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April 13, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
34:29
Riley Gaines: Competing Against Transgender Swimmer Lia Thomas | The TRUTH Podcast #11
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Time Text
For
years, the core premise of the gay rights movement in this country, the G-prong of the now LGBTQIA plus movement, said that the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired on the day you're born.
It had to be really in order to qualify as a civil right in this country.
Yet today the T prong of that same movement, the trans prong, says that your own biological sex is completely fluid over the course of your life.
Now this doesn't make total sense because there is no gay gene, yet we adopt a legal framework that says the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired on the day you're born.
Yet there is a definitive sex chromosome and yet we say that's the attribute that's completely fluid over your life.
These things don't make sense together as a logical model, but they do make sense if you're part of a quasi religious cult, which is really what's happening in America today.
It's a cult that's a symptom of a deeper mental health epidemic in America.
I've been unapologetic about sharing my perspective, the perspective that most human beings have shared through the history of this country, that if you believe that you are born into a body or of a gender that is different than your biological sex, That is usually a sign that you suffer from a mental health disorder.
And the compassionate thing to do is not to affirm that cruelty but to actually help the person who suffers from that confusion, especially when they're a kid.
Yet what we're seeing now is not only causing more of that very gender confusion amongst kids.
But now amongst adults, people cynically exploiting that mental health epidemic to advance their own agenda for advancing fame, social media followers, even dollars through endorsement deals.
That's where we are as a country.
On this issue, I just think more than most issues, it's a sacred cow you're not supposed to touch.
I think it's important that we actually talk about this openly, actually close the gap between what people are willing to say in private And what people are willing to say in public.
That's the litmus test for how well we're doing as a democratic society.
And today, probably more than most episodes, even that we've had so far, we're going to do just that.
Close that gap.
And I've invited today on the podcast somebody who I've been following for a long time.
She's become something of a hero of mine for her courage in closing that gap between what people would have said in private and what she's willing to say in public.
That's Riley Gaines.
Many of you are probably familiar with her, but if you're not, Riley, I'll ask you to briefly introduce yourself and talk about how you came in a first personal way in touch with the, I would say, toxic effects of this trans epidemic in America and how that affected your own life.
And then let's get into it, take gloves off, and really talk with total candor here.
Amazing.
First of all, thank you so much.
I so appreciate the intro, and I have so appreciated following along you.
But really, what's thrusted me into this position?
Last year, I was a senior at the University of Kentucky, where I was a swimmer.
I had made it my goal to win a national title, which would mean becoming the fastest woman in the nation in my event.
All of a sudden, midway through my senior year, this person comes out of nowhere and starts posting the fastest times in the nation by multiple seconds, which in swimming, seconds is a lot.
And this is a sport that's measured down to the hundredth of a second.
So when you have someone leading by multiple seconds, you're kind of scratching your head, especially someone you've never heard of before.
Because like in most sports, You're top level athletes, you know of each other, you know, and if you don't know each other personally, you at least know their names, you know what they swam, you know their times.
So there was a lot of confusion, unbeknownst to me at the time that this was a male.
And this was, of course, the first time that I became aware of a swimmer named Leah Thomas.
Again, still thinking this was a female, I'm talking to my coaches, talking to my teammates, you know, who is this person?
Until an article was posted disclosing that Leah Thomas was formerly Will Thomas and swam three years on the men's team at University of Pennsylvania before switching to the women's team.
And so when I read this, I was so shocked because I thought this was something that would really never infiltrate into sports.
I know it had happened at smaller grassroots levels in high school and middle school, but at the collegiate level, I thought this was so far-fetched.
So I was, of course, shocked, but truthfully, I was relieved when I saw it because I was able to look up who Will Thomas was.
You know, was this a lateral movement?
Was this someone who went from ranking first to continuing to rank first?
Which is, of course, not what I saw.
This was a mediocre swimmer amongst the men, ranking 462nd at best nationally, who has now transitioned and is dominating among the women.
