Rorschach Trap: The 311th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Summary

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DarkHorse Podcast #311: "Rorschach Trap: The Evolutionary Lens"

Hosts: Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying
Date: January 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this wide-ranging episode, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying use their evolutionary toolkit to break down a recent fatal police shooting in Minneapolis, exploring how empathy, justice, and media narratives intersect in the modern world. The episode opens with a discussion of sex differences in empathy (rooted in an overlooked scientific paper) and segues into a critical analysis of how polarization is cultivated and exploited after public tragedies. Throughout, Bret and Heather challenge listeners to reflect on how modern media, instant emotional reactions, and societal changes in gender roles impact our ability to perceive truth and justice.

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1. Evolutionary Lens on Empathy: Paper Review

Timestamps: 14:30–34:59

Key Points & Insights

• Heather introduces a 2006 Nature paper: "Empathic Neural Responses are Modulated by the Perceived Fairness of Others", which found stark sex differences in empathic responses to perceived fairness.
• Summary of Study:
  • Participants watched confederates play a Prisoner’s Dilemma game, acting fairly or unfairly.
  • Subjects reliably attributed positive traits to fair players.
  • When watching fair or unfair players experience pain, women showed empathy regardless of fairness, while men only had increased empathy toward fair individuals; men’s empathy vanished for those deemed unfair.
  • The paper hypothesized men may play a primary evolutionary role in justice/punishment, while women’s empathy may be more unconditional.

Notable Quotes

• [23:09] Heather: “Women respond to people experiencing pain or punishment with an empathetic response, regardless... where as men... don’t tend to have a sense of empathy towards him because it feels justified.”
• [28:02] Bret: “If you set up a system... where you simply sympathize with victims, then you incentivize being victimized.”
• [28:55] Heather: “It’s not justice. It’s quite the opposite of justice... and if you don’t agree then you’re against justice — like, no, I’m against instantaneous reads and blanket empathy where it shouldn’t apply.”

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2. Cultural Consequences: Empathy, Justice, and Social Movements

Timestamps: 34:59–54:44

Key Points & Insights

• The discussion connects the study’s findings to broader phenomena: social justice culture, DEI initiatives, and “oppression Olympics.”
• Bret and Heather argue that the “feminization” of society, including science and public life, shifts rules from adversarial/merit-based (“toxic masculinity,” public, overt, regulated) to covert, cryptic manipulation (“toxic femininity,” emotional, socially manipulative).
• The consequences include easy gaming of empathy systems and creation of "cry-bullies."

Notable Moments

• [47:56] Heather (on Portland’s 2020 protests): “The media representation and what was happening on the ground bore so little resemblance to one another... why anyone trusts that what they were seeing through their screens is true, I do not know.”
• [49:21] Bret (on Minneapolis’ Governor): “Tim Walz is beyond my limit. I cannot stomach this guy because he is so clearly playing the cry bully role... pouring gasoline on Minneapolis.”

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3. The Minneapolis Shooting: A Rorschach Trap

Timestamps: 54:44–106:51

Key Points & Insights

• Event Overview: Alex Preddy, an ICU nurse, was shot by ICE officers during a chaotic protest in Minneapolis. Rumors, partial videos, and partisan narratives dominate public understanding.
• Bret stresses that key facts remain unknown: Did Preddy’s gun fire while being removed from his possession? Did officers know he was disarmed? Was there reasonable fear justifying deadly force?
• Comparisons are drawn to Portland’s 2020 protests, with organized protesters (Antifa reference), escalating standoffs, media distortions, and political actors exploiting trauma.

Analysis of Media Narratives

• Bret and Heather play news clips from Fox News and CNN, noting both are less polarized than expected but still focus on different aspects (weapon legality, protest context, police training).
• “Rorschach Trap” described: An event becomes a canvas onto which individuals project pre-existing beliefs; opposing sides find in it whatever confirms their worldview.
• The hosts analyze technological and psychological reasons why bystander video and media allow for manipulation and division.

Notable Quotes

• [56:00] Bret: “A human being is evolved to look at a situation having incomplete information to render a judgment... We are denied all of those tools. We are looking through a keyhole at an event... ought to cause us to be incredibly skeptical...”
• [70:39] Heather (reacting to news clips): “Those two clips you showed didn’t vary nearly as much as I was expecting... They seemed measured to me.”
• [87:26] Heather (on eyewitness reliability): “Eyewitnesses aren’t reliable... All that is both true and child’s play compared to where we are now, because A) we are not eyewitnesses, but are being tricked by our technology into believing that we are, and B) your point: we are being gamed.”

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4. Manipulation, Media, and Social Division

Timestamps: 94:02–107:05

Key Points & Insights

• Bret labels events like the Preddy shooting as "Rorschach traps"—events engineered or seized upon to trigger tribal reactions based on viewers’ priors.
• The conversation warns that media and political actors exploit tragedies for narrative gain, keeping the populace divided and distracted from systemic issues.
• They urge listeners to maintain “cultivated agnosticism” and resist snap judgments, recognizing manipulation at work.

Notable Quotes

• [94:05] Bret: “A Rorschach trap is going to be an event that divides a population based on its priors... it sure looks like the intent is to cause egregious behavior in front of a camera so it can be portrayed and the country’s sympathies can be swayed.”
• [106:51] Bret (on the Preddy case): “If you think you know what happened to Alex Peretti, you’re way ahead of the evidence... Your certainty is an indication that you don’t know yet what is true.”
• [117:24] Bret: “The instantaneous assessment is not a good thing... you just introduced an error into your model and you don’t know how big an effect it’s going to have.”

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5. Invitation: "Covid Era" Story Project

Timestamps: 107:05–117:08

Key Points & Insights

• Heather announces a project to collect and publish personal stories from the Covid era, seeking to create a repository of primary-source testimony about the social and emotional impact of pandemic policies.
• Submissions up to 2,500 words are welcome; authors may use pseudonyms and are compensated for accepted work.

