was really encouraged.

01:01:17.420 You know, my wife, for example, her mom and dad loved her and they had a good family and

01:01:22.100 still do.

01:01:23.180 But her graduation present was luggage.

01:01:26.880 And the message, and that was very common where I grew up.

01:01:29.900 And the message was, you know, get the hell out of here and get out into the world.

01:01:33.300 Now, you guys are pretty adventurous and you're pretty entrepreneurial, but interestingly enough,

01:01:41.120 you decided to stay within the confines of your family and to build that.

01:01:46.920 And I wonder how, I wonder why those differences were the case.

01:01:51.000 And I wonder also, I guess you got enough, what did you get?

01:01:56.720 You got enough, you got enough satisfaction of your adventurous impulses within the family

01:02:04.280 structure that you guys had created.

01:02:06.180 Was that partly a consequence of being able to participate, let's say, in your father's

01:02:10.760 business?

01:02:11.580 Like, what was it about growing up there that gave you enough adventure?

01:02:18.080 Well, I mean, I can find adventure in a lot of things.

01:02:21.880 So it's like, because we, I mean, just growing up on the river, like, we didn't really have

01:02:27.740 anything, but there was so much adventure on the river and climbing around it and paddling,

01:02:34.560 not just boats, but paddling chunks of styrofoam or paddling a log down the creek where it had

01:02:42.040 danger.

01:02:42.760 It was like, in fact, when I go back now, I'm like, I could have really died at any point.

01:02:47.900 Like, as I'm looking, like, this could have been bad and this could have been bad.

01:02:51.620 But so there was a lot of adventure.

01:02:53.800 And I think as we got into, before the show, we didn't have a lot of money.

01:02:59.320 I think we were kind of like, wow, what's going to end up happening from this?

01:03:05.480 And then once we did the show, we were able to travel a lot.

01:03:09.600 And so we do travel a lot.

01:03:11.480 So we're going all over, and honestly, mostly for work.

01:03:14.760 I mean, we go to do all over the world.

01:03:17.880 We do stuff.

01:03:19.020 And so I guess coming back home, I'm like, okay, now we're back home.

01:03:23.240 This is what matters.

01:03:24.660 So, you know.

01:03:25.240 I'll say, so Willie, growing up, we met in fourth grade at summer camp.

01:03:30.680 And one of the things that always struck me about Willie was he was so entrepreneurial,

01:03:34.980 even as a kid.

01:03:35.920 Like, he was always creating these businesses.

01:03:38.400 And his family lived in the house that they live in on the show, but he was even smaller

01:03:42.620 at that time.

01:03:43.100 It was two bedrooms.

01:03:44.500 And so all our teenage years, Willie fixed up the laundry room or the cook shack that

01:03:50.540 was his room.

01:03:51.260 He was always, like, making himself something special, like a little special room or a special

01:03:56.240 this.

01:03:56.920 So, like, I saw this kind of spirit of, like, adventure and entrepreneurship, even as a kid

01:04:03.420 or as a teenager, as we kind of went through life together.

01:04:06.240 We started dating.

01:04:07.220 We got married.

01:04:07.740 We were 18 and 19.

01:04:09.600 And for my family, we actually traveled a lot.

01:04:13.120 And I think travel is such a gift.

01:04:15.740 And we wanted to give that to our kids.

01:04:17.540 And, you know, there were times whenever we didn't have enough money to travel with our

01:04:21.880 kids, but we wanted to find ways to do that.

01:04:24.760 We bought an exchange student, actually, who became our daughter, Rebecca.

01:04:29.940 And because we wanted to expose our kids to other cultures and other things.

01:04:34.760 So even though we had that deep sense of, like, home, we do just really value, yeah, travel

01:04:42.220 and openness and seeing the world.

01:04:44.360 And I think that that just brings in a whole other depth to children and to people because

01:04:51.800 you understand kind of your place in it.

01:04:53.660 And it's so much bigger than you.

01:04:55.360 And sometimes we can—if we stay in our hometowns, like, say, in these small towns, you can get

01:04:59.940 this sense that it's like, oh, it's all about whatever's happening right here.

01:05:05.240 And we just always wanted to really kind of expose our kids and our family to, oh, this

01:05:10.840 world is a lot bigger than what's going on right here in this little piece.

01:05:16.360 Well, you know, one of the things that travel does, and this has been noted by literary figures

01:05:22.340 pretty much forever, is that you don't really know what you have until you leave it, right?

01:05:30.200 Because you take it for granted.

01:05:31.740 And you can't even see that you have a culture until you go to a different culture, because

01:05:37.400 you just take everything that you think is normal for granted.

01:05:40.640 And you think it's normal.

01:05:42.340 And then when you go somewhere else where normal is different, you realize that, no, you actually

01:05:46.120 came from a particular place in a particular time.

01:05:48.700 And you have your peculiarities because of it.

01:05:51.540 And that can make you—well, it should, if you're wise, that should make you more, first

01:05:57.220 of all, more conscious of what you have, but also more grateful for it.

01:06:00.420 We can return to that theme of gratitude.

01:06:02.460 And so it sounds like you guys got the balance between familial stability and predictability

01:06:09.320 and adventure in the world optimized, right?

01:06:13.540 So you're not bounded by what you've learned, let's say, in Louisiana, because you've traveled

01:06:21.040 all over the place and you've been able to see it from the outside.

01:06:23.980 And so you can get all that varied experience and still remain grounded in your community.

01:06:30.460 So that's another really optimized form of play.

01:06:34.780 So let me ask you a little bit about the business side of things, because I'm very curious about

01:06:39.400 that, so your father made these DVDs.

01:06:43.360 That's the Buckman series, if I understand it correctly.

01:06:46.940 And so he was starting to play with video pretty early, right?

01:06:51.000 So that was pretty—that was smart, because video in the hands of, you know, non-Hollywood

01:06:58.240 types or non-network types, it was the dissemination of early video technology that allowed that.

01:07:04.900 And then it eventually morphed into, well, the kind of thing we're doing today with YouTube.

01:07:08.740 People have these broadcast tools at hand.

01:07:11.540 Your dad was in that very early, you know, and I started to record my lectures.

01:07:16.780 The first ones I recorded were in 1992.

01:07:20.180 You know, there was no way of disseminating them, but I eventually did put them on YouTube.

01:07:24.140 But I started putting my lectures online in 2013, you know, and that was part of laying

01:07:31.440 the groundwork for what eventually grew into the widespread distribution of my lectures

01:07:37.540 and my podcasts now, you know.

01:07:39.180 I mean, large things tend to start small.

01:07:42.780 And, you know, for the first five—first three years, the average viewings for my lectures

01:07:50.120 were probably under 50,000, which is still a lot of people, right, when you're accustomed

01:07:55.800 to lecturing to, like, two or three hundred.

01:07:57.900 Fifty thousand is a number definitely worth paying attention to.

01:08:01.440 But your dad cottoned on to the use of video early.

01:08:05.520 And how—okay, how did that contribute to the success of his business?

