Lauren Southern: I Helped Create the Manosphere — and It Nearly Destroyed Me | Ep. 14

As Christian identity politics become a kind of performance art online. Almost everything political is performance right now, but certainly Christianity. It's just the new biggest tool, the redemption arc industrial complex. I'm calling it or the cinematic culture war universe. Yeah. How, how did you come to, you know, you've gone through the song personal journey. I'm sure we'll deal with all the aspects of it as we go. But as you've made your sort of return to public life over the last year, how did you come to focus on this issue, which you're discussing more recently about Christianity being co-opted as part of the cinematic universe? I think I've come to an acceptance that everyone, they don't seem particularly interested in politics anymore. They want infotainment. They kind of enjoy the characters. It's it's almost like, even when you go to something like a TPUSA conference, it's almost like going to a comic con. There's all these, you know, many celebrities, everyone follows, take pictures with people in costumes, all of this. And I've accepted that politics is profoundly performative. And that's upsetting because I really believed in it. You know, I grew up watching Fox News listening to conservative talk radio every day. I really, really believed in the ideas until I saw behind the scenes, also my own life, how separate the characters are from the actual people. But spirituality should be different than that. I grew up Christian. I don't even know if I can call myself a Christian right now because I have such a complex life and struggle with God in the faith at the moment that I don't want to be a part of the kind of public performance art. But I do profoundly believe in the idea of a spiritual life that we should be striving for something outside of ourselves, higher, something moral, even if we fail. And to see that getting integrated into that performance was perhaps the one thing that I can't accept in the current state of media, especially seeing it increasingly so being used by the administration for justifying wars. Trump's spiritual advice are coming out and saying comparing him to Jesus Christ and having all of these characters destroy the one thing that could be the tool to escape the unreality of the culture, war, cinematic universe. Why do you think Christians broadly speaking, not online Christians, not performance Christians? Why do you think Christians are so accepting of their faith being co-opted as a prop for politicians and political influencers? I think there's two aspects to this. One is a lot of people who say they are Christians online simply are not. You look at Nikita Beer, the head of product management in X. He has said the top bought bio on X is Christian Patriot father, husband. That is the number one fake account. So we're not even talking not Christians, not people, not humans. Right. Then there are a lot of people that have just accepted and put the cross in their bio as a performance art or right wing politics based signaling. And then as for the genuine Christians that did grow up this way, who are in the church who genuinely believe in it, I see a lot of, you know, my family and community that look to this online world and are hopeful and they project their own psychology onto others. They say, I wouldn't lie about God. So why would this person? And they're profoundly, um, sometimes naive in the most beautiful ways because they see the best in people and they don't realize that when you are a public figure, your perception and incentive structure completely changes. Everything is about the next performance. Everything is about what is going to preserve the attention, economy and money and rebranding and people normal people don't think like this. I'm kind of a step in both worlds. I grew up working class normal watching the stuff. Then I lived it and watched it consume me to some degrees, the performance and the audience capture. And I know how politicians and online figures think and it's not the same way as the average Christian, but they don't have a theory of mind for just how psychopathic. I think people online can be. Yeah. You and I have similar backgrounds in the early part of our lives. We both grew up in working class families small town, not only Christian, but evangelical, not only evangelical, but sort of pinocostle or pinocostle adjacent. Yeah. Obviously you're younger than I am. And there probably some of the more superficial pieces of it were different. But you know, like I listened to salty the singing songbook and you're more adventures in Odyssey, I think, but they weren't quite summoning demons with you, Gio and Pokemon yet for you. No, no, no, we were we were more old school. No veggie tails. No veggie tails. Now when veggie tails came out when I was just getting old enough and cynical enough to turn my nose up at veggie tails, which is, okay. I didn't like the heretical vegetables. Yeah, that's right. The heretical. That's where a step too far. Actually, at that stage, I was kind of in a place where I thought the entire idea of telling Bible stories to kids as kids stories is so fundamentally flawed. Interesting. I think I'm coming out the other side of that now and now that I'm a father, though, you my problem within my in my mid 20s with this idea that you sort of reduce all of the complexity of the Bible into these archetypal like David and Goliath is about the little guy can. But of course, that's not at all what the screw of David and Goliath is about. As I get older, I realized that no, you do have to have some way of like creating them, almost like the medic version of the stories so that kids can even begin to build a worldview or begin to build an intellectual architecture, a narrative architecture for how to understand the world around them. So I'm probably pro veggie tails now much to the shame of my. I think it just needs to scale up. You know, you can't stop at veggie tails in youth group. That was one of the biggest problems I had as I think I, I left the church culture when I was 19, went viral, went out into the world. And then I was like, oh my goodness, nothing about what I learned in evangelical culture youth group, you know, between pizza and so on, I'm prepared me for being on a cocaine vendor through European politics. There is nothing that I learned in the youth group that prepared me for the complexity of this world or that it would even be like this, you know, right. And that was all that was my gripe. I didn't go on a cocaine vendor through European politics at 19, but I did. At 20 move to LA to find my fame and seek my fortune. And just came into immediate contact with the realities of the world, right? That the world, as you say, the world wasn't what I'd been prepared for. For me, that drove me further into my faith where it sounds like for you, it had the opposite impact that the sort of, I've said this before, but the fact that the city is always trying to kill you, you know, I mean, life and in a big city, especially when you're from a small town is so shockingly difficult. Everything's expensive. There's this sort of anonymity that you can fall into, which, you know, now I feel like that exists probably for everyone no matter where they are, because of the atomization that the internet creates. But back when the world was more analog, you had to move to a city in order to be unknown in your small town. You're completely known. If, you know, I tell people all the time, you know, far more people, if you grew up in a small town than if you grew up in a city, because you know, everyone, because over the course of whatever it is 15, 20 years, you have some interaction with every person, you know, you can't get away with anything. You, you shoplift at the, yeah, at the convenience store and by the time you get home, your mom knows, you're like, I don't know how anyone would know about this. But everybody knows about everything. Have you ever read, um, UK Chastartons book, "Heretics?" I've never read heretics. Okay. He talks about the microscopic versus the telescope. And it's one of his biggest critiques of Radyard Kipling, who obviously traveled the world and would write all about culture. He's like, you don't see anything. Your starship civilization, speeding on by, seeing everything and seeing nothing. The person who actually, what is it? The Rolling Stone. Gathers no moss. You're not actually building a culture. You're not sitting under the tree and learning the average day-to-day activities of people. And this is what I actually think is the biggest crisis of online influencer culture is when you're in it, all of the problems you're talking about seem so on point and so relevant because you're watching the trending section. But the trending section is an increasingly deep-fried version of reality through individuals who live in their basements or who live at swarays with other influencers. Once I logged off and went back to my small town, the conversations I'm watching happen online are delusional. No one in day-to-day life is having these. They would think you were insane if you brought it up at the community dinner, you know? Yeah. Well, you've been behind the scenes in ways that very few people have. And you've seen this firsthand. And so when you say that, you know, people are projecting their own set of values onto influencers there, they're coming to the politics of the kind of hope that influencers themselves are much more cynical and possess less hope. You're speaking from a kind of experience, obviously. What are the worst examples of that that you've seen? The worst examples. Well, I like to focus on my own failures since it's, you know, I can point out everyone else, but I'm an influencer too, who you get addicted almost unwittingly to the audience capture, because it's not just the audience projecting onto you their own values, but you're, it's a mere, you know, you're projecting back to the audience. What do you want to hear? Oh, I'm getting lots of likes and accolades for saying this. I will continue to say it to you. And even if your own life as an, you kind of get this assumption that the people know you're not the same on screen as you are in your usual life. Right. Since that's like what Hollywood is like, that's what all of the other. influencers are like, you go around and you see they play a character on screen and then they're different off screen. But that's that's not what the result has been. Most people do assume influencers are being completely organic and genuine. And I do think when I was younger, I had no idea about Tradlife getting married, having kids, but when I was 20 years old, I was doing commentary and speeches at universities about how women need to get married, settle down and have an army of children and make them, you know, serial from scratch at seven in the morning to be the perfect Tradlife. And this is how we'll fix civilization. It's a very reductive view of reality. But this is what I saw. My audience wanted to hear me say, I got lots of likes and clicks. And I genuinely believed I was doing the right thing. I genuinely believed I'm the hero of the story because we all tell ourselves were the hero of the story. Then I grow up, I get married, I get divorced, I have a kid and life's a whole lot more complicated than the reductive, you know, reasoning I had been putting across very easy to be certain when you're 20 years old, very easy, much harder once you've experienced the realities. But people like certainty and they want to hear it because it gives their life. It lets you know that life makes sense and there is an ABCD you can follow to be happy and successful. And hearing that life doesn't necessarily always make sense. And it's not always going to go the way you want. And that there isn't an easy formula for success or happiness. That's not sell that's not moving any units. Yeah, I think that's why conspiracy theories are very popular. Of course, life is replete with conspiracy. And having a theory about a conspiracy is much different than believing a conspiracy theory. I'm talking about the latter. I'm talking about believing in sort of omniscient omnipotent nefarious forces who control the world, which to me sounds like a very frightening prospect. I actually think that people find a kind of comfort in it because in a way, believing that, you know, the Jews control the world or that the Illuminati control the world or or whatever it is, is less frightening and actually believing that the world is a chaotic place filled with imperfect people and making imperfect decisions based on imperfect information that we're all just sort of bumping into each other and acting and reacting all the time without some sort of great up a tier of coordinating at all. I think for many people that's the most terrifying prospect of them all. Absolutely. You want it. And you also want to know that your failures aren't your own fault. That's the most seductive part of the algorithm right now is, right. You know, your romantic failures. It's actually just because all men are trash right now. It's actually because all women are gold figures. That's what I'm seeing because most of politics is people projecting their own personal problem onto the world. And I've seen this. I've done it myself where something is particularly bugging me. I will see myself continually talk about a political