You Are What You Watch

Welcome to Clearcast. I'm your host, Tim Dukeman. I'm here with Pastor Dave. And today we're going to talk about entertainment. Americans actually spent $37 billion on entertainment in 2021. And so it's absolutely a conversation that's worth having and a topic we ought to think more clearly about. So let's just start on a practical level, Pastor Dave. family and had to turn it off i don't know if i've ever had to do that with my kids i have had to do that on multiple occasions with my wife where we'll be watching some movie for a while i liked to watch old western movies okay because i thought they would be safer right and then there's some bar scene or brothel scene or something something and you're just like ah and you're uncomfortable it's like it's uncomfortable because it caught you by surprise it's uncomfortable because you're sitting there with your wife And then she's just like, uh-uh. And so that was that. So, yeah, we've had to turn things off. We haven't had to do that recently. And the reason is because now any movie that we're going to watch, I have that on imdb.com first. You can go on there and click down to the Parents Guide. And it categorizes violence and gore, sex, alcohol, profanity.

Frightening scenes. And it actually describes those scenes to you and gives it a rating and tells you how much and what that is coming up. So you can, without watching it or being surprised by it, you can know whether or not there's sex scenes and lots of blood, lots of taking the Lord's name in vain. It's often surprising to me on IMDb, actually, that under profanity, that is often one of the things that is tracked. is taking the Lord's name in vain. And they'll note it out 37 times, saying Jesus Christ or saying something like that or OMG or these types of things. And I'm just like, of all the places, I'd expect to find someone cataloging that. But they do. And so there's lots of things. Well, it's probably written by Christians, like those guides are. Yeah, it's a Christian on there. And then you're like, okay, that means some Christian sat there.

With her little ticker and counted it. I'm looking at the parent's guide on a movie right now, and it says, one religious exclaim that involves the Lord's name in heaven. Nice. Yeah. So thank you to the Christians who are keeping watch of those things on imdb.com. Wow. But yeah, that's from years now. Any movie that we're going to watch or TV show even. I'll go on there first. And my kids actually know that if I go on that website, if they're sitting there kind of over my shoulder wanting to, they know if I'm going to go and read that, that they actually are not allowed to be looking at the screen while I'm reading it because I don't want them seeing what's written. Not because the descriptions are usually very explicit, but they're explicit enough. I don't need it to be curiosity. So that's how things work at our house. Okay.

Yeah, we've definitely used the IMDb Parents Guide many, many times. I would definitely view it as essential. But taking it back, I guess, more big picture, how should we think about entertainment standards and what type of things we ought to be watching and seeing? Say it again. How should we be thinking about entertainment standards? How should we think about what's appropriate to watch? Well, there's... There's certainly things that Christians ought not to be consuming. And so there's a category of stuff that's bad, stuff that's going to be harmful or destructive or tempting. And those are the sorts of things you should avoid. It makes me think of Paul's statement in Philippians 4 toward the end where he says, Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute.

If there's any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. There's another place in scripture, I can't remember if it's in Corinthians or where it says, abhor what is evil, cling to what is good. There is this distinction and we have to recognize that distinction exists in our entertainment, whether that's movies or music or video games. There's just things that are not good for your soul. They're sinful. in there so we have to sort those things out and avoid the things that would be harmful or destructive to us okay um so one of the categories people typically think about with interstitial would be violence um how do we separate a movie that just has violence in it versus a movie that's so violent that we shouldn't watch it like can you give us some some guidance on that i'm trying to think of a case where I'd be comfortable saying, yeah, that's full of violence, but there's a good benefit in you watching it. I suppose the real issue I find with violence is that it does a couple of things. One, it acclimates you to things that are incredibly horrific, and you watch them or you witness them, and the response that anything like that in real life would naturally elicit is,

is uh short-circuited or it's dead yeah you're just like oh yeah they just shot him in the face it or you know they just slit his throat or they just you know threw him off a building or whatever um that that is it sort of it deadens your conscience to the horror of it it makes the image of man less uh of a consideration it teaches you to you're more concerned with the storyline and the plot progression than you are of the fact that What was just depicted was someone, righteously or not, as far as the storyline goes, being killed without justice, without process, without anything like that. If one of the things I think that's a problem that we're starting to notice more as time goes on is there was a time when a tiny bit of violence in a movie was a big deal. Okay. Yeah.

