REAL Drinks And TOUGH Questions: YES or NO with Lauren Southern And Michael Knowles

Summary

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Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: The Michael Knowles Show
Episode: REAL Drinks And TOUGH Questions: YES or NO with Lauren Southern And Michael Knowles
Date: July 18, 2026
Host: Michael Knowles
Guest: Lauren Southern
Format: Humorous, irreverent, conversational “yes or no” game, with real drinks and candid conversation

Episode Overview

This lively episode pivots around a friendly drinking game between conservative commentator Michael Knowles and controversial Canadian commentator Lauren Southern. Through rapid-fire, “yes or no” prompts (with bonus dry martinis), Knowles and Southern dissect hot political, cultural, and personal topics. Their banter ranges from the frivolous to the profound, exposing the tensions and paradoxes within conservatism, liberalism, gender politics, online culture, influencer life, and personal identity. The episode is marked by candid confessions, mischievous humor, and unexpectedly deep exchanges—all underscored by a playful “battle of wits and drinks” atmosphere.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Kickoff: The Destiny Controversy and Setting the Stakes

• Begins with an anecdote about an unreleased game episode with streamer “Destiny” due to his controversial tweets after the Trump shooting.
  • Southern describes literally fighting Destiny to delete a “caustic tweet” aimed at Matt Walsh ([01:58–02:14]).
• The rules of the game are explained: guests must guess how the other answered yes/no questions; points and drinks hinge on accuracy ([02:14–04:01]).
• Wagers: cigars and Canadian chocolate are jokingly proposed as prizes ([03:09–03:41]).

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Social Satire and Gender Politics

Who’s the “Bigger Fraud”?

• Banter about “fake” IMDb heights and internet personas leads into broader commentary on authenticity in the influencer world ([04:01–05:12]).

Looksmaxing, Materialism, and Gender

• Knowles asks: “Is looksmaxing just transgenderism for straight right-wing men?”
  • Southern: “No, it’s men finally forced to compete on the same scale as women because we’re now in the workforce… Now we’re all in materialism hell” ([05:32]).
  • Knowles relates it to changing dating dynamics—women are “learning what it’s like to be objectified” ([06:01]).
• Quote:

  “Women have been looksmaxing for hundreds of years, just forced to do it. Tinder made us equal, you know.” — Lauren Southern [05:32]

  “When I see looksmaxing, I wonder if it’s for women or if it’s just for other men... It’s about mogging, like, it’s about status with other guys.” — Michael Knowles [07:24]

• Discussion weaves in the performative aspects of masculinity/femininity and how both sides may be “caricaturing their own sex” ([09:13–10:28]).

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Bots, Internet Astroturfing, & Social Contagion

• Are most online engagements with “trans activists” or “neo-Nazis” actually bots?
  • Both agree “most of X is bots”—estimates as high as 70% ([13:19]).
  • Online mobs and bot networks amplify the appearance of controversy and shift real opinions.
  • Quote:

    “There’s real people that just get astroturfed and gaslit by the comment section. The bots. That’s the point of them.” — Lauren Southern [14:23]

    “You have to be very stubborn to not give way to it... I've seen people I know have their opinions changed by the bot campaigns.” — Michael Knowles [14:34]

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Edgelord Politics & Ideological LARPing

• Examination of “safe edgy” content—right-wingers performing misogyny (“women shouldn’t vote”) for social approval and money.
  • Southern: “It’s jingling the keys for the audience… brand safe edgy is anti-woman, it’s never anti-minority.” [17:19]
  • Knowles and Southern both observe that cultural trends (left or right) are adopted primarily because they’re socially popular, not deeply held beliefs.
  • Both recount seeing online grifters shift with the wind ([18:59–19:17]).

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Online Influence, Memes, and Modern Political Reality

• Internet memes and rapid shifts in narrative lead to “memoricide”—collective forgetting or rewriting of recent political history.
  • Memorable moment: Southern describes temporarily believing flat earth/conspiracy content due to “waking and baking” and the rabbit holes of the web ([20:04]).

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Conservative vs. Liberal Social Scenes

“Wilder” Off-Camera?

• Knowles asks if conservative circles are actually “wilder” than liberal ones when the cameras are off.
  • Southern confirms: “The conservative movement runs on such extreme levels of repressed horniness that it comes out every month in a new scandal... It is the wild freaking West.” ([21:43])
  • Drugs: Cocaine is surprisingly prevalent in right-wing scenes (“grow up, do a line of coke”). Knowles recounts never trying cocaine due to his mother’s warnings, preferring “zins” and White Monster drinks instead ([22:44–23:16]).
  • Liberals, by comparison, are depicted as neurotic about relationships, caught up in “polycule contracts” but not as openly transgressive.
• Quote:

  “You had to be a kind of out there weird person to get into right-wing political politics because you had to be willing to say things no one else would.” — Lauren Southern [22:25]

  “Right wingers… are hotter. They’re often hotter than left wingers.” — Michael Knowles [24:11]

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Trad Life, Liberal Hypocrisy, and Modern Social Dynamics

• Debate over the real vs. performative “trad wife”/nuclear family ideal:
  • Southern: “It makes sense to work. Maybe for you, Michael, with your fancy little job, cigars, but let me tell you, most people can’t afford it. I sell a lot of cigars, but…” ([31:24])
  • Both agree modern “trad” is often an unattainable aesthetic/lifestyle for most, and is frequently online performance.
  • Knowles reflects on friends who actually live “real trad” lives, finding stability by shrinking expectations, not by mimicking Instagram ideals ([32:31]).
  • Southern: “I think we can’t replicate what we haven’t seen. So if you’ve grown up in a broken family, how do you even know where to begin with creating a stable one?” ([30:48])

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Gender Roles, Modernity, and Desire

• Southern contends that modern men don’t want “stay-at-home” wives; modern men want women with something going on.
  • “I’ve noticed this in my own dating life… men lose interest in you... They want the crazy BPD chick.”
• Knowles pushes back, arguing for complementary and binary gender ideals.
  • “Men and women are different and complementary... the traditional view says…” ([36:21])

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Life as an Internet Personality: Fame, Drama, and Dating

• Southern shares stories about her notorious online relationships, particularly with Destiny, and the fallout of being perpetually in public controversy (e.g., DMs leaked due to catfishing by a fake sex worker) ([47:08–50:28]).
• Both reflect on how their public personas warp relationships, fuel drama, and lead to paranoia.

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Immigration, Socialism, and Social Threats

• "Is the rise of socialism a greater threat to America than rising Muslim immigration?"
  • Knowles: “They're indistinguishable really”; modern socialism is “a product of migration” ([55:12–56:25]).
  • Southern: Many immigrant groups are skeptical of socialism (e.g., Cubans); the picture is more nuanced ([57:45]).

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Love, Porn, and the Digital Romance Fantasy

• Do fantasy novels mislead women more than strip clubs mislead men?
  • Both poke fun at the “trash chick lit” genre but discuss its real psychological influence ([64:02–68:39]).
  • Southern: “I watched the Notebook and I believed that shit… The delusion of ‘I’m going to get married and everything in my life is going to be perfect’ is a lot more enticing than, ‘I have to keep trying every day of my life’” ([67:22]).
  • Knowles: Sees the change as a product of “decadence” and possibly consumer capitalism ([69:26]).

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Rapid Fire Round Highlights (Timestamps Approx. 72:33–100:08)

Quick Hits:

• Is being a cocktail waitress more degrading than being an online conspiracy theorist?
  • Both: “No, it’s honest work.”
• Do flat earthers have any interesting points?
  • Knowles: “No, they don’t… the flat earth stuff does nothing for me.” ([73:19])
• Can you ever really trust a fed?
  • Both: “No.”
  • Southern recounts being pressured to work with feds and “honeypotted” by gigachad agents. ([76:07–77:23])
• Does smoking weed make people more liberal?
  • Both: “Yes. It ‘lives people out’” ([79:59–80:09])
• Can someone be both a tradwife and a full-time influencer?
  • Both: “No. If you’re posting online, you’ve already abandoned it… it’s a type of porn too.” ([90:26–91:02])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Internet Bots:

  “I reckon 70% of X is bots.” — Lauren Southern [13:21]

• On Conservative “Wildness”:

  “The conservative movement runs on such extreme levels of repressed horniness that it comes out every month in a new scandal...” — Lauren Southern [21:43]

• On the limits of “Tradwife” online:

  “If you’re posting online, you’ve already — you’ve already abandoned it, and I don’t care. But just admit you’re LARPing… it’s like a type of porn too.” — Lauren Southern [90:45]

• On relationships and internal life:

  “I have a professor… he never asks me if I'm a Christian or not. He always asks, ‘Lauren, how is the journey?’ Because he cares about my soul.” — Lauren Southern [97:12]

• On the difference between real and online influence:

  “Hard power is different than online power. …If you were putting that into your communities… instead of hitting like and subscribe every day, the world would change like that.” — Lauren Southern [88:06]

• On Modern Politics as D&D:

  “Everyone wants a version of utopia… everyone’s playing Dungeons and Dragons on the Internet right now.” — Lauren Southern [106:31]

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Deep Reflection: Liberal vs. Conservative Discontent

• Recognizing broken families and hypocrisy as the root of skepticism toward “trad” values, especially among liberals ([28:08–29:22]).
• Shared acknowledgment that much of public “trad” conservative and influencer/feminist online identity is performance—for profit or approval ([17:19], [106:31]).
• Both argue the importance of “acknowledging your shadow”—accepting personal and group flaws in order to build any authentic life or movement ([93:17–94:02]).

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Key Timestamps for Notable Segments

• Destiny controversy and unreleased episode: [01:47–02:14], [44:10–45:34]
• Game rules and stakes: [02:14–03:41]
• Looksmaxing/gender roles: [05:12–10:28]
• Internet bots and opinion formation: [11:45–14:34]
• Online grifting/safe edgy content: [15:17–18:19]
• Flat-earther/online meme rabbit holes: [19:17–20:20]
• Conservative scene “wilder” than liberals: [20:29–25:46]
• Trad family, modern realities: [30:48–34:59]
• Feminism and female desire: [34:46–36:19]
• Destiny relationship drama, internet fallout: [47:08–53:36]
• Socialism vs. migration threat: [55:12–56:45]
• Fantasy novels vs. strip clubs: [64:02–69:55]
• Rapid-fire questions: [72:33–100:08]

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Tone & Style

• Witty, self-deprecating, sometimes acerbic. Both guests openly mock themselves and their ideological “tribe,” freely admit mistakes, and weave in cultural/literary allusions (from Dante to Dworkin to C.S. Lewis).
• Irreverent and personal. Deep points are wrapped in jokes and stories about failed relationships, drugs, and “cigar-selling privilege.”
• Nuanced, not dogmatic. Both reject labels and ideological loyalty in favor of realism and moral honesty.

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Conclusion: Episode Impact

While framed as a silly drinking game, this episode provides a rare, honest, and deeply self-critical look at the contradictions of online politics, the right-wing ecosystem, gender, and internet fame. It is rich in off-beat anecdotes, sophisticated literary references, and insights into both public and personal life on the modern political internet.
Not for the faint of heart, but essential for anyone seeking to understand the real culture, community, hypocrisy, and hope in the digital age.

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Final Score:
Michael Knowles wins the Yes or No game, 8 to 1 ([111:38])

Final words:

“That's the greatest victory I’ve ever had on this show. I sort of forgot we were playing a game.” — Michael Knowles [112:03]

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Transcript

[Michael Knowles]

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[Howard Mackler]

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[Michael Knowles]

Paid for by Super Sure Insurance Agency, llc, a licensed insurance agency. You know what's crazy about this? I did this game with Mr. Destiny

[Lauren Southern]

and never published it.

[Michael Knowles]

No, we were going to release it three days later or something. Trump gets shot. We're going to release it a day after that and he comes out and like defends Trump being murdered.

[Lauren Southern]

I was with him that day. It was the first time I had seen him in a year. And then I see his tweet come up and I'm like, I gotta go get in an Uber. He's tweeting on the couch and I open the door and I'm like, what are you doing? Like, you're ruining your life right now. We get into a physical fight over this man's phone. I managed to delete a absolutely caustic tweet towards Matt Walsh that no one saw.

[Michael Knowles]

What was the tweet? I kinda wanna know the tw. Welcome to yes or no, the bibulous battle to discover who knows whom better. My guest today is Lauren Southern. How do we play? Lauren will ask me a yes or no question. I will select my answer away from her prying eyes. Then she will guess how I answered. If she guesses correctly, she gets a point. If she guesses incorrectly, she loses a point. Then it's my turn. No matter what, I will probably end up drinking. Neither of us has seen the questions beforehand. Whoever has the most points at the end wins. The stakes could be higher. Lauren, delightful to see you as always.

[Lauren Southern]

Thanks for having me.

[Michael Knowles]

Shall we make a wager?

[Lauren Southern]

All right, let's do it.

[Michael Knowles]

What do you want to bet?

[Lauren Southern]

What do I want to bet? I don't know. Not money. Tweeting something terrible.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, you don't smoke cigars, so I can't even bet you a. I do smoke cigars. Well, there you go. Ok. Ok. I bet you a fistful of delicious Mayflower cigars if you win. What do I get?

[Lauren Southern]

What do you get? Well, we got some elbows up chocolate that I brought from Canada.

[Michael Knowles]

Nice.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

Okay, that's.

[Lauren Southern]

No, no, no, we don't want that.

[Michael Knowles]

We don't want that.

[Lauren Southern]

No, the mari.

[Michael Knowles]

What else?

[Lauren Southern]

Cuban cigars. I'll get you some Cuban cigars from Canada.

[Howard Mackler]

In Canada.

[Michael Knowles]

That sounds good. Yeah. What else do you get? You can get. In Canada, you can get Islam. You can be killed by your government. You can. Yeah, or Cubans. Okay, Cubans.

[Lauren Southern]

Stars. That's.

[Michael Knowles]

That sounds good. Okay, you know the rules.

[Lauren Southern]

So I take the.

[Michael Knowles]

You go first because you're a lady.

[Lauren Southern]

As we both know, the Internet is rife with LARPing and fake news. According to our IMDb pages, you're five' ten and I'm five' six. Are you Michael Knowles, the bigger fraud?

[Michael Knowles]

You're five' six according to your IMDb allegedly. Well, you were also a man according to some legal document.

[Lauren Southern]

That's a real legal document.

[Michael Knowles]

That's a real one.

[Lauren Southern]

That's a real one.

[Michael Knowles]

How did they say you're not five six? Yeah, I guess we have to answer. Hold on. I'm sorry. We have to answer. Who's the bigger fraud?

[Lauren Southern]

Are you trying to Cheat.