debate regarding that. And I see it in influences around me. They'll be privately going through a divorce and you'll see them constantly talking about gender war slop. And you know what's going on behind the scenes. You know what they're struggling with. The public think they are genuinely making an argument that all women are gold figures. And this is truth. No, this person is going through that personally in their own life right now. They're losing a lot of money in a settlement, whatever it is. And they feel that that's the world because that is their world right now. That is what they are experiencing. There's the famous, you know, facts don't care about your feelings from Ben Shapiro. I always super disagreed with that because I think feelings don't care about your facts. Feelings are what motivate us that we do we care about facts because they can change the world for things that we love for things that we hate for things that we are emotionally and passionately inspired by Emotion runs the world back to just tools we use to push things in the direction of our emotion. Well, the quote a great man to things can be true at once. I want to go back to 19 year old Lauren Southern. Yes. You know, you explode onto the scene. Mostly talk about feminism, I think in those early days. And you say that you started to fall into audience capture that you started to reflect the audience back to them. Obviously, this is we see this everywhere. We see this with all influencers. No ones immune from immune to it. Certainly. I'm not immune to it. But I wasn't 19 when I got into this. You know, I was more fully baked probably than you were by virtue of your age. And so I'm curious how you thought about it at the time. Not how you reflect on it today. But how you thought about it at the time, were you ever conscious of saying something that you didn't truly believe it and truly was supported by by the facts simply because it was the invoked thing to say. No, and I think that's the biggest crisis we face is once again, everyone thinks they're the hero of the story. You look at like people who are fighting for or against abortion and they always frame it as you're killing babies, you're a murderer or you hate women's rights. And that's not what no one's thinking about themselves. No one's thinking I hate women's rights. No one's thinking I'm killing babies. Just like at the time I'm not thinking, wow, I'm really not educated enough to comment on the subject. I'm thinking I have hundreds of thousands of people telling me I'm a hero that saving Western civilization. I have hundreds of thousands of people that are telling me I should kill myself for being wrong. Obviously I can't listen to those people. My critics are evil and demons. So I'm not going to listen to anything they say because it's the most inflammatory stuff that makes it to the top of the algorithm. So I'm not seeing the person that saying, Hey, you're 19 years old. Don't you think you need to educate yourself a little more and see more of the world. Those aren't the comments I'm seeing. And then I'm getting invited to fly all over the world, meet my heroes, the people that I watched on TV when I was younger and everything is just moving onward and upward and it's going so fast that there is no chance in hell. I'm taking my foot off that pedal because why would I. But you were facing the sort of hypocrisy of of the thing from the very beginning. I mean, when you when you even used the language now and I know that you have miles on you now. But when you say a cocaine fueled. You know, journey through European politics. Okay, fair enough. Good exaggeratory. But nevertheless, you were you were confronting and being confronted by realities that were very different than your expectations. Growing up as a young, you know, largely conservative, largely Christian upbringing. And yet you thought that you were on team good guy. Yeah. And and perhaps in many ways you were. I don't want to even paint so broad of brushes to say that you weren't doing good. In the midst of all of this, but how did you deal with those hypocrisies when you face them? I mean, how did you see the things that actually happen behind the scenes and some of those circles and still deduce that you were on the side of virtue. I think this is another problem looking back at kind of evangelical upbringing where your values are largely inherited. It's the people you're around. It's the key. It's all you know, right. There's no question of this is wrong because everyone around you believes the same thing. So when your values are inherited just as a well, of course, rather than through this dialect and debate and pushing back, which wasn't necessarily encouraged in youth group. You had some I remember being in a Bible study and putting up my hand and asking about some of the verses that talk about, you know, women shutting up. And they were like, we're not going to talk about that. That's that's for a different Bible study. So all of the kind of uncomfortable versus an uncomfortable conversations will get rushed over. And it was all what can we say that will bring as many people into the community as possible, rather than preparing people for a world that is going to objectively confront these values. So when I go into conservative circles and behind the scenes, it's a whole lot of partying. It's a whole lot of sex, drugs and rock and roll. And these are the, you know, you are the accumulation of the five people you spend the most time around. Well, I inherit those values very quickly. And it's embarrassing to admit that about yourself that you are as impressionable. As humans are, but I am. I'm I'm very quickly acquiesced to the culture, but I think also because of Because of some of the morals that were instilled in me when I was younger, there was always an aspect at the back of my head that was thinking, is this Is this normal? Should I be okay with this? When I was 22 23 I did a video saying that I was taking a step back from politics to just do documentaries. And that was largely because I wanted to step away From political circles and do things on my own because I was realizing how unhealthy it was for me. But I was always in this half dance of one foot in one foot out. I can never quite leave because there's so many benefits. There's so much excitement. But I knew it was unhealthy, but this is the great battle of being of the world, valley and mountain. Like how do you as someone trying to live a moral life exist in a world in which almost every career you can follow is harming someone to some degree. In which going out you're going to be surrounded by people of different values. You're going to be influenced by them. You're going to make wrong decisions. It's It's just on crack in media where everything is heightened and there's more money and higher personalities. Right. I think we were talking before the show about Well fame and power and their corrosive Influence and how the the world that we've occupied comes with some measure of all three. Yeah. And you you get to see the impact of those on yourself, on the people around you, on the culture around you. I suppose it raises a question of what kind of person is drawn to it in the first place. Do you think that political media sort of like other performance art forms that have existed before Hollywood or theater or music. You think that they tend to draw from people with narcissistic personality traits? Absolutely. You have to be a little delusional to think that you can change the world and that you have the right design for how reality should be. Yeah. You know, and a lot of people that I see even myself in the political media world, they are fixing trying to fix the world because they can't fix their own lives. Everyone has a plan for how the world and communities should be structured. No one wants to be that plan. Because that takes quiet day to day work. It would do a lot more good for you know people that are one comparison I made in my last video was that Twitter is kind of like gray town. We all sit there. We argue. we exert so much energy into that fitness, nothing. When if we exerted that energy instead of hitting like share this that all day arguing into our own communities, things would change like that, but it's a lot harder to deal with the material world than it is to deal with the digital world. So everyone's trying to escape their problems by fixing the world. Right. Instead of their own home. When I got divorced, it was so much easier to or separated. It was so much easier to be on Twitter yelling at people about relationship issues than it was to emotionally face the fact that my husband had left my family and to do the hard work of rebuilding myself in a healthy way. So much easier to just project and talk about everyone else's issues. You raised this in your video, but I'll ask it can can one be a Christian online? I think functionally it's better to say no. That doesn't mean Christians can't use the internet. That doesn't mean Christians can't be online, but functionally I use the example of girl back in the forechan forum days. If someone said they were a girl, everyone would say of course you are because girl stands for guy in real life and it would be an ongoing joke because so many people would pretend to be, but at the end of the day, the real argument was it doesn't matter if you are not your argument still has to stand on its own. So we're all functioning functionally guys in real life here anyway. So I think it's best to assume you just don't know someone's faith on the internet because you the only way you can tell if someone is a Christian or not, really you kind of have to be with someone at three in the morning when they're drunk at a bar to know who they really are. You know, I like that version of people because I've met people that work in the media world where it is maybe only 10 people have seen the real version of them. Millions of people are watching them all the time every day, but maybe 10 people have seen the real version of them. That relationship with God is so private, it's so personal, it's so aside from the material realm let alone the online realm. It's three degrees of separation away from there. There's no way on the internet to tell if someone is a Christian or not. Well, I would agree with that. I would say there's no way to tell if someone's a Christian even at 3 a.m. at the bar. I sometimes worry about I worry about the perspective that says when someone's drunk, you see who they really are because I think the truth is who you really are is a very complicated equation. And we all construct ourselves to some degree. And so, you know, I talk about this in relation to AI before people probably heard me say this. That, you know, when when not AI, but like the idea that was in Vogue a few years ago in Silicon Valley that we're all going to be uploaded to the cloud. And that they're missing the fact that we're embodied souls. They're missing the fact that there is no me apart from the stuff. Because if you were to upload me to the cloud, you'd have to decide whether or not to upload the version of me that would cheat on my wife for the version of me that would not cheat on my wife, which one is the real me? Well, there's the me who's the sum of my intellectual values, my thoughts that I've sort of built my identity around that me would not cheat on my wife that me aspires at least fails, but aspires to virtue aspires to faithfulness aspires to care about the pain that I would cause others aspires to care about the pain that I would cause to myself. But then there's the me who's, you know, been on set for four and a half months in the cold working 15 16 hours a day as exhausted as under unbearable stress is probably a little hungry. And a beautiful girl walks through the room who has the exact right pheromones that somehow register perfectly with something deep and biological in me. You add a few drinks to that situation. Now you start getting into a me that might cheat on my wife. Well, what's the difference? Well, what's different is his things that have happened in the physical world biochemical realities that come from the flesh, the reaction to those pheromones, the hormonal reactions that take place in my body, the presence of alcohol did the part of me that you would upload change? Well, no, because the part of me that you would upload has the virtue of being completely disconnected from the flesh, but the Bible doesn't actually present a version of us that's disconnected from the flesh, even in, you know, if you get past sort of heaven mythology, which is, you know, sells a lot of knickknacks in Christian bookstores, but isn't really all that biblical. Yeah, you know, a more a more biblical view of the future is that there'll be a new heaven and a new earth and will be clothed in something new will have redeemed bodies will still there will still be us because because we are we aren't a thing that's we're not software occupying hardware. We're both the hardware and the software. And so with that in mind, I would only say that the me at the bar at three in the morning, who has biochemically broken down all of the moral structures that I've built to govern my life isn't to real me. And in some ways, it's a more false me. It's a me that's broken through all the work that I've done to be a good man. And has left bare the part of me that actually isn't unique at all because the Jeremy