Riley Gaines is a former NCAA All-American swimmer and campaigner for genuine female rights. In our conversation, we cover her career thus far, how she s navigated leadership positions in female sports and otherwise, how sports have been coopted by men claiming to be women, the ideological capture of women in sports, and of course, her recent experiences at San Francisco State University. She also shares her experience with depression and anxiety, and how she found a way to overcome it, and the lessons she s learned along the way. This episode is sponsored by Daily Wire Plus, a new series created by Dr. Jordan Peterson that could be a lifeline for those battling Depression and Anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, he provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Let s make it a step towards a brighter, brighter, and more positive future you are all worthy of. In this episode, I m speaking up for herself, and fighting for what s truly important. -Riley - Thank you so much for being a fighter, and I m so much more than just a swimmer, and for standing up for what matters. . Thank you for being loud and proud of who s worth it. -Reedy and I hope you know that you re not alone, and that you know you re worthy of it! . . . - RYRIE - RYRAYRIE RALYNN , RYAN GAGEES, RYANA And I hope that you ll join me in the fight for the future you know what s out there, and you can do it! -RJORDERY in 2020! -JORDAN B. PENNY, JORDANCHOR, RAYLYNN, and RYRYAN M. P. M. GARREAU AND KAREN LYNN ECHELES & JUICY WELCOME
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00:00:57.420Today I'm speaking with American athlete, top ranking swimmer, and now campaigner for genuine female rights, Riley Gaines.
00:01:18.740In our conversation, we're going to cover her career thus far, how she's navigated leadership positions in female sports,
00:01:27.000and otherwise, how those sports have been co-opted by men claiming to be women,
00:01:32.480the ideological capture therein, and of course, her recent experiences at San Francisco State University.
00:01:40.620Hi, Riley. I understand that it's about four in the morning there in Nashville.
00:01:46.360I'm in Portugal, so, you know, time zone trouble.
00:01:49.820It's real good of you to stay up so damn late and agree to talk to me and to everybody else here.
00:02:22.520So, what have you been up to the last few years while you were, you know, pursuing the pathway, let's say, of a normal person?
00:02:29.920I had every intention of finishing my collegiate career of swimming, graduating, and going to dental school.
00:02:36.080So, that's always been my passion, was dentistry.
00:02:40.300Specifically, I wanted to be an endodontist, which is someone who performs root canals, essentially.
00:02:45.760I graduated with a degree in human health sciences and health law from the University of Kentucky.
00:02:50.580I was set to be in dental school this year.
00:02:53.820But with everything that really happened, and I know we'll dive into that, I decided, I really realized that dental school, that's something that will always be there.
00:03:03.620But the relevance and the importance behind the issue we're going to talk about, it's not going to always be there.
00:03:09.620And I understood if someone with the same powerful testimony that I have, the same voice, someone who's unafraid to speak the truth, doesn't stick up for this.
00:03:23.640And so, I put my life on hold for a year.
00:03:26.500I've reapplied for dental school in the fall, set to go to the University of Tennessee, but I'm still kind of wavering with the idea of if that's right for me at this time.
00:04:04.100And, you know, what are your credentials?
00:04:06.680So, I've accomplished some really amazing things that I'm really proud of over my career.
00:04:12.060I qualified for Olympic trials in 2016.
00:04:15.840I was only 15 years old at the time, so I was one of the youngest ones there, again in 2020, to which translated into 2021 because of COVID and such.
00:04:45.580But I am the SEC record holder in the Turner Butterfly, which means under this shirt I have really big shoulders that I try to cover with my hair,
00:04:54.640making me one of the fastest Americans of all time, making me one of the fastest Americans of all time in the event.
00:04:59.240So, I've really done some incredible things that I will forever be proud of.
00:05:05.220These are memories I can always look back on.
00:05:07.820And I think that's what gives me the credibility that allows me to use my voice and be heard.
00:05:18.140is the fact that I have firsthand experience competing against a male.
00:05:23.000I got to personally witness and experience the injustice that we face.
00:05:31.280I felt the effect that this infringement had on myself and my teammates and how this affected us, how it affected our performance, how it affected our health, our mental health,
00:05:40.980and what that looked like from our perspective as female athletes who were directly impacted.