And so I thought the NCAA would see this exactly how I saw it.
Nothing opinionated, nothing deeply rooted in hate.
The facts of it.
The facts that this was a mediocre man now trailing the women.
But the NCAA did not see it like that.
They saw nothing wrong with it.
And so our national championships just last March, I Got to sit on the side of the pool and personally feel the effect that this infringement and this injustice had on myself and my teammates.
Because that first day of competition, we watched Leah Thomas win a national title, beating out Olympians, beating out American record holders, the most impressive female swimmers this country has ever seen, again, by seconds.
And that next day of competition was the day that Leah and I raced in the 200 freestyle.
And almost impossibly enough, we tied.
We went the exact same time down to the 100th of a second.
Good for you.
We did.
And so a lot of people say, Riley, you're just a sore loser.
And I'm like, no, I didn't lose.
We tied.
But we both went, I think, one minute and 43 seconds and 52 100s.
And so after tying, we get out of the water and you go behind the awards podium and the official looks at both Thomas and myself and he says, great job.
You know, you guys tied, but we don't really account for ties and we only have one trophy.
So that trophy goes to Leah.
Yeah.
And so I questioned him.
You know, I was so taken aback.
Of course, I knew we tied.
And of course, I knew there's only one trophy.
But I asked him, which was the first time anyone had questioned anything they had done.
But I said, why are you adamant on giving this trophy to Leah?
And he says, oh, well, Leah has to have the trophy for photo purposes.
You can pose with this one, but you'll give it back and you'll go home empty-handed.
Leah takes the trophy home.
And that is when I knew what was happening up until this point was wrong in terms of the unfair competition in the locker room, which I'm sure we'll touch on in a bit.
But when this official reduced everything that I had worked my entire life for down to a photo op to validate the feelings of a man at the expense of our own, That's when I was no longer willing to live in this lie and this false perception.
And that's when I decided I wanted to take a stance in truth and in science and, quite frankly, common sense.
So what do you think was going through the head of the person?
What did they mean for photo purposes?
It's interesting.
I was watching this.
I did not know.
I've been following this from afar and I've been an admirer of your outspokenness and courage.
Even I did not know, though, that you actually had ended in a tie.
See, I just assumed that you actually ranked behind.
But that's an interesting development here in my understanding of this.
What do you think was going on in their logic?
What did they mean?
I think they didn't.
Clearly, when he said, you know, we have to do this for pictures, Leah has to pose with this, has to smile along the podium with this trophy, clearly they didn't want to be seen as being discriminatory.
But what they didn't realize is, of course, Title IX, which is a federal civil rights law that is supposed to stop discrimination on the basis of sex, they didn't realize what they were doing was actually going against Title IX and being discriminatory towards women.
And so they wanted to be seen as inclusive and kind and loving and tolerant and accepting and welcoming and all of these things.
But in reality, it was none of those things to ask us women to smile, step aside, and allow these men to take our spots on the podium and our titles and our scholarships.
That's not kind.
That's not inclusive.
It's exclusive to the very female athletes who the women's sporting category was created to recognize and honor.
Of course, men and women were created equal, but were different.
Women deserve to be celebrated off of our own unique physical ceilings and physical limitations, which is what Title IX allowed.
That's what it enabled.
By allowing Leah, one, to even compete against us in general, winning or not, but two, stand on the podium and ask us to step aside, it perfectly highlighted to me the hypocrisy of all of this, this whole movement, really.
It's even worse than hypocrisy.
I think that hypocrisy is part of it.
I mean, that's almost kind, Riley.
Totally, it is.
It's demeaning.
It's almost an intentional insult, but in the same way, like, I don't know if you saw, I posted this video a number of days ago about an MMA fighter who was a biological man, really beaten the living daylights out of women.
We would call this, even what happened to you the other day at the speech you were giving, There was a day where we would call a man hitting a woman violence against women.