Notable Quotes

• [113:09] Heather: “While I hope that it becomes a repository for stories that act as a kind of history... the act of writing itself is also healing and cathartic... even if you don’t choose to share it, just having written it can be healing.”
• [116:59] Bret: “It’s a kind of cultivated agnosticism that one needs in order to arrive at a correct conclusion.”

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Memorable Moments

• Opening Banter [00:10–02:23]: Playful mathematical aside on "permutable primes," establishing the show’s tone of curiosity and irreverence.
• [24:45] Bret formulating a hypothesis: “The female side of that result, if it is accurate, is so surprising that I think it necessitates an explanation. We don’t have it. I’m going to put a hypothesis on the table...”
• [49:21] Tim Walz & Anne Frank analogy: Intense critique of political rhetoric using WWII references to frame contemporary events, described as “pouring gasoline” on public panic.
• [105:05] Discussion on "sanctuary cities": Explores historical antecedents of current breakdowns in law enforcement and federal vs. local tensions.

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Thematic Summary

• Skepticism as a Virtue: Viewers are admonished to remain skeptical of media narratives, especially those that map suspiciously well onto pre-existing partisan divides.
• Reflexive Empathy Can Hurt Justice: Universal or context-free empathy, especially when channeled through social movements or modern media, is easily gamed and can incentivize victimhood.
• Technological Novelty Outruns Human Brains: Our evolved mental architecture is out of step with the information environment shaped by social media, video streaming, and algorithmic curation.
• Political & Media Manipulation: Widespread confusion around events like police shootings in Minneapolis are seen as the result of deliberate exploitation—”Rorschach traps”—by political and media actors.

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Suggested Sections for Listeners

• 16:00–34:59: Sex differences in empathy, analysis of the Nature study
• 54:44–90:00: Deep dive into the Minneapolis shooting, media coverage, and the “Rorschach trap”
• 107:05–116:59: Announcement and rationale for the “Covid Era” story project

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Closing Thought

The episode concludes with a call to humility and skepticism: immediate emotional judgments are hazardous, especially in the hyper-novel conditions of the modern world. Bret and Heather urge listeners to slow down, gather evidence, and question what they think they know—because the stakes, both for individual justice and our collective sanity, are high.

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Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Hey, folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream. 311, I think. 3, 11.

[B]

311. And it's an awesome number.

[A]

Yes, that it is. Where would we be without it?

[B]

It is not only a prime. Yes, it is a permutable prime. This thanks to one of our locals, people. Thank you. I'm not going to mention your name because I don't know if I should. A permutable prime. You know what a permutable prime is?

[A]

Wait, it's going to derive from permutation.

[B]

Absolutely. And it also called an absolute prime, incidentally, but you're not going to be able to.

[A]

Oh, it's the kind of prime of which there is one per mutation. No, no. All right. That was a little overly biological, but.

[B]

And overly, like, literal with regard to the etymology. Per mutation.

[A]

Yeah, I. I don't know. In what way can it be permuted?

[B]

All of the digits. So 311 is where we're at.

[A]

Right.

[B]

3, 11. You can rearrange those digits in any way you want and you still have a prime.

[A]

That's lucky.

[B]

That's cool. Right? And it's. I mean, it's a. It's. It's a little bit of a cheat because two of the digits are the same in this case, so it's not as many permutations as it might be, but 311, 131, 113, all prime. 311. Here we are. Permittable prime.

[A]

There you go. All right. That's cool.

[B]

I think it's cool.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's where we are. You are.

[A]

I am Dr. Bret Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Heying, if I remember correctly.

[B]

Yes. You should know by now.

[A]

The thing is, one has to have a proper level of skepticism about their own conclusions. Everything is provisional.

[B]

Including, for instance, how many noses one has.

[A]

Exactly. I mean, you're not in a good position to know. It depends on a lot of assumptions about the way mirrors work, how other people react, that sort of thing.

[B]

This just happens to be an issue that you keep reminding our children of that when they make new friends, they should make sure that they have the usual number of noses, and if not, that's suggestive of something else bigger underneath.

[A]

I don't suggest that they shouldn't befriend people with an unusual number. It's that they should make note of the fact that they have done so. All right. This is going to make no sense to anyone else. It barely makes sense to us, but nonetheless, it is a. A loose recap of history that has sort of occurred.

[B]

So, hey, here we are. Dark Horse podcast livestream, the evolutionary lens here on Wednesday as usual. Thank you to all of our supporters on locals. Check out the watch party there and all past Q&As.

[A]

Tuesday.

[B]

Isn't it Tuesday?

[A]

Is it not Tuesday?

[B]

So why do you think I'm giving you a hard time today because you say things like that. Isn't it Tuesday? I don't know, Jen. Is it Tuesday? It's really not Tuesday.

[A]

I have been under the impression all day that we were a day early because of travel plans, but all right, it's Wednesday. I love it.

[B]

It sure is. It really. It really, really is. Well, maybe we should, before we lose the capacity to do so, pay the rent right up at the top and then get to some. Some heady issues around current events. And I'm hoping to get to some. Some smaller stories that you haven't planned on talking about as well. But you wanted to talk about Minnesota. Some.

[A]

I think we should talk about Minneapolis with your lead in of lots of intellectual scaffolding useful to this the paper.

[B]

Oh, you want me to lead with the paper?

[A]

I sure do. It's essential. Essential that you do that, I think.

[B]

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

[C]

All right.

[B]

First. First are our three ads at the top of the hour. None. None. Others from us throughout, throughout the podcast. As always, carefully chosen three awesome sponsors making awesome products this week. And you are up first.

[A]

I am. And our first sponsor, it turns out this week, is Clear. Clear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health. It's widely available online and in stores, and both it and the company that makes it are fantastic. Yeah, that's true. It's clear that Clear. It's clear. That's clear pronounced clear. This is not clear based on the fact that I'm seeing X's where you might expect C's, but nonetheless, the product is called Clear. It's spelled X, L, E, A, R.

[B]

And why is it spelled that way, Brett?