So if you go back, like, if you see a little scene with a little bit of violence in it from, or even a lot, 50, 60 years ago, it's nothing compared to what's available now. Right. Because the purpose of the movie is to create, to elicit shock and revulsion. But if you do that to people, it's going to take more next time. Yeah. And more, like, and over time, it just, it becomes more and more dramatic. I think of the passage of Scripture, the law about the flogging, where he says, They are not allowed to – in Moses' law, they weren't allowed to flog a person more than 39 lashes or more than 40 lashes lest your brother be degraded in your sight. So there's something about seeing the body brutalized that desensitizes us to the reality of the image of God in others. And just a diet of that is going to gradually make us less and less bothered by those sights. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's – so that's one consideration with violence.

Another is bloodlust, which is, in fact, not, I mean, not, there's a danger in becoming, cultivating an appetite for that sort of depiction. And it doesn't necessarily lead to real life outworkings, but it does desensitize you to it. It does familiarize you with it. Create an appetite. An appetite. It makes it normal. It's a normal thing. Especially with CGI now, things are in 4K. What did the actor actually do versus what did they whip up on their computer? How graphic it is, how much blood there is, just the intensity of it is way more than if you were watching a John Wayne movie and there was a shootout. You got smoke.

going out the end of a gun and some guy grabbing his gutter, his chest, and kind of falling over and dying. I mean, that's not how people die in movies anymore. And I do think it has a deadening effect to us. And then when we face death in real life, I actually think it works against us being able to cope with and handle it. I have a friend that I grew up with who loves horror movies. absolutely loves them and is absolutely opposed to anybody owning guns. And I have the same response. Your face, you're like, that doesn't seem to follow. And I'm like, yeah, I've never been able to understand the disconnect because it doesn't seem to follow to me that you would really enjoy entertainment where people are tortured and harmed in the most gruesome ways.

But then even owning a gun for self-protection seems like too much. I'm like, I don't understand it. He's afraid of guns. He had some sort of negative, some fearful event. I want to think when he was in college, there was a threat of a guy with a gun on campus. And that just completely, like then it was real. And I'm like, okay, fine. If you feel that way about guns, sure. But why do you entertain yourself with? Things as bad or worse than what you're experiencing in real life. Right. Yeah, and that's an interesting point. You bring up horror movies because the case I've heard for horror movies, if we can take a quick tangent onto this, the case I've heard is that horror movies have a good, solid grasp on the reality of evil. And then people have argued that it's okay to watch them because...

It's a grasp on the reality of people. And I guess for me that's not a super compelling argument because I don't think it's that hard to go find – like I don't know how you get around or avoid the reality of people in the world we live in. It just seems like that's not really the lesson we have to be learning too much. I don't know. Like, who denies evil at this point in 2023? Well, ironically, I think a lot of people deny evil or are completely appalled by it when it happens. I mean, you think of October 7th, and it's like, everyone's completely appalled that the Palestinians at Hamas would do what they did, and then that Israel would respond as aggressively and forcefully as they did. But it's like they can't figure out where it comes from.

And it seems crazy because, like you said, it's literally all around us. But it's almost like the consumption of horror, violence, that type of stuff, one of the deadening effects is that when it happens around you, you don't recognize it for what it is unless it hits close to home. And if it hits close to home, then you don't know what to do with it. You've not been shielded from it or prepared for it. Yeah. And so the other thing I think about with horror movies is just that there is a sort of reveling in darkness that happens with those movies. And I think it's hard to know, like you quoted Philippians 4 about whatever is honorable, pure, true, right, lovely, of good repute, dwell on these things. And I think that's a very hard verse to apply in a fallen world tainted by sin comprehensively.

When we have total depravity as our lived experience, that can be a difficult verse to apply. And I guess what I would say is that if that verse means anything, it probably means that horror movies are generally not a good idea. That would be my inclination. I don't know. Yeah, I agree. I think we're making the argument that there's some honorable good. There's a good guy. There's a protagonist. There's good being done in a movie. My thought about it has been that the Bible has the best stories in it, the best plot lines, and things you wouldn't expect or things that are really bad and really did happen. And that what we're trying to do is in entertainment, we're trying to get access to those parts of our heart and mind. And yet we're going into the...

