Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Ancient Crimes in Modern Times: The 346th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

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Ancient Crimes in Modern Times: The 346th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 1:00:00
  (Music) Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
• 1:00:09
  It is 3 46.
• 1:00:11
  Do I remember that correctly from what you told me just moments before we went live?
• 1:00:15
  Your memory is not failing at that level, yes.
• 1:00:19
  That's somewhat comforting.
• 1:00:20
  Or as far as I can tell at any level.
• 1:00:21
  Okay.
• 1:00:22
  Yeah.
• 1:00:23
  In the second domain I think you're just fine.
• 1:00:26
  Yeah, although that's a risky domain because it's very easy to acquire, you know, what was your name again?
• 1:00:31
  And then they say their name and a moment's distraction.
• 1:00:34
  It's like, oh, now I've lost it.
• 1:00:37
  That's a matter of caring, isn't it?
• 1:00:38
  No, it's a matter of, yeah, yeah, right.
• 1:00:41
  Exactly.
• 1:00:43
  It is October 7th, which means, among other things, that it is the anniversary of October 7th, the third anniversary.
• 1:00:54
  And we are not going to be talking about October 7th today.
• 1:00:58
  Probably it should be revisited in a later discussion.
• 1:01:02
  But it is certainly an event that has shaped history and radically changed what we think we know about the event has radically changed in the aftermath of the event, which in its own way is very troubling.
• 1:01:20
  And the event disrupted conversations and agreements and amalgamations of people that seemed undisruptible, even when those people don't seem to be related to what was happening in Israel and in Gaza between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
• 1:01:40
  Yeah, it disrupted virtually every conversation that wasn't narrowly focused with, you know, everybody of one mind about events in the Middle East.
• 1:01:49
  It cut across all of those coalitions and discussions and disrupted as a gentle term, a wreck to the goodwill that many had established across many topics.
• 1:02:02
  Speaking of disruption, we're going to talk about sexual aggression and also plague this week, both of which are big disruptors.
• 1:02:10
  Wow.
• 1:02:12
  Yeah, this Cornell situation is a shocking topic and one that brings us right to the heart of many of the discussions that it connects many of the discussions that we've been having about Weston.
• 1:02:30
  Yep, and it's as evolutionary as things get.
• 1:02:33
  That is absolutely true.
• 1:02:34
  So we're going to the top of the hour after we pay our rent, do our ads, we're just we're going to review some of what has been claimed and what we think we know collectively and with some, you know, with some discourse in the middle of that, I'm sure, but then arrive at what we think it means and how all of this happened.
• 1:02:57
  Like, you know, who actually where can the blame be pointed given that there are a lot of a lot of fingers being pointed?
• 1:03:07
  Yeah, I mean, I think on both the topics we're going to be discussing both the Cornell 7 and the plague situation, you're going to get a take here that is very different than you will get anywhere else because both of these things are through and through evolutionary, you know, from many different levels.
• 1:03:26
  So yeah, stick around.
• 1:03:28
  You also get an unusual take.
• 1:03:31
  So I have a pile of books here bigger than last week.
• 1:03:34
  We are offering our books signed in whatever, not whatever, within reason.
• 1:03:43
  What you Oh, wow, I just messed up.
• 1:03:44
  Could you fix that?
• 1:03:45
  Yeah.
• 1:03:48
  In whatever way you like.
• 1:03:49
  We've got we're not we're not selling off our last copies of any of these.
• 1:03:53
  But we've got a number of copies of hunter gatherers guide and translation.
• 1:03:56
  We've got hunter gatherers guide not in translation in the original English in which we wrote it.
• 1:04:00
  We've also got antipode my first book written over 20 years ago, available on our website at darkhorsepodcast.org So the two in English are antipode seasons with the extraordinary wildlife and culture of Madagascar from 2002, St.
• 1:04:16
  Martin's Press, and hunter gatherers guide to the 21st century evolution and the challenges of modern life from portfolio and imprint of penguin published in September of 2001.
• 1:04:29
  But then we also have a number of copies in other languages.
• 1:04:32
  We've got one copy in Czech.
• 1:04:35
  Yeah, here, let me read a little bit from it.
• 1:04:37
  Okay, I don't read any Czech, unfortunately.
• 1:04:41
  How about you read this one, and this one is in Thai.
• 1:04:43
  We've got we've got a few more copies, and you don't want the time.
• 1:04:46
  Okay, I've got Thai.
• 1:04:49
  Really cool.
• 1:04:50
  We've got Polish.
• 1:04:52
  Polish, I said, we've got Portuguese.
• 1:04:55
  This is the Brazilian Portuguese edition.
• 1:04:58
  Spanish.
• 1:04:59
  This is the only one that's in hard copy.
• 1:05:02
  Spanish.
• 1:05:02
  Hispanic.
• 1:05:04
  Spanish, and of course, the French.
• 1:05:08
  So we've got a few copies of all of those, a lot of copies of a couple of those.
• 1:05:14
  And you can go to darkhorsepodcast.org slash books to order.
• 1:05:19
  We're selling them for $40 each, including shipping within the US discount if you buy more than one.
• 1:05:25
  And like that, I think, I think.
• 1:05:29
  So let us then get to our ding.
• 1:05:34
  Let's get to our sponsors for Wow, everything's upside down backwards today.
• 1:05:39
  Let's get to our sponsors for this week's episode.
• 1:05:41
  As always, we have three sponsors, three ads that we read right up at the top for sponsors that make products or offer services that we really and truly stand behind.
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  It's easier to do just by looking at you rather than at the words.
• 1:07:21
  When I, when I get into the situation, I find that reading the punctuation helps.
• 1:07:25
  Yes, I've noticed.
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  Here, I'll try that.
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• 1:10:44
  That's not in the original.
• 1:10:45
  No, I was ad libbing.
• 1:10:47
  I don't think I have ever, ever put multiple exclamation points, marks.
• 1:10:53
  Yeah, it's, I sometimes do it ironically.
• 1:10:57
  I still hold to my claim that English needs a half an exclamation mark because how many times have you been left in the bind where a period sounds tepid and an exclamation mark sounds insane and you need exactly half an exclamation mark?
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  You wanna sound insanely tepid?
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  No, I wanna sound slightly enthusiastic as people often are.
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  Why don't we have a-- Sounds like you are right now.
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• 1:14:00
  It's always good when it happens.
• 1:14:02
  Yeah.
• 1:14:02
  (Bell Chimes) All right, we're gonna talk today about what has been referred to as the Cornell Seven, which I think itself is a very unfortunate and misleading name for what is going on.
• 1:14:18
  Prejudicial.
• 1:14:19
  It's prejudicial in and of itself.
• 1:14:21
  And I think there is already plenty of evidence to suggest that seven people have not been involved has been attested in any sort of equivalent ways.
• 1:14:35
  But let me begin.
• 1:14:36
  So if you're listening with children and you don't know about this case, there's going to involve a fair amount of discussion of sexual acts and drug use, so you should be aware of that.
• 1:14:48
  I'm gonna be reading from both the civil documents that have been brought by the plaintiff who is going by Jane Doe, and also one of the sets of documents brought by one of the defendants.
• 1:15:05
  And then also the DA, who originally, the DA's statement, who originally refused to file criminal charges on the basis that, and as he shares, we will be sharing some of what he shares, the plaintiff's original six-page single-space statement back almost two years ago in November of 2024 suggested no criminal actions had taken place.
• 1:15:29
  But in all of these cases, there are sexual acts.
• 1:15:33
  So that's gonna be part of what we're talking about today.
• 1:15:37
  Let me just introduce, and I have a number of excerpts from the official documents to share, to demonstrate what it is that's been claimed and what we think we know.
• 1:15:47
  And at any point, you want to introduce things please do, we will get to a bigger analysis at the end.
• 1:15:55
  But let me start by saying that I asked both of our children who are 22 and 20-year-old straight young men who are attending college full-time themselves now.
• 1:16:09
  So very much, I assumed, aware of what was happening.
• 1:16:13
  They're certainly not at Cornell, nor I think they really know anyone at Cornell.
• 1:16:17
  But I asked each of them separately without telling the other about the conversation that I had with the first, what they'd heard and what they thought was going on.
• 1:16:31
  And both of them reported having had a similar experience.
• 1:16:35
  And so my conversations with both of them were in the last five days.
• 1:16:38
  So sometime in early October of 2026, both of them reported, you know, it's been all over my feeds and for a while, for a while, I'm just seeing these pictures of these seven guys and I'm being told that they drugged and gang raped a woman for hours and hours and hours on end.
• 1:17:01
  It was an orgy, it was disgusting, and there was no nuance and it looked like that's just what it was.
• 1:17:10
  And then I saw, in each of their cases, I saw something.
• 1:17:15
  I said, "Yeah, this isn't what it appears to be." And they start chasing it down or they hear it from their brother in one of their cases, and then they start chasing it down.
• 1:17:24
  And the whole thing unravels, at least at that level, at least at that totally unnuanced level of seven guys drugged and gang raped a woman in a frat house, right?
• 1:17:40
  And as Zachary, our older son, 22 years old, said to me,"Mom, it's gotta be the worst thing "that a man can do, and it's therefore gotta be"the worst thing that a man can get accused of "to drug and rape, to drug and gang rape a woman." And so to be discovering now that the story isn't that, that some of these people had nothing to do, it seems, with this scene at all, and to have their reputations potentially permanently, publicly destroyed is absolutely an injustice that can't be fixed.
• 1:18:23
  I wanna point something out about why it is that our very thoughtful kids and a whole host of presumably less thoughtful celebrities and lots of folks have had this initial orientation to this story, and then maybe in some of their cases come around to a more nuanced viewpoint.
• 1:18:53
  I think the idea is we all have in our mind the person who upon hearing that someone has been raped has the sense of now, wait a minute, what do you mean raped exactly?
• 1:19:07
  What was the circumstance?
• 1:19:09
  The person who is looking to excuse rapists.
• 1:19:13
  Nobody wants any part of that.
• 1:19:14
  Rape apologists do exist.
• 1:19:16
  Rape apologists do exist, rapists exist, and certainly there will be some overlap between those categories.
• 1:19:21
  But point being, there is a reflexive trust in such stories that may or may not be generally justified, but certainly has to be just at most your initial bent is, I suppose, I, you know.
• 1:19:43
  And is in part the pendulum swing, from decades ago where the initial response was do not believe the woman.
• 1:19:51
  That the default presumption was what was she wearing?
• 1:19:54
  How did she ask for it?
• 1:19:55
  What was going on?
• 1:19:56
  Whether or not there was actually sexual assault involved, the default in many cases was blame the woman.
• 1:20:05
  And so the pendulum has swung in the other direction to the default being believe the woman.
• 1:20:10
  And there will be a default.
• 1:20:12
  And I don't think that the default being believe the woman as a first response is the wrong default.
• 1:20:19
  It becomes the wrong response when what was your initial thought becomes concretized regardless of where the evidence leads.
• 1:20:27
  Okay, I wanna add two things.
• 1:20:29
  One, I think it makes sense as it made sense as an initial reflex in a world where a woman would not lightly allege rape because, you know, the stigma, the trauma, all of the things that come along with it would place a fairly high bar.
• 1:20:53
  So at the point that somebody actually levels this allegation, they have decided to, in spite of certain automatic costs.
• 1:21:02
  In this case, as you'll get to, because the person leveling the allegations, the young woman is anonymized, and because the institution decided not to file charges, which once upon a time, you might imagine that they were potentially protecting rapists.
• 1:21:24
  But in 2026, are you kidding me?
• 1:21:27
  The system is very biased in the direction of believing women.
• 1:21:33
  And so an institution like Cornell deciding not to file charges when an allegation had been leveled ought to make you at least say, hey, wait, what don't I know about this case?
• 1:21:42
  Well, I disagree that the idea that in 2026, obviously they will have done due diligence.
• 1:21:48
  And if they decide not to file charges, then they're right.
• 1:21:51
  Oh, that's not what you said.
• 1:21:52
  I don't accept that that is true.
• 1:21:54
  However, in this case, there are hundreds of pages from the hearings that they held after this case was brought before them in the first place a couple of weeks after the original incident is, the original incidents definitely occurred, October 19th, 20th, 2024.
• 1:22:15
  And in early November, who we are calling Jane Doe, the plaintiff now, brought this to the attention of the campus police and sometime in early November asked for a rape kit, which suggests some gross misunderstanding of what kind of evidence that could possibly provide from at that point two weeks out.
• 1:22:40
  Hold on, I wanna just defend my point.
• 1:22:42
  I was not arguing that one should assume that the university did their due diligence.
• 1:22:46
  My point is if the university rejected the idea of bringing charges against the young men involved, I think the position should not be any reflex at all.
• 1:22:59
  It should be agnosticism.
• 1:23:01
  I don't know what happened.
• 1:23:02
  I need to know more before I come to any conclusion here.
• 1:23:05
  Yes, and I will say, I'm not certainly not gonna show the pictures of these seven men, but I will say before we get into the details that three of them, I'm going to name them.
• 1:23:17
  Three of them haven't even been accused of rape or of sexual assault.
• 1:23:23
  And those are the two Scots, Scott Cretchmar and Norris and Diego Sarabia.
• 1:23:29
  Apologies if I've mispronounced any of their names.
• 1:23:32
  And Cretchmar in particular has provided evidence in the public record, suggesting that even the things that he is accused of doing, he has been cleared of by Cornell.