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00:06:44.580Okay, so let's delve into, people aren't going to know this,
00:07:01.480so you were competing at extremely high level on the athletic front,
00:07:07.780and, you know, I've worked with some stellar athletes as a clinician,
00:07:12.940and I've worked with lots of people who were at the top of their game professionally, let's say,
00:07:18.180and usually what that takes on the professional front is something like,
00:07:24.060well, extreme ability, extreme native ability in whatever area happens to be under consideration,
00:07:30.080and then dedication that goes above and beyond the norm.
00:07:34.540And so the typical great scientist, for example, is absolutely 100% obsessed with what they do.
00:07:42.240It's a 16-hour-a-day job, essentially seven days a week, generally for decades.
00:07:48.240It's the only way that you get to the top of a profession, let's say, or an endeavor,
00:07:53.220that has any degree of rank order by merit and competitiveness, right?
00:07:58.800You have to be as able as anyone else or more able,
00:08:01.900but then you have to be dedicated beyond, well, far beyond the norm,
00:08:05.400because otherwise you're not going to be at the top.
00:08:06.960So when did you start swimming, and what did you have to do on the discipline front?
00:08:13.840And also, I suppose, what sacrifices did your family make to make that possible
00:08:17.700so that you could compete at this level?
00:08:20.320Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:08:25.780Most of the time, you'll probably be fine,
00:08:27.860but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead,
00:10:50.940I mean, you know, there's a lot—well, first of all, it's a very focal application of time and energy over a very long period of time, right?
00:10:59.940And you could argue that, well, there's many things to do in life, and why concentrate so obsessively on that single thing?
00:11:08.480What was it about your family, your situation, your psychology, or your ability that made this attractive to you?
00:11:15.920Why did you spend so much time and energy on this?
00:15:01.460How can we continue to use your failures, your shortcomings, as a way to continue building up?
00:15:08.300So as much as I do take value in winning, I think there's a certain aspect to losing that is also beneficial and has really thrusted me into the position that I'm in.
00:15:21.780It's given me the confidence to do what I'm doing, the leadership, the security to take the arrows that I've been taking.
00:15:28.700And so I think it's a balance, being ambitious of course.
00:15:32.800Yeah, well, that's a really good point, you know, on the resilience front.
00:15:36.760Because one of the things that people need to do to develop in their lives is, well, you could say grace in victory, but you can also say grace and resilience in defeat.
00:15:47.600And the reason for that is that as we progress through life, as you pointed out, on all fronts, things are not always going to turn out the way we want them to turn out.
00:15:58.800And we're going to all suffer harsh defeats of one form or another, sometimes justly and sometimes unjustly.
00:16:06.420And because of that, one of the things that we need to learn and to learn early is how to take defeat in stride.
00:16:14.340Now, you made a case that not only did you learn to take it in stride, but that you also learned how to extract value, let's say, from your failures so that you could then proceed to a new level of striving and attainment.
00:16:31.040You know, when we see someone who's a good sport, and generally that's someone who we might spontaneously admire, we see someone who doesn't take too much, who doesn't try to become vainglorious, let's say, as a consequence of winning.
00:16:47.240But even more importantly, that can take a defeat in good humor, can learn from it and can move forward nonetheless.
00:16:54.260And the reason we admire that is because we all need to learn how to do that.
00:16:57.920And you do learn that in the context of competition, if the competition is structured fairly and as a consequence of task-specific merit, let's say, which is clearly the case in an athletic realm.
00:17:13.020Right. So, you think now, you said that you made a lot of sacrifices on the time and energy front, let's say, to engage in this competitive enterprise, but that the rewards, despite the effort, the rewards were much greater than the cost of the sacrifice.
00:17:34.220So, and you've alluded to some of the rewards. You said that you've been able to discipline yourself and push yourself, and you've also got resilient in the face of defeat, which is crucially important.
00:17:44.380How do you think that's generalized to the rest of your life? And do you think that's typically the case for people who engage in athletic competition?
00:17:53.960Like, what do you think that does for people in general?
