TRIGGERnometry - Lauren Southern: The Internet Breeds Dangerous Ideologies

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Lauren Southern is a Canadian journalist, author, and filmmaker. She has made several documentaries including Farmlands, Borderless and Crossfire. She shares political commentary on YouTube and Tenet Media. A former promoter of the trad lifestyle, Lauren suffered in an abusive relationship as a result, and opens up about the experience in this interview. UnHerd article: How my tradlife turned toxic: https://unherd.com/2024/05/lauren-southern-the-tradlife-influencer-filled-with-regret/ Follow Lauren here: https://twitter.com/Lauren_Southern Start earning A Yield on Silver, Paid in Silver with Monetary Metals. Click here to find out more: https://bit.ly/3Rs8Rv2 SPONSOR: Protect your home this summer with 20% off any new SimpliSafe system when you sign up for Fast Protect Monitoring. Go to https://SIMPLISAFE.COM/TRIGGER Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is something I haven't talked about at all publicly yet, but I've been meaning to for a while. A lot of the internet narratives about how people ought to live their lives, you kind of embodied some of those ideas in your own life and it went spectacularly wrong. It's the reality pill, not the red pill, not the blue pill, not any of these things. Towards the end of our marriage, I found a list in my husband's office of every single media figure that had ever written a negative article about me, both right wing and left wing. I was told that this was a contingency list of people he would contact to hurt my reputation if I disobeyed in the marriage. That is asshole behavior. That's like, that's abusive behavior 101.

This idea that you have in the Red Pill community that, you know, no matter what the man does, the woman is supposed to just, that's not how it's supposed to be. Lauren Southern, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you on. Before we started, you were saying that you have some things to get off your chest, some things you want to say, and you were looking for a right space. that was kind of sensible and reasonable.

Here you are. This is that space, despite what people may say. Yeah, I mean, tell us your story. Depending on who you ask, I'm a very far-right Nazi that's killed a lot of immigrants in the Mediterranean, or I'm a far-left traitor, feminist. So I figured this is a space where I can actually just be a complex, nuanced human

talking to you guys. You have a variety of personalities on. But my story, you want to start from the very beginning, that's a long story. Well, I guess to shorten it a little bit, there was a period in which you genuinely, I would argue, were far right. You were campaigning,

you was trying to stop the boats in the Mediterranean, and people would see that, I think, as being on the fringes of the right. Was that a fair characterization, would you say? I would say that I was definitely associated with farther right side of the spectrum, for sure. But I also think that there's a bit of a memorial side

around what the 2015-2016 political space was and where politics is today. there's been a massive Overton window shift. So myself talking about things like the death of the West is occurring or West as Best was one of my tours in Australia, got me banned from the country, got me put on watch lists,

got massive riots in the streets. And now today, I think you may have just done a speech on the West being the best or the Death of the West as well. I don't think there's the same riots today that there were before. It's really disappointing. My audience would be so much bigger.

Yeah. So there was... Even conversations like The Great Replacement, which I know I have gotten a lot of heat for, a lot of flack. Media accused me of causing shootings with just discussing the topic, not even saying this is absolutely happening. Now I'm looking today and I see Tucker Carlson talking about the Great Replacement on Fox News while he was still there. Or Abe of Lahr doing a speech at CPAC Hungary when just four or five years ago I was being removed from the docket of CPAC for saying those things. So I think, yes, there were things that I expressed or did in the past that I look and I'm like, that is not how I would have done it today.

That is not how I would have said it today. And there are more, there's more nuanced to those issues. But I also think that there's a bit of an unfair retrospect going on here where at that time, it was way more controversial to say the things that I was saying than it is now. And if I had waited five years, I don't think I would have had the reputation that I have today whatsoever. Do you feel that to some extent the first man through the breach always takes all the arrows and that you were one of the people who were maybe, as you say, not in the perfect way, but you were trying to raise awareness of certain issues, which at that time were, as you say, very controversial. And we can talk about the great replacement because I think different people mean different things by it. And that's where you get into difficulty sometimes.

But ultimately, you were talking about mass immigration. you were talking about the self-destruction and the destruction of the West, et cetera. And those issues are now kind of, they're now being talked about much more openly, but people like you, you feel, were punished for raising them at a time when no one else was. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Yeah, there's an interesting, a friend of mine always says, it's better to be wrong too late than right too early when you're in media. And that seems to consistently be the case. I'm sure you guys saw the story about mass graves in Canada. It came out a few years ago. Trudeau did tours of all these graves, said the Catholic Church were literally shooting kids and putting them in these graves with thousands of people and bodies were going to be found all over the country. I was a little skeptical of that. I came out, did some stories about, I don't think these bodies actually exist. I don't think we have enough evidence to whip people into a frenzy that's causing dozens, I think 70 churches to be attacked across Canada, some burnt to the ground, horrific stuff. We should maybe wait a bit. I had local news networks like CTV. saying that I was this far-right fascist.

I was canceled from speaking at my local university, University of British Columbia, told I was basically the equivalent of a Holocaust denier. I had people all over that lived in my community saying I deserve to be scalped, all these things. Two years later, no bodies have been found. They spent $8 million of our tax bucks digging holes in the ground to find absolutely nothing.

And I don't get to clean my reputation from two years ago, those news hits will still be out. That cancellation still happened. But that's another one of those examples of it's better to be wrong too late than right too early. And so you were on the path and you were very much on the right. So what happened? You know, life is more complex than just right-wing or left-wing narratives. And a lot of the work that I did throughout my early 20s, I did on the ground. That was kind of what I had. I couldn't be any sort of intellectual because I'm too young to say I've read every book out there, you know? I'm too young to say I have all of the experience, but I could take people on a journey with me on the ground in

these places. Okay, what's going on in Morocco? What's going on in Turkey? In Europe, my film Borderless, I think, was one of my first that was criticized by the more far-right factions of the internet because the conclusion of it was a borderless Europe isn't good for anyone. I don't think it's good for Europeans, but I also don't think it's good for the migrants because we went on the ground, talk to these people, and I discovered, you know, not every single one of them is an invader saying, let's take Europe. There are people there that genuinely have given up their life savings to human traffickers who promised them. These Europeans want you there. Look at their governments. They're saying refugees welcome. They're going to give you a house. They're going to give you a car. A fantastic job.

You're going to create a beautiful life for your children. These people throw out their passports, get on these boats, show up in Europe and end up sleeping under bridges. Unable to get a job, unable to get citizenship, their lives destroyed, and they're being just as misled by these governments and media propaganda campaigns as Europeans are being hurt by having a bunch of very upset jobless migrants in their streets who, quite frankly,

have nothing else they can do but partake in crime sometimes because they have no way of participating in proper society when they can't speak the language or even get an ID. It's just setting everyone up for failure. But, you know, that's a lot more nuanced conversation than just saying, you know, invaders versus Europeans. That is very, very true. But what people seem to want, particularly nowadays, is they want the binary.

They don't want the nuance. Because what the nuance is is a reality that life is complicated. And if you want to understand this topic, you're going to have to do the reading, and you're going to have to take the time. It's not as easy just to say from the river to the sea or let's nuke Gaza, which is what you get from the extremes of the spectrum. And even if you do the reading, as I've learned, to my own life, sometimes you actually have to do the living to really learn.

