Stranger Than Fiction ｜ Willie & Korie Robertson ｜ EP 385 (EIQvX9j5E3I)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EIQvX9j5E3I

So we started a production company called Tread Lively Productions, and our first film is coming out September 28th in theaters, and it’s called The Blind. 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. And, you know, we’ve talked a lot about kind of the success of it and, you know, what happened after. But this is the story before. We chose to go back and tell the hard days, you know, the hard parts of the story, because I think, 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. But instead, God uses the people who are weak, but that that surrender their lives to him. Hello, everyone watching and listening. Today, I’m speaking with authors, entrepreneurs and the stars of Duck Dynasty, Willie and Corey Robertson. We discuss faith and family values as they were presented in the show and how they were preserved behind the scenes. We also explore the balance between reality and fiction, structure and playful spontaneity that was captured on Duck Dynasty and the true positive impact the show had on viewers, as well as the general culture of the United States and abroad during and since its phenomenal 11 season run. So why do you think that what you did struck a chord with people so deeply and one that was able to be maintained? Well, I think there’s probably a couple of reasons for that. I think people saw parts of their family and our family. And so I think it resonated, especially across generations. 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, and so I think that was one of them. I think it was funny. And so I think people like to laugh and have fun. And I also think the faith aspect was a big part of it with the the prayer at the end. It wasn’t overtly religious, but it was it was wholesome, I guess. So what role do you think the faith played? I actually think it played a really big role. I think that, you know, we are we ended every episode around the dinner table and we said a prayer and we really didn’t have any grand scheme for that. We just did it because it’s kind of what our family does. And so we said a prayer and that just had such an impact on people. I feel like that’s the most common thing people commented on whenever as we’ve like traveled the world and seeing that’s the most thing people commented on. It was just this one is just sitting around the table and being grateful for what’s before you. You know, it was just this idea that, you know, we would submit to to God and give gratefulness, give thankfulness to him before we have a meal. And I think it also really mentioned that nostalgia. I think there was this kind of like, oh, back to something that we’ve lost as a country, as a people. And whenever we did the show, I think that, you know, the network and the executive thought that, you know, we were going to look at this like Louisiana family that’s so different and unique and that we hunt for a living and we eat squirrels and all this and that people would maybe look at us and be like, oh, they’re so different and outside of the norm or whatever. 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 or 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 around a dinner table. 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. You know, we’re always running and gunning and grabbing fast food. And so I think they saw them were like, wow, maybe we did that at a holiday or growing up. And so that was one of the parts where I felt like they were like, oh, maybe they didn’t say a prayer or maybe they used to or maybe they heard about it. So so I think they kind of really enjoyed that kind of like 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. And now we sit down and we eat together. And so but they could kind of see that. And so I do think it was kind of a throwback. You know, it was really interesting to me because I think we we made this. It was a funny show. It was like a sitcom, you know, is a funny show about our family. But it impacted people in really powerful ways. People would, you know, come up in tears saying like, now my family eats dinner together because of your show. Or my husband goes to church now because he saw real men that just love God and can be normal people. You know, and things like are I watched it with my dad, he had cancer. And it just brought us joy and laughter and positivity and hope in a time that was like a darkest time of our life. Hi, everybody. I’ve invited Douglas Murray and Bjorn Lomborg and Jonathan Paggio, who are three of the most admirable and deepest thinkers I know, to join me on stage to talk about a vision of the future that isn’t based on apocalyptic fear mongering and the desire to accrue power that’s a consequence of utilizing that fear. 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. Anyways, that is on November 1st. If you want to come to the O2 and hear our discussion, do so. Get your tickets. 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. 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. 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. But human beings are really the only animals that formally share food. And it’s a very strange thing to do. 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. 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. 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, you each get to talk and to listen, that’s a very good place to inculcate manners into your children. 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. And and it’s a good time for everyone to come together and discuss the separate elements of their life. Right. And in the Old Testament, there’s an immense emphasis on hospitality as the grounds of morality itself and the hospitality to a stranger. But the same thing applies within your family and so within our family. 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. 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. But even more than that, you represented a kind of nostalgic ideal. And obviously that was centered, at least in part, around the dinner table and around prayer. And then you said also that it gave you a chance, like the mealtime prayer, it gave you a chance to be grateful. And that that really struck me as interesting, too, because one of the things that people don’t really understand about prayer, they think about it as a kind of a wish, let’s say. Is that it’s actually a practice. And you can practice being grateful. And the reason you should practice being grateful is, first of all, then you notice what you have to be grateful about. And if your foot isn’t caught in a bear trap while you’re dying of cancer, you have plenty to be grateful for. And so practicing that makes you much more aware of it. But it is also a really good way of staving off resentment. And so it’s striking to me that. How much impact the fact that you guys sat around the table and. All talk together and that you started that off with, let’s say, a prayer of gratitude, 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. What did you conclude from that? It must have been surprising to you, right, to have that to have that have that impact. It really was because to us, it just seemed like a small part of the prayer. It was just a small part of life that we’ve done thousands of times. So I didn’t really. I guess I thought most people would would be like, oh, they’re saying a prayer. And that’s that’s what we all do. And so I was what was striking to me is that a lot of people didn’t do that. And so or or like I said, they used to do that or they didn’t do that. And I was like, wow, that’s and it had this big impact on them. You know, it was like that really helped our family. Wow. That’s what seemed like just a small thing. But that but the dinner table was a big part to us, even growing up. That was a big part of of the, you know, just our whole family. It’s where we you know, it’s kind of it was almost like a big TV show now that maybe that you would also around that to us. That was dinner, one, because we were hungry. And I’m not sure Dr. Pierce said we me and my brothers were a little more animalistic. I don’t know that we’d like to share food. So we were more like canines, like trying to. I remember when Corey and I started dating, she was like, I’ve never seen anyone eat as fast as you. And it was because I was like, you better get it quickly because it’ll be gone. And so she was like, you can slow down. We can just eat and enjoy this. They had four boys and not a lot of money growing up. And they ate, you know, they ate all the home cooked meals because they lived on the river. And he said whenever they would order pizza, which was like a treat to get pizza, they would lick the pieces. So I’m telling on you. They would lick the pieces. So you had to have what you could only have one hand on one piece while you were eating. So that was it. And we would just lick a little because something about licking the food made no one else want to eat it at all. So that was it was some kind of animalistic thing that we figured out. Yeah, I remember I invited one of my friends over from he was from a backwoods town up in northern Alberta called Crooked Creek, man. And it was it was quite the place. It had been scraped out of the prairie just about 40 years previously. And there were feuds going on in that back country. And he’d grown up in kind of a competitive eating environment as well. And I invited him over for Thanksgiving dinner once we moved out east. And I invited him over to Montreal. And the poor guy, he filled up a pretty major Thanksgiving plate because we had quite a feast. And I think he was completely done eating before everyone else had even filled their plates. And I’d often seen him polish off a hot dog in two bites. And he was in the same unfortunate circumstances as you were surrounded by brothers who were going to devour everything ravenously every chance they got. So the poor guy, I don’t think he ever tasted anything. It just went immediately from tooth to stomach without, you know, without any intermediating enjoyment. So anyways, hopefully things have slowed down on the eating front for you guys. Now, you also mentioned and this is something, you know, that I’ve noticed about a couple of other shows. I really like I like The Simpsons. I was a great fan of The Simpsons. Their first 13 seasons were staggeringly brilliant and comedic as far as I was concerned. And I also like this insane, vulgar, horrible, brutal, nasty Canadian show called The Trailer Park Boys, which is like a working class phenomenon in Canada. And, you know, it’s rough and it’s funny, but both those shows and they’re both satirical. One of the things that holds them together is that the characters in the shows have a genuine bond of familial love. So Homer Simpson, for all his flaws, and he’s pretty much 100 percent composed of flaws, is someone who truly is in his bumbling way as devoted as he possibly can be to his family. And in The Trailer Park Boys, these three ne’er do well criminal types, basically who the show is about and their two enemies, they’re bound together, too, by a filial bond that’s actually quite genuine. One of the things that made both those shows popular is that strange combination of satirical humor and the ability of the characters in some ways to tar at each other, but also to be bound inside this genuine, what would you say, structure of love and mutual regard. And I guess it’s something like the optimal balance between cooperation and competition. And the humor seems to play on that proper balance as well. And you can tolerate a lot of biting humor, which is a really nice thing, if you know that the people that are joking at you and