The Odyssey is a Distracting Mess (Ep. 949)

Let's be honest, most men drift. We wake up, we scroll, we work, and then we just rinse and repeat. And we know we're softer than we should be. That's why I built the 31-day resilience reset. This is not a devotional. It is a field manual for men ready to stop drifting and start fighting back. So, for 31 days, you'll train your spirit, mind, and body with scripture, prayer, and daily challenges that forge real resilience. Go to www.undaunted.life/31. life/31day to download this resource for free. That's undaunted.life/31day. Start your reset today. This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. And I looked and arose and said to the nobles and to the officials and to the rest of the people, "Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord who is great and awesome and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes." That is Nehemiah 4:14, guys. That doesn't have a connection really to anything in this episode, but it's always a good reminder. And again, love the book of Nehemiah. If you've not read the book of Nehemiah, you need to get in it, especially Nehemiah 4. But thank you guys for being here today on the show. We're also very, very thankful and always thankful to our donors, guys. We can't pull off this show without donors like you. We got guys that have hopped on board to be monthly donors. 15 bucks a month, 30 bucks one time, 75 bucks a month, whatever. Every little bit helps us to pull this off to equipment around the globe to push back darkness. undaunted.life/donate if you would like to hop on board. undaunted.life/donate. That is in the show notes. Also, leave us a fivestar review and share this with a friend. And got a little bit of breaking news here. Some of you may have already noticed this, but we just launched a new website. Okay. So, if you go to undaunted.life, you can check out the new website. We basically redid the entire thing, but we got this thing, you know, 80 85% of the way there. I'm sure there's going to be some bugs to work out, but in the bottom right there's a feedback button. And so, if you find like a glitch or some sort of an issue or something that you wish was on there functionalitywise, go ahead and leave that on there. But go ahead and check out the new website. So, today's show, you've been asking and asking and asking, and here they are. They are back, baby. Hey, the quick hitters. The quick hitters are back. And so here's what we're going to be going over in the quick hitters section. A gay couple using or suing their surrogate for refusing to murder her baby with a cleft lip. Tucker Carlson threatening to start a third political party after his split from the Republican party. Hundreds of thousands of white British girls being sex trafficked and raped by Muslim men in the UK. Senator Cy Booker's moving tribute to the late Senator Lindsey Graham. An independent minor league baseball team cancelling their game because too many players refused to wear the pride night uniforms. Texas public schools deciding to make the Bible required reading. Sam Alberry resigning from his position at an Anglic Anglican church because it was discovered that he was having sex with men. Shocker there. The Southern Baptist Convention officially voting to follow biblical guidelines on females in church leadership. And a six-year-old Scottish boy standing firm in the face of Islam. Now, I'm going to do a whole review of the movie The Odyssey, the Blockbuster, right? Everyone's been talking about these last couple of weeks. I got a full review here in just a second. But before we get there, I did want to address one more thing. So, as I've talked about on this show a lot, I've talked about Christianity and the connection to the Inog, right? And so if you go back to episode 552 of the show I believe it was yeah 552 I did an entire deep dive on the inagram and I talked about how hey I used to make money doing the inagram I would do it for seauitees when I was consulting with them I you know did it with my wife and you know it was very very helpful and oh my gosh look at all the things I'm learning and everything like that and then I was flabbergasted when I dug into the foundations and the origins of the inog and so I'm not going to do the full deep dive here because I've already done it before, but it popped up here again recently because some very prominent Christians were talking about the Inagram and how helpful it was. They were talking about it on their platform and then I saw it on Instagram. There's entire Instagram pages about how useful the Inagram is with Christianity and how Christians can just use it and it's okay and it's neutral. It's even better than neutral. It's helpful and all those different things. And then I was also told by a Christian friend of mine that the inagram is just something that we can do and that we can redeem. We can use it. It's redeemable. And what he was talking about is this idea that there are things that we can accept, reject, redeem. Accept, reject, redeem, redeem. I think Mark Driscoll was the first person I I heard talk about that, but who knows where he got it from. But there's just things in life that we can flat out accept on the face on its face. Reject it on its face. And then there are some that we can redeem. Okay? And so for some of you, you were like, "Okay, what does that exactly mean?" Let me just give you a scenario. So let's say there's a cooking show, right? It's a it's one of those baking shows on Food Network or something like that. And the hosts say, "Okay, you're going to bake a chocolate cake. There are three different contestants, okay? And so they've done their cakes and now here they are. They're presenting it to the judges and all the different things. They have to describe how they made it and they have to list all the ingredients that they used." Okay? So contestant number one comes up and look it looks like chocolate cake and they just describe, hey, we just, you know, use normal ingredients. So you add, you know, sugar, flour, some eggs, some oil, some different things and then boom, here's a chocolate cake. And so before they even take a bite to test it, we can just accept that, right? This is a baking show where we told you to bake a chocolate cake. You made us a chocolate cake. You used normal ingredients. You used them in order. Great. Accept. Now we have contestant number two. Okay. And then they come walking up to the judges and they have an easel and a painting on it of chocolate cake and they describe what kind of, you know, oil paints they use, what kind of canvas and all the different things and all that. At that point, if the judges were like, "This is insane. You're out of this show. Also, just, you know, hang tight real quick because we need to make sure that you're not absolutely insane." We could just reject that. The judges would reject that, right? They didn't do what the competition was. This is a baking competition and you painted something, right? So, we can just reject that outright. Okay. Now, let's go to contestant number three. So, here they are. They come up. They they present something that kind of looks like chocolate cake. Uh but maybe they they use some weird ingredients or some, [clears throat] you know, less than ideal ingredients. Maybe they did the process a little bit out of order. Maybe they didn't use the right amounts of all the different ingredients. And you know, it turned out okay, but there's some room for improvement, right? They they really tried their best, but they just they made a few mistakes. You can redeem that. We accepted contestant number one outright. We rejected contestant number two outright, and we can redeem contestant number three. They just they need some some help around the edges, but ultimately they they know what they were there for. Contestant number three, that's what people think the inagram is, that it's a redeemable thing. It's got some issues, right? Some little pnicity things, but it's redeemable. But it's not. Okay. So, let's talk about if the contestant were to make a chocolate cake, but then they mix in poisonous and toxic ingredients, right? So, they tell you, "Oh, yeah. Hey, looks like chocolate cake and all that, but hey, you know, I put in a little dash of this. I, you know, I put some battery acid in there. I put some arsenic in there. You know, I kind of put some uh stuff that I found in the sink, you know, underneath the sink, some cleaning materials. I kind of put that in there and whatever. That's what the inagram is. That's what the inagram is. It looks good. Looks like chocolate cake, but it's deadly. It's poisonous. Like, it's something that should be rejected. And here's the thing. Even if on this baking show, you know, just keeping this thing going, if it's 99.9% of the ingredients were great and appropriate for chocolate cake, even if they just put a dash of something poisonous in there, you have to throw the entire thing out. You have to throw the entire thing out. I've used this example before. If I made chocolate cake or something like that and I just put a nugget of dog poop in there in the entire mix and I'd say, "Hey, there's just a nugget of dog poop." You're not taking a piece of that cake, are you? You're not taking a bite. You're chucking the whole thing out. Again, go to episode 552 of this podcast where I do a super duper deep dive, and I'm not going to get to all of it here. So, please go back and listen to that episode. But the origins of the Inagram are demonic and occultic. That's not a theory. Like, it's literally the facts. Okay? Uh, one of the main guides that came up with the modern inagram said he got it via automatic writing. If you don't know what that is, think Ouija board, right? So, most of you are familiar with that. But he said he summoned spirits from, you know, across the dimension that he was currently living in. And basically, he went into this stuper and then he just put his finger, you know, on his pen on the page or on his keyboard or something like that and then boom, he got the inagram. So, he got it via automatic writing. What do you think he was summoning in that moment? Do you think it was the Holy Spirit or do you think it was a demon? Right? I think Colossians 2:8 applies here. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to Christ. Because I heard, you know, some prominent Christian recently say it's a pretty powerful tool. Yeah, you know, hey, it's a pretty powerful tool. You I've heard that from a lot of people. Hey, it works well. Well, to the it's a pretty powerful tool and it works well crowd. Well, duh. Satan's schemes wouldn't work if they weren't somewhat powerful. Like, think if everything that Satan tried to do or tried to get you to do didn't ever work. Well, then you wouldn't keep doing it, right? Assuming you have a functioning prefrontal cortex and you've got all your faculties in order, you would not keep doing that thing. But he's giving us certain powers so that he can have more influence and control over us. I mean, I was just thinking about all the different Old Testament examples where, you know, wasn't it, you know, pharaohs, sorcerers, and magicians? Weren't they able to actually do some stuff that was actually powerful that wasn't, you know, explainable with kind of normal ideology or philosophies? But where were those things coming from? Where was that ability coming from? Like, God is all powerful, but Satan has power, too. And look, we live in a culture that is starving for discernment. I've talked about that a lot this year. And don't be the Christian who says naive things like, "Well, we'll all just redeem it for good." That's nonsense. And just to wrap up uh my thoughts here on that, Psalm 97:10, submit this to memory. Psalm 97:10. Oh, you who love the Lord, hate evil. Hate evil. Yes, God Yahweh commands us to hate. We are to hate evil. The inagram is not neutral. It's not just another popularity or a popular personality quiz. It's an oult tool wearing a personality test costume. We should hate it and reject it. Hey guys, real quick. I know a lot of you train for very specific things. So maybe you've got a mud race coming up, a mountain hunt, a 5K, or maybe you just want to keep up with your kids, or you just don't want to let the old man in. 