[A]

Because it is a reference to the xylitol on which the product is based. A5 carbon sugar. Some of this is going to be recapped here. A 5 carbon sugar that is at the core of both DNA and rna.

[B]

Xylitol, which is also spelled with a C.

[A]

Not by me it isn't. And you know, I'm quite a stickler for good spelling. But in any case, xylophal with an.

[B]

X, therefore Clear with an X, therefore.

[A]

Clear with an X. Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have led to huge impacts on human longevity and quality. Of life, more so than traditional medical advances. For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down. Breathing polluted air, drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health. Clean up the air and water and people get healthier. Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, though. Consider that the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouth and nose, not our mouth. It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person. But it's rare to get sick through one's hands. Rather, we get sick through our mouth and our nose. Thus, it makes sense that we should be using something that we know blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose. Enter Clear. CLEAR is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, a 5 carbon sugar alcohol that our bodies naturally contain in the form of five carbon sugars in ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbones of RNA and DNA, respectively. While most of our dietary sugars have six carbons sugars like glucose and fructose. I got all of the emphasis wrong in that sentence. You know what I'm trying to tell you because you've been paying attention. Enter clear. CLEAR is a nasal spray that contains xylitol. Did I just say that? Xylitol is known to, you know your mic is on as you're laughing at me, your husband. Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues in the presence of xylitol. Bacteria and viruses, including strep, sars, cov, and rsv, don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our body's natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away. Clear is a simple nasal spray that you use morning and evening. It takes just three seconds. It's fast, it's easy, and decidedly healthy. If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listened to my conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Clear, on the inside rail, in November of 2024. Or my conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Clear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses in May of 2025. We recommend those conversations, and we highly recommend CLEAR as a daily habit and a prophylactic against respiratory illnesses. That's Clear with an X, X, L, E, A R. Get Clear online or at your pharmacy, grocery store, or natural products retailer and start taking six seconds a day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health.

[B]

You're Done.

[A]

I am finished with that somewhat fraught ad read.

[B]

I didn't find it fraught.

[A]

I did.

[B]

I was enjoying it.

[A]

My blood pressure's coming down though. I'm all right.

[B]

Our second sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high quality non toxic cookware and bakeware. Maybe you've made New Year's resolutions to eat better or cook more or decrease your exposure to toxins. You can do all three at once by cooking with Caraway. We're in the cold season now, a time for warming soups and stews, big braised, slow cooked cuts of meat and roasted root vegetable. How about some nice and chewy almond cranberry muffins as a treat with Caraway? All of this deliciousness, from roasting to baking, from a quick omelet cooked on the stovetop to a long simmered soup, is easy to accomplish. Caraway's cookware and bakeware is functional, beautiful, non toxic and easy to clean. What more could you want? Modern life is full of hazards, not least the non stick coatings on cookware and bakeware. We threw out all of our Teflon cookware decades ago because Teflon is toxic. And yet over 70% of cookware in the United States is made with Teflon. And 97% of Americans have toxic chemicals from non stick cookware in their blood. When you cook with tough lime, it only takes two and a half minutes for a pan to get hot enough to start releasing toxins. Enter Caraway Caraway. I feel like you're sitting there waiting for me to say something ridiculous.

[A]

No, I am. I am literally rooting for you. I know how difficult this reading stuff can be and I'm. I'm here for you.

[B]

It's. It's gonna be a day, isn't it? Yep.

[A]

Yes. Wednesday, it turns out.

[B]

As it turns out. Yes. Enter Caraway. Caraway kitchenware is crafted with sustainable non toxic materials like FSC certified birchwood premium stainless steel, enameled cast iron and naturally slick ceramic to help you create a safer, healthier home. Caraway makes several lines of non toxic cookware and bakeware. Our favorites of their stainless steel line and their enameled cast iron. All of all of Caraway's products are free from forever chemicals and their enameled cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors. These pots are strong and highly scratch resistant. They'll last generations. And Caraway also offers butcher blocks to cut on glass lids for non toxic cooking with a view and a new bar set which is crafted from rust resistant 304 stainless steel. We're cooking with caraway. And now Zach, our elder son, is too, in his first college apartment. He says it's amazing, which we know to be true. And we know that he will be cooking with it for a long time to come. Caraway's cookware set is a favorite for a reason. It can save you up to $190 versus buying the items individually. Plus, if you visit carawayhome.com dh10, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carawayhome.com dh10 or use code dh10 at checkout. Caraway Non Toxic Kitchenware Made Modern. Our final sponsor. Yes, yes.

[A]

Also excellent, but yes, the Caraway cookware.

[B]

I have not found a use a way to combine masa chips with caraway, but there's probably a way.

[A]

Oh, there are ways.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, I guess. I mean, tortilla soup.

[A]

Yeah, right there. Boom. Nailed it.

[B]

But you just. But you, you don't use chips for that.

[A]

You can use chips for that.

[B]

No, you can't.

[A]

I would never.

[B]

We've added masa chips such as these. These are corbonaros as a crunchy topping on a sort of Latin American inspired chicken soup. But that's different from a tortilla soup. Anyway, caraway is awesome. Masa chips are awesome. And they are our final sponsor for the week. Man, are these chips good. Masa makes ridiculously delicious chips with only three simple real whole ingredients. I say that for the, for the simple ones. For these carbonero, they have some, some additional flavors. They have some additional ingredients. Onion, paprika, lime, tomato, garlic, chipotle, ancho, and habanero chili. So they have a few additional real ingredients. In the super fantastic flavored ones, but in the simple and the yellow, the original and the white and the blue, it's just organic, nixtamalized corn, sea salt and 100% grass fed beef tallow. No crazy industrial seed oils here. Masa chips are made the way that all of our food used to be made. They're fried in 100% beef tallow. No seed oils ever. You can taste the difference and your body can feel the difference. Where am I? There we go. My America's health is declining fast. Chronic illnesses, obesity, autoimmune diseases have exploded. What changed? One thing among many that changed is that all chips and fries used to be cooked in tallow. But in the 1990s, corporations switched to cheaper seed oils, which include soybean, canola, sunflower, and Corn seed oils are often labeled vegetable oils, as if that makes them healthy, while in fact, seed oils are linked to metabolic health issues and inflammation. And today, seed oils make up 20% of the average American's daily calories. Big food companies also use, of course, artificial dyes, stabilizers, and other toxins. Masa chips, though never no seed oils, artificial dyes, or additives, ever. Beef tallow is nutrient rich, nourishing, and makes food taste incredible. Masa chips are crunchy and delicious, and after you eat them, you feel satisfied, satiated and energetic. Masa also supports American farms and regenerative agriculture. Choosing real food heals us and our environment, which in turn makes us even more healthy. Try masa chips with salsa or goat cheese or a spicy pepper jam. Smother them in beans and cheese or just eat them straight out of the bag. They're all delicious. At the moment, my favorites are their white chips, made from heirloom organic white corn, which gives a particularly light and flaky texture. I also love Moss's blue chips, which have a deeper, nuttier flavor and a serious crunch. You love lime, you said last time.