prodding at you do have your back and actually like you. So your show seems to have that sort of element as well. I hope I’ve got that accurately represented. I think so. I think that’s probably exactly right. I think there was a profound love for each other. We had our back. However, we try not to take ourselves very seriously. And so we can see someone and go after that person. But like I said, there’s a love there. In fact, we did it so much so that when we would be out in public, people would come up to me and be angry with me and be like, how dare you say that to your mom or your uncle? We’re fine. We’re good. We think it’s really funny. But some people would be like, wow. But I guess the Robertsons, we’ve always kind of had that. We can make fun of ourselves and really go after each other. And I don’t know whether it was to prepare, because when you’re at school, when you’re in the world, people are going to say all kind of nasty stuff. And so we just kind of were like, I don’t know if we were preparing each other for that, but it’s common. Well, also, I think we kind of got together as a family, not kind of. We actually did. We sat around the table together as a family before the show started and just kind of laid out some things. And one, I think, yes, we were surprised by the impact, but also we did really pray about the impact. We actually did come together as a family and said, we hope that this brings glory to God. We hope that this is a beautiful blessing to families and to our family as well. And if it’s not, just take it away. We actually kind of went into it with that intention. And then also we said, we won’t take ourselves too seriously. And you know how reality shows can be. And there’s these interviews and things like that. And we just said, we’re not going to get offended by anything anybody says. We’re just going to have fun with this and let it be fun and not get offended. And I don’t think anybody ever did. There was nothing on the show that anybody ever said to one another or about one another got offended by it. We just had fun with it. But it was a unique reality show where it was shot like a sitcom. So it wasn’t just run and gun cameras. Like it was like a sitcom. I would enter the office and, hello, I’m here. And so it really was shot like that. But we were really ourselves. And so it was a strange mix of how to do it. But it was fun because we always kind of knew, like, okay, we got to have a beginning, a middle, and an end like a sitcom. Like life doesn’t happen like that. So it was just kind of a smash of reality with kind of playing along some. And maybe I used to call it… And storytelling. Yeah, and storytelling. So I call it guided reality. So how did you manage that combination of scripting and spontaneity? It seems like a very difficult thing to pull off, especially, I presume, that before you engaged in the Duck Dynasty series, you guys weren’t actors and you didn’t have a lot of experience while certainly producing like a half scripted family sitcom. So how did you manage to keep it funny and spontaneous at the same time that you managed to impose some sort of narrative structure on it? And who was responsible for that? How did you do that? It was just talent from God. Humility. Is that the right order? I mean, for me, it was about I’d watch shows. And so what I thought was funny, and like Seinfeld, I watched shows, I was like, oh, it’s really funny how they did that. And so I tried to just do that, remain in myself. I kind of had to stay in one spot. I talked to a lady at A&E who was just brilliant, and Lily. And she wasn’t even from America, which blew me away that she’s from Argentina, came here, was working with American television. To not even grow up here, but to figure out the nuances of people from the South and how that’s funny that would go across America really just blew me away. But she always said like, you’re the boss, which I am. So you have to be the boss. And so I couldn’t stray very, very far from that, because that’s what makes it funny, because people get in trouble. And I would be like, oh, I want to goof off. And she’d be like, you have to be the boss. So I would come in there. So really, there was that dynamic that really makes comedy. Kind of like when you’re in school and someone says something that you’re not supposed to laugh at or church, and it’s so funny. You can’t help but laugh. And so it was kind of that idea. And so once we kind of got that dynamic, which was a real dynamic. I mean, I was the CEO of the company, but I’m not the oldest. And so it wasn’t my father. So there were some kind of strange things there, the dynamics of the company, because it was like dad’s company, but I was the boss. And that’s what they walked in with. It’s like, what do we got here? OK, Willie’s running it, but I’m the third from the top. And as far as siblings, dad’s not in charge. Dad’s kind of doing his own thing. And so once we got the dynamics, and then we just kind of plugged it in and said, y’all go. You know, what would happen if… And we would talk about frustrations where the guys would want to fart around, or they always want to go hunting. They didn’t want to be up there actually making the duck calls, which was a common theme. And then we just kind of went with that and just, you know. It reminds me again of this show I mentioned earlier, the Trailer Park Boys, where each of the people who are involved have adopted a pretty stable character. You know, you know more or less what their role is and what to expect from them. But then that gives them tremendous latitude to improvise. And so the Trailer Park Boys, in some ways like your show, is a mock documentary in principle. This camera crew is following these narrative wells around all the time. And a fair bit of it’s scripted, but a fair bit of it is spontaneous. And it’s often extremely witty. I also know that Guy Ritchie, you know, the British film actor who’s… Or director who’s made a number of brilliant, absolutely brilliant films. You know, what he does is he… I’ve talked to him about this. He sets up the stage and the set, and he primes the actors. And they know the story, and then they improvise the dialogue. And that’s so cool because one of the things that really makes Ritchie’s movies remarkable is the brilliance and harshness of the dialogue. And you know, he gets his actors to play along. And he really likes to work with the actors that can do that. And then the other thing that it reminds me of is what children do when they pretend. You know, so children start to pretend play when they’re about three years old. That’s when they start playing with other children in a real manner. And the way they’ll do that, you know, is they’ll take a scenario that’s somewhat typical, like a household structure, because children often play house. And they’ll assign roles, and they’ll basically lay out a script idea that everybody has to agree on. And then they improvise, and that’s actually what the pretend play is. And if the kids, if it’s going well and the kids are friends, they can get right into it, and they can do that for hours. And what they’re doing is simulating reality and experimenting with roles, and also trying to be funny and amuse each other. And so I wonder, did you have, I don’t know if the pretense, the child pretense ideas ever occurred to you before, did you ever have any sense that you said what you were doing was fun, and it stayed playful. Did you ever have any sense that you had returned to the sorts of things that children do when they’re very young? I love that analogy, because I do think that it sounds exactly like really what we did, but I never thought of it that way. But yeah. Really, that is true. And I think with this show, you had some really strong personalities. And so you had some, probably, you know, if you were kids, you’d be like, you’re the bad guy, you know, and then you’re the good guy, you’re the horse or whatever it would be. So with this one, you had some just great, really strong defining characters. So like, you had my father, who was like… The patriarch. But really strong, but not just, you know, he’s not goofy dad, like this guy’s like really strong and really opinionated. And then his brother, my Uncle Si… I don’t need a knife, I don’t need a sense of direction, I don’t even need clothes. And he’s funny and just one of the most unusual guys I’ve ever seen. Like as far as the quickness he has and how he tells stories is just epic. And so you had him that you just never know, you could almost play off him. Like he could kind of just do whatever he did. So it was like he would do that, dad would do that. And then I would go like, oh, this is perfect, you know. I’m just going to come off this. And you know, if dad’s really overplaying it, you know, I’d be like, you know, we can’t do it, you know. So I could just kind of play off of where they went or Uncle Si. But Uncle Si, you could like, I would feed him a line, like say, you know, especially with pop culture that wouldn’t make sense that he would know that. And he was so brilliant, he could just take what he would hear. And then he would throw it in there like he thought of it, you know. He would say like, I remember one time, like Beyonce, I said, Si, Si, say if you love it, you better put a ring on it. And so I would be talking to him, like, hey, Jack, if you love it, you better put a ring on it. It would just come in there. And then the editing would stop. It’s like, did he just say that? And it was so brilliant. And then if he screwed it up, it was even funnier. One time I gave him a song called This Is How We Do It by Montel Williams. So then Si goes, hey, this is the way that we do it, which was totally incorrect. But it was so funny because then the audience was like, he tried to do it, but he didn’t do it. But we really thought, you know, he just came up with that or whatever. And, you know, I think I was talking to Bill Clinton one time. And Bill Clinton, like, he pulls me in, you know, and I understood why these guys can become president because he like, he puts his hand on my shoulder. And he said, I love Duck Dynasty. And for whatever reason, I said, you don’t watch Duck Dynasty. I don’t know why I took that aggressive, like opposite approach to him. And he looks at me and he goes, you want to know why that show worked? And I was like, yeah, I would love to know why Bill Clinton thought this show worked. And the answer he gave was not just the best political answer ever because he covered every deal. He said, because it was real. And he’s looking at me, he said, it’s real. And I was thinking to myself, and I went, and he went, but if it wasn’t real, we thought it was real. And so I was like, there you go. So he really, he was like, that’s why we bought into it. And if it wasn’t, you fooled us, but we got it. So. Well, also, I think that as we were doing this and playing these roles, we were also having to play ourselves. So we were like, oh, I have to walk around as Cory. So I have to, it has to represent who I am. So that first season, there was a lot of kind of fighting through, okay, what pieces of this is storytelling and is pushing the story along and what pieces of it are us and who we are. And so I do think that was a fine line to try to find. And early seasons, I remember one specific scene, there was a scene where Willie and the guys were supposed to come to the kids school. Instead of doing that, they skipped out and went golfing. 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. 