# EP061 -  Log Off and Hang Out w/ Lauren Hough

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/doc-walks-7327673/ep061-log-off-and-hang-out-w-lauren-hough
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/doc-walks-7327673/ep061-log-off-and-hang-out-w-lauren-hough.md
Podcast: [Doc Walks](https://stenobird.com/podcast/doc-walks-7327673)
Published: 2026-07-16T12:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://docwalkspod.com/ep061-log-off-and-hang-out-w-lauren-hough
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/769d52a5-d399-4750-a0ce-f637076f16a6/DW_EP061_LAURENHOUGH_MASTER_RC-esv2-36p-bg-39p-music-51p.mp3?dest-id=4997995
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/doc-walks-7327673/episodes/ep061-log-off-and-hang-out-w-lauren-hough
Duration seconds: 3665

## Resource

We walk Austin's Boggy Creek Trail with acclaimed memoirist Lauren Hough — from a childhood spent in a cult to Air Force vet to ex-cable technician; and now, she's the writer whose viral essay about fixing people's cable got read 8 million times in a single weekend. Lauren's backstory is so enormous it usually eats a whole interview: she grew up in the Children of God, got run out of the military under Don't Ask Don't Tell (they torched her car), flipped a coin between Atlanta and DC, and told dumb cable-guy stories at the Iron Bear until one of them turned into a book. That book, LEAVING ISN'T THE HARDEST THING, made her a New York Times bestseller and got Cate Blanchett to narrate the audiobook — and, yes, she brought Cate to the Iron Bear. Now book two, MONSTER OF A LAND, is days from release and Lauren is, in her words, throwing up about it. We get into the terror of the follow-up, why she loaded her very cute dog Woody Guthrie into a Dodge van and drove the country like Steinbeck's TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY, and what she actually found out there — not the screaming internet, but hunters in Georgia helping a stranger find a campsite and neighbors defending neighbors when ICE rolled into Minneapolis. Along the way: the cult was boring (too many guitars, bad Bob Dylan rip-offs, one paragraph of hard-won Civil War research), the octagon on the White House lawn is sponsored by Monster Energy, and the cure for all of it might just be to log off and go hang out. Plus: worry monsters in a little free library, why she can't stop muttering about that octagon, and why chasing one good sentence feels like a serial killer chasing a high. DISCUSSION LINKS: MONSTER OF A LAND (2026) | LEAVING ISN'T THE HARDEST THING (2021) | TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY (1962) | CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS (2003)…

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## Transcript

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