[A]

So good.

[B]

So good. And they've also.

[A]

Having heard the ingredient list on this one, I'm inclined to, you know.

[B]

Yeah, we should open this up now.

[A]

Not now.

[B]

We're not going to crunch. Yeah. And then we're going to end up with, like, corn in our teeth.

[A]

No, no, no. It's a mistake. We can both see it. That's wisdom right there. Yeah, podcasting wisdom.

[B]

Easy earned wisdom.

[A]

Fair enough.

[B]

And they've also got, in addition to everything I just mentioned, hatch chili. I mentioned most of them already. And churro, which has cinnamon. Ready to give masa a try, go to masachips.comdarkhorse and use code darkhorse for 20% off your first order. That's masachips.com darkhorse and code dark horse for 25 off your first order. And if you don't feel like ordering online, Masa is now available at nationwide at Sprouts supermarkets. Stop by and pick up a bag before they're gone. They're so good.

[A]

All right, well, we know they won't be gone before the end of the podcast. Not even opening them.

[B]

I know these aren't out. Sprouts. Sprouts. These are.

[A]

Not anymore. Yep. All right. So I am hoping that you will present the work that you were telling me about as a context for discussing what's going on in Minnesota, which I take these to be two. Two sides of the same coin.

[B]

Okay. And sort of somewhat prompted by some of what we were talking about last week when I suggested that the neuroticism on full display in the Atlantic's predictive issue from two years ago about what would happen if Trump won again was more indicative of personality traits of the people experiencing the neurosis than an honest indicator of what was going on in the outside world. I was fed by various algorithms because I was talking about that last week. A number of things related, excuse me, to sex differences and personality traits this week, including from just the hat tip goes to a guy named Joaquim Marias. Apologies if I'm butchering your name on X who linked to a paper that came out in 2006 in nature. So this is not a new paper. This is 20 years old, although that still seems new by Singer et al Called Empathic Neural Responses are Modulated by the Perceived Fairness of Others. Now, that title, to my mind, kind of buries the lead because it doesn't mention anything about sex differences in empathy. And that is indeed what is what a large part of the research finds. I'm just going to describe it and then I'll share a little bit from the paper and then we, then we can talk about it. So there's a small N in this paper. It's only 16 people. So, you know, take that as it is and know that it would be great to have this research replicated. There is no, there is nothing that I find in the last 20 years that says, ah, they screwed it up, it's not right, you know, failed to replicate none of that. I'd like to see it replicated, but low end. And of 16, eight men, eight women as, as the subjects. It's got a really good experimental design in which the researchers first established empathy responses to people, that is the confederates in the research playing a classic game, that is Prisoner's Dilemma, in which they could either be fair or unfair to others. When the subjects, the eight men and eight women, observed the confederates who they did not know were confederates, playing a Prisoner's Dilemma game in which the confederates are either fair or unfair to others. Every one of the subjects in the experiment agreed that the fair player was more fair, the unfair player was more unfair and associated with fairness. They also attributed other personality traits like agreeableness, likability, and actually attractiveness.

[A]

The subjects of the experiment attributed these things as a result of the experience of fairness or unfairness.

[B]

Is that what you they are watching confederates engage in a prisoner's dilemma?

[A]

Ah, got it, got it.

[B]

Okay. And in. And it Is I was actually just trying to describe this to Toby, our younger. So when he called me a couple hours ago. And it is, it is a little bit difficult because there are too many, too many things involved. Right. But the confederates have been, are actors who have been hired by the researchers to act as if they are just interacting in a game, theoretic situation, prisoner's dilemma. And they either act fairly or unfairly to other confederates. The subjects of the experiment who don't know that they necessarily, that they are watching people who are acting accurately.

[A]

They specifically don't know.

[B]

Right. Accurately assess 100% of the time when fairness has happened and when unfairness has happened. And 100% of the time also attribute to those who have behaved fairly bigger psychological personality traits like agreeableness, likability and attractiveness. Okay, so that's sort of, that's, that's the first thing that these authors did. These, these researchers did. Singer et al published back in 2006. Then the experimenters expose everyone to physical pain and monitor the responses of the subjects, both men and women, to seeing these people that they have previously identified as fair versus unfair to physical pain. And they do this not just by asking them what do you think, but there's a bunch of neurological stuff going on that I'm not going to go into the details of because for most people it's not going to, it's, it's not going to track particularly. And here's where I'm actually just going to read from, from the paper what they find. Can you in fact see my screen still? That's amazing. What a great day it's going to be. Okay, so here's this, here's the paper. Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others. I'm going to go down and read just a bit from here, middle of the paper. This analysis revealed that less empathic activity was elicited.

[A]

Hmm.