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. They’re coming in 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. Like, we just wouldn’t do that. And they wouldn’t do that to us. Like, they wouldn’t, you know, but they came in in front of our parents. They wouldn’t just lay into us, you know. And so, you know, as it plays out, the directors are like, come on, just let them have it. Aren’t you mad that they, you know, skipped out? And I was just like, we just, we wouldn’t have this conversation right here. We can’t do this. You know, this is who I am and I can’t do it. And so we ended up just kind of like scruffing that scene and they said, well, what would you do? They caught y’all with some dirty looks. Y’all just gave us dirty looks. Yeah, we gave some dirty looks. Yeah. They said, what? They edited a bunch of dirty looks. So they were like, what would you do? And I said, well, we’d have this conversation that night in our own home, you know. And so we come that night, that evening, and we filmed a whole other scene in our kitchen where Willie walks in and I kind of tell him a little bit what I thought about it. And there was a lot of discussion back and forth with the producers, you know, as we were making it. Because you’ve got to be open, you know, you can’t just say this is it. So you’ve got to be open. Because even back to the beginning of the show, Cory said, she said, I think your family should do a reality TV show. And I was like, we’re just normal people. Like I didn’t see it at all. And Cory’s like, Willie, y’all aren’t normal. Because I appreciate that because she married into this family. It was like, y’all aren’t normal. So I was like, so you’ve got to have an open ear to go and OK, other people can see this differently than what you can see yourself. And so you had to be open to producers. But I think where the dynamic got a little strange was that their idea of family or their idea of what family is was really different than ours. And so that’s I think sometimes they have more of that stereotypical. The dad’s a goofball. He’s just, you know, all he wants to do is watch football or drink a beer. You know, and mom’s the smartest one. Kids are like on their phones, like we hate this, you know. And so we broke that because of and we wanted to. We were like, not all families are like that. You know, there’s respect and there’s, you know, like my children would not roll their eyes at me and say, whatever, dad, you know, we hate this. And, you know, so and dad has a brain and he can think outside of, you know, those things are. So sometimes there was that you had to be open, I think, to listen and be like, oh, that’s really funny, 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, and so. I think that’s the mold that we really broke out of it because before that reality TV was it was all about the fight. It was all about like the train wreck. What can you like the big scenes are the ones where the tables are flipped and everyone’s fighting and everyone’s arguing where for us, the big scenes where the family is around the table. And and and there’s that like Willie mentioned, we mentioned twice, I think respect, you know, that respect for one another and for the kids and their parents and kids and their grandkids. And there was another scene where Phil, who was the granddad, you know, was was having the grandkids clean a football field, a clear field. And they just expected that the kids would be arguing, complaining, upset about it. You know, we didn’t want to do it. But instead, our kids were, of course, you know, their pep all ask them to clean a field, they’ll clean a field. And so it was just this like this this dynamic that we had to kind of work through early seasons to say like, oh, no, that’s that’s just not who we are and not what we do. So there was a part of it that was playful, but then a part of it that was also us kind of saying, 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. OK, so there’s a couple of bunch of things there that you guys drew out. So you have the Clinton comment, you know, that Duck Dynasty was popular because it was real or because we thought it was real. And you said, well, that’s real interesting on the political side, because I suppose you could say the same thing about Clinton and about many politicians. But there’s also a really interesting grain of truth there that also pertains to play. So, you know, you said and insisted that you guys had your characters and your characters actually reflected your actual personalities and that one of the decisions you made was to stay in character. And so that means that when you were fictionalizing your life and it wasn’t real, it was still real because you weren’t willing to play out roles that actually weren’t reflective of your character. And I would say that actually characterizes appropriate pretend play with children, too, because if two little kids are playing house and they can do that very, very seriously, if there’s any falseness in the game, it’s no longer a good analog of reality and the kids will get bored with it right away. If any of the players start to step out of character and break the implicit rules of the game, it’s no longer fun. And it’s because they’re not simulating reality properly. And so while you guys are playing and elaborating on your characters, even if that’s scripted, if you’re staying in character, it’s not false. It’s actually reflective of a deeper truth. And then another thing you pointed out that’s absolutely fascinating, I think, is that, you know, you said, for example, that it’s typical in a sitcom and you see this in advertisements. And this has really been true, I think, since the mid 60s, that increasingly male characters in sitcoms, especially fathers, are presented as bumbling buffoons, right? They’re presented as the sort of people that children can roll their eyes at. Now, you know, there’s a very detailed research, a body of research, laying out predictors of divorce among couples in psychotherapy. So maybe you come from marital counseling. If one or the other partner or both rolls their eyes during the sessions, which is a sign of contempt, there’s a 95% probability that that couple will be divorced in the next year. Like, contempt is a very, very bad emotion. And the idea that kids can roll their eyes at their stupid father, that’s a really, really bad idea. And it reminded me of something. Today, I’m writing this book called We Who Wrestle with God, and I was writing about Noah, the story of Noah today. And there’s a scene after the ark comes to rest after the flood. Noah plants a vineyard, and I guess, you know, he’s had kind of a rough time. So he plants a vineyard and he brews up some wine and he gets pretty rip-roaring drunk. And one of his sons comes into his tent, and Noah’s there, passed out, and he’s naked. And instead of covering him up and shutting the hell up about it, this son called Ham goes and tells his brothers that, you know, dad’s made a fool of himself and sort of gets them to come in hypothetically to poke fun at him. And instead, the other brothers come in with their backs turned and cover him up. And then, so the story goes, the descendants of Ham become the slaves, the servants and the slaves of the sons who covered up their father. And the idea there, no, this is kind of far afield from what you pointed out, but the idea there is that if you don’t have a certain degree of respect or even reverence for your father, despite his shortcomings, which we all have, then you’re doomed to a useless life. And people who are respectful will dominate over you because they’ll be, you know, their lives will go right because they’re in accordance with tradition. So the fact that not only you stayed in character in your play, no, that reflects the kind of deeper reality that obviously people were viewing in your show, but it also reflects the fact that you presented to people something like an appropriate relationship, say, between fathers and sons at a time when that’s become increasingly rare. And then the last thing I was thinking about is recently we’ve seen a strange phenomenon, and I think you guys were probably on the forefront of this, is that as our culture has become more and more obsessed with kind of an impulsive hedonism and an a-religious viewpoint, the shows that have a core element of faith in them have become absurdly popular. And you saw this in the last couple of years in particular with the success, for example, of The Chosen, which was phenomenally successful, right, that long series about Christ’s passion and his life. And then more recently with this film, The Sound of Freedom, and both of those are very fundamentally faith-based without, you know, hitting you over the head with it because the story in both cases still takes precedence by far over any expressions of it, of evangelizing faith, but I think it also speaks to the fact, and I think you guys were early to the market with this, so to speak, is that as the family disintegrates, as there’s more and more fatherless kids, as the divorce rate skyrockets and the birth rate plummets, all of those things are very negative, people have a longing not only for family, but for more traditional families, say gathered around the table, and for a traditional family that’s based in something like faith. And so, well, let’s talk about, let’s talk about first about this idea of filial or paternal respect, you know, you speak of your father with a certain degree of respect, well, an immense degree of respect, you certainly don’t regard him as a buffoon, he started the business, as far as I know, that propelled you guys into the reality TV domain, so what do you think about your father and the way he was portrayed in the show, and why do you think that portrayal was successful and accurate? Actually, I would have to say my father wasn’t really portrayed, he just was doing exactly what he was going to do, so in fact, he didn’t understand, I still, I don’t, he didn’t understand the show, I don’t know that he still understands what we were trying to do with the show, and so he still was like, this is the silliest thing I’ve ever seen, so one of my favorite scenes of him was my son, John Luke, was dating a girl, and he was going to get dating advice from his papal field, and so they’re in a boat, they’re on the water, and my dad sits him down and said, I want to explain some things to y’all, gonorrhea, syphilis, and he just starts listing sexually transmitted diseases. And I’m watching, because I wasn’t in that scene, so as I’m watching on TV, I’m just belly laughing, this is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, because it’s the same exact speech that I heard when I was his age, like 15, Phil just went straight to the sexually transmitted diseases, he left out one, and he was so upset, so I went up to him and I said, Dad, I said, that was, I saw the scene with you and John Luke, and I said, it was so funny, and Dad’s not smiling, he went, Will, I’m not joking, I said, I know you weren’t joking, that’s what made it so funny, and he said, I forgot about Chlamydia, I forgot, you know, he was still like, bothered that he forgot one that he left out. So I don’t know that the show portrayed, I mean, I think Phil was exactly what he wanted, he wanted more, he told me, he said, I think we should have more preaching on the show, and I said, Dad, there’s another Robertson family that has a show, it’s the 700 Club, they preach, let us do this, and if they want more, they can come later, and so, but the dynamics of the show, as far as when we talked about the show, Phil just did what he did, and we just worked around it, which I thought was so funny, because for a lot of dads, especially, you know, older guys were, you know, especially his age, where they just do what they want to do, they say what they want to say, and you just deal with it, you know. So why in the world was he willing to go along with this at all? Because it’s so absurd, it’s so preposterous, right? I mean, it’s