It's the reality pill, not the red pill, not the blue pill, not any of these things. It's real life is significantly more complex than any sort of listical. Well, one of the things that Mary Harrington, she did a piece with you in Unheard, which was one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you. And one of the things that she was highlighting is effectively that a lot of the internet narratives about how people ought to live their lives, you know, you have the red pill for men. this is how you should treat women or the right wing type of stuff. And then there's the equivalent from sort of radical feminists and whatever.

And you, from the way she tells it at least, you kind of embodied some of those ideas in your own life and it went spectacularly wrong. I think it's fair to say. Yes, that is fair to say. Now, there have been criticisms out there that. Lauren, you weren't the perfect trad wife. You, you know, you were a boss babe out there working. You didn't get married to someone who lived near you.

You didn't trad perfectly well, and therefore you aren't the best example to show that these binaries don't work. These binaries do work. You just did it wrong. That's the main criticism I've seen of that Mary Harrington article, which, you know, was quite emotional for me to do. I couldn't have written it myself. I couldn't have published that myself. It would have been too difficult for me to talk about. But I let her do with the information what she will.

And one thing I would say to that is I have thought about this so much. What if I just didn't work at all? What if I married a local boy in my community? What if I didn't date anyone before I dated my husband? What if I followed that trad-listical? Perfect. Would my fate have been any different? Would I not have ended up a single mother?

Would I not have ended up divorced or in a bad relationship? And ironically enough, while I was doing that article with Mary, I had a friend over who was staying at my house because she was going through a really bad breakdown and dissolution of her marriage. And 10 years ago, we went to Bible study together as teenagers, and it was kind of like this, the two separate paths. I went on to have a career and travel the world, and she married the nice, handsome boy from Bible study and had a ton of kids and wore sun dresses and made sourdough and did everything perfect.

And 10 years later, we found ourselves both on a couch talking to Mary Harrington about how we were both divorced and her husbands had left us. So I find, and her husband cheated on her and left her with $100 in her bank. count. She doesn't know what she's going to do right now with her life. She did everything perfect, everything based on the manual and the instructions on the internet, right? And what is the manual? What does the manual say you're supposed to do as a traveler? You marry young. You want to marry young, right, because you want to still be beautiful and have lots and lots of children. You don't sleep with anyone except the one person you marry and they do the same. You likely be a Christian and have faith, which she literally met this man at Bible study, right? You have lots of kids. You don't work as a

woman, or if you do, it's just kind of a hobby job. You support your husband's career. And you, yeah, just try to be beautiful, loving, supportive, do the chores, build the home. And she did all that. That's what she did. So we went on these two different paths, and we found ourselves in the same place afterwards. And I looked at her, and I looked at my own situation. And the only thing I could come to a conclusion about was that life is very complicated. And there is no one-size-fits-all solution for marriage or relationships. And selling it that way can actually make people dig their heels further into bad relationships the way I did. It's, well, I must not be trotting hard enough. I must not be following the listical hard enough. I must be doing something wrong.

And yeah, you know, I'm not a perfect person. I made stupid decisions. That's the one thing I would kind of critique Mary's article I think that, you know, I have some blame in making bad decisions myself as well than just being a victim of the internet and the bad advice on the internet as well. But it doesn't help. I'll tell you that much. The bad advice on the internet doesn't help. And what, you know what, when you talk about this, it makes me realize the power of narratives, you know, and we believe these narratives. But that's all they are. It's a narrative. Yeah. And people who say, oh, you've got to be like this, you're no different to the people on the progressive left, the people on the right. You're no different to a religious extremist who goes, if you follow this path, everything will

be okay. Well, how do you know that? Oh, absolutely. Exactly. And what's ironic as well is, with my girlfriend, I'll call her Ella. She was okay with doing the interview, but Mary didn't include it. I think she thought the narratives would be too confusing doing multiple people. but Ella, ironically, despite doing things far more perfect than myself,

ended up in a worse position than me because I at least had a career, experience, work that I could fall back on. I had built up my life outside of that world of just being that support role in my husband's life. So ironically, almost veering off the perfect instruction booklet for how to have a successful marriage put me in a better position than my friends who followed it perfectly. And I need to clarify, I love marriage. I think it's a beautiful thing. I know happy, happy families. I am ecstatic when I see people in love, and I want that more for the world. But the way we get that is not with these ridiculous binary narratives. It's by being truthful. If you're honest with people about, whew, marriages can go really sideways, even when you do

everything right, that helps them prepare for reality. That helps them prepare for, you know, making decisions off real information, not TikTok videos of people making sourdough bread. It's absurd. Why did you find this narrative so attractive? Because for me, I mean, one of my, let's call it, you know, the shadow is I'm quite a cynical person. And I have to constantly work against that and just fight against it, negativity, whatever else. So when I'm presented with a narrative, I guess I look at it and go, yeah, that's bollocks. I was born in 1995. I am a child of the internet.

Literally since I was like three years old, I've been playing computer games going online from groomscape to neopets to Tumblr to Myspace, all of it. And with our parents' generation, they got a lot of their information from real life, their friends' experiences, families' experiences,

or at the very least, television shows that everyone was watching so they could all compare the same notes. the internet has created such a fractured existence for my generation. We're all growing up, getting most of our information about reality from the web. And then on top of that, we all have a thousand different forums where you can go deeper and deeper and deeper into a thousand different, choose your own adventure for ideologies.

And this was just, it didn't exist before. This is new. This is a new phenomenon, the amount of fractured information and ideologies and forums that people can go down. And I certainly found myself, given that I grew up in a very more left-wing country, I grew up in a high immigrant area in Vancouver, and I grew up in a family that was more conservative. I found myself naturally attracted to more conservative right-wing spaces on the internet. And this is at a time where when YouTube and all these sites were getting increasingly

realizing that having more binary solutions to problems got you far more views than these complex nuanced three-hour videos explaining the reality of the complexity of life. That just, that doesn't, we all know. We all know that doesn't do well on YouTube. We all know that the most nuanced, most thoughtful conversations, they should do well. They should do more well than they do. But the TikTok video with that hard-based dubstep in the background and all the money falling from the screen and, you know, all the captions and the guy screaming that's chopped up, that's going to get 6 million views on TikTok compared to the nuanced conversation.

It's interesting. I was thinking of what you just said on the way over here because, and I understand why Francis asked a question, I understand exactly why you answered it the way you did, because we are like geriatric millennials. We just called the very end of the millennium. Less of the geriatric. Mate, 42, what can I say?

Anyway, and when I see stuff on, the internet when i see people on twitter saying stuff about relationships i've been married uh 20 plus years at this point right i just go well no one can possibly believe this crap right that's what i think when i see stuff on the internet when i see various influences talking about how to how to have a marriage and i just look at it i just go no no this is insane no one can possibly believe this and i'll swipe to the next thing but what i increase realized, this may sound like a really stupid thing to say, but increasingly talking to young guys that work with us and all the rest of it is like your generation, that's your reality. You don't have anything to compare it to quite often. Unless you have some personal experiences, seeing your parents and stuff like that, you're taking it. People are taking the stuff literally. Oh, absolutely. They are. And I think also the easy solutions come from a generation of young people who did grow up in.

broken homes in a lot of cases, and they want to think in their head, there is an easy solution to this. This shouldn't be happening. I shouldn't have grown up in a broken home. There should be steps I can take to prevent myself from experiencing this. Or they'll get so bitter about it, they'll say, actually, there are no steps you can take. It is just, you know, all women bad, all men bad. Marriage shouldn't exist. It's a lot of pain. A lot of pain people have that is coming out in these extraordinarily binary positions. That's a very, very good point. That's a very good point.