[Michael Knowles]

I actually do know my own height, believe it or not. So I'm going to say according to our. Are you Michael Knowles, the bigger fraud? And you have to. You have to guess how I would answer.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, I lock in mine first. I'm guessing. Okay, let's see.

[Michael Knowles]

Correct. They say you're five, six.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, I guess so. I'm at least five, seven.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, I would say you're at least five cents. Are you wearing heels right now?

[Lauren Southern]

I am wearing heels.

[Michael Knowles]

You are wearing heels. Okay, that's.

[Lauren Southern]

So I guess I'm the bigger fraud

[Michael Knowles]

here, but I still.

[Lauren Southern]

Correcto. Where do I put this?

[Michael Knowles]

You can put that right there next to the best selling yes or no game, which is [e-mail] shop. Great. Okay, I'm clear. My answer is looksmaxing. Just transgenderism for straight right wing men. What's your answer?

[Lauren Southern]

Can I click it?

[Michael Knowles]

You click it. You click your answer.

[Lauren Southern]

Yes.

[Michael Knowles]

I'm just going to drink just because. They say it's 11am somewhere.

[Lauren Southern]

Okay.

[Michael Knowles]

I don't know why I'm crying. Is it just looks, Max? Is it just transgenderism for straight right wing men? Yes. I got it wrong. You say no. Why?

[Lauren Southern]

Okay, I think that looks maxing is men finally being forced to compete on the same scale as women because we're now in the workforce. So we're not just marrying men because of their status or money or this kind of stuff. Women have been looks maxing for hundreds of years. Right. Just forced to do it. Now we're all immaterial. Materialism. Hell. Where women are learning what it's like to just be a check mark on an Excel sheet for a corporation. And men are learning what it's like to be objectified. Tinder made us equal, you know.

[Michael Knowles]

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I hadn't considered it from the perspective of working like women in the workplace is the. Because there's a great essay 15, 20 years ago by Christopher Hitchens who was wrong about almost everything, but he had a very funny essay called why Women aren't funny. And he points out, he says the only times women are funny is if they're hefty, dyke or Jewish. He said those are the exceptions. But he said it's not. No, knock on women. Women have a great sense of humor, but men need to be funny. Men being funny attracts women and women are very pretty, so they don't need to be funny to attract men. And you say women are attracted to different things. Maybe it's money, maybe it's confidence. Maybe you're Funny maybe. Whatever it is, you're not. You're not as visual as men are, I think.

[Lauren Southern]

I mean, I think so, but I think that's changing. I think with the culture, it's shifting

[Michael Knowles]

because now the women are becoming more

[Lauren Southern]

like men and the women are. You know, we're getting the same hobbies, the same careers. Women are getting more degrees than men at the moment, so we get to just sit on Tinder and objectify them now, too.

[Michael Knowles]

But do you get the same thrill like in the. I've read.

[Lauren Southern]

I don't think we get the same thrill.

[Michael Knowles]

You don't? Now, I. I would have thought some years ago that basically only men look at porn and women don't look at porn. There are all these studies that come out saying a large number of young women actually look at porn, which confounds my view, because it seems to me men are much more visually oriented and women are totally nuts. I have no idea what actually motivates women. So for men, okay, the looks really matter. Whereas when I see looks maxing, I wonder if it's for women or if it's just for other men. Like, I sat down with Mr. Ikular, the camera. Oh, you.

[Lauren Southern]

Oh, right. I watched that.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah. Thank you. Fascinating guy. And I said, so what? This is about getting girls? And he goes, oh, not really. He said, I'm actually. I'm impotent right now, or I'm infertile or something. You know, the chemicals. It's not about getting girls. Yeah, it's about mogging. Like, it's about status with other guys.

[Lauren Southern]

I think it is. The one thing I appreciate about the looksmaxers is I think they are more honest than everyone in that we are entering such a stage of materialism, and the looksmaxer is the only person that's saying, yes, yes, this is all about mogging. This is all about sex. This is all about status. Whereas everyone else is trying to do it in these, like, weird, underhanded ways, like the guys who will read bell hooks and pretend like the performative male feminist or the girls that jingle the keys. Women shouldn't vote. I'm baking pies on the Internet, you know? Whereas the looks Max was just like, no, this is just about sex and status. That's it. The end result of total materialism. But there's also this aspect. Do you know who Androgenic is?

[Michael Knowles]

No.

[Lauren Southern]

He's like, number five on the Chad rankings. Are you not following the Chad rankings?

[Michael Knowles]

I only follow the top four.

[Lauren Southern]

No. Okay. Oh, okay, I see.

[Michael Knowles]

So he's Five.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

So he's the Terra Titan. And he just came out and he said, becoming a looks maxer for the first time in my life has given me empathy for women, because my problems used to be feeling lonely and trying to get attention, and now my problems are worrying about being murdered or stalked or killed. And it's like it is only a very recent phenomenon that the idea that attention and beauty is positive. Throughout all of history, it was seen as socially dangerous. Every single great myth was about this. Cupid and psyche or, you know, Rapunzel, Snow White. It's all about it.

[Michael Knowles]

Helen does start the most famous war in the world.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah. It's like, you enjoy this, boys. It's not a great thing to be loved just for your appearance. It ruins your life in a lot of ways.

[Michael Knowles]

So it's very tough. I mean, for some of us who are just naturally looks. Max, the way I find it similar to transgenderism. This is why I want my point back, but I probably won't get it back. Transgenderism is a man doing a caricature performance of femininity. So it's not. He doesn't really look like a man. He looks like some bimbo, kind of slutty, crazy caricature of a woman. Right. None of them look like your grandma. None of the transgenders. It's always this skewed, perverted conception of what the opposite sex is.

[Lauren Southern]

Have you seen the people who do the hormone therapy before they go through puberty, though? They look almost indistinguishable.

[Michael Knowles]

Really?

[Lauren Southern]

Absolutely. If you don't go through puberty, and it's like the people who take the puberty blockers before they actually do, like, full on.

[Michael Knowles]

Well, maybe they physically look more like the person, but I just mean they're usually not wearing a hoodie from the Gap. They're usually wearing these kind of over the top, glamorous outfits.

[Lauren Southern]

Kristi Gnomes.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah. Mr. Noem, for example. And the looksmaxers, it seems to me they're doing the same thing, but it's just. They're doing a caricature performance of their own sex.

[Lauren Southern]

Well, that's kind of the male to male transgender thing was when the manosphere came out and you had all these people doing like, the. Just. Yeah. The caricature of your own sex. And it's all very. You know, it's the gender expression. None of it is about just your actual how you were born. And that's always the thing I get confused with when talking to, like, very liberal people about the transgender stuff. I'M like, I thought this was. Shouldn't we be happy with people just being in the body they were born as? And then you can express as any gender expression publicly. That seems like the most body positive thing to me.

[Michael Knowles]

Right. I always had a little affinity for the transgender idea in the sense. Like, I disagreed with the conservatives who said it's just about your chromosomes or whatever because, like, there's obviously a performance to gender.

[Lauren Southern]

100%. Exactly.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah. I mean, some of us come by our John Wayne virility more naturally than others. But there is a. I just. The answer to it to me was always, well, if you feel some discord, you should just act more like what you really are because you act like a man, to quote Vito Corleone. But I still lose my point. I do. Okay, that's fine.

[Lauren Southern]

I can't respond to. You've made a strong argument.

[Michael Knowles]

Thank you. But I still lose. All right, you're up. And Lauren has to clear her answer.

[Lauren Southern]

Yes, sir. Do you think more bots interact with Gen Z on social media than actual trans activists and neo Nazis? Deep in thought with this one.

[Michael Knowles]

I am deep in thought on this because it's a precise answer.

[Lauren Southern]

Do I say no?

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, give me that point. We're talking.

[Lauren Southern]

Absolutely.

[Michael Knowles]

It's the. And that says no because I think a lot of the Nazi stuff is boded and is influence campaigns and all that stuff by lots of different groups. You know, like, I can't tell. Are the neo Nazi accounts being run by like Russia or Israel? I don't know. You know, because there are political advantages to both. But the trans thing, I don't think that was really a bot campaign as much. I think that really was a social phenomenon. It was reflected in demographic studies and things like that. So I don't. There's a ton of bots and influence and paid campaigns and stuff.

[Lauren Southern]

I don't think people would use X or most of the Internet if they realized how much stuff is botted. I don't think they even fathom. And you kind of. I realized the bot stuff going on early because I was terminally online, so I could see the patterns. But even in. There's a guy, an Indian guy from Ottawa, I think, who was running 3000 mega bot accounts just from his own computer at home. An article came out a few months ago about it. I just. And it's so easy to buy them. It's like 100 bucks to buy thousands of these bots. I don't.

[Michael Knowles]

I noticed that.

[Lauren Southern]

I reckon 70% of X is bots.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, at this point that's dead.

[Lauren Southern]

Internet theory.

[Michael Knowles]

I got it years and years ago. Early on I noticed, and this was on some domestic issue, I don't remember when, But I got 10 replies, call it, of the exact same reply all at once. And I pointed this out and one of the bot accountants sort of said like, okay, you got me. Like, yeah, okay, this was a coordinated thing. But then I've noticed it. You know, the only thing that Twitter wants to talk about now is Israel. And I now have gotten maybe a unique perspective into it in that I get pilloried for being too pro Israel because I'm at the Daily Wire and I don't know, I don't like hate the Jews or whatever, so I get pilloried for that from some entities. But then because I have made I feel temperate, moderate criticisms of the state of Israel and various theological views that pertain to that, I've also gotten hit from the other side as well. And you can see them. And I could tell you the accounts that some of which are real people that are almost certainly being paid, but

[Lauren Southern]

also there's real people that just get astroturfed and gaslit by the comment section. The bots. That's the point of them. Like you have a thousand bots and then you have one person that changes their opinion because they're just influenced by the mob.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, I've seen it and I've seen people, people I know have their opinions changed by the bot campaigns. You have to be very stubborn to not give way to it. Cuz it's a very tempting phenomenon.

[Lauren Southern]

Have you ever seen. Do you know who Joel Webbin is? Oh, yeah, I think he's like the first.

[Michael Knowles]

He's the other Matt Walsh.

[Lauren Southern]

Is he okay? I think he just looks man to get groomed by Bots and 14 year olds on the Internet, like full blown.

[Michael Knowles]

Have his views changed? The first way I came to be aware of him is because I looked and I said, why does Matt look a little different today? But it's like crazy. They could be cousins, they couldn't be brothers, but they could be cousins. Have his views changed?

[Lauren Southern]

Joel, he's just a bit of an insane person. He's like, okay, well, I'm gonna say things that you're not gonna think are insane. Cause you're just in. He's just like the fool. Women shouldn't vote, you know.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, but you're saying he also says insane things. Does he?

[Lauren Southern]

I hate you people.

[Michael Knowles]

Hold on. Yeah, no, I just.

[Lauren Southern]

This is. No, the women shouldn't. He is providing the women shouldn't vote thing is the right wing ve of defund the police. Like this is not happening in reality. It's jingling the keys for the audience.

[Michael Knowles]

And the problem with it is it, well, let me ask you this. If it were 1910, women were split on this issue. In fact, more women opposed suffrage than supported suffrage.

[Lauren Southern]

I will have to research this. I don't know that I believe you,

[Michael Knowles]

because here's my argument for it. Look, today I agree. I don't want to get rid of the 19th Amendment. I actively don't want to get rid of the 19th Amendment because you would disenfranchise married women. Like, we need the married women to vote for us. And the married women are Republican and the single young women are Democrats. But Trump won 40% of women under 30 and it's just politically impossible to get rid of it today. And so you can't do it. But the idea of the many brave and valiant and intellectual women who opposed the 19th Amendment, the idea was that the basic political unit is the family. So you want. And some women actually were able to vote because of like different rules around property and stuff, but basically it was just one vote per household. And isn't that more conducive to conservative politics than, you know, voting is this magical, wonderful, intrinsic thing that is a

[Lauren Southern]

much stronger argument than the argument I see from other people on the Internet who just say, well, women are more likely to vote liberal or they're more emotional. Because what I find from those people is they're doing this safe, edgy thing where the majority of people who consume political content are men. So if you're constantly giving them ideological lap dances, you're going to get money. And when you actually look at the data, you're more likely to vote liberal actually if you're a minority.

[Michael Knowles]

So they won't add and they won't do that.

[Lauren Southern]

Their brand is safe of safe. Edgy is anti woman. It's never going to be anti black. It's never going to be anti minority. So I'm just, I don't take any of these people seriously.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, no, this is such a good point. I saw this in the recent Democrat like Mamdani elections in New York. New York Post had this headline, God love him. It was the safe edgy. It was, you know, the 7% of eligible voters voted in the primary. And these socialist candidates, all of whom hate America and where he jobs and stuff, they were elected by young white women. And it's because it's so easy to not and you even hear this from the conservatives, they say, well, you know, my least favorite group is the young white women. And when you say, yeah, you're allowed to say that, but are you willing to say that actually the only reason any of those people got elected was because of migrants from the third World? Can you say that? Can you say it was because of poor migrants from outside of the west who have darker skin and wear hijabs? In many cases, they're the reason they got elected. Are you willing to go that far?

[Howard Mackler]

They're not.

[Lauren Southern]

So it's all kind of performance. Yeah, it's all the key jingling. What is the safest edgy thing I could say? But once someone else goes and pushes the Overton window in that direction, they'll say that too. But you've got like this group of people that are just waiting for the next. But even I think if it just became socially popular to be left wing again, half these people would be left wing. A lot of my friends that are super into the like, really edgy right wing stuff right now, or the really conspiratorial stuff, like they're watching all the Candace Owens stuff. Sorry, am I. Is that like, is she.

[Michael Knowles]

She goes into conspiracies. I haven't watched her.

[Lauren Southern]

Well, they were like voting for Trudeau back in the day.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, no, I'm not. I'm not.

[Lauren Southern]

So it's like you have all these people that joined politics post Covid when the Internet and reality kind of merged and they've got a total memoricide of the past 10 years and they instantly got one shotted by like right wing Instagram reels. They were left wing before. Cause that was socially popular. And now they're right wing because that's socially popular.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, yeah, I've noticed. Even myself, I'm like, pretty steeped in political philosophy and history. I've been a nerd about it for a long time. And I realized, like, with the moon thing, moon landing, I don't, you know, what do I know? I don't know that much about physics or space or whatever. So not that long ago, I had consumed enough Internet content to be convinced we did not land on the moon. Like I knew for certain. I texted my wife, I was like, we didn't. You gotta watch this documentary. I just watched. I made her watch it. I finished watching it with her and I was like, see, we didn't go to the moon. And she was like, yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

I mean, are you sure, though?