01:08:11.040 And how did that morph into the Duck Dynasty opportunities?

01:08:16.320 Yeah, so dad started in the 80s, so we had this barred equipment.

01:08:21.020 He had a guy at the church who was a sound guy, and he said, hey, let's go shoot a video.

01:08:26.700 I believe it was over three or four days.

01:08:29.300 They kind of really played into—my father had played college football with Terry Bradshaw.

01:08:35.120 He had the beard, and it was funny watching the video.

01:08:40.260 He's kind of looking down.

01:08:41.840 He's kind of humble.

01:08:43.400 He's not, like, in your face yet.

01:08:45.420 And so they make the video.

01:08:47.020 So I think they sold, what did he say, 200 or 150 copies, so way less than your 50,000 people.

01:08:54.880 This was—in fact, it was pretty much like, well, that didn't work, you know.

01:08:59.680 However, he was like, no, I think we got something.

01:09:02.100 So every couple of years, they were going to do another one, and then they were going to put more footage and more.

01:09:07.160 And so that was going okay.

01:09:09.040 The big break we had was when Walmart started carrying our duck calls, and then Walmart put the VHSs in Walmart sporting goods.

01:09:22.540 So now we're in about 2,500 stores all over the country.

01:09:28.520 So we're in Northern California.

01:09:30.780 We're on the Eastern Shore.

01:09:32.480 We're up in the Midwest.

01:09:33.740 And that was the game changer.

01:09:35.320 So because they could watch something and get fired up and say, man, look at this guy.

01:09:40.100 And I think we appealed at that point, again, with the spitting and with the Southern accents and just other unusual things that my father would do with the music and all that.

01:09:52.000 We just really got this underground, you know, it was like a swell of people going, hey, man, we love that.

01:09:59.000 We love watching this.

01:09:59.740 Then they would watch them.

01:10:01.040 They would get ready for the duck season.

01:10:02.720 They would put them in and say, now we've got to get fired up.

01:10:05.080 And they'd watch them over and over and over.

01:10:06.660 They'd memorize some of the lines that he would do.

01:10:10.500 And so all that we felt like was such preparation to build up, which would ultimately be Duck Dynasty on A&E.

01:10:18.960 But there were so many little things before that that we got just enough to know, just enough to know how to be around camera, just enough to know all that.

01:10:27.120 So it wasn't like just zero to hero or throw us in a show going, good luck, you know, there's a camera and where's the mic go?

01:10:33.420 I mean, we had had just enough to know, especially how to entertain people.

01:10:37.060 And again, back to how to tell a story, which was learned at the dinner table, because we learned how to tell good stories because we didn't have hardly any TV.

01:10:44.960 There was no computer.

01:10:45.680 So if you told a story, you had to tell it and bring it.

01:10:49.580 And if it wasn't good, believe me, our family would let you know, like, that's terrible, just like terrible food if you cooked it.

01:10:56.280 And so, like, everybody's brutally honest with you.

01:10:58.960 And so you learn how to do that again.

01:11:00.700 I feel like all that played into, you know, that.

01:11:03.940 And that's how the videos did that.

01:11:05.240 Yeah, and back to the business, so the end of the videos would be their phone number, which was their house, you know, everything was right out of their home.

01:11:13.520 And so their home phone number was the business.

01:11:16.460 And so at the end of the video, there'd be a phone number.

01:11:20.420 If you want more products.

01:11:21.380 If you want more products, and people would call, and it'd be back on the back of the VHS tape or the DVD.

01:11:27.300 And so, yeah, people just started calling.

01:11:29.300 All of a sudden, it's like you're answering phone calls from all over the country rather than kind of this little radius where, you know, before, Phil would go out in his truck to this little radius and sell to all the sporting goods stores.

01:11:40.520 Well, then, once it got in Walmart, of course, all of a sudden, you get phone calls from all over.

01:11:45.380 And we're the ones answering the phone, like, as a teenager.

01:11:48.580 I'm like, Duck Commander, and then I'm writing down orders, like, on paper plates and napkins and, like, putting them up to ship out the next day.

01:11:56.200 And so that's when we just started seeing it growing.

01:11:58.580 But that Walmart thing was a big—that was a big break that when they put us in that chain of stores, it just changed everything.

01:12:06.880 Which, not coincidentally, Walmart was whenever—during Duck Dynasty, we were in, I think, 22 different departments in Walmart.

01:12:14.460 And they said that they'd never had this, no other brand, including, like, Coca-Cola, Disney, any other brand, had ever done this.

01:12:22.800 So we had the number one seller in men's, women's, kids, and juniors in the apparel department.

01:12:29.460 And they said they'd never seen it before, that the same brand crossed all the categories at the same time.

01:12:36.600 So that was pretty cool.

01:12:37.660 Yeah.

01:12:37.780 So that's okay.

01:12:40.420 So there's some—lots about that that's really cool.

01:12:43.100 So I mentioned earlier that I'm writing this book, We Who Wrestle With God, and part of it's an analysis of different biblical stories.

01:12:51.360 And I just did a seminar down in Miami that we released a couple of weeks ago on Exodus.

01:12:57.680 And there's a cool part of Exodus that's very much relevant, I think, to what happened with your father.

01:13:03.760 And it's the famous story of the burning bush.

01:13:06.440 So what happens in the story of the burning bush, like, this is an unbelievably useful story, is that—so at this time in the story, Moses is really a nobody.

01:13:17.500 He's left Egypt.

01:13:18.920 He was kind of a nobleman in Egypt, but he killed an Egyptian.

01:13:22.580 And he had to, like, get the hell out of there.

01:13:25.180 And he went to a different country, to Midia.

01:13:28.680 Midia?

01:13:29.080 I think it's Midia.

01:13:29.880 The Midianites live there anyways.

01:13:31.500 And he draws some water from a well for some women, and they're pretty happy about it.

01:13:37.200 And you think he chases some rude, like, punk shepherds away.

01:13:40.980 And anyways, the girl falls in love with him, and he ends up being a shepherd for his father-in-law, whose name is Jethro.

01:13:46.740 And so he's just minding his own damn business, fundamentally, being a shepherd.

01:13:50.280 He's out there in the middle of nowhere, unknown.

01:13:53.280 And he's wandered around one day, and something catches his attention.

01:13:58.720 And he turns off his path, and the story makes this quite clear.

01:14:02.880 It's not like it screams in front of him.

01:14:05.500 It's kind of off the beaten path a little bit.

01:14:08.060 Something glimmers and catches his attention, and he decides to pay attention and go look.

01:14:12.520 And as he gets closer to it, he realizes it's this bush on fire.

01:14:17.040 And as he gets closer to it, he hears God's voice speaking, and then he has to take off his shoes because he enters sacred territory.

01:14:27.140 And then the secret of being itself reveals itself to him.

01:14:31.580 That's God revealing his name, and that's when Moses becomes leader.

01:14:35.580 And you might say, well, what the hell does that story have to do with anything?