[B]

This analysis revealed that less empathic activity was elicited by the knowledge that an unfair player was in pain. However, there was also a marked differences between the sexes. In women, this reduction in activity was very small. Whereas in men, the knowledge that an unfair player was in receipt of pain elicited no increase in empathic activity in fi neurological thing. And indeed formal analysis revealed no significant difference for women when comparing painful trials for fair versus unfair players in empathy related pain regions. However, men showed significantly enhanced activation in bilateral F1 when observing fair compared with unfair players in pain. Consistent with this finding, supplementary analysis showed that women, but not men displayed Significant activation Bilateral AYF1 and ACC in all three conditions in common parlance, without the acronyms associated with neurological regions. Having previously assessed that some people act fairly and some people act unfairly, and having generalized those observations of fair versus unfair behavior to bigger personality traits like agreeableness and likability and even attractiveness, men, when they see fair people experience pain, have a rise in empathy. And when they see unfair people experience pain, do not women, when they see fair people experience pain, have a rise in empathy. And when they see unfair people experience pain, they also have a rise in empathy. So that's the big takeaway here, which is that women respond to people experiencing pain or punishment with an empathetic response, regardless of what else they know about that person, regardless of, for instance, whether punishment is justified. Whereas men, you know, this is a small N and there will be exceptions, and these are averages. And you know, all of the usual caveats apply with regard to population level truths, but men have what seems to me the normal and expected response on average, which is that when you see someone who has previously indicated a tendency to, to cheat, to be unfair, and you see him experiencing pain, you don't tend to have a sense of empathy towards him because it feels justified. That last bit is my interpretation, because it feels justified. Now, one thing that the authors say at the very end of the pa, which is just like a little bit of a caveat for the results, is it is possible that our experimental design favored men because the modality of punishment was related to physical threat as opposed to psychological or financial threat. But then they also say, alternatively, these findings could indicate a predominant role for males in the maintenance of justice and punishment of norm violation in human societies, which is pretty freaking bold. And the fact that they bury the lead in the title of the paper, that you can't tell that this is about sex based differences at all. And the title of the paper is part of, presumably I'm guessing here, how it got published in Nature at all back in 2006. And again, very small N, and a lot of neurological stuff that I'm not qualified to explicitly assess, although they don't get pushed back anywhere that I find in terms of exactly what they're measuring. And the differences are stark. Men, men have their empathy evoked in a context specific way with regard to whether or not the thing that a person is experiencing is warranted, in their opinion. And women's empathy tends to be more universal. That's a remarkable finding if it is true across broader society, which we have no reason to think it is not.

[A]

Yes. Now, the part of it that surprises me, as you allude to, is the female side of it.

[B]

It's shocking.

[A]

It is not obvious to me why this is not a human universal.

[B]

I, until reading this paper, assumed that responses to seeing people experiencing pain would be context specific. And indeed, when we were professors and I taught animal behavior, I was excited to find examples of chimps responding to observing unfairness and responding to it. And I'm trying to remember there's a study in which actually there's old world monkeys as well. Not just chimps, they prefer grapes. And there's also carrots. And if you have to do something to get a treat and you do something and your friend does something and it's the same thing, and your friend gets a carrot or your friend gets a grape and you get a carrot, you sulk.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Even if you're not a human, you see this, you're like, but I did the same thing. Give me what I deserve.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like I deserve a grape. Yeah. Right. And I may be butchering that research. I can.

[A]

No, no, that's very much how I remember it.

[B]

Yeah. So, you know, there's tracking of history, of context, and, you know, that's what, that's what justice is. Right? Like that is what justice is. It is inherently a part of a narrative. You can't do justice as an instantaneous read. You can't do it.

[A]

All right. The female side of that result, if it is accurate, is so surprising that I think it necessitates an explanation. We don't have it. I'm going to put a hypothesis on the table. Hopefully we can figure out a way to test it. But nonetheless, I think we need a proposal for something that would explain why women don't have, apparently the natural reaction that you and I, or what you and I both feel is the natural reaction, which is to be what I would call sympathetic, they're calling empathetic on the basis of whether or not somebody deserved fairness or had behaved in a way that decreases how much they deserve good treatment. Let's imagine what is true on the playground with children. Somebody has been harmed by somebody else, and you were attempting to ascertain, you know, what the right thing to do is. And the problem is you don't know. And this is going to be highly relevant to much of our discussion today, but you don't know what unfolded on the playground. In other words, there is a, in general, going to be a larger context amongst children. There's a whole history that you won't Know or you do know, but it is not safe to analyze within the context of a particular seeming cause and effect because the larger context is going to be playing such a dominant role. Right. So it might make sense to deploy rules that, That result in the punishment of escalation or something like that. So anyway, I'm just wondering if there's not, in the context of children, if what appears to be the female response here makes sense. That doesn't seem to make sense in the wider world.

[B]

Yeah, maybe, but, you know, and, and, you know, empathy for the helpless is obviously going to be more important in traditional maternal roles than traditional paternal roles. But a standard, good, effective parenting response, when your two children are at each other and one of them complains that the other one hit him, and you say, well, what happened before that? Or what did you do? And that's not, that's not blaming the victim. That's establishing what is true, that is establishing history and establishing accountability. If any time the usual bully does something and he can start screaming and get the empathy of anyone he requests it from, then he will win and we will end up with a society or a playground of, you know, weakling, idiot bullies who are, you know, many of them will be men because they were encouraged in such behavior early on.

[A]

Well, I do think this is, this is the question raised by this research. If you set up a system which seems to exist in women, where you just simply sympathize. Again, that's the way I would use the term. But you sympathize with victims, then you incentivize being victimized.

[B]

And, and the game theory is obvious.

[A]

Right. And then, lo and behold, what do you get? Well, you get, you know, the BLM riots, you get a feminization of civilization where everybody is competing, you know, what we used to describe as the oppression Olympics.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Everybody is competing for the claim of most victimized because that, that, you know, brings about the most power.