the filth and the darkness to find it. And then we're going, oh, but there's something good in here. There's a good guy who's out doing good. What was the name of that movie? It came out a few months ago. It was about sex trafficking. Oh, Sound of Freedom. Sound of Freedom. I haven't seen it. I didn't see it, but I just haven't seen it. I was opposed to going and seeing it. Oh, really? Myself. I've never told anybody that, but I was just like, I don't want to go watch a movie that depicts something that's so wicked and vile and evil i'm glad there's men out there doing the the real work of it but i don't think we should consume and put before our eyes that type of uh uh horror because it normalizes it in a way like i think it's it's okay for i remember in um hiding place cory ten boom's book that one at one point she asks her dad oh yeah

a question and he just looked at her and he said honey that's too much for you i don't remember the exact quote he asked her to carry his suitcase his trunk yeah and she says like i can't yeah he said it's too heavy yeah and he said there's other things like what's going on with the jews like what happens to them when they when the trains you know and he just said that's that's not for you and it's like she had some awareness that there was something really awful going on because she was living and seeing bits and pieces of it in her real life right but that her dad was did a good job in protecting her and caring for her by saying honey you don't need like this is not for you and i feel the same way about sex trafficking and is that i yeah we know it's going on and it's a real problem and i i would i want there to be men who deal with it and deal with it justly yeah and protect and save and do those things but

to turn it into a piece of entertainment. I think a lot of documentaries have a strong element of entertainment in them. I never saw the movie. The people I know who saw the movie said it was moving, that it was not cliche or cheap or anything like that. And I just thought, and a number of the men I talked to felt very compelled and stirred up and angry at what was going on. And yet there was nowhere for that anger to be expressed. And when there's not a way for, When you're really motivated to act on something and you're not able to, it just sort of deadens your attentiveness next time. You're like, oh, we get all excited, but you don't do anything about it. I think it has a negative effect. And so I never told anybody, I don't think you should go see that movie. I don't know at the time when it was going on. I just had a visceral response that said, I don't want to go watch a movie about kids being trafficked. I mean, there was a movie a few years ago that came out about,

it was on netflix netflix got in a bunch of trouble about it this kid that was transitioning and stuff and they were trying to tell i'm pretty sure it was about an lgbtq kid and it was trying to personalize them i get really sensitive about movies especially if they have violence and gore any type of stuff like that and kids are involved yeah where it's like i'd like that little kid that's acting is being put in that little child that's acting is being put into an environment or situation they don't understand fully because they're a child, not an adult, and are being subjected to things that maybe they've learned not to respond to like a child would, really frightening situations. And I just think this is inappropriate that we would consume that sort of entertainment at the expense of the people who are producing it. It's the same argument you make against pornography. Right. Is that the destruction of the production to the people who are producing it for your consumption is a real consideration and it's wicked.

Yeah, this is kind of related to that. I'll never forget, I read an article about how, I think it was Jennifer Lawrence in a movie, I hadn't seen the movie, but she had this sex scene in the movie, and she had to get extremely drunk before she could even do the scene. And she would cry all the time doing it and everything. It was basically like laying out, This is the effect. And that wasn't like strictly pornography. It was like simulated or whatever. But this is the effect of what we think of as – or what people would call a tasteful sex scene or whatever. This is the effect on the people producing it. It is incredibly destructive. Yeah, and so I wish that that type of stuff wasn't – I wish we didn't have to talk about that kind of stuff, but we're inundated with it.

with violence, with sex. I mean, at this point now, when you see... One of the things that just frustrates me, and I don't know if it's just because I'm older and maybe a little less led off by the impulses and the... You can see through the stuff that's going on. I end up looking at a lot of the type of sex scenes that end up in movies, and I just think, this does nothing. You could have a really good plot, a really good movie, and this does nothing to move that forward. It's just in there for... Titillation. That's all it's there for. Right. And it's just frustrating. It's like you could take a good movie and spoil it. You think of you could take one of my favorite movies as The Sound of Music. Okay. Maybe sound crazy if you know me, but I love The Sound of Music. I love It's a Wonderful Life. Those are good news. But if you could take The Sound of Music of a man and his wife, his wife's passing away and he's going through mistresses and then this woman comes and she falls and like,

There becomes a love interest, obviously, right? But how would we produce that love interest today? There's no way the sound of music gets produced without nakedness and hidden stuff and kids that are struggling and having all kinds of... A lot of entertainment is trying to interpret people's lives to them. And so all of the stuff that the kids are dealing with would be all the things that are going on in society. It normalizes a lot of brokenness and a lot of really awful things that we should shudder at, but we don't anymore. We're just like, yeah, that's normal. That's just how life is. Yeah. Something that I've thought a lot about is that it used to be 20, 30, 40 years ago. The point of the movie was here is this person who has all of these obstacles or they come up against this great evil and they sacrifice.