[Michael Knowles]

And then I, I said, let's watch it again. Let's watch it again that night. And I go back to the beginning because she hadn't seen the first part. By the time I finished watching it again, I realized we had gone to the moon.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah. Infinite Internet rabbit holes. There was a year where I just went full Canada and was, like, waking and baking, you know, And I became a full blown flat earther. Just the Internet rabbit holes. And then, like a year later, I quit weed. And I'm like, whoa, that was a crazy little side quest.

[Michael Knowles]

No, even I one time were, like, totally digressing. But it's. I'm getting ahead of myself. All right, all right, all right, all right. All right, fine.

[Lauren Southern]

Get back to the game.

[Michael Knowles]

All right, fine. I'm up. Having seen both sides firsthand, do you think conservative circles are wilder than liberal ones? When the cameras are off, that's a very. Having seen both sides firsthand, do you think conservative circles are wilder than the liberal ones? When the cameras are off, you're gonna

[Lauren Southern]

say, I'm not doing a good job here.

[Michael Knowles]

I think Lauren is going to say yes.

[Lauren Southern]

Now.

[Michael Knowles]

I would. Okay. I actually. I need your take on this. Yeah. Because back when you and I both were kind of coming up in politics. Yeah. Political media in the halcyon days of the mid 2000 teens, there's this kind of wacky, dissident, alt right tumultuous stuff going on. But I had a serious girlfriend at that time who then became my wife. My wild oats had been sown. I wasn't really participating in the social life of that moment. You were not married or seriously dating anyone at that time. And you were doing all these amazing docs, and you were way more into it. So you have more insight into this than I do.

[Lauren Southern]

Yes. I think the Daily Wire, and I've always said this because when I talk to my friends who work here or anything, they're kind of insulated. It's its own sphere. And when I ask people, they're like, it's not crazy. Well, I'm like, the Daily Wire isn't crazy. Everything outside of that, it is the wild freaking West. And I think that the conservative movement runs on such extreme levels of repressed horniness that it comes out every month in a new scandal, whether it be Kristi Noem's husband or like some, you know, Grindr scandal or this or that or my own scandals. You know, it's like there's just this level of. You have really transgressive people that had to push this 10 years ago. You had to be a kind of out there weird person to get into right wing political politics because you had to be willing to say things no one else would.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

And then, you know, there's just the taboo culture when you're forced to put out this public image of trad this, that no one's perfect. Everyone has the same human inclinations, this and that. And also like, man, do conservatives and right wing media love their uppers. They love cocaine. Like it's just plain and simple. Not the Daily Wire, maybe. I don't know.

[Michael Knowles]

No, you know what's funny? I've been offered coke so many times.

[Lauren Southern]

Thank you.

[Michael Knowles]

So many times. And I've never done it actually. And part of it was because my mother said, my mother, when I was a kid, she was like, michael, I think you're gonna like booze, so just watch out a little bit. She goes, and I think you'd really like cocaine, so I'd really be careful about that. She goes, I don't think you're gonna like pot. It's true. I don't really like pot and. But I've never done a hard drug. And so for me, the Daily Wire version of doing a bunch of coke is like zins or, you know, it's like, it's a mile at that point.

[Lauren Southern]

Like grow up, do a line of coke. Like you're. They're popular. As in drinking a white monster, putting it in an Adderall, like just be an adult.

[Michael Knowles]

Bite the bullet. Yeah. So, but what I want to know, because before the Daily Wire, before I was like seriously dating my now wife again and all this, I guess I would have been back in college and I was hanging around with some of the right wingers and I noticed the same dynamic, which is these are people who, especially when they're single and they're young and they're exploring sometimes radical ideas which demarcated that period of time, I think from other. From like the 90s. Yeah. We are humans. And also right wingers, there are studies on this, are hotter. They're often hotter than left wingers. And maybe that's natural. Maybe it's because we don't deform ourselves with all sorts of weird like piercings and stuff. But we are hotter. I mean, it's like demonstrably the size of the.

[Lauren Southern]

God forbid we have some sexual patriots out here, you know? Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

That's the thing. And so it's like if you're in that environment where you're like a 25 year old, politics is intoxicating. When you're at the Highest levels of politics, even on the edge of it, it's intoxicating. And you're there with a bunch of kind of brainy, agreeable, hot people who are apparently all doing a bunch of coke. Is it any surprise? So how do you. But do the libs not have their own version of it?

[Lauren Southern]

They do, but they're so busy spending like 400 live streams arguing about whether sock and the polycule has cheated on so and so or sexually assaulted them. And then, you know, they've got like the whole sex contracts that they do. It's like so complicated to them where. Because I actually think like the conservative thing is they're more, in some ways more just like, okay, we're the jock, you're a woman.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

Like, let's go, let's go. Whereas the Liberals are spending 400 years like psychoanalyzing every single interactive thing.

[Michael Knowles]

That's a good point. You hear about these polycules or whatever weird like orgy, left wing things there are.

[Lauren Southern]

And I don't think anyone's actually having sex over there.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, it doesn't. The people who are doing it and the way that they're doing it is not what you would immediately think. And it's like if, if they're all. Not to be too blunt after two sips of a martini, but if they're all kind of fat and ugly and depressed and gay, that's not an environment conducive to wild nights.

[Lauren Southern]

I mean, the gay community have some wild nights. So.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes, that's true.

[Lauren Southern]

You gotta give them that.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

Maybe not the like activist leftist version.

[Lauren Southern]

Here's a take I'm gonna give that is kind of pushing back on the conservative stuff. So. Yeah, I agree with a lot of the things you're saying, but when the conservatives start talking about trad, you know, don't go to school, marry young, do things like the Christian conservative way. It is more Democrat states where marriages last longer. The more educated you are and the older you are when you get married, the more likely your marriage is to be stable and you are to have like a long lasting family. So there are some things we gotta give the libs on that where if you actually care about the nuclear family, some of their arguments are correct in creating more stability.

[Michael Knowles]

Well, are their arguments correct? I totally grant most of those observations. It just seems to me what the libs do is they don't preach what they practice. So they dismiss the importance of marriage. They talk about redefining marriage.

[Lauren Southern]

I think that's Just the radicals. I think the average lib is like living a pretty normal life. And just.

[Michael Knowles]

I agree, they are living a normal life. I just think they don't promote that. So if they were to write a Facebook post, if it's your liberal aunt, they would say, no, no, the LGB stuff is great. They'll go with their. The woman will go with her husband and their two children, their 2.1 children from their bourgeois neighborhood. They'll go to the pride parade and like wave a little flag and then go have brunch afterward. And so I agree much of the way they're behaving because they're richer and more elite and more brought into the kind of establishment of business and politics in the country. They are kind of the dominant class. Their behavior, I think, doesn't match their purported ideology. Whereas for the conservatives is we have this weird dichotomy where we're both populist but also like tweety bow tie people. You have this kind of radically different cultural aesthetic. And for the more populist elements, there's a little more social chaos there, you know, for all sorts of reasons, economic reasons, the decline of the outsourcing of jobs and, you know, decline of religion and all the rest. But I just wonder, yeah, let's give the libs credit and say they are often in their personal lives behaving in a normal and traditional way, but they're kind of pulling up the ladder for other people. Is that fair?

[Lauren Southern]

I think so. But I'd rather like. I think a lot of their aversion is just because I've known libs that. And I talk to them like, why don't you want the trad life? They think it's not possible because they think it's all a show.

[Michael Knowles]

What do you mean by the trad life?

[Lauren Southern]

Okay, so a lot of people grew up in families where they had, like the good public family that went to church, you know, took the autumn photo shoots that they put up on the wall, but then in the home it was falling apart. You know, abuse this and that, and then they're like, this is a show. And then you see over and over

[Michael Knowles]

again, you guys are hypocrites. And for the liberals, the only possible sin, because they deny an object, objective, moral standard, just intellectually, the only. The real sin is hypocrisy. Yes, you're a hypocrite.

[Lauren Southern]

Yes. And they don't think it's actually possible to live that way. So they'd rather be honest and say, actually because this is one Joke I always made when people got mad at me for some of my past dating decisions.

[Michael Knowles]

I'm like, I wonder if they'll come up in any.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, we'll see. But, like, I met so many polyamorous conservative men. They just didn't tell their wives.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

You know, it's like, I'd rather have, like, the honesty publicly and then deal with that as it is good or bad than deal with the hypocrisy, because that destroys people's worldviews.

[Michael Knowles]

It destroys people's perceptions. Yeah, it's very scandalous. And you think one of the definite. I think it was Leo Strauss's definition of liberalism is that it had a low but solid ground, that political liberalism is. It doesn't really take into account the ideal very much. It's not all that dignified. It doesn't really even take metaphysics all that seriously. But you'll all be kind of wealthy and stable. So it's a low but solid ground. And that seems like what you're describing, which is, I want the low but solid ground. These people are degenerates sometimes, but at least they're honest about it.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

And I would say, well, what about the alternative? Like, you know, trad life on Twitter. Trad life on Instagram is a contradiction in terms. You can't. A trad woman probably doesn't have an Instagram, much less post selfies on it. So that's not real. But I know a lot of trads. I know the real trads. You know, the ones who drive in the big sprinter vans for their 14 kids and you've never heard their names, and they just. They really live it, you know? And I think. I agree with you that the libs don't think that is possible to really do that thing. They can't. They don't. This is why they don't believe the Crusades were undertaken for religious reasons. This is why they believe that marriage is doomed to fail, because they can't imagine that people are actually motivated by religion or virtue or sanctity or what have you. But I think they are.

[Lauren Southern]

I think we can't replicate what we haven't seen. So if you've grown up in a broken family, how do you even know where to begin with creating a stable one?

[Howard Mackler]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

You know, and I don't. This is where I also think that trad, for the most part, doesn't even exist at all. Because people in the 50s who we would consider, oh, traditional or whatever, they were just acquiescing to the culture of their time. And what made sense at that time, if those people were born today, every single one of them that was making apple pies and husband goes to work, they'd both be working. They'd be watching, you know, Love island when they got home. They'd be acquiescing to what makes sense. It doesn't make sense to have a husband only working. You can't afford that in this economy.

[Michael Knowles]

Makes sense.

[Lauren Southern]

It makes sense for people to work. Maybe for you, Michael, with your fancy little job, cigars, but let me tell

[Michael Knowles]

you, look, most people can't afford it. I sell a lot of cigars, but I have friends. Like, this is the point that you've hit on, that I think is so right and important is you say people can't believe in a thing that they haven't seen. Yeah. And look, I grew up in New York, pretty liberal place. I lived in la, all this stuff. And you're right, I have a job where I sell a lot of cigars and I make a good chunk of change for it. So I do have a privilege that my wife can stay home and watch the kids. But I know people who don't sell a lot of cigars, and I know people who don't have a lot of those privileges, who make a lot less money maybe than your median, who have a ton of kids, who, maybe they have two cars, maybe they only have one car. Maybe they don't go on vacation very much, maybe they don't buy nice new stuff, maybe they don't, you know, they shrink their lifestyle expectations, but they really do the trad life, and they really can do it. And you just think about the amount of money that we have today is so much higher than what your grandparents have, just gdp.

[Lauren Southern]

And I mean, I think we view, like having an iPhone as wealth, but that's not really like we want. Like, owning property is a lot more difficult. The actual purchasing power, real estate's more difficult.

[Michael Knowles]

But part of the reason for that is the houses are like two or three times the size that they were back in the day. These aren't shotgun shacks.

[Lauren Southern]

I'm from Canada, so it's a different situation. I guess my point is that house is like a million dollars.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes, maybe, though. I guess my question is, you see two options. The kind of fake, hypocritical, Instagram trad life and the honest, messy, degenerate liberals who don't have any ideals and have anything to aspire to. If it were the case that one could make do with less financially that a Woman could actually tend home and raise children and find it fulfilling with a husband who supported her and who wasn't abusive, but who was supportive. And if that were possible, if today we didn't merely go along with the times, but actually chose the life typified by the 1950s, would that be preferable?

[Lauren Southern]

No.

[Michael Knowles]

No. That's really the heart of it.

[Lauren Southern]

The majority of men, when they've been polled, do not want a woman that is staying home. This is the truth. They want a woman that has something, but they're wrong. 50 million Frenchmen, maybe it's like a memetic desire that they just see other people doing that.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes.

[Lauren Southern]

But like, when. And I've noticed this in my own dating life, like when I've been like, I'll stay at home. I'll do this. Men lose interest in you, okay? They don't want. They want a woman with something going on. They want the crazy BPD chick. They want the.

[Michael Knowles]

I don't want the. I do not want your difference. I know I've had close encounters with them. I don't want it. And maybe I am a little different, but historically, I think I'm more the norm. And we live in a kind of wacky time.

[Lauren Southern]

Most people are not the norm. They're the norm for modern society. They acquiesce to the culture around them. You're the norm for Daily Wire.

[Michael Knowles]

I'm the norm for not the 1950s, but the 1250s, perhaps, sure. But nevertheless, that's where a lot of people. I think that's not only where a lot of people are.

[Lauren Southern]

Historically. I have passions. I want to work, I want to do stuff.

[Michael Knowles]

But that's what I'm asking. Cause all this stuff, I said, what do you think? What would you want? And you said, well, if you poll most men, they would lose interest. Forget about the men. Forget about the modern culture and the degenerate low bar. Would you, if it were possible, want that life?

[Lauren Southern]

I tried it. It didn't go very well for me. And I think that, you know, even when the Bible describes the ideal woman, she's a woman that's managing the accounts and the farms for her husband. She's got passions.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah. The home economy.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah. There's like, I don't this idea of, like, I'm just gonna sit and bake sourdough all day and have no opinions. That's a very boring life. And we women have internal monologues despite popular belief. But it's passions and desires. And also there is this, you know, everything about being a Man is promoted as being very cool. Like the Faustian desire to go and conquer the world, the masculine Indiana Jones this, that, and then no guy would ever want to sit at home and be the housewife. Like, that's very talked down upon when you actually like men.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah. No man wants to be a woman.

[Lauren Southern]

No man wants to be a woman,

[Michael Knowles]

but not that many women want to be the Faustian conqueror of the entire world or whatever, to my knowledge.

[Lauren Southern]

I don't know. I think you can have both. Why not both?

[Michael Knowles]

Because transgenderism's not real. I mean, this is my point on it,

[Lauren Southern]

but it's like in a different way. There's a different way that.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes, but this is my point. When you say that, you know, the trad wife is just baking bread and not having opinions. I say, well, she is baking bread. That's true, but she's having opinions. You know, the old conception. Was it Blake who said, the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world? If you look and you. I mean, I've seen some of these up close. The real trad families. It's not that the mother is dominating everything. It's not, you know, it's not that the father's Homer Simpson.