[B]

And I mean, I think this thing I said a couple minutes ago, I think actually might be important. It's not justice.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's quite the opposite of justice. And yet the sort of, you know, oppression Olympics, the progressive stack, the dei, the woke culture, you know, all of these names for the things that have been grabbing hold of society for, you know, well over a decade at this point sound like they're coming from, and explicitly are claimed to be coming from a desire for what they have coined social justice. And it would appear to be sort of the people who prioritize justice over the people who prioritize freedom. There's the freedom first people and the justice first people. But I have felt forever that that was an unfair categorization, that was a cheat by the so called social justice people. And I think this is exactly why they're doing instantaneous reads in which their assessment of whether or not they or someone else has been victimized is not just done instantaneously, but at the point they've come to a conclusion, that's it, we're done.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

You know George Floyd was murdered. Probably not. Yeah, actually.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But like, that's the only conclusion you're allowed to come to. And, and, and if you don't agree, then you're against justice. Like, no, I'm against instantaneous reads and blanket empathy where it should not apply.

[A]

Perfect. Now I want to go back and rescue my hypothesis, okay. Because I think the distinction is are you in a training environment or are you in the adult environment? In the training environment, you may very well want to punish anybody who escalates. Right. So if you, if the point is, hey, if you victimize somebody, you're about to get punished, then the point is that tends to frustrate an entire line of gamesmanship in the direction of a more peaceful playground. But if you apply that in the adult world, perfectly gamable, and you have everybody not only pretending to be victims, exaggerating the extent to which they are victims, creating false flags in order to victimize themselves so that they are justified in going after their aggressor. So the point is the, the gamble nature of the adult world requires a different set of rules than the playground does. And they're naturally different. But the problem is, oh boy, this is rough. But you and I have talked many times about the fact that it's great that women have achieved parity in science, but what's not great is that the rules of science have been feminized. And the right rules under which to do science were the ones that natively male the competitive rules in which you hold each other's feet to the fire. And that having been feminized science, you.

[B]

Push on ideas, good and bad, to pressure test them and to not push on them to start with, like, oh, that's fantastic. But I have this one little question is to weaken everything about the endeavor.

[A]

Yep. So the point is, if what has happened is men and women had very different roles in society. Women were more natively pointed towards the raising of children and even the educating of children, and that now you have parity across civilization and civilization is going mad in part because the Rules that make civilization work, in which you punish people for bad behavior, are now challenged by sympathy with victims. That is reflexive, which is imported from the playground and doesn't belong out here in civilization.

[B]

You know, there's. For a long time, like 90s and the aughts and into the teens, and I don't really hear it anymore. But that may just be because we're not in the classroom and we're not hanging out in academic circles anymore. But since we were undergraduates, honestly, late 80s through very recently, something I would often hear, and I know you will remember this as well, and anyone who's been in an academic setting, except maybe just as an undergrad in giant lecture classes, will have heard something like, you know, we need more of the feminine in power. We know we need the toxic masculine to go away. And we need. And I'm forgetting, like, there's a framing, there's a. There's a number of stock phrases that people used to use, and I can't remember any of them right now, but I've heard them actually as recently as I want to say, 2018, when I was giving a talk at a conference that I thought would have been, you know, awake to this stuff, and some guy, some, you know, aging hippie guy stood up and said, you know, we really need fewer men in power and more women. And I shocked him by saying, no, we do not. Like, absolutely we do not. What we need is to encourage the good forms of both to recognize that we're talking about populations, that we're talking about averages and proclivities, and that there are masculine acting women and feminine acting men, and those aren't inherently bad things, but the toxic forms of both are. Are in fact toxic. They are, you know, accurately named toxic. Masculinity is easier to get rid of, though, because it tends to go physical and public and overt and obvious, and we have laws against it. And the toxic feminine is covert and cryptic and socially manipulative, and everyone can adopt toxic femininity, men and women alike, and there are no laws against it. And it's taking over. And frankly, the response to that is good strong women, but also especially good strong men who are empowered, who know that they are empowered to say, no, not that, not now. This is not the time for empathy. Just like the authors of this paper actually end their paper with by saying, maybe this suggests that in places of things like law enforcement and justice, men are the better people to be doing it. And I'm sorry if I butchered what their message was what they say is these findings could indicate a predominantly role for males in the maintenance of justice and punishment of norm violation in human societies.

[A]

Yep. Well, I feel pretty good that we've arrived at kind of a rough model of what might be going on and why. It's driving us crazy in the present that what we have is an undeclared shift in the way we evaluate aggressors and victims and what we do about it. And that that undeclared shift, whether it's a male version to a female version or something else, just simply a reflexive embrace of victims creates a gameable landscape which will be gamed. And what you will end up seeing are the cryptic bullies disguised, you know, cry bullies.

[B]

That's crybabies. Yeah, yeah, we. We know. We. We've got it all figured out with regard to the people who were out, you know, aggressively pushing people on the playground. And, you know, there will be people who argue that what's going on in Minnesota is exactly, exactly that. And, you know, maybe it is. I, actually, before. Before you embark on this section, I will say I do not know. I have not been paying a lot of attention, in part because I know that I do not know. And I cannot trust what we are being told because everything that we can see after the fact, having not been there, is through someone else's lens, quite literally. And so everyone has a take. Everyone has an ideology, even if they were trying not to. And so, you know, the. The best approach, if you're trying to understand it, will be to hear from. From people with different ideologies, with different takes.

[A]

Yes. Now, I will say I've been struggling with what's going on in Minnesota. I've been struggling with it not so much because I think the event itself is so difficult, but because the effect that it is having on people is so deranging. And I am watching people that I know and trust unable to discuss this event in a. What I would call a purely rational way, because in some sense it seems callous. Right. And so, anyway, I wanted to try to zoom out and figure out how to stand in a different place on the event. And I wanted to show what's taking place in the discussion of the event, which I think bears out exactly what you are describing.

[B]

So you're. It seems to me there have been many events, at least two of. Of similar tenor. You're talking about the more recent shooting of Preddy.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Is that the event that you were referring to?