like your family, you wouldn’t have confused you guys with the Kardashians, and I’m not trying to, you know, throw out gratuitous insults to the Kardashians, but you wouldn’t have confused your family with the Kardashians, and you wouldn’t presume that your father was the sort of person who would decide that a reality TV show for his family was really a good thing or something he wanted to participate in, so why did he go along with it, and what made him successful at it? Well, I think he, I mean, I think there were two things, I mean, one part was because Dad said, I don’t think people are going to watch this show, you know, why would they watch us? And I said, well, Dad, there’s a bigger platform, I think we could, because he’s passionate as we are about sharing the gospel. I said, there’s a bigger platform, and I think you’ll be able to share the gospel with more people with this platform as opposed to around here, you know, like in our little, and so, and Phil did, he was like, hey, if you think it’ll help, if you think if we can get the gospel out more, then I’m willing to do it. That wasn’t it, I mean, also I was like, Dad, I think they’ll pay us money, I think we can make good money, and we can, and so that was part of it, I mean, my dad was in his mid-60s, so he’s like at retirement age, and we didn’t have a lot of money, and he was like, well, this could be, this could be, you know, something to do, and so. I will say, though, interestingly, Phil, so Phil was the one who started actually filming himself, so back in like the 80s, we had a hunting business, and he thought, I wonder if people would want to watch our hunts, and literally bought a video camera, the sound guy from our church filmed them hunting in the duck blind. We didn’t buy one, we borrowed one at first. Borrowed one, yeah. The first ones we borrowed, and then. And so made, yeah, made a DVD, or VHS tape, actually, of the hunt, and it was. It was like duck hunts, which it was kind of like, it was pretty much Clint Eastwood or Josie Wells duck, if he duck hunted, and it was, Dad was like really into Clint Eastwood. Mixed with like classic rock, because he was all like old rock. He was very irreverent, like back then, he would like, we had a spitting scene, like everybody would have like giant shoes at the back, and like it’d be slow motion spitting. But there was like a grassroots people that were like, we love this. It was kind of in your face for like the proper, and I think my dad was always kind of anti-wealthy, proper, and so he was kind of always fighting the system, and so to him, he was like, this is how we do it. It was in your face, it was like raw, gritty hunting, and kind of working man’s type of hunting. This is not your, you know, buy all your property, and you know, because they grew up super poor, and so yeah, so Phil did do that. You know, he had these, he had the videos that went into TV on outdoor channel, and then, so when this came, it was, you know, I think he was more open, but I think he thought, man, this is going to get a lot bigger, and the production will be bigger, which we knew it would. So that’s kind of how he, I guess, we talked him into it, and he agreed to it. The Bible is the root of all wisdom, inspiration, and spiritual nourishment. The Hallow App empowers you to explore the Bible’s profound teachings and to effortlessly incorporate them into your daily life. A great place to start while you deepen your understanding of the Bible is to check out Father Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year, available on the Hallow App for brief daily readings and reflections. 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That’s Hallow.com slash Jordan. Hallow.com slash Jordan for an exclusive three-month free trial of all 10,000 plus prayers and meditations. Okay, so that’s cool in three ways, you know, listening to this from a Canadian perspective. I always feel a bit like an anthropologist when I’m in the United States because your culture is similar to ours, but it has very interesting differences. And there’s something extremely American about the story you just laid out because, first of all, there’s that, you talked about Clint Eastwood, there’s sort of that backwoods rebel thing going on that’s really a powerful part of American culture. You know, the alienated cowboy who’s really a solid guy at heart, who’s an anti-establishment figure, but also a traditionalist. I mean, that’s an unbelievably deep American trope and an extremely successful one. And then, you know, you said your dad, too, was interested in this, in doing the family series, partly because he had some interest in evangelizing. Right now, you said that you guys didn’t want to take that to any extreme. And I think, obviously, that was an extremely good decision, because if your show would have ever got preachy, people would have just shut it off, right? That faith had to be something implicit and displayed, but not something that you were beating people over the head with to convince them, because who the hell wants to watch propaganda, which is something that the entertainment industry is going to have to figure out again. And then you have this interesting additional aspect that’s also deeply American. You know, you said, well, your dad also thought this was probably, at least in potential, a good way to grow the business and to make money. And, you know, you think about how American it is for those three things to meet. There’s the Clint Eastwood, you know, alienated, lone, backwards cowboy with his middle finger up to the system. There’s a bit of Protestant evangelizing mixed in there. And then the last of it is you know, this eye to the market and to entrepreneurial activity. And all three of those things, those American character, logical elements seem to come together in your show. You know, I bet your father really secretly enjoyed all this. I don’t imagine he would let on, but my guess is that there was part of him too that was thinking, this is actually pretty cool, although I’ll never tell my damn sons that. 100% Yes, spot on. He’s actually still doing it. He’s got a podcast that he does four days a week and he loves it. And also, yeah, it was fun to see actually, Phil and Kay and Uncle saw how they all like became younger as we were doing it because they had fun with it. And the family was all together. You know, it was such a blessing that our kids got to be with their grandparents and their aunts and uncles and all that on just a daily basis. Like we were, you know, when you film, you’re there a long time. It’s a long time where things are happening, you’re filming, there’s a lot of sitting around where they’re setting up lights and cameras. And so we just got to be together as a family even more. We’ve always been together as family a lot because we just kind of do life like that and live, you know, live in close proximity and have meals together. But when you’re filming, we were really together. And it was fun. It was a blessing to get to do that. It was a blessing, I think, for our kids to get to have that time with their grand, you know, their grandparents. That was even a more intimate time together. Yeah, there was like these odd combinations of family members, whatever scene you were in. And it, but you’re having to like, I’m depending on my eight year old nephew, you know, during this scene, I’m like, come on, buddy, we got this. And so I may be depending on my uncle or someone else. And so it was kind of, you would be stuck here for hours, you know, but it was really fun. I think that’s what we, you know, kind of miss. And, but you’re right, dad would, dad would gripe about it. And this is, you know, he would cry. But then the minute our show ended, he was doing a podcast the next week, like, and he was out there filming in the woods. And he does like four hours a week, which is mind blowing to me to be doing that much. And so it is funny. He would, he would complain about it on one hand, but then, but he, you know, he certainly thinks, you know, Willie’s mom, on the other hand, this was her chance to be a star and she had a blast. She loved it. She would carry in her purse, like headshots of herself, different headshots. So she would lay them out, like at the grocery store for someone to pick from. And I, and, and she would say, Willie, everybody recognized me. And I said, mom, your shirt said Ms. Kay. Like, like you’re wearing like a shirt, like with your face on it. Of course they, they recognize you. And so it was just fun watching them kind of have this complete different lease on life. You know, when, when, like I said, they thought, I think, you know, I mean, when we took over the company, I remember my dad told me, he said, I think everybody has a duck call. Like it’s over. And this is 10 years before the ducknosh happens. I was like, well, there may be something left in this company. And, but he had kind of thought that was it. You know, we did good. And from where they came from to where they ended up, I thought they felt successful, but they had no idea of the wild ride that was coming within the next couple of decades. So Corey, you married into this family and we discussed earlier the observation that, well, it was a two pronged observation that on the one hand, the duck dynasty family was far from normal, but on the other hand, they actually represented a return to a kind of traditional Norman ideal. So there’s a paradoxical mix there of idiosyncrasy and, and peculiarity in the best sense, but also grounded in something that’s really recognizable and traditional. And one of the things that struck me, you know, my family has ridden a wave of notoriety and popularity, I suppose, that’s lasted now, probably it’s almost 10 years since it really started. And that places all sorts of opportunities in front of you, but also all sorts of stresses when now you’ve, you’ve obviously entered the family, let’s say as an outsider and you could see their idiosyncrasies, but you’ve also been able to see whatever it is that’s enabled them to pull together and to stay together. 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, is that despite the rapid transformation of your lives in all sorts of unexpected, truly unexpected directions, the family seems to have done a good job of staying together and maybe even getting more closely knit. 