that would cheat on his wife isn't actually unique. That's the all fall short, all of send and fall short of the glory of God. That's just that's just meet Jeremy. There's the same as just about meet everybody. That's fascinating. I think I largely agree with what you're saying, but because I've worked in the kind of narcissistic media space, the 3 AM version of people is sometimes more they take the mask off. They take the mask off. Right. Right. Like I know a lot of media figures that have to do a lot of drugs because they have to like they have to have the mask call on all the time because the second that you know they they are forced to reckon with it, they're honest with themselves and they hate what they've become. And I've been at that place in my life too, where admitting that I've hated the position I put myself in or I've hated the person I've become is so difficult and you do have to be broken to get to that point where it's like, woof. I do not like where I'm going because the the speed and the rat race keeps you in the V to act TV so long that you never have to acknowledge it. So I guess you're you're right that it is a combination of the flesh and the spirit and that what I meant more by that is the vulnerable version of someone that could be honest with who they are. And even that version, maybe you'll never know if you'll meet or not only they'll know truly. But I think this is probably why we're not supposed to try to separate the week from the chaff because we cannot tell the difference. Yeah. We're just not equipped to actually know if someone's a believer or maybe not equipped to know if we're they feel believers. I mean Paul says to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling because there is mystery in these questions. The intersection of man and God is of course something that's incomprehensible because God's incomprehensible and because man is incomprehensible because we don't know each other. We don't really know ourselves. How do you ever how do you ever see yourself truly your eyes only look out? It's you know, being a human being is the hardest thing about being a human being. I think one of the scariest realizations I had as well, even just in the material world, not just online, is we all use different definitions for words. Like when I say God, I might mean something entirely different than someone I'll say it. This was something I really had to come to terms with after my marriage because when I said, you know, marriage to death to us part, I meant that, you know, to death to us part. And it was my husband that asked to separate and I thought, how can you say I do until death to us part? And so my entire structure of what other people viewed the world, realizing that they were using different definitions for words, words fell apart. And I thought, how do I how do I exist? How do I operate in this world? How can I trust other people? How can marriage be real if we're using different definitions for love, for future, for life, for family? How am I my entire ideology fell apart? This is also, I think this is why I think that without getting too hung up on words, like I think that one of the great treats will be when we all get to heaven, we find out all the things we were wrong about. And as I always like to chide my Catholic friends, the difference between me and my Catholic friends is that I'll be shocked in the particular and they'll be shocked in the general, you know, I'll be shocked to discover that they were wrong about anything. I'll be I'll be shocked about all the particular things that I was wrong about. But the reason that I can't believe in a any sort of theology that requires knowledge and understanding as its fundamental framework, not obviously knowledge and understanding are part of any theology, but as it's fundamental framework, as opposed to the finished work of Christ as the as the only thing that can be depended on is exactly this. It's that if there is a way at most one human being will ever accomplish it, because human beings don't agree on anything, because being being more sincere about even my Catholic friends have a very high archial authority for the logic for theology, even they don't even understand what one another really believe when they say the same words, much less actually believe the exact same things, even when they say they believe the same things, even when they think they believe the same things. And so if there is salvation, it has to be somehow apart from that, or you know, only one guy is going to make it. I mean, obviously it's me, which is ultimately whatever anybody thinks. Yeah. On some level, if if you have a theology of knowledge and understanding and work, then really you've centered theology in yourself, because only you could ever actually see it the way that you see it, and therefore only you could ever do it the way that you do it. - Once again, this is why I very much compare, if you know, you know, great town from the great divorce. - Yes, of course. - It's hell, essentially CS Lewis is version of hell, but no one knows they're there. Whenever I see the battles of theology on Twitter, I always get a kick out of it. They're like, "Well, was Mary an eternal virgin or not?" And you'll have theology, bro, is Catholic bro, is all Protestants are going to hell, all Catholics are going to hell, and they're all so absolutely certain in fighting all day long. And I'm like, this is kind of giving hell. - That's just, I think, giving hell, guys, I don't think. You know, I'm pretty sure God will be all right if we get some of the particulars here and there wrong. I don't think he'll be all right if we get the love part wrong. - Humility is the only part wrong. - The only right relationship between man and God. But I used to encounter this in Hollywood, you know, being, kind of occupying the space that I existed out there for 20 years. I would often meet young people who's grandma, whom I am, or something, or whatever the connection was, and they had just moved, they'd write off the turn up truck, you know, and they would come and want to ask you, you know, how to be a Christian in Hollywood and how to make it in Hollywood, which of course I obviously did not know because if I know, no, I would have done it. But people would always use this term, "How do we reclaim Hollywood for Christ?" And I would always tell them the same thing, which is, oh, buddy, he was never here. And that's how I'd tell about the internet. - You were very well-reputed. - Yeah. - I used the ring. - Yeah, exactly. - We used the ring for Goddor. (laughs) Yeah, it's definitely, definitely one of those things where the innate nature of politics and Hollywood and these kind of things is power. And I was just doing a course on PSL yet recently. And he wrote a few essays on Christianity and culture and how he would structure a Christian nation. And so, people have been thinking about this for a long time and we're just redoing it in the most cooked ways on Twitter at the moment. And I just kept reading it and I'm like, okay, these are great ideas. But ultimately, I think Christianity and Christ's message has to be separate from the pursuit of power. Like, I don't know that it can exist within a hierarchical framework that you put other humans exerting laws onto other people. Like, that is just, the pursuit of power itself is quintessentially opposed to Christ. - So, Unheard said that your writing is becoming more and more Catholic lately or taking on a decidedly Catholic bent. But this is the least Catholic thing that you've probably said. (laughing) So, you talk about the drugs, the partying, the sort of hypocrisy, the fact that people in political media wear masks, the fact that they're broken, the fact that they give into audience capture. And all of that's true. I think it would come as a great disappointment to most people if they really knew what their favorite influencers were really like behind the scenes. What percentage, I'm not asking you to name names, but what percentage of the people who you've encountered in public life do you think believe any version of what it is that they say publicly? - If I had to pick a percentage, like obviously I don't know anyone's heart or soul, but I'd say maybe 20 to 30%. I think that there's, the problem is that our mind, we rewrite reality and narratives to make sense after the fact for our motives, right? So, it's like if I look back at some of the things I said that I feel were foolish, did I really believe them? Well, I believed I believed them, but I didn't think hard enough about it because it was perhaps beneficial or people liked it and they liked hearing what I was saying and the hype that I was getting was very exciting. So I think a lot of people convinced themselves, they believe the things they're saying, but if they really sat in a room for a long time and logged off and spent time away from the internet, they'd be in a heap of tears on the ground saying what have I done? - So how do you guard against it personally? You didn't, contrary to popular belief, you never fully removed yourself from public life. You didn't walk away from public life. You say that you've tried to form a healthier set of boundaries around your public life or a healthier relationship with public life, but here we sit. - Yeah. How do you now guard against all of the temptations? - I'm trying to figure that out and that's what's so difficult. It's, this is the first time in human history. Like when I got famous on YouTube when I was 19, the idea of being a political YouTube influencer was not in the consciousness of teenagers. Now you ask 30% of teenagers and they want to grow up to be a YouTuber. So I was kind of me and a lot of the millennial political YouTubers were like first through the gates of growing up online. And then how do you separate your identity from the online caricature that you are? I'm trying to figure out how to find a balance myself. This is my first kind of stepping back. I've started to do a few more interviews. I'm seeing myself, oh, I'm scrolling Twitter too much. I got a log off. I'm more aware and I'm more honest with myself. But I think the only thing I can do is A be completely honest with myself in the audience that there's always an aspect of performance. There's always an aspect of performance. I have just as many addictions to the internet as anyone else because it is an addictive object. But then I also, I don't think you can exist offline because the public sphere in conversation is happening here. The psyche has been captured on the internet. So I'm trying to find a balance between univomber in the woods and full blown internet addict. And I don't know if I'll be able to do that. I might fail completely. You might see me posting every day into oblivion from here on. I hope not. But no one's really writing the book on this right now. This is a whole new species of problems. Yeah. So you and I have not met before I don't believe. Although certainly I've known your work for probably as long as you've been in public life. And I think that the problems you're describing do have a kind of universal application across everyone of influence, every politician, every actor, up to, up to and including myself, the temptations are real. The and the corrosive influences are real. The narcissistic tendencies are real. I mean, nobody ever put a bunch of cameras in their house because they had zero narcissistic tendencies, right? Of course. And we don't want to be the version of ourselves that we built up in our head. Like even now I want to look good. I want to look nice. I want people to think I'm fine. Are they extensions or is that your hair? This is my real hair. I'm out of here. Yeah. I know. I saw the slander online. I don't think I did. So all well and good, all true. But there are two, there are two rights to two right wing medias. There is the right wing media that is home to Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson. There's the right wing media that's home to Elijah Schaefer and Andrew Tate and Milo Yanopolis. And there's fluidity. We're watching Tucker Carlson, I think, in real time, sort of move from the former toward the latter and other people as well. I want to just pick on Tucker. But while you have had access to both of those-- and in fact, I told you before the show because it's true, I believe the last conversation I had with Jordan Peterson as CEO of the Daily Wire was him advocating that I should hire you, which was-- which he did twice in that period-- a year, 18 months ago. And he advocated very forcefully for you. He admires you and believes in you and thinks that you're one of the good guys. And you had a relationship with him long before I ever knew him. You were covering him very early. So you've had access to that sphere. But most of your online life has been in the other sphere. And most of your public life has been in the other sphere. And so while the temptations that we describe deeply impact Jordan Peterson, they deeply impact Dennis Prager. A lot less sex drugs and rock and roll over here. A lot less-- So I've heard yes. A lot less-- other kinds of problems, of course. Humans are not immune from-- as I say, are not immune from these temptations. But I've spent most of my life over here. And I haven't had these experiences that you've had on the other side, which, as an observer from the outside, have damaged you. You've been harmed by not