00:17:55.920I think the higher you compete in terms of what level you're competing at athletically, whether that be high school, then college, and then whatever sport that you may be doing, Olympic level, I think the higher you compete, the more benefits you reap, typically.
00:18:13.160You learn more about determination, grit, resiliency. Of course, you are able to, the athletic achievements continue as well, but the lifelong skills and characteristics you develop outside of just the athletic achievements, these are skills that will translate far beyond that into your whole life, forever.
00:18:36.120And that's something, again, that I'm witnessing in myself. I think if I didn't play sports, if I didn't have that sense of teamwork, that sense of, I was team captain at University of Kentucky for two years, so if I didn't have that sense of leadership, accountability, really, I think accountability and responsibility is a good word, then I don't think I would feel confident enough to take a public stance in the way that I have this past year.
00:19:01.320Which, it sounds silly because it sounds silly because my stance is so simple and it's rooted in, of course, truth and common sense and science and logic, reasoning, all the things.
00:19:11.400So it sounds silly to say I might not have the confidence and leadership and the security in and of myself to take the arrows that I'm taking if it weren't for sports.
00:19:21.340I really do accrues. I really do accredit that to being an athlete.
00:19:25.060There was an Ernst & Young study that said, I think, 94% of C-level executives, so CEOs, CFO, COO, that are females were once female athletes.
00:19:37.280And I think that shows how the skills that you develop translate far beyond your sport.
00:19:43.340Yeah, well, it might seem silly in one sense for you to make any claims to the necessity for training for just saying the things you're saying, but there aren't that many people saying the things you're saying in as public a manner as you're saying them.
00:20:01.780And so, obviously, there's difficulties there that are beyond the typical person's athlete or not, the typical person's ability to withstand.
00:20:12.580So even if the topic is in some ways surreal, it's definitely the case that it's unlikely that people are going to take a public stance.
00:20:24.220Now, and so you said you learned to have a certain degree of confidence in yourself, but also to be able to tolerate a certain amount of stress as a consequence of this highly competitive training.
00:20:35.600But I would also ask you, you were the team captain, you said, for a number of years.
00:20:41.060And so what do you think the attributes, what are the necessary attributes of a team captain?
00:20:45.820Now, obviously, you have to be very skilled athletically and competitive, and that means that you're striving to, for victory, you're striving to be the best on your team, you're striving to break the appropriate records.
00:20:56.840But you have to modify that, obviously, if you're team captain.
00:21:00.120And so, like, how do you think, how did you reconcile the demands to be the best on the team with the necessity of being a team leader?
00:21:07.520And what did you have to learn in order to be an effective captain?
00:21:10.880I think the thing that I knew I wanted to implement as a captain, my team at University of Kentucky, there's 40 girls.
00:21:19.100Obviously, when you're dealing with 40 girls, there's a lot of different personalities.
00:21:24.220There's a lot of different ways people communicate, how they handle situations, how they deal with pressure, how they like to be motivated.
00:21:31.440And so, as a captain, number one, I wanted to be someone that everyone felt like they could talk to.
00:21:37.420Again, when you're dealing with 40 girls, of course, there's cliques.
00:21:42.060There's people on the team who are best friends.
00:21:44.100There are other people who don't necessarily like each other.
00:21:47.720You work together, but you won't be friends outside of your sport.
00:21:51.500And so, I wanted to be someone who could unite everyone, in a sense.
00:21:57.520I don't want to make anyone be friends with someone they don't want to be friends with.
00:22:00.620But how can we come together to achieve our goals and what that looks like in terms of communication?
00:22:06.300Which, again, I'm seeing that translate now into my life and how I deal with what I'm dealing with.
00:22:15.680Two, I think what strived me to help us all achieve our goals, our goals we set as a team, was to constantly remind the team of the goals we set.
00:22:25.940I think it's very often in sports where you talk about big things and then you kind of forget about it.
00:22:31.620And when it comes championship season or whatever that looks like, you're not geared up to achieve what you've set because you haven't worked towards it, really.
00:22:39.640You talk about it, but talking about it isn't enough.
00:22:42.600So, in practice, I would constantly remind people, hey, you know, this is the goal you set for yourself personally, which can help us achieve our goals as a team.