Yet today, I mean, that was the America I knew when we grew up.
Yet today, we celebrate that as trans.
And in a certain way, it's just dignifying the very things for most of our human history that we fundamentally regard as disrespect towards women as something that we're not supposed to celebrate in the same vein that we celebrated women's rights 30 years ago on.
That's not just hypocrisy.
It's degrading as I see it.
Absolutely.
It just makes a mockery because from my perspective, I started swimming when I was four and I'm 22 now.
So I dedicated 18 years of my life to achieving maximum performance, whether that be, of course, in your sports specific training, but also your weight training, your physical rehabilitation, your sleep, your diet, all the social sacrifices.
There's so much you have to do and we're not forced.
It's something you're willing to do to compete at that level.
All to shave off a mere few 100ths of a second.
And so, from my perspective, we're competing against a man who is actively taking hormone suppressors, trying to decrease his performance, giving his second best.
Yet we're doing everything we can to shave 100ths of a second off.
And we're going against someone who is doing everything they can To decrease their performance.
I don't understand this whole argument.
What I've been doing this past year, my argument is that it's unfair.
We've lost out on the ability to consent in areas of undressing.
It's not safe.
Just like the video you posted, and there's so many other examples of women being hurt physically by men playing in their sports.
Any sport where there's physical contact, where you're striking something at one another, colliding with one another, Anything of that nature, men have 50% more upper body strength, 60% more lower body strength.
We know the science behind that, of course, yet we're choosing to ignore it in the disguise of being kind.
It's just backwards.
The original feminist movement was, of course, the premise of it was to empower and embolden women in their sex-protected spaces and rights.
Yet now we see this feminist movement doing the exact opposite and actively working to diminish those spaces and those rights.
And so it's just mind boggling.
You know, have you ever spoken to Leah Thomas, by the way?
No, not outside of this meet.
At this meet, we briefly spoke.
Nothing of substance.
I say my animosity is not towards Leah.
It's towards the NCAA for the rules.
But truthfully, I believe Leah is so selfish and is narcissistic and has an utter disregard towards women.
Because when all of this trophy stuff was happening, first of all, I didn't even care about the trophy, the tangible trophy.
It wasn't the object of holding the trophy that I was so upset about.
It was, of course, the principle behind it.
And so when I was conversing with this official behind the podium, you know, saying, why are you giving this trophy to a man in the women's 200 freestyle?
Leah never once said, you know, why don't we both hold the trophy or why don't you just take it?
Which again, I didn't want the trophy.
I'm a 12 time All-American, so I have lots of those at home.
But it was it was the principle behind it.
And that's why I say I think Leah Thomas is so extremely selfish.
This movement is filled with just entitlement.
Lack of responsibility, lack of accountability.
And so my animosity is not necessarily towards the trans individuals themselves, but I do think they show a lot of their true colors when disregarding other women's comfortability and their rights and their feelings and their protections.
I mean, you might have a deeper perspective even, you almost certainly do, Riley, than I do, but my take on this is that There are broadly many young people who are lost.
They're hungry for purpose and meaning.
And their sense of being lost, the emptiness in their life, their sense of depression and mental health illness manifests in a lot of ways.
And one of them is that, oh, maybe I don't like my body.
Maybe I don't feel comfortable in my own skin.
Maybe I'm the wrong gender.
Maybe that's what it is.
And I need to re-identify.
And I think that that...
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
A lot of people in the trans movement will say that's an offensive thing to say, as though there's something wrong with having a mental health condition, which actually many people in this country do suffer from.
So that brings that full circle over there.
But there's a small subset of people, and I don't know Leah Thomas, but I'll just be honest with you in terms of what my sixth sense says here.
Dylan Mulvaney's example I think is a lot more prominent and obvious in this respect.
Which is almost calling the bluff of the entire system and laughing their way to the top to say, well, if that's the game we're going to play, and yes, there are these people suffering, but somehow our entire society suffers from this madness of crowds that says that we're supposed to pretend that that alternative reality is the true reality, then I might as well win.