01:14:38.860 And it's really, it's very, very clear, and it's very clear psychologically, you know, because as we're wandering along our paths in life, our normal paths, so in Moses' case, being a shepherd, in your dad's case, you know, being a hunter and manufacturing duck calls, nothing out of the ordinary in some ways about that.

01:15:01.400 Now and then, something will glimmer and gleam for us that will capture our attention, you know, and we can choose to pay attention to that or not.

01:15:09.860 Now, Moses pays attention to it, but so did your dad, right?

01:15:13.040 So you said he did some sound work, for example, for the local church, and so he developed a little bit of expertise with the new technology.

01:15:19.660 And then he had this idea, which is, you know, it's not exactly a normal idea.

01:15:25.400 It's a pretty experimental and entrepreneurial idea that he could take this new technology that he was interested in and do something unique with it.

01:15:35.220 And there was a little bit of courage that went along with that, too, and a willingness to, you know, to go off the beaten path.

01:15:40.640 And then you said, too, that I also think is so interesting, is, you know, and everybody who's watching and listening should listen to this,

01:15:48.120 because what I see happening to people in their life all the time is that an opportunity will gleam for them.

01:15:55.040 And they notice they're interested in it, but then they don't have the discipline or maybe the courage to pursue it.

01:16:01.780 They're afraid they'd fail.

01:16:03.100 They're afraid it would be foolish.

01:16:04.460 They're afraid they would look bad.

01:16:06.040 And so they put it aside.

01:16:07.460 And so it looks like they've missed nothing, but maybe they missed, you know, the burning bush and God speaking to them.

01:16:14.060 Maybe they missed the whole adventure of their life.

01:16:16.560 Now, one of the things that's quite interesting about you guys, and maybe this also has something to do with your practice of gratitude,

01:16:23.760 is that, well, first of all, your father pursued this strange interest that he had and then did something somewhat preposterous,

01:16:31.560 which was to make these films that were sort of tongue-in-cheek about his duck hunting, you know,

01:16:36.480 and to play himself as a character.

01:16:38.400 But then also, when the entrepreneurial opportunities came along, you guys also jumped on them and said yes.

01:16:46.180 And that really, you know, that really flowered outward, grew outward like a bush, let's say, when it came to Walmart, right?

01:16:54.800 And one of the things you also see about artists and entrepreneurs who want to fail is that they get high and mighty inappropriately about commercial opportunities.

01:17:05.500 You know, you have people, you hear people say this all the time, he sold out or I would never sell out.

01:17:12.140 And whenever I hear someone who isn't very successful say they wouldn't sell out, I always think, well, yes, you would, first of all.

01:17:19.920 And the reason you haven't is either because you're too dumb to sell out or because no one's come to you with even anything vaguely approximating an offer.

01:17:28.460 You know, and the fact that you haven't sold out when no one has offered you a penny for your soul is no indication of your morality.

01:17:35.420 It just means that no one cares what you're doing now, and I'm being tongue-in-cheek about that to some degree, but I do see people fail very often because they take the moral high ground, or at least they think they do, by rejecting commercial opportunities that might come their way.

01:17:54.660 And your dad was obviously canny enough to pursue his creative interests, and that's very interesting, say, and his experimental interests to make these videos.

01:18:04.700 But also to say yes when a business opportunity came his way.

01:18:09.560 You know, and you said, well, that just grew.

01:18:11.740 Well, it grew incrementally to begin with, but then when you hit Walmart, it was like, you know, well, that was the beginning of the, like, that cataclysmic expansion.

01:18:20.500 And people miss those opportunities for expansion when they say no to things that they should say yes to, right?

01:18:26.900 And they get high and mighty about it, and it's stupid.

01:18:29.520 You should be happy if an opportunity comes your way.

01:18:32.580 Absolutely, yeah.

01:18:33.580 We both came, so I came from family business as well, and our family, I think one of the gifts that they passed down, then that we kind of, like, utilized in growing the business was that spirit of, like, risk and entrepreneurship, and it's okay.

01:18:48.920 And I think that, so our family had a lot of businesses, and some failed, and some were, a few were successful, really successful.

01:18:57.000 But a lot of them failed.

01:18:57.700 Walmart bought one of your businesses.

01:18:59.240 Actually, yeah.

01:19:00.080 Sam Walton bought one of our family businesses.

01:19:01.900 That's a, I forgot.

01:19:03.020 Yeah, that's true.

01:19:03.920 So, so interestingly, yeah, so I grew up in kind of this home where risk-taking was, was a reward and was a positive because, you know, you tried something, and it was okay if you failed and that type of thing.

01:19:17.580 And I think back to faith as being kind of this undergirding of that is, like, if you know that you're going to be okay if it fails, and I think that was, that was told to us, you know, over and over again growing up.

01:19:29.420 My dad would say, hey, if we lose it all tomorrow, it's all right.

01:19:32.140 We still got what's most important.

01:19:34.000 So it was this grounding of, like, okay, what's most important is our family and our faith, and if we lose all of this other stuff, all right, we'll be all right.

01:19:42.160 We'll get back up and do something else tomorrow, and so whenever we came together, I think that was a benefit because we kind of brought those two worlds together.

01:19:52.460 Well, I'd say the difference to, like, obviously not knowing your family for so long, but even back then, they were, there was a bunch of different tries at it.

01:20:02.280 So it was like, oh, we'll try this, and even us today, we're like, hey, we'll try that, hey, we'll try this.

01:20:07.160 I think growing up where we were, like, with Doug Commander and the business, that was it.

01:20:14.140 We're saying we're all in, like, we're all in.

01:20:16.720 Like, it wasn't like, hey, we'll try this on the side, we'll try that.

01:20:19.780 All the chips were shoved in the middle going, we're going to put it all right here, and it wasn't a lot of chips, though,

01:20:26.640 because it was like, because most of it was being fueled by the personality.

01:20:32.780 It wasn't like we had tons of money ever invested.

01:20:35.800 It was like, you know, but we are.

01:20:38.780 This is what we're going for.

01:20:40.100 And we could always, you know, Dad was always good, like, saying, yeah, if it doesn't, if this doesn't work, hey, we keep fishing and we keep eating, you know.

01:20:48.480 The standards were low.

01:20:50.000 It's like, hey, we're totally happy in what we've got, you know.

01:20:54.340 That's very cool.

01:20:55.320 Like, you outlined something very interesting there, because one of the things that people might be thinking about is, well, what constitutes failure and what constitutes success,

01:21:06.940 and how do you stop failure from taking you out?

01:21:10.560 And one of the things you both pointed out is that you're actually pretty careful about defining failure.

01:21:16.600 You say, well, look, if this limited enterprise fails, we still have our family, we still have the love and respect we have for each other, and we have a backup plan.

01:21:27.920 And so what that means is that you set yourself up strategically so that failure, it wasn't failure, it was just the death of an experimental enterprise.

01:21:38.020 And then I might also ask you, you know, because you had your family, you had things in place that weren't going to shift, even if some things shifted, right?

01:21:46.720 So you have some security in that regard that enables you to take risks.

01:21:50.800 But then we also might think about failure, too.