[Lauren Southern]

Have you met Greek families? Yeah, well.

[Michael Knowles]

But yes, in a very real sense, it's kind of matriarchal, you know, respectfully, yes, but there is. The woman is doing something, you know, and it's like. I guess this is just my point. If one rejects the trad life, not for practical problems, but in principle, one basically has to become trans because the one, you know, the traditional view says, and the natural view says men and women are different and complementary to one another. They're yin and yang. And the kind of modern feminist trans view says men and women are basically the same. And why not both? Why can't they be both? But I think because they're not both. Because men and women are different.

[Lauren Southern]

I agree they're different. But I also think that in the political discussion online about women and men's desires, they've all been flattened into what is the best for talking points.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, some caricature.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, caricature.

[Michael Knowles]

Like looks, Maxwell.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, like.

[Michael Knowles]

I agree. Okay. All right, who's up? Am I up?

[Lauren Southern]

Who's keeping track of this?

[Michael Knowles]

I don't know. You get two sips of a martini and me and we're. Lauren's up. Okay, Lauren's up.

[Lauren Southern]

All right. Oh, a video or photo prompt.

[Michael Knowles]

Okay. All right, Lauren, thank you for being here.

[Howard Mackler]

Hi there.

[Lauren Southern]

Thanks for having me. I'M really wanting that line now.

[Michael Knowles]

It's real good. Promo code, covfefe, C, O, V, E, F, E. Now, Lauren, I have to say, you know, sometimes the audience gives me flack because they accuse me of flirting with my female guests or hitting on my female guests. But you, this shouldn't be as big of an issue because you are officially a man. Is that right? You have officially changed your gender to a man?

[Lauren Southern]

Yes, I legally changed my gender in Canada. So if you want to win over some of the progressive audience, you can throw a few lines my way.

[Michael Knowles]

Be still, my beating. Look.

[Howard Mackler]

Look at that.

[Michael Knowles]

Whoa.

[Lauren Southern]

What is the prompt here?

[Michael Knowles]

Could you believe anyone would accuse me of flirting with my female guest? Totally. I wasn't married at that time.

[Lauren Southern]

Okay. Am I still legally a man?

[Michael Knowles]

Huh? I mean, we filmed that. That was about 47 years ago, I think.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, about 47. That's okay.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes, you are. You never changed it back.

[Lauren Southern]

Only in Ontario, though. Only in Ontario. You know what was great is there was a guy in Alberta who, after seeing me do that, went and changed his gender to female purely so he could get lower insurance rates on his car.

[Michael Knowles]

Did he get the lower insurance rate?

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, he did. This, actually, this is what makes me mad. Once again, I'm about to live out here.

[Michael Knowles]

Live out. Live out, please. It's a safe space.

[Lauren Southern]

You have all this stuff where it's like, oh, women are worse drivers. I'm sorry, but capitalism disagrees with you. Men are charged higher insurance rates for a reason. In my town, a guy just drove a car off a cliff into the ocean.

[Michael Knowles]

I mean, great for having a timeline. Let me give a caveat.

[Lauren Southern]

Come on.

[Michael Knowles]

I have no data here whatsoever, but I think data and statistics are fake. Unless they support my argument.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, that checks out.

[Michael Knowles]

Maybe men are more aggressive drivers. So basically, I would say in my anecdotal experience, the plural of anecdote being data, men are obviously better drivers than women, but when they are bad drivers, they are catastrophically bad drivers. Whereas women are just more cautious drivers, which is sometimes bad because it leads them into perilous situations. And let me ask you this. Forget about driving off a cliff. Who is more likely to get a scratch on your car or a dent on your car? A male driver or a female driver? Everyone knows the answer.

[Lauren Southern]

I kind of care more about who's gonna total my car.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, okay, sure. I'm just saying, if you. No one's ever like, he's gonna kill

[Lauren Southern]

a family of six in a semi truck. Oh, no, a scratch on my car.

[Michael Knowles]

Let me present this to you. You just bought a new car. You got a beautiful McLaren. I'm not like a car guy. You got a really nice car, and your male friend comes to you and says, hey, I gotta go run.

[Lauren Southern]

I don't know, the data.

[Michael Knowles]

Forget the data. Your gut. I'm going in your gut. The mail says, hey, can I go drive your car real quick?

[Lauren Southern]

I want to get a fact check, Jamie.

[Michael Knowles]

No fact checks.

[Lauren Southern]

I want a fact check.

[Michael Knowles]

No fact checks. This is a fact free zone. If you get a man asks you or your girlfriend asks you, can I borrow your car? Who are you more nervous about picking?

[Lauren Southern]

Well, I drive a manual, so of course I'm going to pick a man. Like it's not, but I drive a manual.

[Howard Mackler]

You're a man.

[Michael Knowles]

You're a man. According to Ontario. This is my wife. Can I tell. Can I tell a tale?

[Lauren Southern]

I'm just trying to peacefully be a man hater over here, and you're just.

[Michael Knowles]

My wife comes to me, she does Uber or whatever. You know, she's getting an Uber when for me, I get a female driver. I say, whatever. It's gonna take me longer to get to the airport, but it's fine. My wife gets a female driver. I'm not joking. She will cancel it. No. Yes.

[Lauren Southern]

I am stoked when I get a female Uber driver. Cause I'm not gonna get murdered. Okay. You know, she said, well, they have a new one.

[Howard Mackler]

Yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

Cause women are afraid of being like kidnapped or murdered or something. But, like, so they have this new one where women can request female drivers. And my wife, she actually goes. She's like, man, are they gonna do one where I can only request a male driver? Please, I wanna do that.

[Lauren Southern]

My wife sounds like.

[Michael Knowles]

Exactly. I mean, it's an amazing quote. If you wanna learn not just how my wife sounds, but if you wanna learn about public policy, you need to go to go pepperdine. Edu DailyWire. A lot of people look at what's happening in the country, they ask the same question, who's making these decisions? Better question is, who's preparing to make the next generation of decisions? Whether it's national security, local government, public policy, or politics, someone will be in those rooms 20 years from now. Question is whether those people will have been formed by serious ideas or fashionable ones. Think of the young people. Like when Lauren and I were on that show 50 years ago and we just had all of our lives in front of us. Well, you got to find those kids right now at Pepperdine School of Public Policy. It's Worth looking at. Students aren't simply learning how politics works. They're studying history, philosophy, economics, national security, and governance to understand why institutions work. So right now, I want you to go to Go Pepperdine. Edu Go Pepperdine. Edu Dailywire. What is that? URL One more time. It's Go Pepperdine. Edu Dailywire. Now, Lauren, Lauren, before we continue, I want you to know that you can take this game home with you back. Even to Canada. Even to Americans.

[Lauren Southern]

I'm not gonna get arrested on my way in.

[Michael Knowles]

You might still, but you can contact yes, the yes or no game. You have the Original [e-mail] shop. You have the conspiracy pack. You have. Which one did you just pull off?

[Lauren Southern]

These are cute. The Politics, philosophy and religion actually boxes.

[Michael Knowles]

You have the dating and relationships pack. Apropos of men and women. And now for the first time today, you have the yes or no, America 250 Limited Edition Pack. Get your copy now.

[Lauren Southern]

So pretty. Wait, do I actually get to bring this home? I'm actually hyped.

[Michael Knowles]

You might be able to bring that home.

[Lauren Southern]

I will steal.

[Michael Knowles]

If you have a second copy, you get.

[Lauren Southern]

As long as the security here don't catch me while I'm leaving with all the boxes. Now.

[Michael Knowles]

Am I up? I'm up. Here we go. This question begins with a video prompt.

[Lauren Southern]

Uh oh.

[Michael Knowles]

In a celebrity boxing match, Destiny would beat the living excrement. These people have filthy mouths. In my production, in your world, that would be an illegal card. That'd be a criminal charge, and I would certainly tournament expel Mr. Davies to St Helena. Destiny would be the living excrement out of Michael Knowles due to Michael's inability to muster a modicum of discipline to exercise his butter soft body. And I'm supposed to answer for you? Apparently, my lady just finished lifting up my.

[Lauren Southern]

I will be torturing your producers, Ben and Nick in a shipping container for a spot.

[Michael Knowles]

As you should. You know what's crazy about this? I did this game with Mr. Destiny.

[Lauren Southern]

You never published it.

[Michael Knowles]

No, we were gonna release it. I don't remember when we did it, but let's say we did it on a Monday. Then three days later or something, Trump gets shot. We're gonna release it a day after that. And he comes out and like, defends Trump being murdered.

[Lauren Southern]

I was with him that day.

[Howard Mackler]

What?

[Lauren Southern]

Yes, in Ashley St. Clair's apartment, drinking Elon Musk's Tesla and Yehoah. And it was the first time I had seen him in a year. And we were. I was at a wedding, actually. And Then I see his tweet come up and I'm like, I gotta go get in an Uber. I get back to Ashley's place. Cause he was just visiting in New York and he's like, can I stay here and work? And he's tweeting on the couch and I open the door and I'm like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Like, you're ruining your life right now. Why would you tweet that? We get into a physical fight over this man's phone. I managed to delete a absolutely caustic tweet towards Matt Walsh that no one saw that was like. And we're literally fighting over this. It flies across the room.

[Michael Knowles]

Can we. What was the tweet? I kinda wanna know the tweet. Can we. You don't have to.

[Lauren Southern]

It was something as bad as the guy deserved to be shot, but no one ever saw it. So we didn't talk for like a year after that. Cause I was so mad.

[Michael Knowles]

It was nuts.

[Lauren Southern]

It was nuts.

[Michael Knowles]

It was very annoying because when I played the game with Destiny, I had a very good time. I thought it was actually pretty good. It was a good game. And so we were about to publish it, but then he comes out and he's like, trump, the president should be murdered, or the former president, future president should be murdered and the conservatives should be murdered. And all this stuff. I said, well, I have this. We had this nice interaction and now it's gonna look horrible if I publish it. So we had to kill the whole thing. All right, so the question is. There's two questions. Wow.

[Lauren Southern]

Oh, boy.

[Michael Knowles]

Mr. Nick and Mr. Davies really giving it to you. Good. Do you think Destiny had more fun having drinks with me than with you? Okay, come on, guys, this is a family show. What are we doing? If we fought. If we fought on the White House lawn, I don't think me and you. I think. I think me and Destiny. If we fought in the White House lawn, would destiny beat me in a celebrity boxing game?

[Lauren Southern]

Which one of these am I supposed to answer?

[Michael Knowles]

Let's do the first one first. Did Destiny have more fun having drinks with me than with you? No, he did not. Did I click no enough times? He did. Is that correct? Am I right on that?

[Lauren Southern]

It's probably correct.

[Michael Knowles]

Do we need to go any further with that? I don't think we do. No. Okay, now more interesting if.

[Lauren Southern]

Oh, wait, listen. Actually, I have a comment to make on that. I think everyone's mad at me for being a woman in a male dominated field, okay? Okay, Every conservative guy I know loses his shit over the BPD Goth art hoe.

[Michael Knowles]

And then, oh, yeah, bipolar.

[Lauren Southern]

They all want the goth chick that's voting lib. They'll go to the march and wear the hat to go get the goth chick.

[Michael Knowles]

You know what's fine? Okay.

[Lauren Southern]

I do it. I go for the blue haired, mentally ill lib side quest, and everyone gets mad at me. You know, woman and male dominated.

[Michael Knowles]

Amazing. The field being bad dating choices. Yes, thank you. That is an amazing observation. Because I was just talking to Mr. Davies, telling tales out of school after a martoonie or two, and he said, goth baddies are having a big comeback. And I said, what are you talking about? He said, oh, they're everywhere, all on my social media. I said, they're not on my social media. It tells me more about you than about social media. And he's really into the goth baddies. And then I was actually thinking, you know, for me, I do. Yeah, I like the more kind of the artsy type, the graduate school type, whatever, you know, which is more lib coded than conservative coded. And. But so what you're saying is, why is it that there is one standard for male behavior and another standard for female behavior? It's almost as if men and women are different.

[Lauren Southern]

Clearly not.

[Michael Knowles]

It's an amazing observation. So, okay, I'm not pressing on the destiny thing. I have my thoughts.

[Lauren Southern]

Listen, when all of your private messages are released to the Internet, and how did that happen? How did that happen? Okay. Do you have an hour? Well, we eventually decided it's not gonna work because I'm not polyamorous. I can't make that work.

[Michael Knowles]

That was the breaking point. Pollyanna.

[Lauren Southern]

I love arguing. I love arguing. I've never had more fun in my life than being in some hick ass bar screaming at destiny while I've got all these people, like four beers deep, cheering me on, like, so much fun. But I can't be polyamorous. I can't do it. You know, we had the conversation. He considered Christianity. Listen, I've been deep.

[Michael Knowles]

Really?

[Lauren Southern]

Yes. I've been deep in the field, doing. I'm out here really debating the liberals. Okay?

[Michael Knowles]

I'm on the front lines.

[Lauren Southern]

I'm on the front lines. You considered changing his life up, but too much. Too much.

[Michael Knowles]

Cause that would have been. That would have been actual, like, heroic virtue. Had you done that. That would be very good.

[Lauren Southern]

I'm out here on the front lines. No one's cheering me on.

[Michael Knowles]

But it didn't work.

[Lauren Southern]

It didn't work. But okay. And I guess during like that phase where we had decided to part ways, he had sent all of our messages, you know, as people do when they're going through like a breakup or whatever, to a 19 year old sex worker on the Internet who ended up being a grown man, catfishing him, who then used it against him to blackmail him or whatever, and then released them four years later as I was flying to go debate the parliament about whether I was a Russian spy or not. I've been on a wild side quest the last few years, guys. If you haven't seen me in a few years, I had feds on my doorstep trying to send me to jail. All my DMs with destiny leaked. My life was just.

[Michael Knowles]

I read a headline the other day that a female cop shot a rabbi outside of a porn and a guy named Mohammed got killed. And that was supposed to be the craziest headline. And what you just described is 10 times crazier than all. So Destiny sends your private texts to some prostitute.

[Lauren Southern]

Yes.

[Michael Knowles]

And then it somehow gets to the government of Canada.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, I genuinely think it was the feds that released it. I'm not joking because it was the day before I was to debate the parliament about whether I was a Russian asset or not. Yeah, it forced. I was trying to be off the Internet and I was forced into a public debate with the federal government. Livestream, Twitch politics.