And I think it's interesting when you gave your manual for how to be a trad wife, it's not entirely what my wife did because we didn't have kids young. But everything else you said, basically, we got married, she pursued a career that wasn't necessarily like the center of everything, you know, and she was very supportive with my career.

Now we have a son, et cetera. But the one thing that you didn't mention that was in the article was this idea that the woman is supposed to be submissive. Yes. And I think that's where a lot of this stuff is gone wrong because get married young. I think that's great if you found

the right person. You know, work hard to be together, all of this other stuff. That can work for a lot of people. Support your husband's career. Traditionally that has worked, right? If people are staying together and they're working together. But this idea that you're supposed to be submissive to your husband,

I think that's maybe where this stuff gets a bit off the rails because a marriage is people working together towards a common goal. It's not one submitting to the other. Yeah, it's definitely not a situation of, I agree with the idea that women and men perhaps have different roles in a relationship. A man cannot give birth to a child or breastfeed. That is controversial. I know, I know. Thanks for demonetizing our video, Laura. And, you know, someone walks in a house to the baseball bat, probably going to want the man to go deal with that, right? But those are both equally valuable rules. And if a woman says, for example, in my relationship, I really needed to be near my family when I just gave birth to a baby. I needed

that support. It psychologically, deeply affects you. It, you know, you're going to lose your mind and your marriage potentially if you don't have those support systems around you when you just give birth. What within that hardcore trad binary, when my husband said, no, no matter what, we're moving to Australia where I'm going to divorce you, I have to submit at the detriment of probably my own child's well-being, my well-being, and our marriage's well-being. That doesn't make sense. That should be a conversation. I perhaps have more knowledge of what myself and the child need in that time that I can contribute than my husband at that time. And he would have had more knowledge in certain areas than me, right? But takes that conversation in equal respect, not just submission.

It's interesting that we talk about the submissive aspect of it, because that's a real problem I have with this part of the right, which says, everything is bad now, we need to go back to X year. And I just go, that's a cop out. That's a cop out. Because what that's actually saying is, I don't have any new ideas. Let's all go back to this time when everything was great. And you're going, everything wasn't great then. And it's not going to happen either. I mean, people are, it's the whole, like, repeal the 19th crowd right now

are the right-wing equivalent of defund the police left. Yeah. It is extraordinarily freakish-looking to normal residents of the world, and it's never going to happen, so you look insane and absurd. And, like, how is this helping your political cause in any which way when it's just having these delusional conversations on Twitter that make normal people log in and go, well, never want to be associated? with those freaks. Like, I don't know what the, I don't know what the approach is there, but

no, it's a very good point because I, when we started this show, it was the left who had gone nuts out. And as both of us coming from the left, in particular with me, I just saw the way that this kind of, it just seemed to morph and metastasize into something weird and deeply toxic. and then although I was never from the right, I used to go, oh, well, at least there was logic to these arguments, even though some of them I didn't agree with. But they were like, come in, welcome, let's talk. And now you just see them go through the same process. It's bizarre. And do you think it's what happens when you isolate yourself, or is there something else going on here? I think there's a massive audience capture going on within the political sphere, both the

right and left. It's interesting because the right wing, I always like, them because they portrayed themselves as an alternative to the media who constantly had money, big money interests, social acceptability, government pressure. We need something outside of that. That's not pressured to have certain opinions. But now, a lot of right-wing influencers, or just influencers on the internet in general, they have no hope of getting a normal job in some cases, particularly if you're on the very far fringes of the right. You couldn't even get a job at a McDonald's. And that's, I don't think society should be that way. I don't like cancel culture, you know. But that's the truth.

And I do know people who operate in those spaces who actually don't agree with their audiences at all, but they are stuck. They are trapped because that is the only job they have to do anymore. So they have to keep feeding in the exact same narratives that their audience want to hear. And when their audience say they want to hear something or criticize them or say,

I'm going to stop following you because you've shifted your opinion, they adjust. And they are actually just a feedback loop to the audiences they have rather than any sort of original or genuine opinion or thought. And I've even noticed this in the marriage conversation. Like, it took me two years to even say I was divorced publicly. I kept wearing my ring.

I know people that are doing this right now that are public figures that haven't been married for years that are socially pretending. They are married because it is such a hit to their reputation with the current audience that is inhabiting the right-wing space online to say that you failed at marriage. Even though talking about that failure, talking about what has happened in the real world will help people. It will help them navigate reality. but instead we all have these kind of pretend reputations. And this can also be used to hold people hostage. Like I had people threatening to expose me for being divorced, you know, to try to ruin me, to try to take me down.

And it's crazy how captured people can be by audience opinions. And nothing was more freeing them finally. Oh, it's the only way to live. You can't be held hostage to other people's opinions. And it's much better to have a smaller YouTube channel, but be true to yourself. than to be, I can't imagine waking up in the morning and going, I hate what I'm about to say. Yeah.

That must be awful. That must be absolutely awful. So, but it pains me to hear that because, to be honest with you, people accuse a lot of people of audience capture. And sometimes I don't know that it's true. Sometimes I think people change their opinion. You know, people change their opinion over time. They listen to certain perspectives and maybe mostly those perspectives or in some cases, only those perspectives and they start to kind of push the boundaries a little bit.

But if there are people walking around with wedding rings on that don't represent an actual marriage, that sounds kind of, that sounds horrible. Yeah. And you know what? It doesn't even, this is something I haven't talked about at all publicly yet, but I've been meaning to for a while. It's very, it can be used to control you in more aspects than just the government or just the, sorry, it's like really hard for me to talk about. It's more than just the, it's more than just the, audience stuff, like part of my marriage that was, it's hard for me to even say abusive. I don't like using the word abusive because it's hard for me to even conceptualize it that way

myself because I very much still, even though horrible things happen, I still care for my husband. Doing that Mary article was very difficult, but there are reasons that I kind of had to talk about it honestly for my own sake. Towards the end of our marriage, I found a list in my husband's office while I was cleaning of every single media figure that had ever written a negative article about me, both right wing and left wing. And I was told that this was a contingency list of people he would contact to hurt my reputation if I disobeyed in the marriage.

So if I left, if I any of that, he would contact them and start spreading rumors about me saying that I was a failed trad wife, all of these sorts of things. So, you know, this control mechanism of public reputation can be used in a lot more ways than just this horrific audience capture. I think it's used by governments. I think it's used by abusive spouses. I think it's used as blackmail, corporations, all this kind of stuff.

And the cancel culture of both sides is absolutely ruining our ability to have honest conversations and real relationships. And a lot of people think, they ask, why did Lauren do that Mary article? Why would she talk about her marriage so publicly? She could have kept it private. That's private matter.

Yeah, I actually thought so for a long time, too. it was actually my husband that started messaging influencers, both left wing and right wing, saying Lauren's divorced. She's this terrible person before I had even spoken about it publicly. So my hand was kind of forced by this false narrative being spread and being emailed to people behind the scenes a ton for the purpose of destroying me so that I would come back to the relationship. Yeah, sorry, I don't know if any of that makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. I'm sorry to hear them. And look, this is your ex-husband and I understand how you feel towards him. But that is asshole behavior. That's like, that's abusive behavior 101. That, you know, using, I mean, I can't describe it any other way. And I'm sorry that I am. No, no.