They have battle scars because they fought it and eventually triumphed. And the point of the movie is that you ought to try to be like that person. Now, when we make a movie, the point of the movie is this person on the screen, you already are that person. You're already just like them. And so it went from an aspirational thing to an affirmational thing where now – the point of the movie is to make you feel better about what you are already doing. Yeah. Yeah. That's become the express. Like now instead of like the person, maybe there's a character arc and they improve themselves, but a lot of times they just make jokes about it and nothing never, there's no change. Like one of the, the amazing things about the last like 10 years, especially is that every female character no longer has a character arc. And if she has any character arc, it's her coming to realize, how amazing and wonderful and perfect she already is. That's become a joke among people who watch movies is that they don't have a character arc. But I think there's a significant degree to which that's really an industry-wide problem for the entertainment industry in general is that we don't want to... It's like they don't want to put people in front of us who are obviously better than us because it might make us feel bad. But I think that's a...

You could argue that's an issue in any form of media. I do think there are unique sins and temptations that are involved with visual media. And one of them we've kind of covered is just the issue of violence. But the issue of profanity and sexual content is, in my mind, a more dramatic issue, like I believe. I think it's closer to the surface, maybe I would put it. I'm not sure exactly how I would best frame that. But I would say that as Christians, part of the issue is that we're very tempted to become inoculated against it and just inured to where we're just not bothered by the media we consume. And if we would nurture a tender conscience, it would put us miles up the road on the issue.

You know, if we would just start with just a basic tenderness of conscience and an awareness, a fear of God, an awareness of God's care for these things, and the fact that He's watching, like that He knows what we're doing and that we stand before Him. Yeah. I think the things that are, with entertainment, the things that sort of stand out to me generally in terms of the troubles, violence, sex, and the effects that those will have on you. Also, it's like the amount of time that gets wasted is a real concern of mine. I was having a conversation with my boys, and this has sort of been an ongoing conversation, and we talk about Dude Perfect. Oh, Tim, you don't even know who Dude Perfect is? Do you know who Mr. Beast is? Yeah, I know who Mr. Beast is. Dude Perfect. It sounds vaguely familiar. Yeah, it's a perfect waste of time. Okay.

Dude Perfect was one of the biggest YouTube channels back in the day. They were one of the early ones to actually make it big. They're professing Christians. What do they do? They do trick shots. Oh, like the basketball shoots? Their initial thing was trick shots with football, frisbee, basketball. Okay. Now they do, I mean, at one point they were just doing pretty much whatever you can imagine, just goofy, crazy things. Yeah. Yeah, and so. So my kids like watching it because it's like, oh, look, they can make this basketball shot from bounce the ball here and there. And of course, they're out there for hours and hours and hours. Oh, yeah. No kidding. But you can watch their five-minute video. They'd be really impressed. And I just despise Dude Perfect. I told my kids, I'm like, you're just a waste. You're just rotting your brain away watching Dude Perfect. Well, my kids are like, well, Dad, you watch things on YouTube. And I'm like, you're right. I do.

I said, now here's the difference. And this is my difference, and I don't know how valid it is. But I said, I watch things on YouTube. I enjoy watching people who have a real skill that they've worked hard to cultivate, a particular skill, not luck. Dude Perfect, I suppose you could argue there is some skill in developing through trial and error the ability to do whatever it is they're doing. But I enjoy watching guys who have perfected a craft and who, love it and like, and like to share it or demonstrate their expertise. And so there's a guy from like, I, he's probably got, he doesn't have a, he probably doesn't have a thousand followers. Maybe he has a few more, but he carves snakes on, on walking sticks and, and he paints, hand paints them, carves them and hand paints them and then sells these walking sticks for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Cause the amount of time it takes and they look like real, I mean, they, I, they're very lifelike.

And it's just an old guy with a beard sitting on a chair with his tools and his paint. And it's like the amount that he can see in a piece of wood, he can see the artistry in it, is really impressive to me. I like watching him. I like watching sports highlights. I like watching good people who are good at what they're doing, doing it. I like watching guys who know how to work on and fix cars and who understand and can diagnose problems. It's guy stuff. I'm sure. So if you're a woman listening, you'd be like, what in the world is the point of all this? I don't know. When the car breaks, there'll be a point. So you don't enjoy watching a video of the top 10 GIFs of all time? No. That's the latest Dude Perfect video. Or the luckiest dude wins a game. Yeah, that kind of stuff I have no interest in. But somebody who's good at, anyone who's good at their craft, I'm drawn more to that stuff.