just money-fame-- wealth-fame power, the sort of natural corrosive influences. But you've been harmed by the actual behaviors of people for whom character isn't really even an aspiration. Jordan Peterson falls short of his aspirations to be a man-of-hi character. Dennis Prager falls short of his aspirations to be a man-of-character. I won't-- I'll name names so you don't have to. I don't think Andrew Tate has aspirations to be a man-of-character. I don't think the lies are shaped for-- has aspirations to be a man-of-character. I think that they're larping in a way that Dennis Prager may be failing, but he isn't larping. Why were you drawn to this half of political media instead of the other? I don't think it's necessarily that I was drawn to it so much as I was very much pigeonholed into that side of the political media space when I was younger. My initial videos, well, I don't agree with everything. I said, certainly the stuff I did on immigration very pigeonholed into like the alt-right, your white supremacist kind of thing. And I never was one of these things. I probably flirted a bit too much with that group because I was young and it's based signaling and edgy and you want to seem cool to the other people in this mirror. And just, you know, the radicalism and zealotry of being 1920 and being famous. And, um, you know, I know Ben Shapiro was even being called alt-right at the time, but he had lawyers to kind of pay to get rid of these headlines, whereas if you go on my Wikipedia page, the first line is Lauren Southern alt-right influencer to this day. I don't think you'd consider me alt-right. In fact, that group is very opposed to me. Certainly these days, but I very much got pigeonholed, but also I would say there's a symbiotic relationship between these two groups. Like, why is Andrew T. Famous? Well, he got interviewed and platformed by many people in legitimate mainstream right who have cheered him on and Tucker Carlson platformed him long before. He kind of moved over to being more in, you know, the sphere he is in now. You know, one of the things I noticed that bothered me a lot about how the media environment, even in the daily wire and healthier spheres work is because you have to put up so much content, you can't really pay attention to who people are and what they're saying. You can't really delve into court cases. Like, I have the utmost respect for Jordan Peterson as a person. I think he is trying and has tried to do the utmost good for the world. But I remember being deeply disappointed when he came out and promoted Tommy Robinson's documentary silenced because if you read the court cases around that, if you understand what he was actually doing, he had horrifically slandered a 15 year old boy, lost the defamation case, was lying about almost every aspect of that film. And there are a lot of people who have done breakdowns of it, but I believe Peterson had interviewed him and promoted it based on trust, based on believing that he was a good person as well without looking into the real details because he doesn't have time because he has to put out a lot of content because he, he, you have to operate on some level of trust with other influencers or you will be sitting in your room reading court cases all day long and never able to keep up with the algorithm. So the reason that this environment existed that I found very damaging and that I was a part of as well exists in symbiosis with the healthier aspects that promoted it and don't have time to look into the details of everything going on there and the scams and the lies and the fake court cases, you know. Well, I'll admit that I don't know the, you know, the allegations about Robinson, I don't know. I haven't. And most people don't. They don't have time to look at any time. I haven't seen any time looking into it as you say. And there is a symbiosis. I will, I'll readily admit that there's a symbiosis. I might quibble on some of the details about when did Tucker start moving. You know, I think that the Andrew Tate interview was a huge red flag that Tucker was on a different path than the path people had thought he was on there to four. Nevertheless, I'll grant the premise. Look at Joe Rogan. He just interviewed Andrew Wilson, who I mentioned. You know, Andrew Wilson. I don't know. I mean, no, no. He does the whatever podcast law, you know, he presents himself as kind of this Christian nationalist character and as always, women, why you, you bring nothing to the table, but you're, you know, insert a bad word. He's very ferrocycled in his behavior and he's being hosted on some of the largest, most mainstream platforms in the world. And I'm not saying don't host people, but there's not like the idea that this environment exists on its own that I existed in that's more kind of radical and crazy. I very much work in symbiosis. Well, okay, fair enough. Dennis Prager wouldn't invite Andrew Tate on a show though, just as an example. Sure. I don't think Jordan Peterson would invite Andrew Tate on a show, or there were at least come a moment where it would no longer be the case that Jordan Peterson would invite Andrew Tate on a show like by the time Andrew Tate is a known quantity. And I'm not trying to pick on you. No, no, please, but I love a harsh real conversation. Be real with me. You've just been on a path that and this is one of the things that is both makes you very interesting as a public figure is that you've, you know, you've gone through the fire and now you're open to criticize even even be self-critical of that world your time in that world. That's a very interesting thing, but there's a danger there's a danger to it too, which which I want to get to, which is the sort of Taylor Swift era's version of public life. Like is this the, you know, you went through your transgressive era and then you went through your trad wife era. Are you now in your redemption era? And what? Oh, no. Okay. Let me, you know what? That this is fair. I believe there's a symbiosis, but I also believe I have a penchant for chaos and I have an attraction to chaotic, disorganized, exciting lifestyles as well. There is a part of me that is a part of that sphere. And I, you know, whenever you see these articles that come out, I don't agree with the headline. Like I created the manosphere and I now would destroy me. I don't think I was destroyed by the manosphere, but is there an aspect of me that helped create the very Frankenstein's that hurt me? 100%. Absolutely. I think I had a personality that was addicted to transgressiveness that was addicted to the the lifestyle in those fears, even if I didn't know it at the time. But yeah, there even even to this day, there's an aspect of me where I have to be very conscious of the fact that I don't make the best decisions. Like if I were your older brother, I would say don't, I don't date destiny. Like that would just be a, that would just be a piece of advice that I'd probably throw on take fully. Probably this doesn't go well. You know, it's funny, you say that, because that was actually probably one of the healthier relationships I had in the political space. Yeah, that's not, that's not a recommendation. You know, when, like, what I would say to that is the, I would, and I said this earlier, I would rather be at least certainly after I had been in this fear that I felt was so dishonest with the public about who they were including myself. It was very refreshing to be at a table with someone who was like, yes, I am polyamorous. Yes, I do drugs. Yes, I, you know, I, I partake in all of this quote-unquote degenerate behavior, then to be at a table with a bunch of people doing the exact same thing, but pretending publicly to be saints, you know, because at least I can't deconstruct the world that I was a part of without honesty. So I couldn't deconstruct it with the people because everyone was lying to themselves. At least I have a lot more respect for people who can sit there and say, this is who I am, even if the public hate it. Yeah, this is what I'm gay. I'm a bisexual polyamorous guy. That's it. I'll get sh*t on all the time by the internet for it, but that's just who I am, rather than people who are exactly the same conduct themselves the same way. But it's actually more dangerous to be friends with people in the right-wing media who have all of these proclivities, but don't tell them publicly because as soon as you find out about it, you're now a threat. And they have to kind of destroy you and destroy your life, whereas if people have their cards on the table and they say, this is who I am, it's a lot safer to have a friendship with them. And you can just talk honestly about your failures. And that's what I, that's what I needed at that time in my life. I needed someone I could talk honestly about my failures and the struggles I was having. I didn't believe in the tried life or marriage anymore after my husband left. I see all the rumors online, Lauren cheated on her husband with destiny. That didn't happen. I didn't even meet him until after my marriage had ended. But we sat and I remember being completely just how can I believe in the ideals of conservatism without inherently believing that my life is a failure? Like I'm a single mother now. How can I how can I not hate myself and still believe in the tried life because I've failed at it? And the idea that maybe I needed to deconstruct some of that was profoundly healing in some ways for me. But I definitely, like I, I certainly concluded that I couldn't be polyamorous that that was not the lifestyle that I could pursue, but sitting there and doing drugs with destiny and talking about how my marriage had fallen apart was foundly more honest than sitting with a bunch of people who were cheating on their wives and telling the internet, you need to be tried and Christ is king. That was a lot better of a place for me to be, not healthy place to be. I do need structure, but I feel more comfortable with people who can honestly talk about their failures. On this idea of people who are cheating on their wives and telling the internet, you know, you need to be proud and Christ is king. They're two interesting pieces of that. I think one of them is I think that for the public man, it's it's better to say virtuous things than to do virtuous things. Whereas for the private man, it's better to do virtuous things than to say virtuous things. Neither is good. I'm not suggesting that a public man living a hypocritical life is itself virtuous. It's certainly not. But it seems obvious to me that if your husband says, I'll be faithful and then cheat. What he says has no value. If your pastor says, be faithful but then cheat. Well, the men fail, men fall to temptation. But they still better than a pastor who says cheat. Like a pastor who says a perfectly Christian thing to do is to cheat it. So there's a kind of, there's a kind of call to to hypocrisy that I don't think is necessarily wrong in public life. That said, there's a difference between, there's a difference between failing in the face of temptation and embracing sin while preaching virtue. And that is now something different. We're not talking about I have a lot of grace for people who make mistakes on a kind of all the mistakes that I make. You know, it's easy to pick on you for hanging out with Milo. I hired Candace to like, you know, nobody's batten a thousand here or anything. But I think that the movement as a whole conservatism as a whole, particularly today, particularly since it moved online, is so graceless. I think that a fundamental flaw in, and even the message of conservatism, not not only how we actually behave, but almost the message itself is that we uphold ideals. And that's important, especially because the left has been tearing down ideals for our entire life. They've been trying to deconstruct the ideals themselves. And so we've gotten so used to upholding the ideals that we almost leave no room for anyone who's fallen short of the ideals to actually participate anymore. You know, when we say things like, all you have to do to be successful in America's study after study demonstrates it, you know, graduate high school, get married before you have children, don't do drugs like you do these three things. You're, you're going to make it in America. And that's true. And it's important to say that that's true because you're giving people actual important tools with which to govern their lives. The problem is most people fall short of one, two, or three of those at some point. And now what? Yeah. And conservatism does a very bad job of saying now what? I would say that it's a it is, it is probably an indictment of the conservative movement that you spent so much time in it and knew it so intimately. That when you entered your own period of distress, you look to someone who is openly polyamorous and openly, you know, openly use drugs or whatever. I'm not trying to just pick on destiny. He is what he is. But that you thought that that that was a more honest way to deal with what you perceived as your own failures in the face of your own separation and divorce. After knowing the movement so well, means that the movement was not presenting you with a viable path to find redemption. And I think that's a that's a damnable indictment. Yeah. I think that there's some there's like a fascinating parallel between detransitioners and failed-trad life people in that you see detransitioners. They always go to