• 1:23:46
  So let's go to some of the public record here.
• 1:23:53
  We have, can you see my screen?
• 1:23:56
  We have the civil case, which was filed to the Supreme Court of the State of New York on September 16th of this year.
• 1:24:06
  This is a little less than two years after the events happened.
• 1:24:12
  And I just include this page to show that we have Jane Doe as the plaintiff against Cornell University.
• 1:24:19
  Chi Phi, is that how it's pronounced?
• 1:24:21
  I think Chi Phi.
• 1:24:22
  Chi Phi Chapter House Association, Chi Phi Fraternity, Chi Phi Educational Trust.
• 1:24:27
  That's gonna be Chi.
• 1:24:28
  Is it Chi?
• 1:24:29
  I think.
• 1:24:30
  We should have known this before.
• 1:24:32
  Alpha Beta House Corporation of Delta Delta Delta, that's her sorority.
• 1:24:36
  So it's the fraternity where the events took place and to which all the named seven men were members at the time.
• 1:24:44
  Alpha Beta House Corporation of Delta Delta Delta, which I can't say without thinking of the old SNL skit, but okay, there we go.
• 1:24:51
  Delta Delta Delta sorority.
• 1:24:53
  Zarene Enterprise LLC, which is Mooney's Bar and Nightclub.
• 1:24:57
  Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gileo Lopez, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, Scott Kretzmar, John Doe, a faculty member, John Doe, an alumni, John Does, the executive board, and Aratio Petito.
• 1:25:10
  Those are the defendants.
• 1:25:11
  Those are the named defendants in the case.
• 1:25:13
  And we're not gonna spend any time on those late, the last four, but she's got seven men named, and she's also got the fraternity, both the specific fraternity house, the chapter where she was at, and the national organization, her specific sorority house and its national organization, Cornell the University, and a bar where she claims that even though she was marked as being underage, she got served a drink, which they deny.
• 1:25:43
  There, you point out to me when I was beginning to go down this rabbit hole, I was like, does she take no accountability for anything in her life?
• 1:25:51
  And I do think that that is a legitimate concern here for sure.
• 1:25:55
  And you said, well, this is a way of trying to extract money from as many institutions as possible.
• 1:26:00
  So the idea that Mooney's Bar and Nightclub, which at worst, at worst here, and we'll get back to this, marked her when she came in for a sorority event as being underage and therefore not legally servable.
• 1:26:15
  She claims to have been served a drink nonetheless, which she clearly must have asked for.
• 1:26:21
  And that is the basis by which she is naming them as a defendant here.
• 1:26:25
  Also, she had already drunk several drinks.
• 1:26:27
  She's changed her story a lot, but she was already quite drunk upon arriving and drank a lot more and did a lot of other substances after leaving.
• 1:26:35
  But the one drink that is being claimed to have been served to her at this bar, which they say they didn't, and everyone agrees they marked her as being underage and not servable.
• 1:26:45
  They're still listed as a defendant, presumably because they're imagined to have deep pockets.
• 1:26:50
  Yes, and because of something called a strike price, which I think the bulk of what we talk about here shouldn't be the legal details, but there are a few things here that are worth pointing out.
• 1:27:02
  One, this is a civil suit.
• 1:27:06
  So it is fundamentally about recovering money.
• 1:27:11
  And the-- In part because the DA had already refused to file criminal charges on the basis of her own statement.
• 1:27:19
  On the basis of her own statement.
• 1:27:20
  The plaintiff's statement.
• 1:27:21
  Now, it is perfectly conceivable that somebody could be exonerated at a criminal level, even in a trial and held civilly libel.
• 1:27:32
  It happens, it happened to OJ.
• 1:27:36
  So-- Do in part to the different standards of proof.
• 1:27:38
  Do, I would, well, yes, it's two different courts, but the primary thing is that the standard of proof in a criminal case is beyond a reasonable doubt.
• 1:27:47
  The standard of proof in a civil case is a preponderance of the evidence.
• 1:27:51
  So there can be doubt and more than half the evidence can go in your direction and you can recover in a civil suit.
• 1:27:59
  The issue of naming these institutions is not just about the fact that some of them are likely to have deep pockets like the National Fraternity Organization, the college, the sorority, but that for any of these defendants, there is a harm that comes from being embroiled in the litigation and therefore an incentive to pay somebody to go away.
• 1:28:29
  So that what it costs to get somebody to go away is called the strike price.
• 1:28:35
  There's not supposed to be, but there's effectively a market for harassing people with deep pockets if you have some sort of a plausible case.
• 1:28:43
  Even if they think they're going to win, the question is, would defending ourselves cost $10 million, waste five years and have our institutional damage in the headlines over that period of time?
• 1:28:58
  Or could we make it go away in a couple of news cycles, you know, pay the person, get them to sign something that says that they can't claim that we acknowledged any wrongdoing, you know.
• 1:29:10
  So anyway, there's some sort of unseemly negotiation that goes on that incentivizes the naming of parties that very likely have no liability here at all.
• 1:29:22
  Although there's probably a danger too that you can't, filing a frivolous lawsuit could potentially have cost to the plaintiff.
• 1:29:30
  So anyway, all those things.
• 1:29:32
  Well, and it's true that if you are an establishment that sells liquor near a college campus, you are constantly under threat of having your liquor license removed if you're serving underage people.
• 1:29:45
  And so the claim itself is an important one, a strong one.
• 1:29:50
  And interesting that they have not said, oh my goodness, you know, maybe someone did serve her even though she had the stamp on her hand that said she was underage.
• 1:29:58
  They've said, you know, no, no, no, we did not.
• 1:30:00
  We got that kind of place.
• 1:30:03
  Okay, so this is the top of the civil suit that was just brought.
• 1:30:08
  And I'm just, I've got a number of screenshots from it.
• 1:30:11
  It's over a hundred pages, so I've just screenshotted here.
• 1:30:16
  Starting on page 20, we have the forward.
• 1:30:18
  This is again from the civil case, the top of which we just saw.
• 1:30:23
  In August, 2022, plaintiff was 18 years old and she flew across the country from her family home to begin her studies at Cornell University with similar hopes, expectations, and trepidations of other high school graduates embarking on something so seemingly monumental.
• 1:30:38
  She arrived on a campus where the university actively promoted Greek membership as a vital part of the campus community and endorsed these organizations as well-managed, worthy pathways to new friendships and improving one's educational and professional opportunities.
• 1:30:52
  Large fraternity and sorority houses were in prominent locations on campus.
• 1:30:56
  Before and when plaintiff set foot on campus, she never knew that the university had been the scene of numerous incidents of sexual assault and rape in the months and years prior to her arrival.
• 1:31:06
  Students were afraid, protesting, and demanding reforms.
• 1:31:10
  It goes on like this.
• 1:31:13
  I get that this is a civil suit.
• 1:31:15
  This is being, this is setting the stage so that we can try to get into the mind of this young woman who two years later would, we are told, be drugged and assaulted endlessly by seven men.
• 1:31:29
  But this strikes me as such a bizarrely naive description of what the Greek system on college campuses is today, but also forever.
• 1:31:45
  In order to save time and to not read the entire thing out loud to everyone, I'll say that farther down it says, as early as two decades ago, people have been concerned about fraternities.
• 1:31:57
  And I will say that we started college in 1987 and we both have stories.
• 1:32:07
  And it was clear.
• 1:32:10
  Both of us knew going to school.
• 1:32:13
  I started at UC Santa Barbara.
• 1:32:15
  You started at Penn, another Ivy League, University of Pennsylvania, which is Ivy League school like Cornell.
• 1:32:21
  And I doubt that you want to repeat the whole story that you went through right now, but I'm gonna give you that opportunity in a second.
• 1:32:29
  I will say that I knew enough about what happened in the Greek system to know that I wanted no part of it.
• 1:32:37
  And furthermore, even though I spent time as a freshman going to parties and enjoying social events in my dorm, I never once set foot in a fraternity on that campus.
• 1:32:50
  Never once.
• 1:32:51
  I remember walking around town with my roommate who I was lucky I happened to adore her and she and I spent time walking around town and we'd get beckoned, like come have a, get a solo cup of beer and then come on in.
• 1:33:04
  And occasionally we'd accept a solo cup of beer.
• 1:33:05
  Like, no, we do not go in those doors because the doors of fraternities are dangerous.
• 1:33:11
  Are they all, are all the men in fraternities dangerous?
• 1:33:13
  No, they are not.
• 1:33:15
  But the idea that this is news, like the only way this makes sense as a forward for a young woman going to an Ivy league school in 2022 when she was starting is if there's also a class component to this story that we have not heard anything about.
• 1:33:36
  If she was first in her family to go to college, had no experience in any way with any universities at all and really had no idea was that level of naive, which I don't think is true.
• 1:33:49
  So the prospect of being as naive as she is purported to have been about what the dangers of these single sex institutions that are lauded in many places where they exist, but are also understood to be, you know, places where depravity and debauchery happen doesn't make any sense.
• 1:34:09
  Yes, it also doesn't make any sense in light of what she goes on to report about her own participation in the event in question.
• 1:34:19
  This is not-- Well, that's two years later.
• 1:34:21
  She's had two years to see what's going on.
• 1:34:23
  Right, but the point is, why is this being portrayed this way in a lawsuit?
• 1:34:28
  Her point is I didn't know that I was in danger and Cornell had an obligation to warn me.
• 1:34:34
  And the point is, well, at the point you're claiming something happened, you were hardly a naive young woman.
• 1:34:40
  It's two years later.
• 1:34:41
  Yeah, so-- And you're in a sorority yourself at this point.
• 1:34:44
  Right, so anyway, it's nonsense that she could be unaware.
• 1:34:49
  You know, there obviously is something, you know, the nature of the fraternity system is that you're talking about groups of men who have chosen to affiliate with each other under the banner of brotherhood.
• 1:35:08
  These are men who have established a kind of loyalty to each other and you as a woman going into their domain, you have to, you gotta just basically be aware of the nature of men that they pose a danger to you.
• 1:35:26
  And, you know, that's not to say, you know, most men wouldn't and I would argue many can't that by the time they've been properly acculturated, they wouldn't find sexual assault enticing.
• 1:35:38
  But you're walking into a domain where you're by definition outnumbered and, you know, it's impossible to be as naive as she's portraying herself as being and it's also just not in keeping with what she clearly herself did by anyone's account.
• 1:36:01
  Move on?
• 1:36:01
  Yeah.
• 1:36:03
  So this is her description, her lawyer's description in the civil suit now, two years, almost two years after it happened, we will get to her statement at the time later, which you will see is different.
• 1:36:17
  But her description in the civil suit is partially, I'm not reading the whole thing.
• 1:36:22
  While on the couch, defendant Ingalls and Newell began passing around a plastic bag containing a white powdery substance claimed to be ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic with hallucinogenic properties.
• 1:36:32
  Defendants Ingalls and Newell then pressured plaintiff into starting the alleged ketamine with them, a drug she had never done before.
• 1:36:38
  During this time, defendant Ingalls and Newell also applied plaintiff with marijuana and Jamaican liquor, believed to be some type of high proof rum.
• 1:36:45
  Soon after they began engaging in sexual acts with plaintiff all without her consent.
• 1:36:49
  During the assault, defendant Ingalls forced oral sex on plaintiff while defendant Newell forced vaginal intercourse on her from behind.
• 1:36:56
  Throughout the assault, defendant Newell slapped plaintiff on the buttocks multiple times resulting in bruising.
• 1:37:01
  If that is the story, looks like right, right?
• 1:37:06
  But as we will see, that story has changed quite a lot from what was originally suggested and from what she attested.
• 1:37:15
  So I hate to be this way, but I would say that story is consistent with rape, but there are certainly things, that story could be true and it could not be rape because it depends on what's the plaintiff here believes is required in terms of consent.
• 1:37:36
  But I think in this case, it's just easier than that because her original statement, which we'll get to, says,"Whenever I said no, they stopped.
• 1:37:48
  I willingly had the ketamine multiple times.
• 1:37:51
  I willingly..." So she engages, this is the first threesome she engages in two more threesomes with a total of four guys over the course of several hours, all of which she explicitly remembers consenting to with the possible exception of the fourth guy who was in the third threesome, which he just doesn't exactly remember what happened, but then no one claims to exactly remember what happened because by this time, we're many, many hours into a ketamine and alcohol fueled sexual experience in like the second or third room of the frat house that they've been in because they keep moving around.
• 1:38:24
  And again, in the original statement that she made to the police, when she went to them, having decided at that point, two weeks after it had happened that now it was consensual, still her statement reveals that nothing criminal had happened.
• 1:38:39
  Okay, so based on this, which is the new version in 2026 of what happened in 2024, you have this line as well in the civil suit.
• 1:38:50
  "At all relevant times, defendant Ingalls had a duty to take reasonable steps to protect plaintiff Doe from foreseeable harm when plaintiff was in his care, custody and control, including when plaintiff was a full-time undergraduate student at Cornell University and was using Xy chapters facilities, locations and equipment." I include this because this phrase repeats many, many, many, many times throughout the civil suit.
• 1:39:15
  Care, custody and control.
• 1:39:18
  Apparently, the plaintiff was in the care, custody and control of not just Ingalls, but all other six named members of this frat house.
• 1:39:26
  She was in the care, custody and control of not just the local chapter, but the national chapter of her own sorority.