What if what I'm really, really good at is making YouTube videos? I'd say that you're – no, I've actually had that discussion. My kids are like, well, what's the difference? It's all entertainment. And I'm like, there is a way to add value, and there's a lot of what goes on. I mean, YouTube originally, you know, here's the how-to videos for stuff. They were adding value. The video was aimed at being helpful to you to answering a question that you had. It's exactly like the difference in sales. You actually have to have a product that you're trying to sell. But the danger, it's in lots of areas in our culture, the tail begins to wag the dog, and you become such a good salesman that you can sell.

anything. What's the quote? You can sell ice cubes to Eskimos or whatever. The idea is when you become so good at YouTube videos that you don't even care about the real life skill. It's just, how can I turn anything into content that people can mindlessly scroll through? When I scroll through the Dude Perfect, which it's easy to rag on them. They actually, anyway, there's There's so much more mindless stuff now that I look back and I'm like, okay. And to be fair, with Dude Perfect, you're not dealing with violence and you're not dealing with gratuitous sex. You're just dealing with silliness. Waste of time. Silliness, which if you have boys. But a waste of time isn't sinful. I wouldn't say that. It actually is, right? Yeah. And my thing is, if you've got boys, you probably don't need to be feeding that mindless silliness. Yeah.

And I certainly don't need my kids thinking that they can jump off of a whatever and not break their ankle when they land. And so there is an element of wasting time. They don't show you the six weeks of him learning to cast because he broke his ankle or something. More than Dude Perfect, that would have been jackass. Oh, right. Where it's like, oh, we're going to get entertained by hurting ourselves or almost hurting ourselves. Right. This stuff has just grown up around us. And I think entertainment, and we're getting better and better at it with VR and stuff, where it's just an escape from real life. And I think in the end, whatever you're consuming, whatever type of, you might be like, oh, well, that's not my, I don't watch bloody things, and I don't watch sexual things, and I'm not watching pointless things. I'm like, okay, but you are being taken away from real life.

Real people, real progress in your life, whatever it is you're supposed to be working on. You're not being entertained and solving the problems your boss needs you to solve. Yeah. Or that your family needs you to address. And so – Yeah, I don't think anyone has ever spent a tremendous amount of time watching or playing video games or whatever, like doing entertainment. And then – Ten years later, they're like, oh, man, I'm really glad I spent so much time entertaining myself. My life would be so much worse right now if I had learned a valuable skill instead. No one says that. And I think if we give – like this is kind of a cheesy way to say it. But if you give your future self a vote in how you use your time, it will most of the time result in you just consuming less entertainment. Yeah, yeah.

That's right. And there's real pressure to be up on the latest this or the latest that. I mean, at my house, the sports that we're interested in are football, professional football and European soccer. And my kids have friends. We don't even have internet or a TV at my house. We have Wi-Fi and hotspots on our phones and whatever. It's not that we're unconnected. And it's like, oh, Manchester City played. We need to find out what happened. Oh, my buddy's favorite team is the, I can't remember who it is, the Dolphins. I need to know what happened when I go to school on Monday. I need to know what happened to the Dolphins game. And it's like, well, maybe. But there's pressure from outside to be caught up with the latest. I mean, if you go onto Amazon or I'm sure Netflix or whatever streaming service, they all have this banner.

Top 10 in the USA. It tells you what everyone else is watching. And if you want to be in the know, you better be binging this. And what are you sacrificing time-wise to get there, to keep up with that? And then it's gone. Yeah, something I thought a lot about recently is just the quality of entertainment, I think, is such an important thing to think about. having this conversation. So over the summer, we read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and it's widely considered the best novel of all time. And we got probably a quarter of the way to the book, and we're like, okay, this is better than most other things I've read. And the quality of the writing was so much higher, and the character building was so much better. And also, I wasn't expecting this as much, but...

There's lots of good world teaching in the book too. It's actually a really edifying book in a lot of ways. And I think about when we look at the Netflix banner of the 10 trending shows in the United States right now, how many of those are we even going to remember that they existed in 15 years? Right. And just from a purely practical standpoint, wouldn't you rather have read Anna Karenina? Then watched whatever the number seven trending show in the United States was in December of 2023. I mean, you know, which of those is better for you? And which one are you going to be happy about in the future? And which one's going to build you up more? Like what's going to put you in a better place? Yeah, but the thing about entertainment is this is normal for you. You're going to make a rational, logical argument for why you shouldn't do dumb stuff but rather smart stuff.

And yet the parts of us, the old man, is not moved by that type of stuff. It's like a little kid's like, yeah, but I want that. And so you're like, wouldn't you rather have read Anna Karenina than what was popular in December of 2023? And it's like, no, I'd probably rather have watched the movie that came out two weeks ago whenever you asked me that question. That's what our flesh would say. Be like, why would I want to spend all that time reading that book? It just changes the way we think about stuff. Well, if our minds worked through the logic of our entertainment choices, we really wouldn't need to have this conversation. Yeah, to a significant degree, yeah. That's a good way to point it. And so – The question is how can we approach our entertainment choices with a more biblically informed mindset, and what are the ways that we can – Work towards making spiritually informed and intellectually informed choices about our entertainments instead of allowing the top trending videos on Amazon Prime or the homepage on our YouTube subscription to determine what entertains us. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's hard for me to talk about because I feel we're so surrounded by it. I think what I'd rather say is there should be movies that you've turned off.