the right because they they'll always just be proof of concept gone wrong to the left. And I think this goes with people who fail to achieve the perfect kind of conservative vision as well. Okay, even the people who are nice to me, well, you're still a single mother, you're a failure, you're like your life's over. We feel bad for you. We pity you. And it's like your life's not over. That's delusional. There are so many people who have forced things happen that filled their life up. But you feel that way if you're really bought into this. And so you have nowhere to go but self-hatred or leaving and essentially going to the left. So there's a lot of ex-vanjalicals, a lot of, you know, yeah, just people from the tried life that go and they go hard left. And I never did the hard left thing. I've moderated a lot, but I've still always told people, you know, I have a lot of criticisms of the right, but I still hold some of these beliefs still. But I certainly feel like there is no place for me. And I didn't feel like there was a place for me after I had failed. And this is the crisis as you point out that most young people have had premarital sex at this point. Most, you know, millennials, zoomers, they're growing up in a world that is antithetical to kind of traditional values. Where is the path to quote unquote redemption? Where is the path to healing? That's not being shown. There's certainly a path to your worthless now. No man is going to love you. No woman is going to love you. There's a lot of, you know, your life is over because you made mistakes. There's not a whole lot of celebration for, and when there is celebration, it's like you have to, this happens on the left and the right. You have to completely change everything about your life and ideology and basically go on an apology tour for the rest of your life saying, I've accepted every single right wing orthodoxy and therefore, and I will always talk about what a failure I was on the left as my full-time job. You know, the redeemed only fans girl can only have a career talking about how bad she was as the only fans girl. You can't become a new person. You can't grow up. You can't, and this is on the left as well. The only career I would have on the left as if I said, I was the bad Nazi girl, and I'm going to apologize and do tours on how evil I was for the rest of my life. There's no room for rowing. And that's the inherent state of the internet. It is Dante's Inferno, the very last level of freezing us in time. You are frozen forever in the identity that the internet has set for you, and therefore you can never escape your sin because every time you post Lauren, you're going to be reminded of every mistake you ever made in the comments section. So you can never escape that identity and transcend into someone better. And we let ourselves get trapped by it. I let myself get trapped by it. I still to this day let myself get trapped by it. And think that that's my identity. It isn't. I mean, you know that. I feel like lowercase or republicanism is the political virtue that I tried. The spouse, I'm not a populist. I don't believe that the people are always right. I think the people are very rarely right. The mob is very rarely right. And yet all the wisdom is contained by the people because it's like computer processors. Like the elite are better processors, but they're necessarily far, far fewer of them. The people are older processors. They're slower processors. But by virtue of the fact that, you know, there's 300 million of them, they process all the wisdom of the ages. It doesn't mean that the individual person is wiser than the individual, you know, the individual Supreme Court justice is not less wise than the individual farmer. But the farmers contain the body of wisdom. And so similarly though, because I'm a lawyer case, our republican, I'm not an elitist. I don't believe that the elite are right. I don't believe the elite should rule. And so I don't like it when the people try to rule. I don't like it when the elite try to rule. I like when representatives rule when we pick someone and they go and now they have a very difficult job and in republicanism, the person, the person who we send up there has to both represent power values. They can't take our values for granted. They can't forsake us. But they also have to lead us. They have to say to the mob, no, we're not going to lynch the guy. We're going to have a trial. The mob never wants to give the guy a trial. They only want to lynch the guy and the leader has to say, I'm going to say no, that's a, that's an innate tension because how do you, how do you lead people while also not forsaking them? And that that's the tension that we've, that we've left behind in our modern view of government. I say modern, I really mean even like the last 15 years. Our view of government since the internet, the ubiquity of the internet has started shifting toward this raw populism, this hatred of the elite. It's obviously it just creates a new elite. It's not lost on me that the great populist president has a gold toilet on his personal 767, like, you know, yeah, but as we've atomized and as we've become more anti establishment, you don't have anybody now who stands up to the mob and says no. And that's where this gracelessness comes from. And of course, you still read your comments. And of course, the nature of the internet is those comments will always be some criticism of something that you've done in your past. But the nice thing about lowercase our republicanism, I don't just mean as a, as a sort of like structure of government, but I almost mean as a way of governing yourself as a public figure to say an audience has entrusted me with this position to some degree because they see me as their man in the arena. They think I represent them. They think that I carry their values into this place that they can't necessarily go themselves. But the way you resist the audience capture piece of that is to say, well, how do I not forsake them, not sell them out, not turn my back on them, but how do I occasionally tell them no? How do I occasionally hold up my hand and say we're not going to do the thing that you want us to do? And I almost think that if you if you make that a practice, not just a philosophy, but an actual practice, if you stand up to your audience without forsaking them, without telling them their idiots or without, you know, none of that, but if you just make it a practice to occasionally upset them in places where you think that virtue is on your side, it gives you the opportunity to at least on your own terms, feel that that wrath come at you and absorb it on your terms instead of the unfair terms, which are normally where it, if you don't do it on your terms, you're going to end up doing it on the terms of your political enemies or the terms of 100 percent of itself. You have to, I mean, you saw in the 2010s, no one hated kind of the rise of the hyper social justice warrior culture, then Democrats that were actually on the ground campaigning, you know, doing the hard work behind the scenes, because you can't win the populace, you can't win the regular voter by trying to force them to say latinx, you know, that's just not going to work. Not going to work. So they needed an immune system and this is what I'm seeing right now is the right needs an immune system. but no one wants to do it first because it's better to be wrong too late than right too early. Anyone who is right too early just gets killed and then the other people come forward and take their spot and take all the glory, you know? But I, so I feel like I've sat on the sidelines for the last year not really making content, staying quiet and feeling like for my own sake to be healthy, to not get sucked into the chaos that I'm so attracted and addicted to, I needed to take a break. And I hope people would step into the arena and fix the insanity that was going on. Like the average right wing conversation online is bitter wars between over micro-pienesses and who, what conspiracy killed Charlie Kirk making up headlines about the bullet. Like we're astral projecting out here with Candace Owens. I can't believe what I'm watching and that people are following this and no one's reading the court case. It's nothing and I was waiting for the immune system to kick in and I was like, oh no, oh no, maybe I need to help a little here too. And I think that you're working on that. I can see you pushing back and I like James Lindsay on your last podcast. They're saying there needs to be this immune system for the right, but there's so much benefit in ironically claiming to be against the mainstream, against the, you know, that is quo in orthodoxy and yet embracing the orthodoxy because Trump is the orthodoxy right now. He is in power, you know, the right is in power. They are the orthodoxy and you have all these people that have completely fallen in line on questioning, while pretending to still be on the fringes of culture, which is just completely undrue. And you cannot enforce a healthy culture from the, you know, you look at Trump and we say we want to bring America back to its roots. And I know I'm Canadian, but we're affected so much by you guys. Our election was arguably completely flipped by Trump's comments. But we want to go back to a traditional healthy moral America. Well, the person that you've elected has how many wives and marriages and divorces Elon Musk has like a million baby mamas. The people that you've put in charge, they're certainly not enforcing that morality down on the culture. Where, when does this immune system kick in? Because right now it just seems like power games and people are willing to accept anything depending on what position it'll put them into. But yeah, I don't know where I was going with that rant to be perfectly honest with you. That was a good rant. Now, I mean, it raises important points and ultimately, see, I'm not a radical at the end of the day. I don't want to like you, I don't want to second American revolution or a third or or for whatever people want to say it is. I don't want to overthrow all the structures of government. I know just enough history to know that with the American revolution, it's almost the only revolution that didn't end up in mass murder, that didn't end up in subjugation of, in many cases, even the people who won the revolution, you know, wind up with their heads chopped off by the guillotine. I don't want my neighbors to die just because I don't agree with them. I do think that abortion is murder. I don't think that the average woman having an abortion thinks that abortion is murder. And so these are problems that have to be resolved culturally. They, you know, I'm not saying if there isn't a role for government. And one reason that the right once power now is because for a long time, the left was comfortable using power and the right was not comfortable using power. And so as a result of that, we feel, in many cases, justifiably so, that our values were destroyed by government. They were destroyed by the state. And now we have to be willing to use the state in order to to champion our values. And I suspect that there is some truth for that. But what I know is that at the end of the day, the only thing that constrains all the evil that we want to see undone in the world is a virtuous people, is a virtuous population. And that's a cultural phenomenon. That's something that happens in interactions between human beings. That's something that requires the strange tensions that occupy the gospel, where God is a God of justice and the God of mercy. We somehow have to find a way to operate in both of those spheres in our, in our personal life. I like the world that we live in though. It's got real problems, the horrible problems. I mean, the Chinese aborted 330 million people during their one child policy. The world is corrupt and evil and fallen and in need of a kind of salvation that we can bring to it. And yet, every good thing I've ever experienced, I experienced in this world. My daughter lives in this world and has to live in this world after me as does your son. I tend to like people. They're the worst, but they're kind of hilarious. People are fun. So I don't like a politics of despair. I don't like the politics of anger. There's a time for indignation and there's a time for standing up. Just like there's a time for power. But moderation is also a virtue in many instances, not in every instance, but in many instances. And so when I see things like the trad bad, you know, the number of women in human history who've lived the exact life that the trad influencer is quote unquote modeling. It's like seven women in all of human history have lived. There have been seven women in all of human history who both managed to turn butter, teach their kids, make selfie videos for the internet, and take a shower every day. That's none. And their husbands are the CEO of JetBlue. That's right. This has never existed. There is no trad because there is no tradition on which this is based. It's just a kind of larping like the Christian influencers now are doing a the Christus King set is doing a kind of larping knowing that all the people who believe that Christus King will take their side at first. And it'll take them a long time to realize that oh, you you're not making a statement of affirmation about the primacy of Christ. You're raising a tribal flag knowing that people were rallyed