• 1:39:32
  She was in the care, I believe, she was in the care, custody and control of the fraternity.
• 1:39:36
  She was in the care, custody and control of Mooney's, the bar.
• 1:39:39
  She was in the care, custody and control of Cornell.
• 1:39:43
  "Was she not at any moment under her own care, custody or control?
• 1:39:47
  Has she no agency?
• 1:39:48
  Has she no ability to take responsibility for anything that happened?" And again, if she had been actually assaulted, non-consensually, that's a different situation.
• 1:40:04
  But that still doesn't mean that the entire world is responsible for you and you are not responsible for you.
• 1:40:12
  The math doesn't work out.
• 1:40:13
  The idea that Ingalls, who I think, frankly, is the most despicable of the defendants here, he is the one with whom she actually had a prior sexual relationship, was romantically interested, was interested in that first threesome and the last one, which also included him.
• 1:40:28
  And at the point that he almost passes out because he's had too much drug and drink, she stops the sexual activity she's involved in to go tend to him.
• 1:40:36
  Like, she actually likes this guy.
• 1:40:38
  She's got terrible taste in men, but he's supposed to have her care, custody and control in his mind and she isn't supposed to have it in hers.
• 1:40:47
  Well, and-- It makes no sense.
• 1:40:52
  The whole thing makes no sense.
• 1:40:53
  It requires a kind of permanent double standard.
• 1:40:59
  And the thing that, I didn't know what to think about the case until I heard that she declined, several things were proposed to her, she declined, and in each case, that was the end of it.
• 1:41:16
  Every time she said no, whatever was happening stopped.
• 1:41:20
  Right, which raises the question, which I think is dispositive across the entire thing, could she at any moment have gotten up and walked out if she chose to and there's no reason to think she couldn't have, right?
• 1:41:35
  So the idea that she was in the control of so and so is directly at odds with-- Well, no, I mean, I think you're misunderstanding it.
• 1:41:42
  The idea here is that she was supposed to be in the care custody and control of all of these men and the institution and the frat house and the university.
• 1:41:51
  This is not that they were controlling her.
• 1:41:52
  The idea, this is being brought up as what should have been happening.
• 1:41:57
  She was supposed to be in everyone's care custody and control except for herself.
• 1:42:02
  She had no responsibility, she was not in her own care custody and control.
• 1:42:06
  She was supposedly in all of theirs and they therefore betrayed her trust in them because they did not take care custody and control for her in an appropriate way.
• 1:42:17
  That is the analysis here and it makes no sense.
• 1:42:20
  Yeah, I'm not sure we're disagreeing, but I just, obviously central to this is the question of consent and-- It is, we'll get there.
• 1:42:31
  I do think that consent culture is part of the problem.
• 1:42:35
  Yes, clearly.
• 1:42:36
  Of course, because unfortunately for all of them, really, the fact that whenever she said no, they said no and then the thing, I mean, the fact that whenever she said no, they stopped.
• 1:42:50
  And she continued to affirmatively request things and stay and move rooms and all of this and when asked, are you okay, said yes, this sort of thing.
• 1:43:01
  All suggests that consent culture is not sufficient, but that doesn't mean that that means we need more of these kinds of guardrails.
• 1:43:12
  Those guardrails aren't the right kinds of things.
• 1:43:14
  Yeah, the guardrails are not, and in fact, there is now conceivable set of guardrails that will work for a culture like this.
• 1:43:23
  Not once you've reduced sex, again, with the reductionism, not once you've reduced sex to the mechanics and the bodies.
• 1:43:31
  And in this case, in this case, she actually did have feelings for the one guy and she went hoping to maybe repeat some of what they'd done before and by the end of the night, she sang to that one guy still, oh, can't it just be us?
• 1:43:49
  She made a terrible choice in being attracted to that one guy and he made a series of disgusting choices and how he encouraged her and portrayed her to his fraternity brothers.
• 1:44:05
  But she was a sentin.
• 1:44:10
  No, it is, it is also, I think, important that her attitude towards what happened changed after the event was over.
• 1:44:25
  Yeah, and we'll get there.
• 1:44:27
  Yeah, because the point is, regret is not the same thing as a lack of consent.
• 1:44:33
  Yeah, being ashamed, being embarrassed, wanting your reputation back, regret.
• 1:44:41
  You can have all of those things, but you don't get to destroy other people when you have them.
• 1:44:47
  I mean, not only do you not get to, but at the level of the way the law works, it can't be that, oh, I didn't violate the law until you thought something weeks later, right?
• 1:45:04
  Either, I have to be able to know what the law is so I don't violate it.
• 1:45:07
  And the point is it can't be contingent on what you decide later.
• 1:45:10
  Which is why her statement, which was still two weeks later, her statement two weeks later is completely different from this one.
• 1:45:20
  Okay, let's continue on.
• 1:45:21
  This is again, the civil suit that was just brought in September of 2026.
• 1:45:26
  Defendant Cornell, so this last language, defendant Ingalls, who's the guy that the plaintiff was actually interested in, has a duty, had a duty to take reasonable steps to protect plaintiff Doe from foreseeable harm when plaintiff was in his care, custody and control, et cetera.
• 1:45:41
  Defendant Cornell discriminated against plaintiff on the basis of, remember, Cornell's a university.
• 1:45:46
  Defendant Cornell discriminated against plaintiff on the basis of her gender in violation of the New York State human rights legislation, something like that, by subjecting plaintiff to disparate treatment based upon her gender, including but not limited to assault and or harassment and rape.
• 1:46:06
  She is holding the university at which she had matriculated a couple of years before, responsible for subjecting her to sexual assault and or harassment and rape, when what she did was she walked of her own free will while already, depending on which moment you want to believe her, was already 10 drinks in or five drinks in or totally sober to meet Ingalls with whom she was interested in continuing a sexual relationship, and now is claiming that in fact, he was raping her.
• 1:46:36
  Well, it's such an odd construction.
• 1:46:38
  Cornell was discriminating against her based on her gender.
• 1:46:42
  Like because she was, because she's vulnerable to an assault because she's a woman, that's Cornell's fault?
• 1:46:51
  Cornell's conduct, I continue reading, was so outrageous, shocking, despicable and contemptible that it exceeds the reasonable bounds of decency as measured by what the average member of the community would tolerate and demonstrates an utter disregard of the consequences that would follow as a result.
• 1:47:07
  Plaintiff is entitled to the recovery of both compensatory and punitive damages from Cornell.
• 1:47:15
  That at all relevant times, Mooney's, this is the bar where she was underage when she went in, she got a hand stamp to attest to that, she claimed she was served one drink nevertheless, Mooney says, no, they did not.
• 1:47:26
  That at all relevant times, Mooney's held itself out to the public and more particularly to plaintiff herein as possessing the proper degree of safety measure to adequately protect its invitees and or guests and to use reasonable care and diligence in its monitoring and policing of Mooney's bar nightclub and those utilizing the premises they're at.
• 1:47:45
  That at all relevant times, Mooney's, its employees, servants and or agents served plaintiff with alcoholic beverages, even though she had an X on both her hands signifying she was under 21 years old.
• 1:47:55
  How many times does a person have to keep trying to break the rules before it becomes their responsibility that they broke the rules?
• 1:48:05
  Even assuming that she's not lying here and that Mooney's is, which is a big assumption, even assuming that she did actually get served a drink, having had her hand stamped apparently on both hands to indicate that she was underage, at what point is that in fact her responsibility?
• 1:48:21
  Well, okay, devil's advocate here.
• 1:48:25
  There is a way it could have gone down that they actually, I mean, obviously she goes on to do ketamine, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:48:35
  I don't see a lot of culpability here, but the way that they could be a little bit culpable is if she got her hands stamped with the underage X and then a server said, ah, I'll serve you one, right?
• 1:48:49
  Which I'm sure happens places.
• 1:48:51
  It may not have happened there.
• 1:48:53
  Probably not because-- I'm not saying it happened here.
• 1:48:56
  Does that ever happen?
• 1:48:57
  I am sure it happens.
• 1:48:58
  Well, more likely what happens is somebody orders a drink, hands it over and the bar is not policing.
• 1:49:06
  Yeah, so one can easily imagine something like that habit.
• 1:49:09
  But if a server decided, I'm going to serve you even though you're underage and then you go on to be assaulted and there's some argument that you were one drink over whatever line it is that would have allowed you to be clear headed, right?
• 1:49:23
  Then you can see the argument.
• 1:49:24
  But my guess would be, no, no, no, they probably did not serve her a drink in spite of the X's on her hands.
• 1:49:30
  Maybe she concealed them.
• 1:49:32
  Maybe somebody handed her a drink.
• 1:49:34
  Again though, like this is, we are back in this, it's bright of the state, it's bright of the institution's territory.
• 1:49:44
  At what point?
• 1:49:46
  Like do women really want to go back to being handed off from daddy to husband and never having any autonomy over their own decisions and choices?
• 1:49:55
  I don't think so.
• 1:49:56
  I don't want that.
• 1:49:57
  This is like nothing in the, granted, okay, it's a legal case and it has to come across as very black and white, but the idea that she has no agency at any point, even when she is actively trying to get things that she later regrets, none of it was her fault somehow.
• 1:50:16
  Well, what the irony here is this young woman has gone off to college where one is ostensibly supposed to accumulate an understanding of the world that allows you to function as an adult in a world of gray area and nuance and all of that.
• 1:50:31
  What she's asking for is Disneyland.
• 1:50:35
  She's asking for an environment where it's impossible to hurt yourself because you're being monitored every second, that every rivet on every fence has been thought about from a legal perspective.
• 1:50:48
  So you can afford to wander around in a daze because the environment has been purged of dangers.
• 1:50:55
  And here she is, she's effectively asking the university to have purged the environment, even the local bars, of danger so that she can stumble into a fraternity, do drugs she's never done before, be in a room full of men, engage in sexual activity, and that she should be safe throughout this entire thing.
• 1:51:17
  Like what planet are you from?
• 1:51:20
  You are engaging a dangerous world with dangers in it as if somebody's responsibility was to make it perfectly safe for you, even as you're there to learn how to function in a dangerous world.
• 1:51:32
  Like what kind of adult were you gonna become?
• 1:51:34
  Yeah, well, in part what we learn here is in her original statement, which again, I'll read part of, is that the kind of adult that she was trying to become was one of a lot of lies by our culture about sex positivity, stemming from sort of third-enth way of feminism, that tells a woman that no matter what she wants at any moment is just fine and she can change her mind afterwards.
• 1:52:02
  And frankly, the people with whom she was involved don't matter, the only thing that matters is what she thinks about it now.
• 1:52:10
  And again, there's a couple of these defendants who I have no sympathy for whatsoever.
• 1:52:16
  I think they were despicable to her and disgusting and I can't imagine why she was interested in them in the first place.
• 1:52:23
  But the institutions here and at least three and perhaps most of the young men involved don't seem to have done much or anything wrong.
• 1:52:38
  And here we have the one case for which we have the most evidence is this Scott Kretschmar character.
• 1:52:47
  So this is, we've already seen this paragraph.
• 1:52:50
  "At all relevant times, defendant Ingalls had a duty "to take reasonable steps to protect plaintiff Doe "from foreseeable harm when plaintiff was in his care,"custody and control, including when plaintiff "was a full-time undergraduate student, et cetera." Well, that paragraph repeats for all seven of the named men, including Kretschmar.
• 1:53:07
  Defendant Kretschmar had a duty to take reasonable steps to protect plaintiff Doe from foreseeable harm when plaintiff was in his care, custody and control.
• 1:53:16
  Near the end of again, the civil suit, we have this about Kretschmar.
• 1:53:21
  "At all times relevant, defendant Kretschmar engaged "in reckless, extreme and outrageous conduct "by sexually assaulting plaintiff "while plaintiff was incapacitated "and could not possibly consent." Remember this is from September, 2026, okay?
• 1:53:35
  About events that took place in October of 2024.
• 1:53:38
  "At all times relevant, defendant Kretschmar's misconduct "was shocking and outrageous that it exceeds "the reasonable bounds of decency as measured"by what the average member or the community would tolerate "and demonstrates an utter disregard by defendant Kretschmar "of the consequences that would follow.
• 1:53:52
  "At all times relevant, defendant Kretschmar knew "that this reckless, extreme and outrageous conduct "would inflict severe emotional "and psychological distress on plaintiff "and plaintiff did in fact suffer severe emotional "and psychological distress as a result, "including severe mental anguish, humiliation "and emotional and physical distress.
• 1:54:09
  "As a result of defendant Kretschmar's reckless, "extreme and outrageous conduct, "plaintiffs suffered general and specialized damages.
• 1:54:15
  "The amount of damages sought here "and exceeds the jurisdictional limits "of all other courts, "which would otherwise have jurisdiction." Here I'm gonna switch to screenshots from Kretschmar's petition filed in March of this year, six months before the civil suit was fired by, filed by the plaintiff.
• 1:54:36
  In this petition filed by Kretschmar, he is now John Doe.
• 1:54:40
  So it's a little bit confusing, but he's now John Doe.
• 1:54:44
  And this was filed by him after he went to an extensive investigation, a hearing panel by Cornell.
• 1:54:49
  And that document is also available although it's highly redacted.
• 1:54:53
  This document is available and I'll post in the show notes, there's a sub-stack that has made most of these documents available and that's where I got most of them.