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. So Corey, how do you think it is, what’s your observation of why the Duck Dynasty family actually managed to do this without, well, without all turning into like raving narcissistic alcoholics and having any everything go to hell in a hand basket, which is, you know, a pretty likely outcome, all things considered? Yeah, I think there was a real rootedness and a groundedness in our place and who we are and our faith, of course, is the thing, is the ultimate thing that plays into that. But I think that just, we did stay true to who we are and we stayed in our hometown. Like, we’re still here. Like, we didn’t move away to LA and Hollywood. And that’s one thing that I remember whenever we were in the middle of it. And it was crazy. You know, people like our warehouse, people just started showing up by the thousands. We would leave our place of work every day and there’d be just hundreds of people out there. And, you know, it was crazy. But I think during that time period, I remember looking at other celebrities who kind of like moved away and were doing it on their own and being so grateful that we were doing it as a family because we had one another to kind of like be there in it together and keep each other grounded in that. And also there is a, I think, whenever someone reaches this level of kind of fame or celebrity, there’s a, it’s a strange kind of loneliness that can happen because you do get a little isolated. You can’t go out and do the things that you maybe used to do because there is so much attention or whatever. And because we were able to do it as a family and we still had one another and we could come back to our same church or same school or same friends or same that type of thing. So we could go out into the world and kind of like do these fun things and big things. But then we kind of came back to this home that where there was a lot of really deep roots. So why do you think you didn’t move away? I mean, famously with the Beverly Hillbillies, as soon as they struck oil, they were off to Hollywood and hilarity ensued. But you guys made a conscious decision. And maybe that was partly to keep the show on the track that it was. Why didn’t you transform your life radically and move away? And I presume also you haven’t done that since. You’ve decided that where you’re situated and situated in a genuine life that has like a multi-generational history that that actually works really well for you. Why weren’t you tempted to seek, let’s say, hypothetically broader horizons? I was never tempted to move from where this is. I guess mostly because we have so much family connect because we’re both from here. Cory’s parents are here. We have like so many different connections here. And so moving away wouldn’t have been advantageous. It wouldn’t have been, and actually, if you take us out, like what makes us who we are, it was here. It was being in Louisiana. I don’t know that us being and living in LA or New York would really make sense even business-wiser for what we do. I mean, I felt like the show was here and that’s where we needed to be. And so, but yeah, that was one of all the things I’ve thought about. I’ve never had any desire to actually move to another place. And yeah, as Billy mentioned, my family’s here as well. So in our neighborhood is my parents, my grandmother, who’s in her nineties, aunts and uncles and all that. And so we just feel like that’s a real blessing to not take for granted and not to lose. And it’s been really neat to see as our kids have kind of grown up. So as the show ended, our kids were all kind of starting college and moving into this high school years, college years, and they’ve all gone away to college and come back here, which has been really awesome for us. And now we have grandkids here. So on this street actually where we live, there’s five generations. And I think that that’s just, it’s not the norm anymore. And so it’s not something to be taken for granted. So we wouldn’t want to give that up for anything. Yeah. And there’s nothing in another, like, I hate traffic and I hate so many people. Like, I don’t know how people live like this. It’s just crazy. And so if you’re talking about food, I can cook anything I want to cook. And as far as being in the outdoors, I can get there. And so, yeah, no other city. I just, every time I enjoy visiting for a second, and then I always think I would never want to live in a city like this or this big. So. Yeah. When I grew up in my small town, Fairview, Alberta, there was about 3000 people there. And it was about 50 years old. And it was about 400 miles from the nearest city of any size. It was literally on the edge of the northernmost part of the prairie and in part of the country, part of the North American Plain that had been settled last. I mean, I had friends whose fathers had established homesteads there when there were still tepees of Cree Indians on the land. And that was in 1937. So it was really the last edge of the frontier. You know, and it’s funny because in our town, people sort of bifurcated into two tracks. There were the kids who knew they were going to leave this small town, Fairview. And we, the kids who knew that probably knew that when they were about 10 or 11, they were going to get away from the little town. They’re going to go off to usually the university, off to the city, and then out into the world. And most, many people didn’t do that. Many people stayed. And it wasn’t necessarily because they were attracted, say, to the kind of family life that you guys are talking about, but because, and you know, I’m not trying to disseminate characterological assassinations here. They were often people who hadn’t really formulated a vision of where they wanted to go in life and didn’t leave mostly because leaving would have required planning, you know. But it wasn’t the case. Like, it seemed to be in our community that if you were headed for something approximating broader horizons and success, you were definitely going to leave. And that was really encouraged. You know, my wife, for example, her mom and dad loved her and they had a good family and still do. But her graduation present was luggage. And the message, and that was very common where I grew up, and the message was, you know, get the hell out of here and get out into the world. Now, you guys are pretty adventurous and you’re pretty entrepreneurial, but interestingly enough, you decided to stay within the confines of your family and to build that. And I wonder why those differences were the case. And I wonder also, I guess you got enough, what did you get? You got enough satisfaction of your adventurous impulses within the family structure that you guys had created. Was that partly a consequence of being able to participate, let’s say, in your father’s business? Like, what was it about growing up there that gave you enough adventure? Well, I mean, I can find adventure in a lot of things. So it’s like, because we, I mean, just growing up on the river, like we didn’t really have anything, but there was so much adventure on the river and climbing around it and paddling, not just boats, but paddling chunks of styrofoam or paddling a log down the creek where it had danger was like, in fact, when I go back now, I’m like, I could have really died at any point, like, as I’m looking like this could have been bad, and this could have been bad. But so there was a lot of adventure. And I think as we got into before the show, we didn’t have a lot of money. I think we were, we were kind of like, wow, what’s going to end up happening from this? And then once we did the show, we were able to travel a lot. And so we do travel a lot. So we’re going all over, and honestly, mostly for work. I mean, we go to do all over the world, we do stuff. And so I guess coming back home, I’m like, okay, now we’re back home. This is what matters. So I’ll say, so Willie, growing up, I knew we met in fourth grade at summer camp. And one of the things that always struck me about Willie was he was so entrepreneurial, even as a kid, like he was always creating these businesses. And his family lived in the house that they live in on the show, but he was even smaller at that time, it was two bedrooms. And so all our teenage years, Willie fixed up the laundry room or the cook shack that was his room, he was always like, making himself something special, like a little special room or a special this. So like, I saw this kind of spirit of like adventure and entrepreneurship, even, even as a kid or the teenager, as we kind of went through life together, we started dating, we got married, we were 18 and 19. And for my family, we actually traveled a lot. And I think travel is such a gift, and we wanted to give that to our kids. And, you know, there were times whenever we didn’t have enough money to travel with our kids, but we wanted to find ways to do that. We, we bought an exchange student actually, who became our daughter, Rebecca. And because we wanted to expose our kids to other cultures and other things. So even though we had that, that deep sense of like home, we do just really value. Yeah, travel and openness and seeing the world. And I think that that just brings in a whole nother depth to children and to people, because you understand kind of your place in it. And it’s so much bigger than you. And sometimes we can, if we stay in our hometowns, like stay in these small towns, you can get this sense that it’s like, oh, it’s all about whatever’s happening right here. And we just always wanted to really kind of expose our kids and our family to, oh, this world is a lot bigger than what’s going on right here in this little piece. Well, you know, the other one of the things that travel does, and this has been noted by literary figures pretty much forever, is that you don’t really know what you have until you leave it, right? Because you take it for granted. And you can’t even see that you have a culture until you go to a different culture, because you just take everything that you think is normal for granted, and you think it’s normal. And then when you go somewhere else where normal is different, you realize that no, you actually came from a particular place in a particular time. And, and you have your peculiarities because of it. And that can make you, well, it should, if you’re wise, that should make you more, first of all, more conscious of what you have, but also more grateful for it. We can return to that theme of gratitude. And so it sounds like you guys got the balance between familial stability and predictability and adventure in the world optimized, right? So you, you’re not, you’re not bounded by what you’ve learned, let’s say in Louisiana, because you’ve traveled all over the place and you’ve been able to see it from the outside. And so you can get all that varied experience and still remain grounded in your community. So, so that’s very, that’s another really optimized form of play. So let, let me ask you a little bit about the business side of things, because I’m very curious about that. So your father made these DVDs, that’s the Buckman series, if I understand it correctly. And so he was starting to play with video pretty early, right? So that was pretty, that was smart because video in the hands of, you know, non-Hollywood types or non-network types, it was the dissemination of early video technology that allowed that. Then eventually morphed into, well, the kind of thing we’re doing today with YouTube, people have these broadcast tools at hand. Your dad was in that very early, you know, and I started to record my lectures. The first ones I recorded were in 1992. You know, there was no way of disseminating them, but I eventually did put them on YouTube, but I started putting my lectures online in 2013. You know, and that was part of laying the groundwork for what eventually grew into the widespread distribution of my lectures and my podcasts. Now, you know, I mean, large things tend to start small. And, you know, for the first five, first three years, the average viewings for my lectures were probably under 50,000, which is still a lot of people, right? When you’re accustomed to lecturing to like two or 300, 50,000 is a number definitely worth paying attention to. But your dad caught on to the use of video early. And how, okay, how did that contribute to the success of his business? And how did that morph into the Duck dynasty opportunities? Yeah. So dad started in the 80s. So we had this barred equipment. He had a guy at the church who was a sound guy and he said, Hey, let’s go shoot a video. I believe it was over three or four days. They kind of really played into my father had played college football with Terry Bradshaw. He had the beard and it was funny watching the video. He’s kind of looking down. He’s kind of humble. He’s not like in your face yet. And so they make the video. I think they sold, what is it say, 200 or 150 copies. So way less than your 50,000 people. This was, in fact, it was pretty much like, well, that didn’t work. You know, however, he was like, now I think we got some. So every couple of years they were going to do another one and then they were going to put more footage and more. And so that was going okay. The big break we had was, was when Walmart started carrying our duck calls and then Walmart put the VHS is in Walmart sporting goods. So now we’re in about 2,500 stores all over the country. So we’re in Northern California. We’re on the Eastern shore. We’re up in the Midwest. And that was the game changer. So because they could watch something and get fired up and say, man, look at this guy. And I think we appealed at that point again, with the spitting and with the Southern accents and and just other unusual things that my father would do with the music and all that. We just really got this underground, you know, it was like a swell of people going, hey man, we love that. We love watch this. Then they would watch them. Like we get ready for the duck season. They would put them in and say, now we’ve got to get fired up. And they’d watch them over and over and over. They’d memorize some of the lines that he would do. And so all that we felt like was such preparation to build up, which would ultimately be Duck Dynasty on A&E. 