to you who don't know like all of that is as you say in your wonderful video, all of its performance are in none of it is aimed at making the world better. The trad movement that failed you isn't the failure of traditional marriage. It's the failure of a artificially constructed and artificially promulgated mask. And of course it failed you. It isn't real. It could never have supported you in your marriage because it doesn't it doesn't exist in the real world that exists that exists on Instagram. That's the only place it is. But there is something real. And the real thing is the thing that we're supposed to if we're in public life, the thing that we should be trying to present to people is reality. Reality is complex. Reality is messy. Reality is filled with failure. Your life has been filled with enormous accomplishment. You've done more than are you 30? I mean, you've done more than most 30 year olds on planet earth. And yet your life is also filled with failure. You've filled yourself. You filled your values. You filled your your marriage failed by whatever mechanisms that took place. I had my own part. Yeah. You played your own part. But that is reality. That is who you are and it's who everybody is. And yeah, we were masks and yeah, we point cameras at each other and yeah, I want a little makeup right now, right? Like I I understand the job. There's this. This is both is my library of my house. And it also isn't the library of my house because if the camera tilts up, you're going to see lights hanging from the ceiling, right? I like showbiz. I think showbiz is important. But the thing that we're supposed to model for people is the thing that's real. And I think that you now in this in this era, this rebranding, this free branding, which by the way, you have to be very careful of. Yeah, you have to be very careful. You I don't know you to know is this Lauren's redemption era. And will it be followed by your I hate the Jews era and then followed by your astral projecting visions of Charlie Kirk from beyond the grave era followed by your you make a hundred million dollars a year era. And yet somehow people think it was still motivated by desire for truth. That could happen. But I hope not. What I hope is that you use this moment that you find yourself in. And this is what I think Dr. Peterson was trying to tell me in that conversation that we had 16 months ago or so is that you're uniquely positioned right now to help people see that there's grace in the world and to help people see that you can advocate for things that are true and beautiful and good, even though your own life isn't always true and isn't always beautiful and isn't even always good. Because if God doesn't have the ability to work through broken vessels, then he can't do any work at all. That's the only vessels that we're offering down here on earth. Right. No, absolutely. I don't want this to be my redemption era because I don't believe that the cameras or the arc or anything can redeem me. You know, I think only God can do that. Right. So I, this is why I think my new policy is just like I'm just going to be completely honest because I can't keep up with the lies and I can't keep up with the audience. They might hate me. They might like me. If I'm just saying what I truly believe in what I'm truly seen, that's all I can do, even if it's my own failure. Have you ever, have you ever put an image into AI and asked it to like remove something from the background? But then the whole image gets like a little distorted anyway. Then you like try fix it and then it deep rise it more and deep rise it more and deep rise it more. This is what I kind of feel, you know, when you talk about the tribe life, it's funny because I kind of, I was, I, I created the maze that I got trapped in. I was 19 doing commentary on that. And I'd never lived it. And this is what most commentators are doing. They're posting about things they haven't lived. And then they're taking that and they're deep frying it more and deep frying it more, deep frying it more until it's unrecognizable. from the real world. And then I went and I followed that path and it led me to destruction. So how do we, I think like you said, it's the question of how do we live in show business, acknowledging its show business, well, reflecting something that's real with people who generally are not living in reality. I like that. I like that little rant, though. It was very inspiring. Hope inducing. I'm good for one hope inducing rant. Or episode. That's what I know. I should mental. Who's doing it right out there? Oh boy. I hate this question. I hate this question because people always tell me they're like, you're so negative, Lauren. You say everyone's faking and lying and then who are we supposed to do what? Where my dad always says this to me. He's like, you always does the God uses broken people. And I think that's true. I think God does use broken people. And I think we have to look for the pieces where people are trying. Because like you said, a human life is not a linear. This is the good guy. This is a bad guy. I think all of us have points in our life where, for honest with ourselves, we've been the bad guy in the story. And you have to look for the people who are and will be again, and will be again, absolutely. That's why I don't want it to be my redemption arc in two years. You can find out I'm doing espionage for China or something. I don't know. But I think whenever you see people making admissions against their own interest, you know what I mean? That's like one of the few times you know someone's telling the truth. It's like their audience are canceling them hardcore. They've lost money. They've lost a contract. They've lost something to say something true. I mean, that is the quintessential message of Christ like we, the heal the world. He had to sacrifice himself. And that's what because everyone is always making selfish decisions ourselves included. It's like to repair that damage. We have to make unselphished decisions in which we are going to be treated unfairly in which we are going to have to make a sacrifice to do some healing. So whenever people are making admissions against interest, I would really look at that and focus on that. When is someone because there's no incentive to say I'm wrong on the internet. There's no incentive. All you get is you get eaten by sharks because they smell blood in the water, whatever the left or right if they hate you. And then your own side say, well, you've betrayed us. You've betrayed us. You're not staying, you know, walking the line, right? So whenever someone is kind of getting eaten by everyone, I go and I take a look at what they're saying and really listen, you know, what are your politics like today? That's the tough part coming back into talking again is I'm more interested in critiquing the way that the political world works because I am so uncertain. I'm more uncertain today than I've ever been about my political positions because I always find reality in contradiction to what I believe. funny experience I had as I play a lot of community volleyball now. It's been really good for me to connect the reality again. Community volleyball. Community volleyball in Canada. And one of the girls said let's do a boy's versus girls game. And I still have this like tick where I spent so much time in media that I'm like yeah. As if boys versus girls like I said that's going to work, like we're going to get wrecked and this girl looks at me like I'm crazy. She's like what why not? And then I think she's just like a S.U.W. or something and she's being woke and I'm like obviously because we have a different biology we're going to get wrecked. But then the next round of volleyball, we go around and I kind of watch the girls and the boys play and I realize like the girls could totally beat the boys in this round just because the guys are constantly swinging into the net. They hit too hard. They hit out. The girls are really focused. They're tipping well. They're getting the right positions. And I'm like oh my gosh. She's not looking at me like I'm crazy because she's some left wing political radical. She's looking at me like I'm crazy because I am. I am the one imposing culture war gov. Non-sense onto a community volleyball game that is not an Olympic match of Olympic players. These are just average people and the girls in this situation could beat the boys. But because I'm taking this culture war, you know, box and placing it onto everyday life, I look like an insane person because I'm not just assessing the situation for what it is. And real life situations do not fall into culture war boxes. They don't and you will look unhinged if you try to make them. Did you win? Did we win? I can't remember. I can't remember. I know the girls have absolutely beat the boys before in games. Yes. They brutally mocked us. Culture war wins again. Culture war wins every time. What do you hope you remember for? What do I hope I'm remembered for? Oh my goodness. You know, you I guess it is a good thing to think about that. It is a good thing to think about that. But I don't know that the best people in history are ever remembered by the masses. You know, I like to think more about how I'll be remembered by my son. How I'll be remembered by the people in my life that I love and I knew day to day. I think that after I've seen the botched jobs, the internet will do on people's reputations, I'm much less concerned about my public perception and whatever I end up in the history books, probably a footnote somewhere on the culture wars of 2010. That's less important to me than my son remembering me as a good mom, as my friends remembering me as someone who loved as, you know, yeah, just good to the people around me. And I'm not always, but I hope to become better. I strive for that. You said at the beginning of the conversation that you don't know if you would call yourself a Christian now and understanding everything that you've mentioned here, understanding that online Christianity is largely performatives, understanding that you never really know what's going on with someone with their own, with their own walk, with their own spirituality, with their relationship with God, understanding that politics has become incredibly tribal and that people are taking sides and taking sides, you know, I think you referenced in your video of a photo of you, you know, a decade ago wearing a day's fault hoodie or something and yeah. And so yeah, I understand all of that. At the same time, I'd be curious what's between you right now and Christ, like what what prevents you from embracing, you know, the grace that's been offered to you. My own vision of my life and the direction I want to go and direction God wants to take me, I think, you know, it's always in a constant battle of I look at scriptures sometimes and I say, my desires and my wants don't line up with this and what I think might lead to a healthier, better life doesn't necessarily line up with this and then I pray and I sit with God and I think it's the pride and ego probably that I struggle with a bit sometimes. I think I'm self-aware of it and I fight it and I do have moments where I do follow what I truly believe to be right and God, but then I also have so many moments where I don't and I make my own decisions and I take the reins and take myself in disastrous directions and it's always this back and forth. It sounds to me like what you're describing is a Christian. Yeah, I know you could say that, but I don't want to disappoint anyone. I don't want to disappoint people by saying, hey, look at me, hey, look at my life. I am a representative of a good Christian and then have them look at my life and go, I don't want to be a Christian. Look at her. You know, it came up in my comments this last week that and it was by a friend online who was reacting to something that I said along the lines of what I said to you earlier about. It's better for a public man to advocate virtue than to actually be personally virtuous, not better in the sense of sin. There's not a distinction in terms of the sinfulness of the two things or but in practical efficacy. You'd much rather have a preacher who cheated on his wife and a preacher who told the congregation to cheat. And one of the things that they said in response to this was, well, I don't know. The preacher who tells the people to cheat, at least we can avoid them. Whereas when you find out that your preacher cheated, it destroys, you can destroy your faith. Nothing I'm saying is meant to advocate for the pastor cheating on us. Why? I forgot to say that that isn't destructive. Of course, it's hugely, hugely destructive, but it's always sort of bothered me this putting our faith in men, business. One of the pastors who most impacted my own sort of theological view of the gospel. Late in life had a massive moral failure and a very public moral failure. And I watched some people react to the pain and the shock of that event. But I didn't feel any pain or shock. I felt sorry for him, sorry for his wife, even sorry for the humiliation he was enduring, which like this is one problem with public life is, you know, you know, this better than most. Divorce is very prevalent. You went through it in front of people and going through it in front of people doesn't make divorce worse. Divorce is just bad. But you got to go through the shame of it, the humiliation of it because it was