01:21:53.640 Like, I don't know what it's like for you guys, but here's one of the things I've noticed in my life is that I don't think I've ever actually failed when I was all in.

01:22:05.260 You know, and what I mean by that is that my plans, business plans included, might not have turned out the way I had expected them to, but if I was all in and I made the right sacrifices, so to speak, I learned something unbelievably useful that I could then use in something that turned out to be successful.

01:22:26.500 You know, I've even noticed this when I'm writing, so, you know, when I'm writing a book, I collect the pieces of writing that I've edited out.

01:22:36.440 I just, I put a little, I title a, what a file, culls, and I throw everything that I don't think fits into those, into that cull.

01:22:46.680 It's sort of like a waste bin, but it's not exactly a waste bin because I can often go back to those ideas and figure out how to use them somewhere else.

01:22:55.360 And so, one of the things I've noticed in my life, and I think it's interesting that you commented, Willie, about being all in, is that if you're really focused on the task at hand, there isn't any wasted effort.

01:23:12.160 Like, it isn't necessarily the case that you're progressing to the goal you have in mind, but if you're all in and you're not mucking about, then you learn something that you're going to be able to, that's going to be of benefit to you and other people at some point in the future.

01:23:28.420 And so, and Corey, you talked about your father and his attitude towards failure.

01:23:36.360 I mean, it sounds that what it's more like, it's not so much an attitude towards failure, it's a conceptualization of moving forward as an experimental enterprise, right?

01:23:48.220 You're going to generate ideas, and some of them are really going to go somewhere, but most won't.

01:23:53.240 And, you know, that's typical of entrepreneurs.

01:23:55.360 Like, most people who make a fortune have failed enough to be in financial distress multiple times before they finally formulate something that works.

01:24:03.720 But that doesn't mean that those, that they were failing.

01:24:07.040 It means that they were experimenting in good faith, and they didn't lose faith, and they had enough support put in around them so that they could tolerate, you know, the, what would you care, the ups and downs of trying to make something eventually successful.

01:24:24.620 Now, you also said that was grounded in your faith.

01:24:27.440 So, you have your family, you have your fishing, right?

01:24:31.940 You have something underneath you, but why do you think that the faith under that, how do you conceptualize that faith, and why do you think that was additionally necessary?

01:24:42.460 I think, like you mentioned, it's that difference in definition of success, you know, and what we deem as success, and so it gives you that freedom.

01:24:52.340 Like, success is faithfulness.

01:24:54.120 Success is a healthy marriage.

01:24:56.220 Success is a family, kids that love you and that want to live beside you.

01:25:01.040 Success is, are all of these things.

01:25:03.620 And so, when you understand what your definition of success is, and it's those things, then you have that freedom to experiment and try new things.

01:25:14.560 And it's okay if this doesn't work or this doesn't work, as long as this is working.

01:25:20.280 And I think that goes back to faithfulness.

01:25:22.180 And for us, that's rooted in our faith in God, because that's what changes everything for us.

01:25:28.520 You know, whenever you have that faith in God, you come up under the authority of God, then you try to live by the life that He puts out for you, the adventure and the full life that He gives you.

01:25:43.300 And then everything that we do reflects that.

01:25:46.160 And so, you mentioned in our show, it wasn't preaching, and it wasn't meant to be preaching.

01:25:52.540 It was just our faith shone through because it's who we are.

01:25:56.960 It's how we relate to one another in marriage.

01:25:59.200 It's how we relate to our kids.

01:26:00.360 It's how we treat one another at work.

01:26:02.480 It just informs everything that we do.

01:26:06.500 So, there's this faith that surrounds it all, but you don't have to say it explicitly because it's just internal, and it's who we are, and it's how we live.

01:26:20.320 It's what makes us laugh, you know.

01:26:22.620 I mean, it's what brings us joy, you know, because it's like, ah.

01:26:26.120 So, when I think about, because you said it's rooted in our faith, to me, it's the ultimate in nothing is wasted is rooted in the faith because you would say, well, what about when you really screwed up?

01:26:38.000 Or what about when this happened and this was terrible?

01:26:41.640 That's what triggers back that faith again going, oh, no, it's not a waste, you know.

01:26:46.140 To where if you were looking at Jesus Christ going, ah, what a waste.

01:26:49.000 They killed Him.

01:26:49.760 You know, He's like, ah, not a waste.

01:26:51.640 This was for you.

01:26:52.520 So, it's, everything keeps going back, and that's, it always is like, nothing's wasted.

01:26:58.260 Can I take, can I take something where I really messed up?

01:27:02.220 We were like, ah, this is bad.

01:27:03.360 Can I take that and use that?

01:27:05.200 And yes, yes, that can be used.

01:27:07.600 Yes, that can be used to help not just you.

01:27:10.240 And if you think about life unselfishly, it may help someone else, you know.

01:27:13.960 It may be, ah, this is really hard for me, but wow, it really helped you, you know.

01:27:17.900 It really helped someone else.

01:27:19.720 And I think that's why we say it's rooted there, because nothing becomes wasted.

01:27:25.020 Everything becomes something that can be used, you know, for, we think, for the glory of God, you know, ultimately.

01:27:33.880 Because we have to put ourselves down as well, and not, it's not, the life's not all about us, you know, for sure.

01:27:40.140 Okay, so, Corey, you outlined a very interesting, I would call it a hierarchy of values.

01:27:44.840 And I think that it is reflected in your show and in your general attitude, and I do think that this is part of what made what you guys did so attractive.

01:27:53.940 So, this is what you basically said to me.

01:27:56.580 You know, you said, first of all, your head is screwed on straight with regard to what constitutes success.

01:28:02.840 Now, you know, you could say, well, success is cocaine and hookers and, you know, the extension of a radically hedonistic life.

01:28:10.380 You can do whatever the hell you want whenever you want.

01:28:12.840 And the clear problem with that is you tend to die, right?

01:28:15.940 You end up face down in a ditch, and you take a lot of people with you.

01:28:18.900 So, it's kind of a stupid definition of success.

01:28:21.960 You had a very prosaic definition of success, right?

01:28:25.840 It's very normal, but also ideal at the same time.

01:28:28.600 You said, and I think you said in this order, you said a good marriage, a good family, and good friends.

01:28:35.300 And so, you could see that that moves from you to your primary relationship and then to your family, the next set of primary relationships, and then to the community.

01:28:43.560 You said, if things are working well there, and this is somewhat independent of economic status, then you're successful.

01:28:53.000 And so, that's, you know, it's good to have your head screwed on straight about what's successful, because that also means that when you have that, you can be grateful, right?

01:29:02.780 You think, well, and you have a grounds for gratitude.

01:29:06.020 And then you implied, too, that all of that was nested inside a religious faith, right?

01:29:11.740 So, that's this turning toward God.

01:29:13.520 And so, it's God underneath the marriage, underneath you, underneath the marriage, underneath your family, underneath your friends.

01:29:20.080 And so, then, and Willie, you said as well that your faith, and this was your religious faith, enabled you to laugh.