There should be series that you didn't finish. Right. There should be apps that you've uninstalled. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I would say, why are we talking about entertainment? Well, because we all spend way more time than is good, healthy, or honoring to God consuming this stuff. To the neglect of, we'll keep up on these things and say, okay, well, how's your prayer life for your devotions? What are you memorizing? How many times have you had dinner with your family in the last week? And how many late nights were there? Did you and your wife go to bed regularly? And it's like, well, no, no, no, no. All that stuff, I'm having a hard time. I'm behind at work. I'm struggling at school. But there's this other thing that is perfectly maintained and up to date. And it's your entertainment life. And so it has a really corrosive effect on your spiritual state.

You might think, oh, we'll just run away from it and not participate in it. And in one sense, I'm like, where are you going to go to get away from? Well, I found something that's been super helpful in limiting the amount of entertainment that I intake is just my wife having a new baby. Yeah. We have a particular series we've watched together. And the last time we watched one was, an episode was... four months ago or three months ago. We've got a new little one that's, he's almost a month and a half old now. And that just really changes your ability to consume. Yeah. And so I think one of the ways to fight this temptation, it's like, well, I'm just going to run away from it and not do it. And it's like, well, that's probably not the best game plan. I think instead what you're better off doing is filling your life up with responsibilities that demand you your time.

Your time and your energy and your thought and your rest, that's probably a good way to fight it. It's just to set your life up in such a way that you don't have a bunch of downtime. And that's easier if you're – I think it's easier as you get older. You just – if you tend to have more responsibilities when you're older. The problem is when you're setting the trajectory of your life, you have way more disposable time, income, all kinds of stuff. And that trajectory is going to die a slow, painful death later on in life. Hopefully, it'll die a death as you gain more responsibilities. I was telling my older boys recently, I said the way that I spent my late teens and early 20s was there was no accountability. There was no input from anyone other than me in terms of what I spent my time, my energy, my interest. None of that stuff was ever cultivated.

in a helpful way. And so now I'm 41 and it's like, okay, but you can't think and want the sort of stuff that 20 year olds think and want and want to do with their time. Cause you're married, you've got kids, like you're, you've got a lot of responsibilities. Like there's these other things just have to go by the way. And I'm not going to participate in them while they do. Cause I don't have the time or energy to do it. Yeah. I'm sure that's true with you guys where those things are like, I'm not going to, I can't get on that train and pay it. You know? No, I don't.

I can't be in that fantasy football league or whatever because I don't have the time to. I can't check Telegram today. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that a lot of this comes down to if you're going to have an approach to entertainment that would even be recognizable to someone who lived in all of human history until 50 years ago, you're just going to have to be okay with not keeping up. You're not going to know what's going on. You're not going to be following all the shows or the movies or whatever. You're not going to be caught up. You're not going to be conversing. Yeah. Now let me add something to it that might be my bristle at. You're not going to be caught up with all the news. You're not. Right. Because what I've said to my family and other people in the church and stuff is I said, news is what affects the way you live, your particular daily life. Yeah. Anything that – just because it's –

on a news show or on Fox or CNN or wherever, whatever podcast you're listening to that's political, I think there's a lot of entertainment that passes itself off as this is news and relevant. And it's like, no, that does not affect me. And I have no ability to change what happens in that situation in any meaningful way from where I'm at right now. And then things that might be news somewhere else are not news to me. And it makes your world a lot smaller when you think of news that way, which is what can I do around here? I think most people probably don't track nearly as closely with their local news as they do with national or global. Joseph Spurgeon, Joseph, I'm sorry, Joseph Bortka just shouted while he was listening to this podcast. Yeah. A young guy from our church that's always talking about the need for local involvement over national. Yeah, because it's where he bangs on.