00:22:55.520Well, one of the most effective leadership strategies, although I hate to reduce it to a strategy because it's more than that, is to produce an organization predicated on the intrinsic alignment of interests, right?
00:23:11.720And so what you really want if you set up an organization is you want each person pursuing a goal that they personally value and so are willing to work for and to sacrifice for and to dedicate themselves to.
00:23:24.060And then you want each of those goals to be serving a superordinate goal that unites and moves the entire team ahead.
00:23:32.000And then you don't have to use coercion and so forth.
00:23:34.060And you can imagine if you're doing that, helping each athlete become the best they can be on the personal level for whatever personal gain they might manage in terms of being more resilient and in terms of, you know, achievement status and all of those things, comparative status.
00:23:51.440You're also doing the same thing for the team and you can understand without much effort how useful that would be in executive management, for example.
00:24:03.400Like I worked with a number of extraordinarily good managers in the business realm, especially on the legal front and then also in academia.
00:24:10.900And the really great managers, they had a very light touch.
00:24:16.140They tended to go around and remove problems before they started.
00:24:20.680And so it often looked like they were doing almost nothing, but they were also extremely good at aligning people's interests so that everybody was moving in the same desirable direction.
00:24:30.880And so what do you think you did badly on that front and had to learn to do better?
00:24:54.420They think it's they take it personal.
00:24:56.140And so something I always tried to do well was hold people accountable in a way that made them want to do better.
00:25:04.200And I think that falls along with, again, helping people develop personally to reach those team goals, which, again, it's I don't think even a male can understand necessarily how women, how especially a room, a group of 40 women.
00:25:27.060And so holding people accountable, I think it's crucial.
00:25:29.820And I feel as if I did that relatively well.
00:25:32.580What I think I could have probably improved on is being a little more understanding.
00:25:40.300It's hard for me to put myself in someone else's shoes sometimes to consider what they have going on outside of the sport because we truly did put so much of our identity, so much of our self-worth into our sport that I oftentimes would forget to look at anything other than what's going on in the sport.
00:26:00.840If someone was having a bad practice, it was very quick for me to get snippy at them without remotely and thinking about other factors that could contribute to the bad practice, whether that be sleep, diet, school.
00:26:18.960And you made a sex-specific comment there, too, that we could delve into.
00:26:22.700Well, you know, if you're focused on a particular goal and you're competitive and achievement-oriented and you want to win, then your focus tends to narrow to that particular domain, right?
00:26:33.540What that means is that you'll sacrifice other interests and concerns for that particular, what would you say, ability to progress along that particular axis.
00:26:45.680And as you said, well, that can come across as harsh.
00:26:49.040Now, on average, women are more agreeable than men.
00:26:52.720And so that means, on average, they're less harsh, at least overtly.
00:26:59.240And, you know, it's an open question, and I don't think anybody knows exactly how to answer this question, than what effective leadership on the female front looks like.
00:27:09.960Now, you faulted yourself, and I would say you faulted yourself, in some sense, for taking a more masculine perspective on those sorts of group endeavors, because it's typical among men for a group of men to concentrate on the goal at hand and to say, to hell with all the other concerns, which is something like, don't bring your bloody troubles to work, just do your damn job.
00:27:34.700Now, you made the point that that was perhaps differentially challenging when working with women.
00:27:54.380Yeah, this is solely based off my experiences.
00:27:57.740At the University of Kentucky, of course, there's a men's team and a women's team.
00:28:00.980My husband now, who I've married, he was on the men's team at Kentucky.
00:28:06.700Just watching their interactions, watching how they can communicate with each other, brush it off, come back to the next practice and be totally fine, that doesn't work with girls.
00:28:17.900Again, based solely off of my experiences, this isn't to overgeneralize.
00:28:22.540This is to share exactly what I have seen firsthand.
00:28:30.120They tend to not take constructive criticism as well, whether that be from the coach or from other teammates or from whoever.
00:28:38.580But the men, on the other hand, especially at the University of Kentucky, which, again, I was able to witness, they could get on each other's backs.