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Go to mountaintuff.com, that's mtnuff.com, and enter the code kyle when you sign up for a monthly plan to receive your first month free after your 14-day trial. So, that's six weeks free to make sure this is for you. I'm sure it will be. That is six weeks free on the best-in-class physical and mental training app in the world. So stop wasting time. It's time to get real fitness results. Let my friends at Mountain Tu guide the way. Again, go to mtntuff. That's mountain.com, promo code kyle. All right, here we go. Let's get into my review of the new summer blockbuster film, The Odyssey. So, yes, there are spoilers ahead, which is actually kind of awkward to say because the source material for this, it's supposed to be, but the source material for this is about 700 years older than the New Testament, but there will be some film spoilers from this. So, obviously, you can see for the last several months, there was a lot of public criticism leading up to the film. You know, uh some of the casting decisions were called into question like, hey, what is Christopher Nolan doing? But then the film comes out and even in the week before the film came out, we started getting some of the critics uh you know coming out. The critical acclaim for the film was insanely high. I think on Rotten Tomatoes right now actually let me go look it up. We'll do a live uh look up Rotten Tomatoes right now for this Rotten Tomatoes the Odyssey cuz I think both the critic score and the normal people score are both insanely high. Yeah, the critic score is 95% and from the crowd from the normies out there is a 97%. doesn't get much higher than that. Huge first weekend at the box office. I think they were saying it was supposed to get around 100 million. It was like 120 or 130 million. So, they basically made back their production budget and they're working on making back their marketing budget. So, it's going to be an enormous film for this summer. Biggest opening weekend uh of Christopher Nolan's career, more than Interstellar, more than Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises, all that kind of stuff. But with some of the the stuff that I knew was definitely going to happen in the film, especially with some of the casting decisions, I didn't really want to see it. I remember when it was first announced that Christopher Nolan was going to be doing the Odyssey, I'm like, this has the potential to be the absolute greatest film of all time. It definitely had the potential to be that. But then the more I learned about the film leading into it, and then after watching it, it certainly uh fell short of that, but I wasn't planning to watch it. But I got requests from several people, you know, people that I knew and then just random folks on the internet to, you know, hey, this is a big deal. It's a big deal culturally. We'd love to hear your thoughts on it. And so I did go and see it. I saw it on the 70 mm IMAX. I guess there's only like 50 or so screens like that in the United States. So that is in the exact dimensions that Christopher Nolan shot in. So it's not cutting off the top or the bottom. So I got to really understand the entirety of what Christopher Nolan was trying to do. So I'm going to do some things I liked about it, some things I didn't really like about it, and then we're going to get into some more details. So some things that I liked about it real quick. I thought Anne Hathaway far and away delivered the best acting performance of the entire film. She played Penelopey, the queen of Ithaca, Adysius's wife. I thought she was absolutely spectacular. I thought the Trojan horse was really unique and pretty cool. You know, again, you have to kind of suspend belief. Like, how did these guys just take random pieces of a ship and then create this incredibly ornate horse? But, okay, you have to suspend your belief a lot in this particular film. But just seeing it depicted with the the men inside, I thought that was really unique. Uh some different things about the horse being stuck in the sand initially with the surf coming up. I thought that was well done. Uh there's a the scene with the Cyclops uh very early in the film. home. I thought that was incredibly creepy, but very cool. Um, Agamimnon's costume, a lot of people were like, they didn't really like it. They're like, "Oh, the helmet looks like it's 3D printed." I thought it was great. I thought it looked awesome. It had kind of this little like, you know, spine, you know, spinal column thing going down the back. I thought it looked really cool. Uh, there was a Hades scene that was really well done. Uh, there was an insanely long piece of dialogue from the most distracting casting decision of all time right in the middle of that. So it really kind of put that in a weird place. But the dead Agamemnon came back to talk to Adysius at this point, kind of giving him some warnings, which pays dividends for later on in the film. So I thought all that was very well done. You know, visually speaking, Christopher Nolan's never going to make a film that is visually hard to watch, right? It's always going to be visually appealing, but then we have to get into kind of what happened with the story and some of the other things. So let's go into some things that I did not like about the film. I did not like the fact, and I knew this going in, that Christopher Nolan was going to be using the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey as his core text to make this film. So, Emily Wilson made a translation of the Odyssey that was released in the UK in like 2017 and then released here in the US in 2018. And you can tell she's coming at this from a more feminist lens. And you know, everyone talks about how her translation is much more readable, but it's getting away from more of the source material, which I'm not going to be a slave to the source material necessarily, but when we're talking about the Odyssey, this isn't like, you know, a story that's like 30 or 40 years old where we can kind of play with the characters and the story line a little bit. Like again, this is older than the New Testament by centuries and we're going to be jacking around with some of the main characters. So her translation and she said this and Christopher Nolan said this tried to make Adysius the main protagonist feel more human make him feel more human right which is completely unnecessary for this epic poem completely unnecessary for the story of Adysius okay because you know how Matt Damon portrays Adysius and then again he's just reading reading lines off a sheet of paper but with Emily Wilson and Christopher Nolan Adysius is portrayed as kind of like you know he's lacking in confidence confidence a little bit. He's lacking in the confidence of his men. He's kind of impetuous. Like out of spite, he like shoots the uh the Cyclops in the eye with a bow and arrow and ends up getting some of his men killed. Like none of that's in the source material. Like we we just have like this con, you know, this confusing character. He doesn't really know who he is. He has to be kind of told what to do. We see that a lot uh with different portrayals in the film. But it felt like another feminist attempt to make a strong virile male character more complicated, right? Because we can't just have heroes anymore. We can't just have masculine dominant heroes anymore. I guess they have to be really complicated. We have to bring in the other parts of their personality. We can't just unplug and watch a heroic male do heroic male things. Also, you could kind of tell what you were in for in the first 60 seconds of the film. The first 60 seconds of the film were incredibly distracting and I hate it. Hated it. But I'll get more to that into that in just a second. Also, there was a decision to have no accents and to use modern language, right? G going back to the Emily Wilson translation for this film. Didn't really love that with these, you know, time period epics, right? Especially ones kind of set in this area. You would expect kind of uh, you know, more of the the English accent, right? You know, kind of bringing more poetic, romanticized language to the dialogue. We didn't really get any of that. There was some like modern, you know, language that was just kind of forced in. Didn't love that decision. The score was kind of meh. I forget the dude's name. Some Swedish uh guy, you know, he kind of interestingly enough, he's done most of the subpar uh movies with Christopher Nolan. So, Oppenheimer and Tenant. I I did not think Oenheimer was very good. Tenant, I don't think anyone liked, but the score wasn't anything to write home about. Like, this wasn't like a Han Zimmer score. where it just absolutely sticks with you. Especially like Interstellar, uh, you know, some of those things, Dark Knight, those things really really stick in in your brain. I didn't really like it. And also, the sound editing, this has kind of been a thing for Christopher Nolan in his career. If you go all the way back to Dunkirk, I remember like having to plug my ears in the theater because it was so unbelievably loud. But then it was really hard to hear the dialogue. I remember Tom Hardy's character was wearing, you know, the mask cuz he was a pilot or whatever. And it's like I we need subtitles for this. I have no idea what what they're saying. So that was a common, you know, problem and complaint with this film, the Odyssey, is that there were several places where the score was so loud you couldn't hear what was going on. Uh, we have the character of Agamemnon's wife. Now, in the source material, she's a deeply evil woman that murders Agamimnon after his triumphant return after the fall of Troy, right? Like she murders him because she's having an affair with somebody else. And it's like kind of this whole thing. But in the film, they kind of, you know, sneak this in that Agamemnon like sacrifice their daughter in order to, you know, have uh more favor with the gods or something like that. And so when he comes back, like she pretends like she's kind of wooing her husband and all that. And then she like stabs him in the throat and kills him, right? And then immediately starts crying, right? Because she's so sad that Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter to the gods or whatever. But it was a completely unnecessary change because part of the part of the genius of the original the Odyssey by Homer is you have this um these two different factions and you have two sides of the same coin where you have these powerful uh women that are queens but you have Penelope who is like beautiful, lovely and righteous and then you have Agamemnon's wife who is beautiful, lovely and wickedly evil. Right. And so you get more out of the