Welcome everybody to a very special episode of Crystal Kyle and friends.

Crystal and I have the honor of interviewing presidential candidate.

Somebody who just announced, Mary Ann Williamson, we're really excited for this.

Mary Ann, thank you for joining us.

Oh, thank you for having me.

Our pleasure.

So, um, have a bunch of stuff that we want to get into, but we thought we would sort of start with the basics.

Okay.

For people who are just getting to know who you are, just tell people about who you are, how you came to this moment and what made you decide to run for president.

My career began about 40 years ago.

And I was interested in the field of spirituality and psychology.

I was giving these lectures at a philosophical society in Los Angeles in 1983.

Shortly after I did that, the AIDS epidemic burst onto the scene.

So things got very, very, very, very fast.

It was similar to COVID in the sense of kind of an ubiquitous panic, but it was different in this way.

With COVID, it was easy to get, but your chances were that you would survive.

With AIDS, it was difficult to get, but if you got at the chances were that you would not survive.

And there was a huge population, particularly among young gay men, where the horror.

We were talking about, you know, losing friends, going to several funerals a week, literally.

It was like being in a battle zone.

So from that experience, and not only support groups, founding nonprofit organizations around that,

it developed into a career where I had more and more experience working with people in what you would think of as the worst times in their lives.

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