• 1:55:03
  Here we have, so what happened is Kretschmar was brought before this hearing panel by Cornell on the charges of sexual exploitation and sexual assault.
• 1:55:14
  And he was cleared of both of those, but then he was found, I'm not sure the right word is guilty here because this is a panel, not a court of law, found guilty of attempted sexual exploitation, I believe.
• 1:55:28
  And so this petition he filed said, "How can you find me guilty of something for which I was not actually accused?" Reminder, Kretschmar says to Cornell,"You found me not guilty," again, I'm not sure I'm using exactly the right language here, "of the two charges you did bring me up against, which were sexual assault and sexual exploitation." Factual findings made by Cornell in the hearing, which Kretschmar's lawyers presumably are here laying out.
• 1:55:58
  The factual findings made by Cornell's hearing panel are not disputed for the purpose of this Article 78 proceeding.
• 1:56:04
  The panel found that Doe, Kretschmar, was at the fraternity house that night.
• 1:56:08
  He saw a message to the fraternity's Snapchat group that said, "Free pussy and alum pick up," alum being the room that she was in at the time, and that he went to the alumni room to see what was going on.
• 1:56:20
  The panel also found that prior to entering alumni, the room, Doe responded, Kretschmar, responded to the Snapchat message by writing, "The alumni shit is not a bit.
• 1:56:29
  First-hand point of view, not a bit." He then somehow explains what this means.
• 1:56:34
  He says it was juvenile.
• 1:56:37
  He doesn't stand by it.
• 1:56:38
  He's sorry he sent those messages.
• 1:56:40
  I still can't really make sense of what he means there.
• 1:56:42
  But-- I think he's saying that the earlier message is accurate.
• 1:56:48
  Yeah, yeah, I think so too.
• 1:56:50
  But anyway, that's not where we're gonna focus here.
• 1:56:53
  The panel further found that, upon entering alumni at the room, Doe saw Roe, Kretschmar saw the plaintiff, the woman, sitting on a bed and speaking with a member of the fraternity.
• 1:57:04
  Roe was fully covered with sheets, and Doe, Kretschmar, asked them if they were okay.
• 1:57:09
  And after both said that they were, Doe left the room.
• 1:57:12
  That is according to what Cornell's disciplinary hearing panel found and attested to, okay?
• 1:57:19
  Furthermore, the hearing panel had access to a voluminous investigative record containing inter-alia, text messages, witness statements, and a medical hair follicle test confirming that Doe tested negative for ketamine.
• 1:57:33
  Cornell finds Doe not responsible for all the charges brought against him.
• 1:57:37
  Based on the record and making credible and factual determinations, the hearing panel determined that Doe was not responsible for sexually assaulting or sexually exploiting Roe.
• 1:57:46
  It found that there was no evidence that Doe intentionally viewed Roe in a state of undress, or that he touched his nose to her naked torso while inhaling ketamine off her.
• 1:57:55
  They have now claimed that by responding to the text and going to the room, he was attempting sexual exploitation, and that's why that piece of the thing stands, which I think is absurd, because really, given what Cornell found he did, you could plausibly, and I think likely, understand what he was doing as an attempt to assess whether or not what was going on in that room was in fact okay.
• 1:58:19
  And that holds for the same, that holds for two of the other people named here as well, that three of the seven who are being publicly raked over the coals for doping and gang raping a woman for hours on end aren't even accused of doing anything sexual to her.
• 1:58:39
  Three of them are accused of asking if they could and then snorting lines of ketamine off of her naked body, which at least in one case, he's demonstrated that he couldn't have, because apparently ketamine stays in the bloodstream and his hair follicle test came back negative.
• 1:58:57
  Okay.
• 1:58:59
  Now, if I can have my screen back for a second, while I find where I wanna go next.
• 1:59:05
  Now we have the district attorney who at the point that the civil case is being brought, you can show my screen here, at the point that the civil case is brought in mid September, many people start going at the DA, who in 2024 looked at the statement brought by Doe, the plaintiff and said, there's nothing criminal here.
• 1:59:36
  It's gross.
• 1:59:37
  I don't like what happened, but there's nothing criminal here.
• 1:59:41
  When the civil case is brought, he starts getting a lot of questions.
• 1:59:45
  Some of them not so nicely phrased about why the hell he didn't file criminal charges.
• 1:59:51
  So this nine page document is his response to that, in which he says, look, I read through a single spaced six page document that was Jane Doe, the plaintiff statement at the time.
• 2:00:02
  It had several of her handwritten comments on it.
• 2:00:06
  And she signed it at the bottom saying that this was absolutely the truth that she understood at the time.
• 2:00:11
  And this happened a couple of weeks after the events in question in October of 2024.
• 2:00:17
  He says, I can't without going through a lengthy process, share that entire document with you.
• 2:00:22
  At this point, several media outlets have had it, have access to it and say that what he has extracted here is a match for what they have and that it does honor to the overall sense of that document.
• 2:00:37
  So I'm gonna share his overall statement, the DA's overall statement, and then a few of the paragraphs that Doe herself wrote about what happened.
• 2:00:47
  Nearer the time of when it happened.
• 2:00:50
  He writes, the DA writes contemporaneously now, Jane Doe's sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped.
• 2:01:02
  On the contrary, Jane Doe's statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious and consensual.
• 2:01:09
  My office obviously did not and could not have based on November, 2024 decision on the allegations of a lawsuit that would not be filed until nearly two years later.
• 2:01:19
  Furthermore, I have never been contacted by Jane Doe's attorneys.
• 2:01:23
  Not to inform me the original statement was inaccurate and not to ask me to reconsider our decision.
• 2:01:28
  Rather, I reached out to Jane Doe's attorneys after the lawsuit was filed to understand the discrepancy between the original statement and the lawsuit's allegations and the proper path forward in light of the lawsuit's allegations.
• 2:01:39
  He goes on at some appropriate length.
• 2:01:42
  He says what I already said that she provided six page single spiced type written statement that she signs saying, I've read this statement consisting of six pages and the facts contained here and are true and correct.
• 2:01:56
  I understand that making a false written statement is punishable as a class A misdemeanor pursuant to the penal law of the state of New York.
• 2:02:04
  Here's some of what she said about the night in question.
• 2:02:08
  On the evening of October 19th, 2024, so this is her reporting it to the police.
• 2:02:13
  It's why it's in the third person, but she has signed this and attested to its truth.
• 2:02:18
  On the evening of October 19th, 2024, Jane Doe walked the approximately one mile distance from Lock 10 in the city of Ithaca, the Chi-Fi fraternity at 107 Edgemore Lane to meet her friend, mail number one.
• 2:02:30
  She had made plans to meet mail number one earlier in the week and quote, had been texting mail number one that she was on the way.
• 2:02:36
  Jane Doe described her level of intoxication as a five out of 10 when she arrived at the fraternity.
• 2:02:41
  While there Jane Doe opened one previously an open can of beer, she and mail number one danced a little in a way that was definitely flirtatious in nature.
• 2:02:50
  Mail number one brought Jane Doe to a quiet area and asked how Jane Doe would feel about having a threesome with two male partners.
• 2:02:57
  Jane Doe agreed due to how attracted she was to mail number one on top of her drunken curiousness.
• 2:03:03
  When she learned that mail number two would be the third participant, Jane Doe remembered being excited because she thought that mail number one and mail number two wanted to have a threesome meant that they were gay.
• 2:03:12
  The three engaged in a threesome involving oral and vaginal sex in a room of the fraternity.
• 2:03:17
  At the start of the threesome, Jane Doe described her intoxication level as five or six out of 10 and that she was pretty okay with having this threesome.
• 2:03:25
  The sexual conduct ended when Jane Doe noticed that mail number one appeared really sleepy and was no longer fully erect.
• 2:03:30
  She told mail number two they needed to stop having sex or to make sure mail number one was okay.
• 2:03:35
  Mail number two then stopped having sex with Jane Doe.
• 2:03:38
  It continues.
• 2:03:39
  Again, as I said, she alleges and actually the men involved, I don't think, counter her claim that there were a series of three threesomes over the course of the night involving mail number one and two and then two and three and then one and four.
• 2:03:55
  Males five, six and seven were never involved in those behaviors at all, even though their pictures are being interspersed with the other four as if they were all guilty of things which frankly, the idea that she had drugs forced on her is not consistent with this original statement.
• 2:04:15
  The idea that she had sexual activities forced on her is not consistent with this original statement.
• 2:04:21
  And would men potentially lie to protect themselves from such egregious claims against them, of course, but there's so much consistency both then and now between the accounts with regard to what it was that she did consent to and whether or not people stopped when they started to do things that she didn't want, that it seems a better bet to believe that her statement a couple of weeks afterwards, which again, was different from what she was feeling the day after, as again, we'll see from an LA Times report, is more accurate with regard to how it actually went down.
• 2:05:09
  Interesting, the DA in explaining why he didn't end up filing charges mentions that her legal team did not reach out to inspire a, a reevaluation, which actually suggests something, I think it doesn't nail it down, but it's pretty grotesque.
• 2:05:40
  The idea that at some level, the whole point here is the discrepancy between the standards of proof and maybe even the value of the public outcry in getting a judgment here, that the point is this isn't really about the legal culpability of the defendants, that at some level, once upon a time, a woman might have gone to college in hopes of finding a mate that would solve her life trajectory problems, right?
• 2:06:21
  That was not the craziest thing in the world to do.
• 2:06:27
  In the post-Nth wave feminism world, where it is imagined that one probably, it's not obvious that you're even looking for a mate at all, and it's not obvious what careers are gonna make any sense, a big judgment could solve her problem economically going forward, and the idea of not being interested in the criminal case anymore, but now being very interested in a civil case at the same time that basically will evaluate the same facts against a very different legal standard, that's pretty suspicious, right?
• 2:07:10
  It's not that the facts of the case became clearer to her, and now that she understands it, she wants justice.
• 2:07:19
  Yeah.
• 2:07:21
  Go ahead.
• 2:07:23
  This is actually, you can show my screen here, this is New York Times, not LA Times, both of them have done some actually decent reporting on this and some not very good reporting, but this is in the days after the October 19th, 20th event, if anyone asks about this, Jane Doe said, according to the roommate's testimony, say it didn't happen, the roommate was plainly concerned, initially she said Jane Doe was kind of recounting it as this crazy thing that she had done, as the days went on, the roommate continued, I think she kind of came to realize that it was something bad, and that she didn't really enjoy her time there, on October 25th, Mr.
• 2:08:01
  Ingalls, that's dude number one, defendant number one, Ingalls texted Jane Doe, Jane Doe replied that Mr.
• 2:08:11
  Newell, that's number two, deaf told people, two days later, she sent Mr.
• 2:08:16
  Ingalls an image of the forum post accusing high five gang rape, question marks she wrote, ridiculous, Mr.
• 2:08:22
  Ingalls, I'm gonna report that.
• 2:08:25
  As Halloween approached, again, remember this happened, October 19th, 20th of 2024, Halloween approached Jane Doe's roommates told investigators, her understanding of what had happened to her appeared to have shifted.
• 2:08:36
  Around October 28th, Mr.
• 2:08:37
  Ingalls was on the phone with Jane Doe, and according to one of her roommates who said she overheard the conversation, he apologized to her.
• 2:08:43
  But rather than assure him everything was okay, Jane Doe took a different tone.
• 2:08:47
  "How could you let this happen?" The roommate recalled her saying.
• 2:08:50
  "I think she wanted it to be consensual," the roommate told investigators, looking back on how Jane Doe had processed the alleged assault.
• 2:08:56
  The roommate told investigators that Jane Doe had been sexually assaulted before, which made it particularly hard for her to talk openly about what had happened, goes on.
• 2:09:05
  High five, the paternity was preparing for a Halloween party, and Jane Doe was eager to attend.
• 2:09:11
  So this, even as her roommates are now saying now, she knows it wasn't consensual, but she wants to go back there a week and a half later?
• 2:09:21
  So the fraternity was preparing for a Halloween party, and Jane Doe was eager to attend.
• 2:09:26
  Text messages included in the investigation show Mr.
• 2:09:28
  Ingalls assuring Jane Doe that he and other fraternity members wanted her to be there.
• 2:09:34
  The men, one of the men that she is accusing of drugging her and gang raping her is assuring her in a way that she feels heartening, that he and the others want her there, want her back there.
• 2:09:49
  "High five, it's your house and you're welcome here," he wrote, relaying the views of the fraternity's president, who was not among those accused of sexual assault.
• 2:09:56
  "Thank you, I really appreciate that," Jane Doe responded.
• 2:10:00
  "Heart, I'll bring my SIGs tomorrow." But then Jane Doe received a phone call from fraternity's president, according to the text messages.
• 2:10:08
  She was disinvited from the party.
• 2:10:10
  "It was for her own good," he said.
• 2:10:12
  Jane Doe sent a biting text to Mr.
• 2:10:14
  Ingalls.
• 2:10:14
  "I knew this was gonna happen," she wrote.
• 2:10:16
  "The woman will always get the short end of the stick.
• 2:10:18
  "Y'all aren't my friends.
• 2:10:19
  "Y'all are covering your asses." By November 3rd, Jane Doe appears to have concluded that she was assaulted at the October party.
• 2:10:26
  She sent a text to Mr.
• 2:10:27
  Newell.
• 2:10:28
  "Let's be clear that 90% of what happened that night "was not consensual.