[A]

Yes, Alex Preddy. So I think everybody will know the story, but just so that we all have the same priors walking into the discussion. Alex Preddy was an ICU nurse, male, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We do not know the particular details. As far as I know, we do not know the particular details of why he was in the midst of a, A, an ICE raid that was being protested by many on the ground who oppose this ICE enforcement in one way or another. He was present. We see video of him present. No one contests the fact that he was legally armed. He was. He had a concealed carry permit and he was carrying a pistol. It happens to have been a SIG Sauer 320, which is, unfortunately, in this story, a gun that is famous for malfunctions. He never brandished the weapon. There were claims from the Trump administration that made it sound, you know, if you say that, you know, he approached officers with a weapon, it sounds like he was brandishing the weapon. He never brandished the weapon. He was holding a phone, but he had a concealed weapon and he got into an altercation. The altercation appears to have started when an ICE officer pushed a woman. And he seemingly attempts to intercede, and he gets into an altercation with the officer. Several officers step in, he's wrestled to the ground. It then seems clear that his weapon is as he is, on the ground being held and wrestled, but he is not under the control of these officers. They are wrestling him.

[B]

He's resisting.

[A]

He's resisting. He's not lying flat on the ground. And his weapon is removed from his holster. It is carried away. Something happens, and then he is shot at least 10 times.

[B]

Now after being disarmed.

[A]

Well, this is one of the points of contention, and one of the things that I think is.

[B]

The story you just told is that his weapon is removed from his holster and carried away.

[A]

Let's put it this way. In retrospect, we know that he was disarmed at that moment. The question of the shooting, what did.

[B]

The people who were shooting him know?

[A]

Right.

[B]

What did they have in their face?

[A]

Did they all know that his weapon had been removed? And did any of them have certain certainty he didn't have another weapon, which is something people sometimes do. They carry a backup. So, yep.

[B]

And so, excuse me, this is important. What is true with regard to the facts and what people can know and what people believed in their heads are obviously points of legal contention in such cases. And they are also exactly the subject of, again, just to take it out of human space for a moment to imagine. Don't imagine that this is an entirely Human kind of experience, obviously the very particulars are. But, you know, knowing what is in someone else's head and acting according to what you believe they know as opposed to what you know to be true, which might be something different than what they know is something that has been greatly studied in organisms like baboons. So, you know, this, this is, it's, it's utterly and highly relevant. Even, even if the man in question was actually fully disarmed and he knew that.

[A]

Right. He may not have known. They may not have known, Some of them may not have known. But the question, unfortunately the legal question rests on each of the shooters and whether they had, at the moment that they decided to shoot, a reasonable threat, a reasonable belief that they were under eminent threat. Right now. Now let me just paint you a scenario. This did not happen, but let's say that some other person had fired a gun into the air with the express purpose of triggering these ICE officers to shoot an unarmed man. Okay? The person who did that shooting would be guilty. The person they're shooting into the air. The person who shot Alex Preddy might well not be based on the fact, even though their belie was mistaken, that they were under eminent threat. So that's what the law, if it works properly, is going to ask is in the case of each shooter and in fact each shot, how many shooters were there? I don't know, but it was like, I think there were at least six officers there. I don't know how many of them shot and how many shot multiple times. It does certainly look to me like there are shots fired after he's already limping on the ground. But again, these are all split second decisions. But there's a lot of other context here. Right. And so one of the points I want to make is that you can't apply the school ground logic. You can't zoom in on the event and say, who is the victim? We actually know who the victim is. It's Alex Preddy. Did he do anything for which death is the right sentence? No, he hadn't been convicted of anything. He wasn't brandishing a weapon. He was allowed to carry the weapon he had. On the other hand, the context, the fact that you have officers engaged in an operation, we can argue about whether those officers are well trained, whether the Trump administration is acting intentionally in a belligerent fashion, because for whatever reason, because it's one of the things that it does. But we also have to look at the fact that you've got an organized group of protesters who are actually engaged in things that amp up the likelihood, that create the likelihood of a tragedy. Right. And you and I watched this up close. We actually went to the BLM protests in Portland in 2020. And it is very clear that there is a game, and I will describe it for you. People might differ with aspects of it.

[B]

But before you do, it is very clear that there is a game that you can see playing out on the ground. And then when you watch the media portrayal of what is happening, it bears so little resemblance to what is actually happening on the ground. This is part of why I say I do not know what is happening in Minneapolis now, just as I did not know what was happening in the end of May of 2020 in Minneapolis. But I saw, we both saw with our own eyes what was happening in Portland on several nights during the. God, it was over a hundred consecutive days of protest that turned into 100 consecutive days of riots in the city of Portland following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the end of May, which of course was prompted in part by the lockdowns and people just feeling you need to get out on the streets and all of this. But none of that is an excuse. The fact is the media representation and what was happening on the ground bore so little resemblance to one another that why anyone trusts that what they were seeing through their screens is true, I do not know.

[A]

And I think the key thing is phones and then screenshots capture certain things and they fail to capture other things. And, you know, in Portland, I'll just tell you, my honest impression of what was taking place is that you had a highly organized resistance force calling itself Antifa. Antifa was doing everything in its power to antagonize the law enforcement. All of it, whether it was feds who showed up, local cops, they were demonizing those people in the most disgusting terms. They literally. I remember one night there was a pig's head burned in front of the courthouse where the riots occurred every night. There were certainly threats of death against the police scrawled on walls. Commonly there were people launching BBs at the federal officers with slingshots. That's a. That's assault with a deadly weapon. But it doesn't look like a gun. You don't. You know, to the extent that you may capture somebody with a slingshot, you don't see who they've launched it at. It doesn't read the same way somebody pulling a gun on somebody does. And the idea, I think is what we need is an undeniable abuse of power captured on film. We need you to see somebody brutalized by a cop. Antifa. Antifa wants a cop to brutalize somebody on camera and to capture it and say, see? Told you. Fascism. The part that was most surprising was that the city government in Portland appeared to be on the side of Antifa hobbling the police so that they were in a disadvantaged, dangerous position, were reacting out of their amygdalas rather than being backed by, you know, city government. They knew they were in legal jeopardy. So their ability, their, their desire to enforce the law is reduced because it, you know, it's harder to sue somebody who doesn't show up and step in than somebody who steps in and something goes wrong. So anyway, you had the police stepping back, you had the federal forces.