But that's not a way. So the trad life, it comes with two parts, not one part. It's not just about what the woman does. It's also about the way the man behaves. And part of the male-female dynamic is a man is, stronger, a man is usually bigger, a man is usually to inflict more damage. And civilizing the man and the man's, you know, being responsible with that strength is the number one thing that he's supposed to do. So to violate that is a betrayal. It's a betrayal. And I think people

need to know that. Like this idea that you have in the Red Pill community that, you know, no matter what the man does, the woman is supposed to just, that's not how it's supposed to Yeah. Well, that was what was so interesting to me is I basically he he left me and I think when he realized a year later that I was actually moving on, he was very upset by that and started calling me hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times and when I was like, listen, I'm done, we can go to mediation, have shared, you know, co-parenting, all this stuff, as long as we're going through a proper mediator to do it. I think his hope was he could kind of destroy my reputation within mainstream circles. So he started sending a lot of emails to more mainstream kind of

left-wing people. She's all right. She's a fake trad wife. She cheated on me. She alienated our child for me. Of course, none of this actually occurred. But a lot of the left-wing, I think, more mainstream people didn't bite. In fact, one of the creators that received these emails was Destiny. I think you interviewed him recently. And instead of his email that he got, was you should confront Lauren during one of your live stream debates and drop on her that she's actually a divorced single mother who failed in her marriage and who stole her child and was cheating on her husband. And he reached out to me and was like,

this is really like unhinged behavior. Are you okay? Like, how can I, like, can you take this to court? Is there anything you can do about this? And that's how I kind of started to find out about the emails. And when he wouldn't confront me on stream, he kind of gave up on the more mainstream left people and started emailing a ton of right-wing influencers and Red Pill influencers,

and, you know, Lauren stole her child, Lauren cheated on her husband, Lauren did this, all from kind of fake accounts. I'm a friend of a friend of his, sometimes from himself. And during this time where I was trying to rebuild my life, figure out how I'm going to talk about the fact that my husband left me,

I had all of these people that previously, in some cases, were friends of me, publishing Lauren's cheated on her husband, Lauren's, you know, alienated her son. So I have people like Pearl Davis tweeting all day about how I've stolen my child and all this kind of stuff. All made up, all invented. And for the sole purpose...

If Pearl Davis is having to go at you, you're probably on the right side of things. But for the sole purpose of psychologically tormenting me while I'm the sole care of my child. And it's incredible, I think that was like a big wake-up call for me, seeing these people who... When, like, left-wingers had a little more critical thinking to say, wow, this is like really weird unhinged behavior,

whereas these red pill people who purport to understand relationship dynamics, who purport to understand, like, how males and females act, just man must be correct. Woman must be wrong. Do I need any evidence? No. And a lot of people think I just said all this with no evidence. I have evidence.

I have court documents. I have protective orders that judges have gone over and said, this is insane. Like, you need a protective order against this person. So, like, I don't know. the people who are out here criticizing and saying stuff like that, it's really been a shocking wake-up call for, I don't think I want anything to do with this space or these people.

Do you think part of it is as well, Lauren, look, the male-female thing I accept is a massive part of it. But isn't part of it as well that you're kind of an apostate of the right? How do you mean? So I see a lot of these people as having religious-like tendencies, whereby you are part of our tribe. You believe, you must believe every part of it, every aspect of it, like hardcore religious people. But the moment you start to not adhere to everything that they say, or perhaps, like, your marriage not going the way that you wanted, all of a sudden, you're not one of us anymore.

And therefore, you need to be shunned. You are disgusting, blah, blah, blah. Do you think that is part of it as well? Oh, absolutely. And it's, you know, I think it was extra painful that betrayal. because I've, you know, these were my own decisions, so I have to, you know, accept the consequences of my own decisions, of course. But I've been banned from multiple countries for upholding the right-wind view. I've, you know, had my name destroyed internationally.

I have to use a fake name when I go into places in public a lot of the time. I've been arrested countless times, almost went to jail. In fact, once again, another thing I haven't spoken about publicly. I, part of the reason that I found my husband very attractive is when I was in Turkey, I was facing five years in jail. We got arrested while filming borderless by the military. And they had put the sheets on our desk. We were going to court the next day. You are facing five years in jail. And I would have been just getting out like now, my life gone. My husband, he, he actually, obviously there's been talk about him being a Fed and having connections with that world.

I didn't fully understand it then and I wasn't dating him at this time but I he had done some work for me at that time and him and another individual that were working on the borderless film as security and fixers. I didn't realize but they had connections with intelligence agencies, one of them American, the other one Australian, who was my husband and they were able to get me out of jail, get me out of that situation in Turkey. I don't know exactly the details or how it happened, but the only reason that I'm not just getting out of Turkish jail is because my husband was able to protect me and his friend from that situation. So I went up against the entire security apparatus of the Western and non-Western world to say these opinions, then met someone who could

protect me from that apparatus and potentially having my life destroyed, ending up in jail. I was banned from the U.S. for two years. And yes, I should have prioritized wisdom and patience. over that desire for love and security, but we all make stupid gambols in our life. And I chose that, you know, it was amazing that someone was willing to risk their career for me, to help me. It was amazing that someone could protect me

from this international security apparatus that is literally trying to put me behind bars for these opinions. And then when I'm left and have nothing left, no career, no husband, nothing, the right kicks me while I'm down. or at least the far-right factions, you know? So it's like this double betrayal of,

did you ever think like maybe a 22-year-old girl that was facing years of, years in jail, getting arrested and questioned by every Western government for opinions might make some silly decisions? Yeah. And then fail a bit in life, because that's pretty psychologically challenging. No, they don't care.

You know, you're not, you're worthless to us now because you're a single mother. And I don't want to advocate that kind of ideology, that kind of treachery against anyone. And that's... Because you're... I agree all of those things. But to them, you're not a human being.

You're an avatar. You're an avatar. Exactly. Exactly. But that's what we all are. That's... Sadly, it's part of the package. And by the way, not to sound lacking compassion, I think what you're experiencing from other people

is an extraordinary lack of empathy. And actually, I hear it even in the way that you talk about, if you don't mind me saying, you're like, my marriage... I failed in my... You didn't fail in your marriage. You're not the first person who's married an asshole. in history of the world.

And I'm serious, right? So, like, the idea that the trad life means that you get married to the same person and you stay together no matter what happens is not the reality of what marriage is. Marriage is two people get together in the hope that they can build a life together. Yeah.

And usually, if both sides work hard enough, both sides work hard enough, most things can be resolved within that. But when a marriage gets to the point where a guy is preemptively making lists of people he's going to use to shame you for leaving him, at that point, you're absolutely right to leave. You're absolutely right to leave.

So you are experiencing what I think is a lack of empathy. And the reason is, sadly, none of us is human. None of us is human to the people watching this. We're just an avatar on the screen. And people, like Francis said, people want their particular narrative. And I'll give you an example where we did this, right? During COVID, we were very skeptical about, not about COVID itself.

We thought it was a serious disease, not least because we had it quite early on. And we were very skeptical of some of the things the governments were pushing, right? And then we got COVID the second time, and it was fucking brutal. It was so bad. And we did a video on our channel in which we talked about how bad it was. And there were a load of people who were very upset with us for talking about the reality. of how COVID affected us? Yeah, you have all these people that say,

we want reality, we want the truth, but they don't. They want the truth that makes them feel good. They want to be spoon-fed things while someone's yelling. This is the truth that the government's hiding from us, and it's just exactly what you want to hear. So part of what you're going through is just the natural reality of being a public figure to some extent. People don't actually care about you.