• 2:10:31
  "I was given more key than I can remember," referring to the ketamine.
• 2:10:35
  She said, "Using your short-hand for ketamine.
• 2:10:37
  "And I know that I told you I felt uncomfortable "and I didn't know anyone in the room." That in itself is strange because Newell was second to the room as Ingalls, who she did know.
• 2:10:48
  The text continued with her telling him that one of her only memories was doing ketamine off of his penis in front of everyone like a sex doll worker.
• 2:10:55
  Four days later, on November 7th, according to the documents, Jane Doe went to an emergency room in Ithaca and requested a rape kit.
• 2:11:01
  (Chuckles) The whole scene is so depraved and sad and no one here is ever gonna have the life that they might've had after these events.
• 2:11:23
  But it doesn't look like anyone forced drugs on this young woman.
• 2:11:29
  It doesn't look like anyone raped her.
• 2:11:32
  It doesn't look like assault.
• 2:11:36
  It looks like young people growing up in a culture where they think they have the simple reduction of static answers to what to do to make sure everything goes okay.
• 2:11:49
  So the man always stopped whenever she said no.
• 2:11:52
  And then they did something else.
• 2:11:54
  And she said yes.
• 2:11:56
  She consented, she assented.
• 2:12:00
  But she spent hours doing things that at the time she was conscious and not coerced.
• 2:12:08
  And now we're seeing reports of her jumping up from the bed and flexing doing bodybuilder poses.
• 2:12:15
  She does say at one point that she agreed to more ketamine at some point because she thought, well, maybe I'll pass out.
• 2:12:23
  And then if they have sex with me, that would be rape.
• 2:12:26
  So there's something in her head about the situation is out of control.
• 2:12:31
  I don't know how to fix it.
• 2:12:32
  And I don't know what I'm doing here, which is all consistent with a confused young woman who walked into a situation with someone who she thought was into her.
• 2:12:44
  And the only thing he's into is being in her and having his frat brothers enjoy her as well.
• 2:12:53
  So there's no relationship here at all.
• 2:13:01
  The story is a window into our very broken culture.
• 2:13:07
  And there are a couple of things that I think, some very uncomfortable things that I think need to be said.
• 2:13:16
  One, every time I delve into the facts of this case, my sense is to this Jane Doe, no, you're exactly wrong about what happened.
• 2:13:29
  And every additional fact makes it worse, right?
• 2:13:33
  The fact that she changed her mind afterwards, she obviously had a conversation, where she relayed this as some lark and some other women were like, wait a minute, that doesn't sound so good.
• 2:13:45
  Oh, maybe it wasn't so good.
• 2:13:48
  And so the point is that's not on these guys I find, yes, there's a distinction between the better of the guys and the more horrible of the guys, but the whole culture on both sides is completely broken.
• 2:14:05
  But I wanna point to a few things that I think are not going to be covered anywhere else.
• 2:14:11
  And I would like to ask people listening to this or watching it to be careful in their research and in response to it, because it will be easy to jump to conclusions that are unjustified.
• 2:14:24
  And I want you to hear what I'm actually trying to tell you.
• 2:14:28
  The first thing to say is that rape carries a stigma based on what the crime once was, and that many things about recent history have changed it.
• 2:14:45
  Now, anybody who knows me knows that I am the last person on earth who wishes to excuse rape.
• 2:14:54
  I think rape is a utterly despicable act.
• 2:15:00
  However, there's a reason that we speak about rape and murder, right?
• 2:15:06
  The most horrible crimes.
• 2:15:09
  Well, why are they the most horrible crimes?
• 2:15:10
  Well, murder, you take someone and you deprive them of whatever life they might've had, of all the things they might've accomplished, of all the ways they might've had.
• 2:15:21
  So you are taking something from someone else of profound value.
• 2:15:28
  And we instinctively understand that the murder of a child deprives them of a much longer life with a great many more joys and accomplishments than the murder of somebody who is at the end.
• 2:15:44
  Well, what is rape?
• 2:15:47
  Rape is theft of much of the wellbeing that a woman possesses.
• 2:15:58
  Let's talk about the consequences, the reason that this is a profound violation.
• 2:16:06
  Imagine a rape that took place in, you know, 1800 or something like that prior to modern technology, prior to modern mores and all of that.
• 2:16:16
  Well, what are the consequences for a woman who is raped?
• 2:16:21
  One of the consequences is the possibility that she will be impregnated and that having been impregnated, she will have no practical option.
• 2:16:31
  She will be, she will probably give birth to that child.
• 2:16:37
  And because that child is every bit as much related to her as a child that she had with a partner, she is in a position where she is very likely to end up raising that child.
• 2:16:50
  So all of the expense that goes into raising a child to adulthood is something that a rapist is attempting to steal from that woman, right?
• 2:16:58
  He's attempting to inflict an offspring on her, whether he knows that that's what he's doing or not.
• 2:17:03
  Presumably most rapists are motivated by much more proximate rewards, but the reason that evolution has created this instinct in men is because it does produce offspring and we are all the product of many rapes throughout history.
• 2:17:18
  We all carry it latently or otherwise.
• 2:17:21
  So the attempt to steal all of that labor and wellbeing is there, but then there's also the consequences of having been raped.
• 2:17:32
  Having been raped, especially if made pregnant, is going to radically reduce in 1800, a woman's ability to establish a relationship that would then produce children with a partner, right?
• 2:17:50
  Her ability to establish that relationship is also taken from her.
• 2:17:55
  There's the immense trauma, which frankly, I think in a clear cut case of rape, doesn't go away for most people.
• 2:18:03
  It's something that they struggle with for the rest of their lives and maybe they come to some kind of peace with it, but the point is it's a permanent injury.
• 2:18:13
  If she does manage to find a partner and produce children of her own, now she's got a mixed brood, some full siblings and some half siblings, which is going to evolutionarily increase the likelihood of them not cooperating and loving each other in the way that they might otherwise.
• 2:18:34
  So anyway, my point is all of those things that I've just described have changed in the modern era, right?
• 2:18:43
  The stigma of having been raped is radically reduced.
• 2:18:49
  The ability to not bear the child of a rapist who successfully impregnates you is now available.
• 2:19:00
  Oh, I didn't mention the disease risk.
• 2:19:01
  A rapist inflicts a disease risk on a raped person.
• 2:19:06
  That's partially reduced by virtue of the fact that bacterial infections can now be treated with antibiotics.
• 2:19:14
  So anyway, my point is though, if you look at all of the things that would have been taken from a woman in 1800 who had been raped and you compare them to modern times, well, as horrifying a crime as rape is, the costs to the woman have been radically reduced, but the implication of the word, the accusation which is being leveled here has remained unchanged.
• 2:19:42
  We have not gone back and reinvestigated whether or not some change has to be made in the way that we think of this crime.
• 2:19:50
  Let me add one more thing here.
• 2:19:53
  When I think about what rape is, having luckily never having been the victim of it myself, one of the most visceral things I think of is the loss of bodily autonomy and authority and agency and just not, and when I have read, and I did in the past, read a number of rape survivors' accounts of how it was that they dealt with it in the days, weeks, months, years, decades afterwards.
• 2:20:25
  It is trying to overcome not just the fear that it could happen again, but the sense like, this is mine and I get to make decisions about my own body.
• 2:20:37
  And in that context, I think this framing of the care, custody and control that everyone else was supposed to have over the plaintiff, Jane Doe, and she was not supposed to apparently have any of it over herself would seem to reverse some of the expectations as well.
• 2:20:56
  Like she wasn't taking responsibility, she didn't have autonomy.
• 2:21:01
  She doesn't claim to have been seeking care, custody or control for herself.
• 2:21:06
  She was expecting everyone else in her environs to do that for her.
• 2:21:10
  And that too would seem to change what a violation will feel like.
• 2:21:19
  If you're walking around assuming that the entire world is taking care of you, you're never responsible for your own actions.
• 2:21:25
  Everything's going fine until something happens that you decide you don't like or someone else tells you you don't like.
• 2:21:31
  And you say, oh, well then that was someone else's responsibility to keep me from doing it.
• 2:21:36
  As opposed to, oh my God, that thing just happened to me and it was horrifying and I need for that never to happen again and how do I get through this and how do I gain my sense of autonomy and agency back?
• 2:21:49
  Yeah, it's effectively, I mean, this obviously is related to the Disneyland point, but more to the point.
• 2:21:55
  It's like, and I've got a lot to say on this topic, sex is profoundly important.
• 2:22:03
  And yes, it is supposed to be extremely thrilling and rewarding, but it is not the kind of thing.
• 2:22:10
  It is a very primordial, deep, ancient thing.
• 2:22:14
  It cannot be rendered safe to have sex with strangers or people you basically, you barely know, right?
• 2:22:22
  That is not a reasonable expectation that I want the state and this college to make it possible for me to go and fuck whoever I want, whenever I want and for it to be perfectly safe and for me to feel, to be so safe that I will feel good about it days later when I recount it to somebody else.
• 2:22:39
  Sorry, that's not a thing.
• 2:22:42
  So beyond the Disneyland aspect, it's the kind of the portrayal in that court filing for the civil case.
• 2:22:54
  It's like she wants to have the kind of agency that a person has on a roller coaster, right?
• 2:23:04
  When you get on a roller coaster, and mind you, there are a lot of bad roller coasters at, you know, rinky dink fairs, do not assume they are safe because they ain't, but when you go to Six Flags or whatever and you get on a freaking roller coaster, that thing has been so thoroughly engineered and so thoroughly checked that the point is you can be a complete dumbass and you can get on that thing and there's nothing bad that can happen to you, right?
• 2:23:30
  You get on the thing, they put the harness over you and basically, do you have agency?
• 2:23:35
  Yeah, you can scream, you cannot scream, you can wave your hands like this, maybe your tit comes out, whatever it is, but the point is you're gonna get off the roller coaster at the other end, the same person that you were when you got on and that life is not like that, right?
• 2:23:48
  Sex especially is not like that.
• 2:23:50
  And so what you're-- It's not supposed to be like that.
• 2:23:52
  Right, it can't be like that and, you know-- Well, it can be if it's being treated like a slot machine, like, oh, what do I want today?
• 2:24:02
  Yes, but, okay, here's the really awful thing.
• 2:24:11
  If you follow back through the discussion that you and I have had many, many times, it's in our book, it's in our Rogan appearance, the first one, men have two reproductive strategies and women have one.
• 2:24:24
  In one of those reproductive strategies or the branch of the tree that is one of those sets of reproductive strategies, men are trying to impregnate women without taking further responsibility.
• 2:24:36
  It's a huge evolutionary bargain and it has traditionally fallen on women to prevent men from having this opportunity.
• 2:24:44
  Women guarding their own well-being should prevent men from having this opportunity and rape is the attempt to override a woman's protection of her own life from that predatory instinct of men.
• 2:24:59
  When you turn sex into recreation, you are inherently playing on that side of the tree of strategies, right?
• 2:25:10
  Men have built into them a willingness and a desire to inflict pregnancies on women who do not require them to invest further and when women are like, well, why shouldn't we enjoy the same kind of frivolousness about sex?
• 2:25:24
  You are playing with something, is it rape?
• 2:25:27
  No, but you're playing with something that is kin to rape.
• 2:25:32
  That is to say, it is kin to the male instinct to inflict pregnancies on women who do not require anything of them.
• 2:25:39
  It's the sexual equivalent of the teaching mistake of teaching to the lowest common denominator.
• 2:25:46
  Let's take men's worst mode and make it available and exciting to women.
• 2:25:52
  Right.
• 2:25:52
  As opposed to encouraging men to behave in their good mode and actually engage, therefore be able to engage in sexual behavior with intimacy that is far more exciting.
• 2:26:08
  100%.
• 2:26:10
  It gets even worse though, when the frivolous sex games that you're playing involve multiple men.
• 2:26:19
  Because as much as casual sex has a kin relationship to men either suckering women into bearing children for them without committing or overriding their consent, actual rape, what is multiparty sex with one woman and multiple men?
• 2:26:41
  What is its closest relative?
• 2:26:44
  Well, its closest relative is what happens when men gang up on women and this is especially common in war, right?
• 2:26:57
  These men who have this fraternal relationship on the battlefield find a vulnerable woman, maybe they've killed her husband and they gang rape.
• 2:27:04
  So this is, you know, if rape is men at their worst, this is the worst of the worst, right?
• 2:27:10
  And now young women wanna play with this toolkit?
• 2:27:16
  No, that's disgusting.
• 2:27:17
  Don't do it, it's not smart.
• 2:27:19
  You don't wanna encourage that in men and you don't wanna encourage it in yourself, just wrong.
• 2:27:25
  But here's where I do find Cornell in the larger culture culpable to some degree.
• 2:27:34
  Here we have a sub-stat called Take Back America Problem and this author, Jared Liederman, has found a number of documents which I also looked at but I'm just gonna read you a paragraph of his summary of one of the documents from Cornell's own sex ed program which it presumably shares with all of its undergraduates.
• 2:27:58
  The aforementioned sexual pleasure guide directed students to a checklist titled Yes, No, Maybe So, a sexual inventory stock list, a copy of which can be found on Cornell Health's website.
• 2:28:08
  It includes sex with two people at once, sex with three people at once, sex with more than three people at once, cyber sex, open sexual relationships, sex toys, blindfolding, bondage, biting, scratching, spanking and slapping for sexual pleasure, sexual clamps and sexual activity involving various bodily fluids.