Yeah, where you have actually the ability to do anything, to accomplish anything. If what you're consuming has no ability for you to act on in your real day-to-day life, it's entertainment. YouTube has videos on it about how to fix this on your car and do build this thing in your house. You name it, it's got videos on it. But if you're never actually going to do that stuff, It's not education. It's just entertainment. A lot of documentaries. Oh, I'm going to learn all about such and such. It's probably entertainment. Yeah, I agree. Which is not to say that there isn't – we talked earlier about there being some Christian themes or redeemable qualities in different movies or forms of entertainment. I'm not – I don't have a hard line in my life about saying that – You can't find those things or appreciate those things at all. I watched a movie recently that was a documentary. It was about a photojournalist who was over in Iraq during, I think it was during Desert Storm. And the main plot of the story was him actually going back. And this was all real-time footage from the war. And it was the culmination of the...

film was them actually getting pinned down in this valley and a number of the the unit that he was with were killed because they couldn't come in to save him so it's a war movie it's sad there's no sex in there but it's real bullets real people real soldiers real video but the real story was his son came with him who was an adult son and his son wanted to know why were you not a father and why were you always gone why are you never here for my graduate like my birthdays for holidays for all this like real life stuff his son wanted to know what is so compelling that you were not a husband and a father and so his son went with him on this last trip and so he and his son are with this group and there's nothing romantic about it there's a lot of foul language in it because they're big people are dying shooting dying and stuff um it was fairly raw it was

real you came away i mean the end of the scene the end of the movie is that is the military funeral for all the guys who didn't come back and i was moved and brought to tears and was also very thankful to have been doing the work that they were doing um and was sorry for the cost that it was on his family thankful for the soldiers who did it um i really appreciated it i don't know that i'd recommend the movie i certainly wouldn't recommend the movie to children in terms of the language and the themes and the things that are going on in there. But it was literal real footage, even real interviews that were aired nationally with this journalist. And so I wondered whether I should watch it because obviously there's going to be violence, there's going to be foul language. So I'll leave you to figure out what the movie was. I won't name it. That's fair.

I'm not saying there's no place for that type of stuff. But I think we need to be careful with it as Christians. And I'm not convinced I'm right either. So here's a podcast about entertainment standards for Christians, and I don't know that I trust myself. I know I don't trust myself to have it all nailed down and know exactly what's right and wrong here. Yeah, that's interesting. I would add, to piggyback on your point, I'm someone who used to be very tuned in. dialed into all the news and politics and everything. I'm a little less so now. What I would say is that any news story that is still going to matter in five years, you will not be able to avoid finding out about it. That's what I'd say. You're not going to miss something by not following the trends. Anything that actually matters is going to boil to the surface at some point. Right, yeah.

If you have one news app on your phone, you will get a push alert about it. It will happen. Or it will be on the banner of any news page or whatever. The amount of news that you need to know just to – if you want to follow the broad scope of history as it's happening, the amount of information it takes to do that is actually really low. It actually takes a very minimal amount because most of the stuff – that's reported on quote-unquote news sites is analysis parading itself as news. It's not actually giving you any meaningful information. It's just somebody's opinion about it. Yeah, I'm thinking about this in terms of the election cycle coming up and how for the next 12 months, 11 months now anyway, we're going to be inundated with political entertainment, political theater.

I can't remember when the last time was I watched a presidential election. I don't watch them because I find them to be an incredible waste of time. I would gladly and have gone back and read the transcripts. I would much rather read it because what I found, though, and what's been very frustrating to me— Oh, are you talking about like a debate? Yeah. Okay. Presidential debates, yeah. I'm sorry. I don't know what I said. You said election. Oh, well, yes, the election. But the debates and the running up to it. Like, I'm much more interested in the substance of what someone has to say. But if you were to go back and take away the visual, the video, and take away the bombast of the arguing and just the entertainment, which is, in my opinion, all it's boiled down to now, very light on substance. Yeah. If you actually, they say, what's your plan to address this fill-in-the-blank issue? It's very...

I'm going to create a task force and we're going to find the best solution for America. Yeah. And which, yeah, plays well in Hollywood. But in terms of like the issues I care about, I don't have, I don't see any value in that. That's like, at least to me, that's bad entertainment. That's like dude perfect. It's like there's no redeeming aspect to it. And some people really, they care and they're motivated. They want to know about it and they, and. I would say, well, I've got my things. It just doesn't happen to be that. That I just say, I think this is just entertainment. Like there's really not much you're going to affect or do or benefit from right now. Right. So to boil all this down, if we think about entertainment and like what's going on when we watch something or we partake of – consume entertainment in some way, like – How would you summarize what's happening when we consume entertainment and how that ought to change our overall perspective toward it? What's happening? I think I'll tell you a story, Tim. Okay. We had a conversation off air where Tim said he hated when people answered questions with stories. But here I am going to do the very thing that Tim loathes. Parables are okay. So when I was a kid, I...