[Michael Knowles]

This even down to like, it's. It's so crazy to think poor Mr. Destiny, who I don't know very well, I met him one time at this very table and. But we got along. Yeah, he said, yeah, we had a good time actually. And, and I just think it's actually a real pity, no flattery. But you know, if relative to the public appearance of the current state of his life, if he could have had some kind of stable thing with you, and maybe if he were then to consider Christianity and were to like get his life in order, that would have been really, really good. And instead he said the holdup was I want to do weird stuff with other people. And then the conclusion of it is he sends intimate conversations to a hooker that ends up in the hands of some corrupt government. That it's just like, it's so easily preventable, I guess is my conclusion.

[Lauren Southern]

You know, I think that there's something that happens to people when they grow up on the Internet. Like I always. People are like, why is your dating life and personal life so crazy, Lauren? It's like I have had millions of people commenting. I have a video on YouTube with 20, 20,000 views that's just covering the flame war in my WikiFeet comment section. You know, like, there is nothing about my life that is normal. I'm banned from like three or four countries.

[Michael Knowles]

I just wanna clarify. The flame war meaning an argument over.

[Lauren Southern]

I have a very controversial, very controversial WikiFeet page. You know, and one thing that would always happen in my dating life as well is men believe everything they read about me on the Internet. So, like, if I date especially like a normie guy, they'll read a headline. This actually happened in my marri was a headline that's like, lauren's cheating on her husband. And it was clearly AI generated to get clicks like nonsense. And I get sent this by my husband, and he's freaking out, and I'm like, this is AI. Like, I need you to understand. Like, let's go through it together. This is AI Same with, you know, I had an ex where there was an article calling me a fascist. His mother finds it, screams at him on the phone, why are you dating a fascist? And it's like to date someone that doesn't understand how the Internet works and isn't seeped in, like, drama, it almost feels like a painful experience for me. Cause I know at some point you're gonna find something on the Internet about me. You're gonna believe it. Or it's because when you're in an argument with your spouse, like, you go to your friends and you say, they said X, Y, Z. Like, give me comfort. And you can tell which friends of yours are gonna just glaze you and be like, yeah, F them this, that. But, you know, that's the personality. Whereas when you get in an argument with someone who's been an Internet personality, you can go on infinite forums telling you they're a psychopath, they're a sociopath, they're this, they're that, and believe. So to be in a relationship with someone else who has experienced that felt a lot safer than to be in a relationship with someone who's going to infinitely use my online reputation against me.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, that actually, weirdly, that's the closest thing to a defense of dating Mr. Destiny that I could possibly imagine. And it actually is a good defense. Okay, the second question. This is the more important question.

[Lauren Southern]

Okay.

[Michael Knowles]

If Destiny and I fought on the White House lawn, would Destiny beat me in a celebrity boxing match? What's your answer gonna be? You're gonna say. Okay, well, you're gonna say. I hope you're gonna say no.

[Howard Mackler]

Correct.

[Michael Knowles]

All right. Okay.

[Lauren Southern]

1 I'm sorry, Stephen. One too many hours on our craters. Okay, you. You gotta get off. He'd beat you in Arc Raiders, not in a physical boxing match.

[Michael Knowles]

That's great, because I don't. Look, I'm not. I'm more of a lover than a fighter, obviously. But I did at the behest of my friend and then employer, Jeremy, he said, I want you to work out. You gotta work out. And we were maybe gonna do a project, and then he said, no, I want you to do fighting. And he had a buddy who ran. He did a Krav Maga thing. So I said, well, I'll call it Krav Maga, and that'll be really cool. And it's apparently an Israeli thing, not beating the allegations at Daily Wire. And so then I called it Jiu Jitsu. I'm doing Jiu Jitsu, and I was doing it multiple mornings a week. And so I'm not saying I could beat up Muhammad Ali, but I'm glad you think I could take on destiny in the ring. That's great. Thank you.

[Lauren Southern]

With that Jiu Jitsu.

[Michael Knowles]

With that Jiu Jitsu. With that.

[Lauren Southern]

Mic is electrocuting me. Yeah,

[Michael Knowles]

I'm clear. Okay, you're up.

[Lauren Southern]

All right. All right, let's go.

[Michael Knowles]

I like that. We're gonna get through, like, four martinis.

[Lauren Southern]

I'm already drunk. I'm gonna be real. I'm drunk, right? Is the rise of socialism a greater threat to America than rising Muslim immigration?

[Michael Knowles]

Is the rise of socialism a greater threat to America than rising Muslim immigration? What would I say? This is about what I would say.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, I know. I got it.

[Michael Knowles]

Okay. I would say. No. What? You got it wrong. It's not. They're the same.

[Lauren Southern]

What?

[Michael Knowles]

They're indistinguishable, really, is my real thought. Let me see how it was phrased so I make sure I answer correctly. Is the rise of socialism a greater threat?

[Lauren Southern]

There's way more socialists in America than there are, like, Islamic fundamentalists.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, but the socialist thing, I mean, we had a socialist moment in the early 20th century, which was Eugene Debs and the anarchists from Harvard, and so. But the socialism now is a product of migration, so it's a product of. I don't think I believe that all the big DSA people are foreign. It's aoc. It's Ilhan Omar. It's that new chicken.

[Lauren Southern]

Was AOC born outside America?

[Howard Mackler]

No.

[Michael Knowles]

They're either second generation. She's second generation. The new DAC is second generation, but it's all a migration. Thing. And the socialism is. It's not like the old. It's not Karl Marx who is evil and probably was demonically possessed, but had interesting insights. It's what they call gay race communism. All this.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, I think when, when it comes to Canada anyway, when we're looking at like electoral like groups you're trying to pursue, a lot of the immigrant communities are very socially conservative. So they, they get pursued massively. And a lot of immigrant communities, if you include Eastern Europe, certainly are extraordinarily anti communist. Like I send my kid to a school run by Eastern Europeans because they're not. Not skeptical of the government because they fell down a YouTube rabbit hole. They're skeptical because they were in bread lines in polling.

[Michael Knowles]

We give the polls a pass, they get a pass. Yeah, they're immigrants, but I'm talking about third world in America. There's a lot from Middle east and North Africa. You've got Dearborn, Michigan and parts of Texas now. But then even the Hispanic immigration is formed by this very communist infused liberation theology injected kind of thing. So I don't think you can parse the two.

[Lauren Southern]

I think there's a lot of immigrants who are extraordinarily skeptical of socialism. Like I'm not. I think like my biggest problem. Cubans. Yeah, Cubans.

[Michael Knowles]

Give me the Cubans. Bring on the Cubans.

[Lauren Southern]

You know, I don't. And I actually, when it comes to like the Islam stuff, I have friends of mine that are Islamic that are not so different from Christian friends when they practice it, you know, normally in their day to day life. And I don't have a problem with that. But the Islamic fundamental, I think you see a lot more with like the mass immigration in Europe that has no real checks or balances. I don't know how much you see the Islamic fundamentalism here in the U.S.

[Michael Knowles]

no, my fear is not. I have some trepidation of Islamic fundamentalism. We have been in tension with this religion for 1400 years, going back to, let's not forget the Battle of Tours was 150 miles outside of Paris, not outside of Mecca. But yeah, there's the dear worn problem and all that. My issue is more with the Mamdani stuff. Is Mamdani a practicing Muslim? I don't know, like, I guess probably not a lot of these people, these hijab people like Ilhan Omar. Is she the most practicing devout Muslim? Probably not. It's that marriage of Islam as used really just to attack Christendom in the west rather than as a robust religion in itself married to the economic version of that, which is socialism and communism. To me that's the threat. Like if you gave me a Samuel Gompers, Eugene Debs socialist, actual kind of working class hero today. I think they're kind of wacky, but to me it's just so different.

[Lauren Southern]

But to me the core problem there is the socialism, the too much government control, the taking away of individual freedoms and finances. In my ideal world, I'm actually studying theology right now in school. I've gone back, I'm just doing a course a semester. But in my ideal world, I miss. There are so many Islamic scholars, Christian scholars, Jewish scholars, that when they, you know, rationalists, when they work together, they have just fascinating insights about the world. And it's like the fundamental issue is when you get the government, the control and the authoritarianism involved. Like that's the fundamental issue. I don't care if someone is Muslim. I don't. Great, that's your journey, if that brings you closer to God. And as a Christian I can have a conversation with you about that. I have a lot, I have a lot more in common with a Muslim than I do an atheist in a

[Michael Knowles]

lot of ways, I'll grant that very last part. But not the other parts because they're different religions and I fear in your comments there's a touch of indifferentism. Well, whatever gets you closer to God. Some people think they're hugging a tree, some people think they have a water hose, but they're all touching an elephant and it's just different parts. And I think, no, the Muslims are wrong for a lot of reasons. They deny the incarnation. They deny the crucifixion, certainly explicitly. And they therefore deny the resurrection. They have a voluntarist conception of God which is divorced from reason, the Logos, which is central to the Christian conception,

[Lauren Southern]

but it's the pursuit of something higher than self, in my view. Yeah, I like that matters.

[Michael Knowles]

So is social.

[Lauren Southern]

It's getting outside of the narcissism and ego of. I am my own God. And I think I have a lot more conversation that I can have with someone in that psychological mindset than I can with, with someone who views themself as their own God.

[Michael Knowles]

I agree. Okay, so then let me ask you this question to clarify the point. You're Prime Minister of Canada, Carney?

[Lauren Southern]

Yes.

[Michael Knowles]

No, you are currently.

[Lauren Southern]

Oh, I am Prime Minister of Canada.

[Michael Knowles]

You are Prime Minister of Canada.

[Lauren Southern]

Oh yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

Let's go.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

And you. There are two policies you can pursue. Only two.

[Lauren Southern]

Oh boy.

[Michael Knowles]

You can either take in half a million socialists from the Christian Democratic tradition to the more hardcore socialist tradition of European Europe. Or you can take in serious practicing Muslims from Somalia, Iran or Iraq. Your choice. Okay.

[Lauren Southern]

But when you say serious practicing Muslims from these.

[Michael Knowles]

Okay, I think you gave your answer.

[Lauren Southern]

I see what you're up to.

[Michael Knowles]

I think you gave your answer.

[Lauren Southern]

But the thing is, they're like, I don't. They stone women to death for, you know, the crime of adultery in these countries. Like, the culture is fundamentally different. If we're talking like a serious.

[Michael Knowles]

Because they call a cherila that grew

[Lauren Southern]

up in, like, Canada, that's going to be very different than a serious practicing Muslim. Like, the cultural influence on these religions matters.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah. Okay, so a weaker. A weaker Muslim. Not a weaker Muslim that's in China, but like a weaker one. Like, it doesn't follow. Okay. All right, I think I got my answer right now. Go to expressvpn.com michaelnolshow Isn't that a mouthful? M I C H A E L K N A W L A S S H O W When you're traveling overseas, you discover that the Internet is not actually the same Internet. You finally have a free evening. You open up Netflix or one of the other streaming services. Suddenly the show you wanted to watch has vanished because apparently it's only available in another country. So much for the World Wide Web. That is one of many reasons I suggest you travel with ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN lets me change my online location, which means I can access different streaming libraries from around the world instead of being limited to whatever happens to be available where I am safe. Even I was just recently, I was on vacation with my in laws and my father in law, he loves watching these Indian shows. I don't know. He's not Indian, but he loves watching the Indian shows. But you can access all the shows all around the world when you use a vpn, which also you should be doing anyway because it protects your online identity, it encrypts your data, and it is super easy to use. Even a Luddite like me can do it. So right now, get four extra months for free if you go to ExpressVPN or use the QR code on screen. There's a link in the description box below. You go to expressvpn.com michaelnolleshow expressvpn.com MichaelNolleshow or use that QR code on screen.

[Lauren Southern]

Lauren, you're up. Wait, no, I'm.

[Michael Knowles]

No, I'm up, I'm up, I'm up. Okay, you have to clear yours oh, okay. I'm on it. Okay.

[Lauren Southern]

You gotta fix these buttons for people with nails. Okay. Sex is not your daily wires. Sexist as usual. Classic.

[Michael Knowles]

Do fantasy novels give women more unrealistic expectations than an occasional trip. Than an occasional trip to a gentleman's club gives men? Hmm, hold on. That's actually. That's kind of a hard question. Do fantasy novels give women more unrealistic expectations than an occasional trip to a gentleman's club gives men? Okay, no, it's not a hard question. Yes, certainly. Right.

[Lauren Southern]

No. But the hooker does love him.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, right. That's.

[Lauren Southern]

She does love him.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, it's. So how many. That's what it hinges on. How many men really believe that, you know, the hooker, she really likes him. He's the one. No, very few. Whereas when women read. I didn't know this. I was talking about this yesterday to Mr. Davies. Apparently a lot of women in the office read these trash chick lit porn novels.

[Lauren Southern]

I tried. I really did try. I went through like a two year period of not dating at all. And I was like, okay, like, I'm a woman, so I'm just not into porn. That's not gonna do it for me. So I'm like, I'll start reading the trash. It was so badly written, I couldn't do it. It's just like, you know, the way people write their LARP novels. Like I was an orphan who was somehow a magical princess, and then I got kidnapped by the very sexy king who just needed to sleep with me every day.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah. Did you see the one? There was one going around. I don't know if it was real or if it was like a meme, but it was like a lady romance novel. But it was. The guy was a minotaur. He was half animal or something. And I can't tell if that was.

[Lauren Southern]

I think I know what you're talking about. I don't even want to say the name of the novel because the fact that I know it is.

[Michael Knowles]

You must. You had. Maybe.

[Lauren Southern]

I saw. I'm not going to.

[Michael Knowles]

Wow. Wow. But it's real. Yeah, it's real. Why, here's. I don't read as much as I should. I should read much more at night. I try. After the kids are in bed. Sweet little Lisa often will be in bed. And I will. I'll sit outside, I'll have a cigar and I'll try to read nice. And I say I don't. If. Let's say I get three hours a week to read sometimes not more than that. I want to make sure. I'm reading something that's really going to edify me. And I. And I think if I'm gonna indulge in a purely entertainment thing, I'll either watch baseball or if a woman wants to watch porn, I guess you say, why don't you just look at porn? You shouldn't look at porn. But why then you just.

[Lauren Southern]

The idea doesn't do the same thing for us.

[Michael Knowles]

The idea of reading. Yeah. This is what I don't get. It's like sitting down to read trash. I don't get, like, I would consume trash in another way.

