RUSLAN KD | Faith, Culture, Commentary (Ep. 953)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Choice Hotels gets you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
Same drive, different day.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
Don't you wish you were getting away? Texas, Ohio, Alaska, we're up there too.
Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Book direct at storieshilttales.com.

**Ruslan KD** (0:30)
Did you know with the Sam's Club app, you're technically in the club, no matter where you are?

**Kyle Thompson** (0:34)
Like, this is a club.

**Ruslan KD** (0:36)
This is also a club.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:39)
And this is shhh, a club.

**Ruslan KD** (0:42)
My bad.
Come join us. Sam's Club.

**Kyle Thompson** (0:45)
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 slash 31 days to download this resource for free. That's undaunted.life slash 31 days. Start your reset today.
This is Undaunted.Life, A Man's Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. Now, Ruslan, I normally welcome people to my studio whenever I'm the one in the captain's chair, but here we are in your studio. So I really don't have any idea how to do my intro. So can you just do something for me?

**Ruslan KD** (1:47)
You're tuning in to the Undaunted.Life Podcast. You got multiple cameras?

**Kyle Thompson** (1:50)
Yeah, you got multiple cameras. Did you know you're a big time YouTuber and a professional Christian? Did you know that?

**Ruslan KD** (1:56)
Apparently.

**Kyle Thompson** (1:56)
Yeah, it's kind of a thing. It's a rumor on the internet and everything on the internet is actually true.

**Ruslan KD** (1:59)
A big time YouTuber.

**Kyle Thompson** (2:00)
Yeah, big time YouTube. But this is what I will say. The thing that I like the most about, because you and I have connected over the last few months. Do you remember how we got connected or who connected us?

**Ruslan KD** (2:09)
Yeah, my buddy Rich, who is a big fan of Joby, started telling me about Joby and started telling me about you. I was already keeping up with Joby a little bit.
And then he said, man, you got to check out Kyle's podcast, it's really good. And so then I checked you out, and I think I just followed you and like randomly showed you the video. Oh yeah, you DM'd me.

**Kyle Thompson** (2:27)
You would just say, hey, I appreciate this stuff.
You and I kind of became birds of a feather, birds of a feather. Not a feather, no one knows what that is, but birds of a feather during the whole Nathan Apffel stuff.
I mean, again, and we'll get into that a little bit later, but I didn't even know this guy existed. I didn't know that you had really dealt with him and had that long-form debate on your show. But I kind of want to go all the way back to the beginning because I didn't have a faith upbringing. A lot of people on my show, they know I talk about country music theology all the time. I was just kind of born in Oklahoma on that precious red clay, went to church here and there, got baptized, didn't know what that meant, but I just knew we could go to Hardee's afterwards, and I was pro all of that. And the country music thing, all that's great. And we just love the American flag, so we get to be Christians. You had a very, very different story about how you came to faith. And so I know we're just going to be kind of like flying over it. 30,000-foot view. But for you, I never had this ardent, atheistic outlook on life. I always just assumed there was something out there, even if I couldn't name it. That's just not where you came from.

**Ruslan KD** (3:29)
Yeah. So I'm originally from a country called Azerbaijan, Baku. Used to be part of the former Soviet Union, which is built on communism. So a lot of hostility towards faith in communism. And so there's a degree where it's probably in my bones to have some hostility towards the faith. Now, the flip side to all of that is I'm also ethnically Armenian, and Armenia is the oldest Christian nation. Yeah. But it's nestled in between Turkey, which had the awful 1915 genocide against Armenia, and next to Azerbaijan, which is just to the east of Armenia. And so we were Armenians living in Azerbaijan, which is just north of Iran, which is all Shia, Muslim and long story short, because of persecution and a ton of ethnic cleansing, half a million Armenians were displaced. I think about 500 were killed in the late 80s called the Pogroms of Baku. So me and my family come to the United States as refugees. And I think we landed here in 1991