I had a lot of music that I listened to, a lot of just hip-hop and rap. That's just what I listened to. And I was a very rebellious, bad kid. To the extent that my mom called the police on me, wanted them to come take me away. She was very fed up with me as a resident in her house. And this was in elementary school. Oh, wow. By the time I got into sports in middle school and high school, I was less trouble at home. But there was really quite a lot of trouble. Anyway, one time I came home. and all of my CDs were gone. No nothing. I had no explanation, no note, no argument, no nothing. My mom had just taken all of my entertainment and thrown it away. And she told me that's what she did. So I went and started looking through the trash, and she's like, you're not going to find it there. I took it to work and threw it in the dumpster. It's gone, gone. Like, gone, gone, gone. Completely removed.

I thought, man, I was so angry as a kid. But you're like, why would your mom... Some of us are like, ha ha, that's great. Your mom was... And I've come to be thankful for what my mom did. But the answer to your question is in why did my mom do that? Not a Christian, not anything trying to be Christian. Why would she do something like that? Well, because she understood that implicitly that I was being affected greatly by what I was consuming. And she worked two full-time jobs and was not around to govern or police my consumption day to day. So she just solved the problem the way she was able to solve the problem, which was to throw it all away. We never argued about it. There wasn't this big, long, protracted issue. It was just gone. Because she's like, this kid is trouble. And I think that the things that he's being influenced by are harmful. And that's going to be the end of that.

If your nose or if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. When it comes to entertainment, I think at some point you have to look at yourself and say, what is it that I'm doing right now? What is it that's going on right here? I need to get away from this. And if that's what's going on, then you need to pluck your eye out. You need to run away from it like Joseph did from Potiphar's wife. And you'll find over time after you go through withdrawal, which is probably a very real thing when it comes to this, is that you'll be better off for it.

But if you get off social media or if you stop watching the show or listening to that music or playing that video or whatever the thing is you're doing, once you get some space between you and it and you start to fill your time that you've gained with something more productive and profitable, you'll be thankful. I really do think you will. If what you do is instead just say, well, I'm just going to stop and I'm just going to sit here, you will inevitably fall back into what you were Or something else, and potentially something worse. It's not just pulling the weeds out of our lives. It's planting good things in their place. And so entertainment can creep up on you. It's always going to be present and around. I've had the occasion to work with some Amish guys, builders. And you think, oh, they're Amish. They would never have.

I'll tell you, as soon as they get off their little patch where there's no electricity and stuff, they've got cell phones and they know more about what's going on in the sports and in the news and everything else, whatever they're interested in. They are very plugged in and engaged with it. It's really their wives that are out of touch because their wives are not leaving the home to go out to work every day. Anyway, we're not here to talk about Amish sensibilities and lifestyles. My point in bringing it up is just to say, even the Amish are not, who've made all the attempt that we can understand in this world, aside from strict monasticism, to get out of the world. And yet, that has not proven to be a strong enough defense. Wow. And so, you have to build a godly life. And so, I think the best question to ask is like, what responsibilities is this causing me to neglect or to not take up? And where can I...

find those responsibilities. Who can I serve? What can I build? What can I do? I really wish guys that watch all these YouTube videos and TikTok reels and stuff about side hustles, I wish they'd just go try one. You realize it's actually really hard work. It's amazing that money doesn't, $2,000 or $10,000 a month doesn't just fall down out of heaven like manna because you decided you were going to try. That you actually have to really go work. Get off the internet and go Try it. If you actually think it's that good of an idea, go try it. It'll probably be better for you and you'd learn more doing it than you would watching videos about it. Sounds like hard work, but it's good advice, Pastor David. It's a conversation I had with my son just recently. That can't be the answer. It's hard. But what I asked him is I said, I said, honey, if something costs 20 bucks, would you just throw your 20 bucks at somebody because you felt like it? Or do you care about your 20 bucks?

Do you want to see real value for what you're buying? He said, yeah, I don't just throw my money around. I said, how many people have to throw their 20 bucks at you for you to make $2,000 a month? He's like, 100. I'm like, yeah, not 100. Is that right? Yeah, I can do math. I was all wrong. And I said, so you have to convince 100 of you. That's right now, three zeros. I was like, you have to get 100 of you to be willing to give you your 20 bucks. I said, doesn't that sound a lot like work? Yeah. Like, that's not going to happen in five hours a week. Like, you're going to have to go work at it. And you can do it, and you're going to have to work at it. And I would rather you do that than continue to watch reels of having some guy tell you how easy it is and all the successes without telling you all of the failures and all of the downsides and all of the risks and all the guys that didn't make it. And we talked about the...

1849 gold rush which they my kids have been studying it and they were studying in history class i said what happened to those guys most of them just they didn't strike it rich right yep a lot of them died so that's what life's like entertainment will ever depict that for you right so get out go try it learn it you'll you'll be better off