• 2:28:26
  Students are asked to classify these acts as yes, no, maybe, fantasy or unsure.
• 2:28:32
  There appears to be considerably more enthusiasm for helping students identify their preferred form of restraint than for encouraging restraint itself.
• 2:28:40
  So Cornell is, is guilty of encouraging debauchery in its undergraduates.
• 2:28:52
  Are they responsible for what happened in the alumni room at this fraternity back in October, 2024?
• 2:28:59
  I don't think so.
• 2:29:01
  But they, and they're certainly not alone in this they certainly didn't invent this kind of language or this kind of encouragement of exploration are lying to themselves.
• 2:29:14
  If they are going to pretend that this, what she went to do and what she was then encouraged to do by a couple of the men who were there isn't exactly in line with what they were encouraging people to consider in advance, whether or not they were into or not.
• 2:29:31
  Yeah.
• 2:29:31
  It's on the list.
• 2:29:32
  Actually that, that's changed.
• 2:29:33
  It's on the list.
• 2:29:34
  That changes this for me.
• 2:29:36
  And I think frankly, these young men, if they're smart will point to this.
• 2:29:42
  And the point is look, if on, was that a sex ed questionnaire delivered to everybody?
• 2:29:50
  I don't know.
• 2:29:50
  Okay.
• 2:29:51
  But let's say that it was.
• 2:29:53
  Available to everybody.
• 2:29:54
  I don't know if delivered, I don't know.
• 2:29:56
  Okay.
• 2:29:57
  Even available to everybody.
• 2:29:58
  If the idea is-- I mean, it's available to us now.
• 2:30:00
  Cornell is inviting its undergraduates to classify these activities based on their own sense of whether it's permissible, desirable, interesting, whatever.
• 2:30:13
  And the point is they are saying, and we rant and rave at the absurd sex ed stuff that's now circulating in many school systems about gender transition and being touched and all this crazy stuff that has no place because the point is you're taking children who can't process this and you're saying, you're putting ideas into their head about what is normal to be considering.
• 2:30:41
  So the point is, yeah, these are college students.
• 2:30:43
  They should be able to look at some crazy document that Cornell is circulating and say, who are these fucking people?
• 2:30:49
  But maybe they didn't.
• 2:30:50
  And to the extent that some very unfortunate thing happened in some room in a fraternity house, the point is actually everybody has a right to say, well, this culture was being encouraged by the college.
• 2:31:04
  I think that's, you know, I'd like to know more about what they are actually suggesting and what discussion went into putting together such a questionnaire.
• 2:31:14
  Like is the whole point really, oh, well, you should figure it out for yourself, whether you're comfortable with all these things.
• 2:31:19
  Yeah, it's got check marks.
• 2:31:20
  You're supposed to do it and then know for yourself if it's a yes or a no or a maybe or a fantasy or I'm not sure.
• 2:31:26
  And, you know, like there's things on that list which again, just like you said, just like if it's kindergartners or third graders being asked to consider if they're really a boy or a girl, being asked to consider if you're really into some of these things puts ideas in people's heads that don't belong anywhere.
• 2:31:44
  Yeah, they don't because it's not good for society and it's not good for the people in question.
• 2:31:50
  One other thing I wanna put on the table before we close out here.
• 2:31:54
  In look, oh, you have more.
• 2:31:56
  Yeah.
• 2:31:56
  Okay.
• 2:31:58
  There's a number of places that we could go, but I did wanna share Jennifer Bielick, who apologies if I'm mispronouncing your last name, who does, who's done great work thinking through trans and feminism and calls herself a, I believe a recovering feminist, is responding to some other tweets here she's done a number of excellent posts on this topic, but she says, in response to someone say, "Consent on its own is not an adequate moral or psychological paradigm for managing sexual desires and impulses." Bielick says, "It is not only inadequate, it is ridiculous.
• 2:32:40
  It's like trying to stave off the flood of a tsunami with a teacup.
• 2:32:44
  Sex is where all the power of nature takes hold inside us, the good, the bad and the ugly, and is poised to overtake our senses, our thoughts, our tidy and fragile psyches.
• 2:32:54
  We walk around like pompous little clowns thinking we can control nature.
• 2:32:58
  Civilization and sexual mores are hardly a panacea for keeping this force in check.
• 2:33:02
  It's a mere thin veil of protection.
• 2:33:04
  And if we're gonna rip that veil to shreds in the span of 70 years inside 6,000 years of civilization, should we act so surprised when things go awry?" I think that's just perfect.
• 2:33:16
  No, how dare we act surprised?
• 2:33:20
  We all think we're living in Disneyland?
• 2:33:23
  Yeah, it...
• 2:33:26
  I'm just stunned by the error, by the way, that is brilliantly written.
• 2:33:31
  But just the idea that like...
• 2:33:35
  You know, just when you go to some national park and you get to the place where the parking lot is near the cliff and the guardrails are there, and it's like, okay, yes, that's true, but there's lots of parts of this park where there are no guardrails and it is incumbent on you to understand you are living in a world in which there is actual gravity and there's actual consequences and there's actually nothing we can do if you're too stupid to figure out that there are edges you need to be paying attention to.
• 2:34:06
  You're talking about sex.
• 2:34:11
  This is not an activity that you can render safe enough to make recreational.
• 2:34:18
  It's not entertainment, right?
• 2:34:20
  And I know that people mishear that.
• 2:34:22
  They think that what I'm saying is it's procreative behavior.
• 2:34:26
  It's very important.
• 2:34:27
  No, I'm not saying that at all.
• 2:34:29
  I'm saying it's a industrial strength power tool and you shouldn't take it for a joyride.
• 2:34:38
  That's not what it's for.
• 2:34:41
  And then the demand, having discovered that there's all of this power and excitement in it to like, okay, well, now let's get the institutions to figure out how it is that nobody ever gets hurt.
• 2:34:52
  And it's like, it's not the kind of activity, right?
• 2:34:56
  This is not something institutions are any good at at all.
• 2:34:59
  And they never will be, they can't be.
• 2:35:01
  Well, and you can't make life safe.
• 2:35:03
  Can't make sex safe despite the phrase that we are all expected to use and think about.
• 2:35:10
  And you can't make anything complex safe and sex is obviously complex.
• 2:35:17
  And instead, the demand, and I would put this on the nth wave feminism, instead the demand is, well, let's just make it the responsibility of the men.
• 2:35:26
  They're gonna have to be so responsible that we can't change our minds weeks later.
• 2:35:32
  You're gonna have to behave in a way that nobody's gonna change their mind weeks later.
• 2:35:35
  You okay with that, boys?
• 2:35:36
  And it's like, no, especially not if you get to be anonymous and leveling your allegation.
• 2:35:43
  Well, and it's not the most, it's not the worst result of that expectation.
• 2:35:50
  But one of the results of that expectation, which isn't good, is that now you got a bunch of men walking around who aren't men, who don't know how to be men, and who thought that that was what they were being asked to be, and no one finds it appealing or attractive or interesting or energizing in any way.
• 2:36:06
  And so you've got a bunch of really confused dudes walking around going like, well, I don't know how to be a man.
• 2:36:12
  I've been told I'm not allowed to be a man.
• 2:36:13
  And when I'm invited into a threesome, I'm gonna do it.
• 2:36:19
  And they did.
• 2:36:20
  Yep.
• 2:36:20
  Right.
• 2:36:22
  All right, I had one more thing.
• 2:36:23
  Did you have more, you wanted to?
• 2:36:25
  I mean, yeah, it goes on forever.
• 2:36:28
  Part of what it is is that there's no, that sex is between the people, is supposed to be between the people who are engaging in it.
• 2:36:39
  And there's no privacy anymore.
• 2:36:41
  There's no expectation of privacy.
• 2:36:44
  Everything is public.
• 2:36:45
  And no, I'm not saying that most people are filming themselves and putting that up on social media or doing a play-by-play in their group chats, but there's a whole lot of reporting going on about what is happening in places that should be private.
• 2:37:02
  And so the expectation that you can explore things in your psyche, in your desires that you don't know about yet, that you aren't sure where they'll go and maybe you don't really want it, but maybe you do and let's just try this out.
• 2:37:18
  And remember, this is a closed door and this is our private space.
• 2:37:22
  That's where the exploration should be happening.
• 2:37:25
  And so, one of the things we haven't talked about is all this was happening in a room that wasn't even someone's private room.
• 2:37:32
  Not only was it in a fraternity, but it was in like the alumni room, which was understood to be like a social room that had three beds and a couch in it.
• 2:37:39
  And it's not like, why do you expect that to have stayed contained when it was in a space that was effectively a public space?
• 2:37:50
  And why don't we expect, why don't all of us expect to have things that are private, that are only ours or only ours and our partners and that go nowhere else, that we never share.
• 2:38:03
  And so, we learn about them and about us and about the us that is the two of us.
• 2:38:08
  And that's where you learn how to be, not in this way that at any moment, someone can open the door like, hey, are you okay?
• 2:38:17
  Because some of the people who opened the door actually seem to be trying to help her, make sure.
• 2:38:22
  Like one of the guys said, I opened the door and that in my four years living there, I'd never seen anything like this before and I didn't think it was okay.
• 2:38:28
  That's one of the named defendants in this suit.
• 2:38:30
  Yeah.
• 2:38:32
  But he wasn't trying to have a private moment because the supposedly this thing that should have been private was happening in a non-private place, in a non-private culture at a time when privacy is gone because no one expects it or wants it and we need it back.
• 2:38:50
  Yeah, I've been wrestling with how to phrase this, that sex is inherently an emergent phenomenon.
• 2:39:01
  And that means that it doesn't exist.
• 2:39:03
  It's not like, oh, it's something you're good at.
• 2:39:06
  It's like, it's a dyadic phenomenon between two people and the point is that's inherently private.
• 2:39:12
  Like it's not that it can't be said, but it's inherently private.
• 2:39:16
  And the idea that it's just, oh, it's something that's happened, oh, I'd love to have a threesome.
• 2:39:19
  Let's see if we could find two other people.
• 2:39:21
  It's like, you just misunderstanding what this thing is.
• 2:39:25
  Right?
• 2:39:27
  All right, I have one other thing though that I wanted to add before we close this out.
• 2:39:31
  And I don't know, I couldn't chase down the exact details, but it looks to me from what I saw, and I'll be interested if you encountered the same thing, but the state is actually now reconsidering whether it needs to go back and file criminal charges, that the governor has weighed in and that there is pressure actually for-- Well, the governor is assigning a new DA to the case, I believe.
• 2:39:57
  Special process.
• 2:39:57
  Or has already done so, Special prosecutor, yeah.
• 2:39:59
  Yeah, so this actually is terrifying.
• 2:40:04
  I mean, the whole thing is eye-opening, but this is terrifying.
• 2:40:08
  The idea that this is now gonna be turned into a political football and a system that declined, I think correctly, to prosecute any of these people because frankly, Jane Doe pretty much established that she had the ability to consent to things that there's every reason for this not, it just doesn't get anywhere close to beyond a reasonable doubt.
• 2:40:35
  And for the state to be pressured into it is like mob rule.
• 2:40:39
  We're gonna get indignant about this, and we're gonna force you to prosecute because you didn't the first time, and it's like, well, have you read the details?
• 2:40:45
  It's absolutely mob rule.
• 2:40:47
  And to what our son Zachary said about what he and everyone was seeing in their time once in their social media feeds, it was like, oh, here's the seven perps that drugged and gang raped a girl for hours.
• 2:40:59
  Like, that did not happen.
• 2:41:01
  That did not happen.
• 2:41:03
  And oh boy, he just said a couple things that I wanted to respond to.
• 2:41:07
  And now, now I've forgotten one of them, but, oh, one of them is that in the hearing that Cornell had for some months after the DA said no criminal charges, they did in various ways reprimand these men.
• 2:41:26
  And what we've heard about is like, oh, a couple of them had to write essays, boo-hoo.
• 2:41:29
  Like, isn't that ridiculously under punishing them?
• 2:41:34
  Well, no, actually, I believe that two of them got kicked out of Cornell.
• 2:41:39
  And the fraternity got kicked off campus, and two of the other ones were heavily sanctioned.
• 2:41:45
  And then presumably the three who didn't actually do anything, got asked to write essays.
• 2:41:51
  I don't actually know for sure that that's how it fell out, although I hope so, because it looks like Cornell actually did a pretty good job, even having put out that crazy sex ed stuff, but in the aftermath of this, with the claims that were coming before them, they did a pretty good job of assessing what was true.
• 2:42:07
  And I guess the place that I would end is one of the things that Zach said to me in our son, our 22-year-old straight son, Zach, who's at college himself now, said to me was,"When I first heard about this, I thought, "Oh, like, oh, that's so horrible.
• 2:42:30
  "That's so grotesque.
• 2:42:31
  "It's like, it's the worst thing that men can do, "and that's just appalling." And then, you know, the onion layers start coming off, and it just resolves to not at all what we are being told it was.
• 2:42:49
  And he said,"Why are none of these stories "what they appear?" It's not that sexual violence doesn't happen.
• 2:42:57
  It's not that there aren't bad cops out there who racially, motivatedly kill black men.
• 2:43:06
  It's not that these things don't happen, but why are the stories that we are fed ones that aren't what they appear?