00:28:45.760They could say personal things to each other that even didn't necessarily apply to their sport when they were getting on one another.
00:28:53.040As women, there would be catfights if we did that, which, again, sounds silly, but that's truthfully what I experience on a day-to-day basis.
00:29:03.100Well, you know, the other, so one of the temperamental differences between men and women is that difference in agreeableness, let's say.
00:29:11.200And so there's less of a tendency for overt conflict among women.
00:29:16.760Now, that doesn't mean there's less of a tendency for covert conflict.
00:29:20.100And actually, what you do see is that antisocial women, right, the ones who can't cooperate well and who can't work together in a team, they use underground strategies like reputation savaging and gossip to, what would you say, promulgate their aggressive behavior.
00:29:37.960Now, men are much more likely to do that up front, and there's some simplicity in that.
00:29:42.880But also, women have a proclivity to experience more negative emotion than men, and so for each unit of stress, they manifest more psychophysiological response.
00:29:53.220That seems to kick in around puberty, and so that additional, call it volatility is the technical term.
00:30:00.260That's an aspect of trait neuroticism, by the way.
00:30:02.660That volatility also, that increased volatility also makes it more difficult, arguably, for women to brush things off the same way that men who are cooperating in a team might.
00:30:13.480And I mean, the reason I'm talking about this, by the way, and delving into this, is because we are going to get into the topic of sex and gender very soon.
00:30:21.540Because, well, that's where we're headed, given that that's the root of the conflict that's made itself manifest around you.
00:30:29.280And so, it's useful to establish and to start to explore the territory that's relevant with regard to sex differentiation.
00:30:39.000Now, obviously, when you were competing, you weren't competing in a co-ed situation.
00:30:46.560It was women competing against women and men competing against men, and it's been set up like that for a long time.
00:30:51.860Right. So, given the claims in our society for radical equality, both in actuality and as a desirable outcome, first of all, do you think that there's any, what is, if any, the justification for not making all sporting events, let's say, radically co-ed?
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00:34:27.000To say that men are stronger, to say that men are faster, taller, whatever, that's not to say that women are inferior.
00:34:35.560That's not to say that we're not capable of amazing things and we're not strong and we're not, again, all of those words I previously mentioned,
00:34:43.400but we have different physical ceilings.
00:34:46.080I believe we deserve to be celebrated on our uniqueness.
00:34:49.740That's what makes the women's sporting category special.
00:34:53.420And there are still phenoms in women's sports, just like there are male sports.
00:35:18.520Yeah, well, okay, so let's delve into that.
00:35:21.260So, because you might say, well, there's two reasons for high-level competition.
00:35:27.240And let's say on the athletic front, one would be to extend the domain of what's possible in terms of performance and to model that for other people.
00:35:35.820And then you could make a case, well, you could make the case that the absolute records are the best example of that.
00:35:41.560So the fastest person in the world, the fastest swimmer in the world, and most of the time that's going to be men.
00:35:47.920But then you could make a more sophisticated case, which I believe is the proper case,
00:35:53.220that actually what you're doing as an athlete or as any expert in a competitive realm is modeling the ability to push the envelope and to further transform and develop.
00:36:08.660And unless you believe that that's less important for women, which is a preposterous thing to believe,
00:36:14.580then you have to believe that setting up a situation where women can push the envelope consistently in whatever directions they're pushing,
00:36:23.920you have to presume that that's a psychological good and a social good.
00:36:27.520And then you have to presume that the spaces where that can occur have to be protected.
00:36:31.660But that also opens a can of worms, doesn't it?
00:36:33.880Because since the 1960s in particular, we've blown off the barriers between men and women in terms of general participation in society.
00:36:46.720And so we've decided that all things considered...
00:36:53.220Spaces isolated to a given sex are suboptimal, right?
00:36:58.860The schools are co-ed, like the public schools, the universities are co-ed.
00:37:03.840All business enterprises are co-ed, so to speak.
00:37:07.400And then, of course, so that raises the question, well, should any domains be left sex segregated?
00:37:17.040If so, how do you walk the fine line between sex segregation for the purpose of facilitating development
00:37:26.680and sex segregation that turns into prejudice and oppression, right?