I might as well get endorsement deals.
I might as well get famous on the back of it.
I don't care if you're a man or a trans man or a trans woman.
I think making fun of femininity is something that we should...
We should be bothered by in the first instance.
But what you see there is, whether it's Dylan Mulvaney or whether it's, you know, whether it's Leah Thomas, I think a certain cynicism to use that to achieve after spending three years swimming on an NCAA, I guess was a Division I men's team, to then switch in your senior year to three for the women's.
It's almost as though it's a little bit of an FU is what I sort of take away from that.
Totally.
Which isn't the innocent version of it.
No, you're exactly right.
The NCAA, the guidelines put in place, they have this testosterone level.
Dylan Mulvaney, we're more than just the hair and the makeup and a testosterone level.
Women are not a testosterone level.
There's so much more that goes into being a woman than merely that.
First of all, the levels they have in place are nowhere near computable of that of an actual woman.
And even if men could get to the same level of women, which they can't, there are still advantages that will never go away that are particularly noticeable in sports, of course.
But I wanted to comment really quickly how you mentioned really affirming a lot of the mental health problems that are happening.
Think about this, the anorexia movement that was in the 90s.
These women who had suffered from anorexia, did we affirm them by telling them that they were in fact fat?
No, and that's not something you would do because it's harmful.
Of course, they believe they're fat a lot of the times, but they're not.
So this is the same thing that's happening now with this whole trans movement.
Men, women, they believe they're that of the opposite sex.
If someone is genuinely struggling with gender dysphoria, that is something that deserves to be treated with pre-care, if there's any sort of hormone or surgeries post-op care, but that's not what we're seeing among our healthcare system.
There is no follow-ups.
I've talked to many even detransitioners who share their experience of what Transitioning was like, and it's terrifying that doctors and medical professionals are being so negligent to do this, and I think we know why.
I'm from Nashville, Tennessee, which we have Vanderbilt there, and they got a statement late recently where They essentially said these trans surgeries and the hormones, it's a cash cow.
They can make all of this money off of these people who are transitioning.
Each person who transitions is $70,000 to $100,000 over their lifetime.
This is great.
We can make so much money.
I think it's all just this spiraling down system that we have in place.
And just like you said, the systems that we do have in place, it's so easy for someone to take advantage of.
If all you have to do to say you are a woman is say, I am a woman, look at what's happening in prisons.
You have men who are convicted of rape and kidnapping and child pornography and horrible things who realize if I say I'm a woman, women typically get lesser charges.
And I get to be housed with women, which sounds awesome to a rapist, right?
And it's happening in Kansas, Ohio, New Jersey, of course, California.
Just in recent weeks, there was over 1,200 men in California applied to be in women's prisons.
And so if nothing else, can we not acknowledge how the systems that we have in place, there will be people who do and are taking advantage of this, with women being the collateral damage in the process.
It's really, you know, also defies, I think, part of what the gender equality movement was about in another way.
You know, I was a high school athlete and I did not compete in college, but I was a competitive tennis player through high school and, you know, was not at the pinnacle of my sport as you are of yours, but was nationally ranked and whatever.
But, you know, on a team...
There are many different kinds of men and young men, and there are many different kinds of ways to be a woman.
And I think that part of what the gender equality movement was supposed to be about – I'm older than you, but when I was growing up kind of in the 90s where I was in high school, I graduated in 2003 – was this basic idea that – You can be a woman in any way you want to be one.
Okay, you can have long hair.
You can have short hair.
You can wear a skirt.
You can wear jeans.
You want to be a boy.
And this was a big thing.
I went to an all-boys high school, too.
The debates about who you can be, who you're allowed to be attracted to.
Back in the 1990s, early 2000s, that was a big debate.
But part of the point about civil rights and equality was to say that you can be a young man, a boy, in any way you want to.
You can dress the way you want to.