[Lauren Southern]

Okay. For women, like, I think this is one thing men don't get, like, because they're very visual creatures. It's like sex and romance for Women is like 80% psychological. It's like it's all in your head. And you know, I really, when I look back, it's not just believing in like the trad fantasy stuff that ruined a lot of my approach to relationships. As well as becoming famous at 19 and you know, getting banned from countries and arrested and becoming disabled because I messed up from the Internet. But like, you know, I watched the Notebook and I believed that shit. I watched the fantasy movies, the Disney princess movies, everything. And the funny thing is, if you actually read the original versions of like the Brothers Grimm, the story of Ariel, for example, Little Mermaid.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

She actually gets rejected by the prince and she has a deal where she's gonna turn into sea foam if she doesn't marry him within a few days. And she. The whole story is she gave up her voice for a man and dies at the end of the real story because you're not supposed to give up your voice. Or the story of Redbeard. Where have you heard this one? No. Mary's a handsome prince. He goes off on a hunting trip. She invites her sisters over. She's been given all the keys to the castle and she's just been told there's one key you can't use and one, you know, just don't use this key. That's the only thing. So they decide, he's away. Excuse my language. Let's open all the doors.

[Michael Knowles]

Of course.

[Lauren Southern]

And the one key that he told her you're not allowed to use, they open the last door and it's a room full of dead bodies of his ex wives. And she tells all her brothers. He comes back, discovers she's opened the room, goes to kill her as well. But because she's told her family about the situation, the brothers kill him and save her. The Old fantasy novels warned you about bad men. They warned you about being open about your relationships with your family, not hiding things. Whereas the newer fantasy is all, the prince is gonna come and save you and he's gonna be perfect and nothing's gonna go wrong. And then you ride off into the sunset and wait. Women love that story because it's simple and actionable.

[Michael Knowles]

Interesting, you know, But I guess what changed? Did women become more simple? Is your implication or. No. Something socially.

[Lauren Southern]

Well, the delusion of just, I'm gonna get married and everything in my life is gonna be perfect is a lot more enticing than I have to keep trying every single day of my life to ensure this is a healthy relationship. And I need to stay on my toes and read situations and be. I have to be intelligent. What, I wonder, like, we wanna live life on autopilot.

[Michael Knowles]

But what?

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes. Yes. But what was the cultural shift that led to that?

[Lauren Southern]

The same shift that's led to clickbait. It's. We're gonna just give people the ideological lap dance they want.

[Michael Knowles]

Oh, okay.

[Lauren Southern]

You know, no one wants hard lessons that gives you an internal locus of control where you have to actually put effort into life. We want all women are at fault. All men are at fault. You're gonna find your prince, and then life is gonna be good. We love those stories.

[Michael Knowles]

Just decadence, basically.

[Lauren Southern]

Decadence.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah. Cause it could be. The other. Read on. It would be that. It could be. Be feminism. That in the old days, before feminism, women kind of knew what was up. You know, they were not laboring under different ideological pretenses. So they kind of knew what men are like, and they knew the good parts of men and the bad parts of men. And so the literature reflected that. And then in feminism, they tell you men and women are exactly the same, and they kind of jumble up a lot of anthropology and that jumbles up the presentation of men in the romance novel.

[Lauren Southern]

I don't know that real feminism talks about how men and women are the same. I think, like, if you were to read, you know, Andrea Dworkin, they're very honest about the differences there.

[Michael Knowles]

I thought you were gonna say Mary Wollstonecraft or somebody. You were going full Dworkin, like, all sex kind of.

[Lauren Southern]

Well, no, I don't think that's what they're saying either. Whereas I think it's more, oh, you're gonna get mad at this, but it's more capitalism that led to the Disneyfication of relationships. It's once again what sells, not what is true. And what's going to help you? And I think that's the biggest problem that we have with materialist society. It's not what is truth, what is going to make life better. And this is what has happened as well with the political, entertainment, infotainment sphere. I actually think a lot of relationship advice. Have you ever heard of AI model collapse?

[Michael Knowles]

No.

[Lauren Southern]

That's where AI is trained on other AIs. Increasingly, it just becomes more and more delusional because it's not pulling from the source, which is reality. You have this with influencers as well. They are all in their basement all day long getting their information about relationships and life from other influencers. And it's like revving journalist reality collapse.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes.

[Lauren Southern]

Whereas none of, like, I look at the relationship advice from people online and I'm like, this has no correlation with how people are actually dating and relating to one another in real life. But it's enticing. And if you're on your computer all day, it's what you want to hear. This is what happened with the Disneyfication of movies, with all the romance novels. It's what we want reality to be. And we escape into our fantasies when real life doesn't give us what we want.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes. I just think especially to point to Andrea Dworkin, who is one of the most radical of the feminists. I don't know that she has the tightest grip on reality. But your point is very good, especially on, you know, capitalism, absent a serious moral restraint, can go off into all sorts of crazy directions. But there's always been market dynamics, you know, there's always been like, what? The thing that changed to me. I don't know. You find it. You're basically saying, I find more of the reality in the feminism. And I'm saying, I don't know. I think the feminism that masked the reality. There are deeper realities, which is why pre feminism, all those stories you cited, which come pre feminism, they presented reality more clearly.

[Lauren Southern]

We don't know what life was like pre feminism.

[Michael Knowles]

We didn't live it. I do.

[Lauren Southern]

You do? I think we make a lot of assumptions of what life was like before we were around, I think. And we kind of see the advert like we see the Norman Rockwell paintings. We don't see what life was actually like then.

[Michael Knowles]

But Norman Rockwell comes after feminism. Right. Maybe you could see Caravaggio, Judith beheading, Holofernes. That was life pre feminism.

[Lauren Southern]

Hell, yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

Right. All right, this is the rapid round. It's time. Time for the rapid fire round. Three questions, 30 seconds. No time to outthink each other. Let's go.

[Lauren Southern]

Uh. Oh, is it my turn?

[Michael Knowles]

You're up, you're up. I'll take away my answer.

[Lauren Southern]

Okay. Is being. Oh, wait, I ask it out loud now.

[Howard Mackler]

I'm drunk. I'm lost.

[Lauren Southern]

Yes.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes.

[Lauren Southern]

Someone help me. Is being a cocktail waitress more degrading than being an online conspiracy theorist? This is your answer?

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

Oh, sorry.

[Michael Knowles]

No, yeah, cocktail waitress is a great profession. Honest profession. And yeah, good job. An important job.

[Lauren Southern]

Do flat Earthers at least have some interesting points?

[Michael Knowles]

No, they don't. A lot of conspiracy theorists do. I'm like, open. I would say most conspiracy theorists make good points. One time. This is a brief story. I know I can't interrupt, but it is a brief, brief story. I was with a buddy of mine, I can say his name, Tim Gordon. It's a Catholic writer and commentator. And I saw him, he was in town, we were having a cigar with another guy who I won't name, and Tim, who's like, opened all sorts of wild, edgy, kind of crazy stuff. Very nice guy, but it's not like he's too restrained. He won't entertain some crazy idea. This other guy says, michael, you love Dante. Do you believe in Dante's cosmology? I said, what do you mean by that? He said. He said, well, that the Earth is flat. I said, well, actually it was Dante, a flat Earther.

[Lauren Southern]

I did a whole course on him.

[Michael Knowles]

No, no, it's like very important to Dante's cosmology that the Earth is not flat originally. And so I said, well, that's not Dante's cosmology. And this other guy, nice guy, but he said, yeah, the Earth is flying. And then Tim turns to us, he said, you know, man, just cause we're Catholic doesn't mean we have to be retarded. Like, this is. We're actually supposed to love pursuing the truth and, you know, science and I don't know natural science and all that. So anyway, no, the flat earth stuff does nothing for me. There's nothing interesting about it.

[Lauren Southern]

But the story is so fun. I love the idea of, like the hidden continents. Let's go to hyperborea, you know.

[Michael Knowles]

No, yeah, that's like that idea that there are hidden lands, that there's a glass dome or something, that there are crystal domes. That's part of. Of Dante's cosmology, that they're crystalline spheres and stuff. But like, the thing that's annoying to me about the flat earth thing is that it's very modern because it's not like their argument is that in the middle ages and in antiquity, people thought the earth was flat. That isn't true. In antiquity, in the middle ages, we knew the earth was spherical or close to spherical. So like, it's not. It's like. I guess my problem with flat earthism is it's a lib and modern. I want it to be based and trad.

[Lauren Southern]

So you need right wing flat earthers.

[Michael Knowles]

I need right wing, flat earth. Okay.

[Lauren Southern]

Based and trad. Right wing flat earthers. Okay, Clearing my answer. Can you ever really trust a fed?

[Michael Knowles]

Really?

[Lauren Southern]

Really?

[Michael Knowles]

The answer's no. No.

[Lauren Southern]

They lied to me so much you wouldn't believe it. My fed lied to me. They said I was never going to be able to come to America if I didn't work for them. And I. Here I am.

[Michael Knowles]

Here I am one time a fed and FBI agent.

[Lauren Southern]

Oh, maybe I'm working for them. Sorry.

[Michael Knowles]

An FBI agent comes to me after there was an antifa attack at one of my speaking events. And my assistant said, michael, the FBI wants to speak to you because there happened to be an FBI agent at your speaking event. What are the odds? And they want to speak to you to pursue charges against this person. This was at the time the FBI was spying on Catholic churches, all this stuff. I said, oh yeah, the FBI wants to speak to me, they can send me a subpoena. Otherwise, I'm not speaking to the FBI at that time. This is under Biden. What do you know? He was a good agent. And he actually did elevate it to the doj. And he actually got these people thrown in jail, or one of them thrown in jail. But to the point of the question, it would have been crazy for me. Look what they did to Mike Flynn. I could not have just voluntarily at that time spoken to a federal agent.

[Lauren Southern]

Well, when I was in the tenet situation, what's funny is like I hired. This was the Russian, the Russian influence. Everyone thought I was a Russian Russian spy, blah, blah, blah. I hired like super lib lawyers. Like they were through and through lib. And the first thing they said to me is, they're like, this is a political thing. This is like full on, just aware of it, high powered lawyers. This is a political thing. Whatever you do, any fed that shows up to your door, tell them to F off. And when I called them and I'm like, the feds are at my door. They just started laughing. They're like, you tell them to F off. And it's just, it's.

[Michael Knowles]

It's like did you tell them to f walk?

[Lauren Southern]

I did, but they kept showing up and they said I was going to go to gym if I didn't work for them. And they just. And then they tried, like, the honeypot thing. You're so pretty. What's your dating profile like? Come for dinner with me.

[Michael Knowles]

They sent this buff like he was a Gigachad Fed.

[Lauren Southern]

Gigachad Fed.

[Michael Knowles]

Did it work? You don't need to.

[Lauren Southern]

No, it didn't work. I was on to them. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes. To quote George W. Bush, the point is, you're not gonna fool me again. Next question.

[Lauren Southern]

Is selling a blank book for $12 more of a grift than using Patreon money to shoot flare guns near migrant boats?

[Michael Knowles]

I actually didn't. Did you do that?

[Lauren Southern]

It was a torpedo, actually. Okay, this is like, so overblown. There's like a million videos that Santa shot flare.

[Michael Knowles]

I got an answer. Hold on.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, okay.

[Michael Knowles]

Is it more of a Griff? It's not a Griff. What are you. Oh, I don't want to give away the answer. I give away the answer. You got it wrong. Give me my point. That's awesome. Oh, you were saying? It's blinding.

[Lauren Southern]

You think I was grifting? You think it's a grift to shoot flare guns at migrant boats?

[Michael Knowles]

No, I just think that the blank book was not at all a grift because it was totally forthright. And so in any way in which the migrant boat thing deviated from not a grift at all, then it would be more so.

[Lauren Southern]

Okay, there was a protest against a ship that was going to Morocco to go pick up migrants. And in order for the protest boat to be seen. Cause it left late, I had to light a flare to film. Wasn't a shooting flare. But by the time it went through, like the Chinese telephone game in Italian press, they said I used a torpedo. They literally said I used a torpedo on the boat.

[Howard Mackler]

I don't know.

[Lauren Southern]

How do I.

[Michael Knowles]

And maybe you should.

[Lauren Southern]

You know, I did kill. I drowned baby puppies, actually, on that trip.

[Michael Knowles]

Wow, that's crazy. I did because I. Of all of my provocations in the course of politics, which have been. There have been some. I've never started shooting migrants on the open sea.

[Lauren Southern]

You know, it's not something I would

[Michael Knowles]

do today, to be fair, but maybe wasn't so wrong. Do you regret it?

[Lauren Southern]

I think that. Okay, so this serious answer. There was a lot of debate within the European Parliaments about whether these Boats were causing a pull factor that was killing migrants at the time because it was causing, you know, the human to basically send more of these cheap boats out that would sink. Apparently the pull factor data was incorrect. It wasn't actually causing a pull factor. So it's just. It's not a protest I would do today. Am I still against illegal immigration across the board? Of course, but I don't think I would have done that protest today. No.

[Michael Knowles]

You wouldn't go sink the boats?

[Lauren Southern]

I would not go sink all the boats I sunk with people begging and crying and screaming

[Michael Knowles]

rapid fire. Does smoking weed make people more liberal? It does, obviously.

[Lauren Southern]

It made me more liberal.

[Howard Mackler]

Yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

I'm living out. I'm living out.

[Michael Knowles]

You're saying I'm smoking the weed and I don't regret it, but it's.

[Lauren Southern]

I quit weed, but it permanently made me more liberal.

[Michael Knowles]

It does, yeah. It lives people out. It does. There's no. It's like totally opposite.

[Lauren Southern]

I would get into Twitter arguments with people when I was still, like, doing like the hardcore right wing thing. And then I'd smoke weed and I. I'd go back to the argument and I'd be like, I'm so fucking wrong. I can't believe I said that shit. It's like unreal.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, it messes with you.

[Lauren Southern]

It has on your brain.

[Michael Knowles]

It's even. I love when people. When I've. I'm pretty harsh on the old Haitian oregano, the old, you know, jazz cigarettes.

[Lauren Southern]

You've smoked weed before?

[Michael Knowles]

On occasion I've had a little Peruvian parsley, you know, a little Colombian. Cuban twice.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

The old ganj. I'm talking about pot. And I never loved it, really. I think, in fact, I could count on one finger the times I've ever even thought, thought I would like to have marijuana right now. I don't really like it.

[Lauren Southern]

I love. I did this once. It never got released, but I did a political compass of drugs. And it's like you put. For cocaine is like a very right wing drug. And then weed is like. I don't know, it's like left wing drug. What is like the left wing authoritarian drug is my question, though, because, like, I feel like you go to like ayahuasca mushrooms.

[Michael Knowles]

He's offering an Ethiopian

[Lauren Southern]

crack.

[Michael Knowles]

No. Gosh, I don't know, like for Stalin or for acid.

[Lauren Southern]

Who knows?

[Michael Knowles]

No, because the.

[Lauren Southern]

No, it's like coffee zins. All the uppers are all like upper right hand corner.