They care about what you represent to them. But part of it is the same thing. very, very dumb, one-dimensional, black and white way of looking at everything. And like Francis was saying, it happens on the left. It's increasingly happening on the right. There's a kind of snowflakeery as well. If you don't agree with us, you're going to get cancelled. And we're not going to talk to you. You can't come on our show. And I hear this more and more as well. And yeah, I think the way the internet is going is just, it's kind of worrying, particularly as I increasingly realized what I said earlier, which is like your generation doesn't have anything

else. That's that scary. And you know what is also very interesting that I'm seeing is when you portray these political ideas as these binaries, and you know, you even pointed it out there, like, my mind is even having trouble getting out of it. You're like, you didn't fail in marriage. Like that's, you're, I'm still repeating those narratives of what life is that I've learned from the internet and I got to let go of that. But what happens is then when people fail to live up to the ideal, where do you go from there? And most people will. And this is what I'm finding is the main problem with the right is it's like, no forgiveness, you do only fans, you do this, you do that, you are garbage, can never be forgiven. Well, we live in a broken world, and I don't know if you

guys are Christian or not, but I think the only political ideology, sorry? I just said we're Muslim actually. Well, it doesn't quite fit with this, but it can't be Muslim for this. Christian. Your point is the idea of Christianity, which a lot of people on the right advocate for, is that we're all imperfect and we're all due forgiveness. Well, you have to have it. If there isn't a path back to what one deems an acceptable way of life, if there isn't a way to be forgiven, well, then we're all doomed. And that means even the only fans, girls, they have to have a path back. Because guess what? The whole world is headed into certainly what the right call this degenrecy, this lack of morals, all of that. And when you try to live up to it and you fail,

and you know that this sect of the internet or this sect of politics is never going to see you the same, never see you as an ally, the only choice you actually have is to go to the left. That's your only choice. That's the only path you have. And I've been fighting against that and fighting to just remain nuanced. Like, if it's mass grave stuff, I'm going to call it out. If it's ridiculous red pill ideas, I'm going to call it out. But then, of course, you end up a little politically homeless, as I find you guys know well. Yeah, but you've got to be, see, you've got to be comfortable with that, Lauren. Yeah.

You've got to be comfortable of being politically homeless. Believe me. They've made it far more uncomfortable to be in a political home than it is to be political, politically homeless. But it's in our space, it's where anyone who's thinking rationally about this thing ends up, right? It's like some of the things that the left has got away with for years are absolutely atrocious. and they have to be criticized and they have to be called out. That doesn't mean that the right response

is to massively overreact the other way. And if you are smart and sensible as you are, you're going to end up in the middle. With everyone hating you, that's just what it is. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. But I've also learned it's much, like, if this had happened five years ago,

and I've got accounts that are tweeting out Mary's headline and it's got 10,000 likes, like this dumb whore and whatever, hasn't bothered me almost at all. The accounts, like correcting the right. record on things that I'm like, okay, this is just inaccurate. And I think maybe some smart people might have gotten this inaccurate as well. I don't mind doing that. But that kind of stuff, it just, like, these are truly just stupid people. Like, genuinely, we, I don't even think it's a left versus right war anymore. It's just stupid versus critically thinking war. And also the, the reality

aspect. If you are based in your life off of internet talking points, you are going to have a bad time in reality. And the amount of people I have met that are massive figures on the internet, you know, showing themselves living at large with the happy family, this and that, that you meet in person and it's like, whoa, what you're portraying online and your reality do not match. I would much rather have people thinking I'm miserable on the internet and be spending my days, you know, swimming in the ocean with my son, having barbecues with my church, you know, having tons of fun, which is what I do spend my days doing, which is why I can shut off my phone, shut off my notifications, and go, enjoy reality, which is much better, much sweeter than when people thought I had to be. I had to

this happy, perfect marriage, and I was posting the Instagram photos of, oh, look at me, I won the trad life. Miserable. It was a hell on earth. It was. And it's just about this schism we're having in the world where it's you got to pick. Are you going to live in reality? Are you going to make your decisions based off of the complexities of the real world? Or are you going to base, are you going to join the Matrix, which is the Internet? That's what it is. It's all fake. It's all nonsense, which is so funny, because you have people that call it the Matrix falling, sorry, getting into, but like, there's a lot of false realities being portrayed as waking up online right now. Of course. You know, one of the really interesting things that I found about your journey is I can't remember where I read this, where you said that you were happier being in a, I think it was in a trailer park, in a very poor community, just you and your, sorry, and your son, then you were

portraying this happy life where you were together because you had community? Yeah, it's been the strangest thing getting all of these messages from people, my condolences, my condolences, Lauren. I get it. I get the impulse because they read the article and they're like, wow, that was really hard. I wouldn't take back a thing that has happened in my life. I don't know if I would have been able to break myself out of the cognitive dissonance of believing in this kind of hardcore dogmatic red pill stuff if I didn't live it firsthand. And that information that I'm going to be able to pass on to people I love, to my son, that I have used to get, you know, just a more depth and empathy and understanding of humanity, invaluable. Invaluble. And then, of course, the trailer, everyone says I lived in a trailer. I didn't live in a trailer, but it was a trailer park. I lived in a cabin. It was a nice cabin. But my neighbors did live in trailers. One of them lived in a shed, the coolest people. Like, so much fun. We would have fires by the river every night. I, You feel lonely, you know, I get out of my cabin and I see, oh, they're having a community fire.

I'll bring down my little one. He'll play in the river. We'll all cook smokies together, have some beers, laugh. I had never experienced anything like that in my life. At the top of my career, I was living in this white box in Toronto, you know, live in the life or whatever. Spending most of my nights just typing away on Twitter alone, that wasn't very fun. I did have a lot of fun when I was on tours and going out and getting in trouble. But for the most part, life is what happens in between the big events online. And what are most of these content creators doing in the in-between time, that they're not live streaming, that they're not publishing videos. Do they have families? I've noticed my biggest critics of my marriage and all that.

Typically, they either have never had a family in their life so they don't know how difficult it is and how amazing it is as well to make that happen. Or they're divorced themselves and probably haven't talked about it, or I know haven't talked about it published. or just glaze over that because they feel they can get away with it. So, no, the reality people are actually living and what is being portrayed online, this should be the most basic point in the world, but it still seems like people don't get it. I think your audience probably get it a little more,

but yeah, no, it was a beautiful, wonderful time. And I've left that space. You know, I'm in a much better position materially than I was before. but my spiritual condition today and then was still beautiful, fantastic. It was just about getting into reality. And when was the moment, Lauren, when can you pinpoint that actual moment where you were like, hang on a second? Oh my goodness.

Wow. Cognitive dissonance is a difficult thing to do, especially when you've got circular ideology that you've prescribed to. Once again, you have to remember, I. destroyed my reputation within the public normal sphere promoting this right-wing stuff. And then, like, farmlands, borderless, I still support it. I think a lot of, I would have, I think if I had portrayed it differently or even waited five years, it would have gone over better. But either way, I definitely had this cognitive dissonance that this whole space, everything they're saying

must be correct. I have dedicated my whole life to it. Okay, what am I doing wrong? Women are always the one that lead relationships. They're always the one that are the problem. So I must not be tradding hard enough. I need to trad harder. I need to trad harder. And you just, anytime something bad happens, you have to go in a circular motion. It was a long, it was like little bits of it.