You can have a high-pitched voice.
You can have a low-pitched voice.
You can be even attracted to other boys if you're gay.
It's a small percentage of the population.
You can be a woman and you can be a man any way you want to be one.
And that was what was supposed to be liberating about the gender equality movement and even a big part of the gay rights movement.
And yet now it seems to me that what the trans movement is saying is that no, no, no.
There's only one way to be a woman and there's only one way to be a man.
And you have to actually fetishize that archetypal image of what it meant to be a man or a woman to say that if you do want to have short hair or be tomboyish or whatever, now it means in the literal sense you're not just a tomboyish girl but you actually have to identify yourself as a boy or experience now it means in the literal sense you're not just a tomboyish girl but you It seems like it denies the environment of gender equality and the philosophy behind gender equality and freedom and liberty in the first place.
You see what I'm saying there?
Absolutely.
And that's why I do use the term hypocritical because it goes against everything that, again, it was typically embraced by the left, right?
This whole equal pay, all of the gender equality things, it was embraced by the left, and so now we've seen a total shift.
And it just happened to me, maybe I was naive, but it happened so quickly that It kind of makes you sit back and say, whoa, you know, what's happened?
Do we really have these people who once fought for women's rights, who often said, you know, always believe the women, especially in my case of what just happened at San Francisco, now victim-blaming the women?
Now telling the women that they have to step aside and allow men to take their spots?
That's the hypocrisy and the double standard that I was referring to.
I don't know if COVID expedited things at that time at home where we all had our phones, we were all sat on social media, we didn't have anywhere to go.
I don't know if that added a sense of social pressure to it all.
But now, I mean, look at it.
It's all over social media.
It's being infiltrated into the education systems.
We have kids as young as...
I mean, I have parents reach out to me with their kids as young as five who have transitioned.
And it just...
I think we can all acknowledge that no five-year-old can truly understand the lifelong implications of what it means to truly transition.
And first of all, these kids going through middle school who are uncomfortable in their bodies.
Who's not uncomfortable in your body in middle school?
That's a time of, of course, awkwardness and puberty and all the different things.
But you're right.
It's now become...
If you are uncomfortable in your body, you're very quickly...
Persuaded through social media and through different realms of our everyday life that you're in the wrong body.
Oh, you feel uncomfortable being a man?
Here, you can be a young girl.
Oh, you feel uncomfortable being a girl?
Cut your hair short.
You can say you're a he-him.
And so it's just being influenced in a way that's not healthy, that's not actually representative of our society, of that LGBTQ community.
It's been an exponential increase, but I think we know why that increase has been so exponential.
Yeah, I think that's kind of my question for you actually.
You're of a younger generation than I am.
You're technically Gen Z, is that right?
Correct.
Where these labels, you know, leave off.
I'm a millennial, so you're a generation younger than me.
Your point is you're 22, I'm 37, you know, whatever.
You have a different peer group than my peer group and grew up in a different cultural environment in this country than I did.
And so I'm particularly interested in your answer to this.
What the heck do you think is actually going on?
We can complain about the problem, and we are, and I think it's important.
And you have more than anyone that I have seen publicly who is first person to live the consequence of this have actually had the courage to speak in such a dignified and respectful and civil way about this issue that is so distinctive about you.
And I so appreciate it.
With that spirit, it's why I'm asking you, because it seems like you have a wisdom about you that's well beyond, you know, the ripe age of 22 and graduating from college.
What the heck do you think is actually going on here in the country and in your generation in particular that causes this illusion to spread like wildfire as it has?
What do you think?
It's really interesting.
I've done a lot of thinking about what the ulterior motive here is.
You know, why?
Why is this happening at such an alarming, rampant rate?
My first kind of observation is that it seems as if everyone wants to be a victim, which is a very weird approach to have.
Everyone wants to, in some way, become a marginalized group.
Everyone wants to be oppressed.
They want to be victims.
And at first this struck me, you know, why?