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. 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? And we had had just enough to know, especially how to entertain people. 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. There was no computer. So if you told a story, you had to tell it and bring it. 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. So like everybody’s brutally honest with you. And so you learn how to do that again. I feel like all that played into, you know, that and that’s how the videos did that. 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. And so their home phone number was the business. And so at the end of the video, there’d be a phone number. And if you want more products, and people would call and be back on the back of the VHS tape or the DVD. And so, yeah, people just started calling. 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. Well, then once it got in Walmart, of course, all of a sudden, you get phone calls from all over. And we’re the ones answering the phone, like as a teenager, 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. And so that’s when we just started seeing it growing. 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. Not coincidentally, Walmart was whenever during Duck Dynasty, we were in, I think, 22 different departments in Walmart. And they said that they’d never had this, no other brand, including like Coca-Cola, Disney, any other brand had ever done this. So we had the number one seller in men’s, women’s, kids and juniors in the apparel department. And they said they’d never seen it before that the same brand crossed all the categories at the same time. So that was pretty cool. Are you looking for an all-in-one e-commerce platform that can help you easily set up and grow your business online? Look no further than Shopify. With Shopify, you can quickly and easily build your own online store, manage your inventory and accept payments from customers. Plus, Shopify offers a range of customizable themes and templates to choose from. So you can create a professional looking store without any design experience. 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And it’s the famous story of the burning bush. 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. He’s left Egypt. He was kind of a nobleman in Egypt, but he killed an Egyptian and he had to like get the hell out of there. And he went to a different country to Midia. Midia? I think it’s Midia. The Midianites live there anyways. And he draws some water from a well for some women and they’re pretty happy about it. And you think he chases some rude like punk shepherds away. 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. And so he’s just minding his own damn business, fundamentally being a shepherd. He’s out there in the middle of nowhere, unknown. And he’s wandered around one day and something catches his attention. And he turns off his path. And the story makes this quite clear. It’s not like it screams in front of him. It’s kind of off the beaten path a little bit. Something glimmers and catches his attention and he decides to pay attention and go look. And as he gets closer to it, he realizes it’s this bush on fire. 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. And then the secret of being itself reveals itself to him. That’s God revealing his name. And that’s when Moses becomes leader. And you might say, well, what the hell does that story have to do with anything? 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. Now and then something will glimmer and gleam for us that’ll capture our attention, you know, and we can choose to pay attention to that or not. Now Moses pays attention to it, but so did your dad, right? So you said he’d done some sound work, for example, for the local church. And so he developed a little bit of expertise with the new technology. And then he had this idea, which is, you know, it’s not exactly a normal idea. It’s pretty experimental and entrepreneurial idea that he could take this new technology that he was interested in and do something unique with it. 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. And then you said too, that I also think so interesting is, and you know, and everybody who’s watching and listening should listen to this, because what I see happening to people in their life all the time is that an opportunity will gleam for them. And they notice they’re interested in it, but then they don’t have the discipline or maybe the courage to pursue it. They’re afraid they’d fail. They’re afraid it would be foolish. They’re afraid they would look bad. And so they put it aside. And so it looks like they’ve missed nothing, but maybe they missed, you know, the burning bush and God speaking to them. Maybe they missed the whole adventure of their life. 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, is that, well, first of all, your father pursued this strange interest that he had, and then did something somewhat preposterous, which was to make these films that were sort of tongue in cheek about his duck hunting, you know, and to play himself as a character. But then also, when the entrepreneurial opportunities came along, you guys also jumped on them and said, yes. And that really, you know, that really flowered outward, grew outward like a bush, let’s say, when it came to Walmart. Right. 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. You know, you have people, hear people say this all the time, he sold out, or I would never sell out. 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. 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. 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. 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. And your dad was obviously canny enough to pursue his creative interests, and that’s very interesting, say on the, and his experimental interests to make these videos, but also to say yes when a business opportunity came his way. You know, and you said, well, that just grew, 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. And people miss those opportunities for expansion when they say no to things that they should say yes to, right? And they get high and mighty about it, and it’s stupid. You should be happy if an opportunity comes your way. Absolutely. Yeah. We both can, 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 utilize in growing the business was that spirit of like risk and entrepreneurship, and it’s okay. And I think that, so our family had a lot of businesses, and some failed, and some were, a few were successful, really successful, but a lot of them fell. Walmart bought one of your businesses. Actually, yeah. Sam Walton bought one of our family businesses. That’s a, I forgot. Yeah, that’s true. So, interestingly, yeah, so I grew up in kind of this home where risk taking 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. And I think back to faith as being kind of this undergirding of that. It’s like, if you know that you’re going to be okay if it fails, and I think that was told to us, you know, over and over again growing up, my dad would say, hey, if we lose it all tomorrow, it’s all right. We still got what’s most important. 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. 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. Well, I’d say the difference to like, obviously not knowing your family for so long, but even back then, there was a bunch of different tries at it. 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. I think growing up where we were like with with the commander and the business, that was it. We’re saying we’re all in like, we’re all in like, there wasn’t like, I would try this on the side. 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, because it was like, because most of it was being fueled by the personality or wasn’t like we had tons of money ever invested. It was like, you know, but we are this is what we’re going for. And we could always, you know, that 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, the standards were low. It’s like, hey, we’re, we’re totally happy and what we’ve got, you know. That’s very cool. Like you outlined something very interesting there, because one of the things that people might be thinking about is, well, what, what constitutes failure and what constitutes success and how do you, how do you stop failure from taking you out? And one of the things you both pointed out is that you’re actually pretty careful about defining failure. 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. 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. And then I might also ask you, you know, cause you had your family, you had things in place that weren’t going to shift even if something shifted, right? So you have some security in that regard that enables you to take risks. But then we also might think about failure too. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. And Cory, you talked about your father and his attitude towards failure. 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. You’re going to generate ideas and some of them are really going to go somewhere, but most won’t. And that’s typical of entrepreneurs. Like most people who make a fortune have failed enough to be in financial distress multiple times before they finally formulate something that works. But that doesn’t mean that those, that they were failing. 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 call it, the ups and downs of trying to make something eventually successful. Now, you also said that was grounded in your faith. So you have your family, you have your fishing, right? 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? I think you, 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. Like success is faithfulness. Success is a healthy marriage. Success is a family, kids that love you and that want to live beside you. Successes are all of these things. 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. And it’s okay if this doesn’t work or this doesn’t work, as long as this is working. And I think that goes back to faithfulness. And for us, that’s rooted in our faith in God because that’s what changes everything for us. 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. And then everything that we do reflects that. And so you mentioned in our show, it wasn’t preaching and it wasn’t meant to be preaching. It was just our faith shown through because it’s who we are. It’s how we relate to one another in marriage. It’s how we relate to our kids. It’s how we treat one another at work. It just informs everything that we do. 