My husband leaving me and me begging him to do counseling, begging him to do co-parenting and him saying, no, no interest in that. I need to go start a replacement family. I was like, wait, this isn't what I've heard on the internet. This isn't what is supposed to happen. Men don't do this to women, right? And then I think going to my lawyer and trying to figure out how to rebuild my life from scratch and realizing that I'm going to have to do all of the paperwork in order to move on.

Like, he wouldn't do any of the paperwork. So I was getting punished on my taxes. I wasn't able to get any money back for having a kid. I was literally getting fined because I couldn't get divorced. He wasn't paying childs for anything. So even though he left me, my lawyer's like, yeah, you have to apply for divorce if you want to move on with your life. Well, that certainly got the wheels going of, wait, do 70% of women initiate divorces or are a lot of women left with the paperwork because a man has to prove that he's paying child support in order to file for divorce when he's left?

And I'm like, whoa, a lot of these stats, even the stats, like, we got the numbers. they don't really check out when you look at the nuance of what it plays out in the real world as. And it was a long process. And then I think the last nail in the coffin was my friend Ella, her marriage falling apart and a few other of my friends that were kind of living in this life because I still had the cognitive dissonance of you didn't do it right enough. If you had not worked, if you had married a guy locally, if you had all of the critiques that I get online about this, I swear people think I even thought about this.

I've thought about it more than one can possibly imagine. And seeing that, wow, it didn't work out for them either, and they did all of these things right. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was wrong. But it was also very freeing because I'm like, maybe I don't need to blame myself. I take responsibility for making poor decisions,

but that's also just life. It's complicated. And all you can do is move forward and make better decisions with the information you've got. And it doesn't mean you're a waste of a human being, or, you know, I'm a, I'm a single mother. Okay. So what?

Like, so effing what? I'm divorced. So what? What now? Okay, I'm nothing to the right. All right, I'll move on and I'll make great films on my own about something I care about. It's not for, I'm not looking to appease anyone who thinks I'm inherently worthless because life is complicated.

And also, this will pass. People move on from stuff and this will pass for you too. The question I wanted to ask you is, to what extent is the appeal of that kind of red-pill type of way of looking at relationships, a product of the fact that we've been spoon-fed the exact opposite stupidity from feminists for the last 20, 30, 40 years where you're going, that's what you think are related? What? Like, and so I think almost the stupid reaction is kind of somewhat understandable, given the stupid impetus you had in the first place. Yeah, there was a part of me. I've had to work on being like, okay, I'm in control of my own decisions.

I can't blame everyone else. These are factors that I want to talk about because they're real, but I had a lot of bitterness towards feminists for a while because I looked at it and I was like, if only they had done something. better than what I witnessed when I was a teenager. If only they weren't running around saying kill all men. I hate men, protesting against rape by running around naked in the street with duct tape on their boobs. Maybe I would have listened to some of their arguments and realized, you know, they're not right about everything, but there are some aspects of marriage that are complex. There

are situations where abuse does take place from a man towards a woman, and here are the red flags you can look for. I wish that they were having a more honest, real conversation when I was younger, or at the very least that the people running the media that were promoting this stuff weren't promoting the most insane incantations of it because it really does hurt people. It hurts people when, you know, the... Because I'm looking at my dad.

I'm looking at the men I grew up with and I'm like, these are wonderful, great men, wonderful men. Not rapists, not trying to kill women or oppress women. So what are these people talking about? Well, if they didn't talk in terms of all men, if they didn't talk in terms of, you know, pussy hat and whatever these, like, ridiculous protests they did are. And it was a little more intellectual.

And they actually reached out and tried to talk to the right. Because that was another thing that didn't happen in 2015, 2016, is the more feminist spheres of the Internet, they were simply unwilling to reach out and meet, you know, right-winger's where they were at and have proper debates, respectful debates. They wouldn't do it at all. They just discounted them all as idiots, fascists, this, that, and the other.

I don't know. I think people discount the idea of winning over the other side totally and they give up on it and then they fall into their own dogma and they actually lose a lot of the people that would have been their best audience members that would have been helped the most by hearing some nuance. Well, yeah, I was on Chris Williamson's show a while back and we were talking about men and women. I said, you know, I remember saying to him that any ideology that wants to push men and women apart, whether that's red pill or in-cell stuff or whatever. all these forms of feminism, there's different types of feminism, as we know, but there are forms of feminism that are just about hating men, the ones that you're talking about. All of this is toxic shit. Yeah. And in the middle is the fact that men and women have had to work together to survive

since the very beginning of humanity, and maybe that's what we ought to be focusing on. Yeah, and every man or woman I meet in real life, you know, there's a little meme I saw that's like, I like the 3am version of people. I like the version of people that at a bar at three in the morning are crying and telling you what they really feel about the world and what they really think. And every single man or woman I've met, no matter how radical they are in either direction or like, yeah, I just wish I had someone who cared about me. They don't hate women.

They actually desperately want a relationship with them and feel that's out of reach. They feel that's impossible. Or they don't hate men, but they feel that that's out of reach. That's impossible. I think a lot of the progressive ideology comes from this as well. they've actually, they look at the trad life stuff and they say, I know that's BS. And in a lot of cases, they're right because it's this fake version of what a relationship in marriage is. And they say, I know that's BS. So that's impossible. And I'm not even going to try. I'm going to join

Onlyfans. I'm going to, you know, not even believe in traditional marriage or relationship structures whatsoever. And that's what happens when you create these absurdist versions of what reality should be is skeptical people won't believe you and they'll reject it all together. Whereas if we just approached it and said, yeah, it's complicated. Some people fail. It's okay if you do. You pick yourself up. You try to do better.

You learn from your mistakes. You realize it's hard. You might need counseling. You might need a community around you, whatever it is. Just real conversations around reality. Do you think part of it, I know this isn't the case for you because you talk going terms about your father, but do you think part of the problems as well is the fatherlessness in society where normally you would have that male who's,

be, you know, a role model, a guiding influence, somebody who stabilizes you when things are going wrong. A lot of people, both women and men, don't have that. So as a result, they get pulled towards this nonsense, whether it's nonsense by the progressive left or it's nonsense by the red pill right. Yeah, absolutely. It's been very interesting for me to experience it firsthand. You know, I think about this a lot with my son, and I've worked very hard to get positive male role in his life from my church and local community. My father is with him right now. They're probably playing water guns in the backyard

at the moment. It's so important. But it's very interesting and I think very unhelpful that you have people in the more right-wing spheres characterizing this as a single mother problem. It's usually characterized that way. Single mothers are destroying the West, destroying society.

It's like, no, they're holding it together by a threat. They're the parent that is staying. at least the ones who, you know, I don't think this whole parental alienation thing is as common as we pretend it is. I think it's a very convenient narrative for some men like my husband who genuinely have rejected co-parenting and tell that to their friends so they don't have to live with the responsibility of what they have done. And if you look at the actual data, once again, 90% of cases where men pursue custody, they get it. So it's, and in most cases, it's men who don't pursue custody, who aren't interested in it, that this is happening. And it was very shocking for me to learn all these statistics. So, and there are cases, let me be clear.

I have a man that I know that I grew up with. I did classes with, much like my friend Ella, left with three kids and a farm, wife cheated on him, you know, left the kids. Those cases are real, and they are horrific. And my heart goes out, single fathers just as powerful, amazing as single mothers in holding that society together. but we need to have a conversation of accountability for anyone who is involved in abandoning a child. It's there needs, there's so much social pressure on women and this, like, you're useless, you're worthless

if you're a single mother, pathetic, you know, used goods, all these different things. I just don't see the same amount of social pressure against men that abandon their kids, especially because they didn't, there's nothing to show for it. You walk out and the amount of girls I found that are like dating a guy

and then halfway through dating him, find out he has kids that he's left, but he's never mentioned it. There's just not the same kind of social pressure. And I don't even know if social pressure is the answer, because usually shame and that, I don't think it helps that much. I don't, maybe you guys are men. Maybe you have a better answer than I do for why this is occurring, why there isn't this, you know.