character of Penelope by leaving Agamemnon's wife alone. That actress can just be evil. I think they may have changed it a little bit to do a little bit of a girl power thing, right? And of course, they couldn't portray the actress that they cast in that role as kind of a negative person. We'll get more into that in a little bit. But the the movie itself was almost 3 hours long. It was over long. It was incredibly frenetic. There was a lot happening, especially in like in the first act and into the second act, but everything just kind of felt kind of random. You had these and the when you read the Odyssey, it's hard to follow sometimes anyway, but constantly going back in time and forward in time and moving things along in terms of the timeline of Adysius's journey, it was very frenetic and kind of hard to to grasp. There was no time to breathe, really let the story develop, which is what you normally see in the first and second act to really crescendo into the third act. It felt a lot like Oppenheimer. And again, I know I'm on a, you know, island by myself by saying I didn't think Oppenheimer was very good. I saw that in 70 millimeter IMAX as well. But it was incredibly loud, incredibly frenetic. Again, I didn't have to deal with any of the gratuitous sex scenes that were shockingly in Oppenheimer. Like Christopher Nolan's never done that. He just shoved those into that uh movie. No pun intended. But, you know, it just it felt a lot like Oppenheimer, right? So, that's two movies in a row for him. And again, yes, I know Oppenheimer was incredibly acclaimed. Everybody loved it, but man, it could have been I felt like it could have been cut in half and there was a lot of stuff there was a lot of fat that I felt like could have been trimmed off of that movie. And then also the thing probably that I liked, you know, one of the things I like the least about this film is the ending. So in the source material, Adysius comes back after he reveals that he wasn't actually a beggar. You know, he strings his own bow, shoots it, all that, and then he kills all 108 suitors that were in his house, slaughters them all. But not in this film. He slaughters a lot of them, but then some other guys bow to him and they I guess become his servants. I guess why he didn't just slaughter all of them, I I have no idea. I will say this, uh I think long gone are the days of Jason Bourne in terms of Matt Damon's fighting ability. A lot of the fighting, especially in that final scene, it was just kind of awkward. Like at one point he picks up these two axes and he's like spinning around hitting them. It's like what you would do if you were doing a cartoon where you know the person surrounded he's just kind of spinning around hitting people with his axe. The bow work felt really awkward throughout the entire film. There were a lot of people shooting bows like it was I mean he's just kind of like pulling it right here and like you know letting the arrow go from his chest. It felt funny. It felt funny. It didn't it didn't look good. Uh so yeah that that was a little bit weird. uh changing Adysius's triumphant return because again spoilers here in the original source material Adysius comes back he kills all of his wife suitors and then he retakes his throne but in the film they take it as a chance to make a love story connection where he gives up his throne to his son and then he and his wife just sail off towards the sunset. So it was nice like it was a nice story but that's not the story of Adysius. He doesn't come back and give the throne to his son. He comes back and reclaims his throne and reclaims his queen. That's the love story connection. They don't need to go on a carnival cruise, you know, off into the horizon. And I I guess whenever I think back when you think about epic time period pieces that have stood the test of time that are absolute classics, Gladiator, Braveheart, they're so classic and beloved because they have a central theme and a central ethic that the main protagonist carries through, which in the Odyssey is Zeus's law, which is essentially love your neighbor as yourself right? But then there's a heroic, sacrificial, courageous, deeply masculine protagonist. Okay, we got that with Maximus. We got that with William Wallace. We didn't get that with this version of Odysius. Again, he kind of, you know, started out pretty okay. It was really rough in the middle and was was better in the end. And again, even the source material doesn't have Odysius as a completely unblenmished character. But again, it just felt like the the changing of who Odysius was according to the source material was not helping tell a better story. But I've already talked about a lot of things and elucidate a lot of things I didn't like about the film. But the biggest issue with this film far and away was the casting. And I'm not just talking about one or two characters. I'm talking about a lot of the characters. Okay? And that was one of the main things that the public was talking about some of the casting decisions. That's what the online world was up in arms about in the leadup to this film. But I'll just go down like a quick review of some of the the main people that that were cast. So of course Matt Damon was cast as Adysius. I like him generally as an actor. I he's never had a performance that I thought was particularly odious. Right. I I did hear that Tom Hardy was offered the role of Adysius. And so it kind of felt like, you know, when I was watching Lord of the Rings, that unbelievable direct, it was kind of hard watching Aragorn on screen knowing that Russell Crowe turned down that role because I like VGO Mortonson a lot. You know, I did a whole episode on the road here recently. I think he's a tremendous actor. Russell Crowe was a way better choice. Would have been a way better choice choice for Aragorn. I think Tom Hardy would have been better than Matt Damon, but it really wasn't that big deal. Matt Damon did a fine job. Again, I've already talked about Anne Hathaway, spectacular performance as Penelopey. Tom Holland, Spider-Man, he played Tmicus, Adysius's son. Thought he was good. Robert Patson, he played Antinius. Uh, he was good. Uh, he's a really good bad guy. He's way better in this than he is as emo Batman. Like, can we just be honest about him in the Batman film? How awkward that was, the emo Batman thing. Not a good Batman. Uh John Leguisamo, he played Yumeas surprisingly very good. Like I was very drawn to his performance. I thought he did a spectacular job as that character. Again, I was a little surprised that he he filled in that way, but I thought he did great. Chariss Theren had kind of a minor part playing Calypso. I thought she did very good. Zindaya played Athena, which can we just talk about real quick? Why why do we insist on just calling her by one name? Like, don't you have to be like supremely talented or famous to only be known by like a single name, right? You know, uh, Prince Madonna, like, you know, those kinds of things. Why do we just let her be called Zenia? Like, I don't really get the Zenia thing. The Athena connection in this film was very strained in and out of the film, not really explained until kind of the end. You know, you have the connection with him seeing a girl looking like, you know, Zenia being beheaded as the statue of Athena's being beheaded. So, he connects that the entire way, but it just kind of was in and out. It was a very awkward performance. Then you had uh John Bernthal. He played Menow. The funniest thing about John uh Bernthal, he's been in a bunch of stuff, right? He's the exact same character in every single movie he's in. [laughter] like whether he's playing like a character from 3,000 years ago or he's playing the Punisher, it's the same performance. Like he's nothing if not completely consistent. But now we need to get into some of the very very questionable and really downright horrible casting decisions from here. So just to give you a sense of what's to come, remember me saying how much I hated the beginning of this film and how it just kind of set the tone. This is what we see in the first 60 seconds of this film. There is a black suitor in Odysius's house, an Indian Greek military commander, a Korean hoplight soldier, and a Greek soldier played by a [ __ ] aka a woman that thinks she's a man. And we're just told, "Yeah, don't notice any of that." So, it's a unbelievably major distraction right out of the gate of the film, and we're just supposed to let the momentum ride. Okay, now let's get into the individual actors. There's an actor called Himesh Patel. Uh he plays your Uralis Uralus. Anyway, hard to say. Uh he's Adysius's second in command. Okay, so when you go back to the source material, like you know, this is a legit Greek warrior. One of the most distracting parts about Himesh Patel, and he was on screen a lot, was literally how he looked physically. So, they're wearing this Greek armor. There's no sleeves or whatever. And this man looks like he has never picked up a weight in his life. Now, no one's saying he needs to look like Mr. Olympia, but if you're a second in command under Adysius, as a Greek military commander, it's expected that you would probably look pretty hard. Like, you'd have a pretty hard body. Okay? And take this as an expert. I had a baby arm that I'm currently in the process of building back up. I had a baby arm there for a few months. This guy looks like he had never worked out in his life. It was incredibly distracting. That may seem like a a little bit minor, but it really wasn't because again, what was the character? A tremendously competent Greek warrior. You would expect that person to look like they've swung a sword that weighed more than a few ounces before. And then also this is an Indian actor. So I think he grew up in England but he's of Indian descent. India as in Indian as in India descent. And if we think about this all hoplight soldiers, so that would include the commanders were Greeks. Because some people are like, "Oh, well you know in the Greek city states they had slaves and blah blah." Aside from the fact that there wasn't a huge amount of slavery in the Greek days, you could not be a hoplight unless you were Greek. Spoiler alert, there were no Greeks that were from India. Okay. Then we had Corey Hawkins who played Palibus who was a suitor of Penelope. So this is a black man that was a suitor of Penelope. All of the suitors, all 108 suitors from the source material were all Greeks. They were not Africans. They were all Greeks. So that was distracting. Then you had an actor playing uh so Will Young Lee, he's a Korean actor. He played Ankyus, I think is how you say it. So he was another Greek hoplight. So this is a Korean guy, someone from Southeast Asia playing a Greek warrior. Distracting. And then if you look at some of the other uh crew, some of the other hoplights, some of them looked like they were from Central and South America. Um you know, several looking like they were of subsaharan African descent. At one point there was even an obese hoplight, which can we talk about the fact that there pretty much were not obese people in that day? And if they were obese, they would not make them a, you know, triple extra-L large set of armor so that they so they could come on board. It was like, why? Why is this person even there? Like they weren't on screen very much, but it was very very distracting. Now, some people have said that if you are because I'm not outraged by this, but if you are distracted by the the race of the