[Michael Knowles]

I don't want to sound like I'm squeezing out of this. Cause. Yeah. Coke and amphetamines and whatever. Like, that's ultra right wing. And pot is left libertarian. And right libertarian is probably also kind of pot, but maybe like a little bit Silas. Like mushrooms or something. Yeah, yeah, but I'm not being cute. In the authoritarian left, I think it is like the devil. I think it's like the hard stuff. I think it is like occult, crazy. Satan.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, I'm doing a line of Satan right now. Now I'm a Marxist.

[Michael Knowles]

I mean, Marx. Marx was in contact with demons. There's no question about it. You read his poetry.

[Lauren Southern]

I'm guessing you've read that hideous strength that.

[Michael Knowles]

Do you know, I've never read that hideous strength.

[Lauren Southern]

You would love it.

[Michael Knowles]

Isn't that.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, everything you're saying right now. So like, you know the idea of like microorganisms, the whole idea is that these professors and scientists get in contact with macro organisms and they're like, we're getting advice from macro organisms which are actually demons.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes, yeah, yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

But they make it all scientific.

[Michael Knowles]

There's a good book by Paul Kenger, the Devil in Karl Marx, which just. It's a spiritual biography of Marx. It's crazy and it's sort of undeniable. So.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah.

[Michael Knowles]

Anyway, I don't know what. Cause otherwise, I don't know what the drug is even like at a lower level.

[Lauren Southern]

You see, I'm of the opinion that your drug of delusion can be anything, though. So I had this debate on Piers Morgan with this guy named Andrew Wilson. Have you heard of him before?

[Michael Knowles]

Yes, yeah, yeah. I've never spoken to him.

[Lauren Southern]

We were debating trad. And I said, there's a bunch of trad LARPers on the Internet. And he said, name one, name one, name one. And he kept asking me to name one. And when I named people, he was like, not real trad. Not real trad. Not real trad.

[Michael Knowles]

And I'm like, no, true trad.

[Lauren Southern]

Exactly. I feel like I can. Could have had the same debate under communism and them saying, well, the Stalin's not a real communist. Well, that's not a real communist. Well, of course not. It's all a bastardized reincarnation of an ideology that was never gonna work in the first place. And you can say. But I think, like, everyone just finds their poison of ideology to get their authoritarian, you know, devilish ideas.

[Michael Knowles]

No, but the difference. Here's the difference. Look, I don't. I don't know Andrew Wilson. He wanted to do some debate ones more than once, I think. I've never done it. I'VE never met him. But you say it's like communism in the sense that trad life is never going to work.

[Lauren Southern]

We're not going back. Listen, the cat's out of the bay.

[Michael Knowles]

And might you say all these. He said all these guys. Am I a true trad. That's what I'm asking.

[Lauren Southern]

There are communities like okay, so I live in a small community where we have every other corner has a little bookshelf and you go and you put books in there and people take from it. It's like a communist system.

[Michael Knowles]

My kids love it.

[Lauren Southern]

We have one high tradition trust society. Communism does work in like a small community where everyone is in agreement. We're sharing. You know, you give me some eggs, I give you some vegetables. Like we have that.

[Michael Knowles]

That's just private community. You have that in. That's not.

[Lauren Southern]

And trad works in the small. But you can't dictate it from a government down. And you can't dictate it from an ideology on the Internet down.

[Michael Knowles]

Not the latter probably less effectively. But the law is a teacher. I guess my only qu. My only point on the decision distinction how we got a field to Andrew Wilson from pot will trace back. I agree. Communism never works in any case. It just. It ultimately doesn't work because it makes some anthropological errors in tribes.

[Lauren Southern]

It works fine but it's just always going to be small. Like you just don't want the federal government dictating things down.

[Michael Knowles]

But is there any but am I a true tread.

[Lauren Southern]

I don't know. I don't know.

[Michael Knowles]

You don't know. If you had to bet gun to your head. Andrew Wilson put a gun to your head.

[Lauren Southern]

What does your wife do for work? Does she work?

[Michael Knowles]

She was a professor. But she doesn't work.

[Lauren Southern]

You're not a true trad.

[Michael Knowles]

She doesn't work anymore.

[Lauren Southern]

She's a professor. You like her because she's a smart woman.

[Michael Knowles]

No, but they're playing you like her

[Lauren Southern]

because she can think. You would not like her to be a dumbass.

[Michael Knowles]

Trads don't insist on dumb women. They don't like their traditional life is that the woman tends to the home

[Lauren Southern]

shouldn't be able to be educated, should it? Cause like priests. There was no credit card, no mortgage.

[Michael Knowles]

I think that's true. I think Jane Austen was pretty educated.

[Lauren Southern]

I don't know.

[Michael Knowles]

I think that men esteemed women very highly. We were talking about Dante earlier. I think he thought quite highly of Beatrice. I think in the history of the Church you have rather educated women. Saint Catherine of Siena would be a Teresa of avid.

[Lauren Southern]

Okay, so you're. I think you're closer to capital T trad is what I'd call it. There's lower T Trad, which is like the online LARP version, and then there's capital T trad, which is informed by the classics. You know, as I think Dante was extraordinarily respectful of women. You know, the way that he elevated him in his work, like Beatrice, of course. And then, you know, Catholics are quite

[Michael Knowles]

referent to the Catholic.

[Lauren Southern]

The apocryphal scripts include Judith and all these, like, very high powered women that are respected and seen as powerful and able to enact their power onto the world. There is a version of trad that is a fully encompassed tradition that includes the whole ecclesiastical body of works and not just this narrow vision, which is so.

[Michael Knowles]

Hold on, you're telling me, Lauren, you're telling me I could beat up destiny? You tell me I'm a capital T trad. I'm feeling great. I almost don't care if I go in vino veritas. Okay, next rapid fire question. In 2026, do Russia, China and Qatar wield more influence in American political circles than aipac?

[Howard Mackler]

Ooh.

[Michael Knowles]

What would you answer? I would say, Do Russia, China and Qatar wield more influence in American political circles than AIPAC in 2026? I say no.

[Lauren Southern]

I say no.

[Michael Knowles]

No. Yeah. In political media they might.

[Lauren Southern]

So this is a big theory I have with the Internet world that I always try to get across. If you saw recently, you know, that rape gang inquiry that came out right before the election with Rupert Lowe, like, Elon Musk was pushing it and everything. There is this idea where people think X is real life. And they're like, okay, the rape gang report is going viral. The numbers were very off in that, by the way, which I care about.

[Michael Knowles]

I think the rate was too high.

[Lauren Southern]

Quarter million women rape, extrapolated from Telford and the other kind of Rotherham Rotterdam and, like, acted like every other town had those numbers. And then you'll see people online say, oh, well, who cares if it was 250,000 or 50,000? I agree. So use the right numbers. Because you look at where with Canada with the mass grave stuff, they were like, who cares if it's a thousand dead bodies or one dead body? I agree. Use the right numbers.

[Michael Knowles]

Totally made up.

[Lauren Southern]

Some odd churches were burned down. Like, I apply the same standards to the right and the left. I don't care who's using fake numbers. But they think Twitter is real life. And so they go, it's trending. Rupert Lowe's gonna win. You got Sargon, Akad, all these characters that are like, yeah, restore is gonna win. He gets what, like 3% of the vote in reality? Same thing with Israel. People will say, look at all the anti Israel sentiment on the Internet. Like, you would think that Israel was like done for. You know, AIPAC was done for. If you look at Instagram reels, everything, like, the youth are very anti Israel. But if you look at actual hard power, real power, Israel has made more moves in their favor in real politics than they have since the seven clobbering Iran, the clobbered Iran, the amount of territory they've gained in Gaza and the west bank, everything. Hard power is different than online power. And when people think, I think that online politics is a vacuum for people's real, like, strength to influence society. Like, if you were putting that into your, like, communities, going and joining your local councils instead of hitting like and subscribe every day, the world would change like that. But instead we've got the bread and circuses of X. Yeah, yeah. In which the people who are actually

[Michael Knowles]

wielding hard power, like, yeah, I agree with that halfway. Other than I don't think the alternative is they would be civically engaged and join cartoons.

[Lauren Southern]

They just like that.

[Michael Knowles]

They just watch baseball or porn or something. But it's a great. We need another refill for Lauren.

[Lauren Southern]

Nick.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

I came here for free drinks. I'm not coming here to do the show.

[Michael Knowles]

It is amazing because you think like, obviously Russia, China, Qatar, they want more influence. China especially keeps trying to send like bio agents into the US to poison infinite honeypots. Infinite honeypots. But you just think, no, believe it or not, I know you think everything is just abstract, but there's this long standing US Israel alliance. There are lobbies, there are all this stuff. And it's like Qatar. Yes. Qatar is investing a lot of money. Yeah. China is sending a lot of spies. Yeah. Russia is always up to tricks. Like, they're always up to tricks.

[Lauren Southern]

But jinx.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, yeah, they are. But the Internet isn't always real life. I agree. Okay, final one. No, sorry, second penultimate one. Can someone be both a true trad wife and a full time influencer? We've already answered that. This is your answer. The answer is no. Obviously. Obviously not obviously. It's basically, if you know a person's full name, she like kind of can't be a tradwife if the public knows.

[Lauren Southern]

I believe there are babushkas in Eastern Europe sitting on the farm all day working. You Know, being the matriarch of their families that are, quote, unquote, capital P trad. Yeah, but this is where my thing comes in with the trad life online. If you are posting online, you've already. You've already banned it, and I don't care.

[Michael Knowles]

I agree.

[Lauren Southern]

Like, I don't care. That's fine. But, like, just admit you're larping and playing a fantasy and it's like a type of porn too.

[Michael Knowles]

I agree, I agree. I.

[Lauren Southern]

There's all the girls with the pies and the little dresses. Like, this is. It's the same thing that women watch in their little novels and, you know, the Notebook. All of it.

[Michael Knowles]

Porn.

[Lauren Southern]

It's just porn.

[Michael Knowles]

It is. It's just not like, I'm not so harsh on it in that I think. Speaking of hypocrisy, La Rochefoucault says, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. I would rather people watch trad porn than, like, actual, you know, whatever, like, people bumping uglies. But the better version of it is get off Instagram and get the real thing. The real thing is a lot of people better.

[Lauren Southern]

I disagree with you.

[Michael Knowles]

Okay.

[Lauren Southern]

I would rather people accept their shadow. I think that's the biggest problem the conservatives have is they don't accept their shadow. When you, I assume, given all of your respects to Dante, you've read the Inferno. I have. And you know, the biggest part of that is he goes into the Inferno in every level of hell. He acknowledges the similarities he has with the people in that level. He doesn't get mad at them or judge them. He sympathizes with them because he understands how you ended up in the second, the third, the fourth.

[Michael Knowles]

No, he judges. He sympathizes with them, but he fears. Like, for instance, there's a famous line in Canto 5 when he's speaking to. I guess it was Francesca. Was it Francesca? I forget the famous line where she goes, amor calienti rato sa prendi, presigo tui della bella. Persona gimni futulta el modo encore mo fende amor. Canula mato mar per dona. Final clear line is amor conduce noe ad un amor. Love led us to one death, and Caina awaits the guy who killed me. And at the final line of it, Dante falls like a dead body falls. Cause he sees in himself this fear that literature and arousing erotic passion can lead one to hell. So he sees that he's a sinner.

[Lauren Southern]

He sees it in himself, but he

[Michael Knowles]

is harsh on the sinners. He kicks them, he's harsh on them because he wants to go to heaven.

[Lauren Southern]

But that between him and the sinners, he recognizes the sin in himself. He sees his capacity for that. And how does he get out of hell? He walks up the devil's back into Purgatorio or whatever. What's the next level? Yeah, Purgatory, Purgatorio. And then he goes to the trials of going through fire to shed himself of these things. But he has to get to that last level and see himself as the ultimate sinner, the betrayal, before he can walk up the devil back to Paradisio.

[Michael Knowles]

But then when he. No, crucially though, crucially, whereas I see

[Lauren Southern]

the trads and the online right wing LARPers as not admitting they have the capacity for these things at all, I'm an entirely different creature from these leftist degenerates I reject. No, you're not. You're the same. Just we're hiding it and we're not accepting our capacity. When you accept your capacity for that evil, then you can overcome it and you can sympathize and you can truly walk people towards God.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes, with a crucial capacity. The beginning of the Divine comedy in Canto 1. Dante wants to go up the mountain. He finds. I find him. He's in a midlife crisis. He says, I'm in the middle of my life's journey. And he tries to climb up the mountain out of this wood that he finds himself in, but he can't climb up. And he's stopped by three animals. And he realizes he can't do it on his own.

[Lauren Southern]

He needs something higher than himself.

[Michael Knowles]

He needs grapes to pull him. Yeah. And so the shade of Virgil comes down.

[Lauren Southern]

Yeah, okay, right.

[Michael Knowles]

And St. Lucy helps me, but the shade of Virgil comes down and he says, miserere me, have mercy on me. And Virgil was sent down by Beatrice, his beloved, who, you know, is looking at God. And so he is brought up by grace. And yes, the way he gets, he goes all the way down to the pit of hell, comes up the other side into Mount Purgatory, goes up to heaven. But the crucial problem is he doesn't save himself. And he does judge the sinners. He says, these sinners, this is bad. And he's harsh on them and he kicks them and he's rough on them and he's mean on them. And I guess this is the point, that the whole distinction here between the low but solid ground of liberalism that says, no, we just should embrace our brokenness and we should Just embrace that we're all kind of messy and whatever versus no, recognize that. But strive for something higher and you actually should judge the bad thing and you should try to aim for something higher. And that's why the trad porn.

[Lauren Southern]

But who are the lowest levels of hell? It's not the second level, which is lust, it's pride, it's ego. It's these sins that are less entertaining to acknowledge, which I think within the kind of right wing online LARP sphere where people act like they are so good and they're judging these degenerates, they're yelling at the OnlyFans girls. I see it as like the seventh and eighth layer of heaven. Yelling at the second, you know.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're definitely. It's uncharitable. And yeah, I agree. You shouldn't yell at the OnlyFans girls. I totally agree with that.

[Lauren Southern]

I saw you on the Whatever podcast. Were you yelling at the OnlyFans girls?

[Michael Knowles]

No, I was nice to be. That was the subversion of the format

[Lauren Southern]

because there, you know, there actually is in Paradisio, there is the level of hell for the sluts or the level of heaven for the sluts who were motivated.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, when you go up through purgatory, it's all the sins and you're being expurgated of them. But there is this. People like to point out that the sexual sins are not the most serious sins, which is true, but.

[Lauren Southern]

Sorry, go ahead, finish.