01:29:30.200 Okay, so a couple of things on that.

01:29:31.780 First thing is, one of the benefits to Christian faith is that you have a good standard of comparison.

01:29:39.140 And one standard of comparison with regards to failure is that if you aren't literally being nailed to a cross while you're being mocked by a mob and tortured, things are actually pretty good.

01:29:51.540 And that's really useful to know, because it's easy to think that you're at the bottom and to despair when you're nowhere near the bottom.

01:30:00.400 And if you know you're nowhere near the bottom, even when things have gone sideways, you can still be grateful, and that's extremely helpful.

01:30:07.980 So, that's helpful.

01:30:09.960 But then you also said, and this is more complex, you know, you said that your faith, your religious faith, made itself manifest in all the things you did in the show.

01:30:20.020 And I would say, I can understand the idea of the good marriage.

01:30:26.580 I can understand the idea of the close family and your friendship network.

01:30:30.000 But how do you specifically think that your religious faith helped keep you in character, like helped keep you honest while you were doing the show?

01:30:39.360 How it informed your marriage and your relationship with family and friends so that you guys could tolerate the ups and downs of your wild ride towards success without fractionating.

01:30:49.700 Like, what specific role do you think that religious faith per se, rather than marriage, family, and friends, played in keeping you grounded and also in, what would you, accounting for the popularity, the enduring popularity of your show?

01:31:05.600 Well, there's a scripture that talks about the fruit of the Spirit, and it says the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, and self-control.

01:31:17.520 And so, I think that, you know, whenever we are embodied by the Spirit of Christ, we live those things, and those things come out of us.

01:31:26.340 And so, there's also a scripture of talking about the aroma of Christ and just that—and that we're lights of the world and we're salt of the earth.

01:31:34.400 All these things that, you know, scripture says about us as we are embodied by the Spirit is how we try to live.

01:31:43.400 And so, I think those things just kind of come out of whatever aspect you're doing or whatever thing you're living.

01:31:51.100 Not that we're perfect in it, by any means, of course.

01:31:54.160 We're not perfect in it, but we do try to live, and we hope that those fruits—there's an outpouring of those fruits in our life.

01:32:03.520 Well, and also, he says they'll know you by your love for one another, not exactly what you know or how much you know, but that's how they will see you.

01:32:11.400 The way I see it reflected, like, especially on the show, is, you know, when it comes down to just the show and how we're on it.

01:32:19.920 I think it—you know, our faith kept us from, one, taking ourselves way too seriously or thinking we're so important or—I mean, we could act—we have the goods.

01:32:29.960 We could look around going, hey, we've got one of the top TV shows on television right now, which could have made us unbearable.

01:32:38.340 I mean, there were times with production.

01:32:40.260 There were so many things going on where I could have just lost my mind.

01:32:43.560 So, one of the aspects where the faith came out was actually just to be on set and do the show because there was just—you know, there was different wars and different things going on, you know, behind the scenes.

01:32:54.460 And so, you know, you had to keep that together to actually do that.

01:32:58.300 And I think just to remain playful and not become so serious, you know, when you're talking about if it's not—if you're not being crucified and you're not, you know, having that, I think you—if not, you get—I think that's why people get so caught up.

01:33:11.320 And they can't really enjoy success because they're too worried about, you know, either losing it or what's going to come next.

01:33:18.160 And so, I just see that as faith doing that, and that's where it's just manifesting itself and just going, hey, I have faith, you know.

01:33:25.200 I mean, this is, you know—plus, life is short.

01:33:27.720 I mean, it's really short.

01:33:29.100 And so, if you believe that life will continue and that you'll go on, then it should help you, I guess, to have a better disposition here on this earth, knowing that you're just here like that and you're gone.

01:33:41.220 So, that's—I think that comes out in faith as well.

01:33:45.260 So, you point out two things there that are interesting.

01:33:49.180 So, earlier, you know, you guys talked about the necessity of being all in, you know, that if you made a decision, you were going to put everything behind it.

01:33:56.400 And you can imagine that that could devolve into a kind of grim seriousness of purpose and a kind of panic because you've bet everything.

01:34:05.220 Well, first of all, you know, you did say in some ways it isn't that you hedged your bets.

01:34:09.560 You protected yourself because you had your marriage and your family and your friends and you weren't going to risk that.

01:34:15.260 And you're all in.

01:34:16.140 But also, so your faith—it seems to me that your faith enabled you to believe that what you were doing was important and worthwhile and that it could have a positive effect for you and for other people.

01:34:27.940 But also, simultaneously, I suppose, by subordinating you to something that was higher on a regular basis, it also stopped you from becoming egotistical and assuming that your success marked you out somehow as, you know, preternaturally special.

01:34:44.920 And that's definitely, you know, that's definitely a temptation for people who are celebrities because, you know, I've thought about this a lot in relationship to Adolf Hitler.

01:34:55.480 You know, because you could imagine if tens of millions of people thought you were the savior of your country, who are you to say that you're not?

01:35:09.220 And the answer to that has to be, well, you're someone who's subordinated to a higher authority, you know, and if you have a religious faith, that would be the authority of Christ or God.

01:35:19.360 And you're not that.

01:35:21.260 Whatever you are, no matter how spectacular you are and successful, you're definitely not that.

01:35:26.300 If you don't have that and you accumulate faith or fame and notoriety, like what's stopping you from confusing yourself stupidly with the deity, you know?

01:35:39.840 And so it sounds like you guys balanced your faith so that you could take yourself seriously, you know, and presume that what you were doing was worthwhile and important.

01:35:48.560 But it also protected you against the narcissism that can easily emerge when, well, as you said earlier, when you can't even go down, you can't even walk down the street without being, you know, constantly recognized and celebrated and put on a pedestal for that matter.

01:36:05.920 We're in our home right now in our dining room.

01:36:09.160 We have a big scripture on the wall and it's Romans 12, 9 through 18, and it talks about all those things we just talked about.

01:36:17.760 It was thinking of that as you were saying it.

01:36:19.860 It starts out saying, love must be sincere, hate what is evil, cling to what is good.

01:36:24.060 But then it goes on to talk about not thinking of yourself more highly than you ought and not trying to, you know, you need to sit with people from all walks of life.

01:36:35.560 You need to be hospitable and all these things.

01:36:38.580 So all these things are kind of right there in that Romans 12 scripture that we have over our table.

01:36:44.560 And so it's just that constant reminder, you know, to, yeah, that we are up under something that's greater than us.

01:36:53.400 So can I, we're starting to approach the end of this part of our discussion.

01:36:59.240 For everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Willie and Corey Robertson about their marriage on the Daily Wire Plus platform because I'm very interested in what they've done right because they actually seem to like each other to some degree, which is nice to see in a married couple that have been together for a long time.

01:37:15.460 I think maybe what we'll do before we close is I'd like to ask you guys what you're doing now and what your future plans are.

01:37:23.680 When we were planning this interview, this podcast discussion, you talked to me a little bit about your future plans.