actors portraying the people in this film that you're a racist, you're a racist for noticing. Okay, so just to start out here, I completely reject that people the people that cry racism if you notice that there are a bunch of different races represented in the Greek hoplights and the suitors of Penelopey. I reject that entirely. Because why why are we supposed to suspend our belief that much? I mean, so so look at this. I've already brought up, you know, William Wallace Braveheart before, so let's bring it back in here. If you were to watch the movie Braveheart, set in Scotland or, you know, the wider United Kingdom at the time, you would not expect to see an African person there. You would not expect to see a Southeast Asian person there. You would not expect to see someone from India there. You would not expect to see someone from Bolivia or Brazil or or something like that. And I think that Christopher Nolan cast this very diverse cast for Oscar purposes. He didn't want to be uh, you know, accused of, oh, you you're just another person perpetuating white supremacy by having only white actors or people like that. But I think Christopher Nolan sacrificed part of the story in the source material in order to seem more diverse, to seem more inclusive, right? And I think you would do well as many have to point out that Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Charlies Theren, they don't look very Greek, right? That's fair. But can we just be honest? Like subsaharan Africans, Indians, Southeast Asians, Central and South Americans, in terms of their look, their racial look, it's pretty far away from what a Greek person would have looked like at that time period. It's not even comparable. So I think Charlie Sarin's what, she's from South Africa or something like that. got to think Mad Damon's of I don't know German Irish descent or something like that. That look is a lot closer to what a Greek person would have looked like. The others are incredible stretches, right? And guess what? It doesn't make me racist for noticing. I I'm just noticing because it's right there in front of me. And look, I I get that you can make people suspend their belief systems while they're watching a movie. Again, there was like a 40 foot tall cyclops fighting a bunch of dudes in a cave for part of the film. Okay, where we're suspending our belief, but if we're suspending our belief in skating around the source material when it comes to a bunch of the casting decisions, then why film this in a place that looks like the Greek Isles, which most of it was actually filmed in the Greek isles. So, we're not going to make decisions in terms of the cast that are delivering the dialogue that are anything close to the source material because we don't really care about that. Let's just kind of cast whoever. It doesn't really matter, but let's definitely do this and make it look like we're in the Greek islands. Like, why not just scrap the entire setting? Why not just, you know, shoot it in Chicago or Mexico City or something like that? Like, why even do that? And again, think about if the roles were reversed. I thought about this, you know, before I left to go see the film yesterday. What if when they were making the the Creed series, right? So, kind of like that next generation of Rocky series of all that. So, you have this guy who's playing Apollo Creed's son. Imagine if they had cast a white actor or Native American actor or an Argentinian actor or an Australian actor. You'd be like, "Hey man, Apollo Creed was black. This is his son. Apollo Creed, you know, made this baby with a black woman. What are we doing here?" and people would be shouting you down as a horrible racist, right? We would be canceling Sylvester Stallone and the studio putting that film out because when it comes back to the source material, it's like, well, yeah, the race isn't the only thing that's important about these characters, but it is important. It is important for the story. Like, you would have done well to where it's like, okay, if we had presented Creed as, you know, some guy from Norway, some Nordicl looking dude, right? you would have been like, "Yeah, I can't suspend belief that much because I've seen the source material. I've already seen this depicted." So, if we're going to scrap all the the decisions for a more diverse cast, why not have a more diverse setting? Why why not have a bunch of skyscrapers around? Why not set it in middle America with a bunch of flat lands and grasslands? But then we need to get into a couple of the the most kind of flumxing decisions in terms of casting. Let's talk about Lupita Niongo as Helen of Troy. There was a lot of outrage about that. The outrage was kind of all over the place, but one of the the main things that I kept hearing is she's not pretty. Ah, she's not even pretty. So, here's the thing. Pretty is kind of in the eye of the beholder, right? But there are people that are generally regarded as beautiful or as handsome and and we can't pretend to not know that. So, I remember I don't know why I was listening into this conversation, but there were these gals talking I this was years ago and I can't remember who they were talking about. some actor in Hollywood, uh, Brad Pitt or Chris Hemsworth or something like that, and they were talking about how handsome this actor was. Let's just say it was Chris Hemsworth. So, they were so, "Oh, man. Can you believe how handsome he looked in Thor or whatever?" And I remember one of the ladies saying, "Yeah, I'm not really attracted to him, but he is clearly very handsome." That's what we're looking at here. because you can look at somebody and say, you know, you can say, "Hey, I'm not attracted to this person, but I can obviously uh admit that they're they're pretty or they're handsome." Right? So, I think that that comes into here into this discussion because the source material, if you go back to Homer's description, he never describes the physical characteristics of Helen of Troy. You don't see it in any of the source material, but we have some hints. She was the daughter of Zeus and the queen of Sparta. she would have been Greek. Okay. So to ask the audience to suspend the source material and her depiction as having a Greek mother growing up in Sparta and then giving us an actress of Kenyan descent is ridiculous. Not the most distracting thing in the world, but [clears throat] ridiculous. And the thing about Helen of Troy, the thing about the pick as of Lupita Nyongo as the actress to to portray that, the thing that was the most strange is that they completely as part of the dialogue completely disregarded one of the core storylines in the history of human fiction. They just ignored it. So even if you're not very well read or a very learned person, if I were just to ask a random person on the street to name the character from f from fiction that had the face that launched a thousand ships, almost everyone with a, you know, functioning brain would know that that was Helen of Troy. It's one of the most recognizable things in the history of fiction. Just think about that. So, you just have to ask yourself, is what was shown on screen during the Odyssey indicative of a woman that you could generally see warranting that kind of reaction? And this is what I mean by that. Because in the film, they depict Helen of Troy as having a marred face. So, think of the most attractive woman in the world. And let's say they were cast to you, the most attractive woman in the world to you, which could be Lupita Niongo, could be someone else, could be someone that's not even an actress. Let's just say you put them in, superimpose them into the film. They mart her face. They scarred up her face and they cover it up with just a few lines of dialogue, right? They they just cover up this casting of Helen Troy and the depiction of Helen Troy by implying that her husband Agamemnon wasn't coming to get her because she was so beautiful and he wanted her back, right? Or uh [clears throat] like or you know casting it was Agamemnon or mental house. Anyway, I'm I'm kind of getting the characters confused, but anyway, like that was the whole idea is that they were coming to get her coming to get her back because she was so beautiful. But in the film, they talk about it like, no, no, no. They were just coming to get her to open up trade routes, right? You know, you have the brother that's, you know, trying to go get her back and so the other brother is trying to just take advantage of trade routes. And so Christopher Nolan dromanticizes one of the most well-known story lines in all of human fiction and turns it into a story about trade and commerce. Like it was just absolutely an unforced error. So it doesn't matter to me if you think you know Lupita Nyongo is attractive or not. They purposely made her unattractive for the role. Showed her having a scarred face, right? Like that that was the entire thing. It felt completely ridiculous. Like they could have just dropped that whole thing, cast the same actress, and it wouldn't have been distracting. But again, [clears throat] this entire idea is that she is the queen of a particular area of Greece. So she would be somewhat Greek looking, not subsaharan African. But then we need to get into the most ridiculous casting in the history of Hollywood. The most ridiculous. This was Elliot, formerly known as Ellen Paige, playing son. Okay. Now, if you are someone who has read the the Odyssey or even the Iliad, you might think to yourself, wait, Cinnon, is that a character in there? Nope. This is a character that was made up and forced into this story. There were some later writings that made up this Cinnon character or whatever, not in the source material. So, that's a great place to start. So this character has a small part in the film, not a lot of speaking parts, but that character is a major part of the film thematically from the opening scene all the way through to when Adysius takes out the main bad guy suitor at the end of the movie. Right? And if you've seen the movie, you know exactly what I'm talking about, right? This is a major central character that has a very minor part, if that makes sense. Okay. So, what Christopher Nolan's asking you to do is to suspend belief so much because he cast a 5- foot tall 100b woman with a mental disorder and extreme body mutilations, including cutting off her breast tissue. And I'm not sure what's going on, you know, below the belt. casting that person as a Greek hoplight soldier because Christopher Nolan could have cast any non-obese male actor on planet Earth and it would have been, you know, would have saved this movie and not been a distraction. And look, I've already talked about how distracting it was having people of racial groups that clearly would not have been any part of this story. But it could have been of any race of any race whatsoever, right? could have been a Cambodian dude that he put, you know, in saying, "No, this person's definitely a Greek." Would not have been nearly as distracting as Ellen Paige was in this. Like, she was incredibly distracting. Like I talked about that Hades scene, very ominous, incredibly well done. She has one of the biggest speaking parts in that entire scene. It's her and Matt Damon. And it's it's a woman trying to sound like a man. That that's what it is. I know that she has gotten a lot of alterations and she's on testosterone and it's naturally, you know, deepening her voice, but she literally sounds like a woman trying to sound like a man because she is literally a