[Michael Knowles]

According to Our lady of Fatima, most people who go to hell go to hell for sins of impunity. So they're not the worst sins by far, but they ensnare the most people. And this is why I think it's so important to be clear about it. It's like, on the one hand, we have to have the mercy to not be mean to the OnlyFans girls on the Whatever podcast. But on the other hand, we have to have the clarity to say, this stuff is really bad. Don't do it. You are made for something higher. Do not settle for the low, but solid ground of liberalism. Look higher and aspire to something that you are capable of with God's grace.

[Lauren Southern]

But how do you walk people there? Because I think the majority of online Christianity is performative. Right. I think it's people that prefer about the aesthetics of it rather than the depth. I mentioned this in another interview recently that I have a professor of mine that has probably kept me more in touch with my, you know, pursuing of faith, which I don't even like to call myself a Christian on The Internet, because I don't think it means anything. Have you heard of 4chan? The word girl, what they mean by girl?

[Michael Knowles]

I don't know the word girl.

[Lauren Southern]

So back in the day when people would get an argument, someone would say, well, I'm a girl, so I have more authority on this opinion about relationships. And people would get, okay, sure you're a girl, because girl means guy in real life. And then girls, girls would complain and they'd be like, but some of us are actually girls. And the guys would go, it doesn't matter, we're all effectively guys in real life here. Because your argument has to stand on its own, what you're saying. And I believe this with online Christianity. You have all of these politicians that are Christian signaling for votes and donations and you know, accolades based signaling on the Internet. But your behavior should stand on its own. You shouldn't have to say you're a Christian on the Internet. So I have a professor of mine that I've worked with for 10 years. I always go back and do class. I did my Dante class with him, masters. And he never asks me if I'm a Christian or not. And he is a man of faith. He always asks me, Lauren, how is the journey? How is the journey? Because he cares about my soul. And I think this is the same thing that happened with Peterson. Whenever people would ask him, are you a Christian or not? He would say, well, what's the meaning

[Michael Knowles]

of the word believer?

[Lauren Southern]

Well, you don't care if, if I'm a Christian or not. You care that I'm on the same team as you because that makes you feel good and that makes you feel like you're on the right direction. You're on. It's an in group signaling thing. You don't care about where my soul or my heart is at. And I'm speaking for Peterson. I don't know if this is actually what he felt, but that's what I read from it. People don't care about what is actually going on internally. They care about the online social signaling and that has ruined so much of politics and depth and religion on the online sphere.

[Michael Knowles]

I agree there are a billion problems with online presentations of religion, no question, but. And we should have a rich internal life and a relationship with God and we shouldn't get the applause of the multitude because we should try to win rewards in heaven. But you should say you're a Christian, right? Because it's outside of that.

[Lauren Southern]

It doesn't mean anything on the Internet. It doesn't mean anything. Everyone says They're Christian. They all put aversive people that I'm more likely to see someone with a verse in their bio or a cross in their bio calling someone a slur than I am seeing them repeat the Beatitudes.

[Michael Knowles]

You know, that's true. That's true. Most people don't repeat that.

[Lauren Southern]

And it's the actions, you know, the end of the last battle. C.S. lewis, they talk about the soldier who was fighting for Tosh. Was it.

[Michael Knowles]

This is such a female male coded thing. I've read essentially everything C.S. lewis ever wrote. Nonfiction. I've not read any of his fictional codes.

[Lauren Southern]

Okay, Is that embarrassment?

[Michael Knowles]

Embarrassing.

[Lauren Southern]

Sorry. Two seconds. The soldier goes to Aslan and he's like, listen, I fought for the bad guy my whole life, but I've done so because I believed it was moral. I believed it was right. I believe it was truth. I believe it was kindness and love. And Aslan goes, even though you fought under another name, you were fighting for me this entire time because I am love. I am truth. I am goodness. I am loyalty. So it's the actions that mattered, not the words that came out of your mouth or the side that you were allegedly aligned to public. It was, I am the embodiment of truth and kindness and loyalty and goodness.

[Michael Knowles]

That's true. But there are external things like baptism, which now saves us, according to St. Peter, like eating the flesh of the Son of Man and drinking his blood, without which we have no life in us, as says St. John. My point is not. I agree with you, there's superficiality and we shouldn't have that. But I think one should have the confidence to say, I believe in Jesus and I trust in Him. I'm a bad guy.

[Lauren Southern]

I believe in the message of Jesus. I believe that the only way to fix the world is with repeating the self sacrifice that he has made to undo the sin and the selfishness that all of us create through our.

[Michael Knowles]

Well, you can't repeat it.

[Lauren Southern]

Well, attempting to. Attempting to, in our own small ways, make those sacrifices where we see something higher than self. And of course we can't repeat it because we're.

[Michael Knowles]

And to do what he tells us to do.

[Lauren Southern]

Attempting to. Yes, yeah. But we fail.

[Michael Knowles]

We do. And that's why we need his grace. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, that's true. This is my. Like, the thing I'm actually trying to get at here though, is it's not just an internal personal thing. Like there are external. Like there are sacraments. There is an external.

[Lauren Southern]

You're a Catholic. I grew up hyper. I grew up charismatic,

[Michael Knowles]

much more, you know, exciting music.

[Lauren Southern]

This is where it goes. Like, how do we communicate with a generation who we have no sympathy for, despite them growing up with no signs or even model of what a religious or traditional life looks like? And we don't have sympathy for them. We don't have. We. We. You have so many people online. I see this with like the fake monks who it's like, okay, no one wants to sleep with you and you say you're a monk that's superior simply because you don't have the ability to sleep with people.

[Michael Knowles]

Join the sustenance order, you know? Yeah, yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

But like so many people just take for granted the childhoods they had. They take for granted the environments they're in. Like if you grew up in a trap house with a, you know, mom who is an only fans model and this and that, you'd be acting in very different ways.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah.

[Lauren Southern]

And I think the lack of sympathy for that on the right is disastrous because everyone is growing up in a more liberalized modern world. And this is where you see eternally all these people being canceled over and over and over again on the right for failing to live up to it because it forces people to hide their true nature, to fit in with a group that most people simply don't have the tools to.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, yeah. No, there is two good points from two great thinkers, C.S. lewis and Shia LaBeouf. C.S. lewis, he says when he gets to heaven, he'll say, he expects to say, of course, that it all kind of the things that didn't seem to make sense did make sense from the vantage of heaven. And then Shia LaBeouf, when he was asked, what would you say when you meet Christ in heaven? They said, I wouldn't say nothing. I'd cry and kiss him. You think that's actually, that is actually what you would do. You would be overwhelmed with charity. Okay, now, before we move on from the rapid fire round or from my rapid fire round, do you still consider yourself a conservative?

[Lauren Southern]

What does that mean?

[Michael Knowles]

I think I got my point. I think I just go, I'll take it. That's great. You would say no. Yeah, why not?

[Lauren Southern]

I have conservative opinions on a lot of, of things still. But I don't want to be a part of any club and I don't want to have any label because I found myself over and over again trying to find a social in group where I'm like, I'm a conservative, I'm a trad, I'm a this, I'm a that, and failing to live up to those standards. And I will eternally fail to live up to the standards of the conservative movement. I will eternally fail to live up to the standards of the trad movement. I will fail to live up to, you know, the Christian image because I am a human being and I'm a very flawed human being. And I also want to have the ability to change my opinions on things without feeling beholden to a social group or audience capture.

[Michael Knowles]

Yes, there is a great line. We were talking about Dante from his grandfather Cacaguida in Paradise, where he says Dante is getting his political journey prophecy from his grandpa because he's about to be betrayed by his political party and have an exile. So. It will go better for you to be a political party unto yourself.

[Lauren Southern]

I love that.

[Michael Knowles]

Very tempting. However, by what definition conservative is not. It's a party in Canada, I guess it's not a party. In America we have a Republican and Democrat party. Conservative is something kind of ancillary to that. What do you mean by conservative? You don't have to be a member of a party or a club.

[Lauren Southern]

Well, what are they conserving anymore? Because to me it seems like they're conserving social capital, views, likes, money. I don't know that there's any real policy point that is being conserved. Like if a party comes about in Canada, I'm going to vote for it based on what individual statements they're making that line up with my real experience in the real world.

[Michael Knowles]

Sure. But forget about the party. Let's just say lowercase C conservative, whatever that is, whether that's Joseph Demestri, Edmund Burke, all the way up to Donald Trump, whatever that means. It seems to me Michael Oakeshott has a good definition of conservative, which is to prefer the tried to the untried, the real, the actual to the possible, the present laughter to utopian bliss. That to quote Roger Scruton, it's more an inclination than an idea that it is a desire to conserve things, as it were. But are you that? Are you that thing?

[Lauren Southern]

Yes and no. Because I am that thing. When it. Like I said earlier when I talked about the idea that when it comes to marriage, some more liberal opinions, like being more educated or getting married later, actually work better to preserve marriage. I am a realist in the sense of if a liberal opinion lines up more with reality, I'm going to take that. And if a conservative opinion lines up more with reality, I'm going to take that. But I'm seeing you talk copianism on both sides because it sells the. Once again, the. I'm gonna bake breakfast cereal from scratch at six in the morning for all my kids. Because this looks really aesthetic on Instagram, even though My husband's the CEO of JetBlue, so that's the only reason I'm allowed to do this. That is the conservative fantasy, the liberal fantasy. There's no difference between men and women. And we're gonna have a socialist utopia. Everyone wants a version of utopia, you see, the fascist dark enlightenment. Larry, everyone's playing Dungeons and Dragons on the Internet right now.

[Michael Knowles]

Look, I'm sympathetic to that because I think 85% of people are. I woke up this morning and I was working. I woke up, I snoozed, I was writing. My producers were screaming at me, as they often are. And then I come out, my kids had already finished breakfast, but then I see there's a nice ham, egg and cheese sandwich, one of my most favorite meals, and it's waiting for me on an English muffin that was made from. By my wife. Not breakfast cereal, which I hate, but English muffin. An English muffin from scratch. It's real. My wife is very educated. She's a very intelligent woman. It's all real. I'm not the CEO of JetBlue. I'm not crying poverty, but I'm not the CEO of JetBlue either. And that is real. That can be real.

[Lauren Southern]

It can be, but it's very difficult to do, and it's very difficult to replicate for a lot of people. And I don't. It's kind of like the DARE program. You know, I think that message your mother gave to you where she was saying, you're really gonna like, you know, nicotine, and you're really gonna like cocaine. That should be the message of the DARE program, where they say, you know, actually, cocaine isn't. It's bad for you, but the reason it's really bad for you is because you're gonna love it. So you need to be warned about that. And I think this is the biggest problem conservatives make is like, you know, they act like, okay, you get married and then you. That's life. Whereas in a lot of Christians, too, you get married and it can never break. You never leave that union. No, actually, that's like, Right. Not fragile. On a box of fine china and sending. You need to write fragile. Actually, marriages are very easy to break. Actually, you know, the trad. Life is very difficult to do. It's not just. This is gonna make you happy. You shouldn't have kids because you think they're gonna make you happy. This is all hard. Like you should do it.

[Michael Knowles]

Cause it's the good thing to do. But not to the point.

[Lauren Southern]

It's the eventual result of becoming the kind of human being that can raise children Right. And have. But these are all extraordinarily difficult things to do. And writing it like a checklist system. You liberals would be happy if you just did this. No, this is a difficult path to take. And I hope that you're able to exit the reality where you have given up on this path because it is difficult. And you saw people fail. There's no sympathy for liberals who grew up in broken homes, which is the majority of people who saw this fail over and over and over again. Like, where is the acknowledging of their reality that actually. Yeah, a lot of conservative homes are. Are actually really broken? You know, we talk about transgenderism all day and we say we've got this massive transgender problem that's breaking up families. I don't disagree that there's problems there. You know, the trans athletes in sports. What about alcoholism in families where the husband's beating up the wife? That is way more common than, you know, transgenderism. We don't talk about so many of these real issues because they aren't exciting for the culture war. It's way more exciting to talk about the sexual sin of the right wing movement than it is to talk about the ego and pride, which is far more insane, insidious, you know?

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, the thing that was novel about. Well, I'm sorry. The thing that's interesting about transgenderism is that it's novel. Yes, right. Is that it's.

[Lauren Southern]

But we care more about novelty than what is actually.

[Michael Knowles]

But it's also.

[Lauren Southern]

Oh, that's just a basic problem. We don't talk about that anymore.

[Michael Knowles]

Nobody would say we should be intemperate, you know, as a. As a principle. So when it comes to like booze or drug, I guess for the libs it would be more drugs and for the of kind conservatives would be more booze or something.

[Lauren Southern]

Alcohol is more dangerous than most of the hard drugs because most people are

[Michael Knowles]

getting into that over, you know, as a population level. Maybe. But, you know, fentanyl is a lot rougher on you than a glass of wine.

[Lauren Southern]

There's less people struggling with that.

[Michael Knowles]

Sure, yeah. But I just mean that's all baked in. That's been true for all of human history. Whereas the anthropological error is something that's kind of crazier and indicative of greater errors. And so, yeah, like, yeah, yeah, of course there's all this sort of brokenness. But then the question then becomes, if we're going to try to fix it. Well, sorry, if we're going to respond to that reality, are we going to respond in a way that says, hey, you know what? Most people are screwed up and that's just fine, or are we going to say, hey, most people? Actually everybody is screwed up to some degree. And there is an objective of good, there is bad, which is the privation of the good. And we should order our society and our personal lives to pursue the good, which we can know and we can tell people and we can be confident in.

[Lauren Southern]

We can only pursue the good if we acknowledge the shadow. I agree with the ordering of society, but without acknowledging the shadow. And when you deny the shadow, you can't integrate it and pursue the good because it just goes. Comes out in more and more ways that you hide from the world. Which is where I think the online world incentivizing. Hiding one's shadow incentivizes that you only show the good. And because of that.

[Michael Knowles]

Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Okay, now go check out Lauren Southern on social media. Where do you find her at Lauren Southern. You get her book. This is not real life. Out now. Lauren, excellent to see you. We only had. Was it three?

[Lauren Southern]

I think I finished three drinks. I am wasted. Perfect. Pre drink.

[Michael Knowles]

Wait, who won? Lauren. I hate. This is gonna be really rough for gender equality. The score. This is.

[Lauren Southern]

Stop it. Don't read it. I'm gonna throw my drink.

[Michael Knowles]

It's eight to won. Wonderful to see you. See you next time. For you. It was me. Kill yourself. I won. That's the greatest victory I've ever had on this show. I sort of forgot we were playing a game.

[Lauren Southern]

I did too. That was very fun.

[Michael Knowles]

Wow.