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. It’s what makes us laugh. I mean, it’s what brings us joy because it’s like, so when I think about, because you said it’s rooted in our faith, to me it’s the ultimate and nothing is wasted is rooted in the faith because you would say, well, what about when you really screwed up or what about when this happened and this was terrible? That’s what triggers back that faith again going, oh no, it’s not a waste. To where if you were looking at Jesus Christ going, what a waste, they killed him. He’s like, ah, not a waste. This was for you. So everything keeps going back and it always is like, nothing’s wasted. Can I take something where I really messed up? We’re like, ah, this is bad. Can I take that and use that? And yes, that can be used. Yes, that can be used to help not just you. And if you think about life unselfishly, it may help someone else. It may be, ah, this is really hard for me, but wow, it really helped you. It really helped someone else. And I think that’s why we say it’s rooted there because nothing becomes wasted. Everything becomes something that can be used for, we think, for the glory of God ultimately, because we have to put ourselves down as well. The life’s not all about us, for sure. Okay, so Cory, you outlined a very interesting, I would call it a hierarchy of values. 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. So this is what you basically said to me. You know, you said the sense, first of all, your head is screwed on straight with regard to what constitutes success. Now, you know, you could say, well, success is cocaine and hookers and, you know, the extension of a radically hedonistic life. You can do whatever the hell you want, whenever you want. And the clear problem with that is you tend to die, right? You end up face down in a ditch and you take a lot of people with you. So it’s kind of a stupid definition of success. You had a very prosaic definition of success, right? It’s very normal, but also ideal at the same time. You said, and I think you said in this order, you said a good marriage, a good family and good friends. 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. You said if things are working well there, and this is somewhat independent of economic status, then you’re successful. 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? You think, well, and you have a grounds for gratitude. And then you implied too that all of that was nested inside a religious faith, right? So that’s this turning toward God. And so it’s God underneath the marriage, underneath you, underneath the marriage, underneath your family, underneath your friends. And so then, and Willie, you said as well that your faith, and this was your religious faith, enabled you to laugh. Okay, so a couple of things on that. First thing is, one of the benefits to Christian faith is that you have a good standard of comparison. 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. 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. 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. So that’s helpful. 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. And I would say, I can understand the idea of the good marriage. I can understand the idea of the close family and your friendship network. 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, 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? 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? 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. 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. And so there’s also a scripture of talking about the aroma of Christ and that we’re lights of the world and we’re salt of the earth. All these things that, you know, scripture says about us as we are embodied by the spirit is how we try to live. And so I think those things just kind of come out of whatever aspect you’re doing and whatever thing you’re living. Not that we’re perfect in it by any means, of course, 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. 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. The way I see reflected, like, especially on the show is, you know, when it comes down to just the show and how we’re on, 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 had the goods, 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. I mean, there were times with production, there were so many things going on where I could just lost my mind. 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. And so, you know, you had to keep that together to actually do that. And I think just to remain playful and not become so serious, you know, when you were talking about 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 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. 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, I mean, this is, you know, plus life is short. I mean, it’s really short. 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, you’re gone. So, so that’s, I think that that comes out in faith as well. You point out two things there that are interesting. 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. 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. Well, first of all, you know, you did say in some ways it isn’t that you hedged your bets, you protected yourself because you had your marriage and your family and your friends, and you weren’t going to risk that in your all in, 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. 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, pretty naturally special, right? 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, you know, because you could imagine if tens of millions of people thought you were the saviour of your country, who are you to say that you’re not? 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, and you’re not that, whatever you are, no matter how spectacular you are in successful, you’re definitely not that. If you don’t have that and you accumulate faith, fame and notoriety, like what’s stopping you from confusing yourself stupidly with the deity? You know, 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, 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. We’re in our home right now in our dining room. 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. It was thinking of that as you were saying it. It starts out saying love must be sincere, hate what is evil, cling to what is good, but then it goes on to talk about not taking, 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. You need to be hospitable, and all these things are kind of right there in that Romans 12 scripture that we have over our table, and so it’s just that constant reminder, you know, to, yeah, that we are up under something that’s greater than us. So can I, we’re starting to approach the end of this part of our discussion. 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. 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. When we were planning this interview, this podcast discussion, you talked to me a little bit about your future plans, 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? Yeah, so after the show ended, we, and as we’ve talked about, just saw kind of that impact of entertainment, and so we started a production company called Tread Lively Productions, and our first film is coming out September 28th in theaters, and it’s called The Blind. 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. We’ve talked a lot about kind of the success of it and what happened after, but this is the story before. It’s interesting that we chose to go back and tell the hard days, the hard parts of the story, because I think when you see a family like ours on television, sometimes you could think, oh, of course God used them. They all love each other, and they’re all this, but actually, scripturally, and you’ve mentioned several people in the Bible that God used for big things, but that were really flawed and had really, you know, had these hard stories, 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, but instead, God uses the people who are weak but that surrender their lives to him, and so this is the family story. It’s Phil and Kay’s story, really. Willie was two in the movie, and he was actually played by our grandson, which was really fun, but this is their story, and their ten hard years of marriage that Kay got pregnant in high school, and they went off to college together and had ten hard years where Phil was an alcoholic. He, you know, was adulterous. He had all the things that you would say, this family will never make it, you know, it’s over, and there was a point where it was over, you know. Kay had moved to West Monroe, which is why they ended up here, because Phil had kicked her out of the house, and it was just a real low point in their family life, and a pastor went to the bar where Phil, you want to tell this part of it? His sister, yeah. Well, my dad’s sister, my Aunt Jan, begged this pastor to go up and preach the gospel to her brother, and I can just imagine this conversation, like, it’s in a different state, you know. It’s like, oh, time to come to church, and, you know, it’s like, no, he’s running a bar in southern Arkansas, and that preacher got in that car and drove to that bar and walked into this bar, and Phil was not happy to see him. It was very adversarial, and he shares his faith with him, and, you know, nothing happens. Phil says, I’ll keep that in mind, 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, 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, and when he got to that point, that’s when he looked back up and said, hey, let me talk to that preacher again, 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 was completely different, none of this, I mean, it’s like the whole, you know, I don’t go to the church camp to meet her. I’m not talking to you. 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. Who knows what would have, how that would have ended up. There would have been no Doug Commander, no Doug Dynasty. No, that would have happened, 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, 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. Dad had kicked us out. The only thing that turned him around was that faith in Jesus Christ and said, amen, 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, it was almost like he saw it, like, like, sawed him. This is all detailed, you said, in the blind? Yes, 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. 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, and that’s really their family story. It was just this miraculous event in their family’s life where, you know, Jesus revealed himself to Phil. He changed his life. He turned his life to him. 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 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. Yeah, well, that’s so, it’s so interesting. 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, and that’s actually pretty good for everyone, because everyone is flawed, 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. 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 goodwill and you’re willing to operate in the world properly. 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, and Moses couldn’t speak properly, and that’s continually, he actually had to ally himself with his brother Aaron. Now, we don’t know why, 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. 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, and yet he became the ultimate archetypal leader, and I think sometimes people become successful because of their flaws rather than despite them, 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. 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, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Solzhenitsyn found himself in the most dreadful circumstances you could really possibly imagine, the most hopeless circumstances, 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 we admitted to his faults. 