woman trying to be a man. And I I you should certainly pray for for I'll call her Elliot Page, right? I don't care what you call your first name. I'm not going to use masculine pronouns for you. But someone that's just deeply deeply confused. And Christopher Nolan is playing into that by casting her in a male role, a central thematic role in the Odyssey. [clears throat] So in total, bad casting decisions can sink an otherwise awesome movie or awesome TV show or something like that. And I think that's exactly what happened here. Uh it was distracting the whole way through. for almost three hours, you were constantly shown actors and actresses where you had to suspend your belief to to make it seem like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense for someone that looks like that to be a part of this story. And again, to the people that think that's racist, I feel the need to address that again. Think about how mad you would be if, I don't know, uh, Brad Pitt were cast to play Barack Obama in a biopic. You would lose your mind. You would absolutely lose your mind. Like what if Vince Vaughn were cast to play Martin Luther King Jr. Owen Wilson is cast to play Malcolm X? You would lose your mind. It would be too distracting. Even if it wasn't that offensive to you, if you tried to watch it and be a part of the film, you're like, "This this this doesn't make any sense." Now, I had a feeling walking into the movie that it might be doomed from the get-go because of the use of Emily Wilson's translation and the casting of Elliot Page. And I feel like I was right because with any piece of art, especially with film, you can certainly ask and expect your audience to suspend their beliefs and expectations a little bit. But in order to enjoy the Odyssey, because I I've talked to several people, including my friends, that really enjoyed the film. In order to do so, you have to suspend your expectations and beliefs constantly and to an extreme degree throughout the entirety of the film. Like many people that watched it were able to do that, but I think you're giving away too much grace to the film and to this director. Like more grace than you would give just about anybody else. And I think it's because it's Christopher Nolan. Because he's generally regarded as the best living director in Hollywood. And there's an argument he's the greatest director of all time. And so people are willing to just, you know, put their blinders on and plug their ears a little bit and say, "Oh, no, it's great." But I wonder if it was a no-name uh director that was given this enormous project from Universal Studios if you would feel the exact same way. Because usually with amazing films, and I I'll say this even just for me, with an amazing film, think about when you walk out of the theater and think about, you know, the next morning when you wake up or think about a week later. The more time that goes by after I watched The Odyssey, the more I remember how much there was there to not like about it. Like, it's the exact opposite. When I watch a film and it's like sticky, it really sticks with you. And then you think about the next day and a week later and whatever, you're like, man, there's even more than that I like about this film. You can't even wait to see it again. Like, the Odyssey is going the other direction for me because as it was getting toward the end of the film, I was like, okay, this is a 6 out of 10. And then the ending was beautifully done, beautifully shot, like it was very dramatic. So I was like, "All right, you know, maybe it's a seven." But then I woke up this morning, I'm like, "Oh, I'll just split the baby here." It's a six and a half. Okay, it's a 6 and 1/2. The movie felt like one big own goal after another. It would have been better if they had cast 100% no-name actors and actresses than that hodgepodge of all-star cast that was incredibly diverse. Right. This is not a film that I would watch again for you. I would only suggest watching it if you can do so in 70 mm IMAX because there's something to be said for that experience, right? So, you can go watch a Major League Baseball game or an NFL game or a UFC fight or something like that and look, the game might end up not being very good. The fights might end up being duds, but you're part of the ambiance and the experience. There's something there. But for this film, only do it if you can get the full effect of the 70 millimeter IMAX. And even though I just spent what the last half hour or so kind of crapping on this movie, saying it's not that good, even this film is still better than The Lord of the Rings. Hey guys, real quick, I just wanted to remind you that we have an official Undaunted Life store. You can go to shop.undaunted.life or check it out in the show notes. Guys, we're always going to have hats and shirts and a bunch of other awesome stuff. Go there, support us, wear the mission. Again, it's shop.uned.life. Check out the link in the show notes. Shop.undaed.life. All right, let's go ahead and get into the quick hitters. And I want to kind of reiterate something that I talked about on the AMA, what was that a week or two ago about the different uh news outlets I use? Because [clears throat] this guy asked me on AMA, it's like, "Why are you using news outlets that you also criticize that seems kind of like underhanded?" I'm using a bevy of different news outlets to give you a bevy of different perspectives. Sometimes I like to read from different news outlets because you can see the hints even in the language they use about the bend of the article and the person writing it. Okay, so there's your note. Let's get into the first quick hitter here. A gay couple using their surrogate for or sorry suing their surrogate for refusing to murder her baby that had a cleft lip. This is according to Life News on July the 13th. A same-sex couple in Ontario has used has sued their surrogate mother after she refused to abort her baby diagnosed with a cleft lip, a relatively minor and easily correctable condition with surgery. The lawsuit filed in Ontario Superior Court in May seeks approximately $600,000 in damages. It alleges the surrogate failed to keep the couple informed about the baby's health, put the child's life at risk, failed to follow their direction on medical care, violated confidentiality, and cause one parent serious emotional distress. The conflict began in late June 2024 when the ultrasound at about 22 weeks showed the baby had a cleft lip along with possible cleft pallet and a minor heart defect. The couple sent the surrogate a letter demanding that she kill the baby in an abortion under a clause in their surrogacy agreement. The surrogate single mother and corrections officer in Ontario's Muskoka region refused. She insisted on further testing and said she would only consider having an abortion if the baby had no realistic chance of survival. She viewed the cleft lipped as largely cosmetic. Specialists at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto later Toronto later determined the baby was otherwise healthy with only a minor cleft lip defect that can be addressed through surgery and therapy. The couple agreed to continue the pregnancy. The relationship soured after the disagreement. The surrogate gave birth at home with midwives as originally agreed, though the couple had wanted a hospital delivery because of the cleft lip. The newborn baby had temporary breathing difficulties, but recovered quickly after receiving oxygen and being transported to the hospital. After taking their son home, the gay couple cut off contact with the surrogate. She later sought reimbursement for roughly $10,000 in expenses related to the pregnancy. The contract required disputes over expenses to go through arbitration. The surrogate has denied the couple's allegations, stating she kept them informed and did not endanger the child. So, terrible story for a lot of different reasons, but I'll go to my big takeaway here. This was always going to be the outcome when we as a society decided that when it comes to parents, any two will do. Any two will do. Because again, remember it went from gay couples saying, "Hey, just let us do whatever we want. Like, get rid of sodomy laws. just let us do whatever we want in our bedrooms. Then it was, "Hey, give us civil unions." Then it was, "Hey, let us get married." Then it was, "Hey, let us adopt orphans." Now it's let us make designer babies because, you know, we're two men making a lot of money. Let's make designer babies. And if the baby's not exactly what we want, we demand that you kill it. And if you don't, we will sue you. Because look what surrogacy has done. And Katie F has pointed this out beautifully. She did it on my show and every time she goes on any show. Seracy splits one mom into three moms. Okay? Because there's biological mom, right? That provides the egg which combines with the sperm cell to create a one- cell zygote, right? Then you have birth mom, which is the mom that carries that baby. It's the only uh it's the only body that baby knows. It's the only sound voice that that baby knows. And then you have social mom, which is the one that raises the baby, pro, you know, you know, protects the baby and soothes the baby. Sergey splits that into three people. You have these sodomite couples that will go and they will buy eggs. So that's one mom. They will put them into the rented womb of a woman. That's mom number two. And then they will just delete social mom from their life because it's two gay dudes raising the baby. I mean, just just think about that. Why are we okay with this? Why are we okay with allowing gay men to use IVF, invitro fertilization, and surrogacy to create these designer babies? And if they become Lebanon's and veritins leans, life unworthy of life, yeah, fine, just kill it. We'll try again. When you do children this way, when you only consider the ideals, the ideals and goals of the parents, it leads to the abuse and commodification of the children. Okay? This isn't like or ordering a handbag or a couch. This is a human being. And again, with the IVF uh process, they never just make one embryo or two. They're making 10, 15, 20, 25 embryos, right? And then they'll do genetic testing on those embryos and they'll try to decide, okay, well, this one's going to be pretty good. This one has a higher chance of having a high higher IQ and won't go bald and will have blue eyes and and should be rather tall and those types of things. And they're just geting getting rid of all the other ones cuz what a lot of these IVF facilities, they have to report how many live bursts they get, right? And then no one wants to talk about the fact that close to 100%. It's not 100% but in the low singledigit percentages of human beings created with IVF will ever live outside the womb. The rest of them will be selected for destruction even after implantation or uh implantation rather. A lot of them will be disregarded. They will be orphaned at their cryogenically frozen, you know, labs that they stay at. They will be donated to science or they will be thrown into trash cans. And we're not supposed to notice that or talk about it. Even as Christians, we're only supposed to focus on the babies that are created and that live outside the womb when they're here. When I'm like, "Hey, I care about mom, dad, the the live babies outside the womb and all their brothers and sisters." But then as society, we can't even have that debate because we have gay men going crazy and using this this this process. And here's