01:37:31.140 And so do you want to tell everybody what projects you're working on now and what you see in the future, what you're bringing to people in the future?

01:37:37.440 Yeah, so after the show ended, we, and as we've talked about, just saw kind of that impact of entertainment.

01:37:45.520 And so we started a production company called Tread Lively Productions.

01:37:48.980 And our first film is coming out September 28th in theaters.

01:37:52.580 And it's called The Blind.

01:37:53.880 And it's interesting that we've had so much of a conversation about Willie's dad, Phil, because that is really what this movie is about is Phil and Kay's story.

01:38:02.140 And, you know, we've talked a lot about kind of the success of it and, you know, what happened after.

01:38:07.780 But this is the story before.

01:38:09.840 And it's interesting that we chose to go back and tell the hard days, you know, the hard parts of the story.

01:38:17.420 Because I think when you see a family like ours on television, sometimes you could think, oh, of course God used them.

01:38:24.420 They all love each other and they're all this.

01:38:26.280 But actually, scripturally, and you've mentioned several, you know, people in the Bible that God used for big things, but that were really flawed and had really, you know, had these hard stories.

01:38:39.740 And so it's actually, you know, I think people can discount themselves and think, oh, I'm out because I didn't do this or I didn't do this right.

01:38:48.820 But instead, God uses the people who are weak, but that surrender their lives to Him.

01:38:54.280 And so this is the family's story.

01:38:56.980 It's Phil and Kay's story, really.

01:38:59.360 Willie was two in the movie and he was actually played by our grandson, which was really fun.

01:39:03.680 But this is their story and their 10 hard years of marriage that Kay got pregnant in high school.

01:39:11.440 And they went off to college together and had 10 hard years where Phil was an alcoholic.

01:39:17.760 He, you know, was adulterous.

01:39:19.740 He had all the things that you would say, this family will never make it.

01:39:24.620 You know, it's over.

01:39:26.040 And there was a point where it was over.

01:39:28.280 You know, Kay had moved to West Monroe, which is why they ended up here, because Phil had kicked her out of the house.

01:39:33.860 And it was just a real low point in their family life.

01:39:36.940 And a pastor went to the bar where Phil, you want to tell this part of it?

01:39:43.880 Yeah.

01:39:44.320 Well, my dad's sister, my Aunt Jan, begged this pastor to go up and preach the gospel to her brother.

01:39:53.000 And I can just imagine this conversation, like it's in a different state.

01:39:58.500 You know, it's like, you know, it's like, oh, time to come to church.

01:40:02.200 And, you know, it's like, no, he's running a bar in southern Arkansas.

01:40:07.260 And that preacher got in that car and drove to that bar and walked into this bar.

01:40:12.300 And Phil was not happy to see him.

01:40:14.940 It was very adversarial.

01:40:16.760 And he shares his faith with him.

01:40:18.680 And, you know, nothing happens.

01:40:20.480 Phil says, I'll keep that in mind.

01:40:22.440 And then when he leaves, it wasn't until Dad really, the movie says, when he came to the end of himself, you know, when he was alone, he's in the woods.

01:40:32.480 He's living, he lived in the woods for six months running from the state police, which is another reason we ended up in Louisiana, to get away from the police.

01:40:40.380 And when he got to that point, that's when he looked back up and said, hey, let me talk to that preacher again.

01:40:45.660 And so what blows me away is that had that not happened, and I just can't quit thinking about, like, if that guy doesn't go there, and if it doesn't happen, and if the marriage busts apart, and my life looks completely different.

01:41:01.680 None of this, I mean, it's like the whole, you know, I don't go to the church camp to meet her.

01:41:06.980 I'm not talking to you.

01:41:07.980 It's almost like every day is another reflection of what would not have happened, and I would have been, you know, a single parent.

01:41:15.380 Who knows what would have, how that would have ended up.

01:41:17.420 There would have been no duck commander, no duck dynasty.

01:41:20.020 None of that would have happened.

01:41:21.260 And I can almost, like, 23andMe, like, you can trace it back, and I can trace it back to that one little couple who had no money, no anything.

01:41:28.160 But a guy went up there, shared the gospel, and so that's why the faith is so important, because this is beyond marriage counseling.

01:41:36.720 Dad had kicked us out.

01:41:38.060 The only thing that turned him around was that faith in Jesus Christ and said, I'm in.

01:41:44.060 And then his life drastically changed, very similar, like, where Saul to Paul, you know, it's like you see that kind of, like, bang, you know.

01:41:53.080 It was almost like he saw it, like Saul did.

01:41:55.860 But this is all detailed, you said, in the blind?

01:41:58.660 Yes.

01:41:59.020 So that's in the movie The Blind, which when Willie mentioned Saul to Paul, that's exactly, you know, the story of Saul, because he's blind.

01:42:06.300 He's—whenever Jesus kind of, like, blinds him on the road to Damascus, and then it says the scales came off, and he was baptized, and at once he started proclaiming that Jesus is the Son of God.

01:42:17.800 And that's really their family story.

01:42:20.240 It was just this miraculous event in their family's life where, you know, Jesus revealed himself to Phil.

01:42:28.180 He changed his life.

01:42:29.420 He turned his life to him.

01:42:30.700 He repented of his sin, turned around, came back to their family, and then his mom, Kay, actually forgave him, you know, which is another miraculous thing, because that's not easy to do.

01:42:40.700 After living through that, she says he was like the devil, like, living through those years with him, she actually forgave him, and their whole life changed.

01:42:51.380 Yeah, well, that's so—it's so interesting.

01:42:53.120 I mean, Corey, you started out this discussion with this observation that in many of the biblical stories, let's say—and this is true of great literature in general—that it's often extremely flawed characters that make the most interesting pathway forward.

01:43:09.380 And that's actually pretty good for everyone, because everyone is flawed.

01:43:14.040 And so if there was no pathway forward for flawed people, we'd all be permanently at hell, and that wouldn't be so great.

01:43:21.100 And so one conclusion you can draw from that is that you shouldn't make the presumption to begin with that your flaws, as egregious as they might be, necessarily bar your way forward if you have good will and you're willing to operate in the world properly.

01:43:37.960 Now, you know, we talked a little bit about the story of Exodus, and there's a really good example of that in the Exodus story, because there isn't a more archetypal leader than Moses.

01:43:49.820 And Moses couldn't speak properly.

01:43:54.420 I mean, that's continually—he actually had to ally himself with his brother Aaron.

01:43:59.480 Now, we don't know why.

01:44:00.720 I mean, we don't know if Moses had a speech impediment or if he just wasn't, you know, a very facile public communicator.

01:44:07.980 The story doesn't make it clear, but it does make it clear that he wasn't the sort of person you would have picked to be a leader, because he wasn't verbally competent.

01:44:17.760 And so—and yet he became the ultimate archetypal leader.

01:44:22.660 And I think sometimes people become successful because of their flaws rather than despite them.

01:44:28.280 And so that's, you know, that's a pretty heartening story, in that you shouldn't write yourself off just because there's something wrong with you, because then everyone would be written off.

