Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2115 - Riley Gaines
Uploaded: 2024-03-07T18:00:23.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2115 - Riley Gaines' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-03-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2115 - Riley Gaines' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-03-07. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2115 - Riley Gaines

Hello. Hello. Very nice to meet you. Yes, and you. You've been on a wild little
journey, huh?
A journey that I certainly never expected, never wanted, still don't want. So,
yeah.
Did you ever, in your wildest dreams, think that you would have to be an
advocate for women's sports?
For sanity.
For sanity, yeah.
No, no. Never did I imagine that anyone would have to be in the position that I'm
in. Nevertheless, me.
So, like you said, it really has been a wild, almost two years now. I graduated
college, set to be a dentist in dental school.
Wanting to specialize in endodontics, which, weirdly enough, is root canals. So,
to say that this is a totally different path than I could have ever anticipated
doesn't do it justice.
Yeah, that's a minor understatement.
Yeah, right. Exactly.
So, walk us through the beginnings of this for you. What was your first
introduction to this insanity of biological men with gender dysphoria trying to
compete with women?
So, I'll take you through my kind of timeline here.
Okay.
Started swimming when I was four years old, right? I come from a family of
athletes. So, my dad was an NFL player. My mom, she played D1 softball. My
oldest sister, she played softball. I went to Ole Miss. My brother, he's in
college playing football now. All my uncles won Super Bowls and all this stuff.
So, come from a family of athletes.
Started swimming when I was four. Graduated when I was 22. So, you know, 18
years of my life, I really dedicated to my sport.
It's impossible to put in the words, you know this, the time and the hours and
the dedication and the sacrifices that it takes to compete and ultimately be
successful at the highest level.
But, of course, I was willing to do this. I knew I had to.
Right? You don't get to go to prom. You don't get to have sleepovers with your
friends on Friday night because guess what? Practice at 6 a.m. on Saturday.
All of that to really say it's a lifelong journey. College rolls around. Truth
be told, I really could have gone anywhere that I wanted to swim.
I'm absolutely biased and the SEC is the best conference. So, I knew that was
for me, but went to University of Kentucky. Could not have been a better place
for me.
Freshman year, right, there was a lot of adjusting. It was a lot of time and
hours. I thought I worked hard before. I was wrong.
We were in the water six hours every single day, with three of those hours
being before 8 a.m. Right?
So, you practice from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., go to class, come back, practice again
from 1.30 to 4.30, ate your dinner, iced your shoulders, went to bed, did it
all again the next day.
We swam about 15,000 yards every single day, which is equivalent to like 10-ish
miles.
So, lots of adjusting. Sophomore year, still improving though, still getting
better. Sophomore year rolls around.
We're, you know, I really started having this breakout season, started doing
some pretty great things.
Really had finally developed like a sense of consistency, I think.
And about three days before we were supposed to leave for our national
championships, which of course, you know, the NCAA, think about basketball, the
NCAA tournament, equivalent in swimming.
We were ready to go, the meat you work all year, really all your life for.
About three days before we were supposed to leave, in March of 2020, our
coaches pull us out of the water, sit us down, say,
look, you know, if you live in the dorm rooms, pack your stuff up, you have to
leave campus tonight.
Of course, COVID had hit.
I didn't really know what this meant at the time.
There's still a lot of uncertainty around this.
So, I thought this meant we got a weekend off, we got to go home, we'd quickly
return.
But, of course, that was not a correct assumption.
Because upon going back home, home is Tennessee for me, right?
There were no pools open.
There were no gyms open, nothing like that.
And so, every day, I swam miles, aimlessly in the lake.
I'd put on a wetsuit, and I'd jump in the boat dock, and I'd swim down by
Johnny Cash's house, and I came back, and I did the same route every single day.
Because, again, I knew that I had to, if I wanted to continue this breakout
season I was having my junior year, or my sophomore year, into my junior year.
Right, and the amount of snakes that I swam by, and, like, dead catfish that
are floating on top of the water that, like, hit you in your face while you're
swimming is not pleasant.
But, eventually, we were able to come back junior year.
We had to deal with all the COVID theatrics, which I'll be the first person to
say that being a college athlete, really being a college student, I would argue
being a human during the time of COVID, was miserable, to say the least.
But, especially being an athlete, right, in terms of the mask mandates, and the
social distancing, and the contact tracing, and the mandatory vaccines, which,
have you ever seen?
Have you ever seen a swimmer in the pool, wearing a mask?
I have.
You have.
I have.
I watch videos of it.
Well, we essentially waterboarded ourselves.
It's so fucking stupid.
Isn't it?
It's so stupid.
Isn't it?
So, but, dealing with all the theatrics, outside of all that, really, this was
the year that I won my first individual SEC title.
University of Kentucky won its first ever program title in school history.
And, ultimately, I concluded my junior year, placing seventh in the country,
which I was proud of, right?
You're top eight.
You're an All-American.
It's a pretty high honor.
But, I knew right then and there that I placed seventh in the nation my junior
year, that my senior year, I had a goal of winning a national title.
So, that's kind of the back story to now kind of finding out about all of this
other stuff going on.
Senior year rolls around.