another thing that most people don't know about. Do you know that there are pedophiles that are utilizing IVF and surrogacy to get children in their own care because they know with a lot of these pedophiles in their background, they would never be able to pass a background check to adopt one of these children. Most of them would not be able to do that. But when you do surrogacy, IVF, all those different things, and you take possession of a child that you designed and created, there's no background check. So, if you can get your brain into the place where you can see the perspective of a pedophile, why would you not do that if you had the means, that's what we're talking about here, and that's why we're going to continue talking about it on this show, cuz I need more of you to wake up to how evil all of this is. All right, next quicker here. Tucker Carlson threatening to start a third party, third political party after a split from the Republican party. This is according to USA Today on July the 2nd. Conservative commentator conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said he plans to help launch a new political party after breaking from President Donald Trump and other Republicans over the US war in Iran. Carlson, the former Fox News host, who now has a weekly political podcast, said in an interview with the Colombia Journalism Review, published July 1st, that the Democratic and Republican parties quote are in lockstep solidarity with each other unquote on foreign policy, war in the Middle East, and other matters. We need a third party, said Carlson, a one-time close Trump confidant. I'm going to help build a third party. There should be a good faith effort to figure out what benefits the country. So, a few things on this before I get to the big takeaway. Our system can only sustain and tolerate two major political parties. This idea that we're going to have a third party is absolute fantasy. The hard part for both parties right now is keeping the fringes of their party in line. Right? So, we see this with the Democrats that are currently being taken over by socialists, the DSA. And then with Republicans, you get that, you know, kind of the woke right side. That's the hardest thing to do for both parties. And look, but even if Tucker Carlson, which do we really think that he would ever do this? But if even if he and the people that are he he's helping or that are helping him pull this off and they even get 5% of the vote, Republicans are sunk. Republican margins in national elections are so razor thin that if you peel off even low single digits of the vote, Republicans have no chance at winning. Which calls into question why Tucker Carlson is even floating this idea. The big takeaway here, no one actually believes Tucker Carlson will take the time, effort, and money to do this. This is this is like a high form of online, you know, trash talk. That that's all this is. No one believes he's going to do this. Have you seen anything in your life to make you think Tucker Carlson has the the sway, the pull, the time, effort, and capability to pull off something this enormous? An actual third party. Not some rallies, not podcast guests, not some, you know, tension in the political machine. An actual standing third party. I mean, if you believe that, I've got some oceanfront property in Oklahoma for sale. All right, next wicketer here. hundreds of thousands of white British girls being sex trafficked and raped by Muslim men in the UK. So there was a report released in June called the rape gang inquiry report. So this inquiry was commissioned by an independent MP in the UK named Rupert Low. I think he was on Joe Rogan recently. I think I have that right. But this was privately funded, not funded by the UK government or by parliament. There's a 200 plus page report. I have the link to it in the show notes if you'd like to go through the entire thing. But I just want to read from the executive summary here. The rape gang inquiry examined the systematic targeting of vulnerable girls, overwhelmingly white British by predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs across towns and cities throughout the United Kingdom. The evidence put to the inquiry confirms that this scandal constitutes one of the most horrendous failures in the history of the country. Organized networks of perpetrators built coordinated operations that transported victims between locations, supplied them with drugs and alcohol, recorded abuse for distribution and blackmail, and passed girls between multiple adult men. These crimes have been committed for decades since the 1950s by Pakistanis in particular and have affected every region of our nation. The scale of the crimes committed is staggering. It has been previously established that at the very least 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma. the true number is probably higher. So, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of mainly white British girls, many of them minors, being systematically raped and trafficked by Muslims inside the United Kingdom. Big takeaway here. This is one of the many downstream consequences of three things. Number one, wokeism. Number two, toxic or suicidal empathy. And number three, the importation of the third world into the first world. So we'll we'll go through those briefly. So wokeism, like this is, you know, this, you know, this higher understanding of supposed systemic oppression, right? And so that's going to lead you to do things that would otherwise not be to your benefit as a country because you don't want to come off as seeming insensitive or racist or you know otherizing the people that have self-categorized as other. And the second part toxic or suicidal empathy it's hey we there's just these refugees from this this poor destitute country. We're a rich country. Let's bring them here. They'll assimilate. There won't be a drag on the system. They won't stub their toe and go to the ER and make it impossible for anybody to get health care in a place where healthcare is already really, really hard to come by. They're not going to do that. But isn't it so interesting? There are 50 plus Muslim countries in the world. Do we ever hear stories about people from third world Muslim countries immigrating to other third world Muslim countries? We don't really see that as often. They're coming to the West. They're coming to the United States. are coming to Canada. They're coming to Spain. They're coming to Scotland. They're coming to England. They're coming to Portugal. They're coming to Sweden. Why are they doing that? Why? It's almost as if it's exactly what their false prophet would tell them to do. Infiltrate the first world, the Christian world, the white world, if you want to call it that, and then operate using tea. Act nice to their face. wait for their backs to be turned and at the opportune moment slit their throats. This is a downstream consequence of that. And the third thing is importing the third world into the first world. When you allow people from the third world to immigrate to your country, whether legally or not legally, and you have no standards for how they will assimilate and the timeline by which they will assimilate, you cannot expect them to assimilate because every country should have an expectation at a minimum of language. So if I were to immigrate to Portugal, they should expect me to speak Portuguese. this idea that I can go there and operate in English. Again, I know it's a little bit different because English is the dominant thing. Let's say this. If you move from Japan to Portugal, right? No one in Portugal is going to be learning Japanese to make you feel better. You need to learn Portugal because you need to operate in their context. That's completely fair for the Portuguese to expect that of someone coming from another country. The problem is when people come from the third world is language is just one of the problems. It's just one of the issues, right? and we're all too ready to come to their their aid. I saw a video from Dearbornne, Michigan where there's a Home Depot there and the signs in Home Depot are in Arabic, right? So, this say it says tools and then below it says, you know, the scribble scrabble of whatever Arabic says is tools. Just come in their direction, not demanding that these people do the most basic thing, which is just assimilate to the language. But then they're also bringing their culture with them. So there's not a single kind of culture that utilizes rape, but rape in the Muslim third world is worse than rape essentially anywhere else in the world. And so when you have these people with a rapy mindset and they already see white British women as infidels, they see them essentially as lower than cattle. And so if you have an affinity for the human female and you see them as less than human subhuman labens and veritans leans just in Arabic then yeah why wouldn't you systematically rape them and make money off of it and film it so that you can make money off the pornographic images and videos that are you know going around the internet why wouldn't you do that and there are people right now looking around in the UK all over the world paying attention to what's happening in the UK like how did this happen how did any of this happen and look we're going to get a whole lot more information on this this rape report and kind of the the true breath of this entire thing and it's only going to get worse. All right, next wicket here. Senator Cory Booker's moving tribute to the late Senator Lindsey Graham. So on July the 11th, uh South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham passed away of a medical emergency. Um you know had a tremendous impact on the Republican party. He was one of Donald Trump's largest confidants even though you know when they were running for president they were really at odds. had a great reputation in the Senate and one of the reasons why he had such a great reputation is because he got along so good with everybody. Okay? And I was actually shocked to see this, but I want to go to this video. This is New Jersey Senator Cy Booker. He posted this on his personal exac account on July the 12th. Let's go to the clip here. >> One of the White House negotiators during that first negotiation told me that Lindsey Graham was like an unguided missile. that God, he you never knew which way he was going to go, whether he would come back and hit you. But when he was aligned, when he would be in the right place at the right time, man, he could get things done that other people couldn't and bring a lot of light and new possibilities to the efforts. I am stunned at Lindsey Graham's death. But I pray that he is reunited with his friend John McCain, that they both are experiencing God's love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness. My prayers are with his family and all those who loved and cherished him. I will miss my perhaps most unexpected friend in the Senate and someone with whom I got some good things done. >> So, here's my big takeaway on this one. Cory Booker and I disagree about almost 100% of things that could be disagreed on in the world of politics, but all I have to say about this one is bravo. Bravo, Corey Booker. I know you took some shots for even posting this video, but you wanted to honor somebody who had passed away because at that point, there's nothing left to squabble about politically, but you could have just ignored this or put some sort of like, you know, chatbt PR statement out. You took two minutes out to talk about your friend Lindsey Graham and I just commend you for doing that. Bravo. Hey guys, real quick. 