Why would someone want to View themselves as marginalized, and I think it's because when you become this oppressed group, you typically have less responsibility.
You have less accountability.
And truthfully, what I've noticed about this trans movement is a lot of the times it's white men who are transitioning.
Of course, we know white men have never been looked at as this oppressed group, and so it's a way for white men to become oppressed.
It's a very interesting I don't know.
I've really tried to sit back and understand it.
And that's what I'm noticing a lot of.
And why people want to be victims, I just don't understand.
But I think people strive for that.
They don't want accountability.
They don't want responsibility.
They want to break down that sense of family and faith and freedoms and all the things.
And truly, a lot of it is deeply rooted in Marxism, what's happening.
With the changing of the language we use and the suppression of speech and denying objective truth, But I think your point about victimhood, it strikes a chord with me.
You have no reason to know this, but that was, I mean, I wrote, I've written a couple books, but the second book I wrote was all about, it's called Nation of Victims.
Right.
Was exactly based on that thesis.
I didn't talk as much about the trans issue, but you reminded me of a parallel there.
So my parents came as immigrants from India.
I was born in this country.
Right.
A lot of my cousins, etc., live in the American Midwest.
Now many of them have kids.
I have kids.
We see what's going on in the next generation as well.
And there's a really interesting parallel trend where...
You know, did we encounter, so first of all, did our parents' generation encounter a lot of hardship coming halfway around the world to a country where there's no internet, there's no cell phones, you're located in a totally different land from the one you grew up in, in a different culture, in an environment that, frankly, was a little bit less welcoming, maybe in the American Midwest than it is today, of people from multicultural backgrounds?
Not by a lot, but by a little bit.
Yes.
Then, did we encounter our own versions of hardship, not just because of race or ethnicity, but because everybody encounters hardship in their lives?
Yes.
Absolutely.
But then now we're seeing a trend in my kids' generation and my nieces' and nephews' generation where the Asian-Americans or Indian-American kids who are sort of the second and third generation, they're now describing themselves as, using this new term, persons of color.
Right?
We didn't use that term when I was growing up.
We thought of ourselves as American.
And then if you think about your heritage, you would say, fine, Indian-American.
But you don't lump yourself into a category with like 100 or 1000 different cultures, each of whom are as different from each other as you or I might be, even though we have different skin colors.
It doesn't make any sense.
Unless you're trying to play this game of the victimhood currency game, right?
So LGBTQIA plus is the equivalent to sexual identity as person of color is to racial identity, which is you're just lumping a bunch of things together that have really no coherent relationship to one another other than the victimhood status that it allows you to earn.
And then when that victimhood becomes – I love that I wrote it down the way you said it.
You have less accountability.
I think you might have actually said it even better than I said it in the book.
The way I talked about it is victimhood becomes a currency.
So on the positive side, when the currency is trading at a high, you want to cash it in.
You actually probably get closer to the truth of the matter where you say when you lose accountability, then you have any sense of responsibility.
But it is this currency-ification of victimhood that I think accounts for why people flock to any status that allows them to be a victim.
And if you're a white man, that's the only one that's available to you.
If you're an Asian American or an Indian American that might not have been seen as a member of the black community, then you call yourself a person of color.
I think that's a big part of what is going on in the country.
It's a powerful insight on your part.
Totally.
And you even mentioning that you didn't put your identity in being a person of color because you were confident in who you were.
You're confident in who you are now.
It's not your full identity, what your race is or what your ethnicity is or your heritage or any of those things.
And that's what I think these people, they struggle finding their identity.
And so they put their entire identity into this LGBTQ group or whatever that might look like.
Whereas, I think it's an attention thing.
I think it shows a lot of insecurities and a lot of kind of I'm using the terms beta and alpha male here, beta, alpha female.
I think it's a lot of the beta group of that who are not as secure with themselves, who want attention, who want to feel as if they belong somewhere.
Therefore, they go within this group.