public. And so I hated that for him. But it didn't impact my faith in any way because or my theology because my theology sort of premised on the idea that God doesn't recommend us. He recommends himself that great men fail that all of sin and fall short of the glory of God as we've said before today. I'm never surprised to discover that no one is a good example of what it means to be a good Christian. And so I only offer that to you as a, I certainly wouldn't tell you how you should present yourself. And to the extent that you don't feel you should present yourself a certain way, you're probably right. Like I'd be the last guy to equiple about it. I don't know where you are with those things. But I do think that there's something wrong with the assumption that to be a Christian in public life means that you have to model being a good Christian. I just don't think there are good Christians. I think that there are only people who acknowledge their need for the unmarried favor of Christ. And because it's unmarried, you didn't make it. It is not married. In fact, if it were married, it wouldn't be the thing. It wouldn't be grace. And so I hope in my, and some ways I'm talking to myself, I hope that in my own life, because I'm, you know, I don't have a cross in my bio on X and never will. Tribal Christianity is, is, is completely aberrant in my view. But I am a moderately well known Christian. And I certainly hope nobody looks to me to be modeling Christian virtue, which I may aspire to, but certainly don't, certainly don't achieve. You know, I don't, I don't want for myself. And again, I'm kind of, I'm kind of using my conversation with you to talk myself through something at the moment. I don't want to, I just don't want, I don't want anybody to put me on some sort of moral pedestal because I, I certainly know that I don't belong on one. And I don't just know like, oh, I hope they don't learn about my past. No, I hope they don't learn about my future because I've lived long enough to know that people, stay people and you don't stop needing the mercy of God as you, as you age, you continue needing the mercy of God as you age. You've, you've been a, you've been a public figure. So I'm certain you've experienced it though. I think I may be experienced it at a very heightened level because I was like the 19 year old blonde velcroy that people are following. So they really idolized me in some way. So the crash, the crash was epic. You know, the cancellation was like this horrible. You have betrayed us kind of feeling. And I'm like, Oh my goodness. There is a cost to being God. There's a cost to pretending you are God. And I do not want to, not only do not want to pay that price. I don't want to have, I don't want to be, because I fell for it too. I think the deepest betrayals I ever experienced, which was a betrayal of self in reality, because I believed in man instead of something higher was seeing, meeting my heroes, you know, meeting my heroes. That was the most disappointing heart breaking, uh, jading aspect of life. But like you said, it was kind of my own fault because I never should have put my faith in men to begin with. But I, I think my carefulness around that, the subject is I realize a lot of people who follow the political discourse are like me when I was younger and follow the political discourse. And I'm thinking about them now and I'm thinking about me when I was 18 years old, getting excited to join this world when I think about portraying myself and how I speak. So now your life is different. You have more of a normal life. A little more. We'll see from this point forward. I've done more interviews in the last few weeks than I've done in a year. How do you feel about it? I'm nervous. I guess I got to tell my, I wrote my book, this is not real life. And in it, I put a warning to myself, you know, these are the lessons I've learned at rock bottom after all of my private messages with destiny have been released to the internet after I've been detained and ceases on my doorstep talking to me about how I'm going to jail for being a Russian spy after I've fallen for every single ridiculous trope in bass pace gets famous money. Like I fell for all of it. I made every mistake. Now I'm at rock bottom. What are the lessons I've learned? And I wrote them in my book so that when I got to this point, I could go back there and say, hold yourself accountable. And I hope I can. I don't know if I can, but I've put in more. I've put in a very public record of what I hope to hold myself accountable to. And you know, I've got other people running my social media stuff now so that I don't have to be sitting there scrolling through it all day. I've, you know, I've got, I like, I've got to get to my volleyball. I got to get home so I can play. I've got real life things going on that I didn't have before. I didn't have a stable self and identity in community outside of the media world. From the point I was 19 and moved to Toronto to pursue all this, I have that now. I'm hoping that will be a good stronghold against it, but I already see myself failing in certain aspects for sure. Why are you back? The I thought I would never want to log on to the internet again initially. But now I'm feeling like it's ironic because I had no knowledge and no wisdom when I was 19 years old and was the most viral I had ever been when I was that age. And now that I don't want to say anything I understand the space and life a thousand times more than when I was 19. And I hope that I have some not insane wisdom but some little pieces of wisdom that can maybe correct the space that I helped create when I was 19. You know, I look at a look back at some of the trends that I helped create like off in Himer looking at his nuclear bomb like you know those man on the street videos where people go out and they find drunk chicks and they're like what salary does a man need to make for you to date? Oh, $300,000. And then I like I made those when I was younger of feminists. I was one of the very first people on YouTube doing it and I know how they're made. You go you ask people they're shocked they're not giving you their best answer. You find the 10 most inflammatory ridiculous statements. You edit it down. It gets two million views and everyone thinks that that's an accurate portrayal of an entire gender and entire entire people group and entire ideology. You can do it with anyone. You can do it with conservatives. Make them all look like idiots. You can do it leftist. And this is distorting people's perception of reality. I know how the game works. I know how the distortions are done. I know the mistakes and the pitfalls I fell into. And I hope that I can come in here in a healthy way and show people how to interpret the media environment because they are falling deeper into the delusion. You've created your own Frankenstein's that have created entire cults of delusion. And this is affecting people's lives. You know, I know people that fell into the manosphere and can never get a successful relationship because of that because of their views on gender relations now. Not that I'm an expert on them myself, but hey, I spent 10 years growing up on the internet. That's probably part of the reason. I was deluded into certain things as well. But these delusions are breaking families apart. They're splintering reality. We're no longer having the same conversations. Everyone's splintered in the information they're receiving. Once people understand how it works, I hope we can, we have to have enough discernment to escape it ourselves because the scams aren't going away. There's only going to be more because there's money to be made in it. The clickbait isn't going away. It's just going to get worse because there's money to be made in it. The delusion and the lies aren't going away because there's money and power in it. So we have to someone, whether it's me or hopefully people that are smarter and better than me at this need to speak up and help people see the media delusion, the colonization of our minds that is happening right now. Has anyone ever offered you money to say something you don't believe? No, wait, let me think about that. To say something I don't believe, no. Yes, yes, but I've said no. I've been offered. I've been offered. Yeah. How does that work? How does the offer come? I think in a lot of cases, it's more what I realize looking back, I probably only accepted money like less than a handful of times for tweets or anything, but I'd say the average person is getting paid for weekly for tweets that they're sending out now influencers. You'll have someone that's in a political administration or a lobbying group contact you and they'll say, hey, this suite here, $500, $1,000 and we'll just send it to you by Monero or PayPal or whatever. And it's always going to be a degree of separation away from the actual politician or group that's doing it. Or I have a story I talk about in my book where I just met someone at a swore and they invited me to go to Russia and they said I can get you interest in contact. I went to Russia and the entire time we were there, they kept telling me we need to go to the Donbass. We've got a fascinating story. I can get you military contacts that didn't pay for anything. They didn't tell me this was a state operation, like nothing. It just seemed like a natural kind of, oh, you've got an interesting story for me. I ended up saying no to this story in the Donbass, which was coincidentally a story of oppression people in the Donbass, the oppression of Russian people in the Donbass and why Russia needs to go and defend them. Three years later, four years later, Russia invaded Ukraine on that very basis, the story they were pushing me to make. And a year after Russia invaded Ukraine 2023, the individual who invited me to go there was outed as a Chinese spy. So this is, and you know, I have all the emails, I've all the proof of all this. This is something that I don't think people understand. It's not even influencers doing things deliberately. I could have easily gone and made a documentary on the Don Bass without thinking there was a single nefarious hand involved in making that pre-war propaganda happen, right? Because it was just, that's how I got most of my stories. People call me up and say, "Hey, I've got an interesting story. Come check it out." There's a good chance that guy could have never been outed as a spy, right? There's a good chance I never knew about if Russia didn't invade Ukraine. I never would have heard what the, and that was years and years before it happened that this pre-war propaganda was being, they were attempting to make it. This is how influence operations work. They're happening years before political moves are being made. They are, in some cases, the influencers don't even know they're being influenced. They're having bought campaigns flooded to push them in certain directions. They're having state actors, foreign actors, pressure, and influence them without them knowing. I'd say in 50% of the cases, they're complicit and just getting paid. This is how the whole world of online media is operating right now. It's an enormous amount of money flowing through a system to a very small handful of influencers. As you said, even knowing when you're being used in these operations isn't always obvious. Yes. Then there's the way in which everyone's being paid to say the things that they believe, which is just ad revenue, subscription revenue. The audience capture is also a lucrative impact on the things that you've ended up talking about. This is what so ironic to me is that when dissident media came about, especially 1516, everyone was saying this is the cure to the mainstream media who are captured or the doxies. They can't say the truth because they'll be fired from their jobs. But now you look at the dissident space and I know people who are constantly repeating extraordinarily toxic ideologies and they can never change their mind because they will be canceled by their audience who will leave them in the dust and they can never get a normal job again because they've gone so far to one extreme that they're unemployable now. They are more captured than any mainstream media journalist could ever imagine being. If you think someone like Fuentes could quit his job and start working at even a McDonald's, there are a lot. I don't know. You look at Elijah Schaeffer right now. He's doubling, quadrupling down because what other job can he do? He actually doesn't have a choice but to keep performing for the internet, which is a terrifying prospect. You think about foreign influence and operations. We are kind of breeding a foreign influence farm because you've got all these people who are unemployable in regular society who can only be performers on the internet and they got to pay and feed their families somehow. Yeah, and this is part of how the social contagions work on the internet too, right? It's not just that bad ideas have virality. It's that economies form around the bad ideas and now there's an incentive structure that draws other people into the sphere of the bad idea. You see it, I mean, you, it's very easy to identify it on the left, but obviously it's happening every day on the right as well. Yeah. And there's like, people also don't realize how much of politics is behind the scenes social pressure in friend groups, it's group chats. We don't like this person. We do like this person. They