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All right, next quicker here. An independent minor league baseball team cancelling their game because too many players refused to wear the Pride Night uniforms. So early on this season in Major League Baseball, there were a couple of bullpin guys from San Francisco Giants. They had Pride Night uh at the San Francisco Giants because of course they did. And so they changed their Orange SF logo to be all the colors, all the vomit colors of the LGBTQ plus pride flag, right? So it wasn't just the rainbows, the brown and the pink and the blah. Anyway, an absolute like hogwash na nastiness. So one guy wrote a verse on there uh talking about what the the the rainbow actually was, right? is a promise from God. And again, the pride flag has six stripes on it. The real rainbow has seven. Another guy just refused to wear the San Francisco pride hat. He just wore his normal hat. Those guys got a bunch of crap obviously playing for the San Francisco Giants. Um but then this is according to NPR on June the 18th. This was after all the San Francisco Giants stuff. The independent minor league baseball team, the York Revolution, is declining to play its Pride night game Thursday, June the 18th, and has elected to forfeit its game after players refused to wear uniforms that featured a rainbow design on the team's jersey. This decision was not reached lightly, the team said in a statement. Unfortunately, several of our players have refused to wear the scheduled Pride Night jersey, and the club decided that hosting the event is more important than forcing players to wear jerseys they are not comfortable with in playing the game. Big takeaway on this. More of this, please. More of this. Because every single Major League does this. Some sort of a Pride night. Some sort of a Pride jersey. NHL, Major League Baseball's doing it. We see it all over the place, right? Even if they're just signaling during the month of June. But we need more players to say no. And they could do it silently by refusing to play the game. But a lot of these guys think of themselves as athletes because they are. And so they want to go play the game if they are physically able to. It's part of just being an honorable human being. Also, they know that they have fans. And so if you have a fan out there that bought a ticket so he could watch you play and you sit it out because you know your moral superiors there want you to wear, you know, the rainbow flag jersey and all that, you know, that's not fair to that kid. So you just wear your normal jersey. you just wear your normal hat knowing people are going to notice it's not going to be able to go under the radar because this is one thing that I remember. So if you think back to the World Cup, I remember seeing all these videos going viral and even pastors sharing it of the Team USA men after their games, after their their wins or whatever and even their losses circling up on the field afterwards and praying and people are like, "Oh, revival. Look at this. We got soccer players coming to the field and praying after the game." as if that's not something that happens in a lot of sports, right? We see this before and after football games normally where players from each team will come together and pray and all those different things. But need I remind you that in the very last friendly, which I think was against Belgium, uh, who knocked them out of the World Cup, but in the very last friendly they played before the World Cup, may not have been Belgium, doesn't matter. They wore Pride Progress flag jerseys. So, they had the red, white, and blue. They had the stars and stripes and all that, but the numbers, brown, pink, baby blue, red, yellow, green, the whole pride uh progress fra almost had a fro slip there. The whole pride progress flag uh colors there on the back with the numbers. Where were the Christians on the team then? Did they want to be known for what they're for, not what they're against? Did they not want to scream about things that the Bible supposedly just whispers about? Are they one of those people? Are they just go along to get along people? Are they just I don't want to rock the boat people? Are they I don't want to be seen as a bigot type person. It's like oh I don't want this to hurt my witness kind of a person. When are we going to have someone that just stands up and says no no I'm not going to wear that? Because you know where some of these people would draw a line is if their jerseys as opposed to saying [inaudible] on the back said I love Satan. I worship the devil. They probably wouldn't do that if they're playing for the San Francisco Giants and you know they're a Christian but they don't want to rock the boat and hey we're going to play tonight and uh we're going to be supporting the the Church of Satan and so we're all going to be wearing these satanic symbols you know upside down crosses and you know uh we're going to have baffomets you know in the stadium instead of our normal uh mascots and things like that and that's where a lot of these people would draw the line but what I would ask you is what is the fundamental difference between hey I'm not going to participate in you know the synagogue of Satan night or actually no the actual church of Satan night versus the pride progress night what is the fundamental difference because when you start peeling back the layers you realize there is no fundamental difference none whatsoever it's the same thing it is the celebration and normalization of abominable sin and so if you are a Christian athlete and you are unwilling to say no to just putting a jersey on your body, how can we expect you to stand up as things get worse? Cuz things are pretty bad society and culturally here in the United States. Not nearly as bad as other places in the world. And here's the other funny thing about going back to the Islam thing. Isn't it so interesting that there's this red and green alliance? So the red of communism, socialism, and and the green of Islam or something like that coming together and you know these woke, you know, nose ringed, you know, purple-haired people telling the Muslims, "Oh, come on in. We love you guys. Like, let's, you know, let's all ahu Akbar together. Let's let's just come in. And as soon as the Muslims come in and get control, you want to know, one of the first things that they do, they get rid of pride stuff. Like, I I I'm trying to remember, there was an actual municipality where uh Muslims took over the majority of the city council and the very first thing they did is they uh got rid of all Pride Month celebrations. And so, all the woke people were like, "Wait, what? What? What?" All the gays were furious. All the trainee were absolutely furious. And it's just like, yeah, because y'all are suckers. Y'all are marks. But back to these Christians that are playing in these games. Why aren't you standing up? If the York Revolution players can do it and make international news and and help people like firm up their position and to stand for Christ, how what better way to do that as a MLB player or a NFL player or an NBA player than you being the one to stand up? Buck the trend. Otherwise, I don't know if your faith's actually real. All right, next quicker here. Texas public schools deciding to make the Bible required reading. This is according to the AP on June the 26th. Bible stories have become required reading for more than 5 million public school students in Texas. The vote to approve the plan Friday by the Republican controlled Texas State Board of Education reflects a broader conservative effort to introduce more religion into US schools. Last year, Texas began the largest state uh became the largest state to require every classroom to display the Ten Commandments. The mandated reading list has drawn fierce opposition. Critics argued that it violates the constitutional separation of church and state, lacks diversity, and favors Christianity over other religions. Supporters say Judeo-Christian traditions were fundamental to the nation's founding, and that should be reflected in public school curriculum. So, obviously, there's a ton of outrage here. Ton of outrage, and even the AP, they're going heavy-handed on the language. The Texas State Board of Education is not trying to introduce more religion into United States schools. They're obviously trying to introduce more Christianity into schools. They're not like, "All right, let's do some Buddhist stuff. Let's do some seek stuff and let's do some Jewish stuff. Let's do all No, it's Christian stuff. Like going back to the fundamental founding of this country. But yeah, there's been plenty of outrage and all this. But my big takeaway here, freedom of religion is not the same as freedom from religion. It's just not. People need to understand that just because you have freedom of religion does not mean that you are exempt from ever having to experience religion. And here's the thing. You are taking advantage of a culture. Think of how Richard Dawkins talked about this, how he's culturally Christian. You hate God, but you want to live in a Christian country. Because if you hated God and lived in a Muslim country, they'd kill you, right? Infidel. If you hate God and then you live in a communist country, you have no freedoms. Where do we get human value and freedoms from? Not from an atheistic, naturalistic, materialistic worldview. We get it from the Christian worldview. But it goes much further than that. just speaking about the language going back to the founding documents. I said this recently on the podcast. You can't understand the federalist papers if you don't read the Bible because the founders of this country quoted the book of Deuteronomy more than any other thing, more than any other writing from any other book or any other collection of books. So, if you don't understand the Torah, if you don't understand parts of the Old and New Testament, it's going to be hard to think, why would these people ever want to set up a country and do this [clears throat] experiment with this form of government, a constitutional republic? That's kind of weird. We're not a democracy. We're constitutional republic. But you can't read William Shakespeare and understand it if you don't have a foundation of understanding what the Bible says. There's so many things you can't understand without the Bible. So, I say bravo to this as well. All right, next cricketer here. Sam Alberry resigning from his position at an Anglican church because it was discovered that he was having sex with men. This is according to protesty on May the 3rd. Pastor, author, and apologist Sam Alberry has resigned from his position at his church and from Keller Institute after revealing that he had been involved in an inappropriate relationship with a man several years ago. Alberry, a gay Anglican priest who endorsed celibacy for the same sex attracted, served as associate pastor at Emanuel Nashville Church alongside leaders such as Russell Moore, Ray Orland, Gavin Orland, Barnabas Piper, and TJ Tims. A statement from Emanuel Church about Sam Albury reveals that they knew he engaged in an inappropriate relationship with another man in 2022, but didn't believe it rose to the level of being disqualifying and decided to retain him as a pastor. They later discovered new information about his relationship that was previously undisclosed and then terminated his employment. He was a