Shame is definitely the answer. I'm serious. You think so? I'm serious. You had a child. How are you abandoning your kids? I don't care what happened in your relationship. you should be there to contribute to raising that child.

Whose responsibility is it? We hear all these points from the red pill. You know, man is supposed to take response. Okay, take your fucking responsibility then. That's what you signed up for. When you decided to have a child, that's what you signed up for. And if you didn't, you should be shame. I have no problem of shaming people like that.

Sorry. End of interviews. Since you asked, yeah. Yeah, no, I wish that. I don't know all the answers. I don't. This is something I'm still exploring and trying to figure out myself. And, you know, I'm just in this phase of shift of looking at the data and being like, ooh, this may have been deeply misrepresented in the right wing movement. And I think partially because a lot of the audience are male. And this is, see, I already know everyone's going to think this is like an anti-man rant. It's not. It's a financial incentives rant. It's there is a financial incentive to appease an audience. If you write for feminist frequency, if you write for Dezabel, your incentive is not going to be writing an article that says, ladies, here's why you're at fault for your relationship failures, even if there are some things that women need to hear. Just like if you are kind of in the red pill spaces, there's absolutely no incentive to tell your audience, man up, you know, take responsibility, stop being a loser. Like, women aren't at fault for anything. There's no financial incentive for that. It's this feedback loop of people like to feel good. They want to stagnate where they are. actual growth, actual growth is hard. It's been very hard for me,

taken me years to admit things that I've been wrong about in the past or misunderstood. But there's such a financial incentive to keep feeding people misery. I think also as well, and let's be blunt about it, it's a challenge, it's the thing that I have to work on every day as well because I'm not perfect, sadly, is a lot of people don't want to be adults.

Yeah. That's it, you know? We, you know, that we treat kids as adults and adults as kids. That's what we do now. And everybody so, you know, nobody wants to feel discomfort. Nobody wants to feel challenged. Everybody needs to be made to feel that everything's okay all of the time. That's not how life works.

There are going to be times where you're not okay. There are going to be times where you're profoundly uncomfortable. And in fact, the only way to grow is to embrace discomfort. Yeah. And that's just life. I'm sorry. And I just think a lot of people don't want to admit that. And they will do anything to avoid it as well. Yeah. We've all done it. Yeah. Like, like. And that's the biggest temptation of all in life is to blame other people and to say, well, she did this, he did that and whatever. Ultimately, we're all responsible for decisions we make. You know, you made decisions. You married this guy. You're responsible for that. Then you left. you're responsible for that too. Like, and he's responsible for the things that he's doing and not doing. And ultimately, pretending that like, oh, it's okay to leave.

No, it's not okay to leave your kids. It's not okay. There's nothing that's okay about that. Whether, whatever, you know, the relationship is the relationship people don't, adults don't get on. It's not the child's fault. The child didn't have anything to do with it. And as a man, you're supposed to be there.

That's what you signed up for. That's what you're supposed to do. Whatever else is going on. Is shame the only thing? that works? Probably not. A good beating as well. A good beating as well. So you guys really do want to go. You guys are Islamists. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. As long as we get to be a joint Caliph. Yeah. And I just can't grow a beard, so that's the reason this. I look like this. I could grow a great bit. Anyway, let's not get into this. This is off the of the subject of what we're

talking about. But yeah, I just think it's great that we're having this conversation. because I think people need to be honest about stuff and not enough people are. And I think it's great that you're here and I think it's great that you've come out the other side and you're building a new life. And I want to tell you, Lawrence, on me, like, with the best advice that anyone's ever,

well, there's two bits, but the second best, I would say, is this two shall pass. All of this stuff, it feels as raw as it does in the moment. And eventually you'll process it, you'll have a great life going forward, you'll make great content. And by the way, you've been humbled. All of us get humbled at points when we think, oh, and it's coming for me, it's coming

for Francis, coming for all of us. And the great thing about that is you are now a much more nuanced person. The stuff you're going to put out into the world is going to be much more closer to the reality of stuff. And there's an audience out there for that. It may not be the same as, you know, talking about how women ain't shit. But then it's going to be you, though. And that's what you really want.

Yeah, and I know it's, well, I think this has mostly passed. I think this is part of the passing. I'm very, very grateful for the life I'm living. I'll tell you right now, when, I don't think people even talk about the physiological effects of lying. And, you know, I know it's not, it's lying by omission, like me not talking about my marriage and continuing to wear my wedding ring. I literally was going great. You must be lying a lot here.

I had two gray streaks going on either side of my head. I couldn't sleep at all, nothing. And it wasn't until I published my long tweet and video saying, you know what, here's the truth. This is the life I'm actually living. That I was able to start healing. I stopped graying. I was able to sleep better.

My body, like, incredible, incredible. I actually think it kills you lying. Gabor Mate, I'm sure you've read his book. But, yeah, constantly suppressing truth actually kills you. It actually has a physiognomy effect, so to speak. Well, you know, you were asking me about the tour with Jordan before we started. And this is what he talks about. It's very interesting because he basically talks, whenever anyone asks him about heaven or hell,

he always talks about heaven on hell on earth. He doesn't talk about the afterlife. I don't even know if he believes in the afterlife. And what he says is every time you do things that you know are the wrong thing to do and lying would be right at the top of the list, especially for Jordan, I think, you get closer to your personal hell on earth. And every time you tell the truth and you act in accordance with your principles

and with your values, you get closer to heaven on earth. And so every step, and it's funny, we've been talking about this all week with the guys as well. It's like every single thing that you can do that you know is in line with who you are

and who you're supposed to be takes you that little tiny step closer to being in a good place. And it works the other way too. And you stack up those lies long enough, you're going to be in hell. Yeah, no, absolutely. And likewise the truth.

And I think people, you know, it's very interesting. Christians talk a lot about spiritual warfare. And have you ever read screw tape letters by CS-Lews? No, no. It's my favorite author. I love C.S. Louis. But it's a conversation between, you know, demons about how they're going to manipulate a human being. And you look on Twitter and some of the conversation that's going on.

And these people literally sound like the demons from screw-taped letters in the way that they talk and try to manipulate you. even like the repetitive barking of, you're, this, like talking to anyone, you know, kill yourself. And sometimes I'll click on their accounts and I'll scroll through and I'll be like, what is the kind of person that tweets like this? And I found one a few weeks ago. Most of his tweets are just like using every possible slur towards every influencer you could imagine. And then I found a tweet where it was a long rant and he was talking about, I have never felt further from God in my entire life.