And so it's just...
I still don't know if I fully understand why the bigger picture behind it, I think that will be revealed.
I think every day it's becoming more and more obvious what's really happening.
So I'll be interested to see how the next year or two years really pans out for this whole movement.
Yeah, it's a very powerful and honest reflection on your part.
I think that my message to people your age or my age or whatever, any age really in this country, is that your racial identity or your gender identity or who you're attracted to, I'm just thinking about how we can persuade, rather than just talking to people who agree with each other, how do we actually address the problem?
Just give people a sense that that's one of the least interesting parts of your identity.
How about your beliefs, your convictions, your passions, what you do, what you create?
Time is limited.
We have limited time that God has given us on this earth.
There's more to life than figuring out what gender you are.
You're the one you're born in, but there's things to do.
There's things to be accomplished.
I found that I haven't been totally successful in Landing that message quite in that way, but it's a step in the right direction where as hypocritical as a lot of this is, and I've spent most of my books and elsewhere calling out the hypocrisies of this, that definitely plays a role in highlighting the issue to people, but it plays very little role in persuading the people who are in many ways exhibit A of the problem.
But we care about having one country left.
The message I'm trying to move to, and maybe you can try it out too.
I don't know.
See, tell me how it works for you.
Just to tell these people this is the least interesting part of who you are.
There's more to you.
Absolutely.
To the real you, you know.
Absolutely.
And I love that.
I love the fact that you mentioned getting in front of a different crowd because that's one of my biggest things.
Get in front of people who don't agree with you, which is why I go to these colleges and talk to these kids, because I want to engage the younger generation, even if it means I just went to Cal Berkeley, I just went to San Francisco State.
I want to get in front of people who have questions, hard questions, and I want to answer those questions.
Remind me the name of that soccer star you were recently sparring with in debate, which I thought was great to engage in debate.
What's her name?
Megan Rapinoe.
Megan Rapinoe.
She's a well-known figure.
She has different opinions of you.
I'll just say in closing, I think we need more of that.
Open, honest dialogue and discourse.
I think if she was receptive to it, we would have you on this podcast.
Let's just engage in open discourse and dialogue rather than each speaking to our respective echo chambers.
Are you willing to do that?
Absolutely.
This is a call for it.
I would love to.
We'll reach out to, we'll see if we can't, let's see if we can't get in touch.
And I just think we need more of that in the country.
And I think that might actually be what allows us to see more commonality with one another.
At least we're committed to free speech or a value that we believe in rather than sexual identity or race or whatever.
Let's do it.
Totally.
I'm in.
Because in my experience at San Francisco this past week or whatever it was, in trying to have this open dialogue, I was met with ambush.
I mean, violence.
I was barricaded in a room for three hours.
I missed my flight home.
They were trying to negotiate a ransom deal.
If I wanted to make it home safely, I had to pay them.
That's what I'm being met with.
And so it's so hard to get in front of people who disagree with you if they're not willing to listen.
And so we need more civil...
Respectful ways to have open dialogue.
I think it's so important.
Just like you said, we don't want to live in a divisive country.
There's so much divide going on on both sides.
We need to unify ourselves.
Yes, there's always going to be things we disagree on.
No doubt about that.
But how can we work together to create solutions without compromising on our values?
What that might look like?
Is there a way we can do this?
And I truly believe the answer is yes.
But it's just getting in an environment where that's possible, which is really hard.
Leave that to me.
Let's see if we can find, even if it's Megan or somebody else, let's come back and do this.
Let's do this again.
We're out of time today, but you've been so thoughtful and kind with your graciousness on being really opening up on this issue.
Let's see if we can't do that here.
And we'll be, as I'm sure you will be too, respectful and civil, but unapologetic in really airing, I think, differences in a way that people don't do in this country enough anymore.
So let's do it, Riley.
Absolutely.
Sounds fantastic.
Thank you so, so much for having me on.
This was a pleasure.
Thank you.
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