prominent partner and editor at the Gospel Coalition. Shock of all shocks, the founding editor of Living Out, a ministry for those struggling with samesex attraction and one of the key architects of the acceptance of samesex attraction within evangelical circles movement. So, as I heard about the story and as I read about it, it was like, "Wait a minute. You mean the guy that said it was okay for Christians to be gay is gay and is having sex with men? You don't say. Color me shocked. Some people are like, "Well, he wasn't saying it was okay to be gay." No, no, no. Like, he tried to draw a distinction where there was none. He's like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can be gay. You can be gay like me. Just don't have sex with dudes, right? Just be celibate, right? It's not okay that you have that broken desire inside of you. You must take not just your behavior but your broken desires of your heart to the foot of the cross. That's something that Sam Alberry refused to say and do. He said, "I was born this way. There's nothing that can be done about it. Blood of uh Christ, cross of Christ, be damned." He didn't he wouldn't say that, but it's like that doesn't count here. I'm just going to be this way my entire life. You just need to be celibate. But then you see most of these people that are saying things like that aren't actually celibate themselves. But to take kind of a a left turn here on this story, my big takeaway, you know what would be awesome? If just once, it'd be awesome to see this once. If one of these prominent big EVA pastors and authors would come forward and admit their sin before somebody found out what they had been doing. So, I wonder what his church saw in 2022 that made them think, "Yeah, this isn't disqualifying." What? Did only have sex on Tuesdays with his live-in boyfriend? Like what did they see that was like, yeah, you know, this isn't worth getting rid of him. But then they found out more stuff showing that he was actually carrying on sexual relationships, sodomite abominable relationships with other men. And they're like, "All right, this bridge too far." But we never see it happen that way. They always get caught. Steve Lawson got caught. Carl Lince got caught. When are we going to see these people just come out before and say, "Yeah, I need to admit my sin. I need to submit myself to the authority of elders and I have disqualified myself from this pulpit and I'm not going to try to get it back. Guess that's too much to ask. All right, next quick hitter here. A couple more to go. The Southern Baptist Convention officially voting to follow biblical guidelines on females and church leadership. So this is according to the Christian Post on June the 10th. Messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention voted in favor of of a proposed constitutional amendment that solidifies the denomination's ban on women serving as pastors, overseers, and elders. Excuse [clears throat] me. The vote marks a significant victory for conservatives one year after a similar proposal failed to gain enough support. The amendment will still need to pass a second vote at next year's SBC annual meeting to be officially added to the denomination's constitution. So big takeaway here, this is necessary, but it's absolutely ridiculous that this is necessary. Can't believe it wasn't passed last year. It wouldn't actually so shock me if it didn't, you know, pass next year or something like that. But this whole thing is ridiculous that it even has to be discussed. The complimentarian view is the correct one. The egalitarian view is not. But this gets really muddled. And you heard me talk about this when I was talking to Miles de Benedictus. I went to the Logos AI. The Logos app and software is so incredible. It's awesome. And now that I have this AI chat function that has made Bible study, making connections like that Leash on a dragon episode. Man, I was going back and forth with that AI. Okay, refer to this part of scripture. Okay. Okay, well where where does that pull from here and all that? It was tremendously helpful. Tremendously helpful, right? And more trustworthy than using Claude or Grock or Gemini or something like that. But I said this on the show, but if you didn't hear it, I went to the AI about a different project and I was like, "Hey, everywhere in the Bible where it talks about pastors, shepherds, elders, deacons, like we see the the language gendered as male, correct?" I was just making sure I wasn't missing something. And he gave me this long answer, this mely mouth, saying one thing out of one side of your mouth, one thing out of another side of their mouth. I was just like, it was hard to follow this answer, but it was like, yeah, well, some people think this, but there are scholars that have questioned yada yada. It was blah blah blah. So, I get mad at the AI and I say, stop answering this question like you're trying to win a debate in a room full of feminists and liberals and just tell me what the text says. And then it said, uh, essentially, yeah, all of it's gendered male. I was like, holy crap, how why did I have to go through this? Like, I had to Pete Rose slide through thorn bushes to get to the answer that should have been easy from the beginning. It could have given me a one-word answer of yes to my initial question, right? But that's the millu that we're in because the AI inside of Logos is only pulling from Logos materials, stuff that they have licenses for, stuff that's part of the software. And so there's a lot of stuff in the software that oh all of a sudden after thousands of years that word doesn't mean what we all think it means. Women can be pastors. Women can speak in front of mixed audiences from the pulpits of prominent pastors. No big deal. Women can be elders, right? No big deal. For those of you listening to this that go to a church that has female elders, what are you doing? What are you doing? If your church is going to do something so contrary to scripture, a lot of things are not clear in scripture. That's clear in scripture, especially the description of elders. It's all gendered male, all the language, all of it. If your church is willing to forego that to not [inaudible] off some of the women in the congregation or [inaudible] off some of the, you know, wives of the elders or the wife of the lead pastor. And so you just throw a couple of women on the elder board. What else are they going to sacrifice in their attempt to not offend anyone? What other parts of the Bible are they going to bow because of pressure? Because they got hit by four waves of feminism and it didn't even take that many. They were willing to bow from the very beginning. And so good job to the SBC by doing this. But the fact that it had to be a constitutional amendment is just absurd. All right, last quick hitter of the day. I love this one. A six-year-old Scottish boy standing firm in the face of Islam. Uh so I'm going to show you the clip here. Uh but apparently this video was taken at a field trip by the Beaver Scouts, which are like a 6 to8year-old boys and girls in the country of Scotland. So they were visiting a mosque for whatever reason that day and then this happened. >> [music] >> So to describe what's happening on screen for those of you just listening to this, you see what I assume is the imam of this mo showing these children how they are to kneel and pray to Allah. And then we see one young man when all the kids and all the adults in the room bow to do this Islamic prayer. We see one young man, I don't know the kid's name, but a young man between the ages of six and eight that just stands there with his hands in his pocket while all of his other Beaver Scout buddies are praying to the false god of Islam. Just stand there with his hand in his pocket. He didn't make some grand declaration. Uh obviously you could tell by looking at the kid he was well uh intact in terms of his mental faculties and so it wasn't like he didn't understand the instructions from the imam. He just basically was like no [clears throat] dude not doing that. So big takeaway on this one last one of the day. This young Scottish boy has more stones and courage to stand up against Islam than many of the pastors in the west. many of the Christian pastors because this boy was like, "Wait, this ain't true. This is weird. I'm not doing it." He didn't act like the Team USA men's soccer team that was like, "All right, yeah, go ahead and put the Pride Pro progress flag stuff on my jersey. Whatever. I can ignore that. I don't want to say I don't want to stand up and do anything." It's not going to be like, you know, some of the pastors here in this country that, you know, just accepted the Black Lives Matter stuff and never recanted their support for BLM, the Communist Organization, and posting the Black Square on Twitter. This gosh boy just said, "No." And he doesn't even know what he did fully, but what he basically said is, "No, I'm going to stand firm and act like a man." I got high hopes for that young man, right? I have no idea anything about his family life, any about us, anything about his socioeconomic status. I have no idea what kind of IQ the kid has. No idea what his aspirations are, but in that moment, I can pretty much tell you that kid's going to be okay. He may not become a billionaire. He may not change the world or all that, but that looks like a kid who's probably going to marry a beautiful Scottish gal, have some kids, and raise them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. because when it came time to stand firm and act like a man against Islam, he did it. So, let that be an encouragement to some of you weak kneed, yellow-bellied, you know, sweater vestwear wearing pastors out there that don't want to ever touch Islam because, oh man, that's the third rail for you. Could you at least try to have the same level of courage as a seven-year-old Scottish boy? It'd be awesome. All right, guys. We're going to leave it there for today. Before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost at Undaunted Life. Our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that forges spiritual, mental, and physical resilience. Don't forget to check out our new website, undaunted.life, undaunted.life. There is a little form there in the bottom right. If there's something we forgot to do or something that's not working right, please let us know. Also, donate to the daily blade. If you need a taxdeductible donation, you can go to new horizonsfoundation.com to do that or just go to the link in the show notes. You can donate directly to Undon Life undon. cash donate, please hop on board, and be a monthly donor. And then I've got links to everything else I talked about in this episode. Thank you everyone for listening to this episode. Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate, and leave us a positive five-star review. If you want me to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, just shoot me an email to info@undaunted.life. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook. And check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more content like this coming. www.undaunted.life. The music on this podcast is the song Conqueror by the Christian metal band Void Awaken. Be sure to stream their music on Spotify, Apple Music, and wherever else you get your music. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness. Keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience. Keep seeking the Lion of Judah. Now [music] [music] heat.