I feel nothing but hate. I feel nothing but disgust towards everyone. I want everyone around me to suffer. My life is nothing but pain. And like going deep into this man's, literally saying, I just want to fully embrace the demon. And whether you believe in, you know, the spiritual, I do, or you don't, there is clearly a psychological poison that people can dip their soul into and be almost entirely lost in. And these people have full access to your brain. on the internet, they have full access to try to manipulate you and psychologically move you, which I think brings it into the audience capture. In some cases, when you don't block these people, when you leave them having access to your energy and your psyche, I think it's literally demonic influence. You have just thousands and thousands of these people screeching the most useless, unhelpful lies in your ears. And some people have the audacity to say, ha ha, you blocked me. I win. I wouldn't let a crackhead scream at me on the street. I'd cross. the street and say bye-bye, why would I let a bunch of people on the internet that are acting like

crackheads and demons do that. It affects people, whether you admit it or not. It does. If you emit darkness, then that's what you're going to get in return. And if you admit light, that's what you're going to get. You have to make that choice. What is it that you want to do? We all know that person who walks into a room and they just seem to suck everybody's energy. You don't hear him. But, you know, it's true. And you know, it's true. And you know, You can, whether you want to believe in spirituality or not, we all feel it. We're like, oh, get away from them.

Yeah. And I find it very interesting that when you go on and you see a lot of these accounts that are doing this, at least on the right, obviously the left have their own little demons that are, and they kind of portray the same thing, though. You have a lot of the people on the right that put, like, the Christian cross in their profile, and then they're like, die, whore, you'll never be forgiven every sins. I mean, to be fair, like, you know, that was Christianity a few centuries ago. Well, I don't think that was Christianity.

Let's not open up and a whole... I don't think that's what Christ would have liked very much. You talk about only fans. I mean, Jesus hung out with basically girls who did Onlyfans. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then you have like the left-wing demons that have like, peace, love, unity, and then they're like, kill yourself. And these people are, yeah, very, very deeply dark.

And you'll never see them in a profile photo. You'll always see fake profile photos because I think, like you said, when you have these people who are energy sucks, who are clearly not taking care of themselves, who hate their lives, when they walk into a room, you can feel it, you can see it. And I think most of the people who behave in this way, it just wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for the shield of the internet.

So much like any sort of great invention, it can be used for great good or great evil, depending on the state of humanity. And I think it's really exposing a spiraling humanity psychologically. That wouldn't, it wouldn't be possible. to spiral to this level if we had the accountability of actually seeing how people were treating

themselves eye to eye face how people were received in their communities. I know for a fact none of these people could talk like this to my face. None of these people could survive at a community or in real life if they, you know... Well, that's why on the internet is saying dumb shit because they don't have that. Listen,

it's great to have you on. I think you have a unique opportunity now actually, having been through all of this to start... Because, see, I, we talked about this earlier with your generation, like being the first ones to really experience the full glare of the internet without any reality attached. But your story is a good example of how this starts to get balanced out.

People like you coming forward and going like, this is what happened and this is what I thought and now I think this and this is why and blah, blah, blah. You have a unique opportunity now to reach lots of people and kind of get them to realize, you know, you need to go and touch grass every now and again. So even if that's all you do, it's been, you have an opportunity to do that is what I'm saying. And I hope you take it. Thank you. Yeah, I hope so too.

And I would definitely tell anyone who is watching this, if you're in this limbo right now of, oh, I want to live up to the expectations of this ideology or this group that I've attached myself on the internet, don't live up to the expectations of what you truly want in the real world, what's going to make you happy, what's going to make your family. what's going to make your family happy, what's going to build and create and, you know, just bring joy into your life daily and goodness. And none of that has anything to do with what people you've never met say on the internet or ideas that are applicable in real life. So choose, choose the reality pill. And also, one of the things that I find very odd is why anyone would ever take advice from people that aren't successful at the thing that they're advising you about. like, I wouldn't take marriage advice from a guy who has, I don't know, seven girlfriends or whatever. Like, I'm not, that's, he has nothing to teach me. You know what I mean? So there are lots of people in

your life, I hope, I don't mean you specifically, but just in a person's life where you go, well, you know, Uncle This has a, has a great relationship. Can I go and talk to him about how to do this? Or this guy knows how to use a hammer and I need to hammer something. Like, you wouldn't ask people for advice. Do you know what I mean? You're giving me, I wish I didn't. lose this memory by getting so caught up in the internet stuff. But the best man I ever met in my life, one of them, my grandfather. My mother had four sisters and single mother, she was, my grandmother was an orphan from the war and, you know, came to Canada at 16 years old with absolutely nothing and nobody and ended up with four daughters without the fathers involved for the most part. And

they were like literally dumpster diving in trash cans to get food. And my grandfather was a traveling clothing salesman, met them, took all the girls in, was always, I always saw him as grandpa, he was their father, took care of them, absolutely adored my grandmother, Jenny. They got married, you know, adored each other to the very end. And when he died, I remember being, I think I was, I can't remember exactly how old I was, but I was still young, maybe young teenager, being in the backyard there and all of the sisters holding hands and my grandma and myself and the grandchildren planting a tree and just being like we loved and adored this man and he was the happiest man I ever met, loved music, loved all the daughters he had. And on the internet, they would have called him like,

oh, look at this cock. Like, you know, like, what? Like this guy, he's taking this single mother with four kids. Like, what? Three daughters or whatever. And no, like the happiest man you would have ever met most beautiful, and healing. He actually did something very different than what this modern kind of ridiculous red pill ideology does. He actually healed a family. He taught my mother what love should look like, what a marriage should look like. And in turn, when she got married, she's still with my father. They're happy, you know, he healed a broken chain of family destruction. Can anyone that's advocating all of this, you know, red pill stuff say that they would have the balls to do that? No, they'd be too scared about their public reputation to actually heal the world and build a family that would love

them and be there for them until the day they died. My grandma never forgot him. And she started getting Alzheimer's and she just spoke about him every day, just adored him. Real love. But no, she would have been, like all the names they would have called her and him. But no, they were truly, truly happy people and healing the world, kindest people you'd ever bet. That's a beautiful, that's a beautiful place to end the interview. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Lauren. The final question is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Lauren answers the last question, when the interview is over, make sure you head on over to locals by clicking the link in the description to see this. How do you deal with the difference of opinion within your sphere?

Like, for instance, a battle between Ben Shapiro and Candice Owens, your differences with Tim Bull, etc. I technically work at Tenant Media with Dave Rubin. Dave Rubin tweeted out the other day, Hamas wouldn't even rape these cows to a picture. of kind of more obese women. And I just put a bunch of question marks below and I'm like, yeah, we do stuff on the same channel, but what the hell is this? Right now, I think the main thing

that we need to be talking about within the political space is the catastrophe that is audience capture. We need to free the minds that are currently, you know, leading discourse to speak in a way that they actually mean to tell the truth about their own lives, about reality, and no longer feed into an audience. And as you guys said, you like to call the crazies,

in your audience every once in a while. Yeah, we said this before we started the interview. But you say we, I don't think it's we. I think the people you're talking about need to recognize that they would much rather live a life that's truthful than make more money. And we've done that from day one. We deliberately pissed chunks of our audience off regularly

because we're like, you probably don't belong here. And there's great content out there for you talking about how women are sheer or men are sheer or whatever. You just know what we're going to do. So the people you are talking about, to the extent that they're listening to this, man up, strap on a pair. Absolutely. And I can tell you, you guys are more comfortable having just saying what you think, having an honest conversation. I can feel it when I'm in a room

and someone is like, okay, what's the talking point? What's the talking point? Very stressful energy, very, got to appease, go to appease, no way to live. But yes, definitely audience capture needs to be talked about. All right. Well, head on over to locals where we ask Lauren your questions and it's going to be tailored specifically to you exactly how you like it. Yeah, men are trash, so are women. Everyone's trash. I love men.

I love women. That's both great. Thanks guys. Canberra Boy asks, would you tour again with Stefan Moliner?