01:44:37.260 And then the other part of what you just described that's interesting—it'll be very interesting to see how this plays out in the movie—is that, you know, it reminds me—I read this—I've been very influenced by this Russian author,

01:44:50.060 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Solzhenitsyn found himself in the most dreadful circumstances you could really possibly imagine, the most hopeless circumstances.

01:45:01.280 And it wasn't so much like the story you just described, because a lot of this was imposed on him rather than being driven in some ways by his own faults, although he admitted to his faults.

01:45:13.440 He was—first of all, he was on the Russian front when it was—this was in World War II, and Stalin had formulated a pact with Hitler.

01:45:22.220 And so the Russians were dreadfully and absolutely unprepared when the Germans came marching forward.

01:45:28.380 Then Solzhenitsyn, he was writing some letters to a friend that were critical of Stalin's leadership, and the authorities got wind of that, and they threw him in a concentration camp, in a prison camp.

01:45:40.000 And then he was in a prison camp for, like, decades, and he got cancer.

01:45:43.480 And, you know, he was three-quarters starved to death, and he had to memorize this damn book.

01:45:48.340 And you couldn't imagine someone more powerless than Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a more hopeless situation.

01:45:54.560 And yet he formulated a book in his imagination that eventually brought the entire communist enterprise to a shuddering halt.

01:46:01.680 And the story you told is of someone who had wandered pretty damn far off the straight and narrow, right, and who was out in the bush hiding from the cops, which is a pretty hopeless place to be.

01:46:13.160 And you could also imagine that if you had any sense, you'd be pretty down on yourself in a situation like that.

01:46:18.380 You might think you're the sort of basket case that could never be redeemed.

01:46:21.960 And yet, as you pointed out, there was hope for redemption even in those circumstances.

01:46:28.140 And the proper decision led to a whole array of extremely positive events.

01:46:33.260 And so, you know, maybe no matter how deep the abyss you managed to plunge yourself into, if you take responsibility for your flaws and look up, there's still hope.

01:46:47.480 And that'd be nice if it was true.

01:46:49.260 And it sounds like this movie is laying that out, you know, as biographical fact.

01:46:55.820 Now, when is it coming out?

01:46:57.840 September 28th.

01:46:59.040 And yeah, you just said exactly what we hope, you know, for the film.

01:47:03.240 That's the message is really that there's no one too far gone.

01:47:06.680 You know, there's no one that's without hope.

01:47:08.480 And that's really the message of the film, I believe.

01:47:13.060 And did you—how has it been finding distributors?

01:47:16.120 Has that been an easy thing for you guys?

01:47:18.060 Or have you run into obstacles on that front?

01:47:21.160 I know the people who did the Beyond Freedom movie, for example, they had a hard time finding distributors,

01:47:26.720 partly because it was a faith-based movie.

01:47:29.860 You have a much broader track record of commercial success, so I imagine that worked in your favor.

01:47:36.120 But how has it been finding distributors, and what are your predictions?

01:47:40.620 Are you happy with the film, and what are your predictions about its reception and its success?

01:47:44.840 Yeah, there's definitely obstacles to finding distributors for our film and, I think, other faith-based films.

01:47:54.580 So we're doing a Fathom release, which we're grateful for Fathom, and they've been fantastic to work with.

01:48:01.140 We're—right now, I believe we're in 1,800 theaters, and that's growing day by day.

01:48:05.200 So we're very excited about that.

01:48:07.880 But yeah, it has definitely—you know, it's not without its challenges.

01:48:14.900 There are gatekeepers to what gets out there, and so we're seeing a little bit of that.

01:48:22.540 But we're really excited about how it turned out.

01:48:26.520 It's been a couple years' work in progress of, like, all in, like we talked about,

01:48:32.260 just going all in to make sure we tell the story the right way and in a beautiful way.

01:48:38.860 And it is—the film came out just beautifully done.

01:48:43.280 Every single person that worked on it did just above and beyond, and we're very proud of it.

01:48:49.780 Yeah, and it's not—it says this is a true story, because it's pretty much since Mom and Dad are alive,

01:48:55.780 and we were able to talk to so many people, we have exactly what—you know,

01:49:00.520 it's exactly what they told us, you know, had happened.

01:49:03.600 And so that's been real neat to be able to put that together.

01:49:06.900 And it's interesting, like, we talk about a Christian movie, but 95% of this movie is not Christian,

01:49:12.940 because none of them were Christians.

01:49:15.960 And so it wasn't to the end where they actually embraced this faith or whatever.

01:49:20.140 And so it's just a real story of, like, how damaging, you know, you can make—people can make their lives.

01:49:27.440 And my father had certainly done that, you know, a lot of hope and promise and, you know,

01:49:32.920 but then he just, you know, went terribly south.

01:49:36.720 And then, you know, when all hope seemed lost, that's when the gospel came in there.

01:49:42.940 And so it pretty much ends right when Dad becomes a believer.

01:49:45.920 He gets the idea, like, okay, now once he's sobered up, I can maybe build duck calls.

01:49:50.880 And then it just, you know, obviously we know how it ends, because, you know, here we are now.

01:49:54.620 But that's that story is from the—and it's a time piece set in the 60s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.

01:50:01.160 So it's kind of cool going back in time and seeing how, you know.

01:50:05.620 Shockingly, the places—we shot it very near where they grew up, and it pretty much looks the same.

01:50:11.380 It looks like it's been stuck in time anyway.

01:50:13.240 But the early response, like, from the people that have seen it, you know, we've done screeners and things like that, has been fantastic.

01:50:20.280 And from some press that have seen it already as we've been doing these kind of interviews about it, it's been really amazing to see how it's impacted people already.

01:50:29.420 And also, I think, you know, there's expectations sometimes with independent films or Christian films that they might be, you know, cheesy or whatever.

01:50:36.860 And, you know, we've gotten none of that.

01:50:39.260 That's been really rewarding to see, too.

01:50:41.000 Even our kids, you know, whenever we first showed our kids, you know, that's the test.

01:50:46.000 You're like, they're all in their 20s, you know.

01:50:48.220 Are they going to think this is good?

01:50:49.860 And they were like, whoa, that was not—that's like a real movie that's not cheesy at all.

01:50:55.220 It's not, you know, preachy or anything like that.

01:50:58.860 I think it's just really beautifully done, and I'm really, really proud of it.

01:51:04.380 Tell us again the release date.

01:51:08.300 September 28th.

01:51:09.000 And, yeah, there's a website, theblindmovie.com, that you can go and kind of look for your theater and all that.

01:51:15.940 All right, so let me ask you one final question.

01:51:18.620 People are going to be wondering how this discussion came about.

01:51:23.360 And so I don't remember exactly how we made initial contact.

01:51:28.200 I remember we met at a corporate event.

01:51:31.220 Willie, you and I met at a corporate event.

01:51:32.740 That was the first time we had a chance to speak in person.

01:51:34.940 But do you remember how it is that we made contact to begin with and why?

01:51:39.300 Yes, so in a random way.