About midway through my senior year, I'm right on pace to achieve my goal.
I'm ranked third in the nation behind one amazing female swimmer who I knew
very well because, you know, like in most sports, your top-tier athletes know
of each other regardless of where you compete because you've grown up competing
against each other.
So, I knew this girl very well, trailing her by a few one-hundredths, tenths of
a second, maybe.
But, the swimmer who was leading the nation by body lengths, might I add, which
is a very large margin in swimming, right?
A sport that's measured down to the hundredth of a second, this swimmer was
leading the country by multiple seconds, was a swimmer that I had never heard
of before.
And this is the first time that me and my teammates became aware of a swimmer
named Leah Thomas.
For all we knew at the time, right, keep in mind we hadn't seen a picture of
this person or else things would have been a little more clear.
For all we knew at the time, this was a senior from University of Pennsylvania,
which is not a school that historically produces fast swimmers.
Now, I would argue, is not a school that historically produces really anything
good.
Leading the nation by body lengths, ranging in events from the hundred
freestyle, which is, of course, a sprint, and all the freestyle events in
between through the mile.
Which, if you don't know swimming, right, think about this in terms of your
Olympic runners.
Because that's like saying your best 200-meter runner is your best marathon
runner.
You and I both know that that doesn't happen.
They're two totally different systems.
But that's what we were saying in this person.
So I'm scratching my head, right?
I'm talking to my coaches, my teammates.
Who is this person?
We had no idea.
And we continued to stay in the dark until an article came out.
And in this article, very briefly disclosed, in a blip of a sentence, as if we
were really supposed to just read right over it.
It says, Leah Thomas is formerly Will Thomas and swam three years on the men's
team at University of Pennsylvania before deciding to switch to the women's
team.
And so when I read this, of course, I was shocked, naturally.
But really, it was kind of like the sense of relief that I felt.
Because at this point, I went to look up who Will Thomas was.
Because admittedly, I was curious.
You know, was this a lateral movement?
Someone who went from ranking amongst the best of the men to now continuing to
rank amongst the best of the women?
Which is, of course, not what we saw, right?
We saw that this was a mediocre man.
And that's generous.
At best, ranking 462nd in the nation the year prior when competing against the
men.
And that's why I say I felt relieved.
Because I thought that the NCAA would see this how I saw it.
And how, again, my teammates saw it.
How my coaches saw it.
How my family saw it.
How anyone with any amount of brain activity would probably comprehend this.
Look, nothing hateful about it.
Nothing even opinionated about it.
The sheer facts on the paper in front of us that this was not a lateral
movement by any means.
But lo and behold, the NCAA did not see it that way.
They saw absolutely nothing wrong with this.
And so, about three weeks before our national championships in March of 2022,
they released a statement saying that Thomas' participation in the women's
category was a non-negotiable.
Basically saying that, look, there was nothing that we could do.
As female athletes, there was no questions that we could ask or concerns that
we could raise.
We were told that we had to accept this with a smile on our face.
So, that's kind of the lead up to that national championships and really how
myself and my teammates and really the nation, the world, actually found out
about Leah Thomas.
And I will say, I'd heard of this happening in sports before.
But I'd really only heard of it going the other way, right?
So, women, females who wanted to self-identify as men, then going to compete in
the men's category, which, look, I didn't ever agree with.
I never necessarily supported it.
But maybe at the time I didn't see a problem with it, right?
Because no one's, I guess, competition, the men's competition isn't being
threatened.
So, you know, I thought it was dumb on the woman's behalf, but whatever.
When did you see this from biological women competing as men?
Actually, in the sport of swimming, again, there was a swimmer from Harvard by
the name of Skylar Baylor, competed on the women's team and then decided to
switch to the men's team at Harvard.
Isn't there an issue, though, with steroids?
Because if you're going to compete as a man, that means you're biologically
transitioning.
That means you're adding exogenous hormones, which would mean that you're
taking steroids.
Right.
And you're allowed to do that if you're a woman transitioning to a male?
There was no, there was no, the InstaBlaze policy at the time was 12 months of
HRT, hormone replacement therapy, and you compete, you can compete in the
category that best suits you.
Right.
So with Leah Thomas, I'm sure you got into this.
What were the requirements that this 12 months, is there an analysis of
testosterone levels?
Is.
It was just 12 months.
That's it.
That's the only standard.
So no one is actually checking to see if this person is actually taking
estrogen or taking testosterone blockers or doing anything.
You just have to say you're on this program for 12 months?
I believe so.
Yeah.
I'm not sure what the process looked like if they talked to Thomas's doctors.
I don't know.
But yeah, the policy that had been in place since 2010, so obviously this is a
pretty old policy, 12 years at the time, that's what it stated.
So that policy's been intact for 12 years?
Correct.
And now NCAA, in true cowardly fashion, is changing course, right?
They don't want to be responsible.
They don't want to be accountable for this.
So what they're doing now is a phase-out approach of this policy and leaving it
up to each specific sport governing body to make their own rules, right?
So now for swimming, they would resort to looking at world aquatics or FINA,
which is the international governing body.
For soccer, they'd look at FIFA.
For rowing, they'd look at U.S. rowing.
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