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, and so the Russians were dreadfully and absolutely unprepared when the Germans came marching forward. 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, and then he was in a prison camp for like decades, and he got cancer, and you know, he was three quarters starved to death, and he had to memorize this damn book, and you couldn’t imagine someone more powerless than Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a more hopeless situation, and yet he formulated a book in his imagination that eventually brought the entire communist enterprise to a shuddering halt, 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, and you could also imagine that if you had any sense, you’d be pretty down on yourself in a situation like that. You might think you’re the sort of basket case that could never be redeemed, and yet, as you pointed out, there was hope for redemption even in those circumstances, and the proper decision led to a whole array of extremely positive events, and so, you know, maybe no matter how deep the abyss you manage to plunge yourself into, if you take responsibility for your flaws and look up, there’s still hope, and that’d be nice if it was true, and it sounds like this movie is laying that out, you know, as biographical fact, now when is it coming out? September 28th, and yeah, you just said exactly what we hope, you know, for the film, that’s the message is really that there’s no one too far gone, you know, there’s no one that’s without hope, and that’s really the message of the film, I believe. And did you, how has it been finding distributors? Has that been an easy thing for you guys, or have you run into obstacles on that front? I know the people who did the Beyond Freedom movie, for example, they had a hard time finding distributors, partly because it was a faith-based movie. You have a much broader track record of commercial success, so I imagine that worked in your favor, but how has it been finding distributors, and what are your predictions? Are you happy with the film, and what are your predictions about its reception and its success? Yeah, there’s definitely obstacles to finding distributors for our film, and I think other faith-based films, so we’re doing a Fathom release, which we’re grateful for Fathom, and they’ve been fantastic to work with. Right now, I believe we’re in 1,800 theaters, and that’s growing day by day, so we’re very excited about that. But yeah, it has definitely, you know, it’s not without its challenges. There are gatekeepers to what gets out there, and so we’re seeing a little bit of that, but we’re really excited about how it turned out. It’s been a couple years’ work and progress of like all in, like we talked about, just going all in to make sure we tell the story the right way and in a beautiful way, and it the film came out just beautifully done. Every single person that worked on it did just above and beyond, and we’re very proud of it. Yeah, and it says this is a true story, because it’s pretty much since mom and dad are alive, and we were able to talk to so many people, it’s exactly what they told us had happened, and so that’s been real neat to be able to put that together, and it’s interesting. Like we talk about a Christian movie, but 95% of this movie is not Christian, because none of them were Christians, and so it wasn’t to the end where they actually embraced this faith or whatever, and so it’s just a real story of like how damaging, you know, people can make their lives, and my father had certainly done that, you know, a lot of hope and promise, but then he just went terribly south, and then when all hope seemed lost, that’s when the gospel came in there, and so it pretty much ends right when dad becomes a believer. He gets the idea like, okay, now once he’s sobered up, I can maybe build up calls, and then it just, you know, obviously we know how it ends, because here we are now, but that’s that story. It’s a timepiece set in the 60s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, so it’s kind of cool going back in time and seeing how, you know, shockingly the places we shot it right near where they grew up, and it pretty much looks the same. It looks like it’s been stuck in time anyway. 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, 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. 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, and, you know, we’ve gotten none of that. That’s been really rewarding to see, too. Even our kids, you know, whenever we first showed our kids, you know, that’s the test. You’re like, they’re all in their 20s, you know, are they going to think this is good? And they were like, whoa, that’s like a real movie. That’s not cheesy at all. It’s not, you know, preachy or anything like that. I think it’s just really beautifully done, and we’re really, really proud of it. Tell us again the release date? September 28th, and yeah, there’s a website, theblindmovie.com, that you can go and kind of look for your theater and all that. All right, so let me ask you one final question. People are going to be wondering how this discussion came about. And so I don’t remember exactly how we made initial contact. I remember we met at a corporate event. Willie, you and I met at a corporate event. That was the first time we had a chance to speak in person. But do you remember how it is that we made contact to begin with and why? Yes, so in a random way. So first of all, our son, John Luke, read your book years ago and gave it to me. And we’re big readers. We love to read. And he was like, Mom, read this. So good. Twelve Rules, that one. And then we went back and read Mouths and Meaning and all that and just started listening to your podcast and have loved you and followed you and prayed for your family. That’s a gift that people give us. They tell us as we’re walking around, like, oh, we pray for your family. And so we’ve prayed for your family over the years and have just followed along in your journey. And it was similar in timeline. We came out in 2012, so similar kind of in timeline as well. And so actually a year or so ago, I was in Copenhagen and met a friend there in Copenhagen. And he said that you had been there the week before and we got into a discussion. And so I asked if he’d share my email with you so that we could kind of exchange emails. And we did that for a minute. I kind of told you a little bit about our family, but we didn’t connect until Willie met you at the Dave Ramsey speaking conference. 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. So you were going to be there. Corey was not able to come because we had had our- I had planned to come because I wanted to meet you, of course, because we had communicated a little bit, but we had a new grandbaby. So of course I had to be home with our new grandbaby. So I didn’t have to come. Yeah, 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. And so, and Corey was like, it’s Jordan Peterson and you. And I knew what she meant when she said it, like somebody doesn’t belong at this big conference. And I met, yeah. And so, which I was kind of like, hey, here we are. So she was like, well, you know, let me know when you talk to him and all that. And so I was going to meet you before you went on stage, because I had spoken the day before. And then, but it didn’t work out. You were doing something with your mic. And so I said, we’re just waiting till afters. So you come off the stage and when I saw you, which of course you don’t know who I am. And you’re like, hey, and you said, what are you doing at the- you said, what are you doing at the conference? And I said, I said, I’m speaking. And for whatever you said, did you speak to the whole group? Which really made me laugh because I was like, I think you thought I was like, maybe like the maintenance crew. Cause you’re not going to say you judge me, but you were looking at my appearance and you were thinking, how are you just out there? And what were you talking about? And I said, yeah, I was speaking to the whole group. And then you asked me what I was speaking about. And I told you neuroscience and Canadian politics. And that was a joke. And everybody started laughing. But I could see your brain was spinning. And so I was proud that I had you speechless, especially after just talking to you for a couple of hours. I had you speechless just for a second while that computed in there. So that’s how we met. And then I told Cory and then, then, but you said, yes, I remember your wife emailed and, and then we circle back and here we are. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Well, Cory, I’m very glad to know that a HIC from Northern Alberta takes precedence in your imagination over HIC from Louisiana. So I would have never suspected that. So it’s good to know anyways. All right. Well, look, guys, that was great. I, I, I’m hoping your movie like blasted out of the park. That seems highly probable to me. For everybody watching, listening, I’m, I’m going to talk to Willie and Cory Robertson for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform. We’re going to talk about their marriage. I’m very interested in, you know, biographical details of people’s lives. 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. They obviously seem to like each other. 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. You know, you never step on each other. And I would say you guys probably talked about 50% of the time each, you know, of the time that, that was devoted to, to your side of the camera. It was very interesting to see that, you know, how careful you were about taking each other into account. 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, hopefully not that, you know, and some competition there for status. And that’s always a bad sign within a relationship. Like it can be playful and competitive, but real status competition is, that’s just not good inside a marriage. 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 and how you also translated that into this very playful and easy turn taking in the conversation. So anyways, that’s what the clinical psychologist didn’t be noticed while we were talking. 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. And so we’re going to close this up. If you guys who are watching and listening want to attend to the conversation about marriage within the dark dynasty, please join us on the Daily Wire plus side of things. And thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you too. I’m really looking forward to your movie. Like I said, I hope it’s ridiculously successful and helpful to people. You certainly whetted my appetite to go see it. I want to see how this all came about and how you managed this movie. So it’ll be fun to see that. And so thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. And as I said, it’s been a pleasure getting to know you. Awesome. Great talking to you. This was awesome. Thanks so much. Thanks. But as the drink, he becomes the devil’s son. You know that ain’t your brother. I ain’t going to preach to men around here. I heard you might be needing one. We’re fine. I don’t think we are, V. I ain’t the problem. You’re the problem. Get out. It’s full. At some point in our lives, we are all going to feel desperately alone. We realize that we ain’t ever alone. Someday you’re going to have to fight for your marriage. When things get tough, when things get tough, it’s what you do. You fight. You must be one of Kay’s friends. I know Phil ain’t got no good looking friends. This is my sister. Well, no, I was just being friendly. Mine will be friendly in that direction over there. Yeah, okay.