• 2:43:12
  Like, why are we not talking about the rapes in Europe?
• 2:43:18
  Like, there is plenty of sexual violence to be talking about, and this isn't any of it.
• 2:43:25
  Yeah, that's actually-- This is not any of it.
• 2:43:27
  That's a great comparison, actually.
• 2:43:29
  The grooming gang stuff, which is denied, so that, you know, you can't even have a proper conversation about it, despite the fact that it clearly has happened at scale, right?
• 2:43:43
  Or, you know, men put into women's prisons because they don't address and claim they're women, and then go on sexual rampages.
• 2:43:53
  We can't talk about that because that would be mean to the men, because they say their will.
• 2:43:58
  What are we doing?
• 2:44:00
  How are we so motivated?
• 2:44:02
  How did the mob get us so motivated on this, when it's not anything that it appears to be?
• 2:44:10
  Yeah, I mean, it is kind of the crazy book end to Me Too, right?
• 2:44:19
  Me Too-- Well, Dan, you can say that with some hope, I expect, but-- Well, yeah.
• 2:44:25
  Me Too starts with a legitimate recognition that there's an awful lot of assault, and lots of people have stories that they haven't told.
• 2:44:34
  And then it becomes insane, and it's like, you know, Matt Damon is the villain for claiming that rape and a swat on the ass are different, right?
• 2:44:46
  So they're all of this craziness, and believe all women.
• 2:44:51
  Believe all, excuse me, all how?
• 2:44:55
  There aren't women who would lie?
• 2:44:56
  I find that unlikely.
• 2:44:58
  Yeah, once again, the math just doesn't work out.
• 2:44:59
  Just follow it just a little bit.
• 2:45:01
  Right.
• 2:45:01
  Yeah.
• 2:45:02
  But okay, and now, here we are.
• 2:45:04
  We're actually watching the machinery of the state be wielded in a case that, you know, if there's one thing this case is, it's like never-endingly murky.
• 2:45:18
  This doesn't get anywhere near reasonable doubt because every single thing is just like, "Ugh, no, I'm sorry." You know, even the basics of consent seem to have been met here, right?
• 2:45:33
  Like, why is the state involved?
• 2:45:36
  Why are there courts?
• 2:45:38
  So, you know, it's that, it's like the ludicrous, it's the reducto ad absurdum, you know, with, you know, the state and special prosecutors and the governor and all of that madness.
• 2:45:53
  And the point is, this is why we don't play the game this way.
• 2:45:56
  Right.
• 2:45:57
  This is why, you know, A, you know, the safety of sex is not a matter of, you know, of formal rules at a college or something like that, right?
• 2:46:13
  It has to be about, you know, you need an industrial strength culture that knows what to think of these things so it doesn't come down to the, "Oh, you know, don't fall into that canyon because there's a guard rail." It's like, "How about don't fall into that canyon and if things go wrong, there's a guard rail of last resort, you know?" Well, I mean, it is, it's partially the sort of protectionism of American culture, the, you know, the extension of it that we used to comment on in the early 90s when we started traveling to Latin America and the open holes in the middle of streets in all cities in Latin America that we've run into are colloquially called, colloquially called gringo traps.
• 2:46:56
  These, imagine a hole that goes down eight feet and has rebar sticking out of it so that a person looking at their cell phone walking down the street.
• 2:47:06
  Well, in the early 90s, there was no looking at a cell phone, but you just have to keep your wits about.
• 2:47:11
  You have to look alive.
• 2:47:12
  You have to know that you're walking in a place where the lawyers haven't already been through and made everything completely safe for you.
• 2:47:19
  And so, you know, do the locals fall into the gringo traps?
• 2:47:21
  No, they do not.
• 2:47:22
  Neither did we ever, nor did we ever hear about any gringos impaling themselves on the rebar, but it was a risk because those don't show up in American cities.
• 2:47:30
  They show up in cities without as much resource and without as many lawyers to enforce the application of resource where it should be there.
• 2:47:39
  And so it's not as safe a place to be.
• 2:47:41
  And as such, you grow up, you get wise, you grow mature with regard to the actual risks in the world.
• 2:47:47
  And I think the protectionism, which makes walking down a city street in the United States a safer experience than in, say, Quito, has extended into our approach to sex and relationships.
• 2:48:03
  Actually, I think that's exactly right.
• 2:48:05
  And you've got to continue them from the sitting in an airplane seat on a Boeing going somewhere or on a roller coaster at Six Flags or whatever, okay?
• 2:48:21
  You don't need to know anything to be safe under those circumstances.
• 2:48:26
  And at the other end of the spectrum, there's the honest to goodness jungle, right?
• 2:48:33
  Remember when we first started going into the jungles of Latin America and we had to be told, "That's a monkey pot tree.
• 2:48:42
  You don't linger under the monkey pot tree.
• 2:48:44
  You run from one side of its, you're on the ground, its canopy is up there, but you run from one end to the other because it's got these giant woody pods." Bat pollinated actually.
• 2:48:56
  Giant woody pods.
• 2:48:57
  When their flowers not on their pods.
• 2:48:59
  Well, the pods open up and the bats fly into pollinate.
• 2:49:02
  But anyway, story for another day.
• 2:49:03
  But the point is a bowling ball size piece of wood that falls off this tree.
• 2:49:08
  And yeah, you're very unlikely.
• 2:49:10
  If you lollygagged under it regularly, you'd probably never get a hit, but you can't afford to get hit even once.
• 2:49:16
  So the point is that is the opposite of the roller coaster or the airline seat, right?
• 2:49:22
  That's the real world where the dangers are out there.
• 2:49:25
  It's incumbent on you to figure out what they are and how to minimize the risk.
• 2:49:28
  And the point is, which of these two things, is the instinct correct to try to push sex in the direction of a roller coaster where you can't possibly get hurt because the rules are just that fucking clear?
• 2:49:39
  Is that the sex you want?
• 2:49:40
  Or is it more like the jungle where the point is, yeah, you're gonna have to figure this one out.
• 2:49:45
  And until you do, you're gonna have to go in there with caution and humility that allows you to figure it out without getting burned.
• 2:49:52
  And there's always going to be more to discover.
• 2:49:54
  And that's part of what's wonderful about it, sex and the jungle, right?
• 2:49:59
  Like it's not fully knowable.
• 2:50:02
  It's not, you can't do it with static rules.
• 2:50:05
  You can't do it with the reductionism and you can't just get there, understand it, know, and then be like, okay, well, I did that.
• 2:50:12
  Okay, next Tuesday then, again, and again, like it's gonna be different every time.
• 2:50:17
  And that's part of why we do it.
• 2:50:20
  Yeah, and that's really it is that the point is it's inherently complex.
• 2:50:26
  So yeah, you and your static rules and your laws and your special prosecutors, no, that's not the way.
• 2:50:33
  It's not going to work.
• 2:50:35
  Yeah.
• 2:50:37
  All right.
• 2:50:38
  Do you want to talk about the plague?
• 2:50:39
  Yeah, I did want to talk about the plague.
• 2:50:41
  I don't want to talk about the plague.
• 2:50:42
  No, I don't really want to talk about the plague either, but I think it's incumbent on us to do what we do.
• 2:50:47
  So.
• 2:50:48
  Well, I've been paying, I will say I've been paying basically no attention to the plague story.
• 2:50:52
  So I would, I can, but we'll see.
• 2:50:57
  What I will say is that we have a story in Russia of a 28 year old worker.
• 2:51:07
  Her name was Daria Shiplinova.
• 2:51:12
  Shiplinova.
• 2:51:14
  No, it's Shiplova maybe.
• 2:51:18
  Or no, Shiplcova.
• 2:51:19
  I don't know, I didn't write it neatly enough and I feel bad because she's now dead. 28 years old, died of, well, reports vary.
• 2:51:30
  She was working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute and on the 29th of September, she was admitted to the hospital with some sort of severe pneumonia.
• 2:51:44
  She died on the 1st or 2nd of October.
• 2:51:48
  That's about where what we can agree on for sure ends.
• 2:51:52
  The implication is that she died of pneumonic plague, and I will get back to some details about plague here in a second.
• 2:52:01
  Died of pneumonic plague, which she may have contracted at the point that she broke a test tube, which may have contained plague from within the Institute, or it may have been a sample that she had recently collected in the field where there has been a plague outbreak.
• 2:52:21
  I think a plague outbreak.
• 2:52:22
  From a person or from?
• 2:52:23
  No, I think from animals.
• 2:52:25
  So anyway, this Institute studies plague and she had been on assignment in the field and had collected samples.
• 2:52:34
  Whether or not she actually broke a test tube is in dispute.
• 2:52:41
  There is something about the idea that she broke a test tube and got a pneumonic plague that doesn't add up because this is somebody who works in a plague-studying Institute who would have understood that she had 24 hours from the onset of symptoms to take antibiotics.
• 2:53:01
  In the absence of the antibiotics, plague is something like 100% fatal.
• 2:53:05
  It's not 100% fatal, certainly, if you get to it with appropriate antibiotics in the first 24 hours after symptom onset.
• 2:53:13
  There's a latent period before that.
• 2:53:15
  Go ahead.
• 2:53:15
  I have a question.
• 2:53:17
  Yeah.
• 2:53:17
  I do not remember the distinction between pneumonic and bubonic plague.
• 2:53:22
  Is it the same pathogen?
• 2:53:23
  Yes, it is the same.
• 2:53:24
  The same pathogen acting in different parts of the human body.
• 2:53:28
  And I remember that there was a plague outbreak.
• 2:53:34
  I don't remember which type in Madagascar, one of the times that I was going to work there, maybe one of the times that we were there together.
• 2:53:41
  And at that point, I was advised, you know what, it's not that big a deal as long as what you're carrying the treatment, which at the time I was told was doxy doxycycline, which is a powerful antibiotic, but it has funny, the risks that we know of these things and what show up right away.
• 2:53:58
  So doxycycline, we were always told, was a risk because if you're out in the tropical sun, especially you're at very much higher risk of burning.
• 2:54:07
  So you have to take precautions to stay out of the sun while you're on doxy.
• 2:54:11
  Now I'm also seeing that fluoroquinolones like Cipro are more frequently used against plague, but of course, fluoroquinolones have their own, in the 90s, not really as well known, but now very well known hazards around tendon and ligament damage.
• 2:54:27
  So I think you and I got bad advice.
• 2:54:30
  The-- Doxy is still being-- Doxy works, but the advice that we needed was that plague has a deceptive life cycle.
• 2:54:45
  So I'll talk more about the life cycle in a second, but the deceptive life cycle has a non-inflammatory early phase, the mnemonic version.
• 2:54:54
  The mnemonic version is the lung spread version.
• 2:54:57
  Bubonic version is spread by fleas.
• 2:54:59
  Humans do not spread plague to each other through fleas.
• 2:55:03
  They can contract it from fleas that have bitten an infected animal, but they spread it to each other through coughing.
• 2:55:12
  But a flea couldn't move from one person to another, like an anopheles mosquito can move from one person to another and spread malaria?
• 2:55:18
  Almost never does because of our hairlessness.
• 2:55:21
  So people don't tend to get fleas.
• 2:55:22
  We don't tend to harbor fleas.
• 2:55:24
  Yeah.
• 2:55:25
  And there's lots of nuance.
• 2:55:27
  Actually, in looking at plague and how it functions, just so much interesting biology surrounding it.
• 2:55:36
  Rodents are very frequent reservoirs of it, and they almost never, at least things like prairie dogs, almost never spread it mnemonically, even though it's the same bug.
• 2:55:48
  But the basic life cycle involves these rodents who contract it from an infected flea, die very quickly, and their fleas flee, right?
• 2:55:58
  And find new hosts.
• 2:56:00
  And so it spreads very quickly that way rather than by rodents coughing on each other.
• 2:56:04
  Cats actually will cough it onto each other and people, and cats actually are a vulnerability with respect to plague.
• 2:56:13
  So anyway, the pest in question is a bacteria.
• 2:56:17
  It's Yersinia pestis, and it is unusual in having two different ways that it can be spread because usually trade-off wise, that would be prevented.
• 2:56:29
  If it got really good at getting spread one way, it would basically surrender an effective ability to spread another way.
• 2:56:38
  In the flea transmission, it causes, it is part of a large family of gram-negative bacteria.
• 2:56:49
  These are bacteria that lack a cell wall that causes them to be stainable.
• 2:56:53
  It's just a way that bacteria are classified.
• 2:56:56
  But anyway, it causes a growth in the gut of the fleas that blocks a valve in the gut of the fleas.
• 2:57:06
  So the flea ends up regurgitating when it bites-- One of these disgusting stories.
• 2:57:13
  Yeah, so it kills the flea, it starves it.
• 2:57:16
  And it causes the flea to regurgitate into the wound that it has just opened in a victim.
• 2:57:24
  And it then has several interesting adaptations that allow it to move through tissues.
• 2:57:29
  Basically, it has a gene that allows it to break down fibrin in blood clots.
• 2:57:35
  And so it can move through tissue, it can get into lymph nodes where it grows outside of cells.
• 2:57:40
  It's not a virus, mind you, it's a bacteria.
• 2:57:41
  So it can grow outside of cells, become septic, get to your lungs.
• 2:57:46
  And so the very same infection can start out from a flea bite and it can end up being transmitted person to person pneumonically.