went against, you know, the talking point of the day. It's all, it's all a whole lot of pressure campaigns. Once again, this is why I just kind of go by that motto of, are they making an admission against their own interests? That's where you'll find truth. But most people aren't media trained to even begin that. Like you said, they look to Candace and they think everything's an admission against her own interest, even while she's making millions and millions of dollars doing this. The thing we're not allowed to talk about that I talk about every single episode and make eight figures a year talking about it. And so Tucker Carlson just launched his new book brand and he's like, we're going to do the most canceled, you know, authors, the books that no one can breed. And it's like Russell brand Hollywood, you know, Hollywood guy that's been famous talking every day on the internet with millions of views. I don't know. It's just the idea of being a martyr has been branded. And I talk about this in my video with murder in the cathedral by T.S. Eliot, where the priest has to consider am I actually being martyred for the sake of good and God or am I being martyred because I want the legend of it because I like the story. But in these cases, it's not even I'm being a martyr for the legend. It's I'm being martyred and I'm making millions of dollars at the same time. How is this like sure in 2015 if you came out and said some of these things, you'd actually get lose your job. These were normal people posting on the internet with no incentive. There was no Patreon. There was no massive infrastructure around this. Now people are making millions of dollars on go fund me just for saying the N word in a waffle house. It's like, I don't know what is what is the incentive structure here. Do you think the internet? Do you think that anonymity on the internet has been on the whole a good thing or a bad thing? Largely negative, I think. I mean, it's funny because I would have said positive years ago when I was like, well, people need to be anonymous so they can't be fired from their job. But a, social change only happens when people say things with their faces and their chest. So it's not the anonymous people saying it. It's the people that are willing to put their you know, put their face in the reputation behind it. And b, now you can't tell who's a bot and who isn't, which has largely changed, you know, incentive structures. You can, if you are genuinely convinced every comment below a post you make is a real person and 90% of them are bots, you are brainwashing influencers, which I think is being done constantly. Yes. And thus brainwashing the population because the influencers are responding to the audience capture and then everyone moves in the direction of where the crowd is going and where the leaders are going. So you can corporations, governments, you can absolutely buy the public's consciousness now and it's all in their pocket really. Let me look at my propaganda that's being, there was a big shift in kind of 16, 17 when advertisers realized people wanted to hear product reviews from authentic individuals. They didn't want to see it in an ad. They skipped the ads. They wanted to hear someone they trusted saying buy this product. So all the advertising went into having you the influencers say, I use this and that goes for politics as well. If you have someone in your basement with a camera saying something, it's it's, you know, it astroturfing grassroots politics and it's happening every day. Even even the most innocent influencer that isn't doing anything wrong is being influenced by this through bots and through, you know, being pushed and pulled by social, even Chinese agents like me when I didn't think I was being led in any direction, you know, I was like what, 22 years old, what this happened. Yeah. And of course, it's true. Social proof is so powerful that seeing your comments flooded does change. Put that aside. Of course, it changes you seeing someone's comments flooded when you're not an influencer. You're just someone who engages with the influencer culture. You're, you're part of the audience. When you go in to comment on a Lauren Southern video and you're greeted by 500 negative comments, it, it has an impact on what you think. And if 400 of those are bots and 90% of the other 100 may not have even felt that way until they read the bots. Yes. This is how social pressure just or social proof can be hacked by fake humans that change the behavior of real humans. The other craziest thing is there, there are people now documenting this boyfriend and girlfriend showed their phones looking at the same video. The comment algorithms are now swapped for based on what you want to see. So it was this video of this woman talking about dating and men and this and that. And the boyfriend's phone had all, you know, this single childless cat lady, this bitch, this that this. And the girl's phone was like, yes, queen, preach. So even the comments are being curated to your own interest. There is this weird aspect of well, the internet is so bad for us. And while we are being influenced by it, we are also getting a mirror to our own minds and to the mind of humanity, right? And it's a, it's an ugly place. It's an ugly place. And when you look at it and everything is negative, there is an aspect where you're at fault because you keep clicking on it. You're rubber necking. Yes, I do think the dealer is lacing the drugs. Like you go and you look up, you girl outfit. And suddenly you're getting like girls in underwear and then you're getting lolly-con. It's like, what is going on? And then you're getting weirder and weirder posts. And I don't know the term lolly-com and now I'm going to look at those. Don't look it up. Do you know how you will end up in jail? But like I think that the, like you just keep getting fed harder and harder drugs. And this is where you get the people that go down like the crazy porn rabbit holes, the people that go down the radicalism rabbit holes. And yes, we do have an aspect of ourselves that we have to control and we have to know. But man, people are not good at self-control. Look at how drugs and alcohol and devastating lives. Yeah, I don't even think the first thing ended up being true. In 2016, I might have agreed that people need an enmity to protect their jobs. But what I realize now is that anonymity makes it easier for people to lose their jobs for their politics. 80 million people voted for Donald Trump. If 80 million people had their faces on their ex accounts and said they voted for Donald Trump, you couldn't fire them. That's true. That's true. Yeah. And anonymity allows us to get the one guy that we catch. We caught you voting for, or whatever. We caught you saying this. We taught you. So not only does it give us an excuse to be our worst self. online, which of course is one of the obvious downside effects. Not only does it make it possible for these bots, but it actually in a strange way is empowered cancel culture. The fact that we're all anonymous. I find this very funny in the realm of when I see political cancellations as well. Like everyone is a lot harsher on other people's sins than they are on their own, right? When it's your own sin, well, you know, there's extenuating circumstances. I had reasons for that. But when someone else is like, man, if there is a conservative influencer that has been caught in some sort of scandal, everyone is throwing stones. And I remember even the Sarah Stockle I just shaped for all just bringing it up because it's recent, but I remember scrolling through and seeing influencers that I knew had cheated on their wives. I knew I'd been in this position. And you know, I'm not saying you can't heal from that. Not good, but like they luckily never had to deal with it in the public eye. They think God like got to keep heal like hopefully change whatever. And they're throwing stones. And I'm like, yeah, the only reason people get canceled so hard is because everyone else is hiding their own sins, especially the commenters actually. They are, man, they most people that are in the comment section could not survive a second as a public influencer if their life were under a microscope, you know, and that's not just any judgment. Like I haven't done any better myself. But it's just, yeah, we all we're all very quick to excuse and understand our own sins and our own failures. But for other people, I had a buddy when I was, I wasn't even a buddy. I directed a play and he starred in the play. He was 18 or 19 years old. And his father was a pastor. And sort of a small church, like a fairly close knit church. And he still lived at home and his mother discovered pornography on his computer. And they made him get up in front of the congregation and confess. And I just thought man, you should have asked for a show of hands. Look what, what nonsense this idea that we on some level, there's a part of it that makes sense, which is that because no one is righteous, but we still have to uphold righteousness as a high as the high ideal. It is necessary that sometimes you can point to an act of unrighteousness and point it out. So that's the most charitable, the most charitable read. But I think that in the same way that Christ says, they'll hate you for my name's sake. And because Christ says it, it must be true. But in application, they usually just hate you because you're an asshole. I think that it's also probably true that while we need examples of unrighteousness to make the distinction, most of the time we're just cast in stones so that nobody looks too close at us. Oh, absolutely. And I think it largely teaches people don't get caught. It's like don't get caught. And you know, yeah, we're just largely incentivizing the constant moral performance game, I think. And I get it. Like there's so many benefits to it, especially like, you know, I grew up playing a lot of video games. I think a lot of people who are in politics grew up playing video games, certainly in the younger kind of crazy YouTube sphere. And it's, you're creating a character and you're competing against other characters and you're gathering information to weaponize against them. And then you're seeing how many likes you can get on your team and your side and how many allies you can accumulate. And it's very much the video gamification of life, which is so far removed from any sort of concern for anyone's soul or spirit. And that's once again bringing it back to the Christian thing is, you know, I think that's why Jordan Peterson never wanted to answer when people would ask if he was a Christian because he knew it was just team sports. You want an affirmation that I'm on your team. You don't that's such a bastardization of the idea of actually caring about my soul and my spiritual journey and where I'm at. I have a professor. His name is Rondar. He's he followed he's followed my career for 10 years. I took beginner politics courses with him in every few months. If not every month, he emails me and says, how's the journey, Lauren? And he does this with most of his students and he will meet up with you and walk with you at the darkest time of your life and give you a book that you need to read. This is this is the book you need at this point in your life. That is a man who cares about people's inner journey and he doesn't care about any public accolades. He's not super famous. You know, he's got a lot of well published books, but he's not like on tons of podcasts everywhere, but man, that is a mentor and someone who is really taking God's message and apply to in my view. That has nothing to do. He never asks me, are you a Christian? Not once, but he's leading more people to a Christ like life than anyone I've ever met, really. What would you most like people to know about the reality of political media? That everyone involved is human and they are corrupt, no matter left or right. And that I think this is why I'm such a Lord of the Rings nerd, I'm going to bring it back to that. Boramir is the best character in Lord of the Rings. He's the most lovable, most interesting character because he is the most human. He is flawed. And even at the end, he managed to turn it around and make the right decision or try at least. And that's what I believe, as much as I may wreak sometimes of this stain or bitterness when I talk about the political world, I do have a deep love for these people because I'm one of them. I'm another human that got cut up in money and power games and public accolades, public figure life. And everyone is like Boramir and they need, they need reminders sometimes that they're seeking power too much. They do good things, they do bad things, but they're actually no different than you, the viewer and you, the viewer, someone who is on the outside are just as important in where the world is headed in your day-to-day decisions and what you choose to watch, what you choose to follow, what you choose to click on. You're a part of this all as well. And I think when we just let mindlessly the people that are doing the media part lead, man, that's giving the one ring to Boramir. And that's not a great idea either. That doesn't mean he's not part of the fellowship, that doesn't mean he doesn't have a place in it, but they need the whole fellowship and the hobbits, the viewers are sometimes more important in keeping true where we're going. Boramir and Southern, thank you. Thanks for having me.