01:51:41.000 So first of all, our son, John Luke, read your book years ago and gave it to me.

01:51:46.660 And we're big readers.

01:51:47.500 We love to read.

01:51:48.120 And he was like, Mom, read this.

01:51:49.280 So good.

01:51:49.720 12 Rules, that one.

01:51:51.400 And then we went back and read Madison Meaning and all that and just started listening to your podcast and have loved you and followed you and prayed for your family.

01:51:58.560 That's a gift that people give us, they tell us, like, as we're walking around, like, oh, we pray for your family.

01:52:03.040 And so we've prayed for your family over the years and have just followed along in your journey.

01:52:09.760 And it was similar in timeline.

01:52:11.460 We came out in 2012, so similar kind of in timeline as well.

01:52:15.260 And so actually a year or so ago, I was in Copenhagen and met a friend there in Copenhagen.

01:52:21.940 And he said that you had been there the week before, and we got in a discussion.

01:52:25.940 And so I asked if he'd share my email with you so that we could kind of exchange emails.

01:52:30.900 And we did that for a minute.

01:52:32.980 I kind of told you a little bit about our family.

01:52:34.900 But we didn't connect until Willie met you at the Dave Ramsey speaking conference.

01:52:41.420 And you gave me such gold, you don't even realize what you gave me, which was a really funny story, which those are the things I cherish.

01:52:49.960 So you were going to be there.

01:52:51.580 Corey was not able to come because we had had our—

01:52:54.560 I had planned to come because I wanted to meet you, of course, because we had communicated a little bit.

01:52:59.440 But we had a new grandbaby.

01:53:01.040 So, of course, I had to be home with our new grandbaby.

01:53:03.380 So I didn't have to come.

01:53:04.340 And even in our marriage, which I know we're fixing to talk about that, but my status went up because we were on the same venue together.

01:53:11.860 And so, and Corey's like, it's Jordan Peterson and you.

01:53:16.420 And I knew what she meant when she said it, like somebody doesn't belong at this big conference.

01:53:22.820 And I met, yeah.

01:53:23.680 And so, which I was kind of like, hey, here we are.

01:53:26.160 So she was like, well, you know, let me know when you talk to him and all that.

01:53:30.720 And so I was going to meet you before you went on the stage because I had spoken the day before.

01:53:36.580 And then, but it didn't work out.

01:53:38.440 You were doing something with your mic.

01:53:40.680 And so I said, we'll just wait until afters.

01:53:42.520 So you come off the stage.

01:53:44.360 And when I saw you, which, of course, you don't know who I am.

01:53:47.740 And you're like, hey.

01:53:49.240 And you said, what are you doing at the, you said, what are you doing at the conference?

01:53:52.800 And I said, I said, I'm speaking.

01:53:56.000 And for whatever you said, did you speak to the whole group?

01:54:00.480 Which really made me laugh because I was like, I think you thought I was like maybe like the maintenance crew.

01:54:07.140 Because you're not going to say you judged me, but you were looking at my appearance and you were thinking, how are you just out there?

01:54:12.940 And what were you talking about?

01:54:14.680 And I said, yeah, I was speaking to the whole group.

01:54:17.880 And then you asked me what I was speaking about.

01:54:20.920 And I told you neuroscience and Canadian politics.

01:54:24.780 And that was a joke.

01:54:26.060 And everybody started laughing.

01:54:27.360 Yeah, yeah, that was good.

01:54:28.220 That was good.

01:54:28.700 But I could see your brain was spinning.

01:54:31.740 And so I was proud that I had you speechless, especially after just talking to you for a couple hours.

01:54:35.780 And I had you speechless just for a second while that computed in there.

01:54:40.280 So that's how we met.

01:54:41.680 And then I told Corey.

01:54:42.940 And then, but you said, yes, I remember your wife emailed.

01:54:47.040 And then we circled back.

01:54:49.120 And here we are.

01:54:50.420 Right, right, right, right.

01:54:52.160 Yeah, well, Corey, I'm very glad to know that a hick from northern Alberta takes precedence in your imagination over a hick from Louisiana.

01:54:59.520 So I would have never suspected that.

01:55:01.600 So it's good to know.

01:55:02.760 Anyways, all right.

01:55:03.700 Well, look, guys, that was great.

01:55:05.180 I'm hoping you're moving, like, blasted out of the park.

01:55:09.820 That seems highly probable to me.

01:55:11.840 For everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Willie and Corey Robertson for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:55:18.700 We're going to talk about their marriage.

01:55:20.540 I'm very interested in, you know, biographical details of people's lives.

01:55:25.200 And I'm particularly interested in how their marriage has survived the, you know, rapid expansion of their lives and all the twists and turns that their lives have taken.

01:55:36.120 They obviously seem to like each other.

01:55:38.060 One of the things that's quite striking about talking to you two, by the way, is that you're very balanced in your turn-taking in your responses to this interview.

01:55:50.320 You know, you never step on each other.

01:55:52.040 And I would say you guys probably talked about 50% of the time each, you know, of the time that was devoted to your side of the camera.

01:56:02.620 It was very interesting to see that, you know, how careful you were about taking each other into account.

01:56:08.880 I also watch couples all the time when I'm talking with them to see if there's some underground resentment or hostility eye-rolling.

01:56:18.840 Hopefully not that.

01:56:20.560 You know, and some competition there for status.

01:56:23.620 And that's always a bad sign within a relationship.

01:56:26.240 Like, it can be playful and competitive, but real status competition is, that's just not good inside a marriage.

01:56:32.740 And so it was really, it was cool to see how on the same page you were in your discussions about what had happened, about your family life,

01:56:41.560 and how you also translated that into this very playful and easy turn-taking in the conversation.

01:56:49.020 So, anyways, that's what the clinical psychologist in me noticed while we were talking.

01:56:53.740 And so God only knows what I'll notice when we talk on the Daily Wire side, which we're going to do in moments.

01:56:59.420 And so we're going to close this up.

01:57:01.460 If you guys who are watching and listening want to attend to the conversation about marriage within the Dark Dynasty,

01:57:10.140 please join us on the Daily Wire Plus side of things.

01:57:13.940 And thank you very much.

01:57:15.520 It's been a pleasure talking to you two.

01:57:17.720 I'm really looking forward to your movie.

01:57:20.000 Like I said, I hope it's ridiculously successful and helpful to people.

01:57:25.140 You certainly whetted my appetite to go see it.

01:57:27.860 I want to see how this all came about and how you managed this movie.

01:57:31.700 So it'll be fun to see that.

01:57:33.640 And so thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.

01:57:37.480 And as I said, it's been a pleasure getting to know you.

01:57:40.420 Awesome.

01:57:40.960 Great talking to you.

01:57:41.320 Great talking to you.

01:57:42.320 This was awesome.

01:57:43.140 Thanks so much.

01:57:43.800 Thank you.

01:57:59.680 Thank you.

385. Faith, Fame, and Adventure： The Reality Stranger Than Fiction ｜ Willie & Korie Robertson

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