• 2:57:56
  So anyway, a researcher, a plague researcher who either with a vial of some lab sample or something that you brought back from the field had broken it, I think would immediately have gone onto doxycycline or whatever the most appropriate antibiotic is and certainly at the point of symptom onset have done so.
• 2:58:21
  Likewise, also the idea of, yeah, people screw up, but in general, I think this was a fairly, it's like a BSL-3 lab, you would be handling these things carefully under a hood so that if you did break something, it wouldn't escape into your lungs.
• 2:58:40
  Anyway, there is something weird about the idea of broke a vial, contracted plague, died days later.
• 2:58:47
  That story doesn't quite add up.
• 2:58:50
  There's too much casualness in the narrative.
• 2:58:52
  Yeah, I mean, just put yourself in, I've been bitten by bats and rabies becomes a very prominent feature of your thinking and it's just hard to imagine somebody being cavalier who works in a plague studying institute.
• 2:59:09
  But anyway, suffice it to say, somebody died of something that may have been plagued.
• 2:59:13
  The official Russian disclosure, says she just died of a pneumonia, which is not a disease, it's a syndrome, which could have been plague induced or not.
• 2:59:29
  But the question is, what should we in the outside world be thinking about this?
• 2:59:32
  Is the fact that this shows up in our news feeds, is this the next COVID?
• 2:59:39
  Is this some kind of pure nonsense?
• 2:59:45
  Is the fact that this comes out of a lab, was it gain of function enhanced in some way that it should worry us?
• 2:59:51
  So what I wanted to say is, in general, you can be certain if this incident results in a plague epidemic that is of global concern, you can be certain something is wrong with the story.
• 3:00:10
  And what is wrong could be one of a couple things.
• 3:00:13
  It could be that somebody is taking advantage of the social environment and they're going to use plague as an excuse for something even though plague has no risk of becoming a global pandemic.
• 3:00:24
  And I think we can say that for sure with respect to plague, wild type plague.
• 3:00:29
  Why?
• 3:00:30
  Because plague shows up.
• 3:00:33
  As you point out, there was a plague outbreak in Madagascar, it's not the only one Madagascar is one of the more likely places for a plague outbreak.
• 3:00:40
  Plague outbreaks happen.
• 3:00:41
  How is one person contracting plague in Siberia any different than any other one person in any one of those outbreaks?
• 3:00:50
  So the point is, if this one person in Russia where we know immediately who patient zero is, turns into a global thing, it's one of two things.
• 3:00:59
  And it could be both.
• 3:01:01
  One is SIA, right?
• 3:01:03
  Somebody's using our fear of a disease with a 100% fatality rate to manipulate us or gain a function.
• 3:01:11
  All right?
• 3:01:12
  You could do things to plague that would cause it to be a very frightening, potentially pandemic causing bug, but it won't do them naturally.
• 3:01:22
  Now, plague is interesting in one sense because A, super high fatality rate if you end up with symptoms.
• 3:01:31
  If you don't treat it.
• 3:01:32
  And B, it does not abide by the usual rule of thumb that pathogens evolve to be less virulent because it doesn't need you to be up and about.
• 3:01:45
  And the reason it doesn't need you to be up and about is that it has a latent phase.
• 3:01:50
  It actually arrests inflammation and then overwhelms you with inflammation.
• 3:01:56
  So the point is you are generating a colony that isn't symptomatic, and then suddenly you're coughing on the people who are taking care of you and it spreads like that.
• 3:02:07
  So that's...
• 3:02:08
  Cadavers can also spread it or no?
• 3:02:12
  Well, it's a bacterium, so I'm gonna say it's not a zero chance.
• 3:02:16
  And in fact, there is some plague that is contracted sometimes through the butchering of certain animals.
• 3:02:24
  Well, and I guess, I mean, if you...
• 3:02:25
  I'm just, I'm trying to remember what I once knew about what actually happened in the Middle Ages with plague.
• 3:02:33
  And I imagine if you were sleeping on straw or otherwise weren't able to clean the linens that were around you very often, you might have fleas.
• 3:02:43
  People might've had fleas, in which case, you could have had the bubonic plague spreading more from people recently dead than from those who were still alive.
• 3:02:53
  Yeah, I mean, I can see it in the bedding still.
• 3:02:56
  Human body doesn't tend to have a colony of fleas that go looking for another host.
• 3:03:03
  But anyway, suffice it to say, if you were gonna modify a pathogen to make it into something with pandemic potential, plague is a candidate with several things that would lend to that.
• 3:03:20
  And if you were gonna do it, enhancing its antibiotic resistance would be an obvious mechanism.
• 3:03:27
  It's still not a slam dunk that it would spread very far.
• 3:03:31
  But the other thing, and I wanna call people's attention to this, I do not think this is likely to have happened here.
• 3:03:39
  However, because we live in an era of PSYOPS and gain of function and all of this, you think back to what I've said multiple times about the COVID shots and the fact that the COVID shots, especially if you had two or better yet three of them, the mRNA-based ones, trigger the production of IgG4.
• 3:04:04
  And you'll remember IgG4 is the immune system's own mechanism for turning down an immune response.
• 3:04:11
  So basically IgG4 is an antibody that turns down the recruitment of other white blood cells, like natural killer cells.
• 3:04:21
  So it's paradoxical that those shots, which were supposed to increase immunity, actually turned down immunity in response to the spike protein.
• 3:04:30
  Now, what I said about it in prior discussions is that it is interesting that China and Russia did not vaccinate with mRNA-based technology.
• 3:04:43
  They did have COVID shots, they were not mRNA-based, so presumably did not trigger the production of IgG4 in response to the spike protein.
• 3:04:51
  So a bad actor who decided to install spike protein on a pathogen could, I think, rely on the immune systems of people who were vaccinated, that is to say, people in Europe, people in the United States and South America who got the mRNA shots, you could trigger their immune systems to turn themselves down by just simply putting the spike protein on them as a flag.
• 3:05:18
  So if this turns into something, I don't think anything's gonna happen here.
• 3:05:23
  They've brought in something like 200 contacts of the person who died, they haven't found any more cases, so I think it's just done, it's a nothing burger.
• 3:05:35
  If it's not a nothing burger, it could be a local thing, it cannot be a global thing, if it was the kind of thing that could become a global thing on its own, it would have done it because there are outbreaks every year, right, it's not, the fact that plague is out there is not like smallpox suddenly showed up out there, it's plague, it's out there.
• 3:05:55
  So there are cases, this one shouldn't be special, in fact, this one should be less likely to cause that because we know about it right away and it happens to have happened in the context of a plague-studying institute.
• 3:06:04
  If it does happen, could be pure cya, could be gain of function enhanced, that wasn't regular plague that she died of, in which case, watch out.
• 3:06:15
  And along those lines, I just wanna point out this other odd fact.
• 3:06:21
  At the point that COVID happened, COVID was shortly after Event 201.
• 3:06:31
  Event 201 was a tabletop exercise in which a coronavirus like pandemic happened and lots of stakeholders practiced what they would do.
• 3:06:41
  It's very conspicuous to those of us in the COVID dissident community that there was a tabletop exercise that involved all sorts of prime movers in the COVID fiasco.
• 3:06:56
  And I've said since then, watch the tabletop exercises, that when Goliath is up to bullshit, Goliath will often run a tabletop exercise and I don't think we know what these things are, I don't think we know why he does that.
• 3:07:11
  It has something to do with priming people so that when you need them to react to your PSYOP, that you've got a bunch of them who think they already know what to do and you can make it happen faster, that's sort of the best case.
• 3:07:23
  Worse, it could be like an advertisement, hey, we're planning a coronavirus outbreak, anybody got an angle, you wanna get in on this?
• 3:07:32
  So I went looking, was there a tabletop exercise in advance of this plague showing up in all of our news feeds?
• 3:07:41
  There was one.
• 3:07:42
  Yeah, and you'll never guess who it was.
• 3:07:48
  Don't make me.
• 3:07:49
  The Russians and the Chinese.
• 3:07:51
  Now, I think the Russians and the Chinese held an exercise about basically cross border pathogen issues and their tabletop exercise focused on three things.
• 3:08:05
  It focused on plague, it focused on disease X, which I believe was supposed to be a tick-borne illness, and it focused on basically sanitation after a massive flood.
• 3:08:19
  They held this in August.
• 3:08:25
  Now, that could just be bad luck.
• 3:08:28
  As I always ask in the case of these tabletop exercise questions, you always wanna know whether or not these tabletop exercises are so common that it's not surprising that one of them happened right before some event.
• 3:08:41
  If they're rare and it happened before some event, that suggests maybe there's a connection.
• 3:08:45
  If they're common, maybe it doesn't suggest anything.
• 3:08:48
  Now, in this case, the Russians and the Chinese, who do not traditionally like each other, held a joint exercise, plague was one of their foci, and it was in August of this year.
• 3:09:01
  So how frequent are they?
• 3:09:03
  I don't know.
• 3:09:04
  It seems like not that frequent.
• 3:09:07
  The concern, and again, I don't think there's any evidence yet, and I don't expect to see it.
• 3:09:13
  There's any evidence that this bug was tinkered so as to have pandemic potential that regular plague wouldn't.
• 3:09:20
  But if the Russians and the Chinese didn't vaccinate with mRNA for COVID, they don't have the vulnerability that the West does to something bearing spike protein.
• 3:09:35
  And I don't expect that there's any spike protein in plague.
• 3:09:38
  There's no reason for it to be there.
• 3:09:39
  Obviously, a bacterium and a virus are in completely different places on the evolutionary tree, so there shouldn't be any reason for spike to have found its way there.
• 3:09:52
  But were you to see it or something like it, that would tell you somebody's up to some hijinks.
• 3:10:01
  Yes.
• 3:10:02
  All right.
• 3:10:04
  So on that-- I finished before I finished my sentence.
• 3:10:06
  I didn't say it because I wasn't done yet.
• 3:10:08
  Yeah.
• 3:10:09
  Did you stop talking?
• 3:10:09
  Sorry about that.
• 3:10:10
  No.
• 3:10:11
  So anyway, just to sum it up, I think this is a nothing burger, but if it's a something burger, now you know what you're looking for.
• 3:10:21
  Oh, wait, what?
• 3:10:23
  What are you looking for?
• 3:10:23
  Well, if we suddenly-- So the tabletop exercise already happened.
• 3:10:26
  Tabletop exercise already happened.
• 3:10:28
  If the tabletop exercise was already done, the tabletop exercise already happened. If this thing began to spread from Siberia in a way that other outbreaks that happen every year haven't spread, that would be one indicator.
• 3:10:38
  If we get some sort of weird, oh, we've sequenced the genome of the bug that's causing this outbreak and is resistant to doxycycline or whatever it is that they're gonna say, and then, lo and behold, it seems to have spike protein on it, well then, we know what game they're playing.
• 3:10:57
  Again, I don't expect to see it, but if you did, that would be a alarm.
• 3:11:01
  That's a very precise and unlikely prediction, therefore.
• 3:11:05
  If it happens, yeah.
• 3:11:09
  Right.
• 3:11:10
  All right, well, this has been fun.
• 3:11:13
  (Both Laughing) A very uplifting episode of Dark Horse Evolutionary Legends.
• 3:11:18
  I miss the Tilkayo.
• 3:11:20
  Tilkay, no, those were good times.
• 3:11:21
  Yeah, the tiger cats of the Andes.
• 3:11:24
  Yeah, I had a dream, told you this, that we ended up with a tiger cat, I had Tilkayo, but I think it was a colo colo.
• 3:11:30
  A different one, an ocelot relative.
• 3:11:32
  Yeah, so that's happier, happier subject.
• 3:11:36
  Yeah, I mean, I imagine it's a lot of work, but.
• 3:11:39
  Probably, but they're small.
• 3:11:42
  Yeah, we had a small cat once, it was a lot of work, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
• 3:11:46
  That's true.
• 3:11:46
  Yeah.
• 3:11:47
  All right.
• 3:11:49
  Yeah, well, we will be back next week, same time, same place.
• 3:11:55
  Check out darkhorsepodcast.org for any updates on schedules slash books to get your copies of Hunter Gathers Guide or Antipode signed, sealed, delivered, et cetera, in English, or for Hunter Gathers Guide in translation, what did I say, Czech, Polish, Portuguese, Thai, Spanish, and French.
• 3:12:16
  Wow.
• 3:12:16
  Yeah.
• 3:12:17
  Yeah.
• 3:12:17
  Yeah.
• 3:12:18
  And, you know, it was published in more languages than that by a lot.
• 3:12:21
  Somehow we never got copies, for instance, of Mandarin, which is too bad.
• 3:12:26
  You know, I feel like we were entitled one copy from every language it was translated into and one copy of the first edition, which we never got.
• 3:12:34
  We never got because it sold out so fast.
• 3:12:36
  We got copies of the second edition, so that's what you'll be getting.
• 3:12:40
  We also, the very first language in which, where the rights were sold and in which it was translated, was Lithuanian, which we do not have, which I am sad about.
• 3:12:52
  Yeah, me too.
• 3:12:55
  All right, but we do have all those others, so you can check those out.
• 3:12:59
  You just had your Patreon calls this weekend.
• 3:13:01
  They were good.
• 3:13:01
  Excellent.
• 3:13:02
  They were good.
• 3:13:03
  Yeah.
• 3:13:04
  And yeah, until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat real food, and get outside.
• 3:13:12
  Be well, everyone.