This is Undaunted Life a man's Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. All right, everybody. Here we are. We're towards the end of the year, the end of 2025. And as you know, at the end of the year, we do a bunch of top lists. So we do like best podcasts of the year, today's best books of the year. Then we'll wrap up the year with some other shows. So I changed it up a little bit last year with my list from 24. So I did it. I used to do categories and different awards and different things like that. But this year what I decided to do is I just decided to do what I did last year, which is a top 10 list. So we're going to go from 10 to one, and these are in order.

And this is very hard to do. Okay. One thing I will tell you is I can't really read books that aren't the Bible outside of the podcast, the ones that are the people coming on the show, the interviews. And so these are going to be books that I read because of the podcast, because there were several books that came out this year that I wanted to read that I just didn't have the person on the show. So I just didn't have the capacity to read. But I do have some breaking news for 2025 before we get to the list for the first time ever. Because I think I've been doing the best books of the year for, I don't know, six, seven years in a row, I will not be having a worst

book of the year or a most disappointing book of the year or, you know, biggest letdown.

I just don't have one.

Every book I read this year, depending upon the circumstance, I could recommend to somebody

to read.

Because in past years, there have been accidentally some stinkers.

And so now that, you know, I'm kind of vetting the podcast because now, I mean, since the men's conference at Churchill, I'm

probably getting 35 or 40 pitches for people to come on the show to talk about their book or their

podcast or their ministry or their business or their, you know, documentary or whatever. So it's 35 to 40 requests

for every one that I can have on the show. And so I have to be incredibly, incredibly stingy about

who comes on the show. And so I'm really vetting the author, the publisher that they're coming from

and all those types of things. So we are not doing a worship of the year. So you don't have to look forward to that. But I do want to give you some honorable mentions before we get to the stuff. I've got three honorable mentions. These were books that were not released in 2025, okay? But these are books that should be on all of your lists. Okay? The first two would probably have been in my top five had they been for this year,

but all three are fantastic. So one is them before us, why we need a global children's rights

movement by Katie Faust. That was released in 2022. She was on episode 761 of this podcast. She's an

absolute firecracker. That book is so important and it has helped me kind of solidify a lot of my views that I already had. But again, as a children's rights advocate, that's not really something that you normally hear about. But she really elucidates a lot of the arguments of things that I've talked about on the show. So that book is well worth your time. Then we have the sin of empathy, compassion, and its counterfeits by Joe Rigney. That was released at 2024. Don't listen to Amazon. Okay, they said it was released in February 2025. Nope, you open up the front cover of that book and it came out in 2024. He was on episode 801 of this podcast. Very short book, very short read, but it's dense. And I will say you just look at the title. You're like, wait, the sin of empathy. That doesn't sound very nice, and that's actually part of the problem. He actually elucidates that throughout the text, which is we have this idea now that in order to be good Christians that we have to be empathetic, but sometimes when people say empathy, they actually mean sympathy. And so at the end of the day, it's just something that I think people should really spend some time with. So check that book out. And then also, Doug Wilson's latest book, which was released in 2024,

keep your kids, how to raise strong kids in an age of therapeutic sentimentalism.

He was on episode 731 to talk about that.

So another great book for you guys to check out.

But now we need to go ahead and get into our top 10 list.

I'll try to make this episode shorter than some of the normal episodes just so you guys can maybe go research some of these books. Every book that I've talked about, including the ones that I just said were honorable mentions. All those are in the show notes. You can check them out on Amazon. But number 10, code name Pale Horse, how I went undercover to expose America's Nazis by Scott Payne. So that was episode 734 of this podcast. So it's literally right there in the title. This guy went undercover. He exposed America's

Nazis, some other white supremacist groups. He got into some biker gangs. He was actually

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