[B]

Well, I mean, yeah, but wait, like the police were literally defunded. People took early retirements. They saw a huge decrease in applications to join the force. Ted Wheeler, then the mayor was, you know, he was just one in a long list of hapless boobs leading various west coast jurisdictions and you know, all across the country. But you know, we happen to know the west coast better. And he literally apologized when Antifa broke into the condo building that he lived in and set it on fire.

[A]

Yeah, he moved.

[B]

He apologized to them. I don't know if he even apologized to his neighbors and he moved. That's the kind of spineless idiots we have in so called leadership.

[A]

Well, speaking of spineless idiots, and mind you, I'm trying to do this in a non prejudiced way.

[B]

Sorry, it should be quite.

[A]

Tim. Tim Walls is beyond my limit. I cannot stomach this guy because he is so clearly playing the cry bully role. So we have Ted Wheeler in Portland who, you know, you and I watched set the community up, you know, basically poured gasoline on a fire. And here we have Tim Walls, who I'm alerted to from Tucker, who showed this clip on his most recent broadcast. Take a listen to Tim Walsh talking about the situation unfolding in Minneapolis.

[B]

So this is now, this is in the last couple days. Okay.

[D]

This is a guy who is in the middle of the biggest political scandal in a state's history. It's the Somali welfare scam that has just been exposed that you've been watching on Instagram. Here's one example. Tim Walsh.

[A]

We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Franklin. Somebody's going to write that children's story about Minnesota. And there's one person who can end this now.

[D]

Someone's going to write that story about Minnesota. Now he's referring to Anne Frank, of course, the little Jewish girl who was killed in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding for more than a year with her family in the. The secret alcove from the Nazis. It's a story that most American children are very familiar with. And it's the most terrifying possible thing you could ever say to a population, that the President of the United States and his armed agents are going to kill you like they did Anne Frank. So the people I'm opposed to are not simply Nazis in some theoretical sense. They're coming here to round you and your children up and take them to a death camp.

[A]

Okay, so put aside what Tucker has to say here, which I agree with. You can clearly see that Tim Walls is attempting to put his own population in a mindset where that thing that you feared since you were a child is actually unfolding on your own streets. You therefore know who the bad guys are, what they're capable of. The fact that children are hiding in their homes already tells you where we are in the story. I mean, this is, it's Ted Wheeler pouring gasoline on Portland. Is Tim Walsh pouring gasoline on Minneapolis. It's the same play.

[B]

It's, it's, it is the same play, but I mean, in some ways it's even, it's, it's, it's additional plays as well. All you have to do to prove that you're in mortal danger is act as if you're in mortal danger. That's, that's the standard of evidence, or believe it. So parents, psychopathic parents are going to impose trauma and fear on their children and tell them they can't leave the house. And that's going to spread. And Tim Walls is going to use that as proof. Not that there are really bad parents out there who are abusing their children psychologically with fear and trauma that is imposed by, in part them, but proof of a hit larian level invasion in their city. How is that proof? Like what? How, how did we get to a place where not just. Not only is empathy invoked inappropriately at every level, but analysis does not exist. There's no logic here. If all you have to do to prove that Hitler's back is there are children hiding in their homes, then all you have to do is get children to hide in their homes. And I don't even know. Abracadabra.

[A]

You've proven it 100%. Now let me give you another example. And mind you, I'm not gonna come out in. This is a clear story. I don't think this is a clear story, but I think certain elements of it are clear. Here's another one. You have ICE agents. Again, I'm not saying these are the right people. I'm not saying they're well trained. I'm not saying that the Trump administration is not acting intentionally in a belligerent way for a reason, for its own political reasons.

[B]

You're not saying the opposite of those things.

[A]

I'm not saying. I'm not saying one way or the other, but I am saying the optics of these guys masked with their sunglasses descending on American cities is appalling. It just gross. These people are obviously embarrassed at what they're doing, except they're also being doxed. I don't know what the right response is. If you're a federal officer being accused of being a Nazi and you're being doxed, you're having your actual identity exposed. It's being said online that you are, you know, justifying, you know, being shot, whatever. These things are all happening. Concealing your identity is not an unreasonable thing to do. I don't know what the solution is. If people are allowed to dox you de facto or actually by law, then disguising yourself makes sense, which then makes you look like a shameful Nazi, hiding your identity because of what you're doing.

[B]

So, again, I don't know the images you're referring to. I have not been paying attention. But what you just described doesn't sound, frankly, any different from what we saw with regard to ICE and protesters in Portland in 2020. Like it was.

[A]

It's the same playbook.

[B]

It's the same freaking playbook. And, oh, do they look. Do they look powerful and like they're wielding weapons? Well, yes, that is their job. That is what they're there for. Are you inherently scared and going to fight back against anyone who shows up looking powerful and wielding weapons? Well, then it's a standoff. Like, if there is literally nothing that could happen that would warrant force, then you are asking for anarchy. And of course, we know that some people are asking for anarchy, but most people aren't. Most people just haven't followed through their own arguments about what it is that they would like to happen and what would happen if the things that they are asking for were to come true. And it's in most cases, in many cases, among those on the illiberal left, it's chaos. It's complete chaos.

[A]

I think it's also proceeding because people do not understand the novelty of the environment in which they are trying to make sense and on the one hand, it's completely obvious. It will be even more obvious to you and me. But a human being is evolved to look at a situation having incomplete information to render a judgment, to understand what its likely implications are. If they didn't see the event, particularly they hear the reports, they likely know the people from whom they hear the reports and can detect whether or not these people are reliable witnesses, whether they have known biases. All of these things. We are denied all of those tools. Yes, we are looking through a keyhole at an event and don't know what the context of the event is. And we don't know what players have a stake in what conclusion we reach about it, which is it ought to cause us to be incredibly skeptical of what we think we know about these events. And maybe the next thing to do is just to take a look at two reports. One of, you know, you basically have two sides that have developed here instead of there being a sort of, oh, gosh, this is not good, it's bad for America. What do we do about it? There are two sides. In what way this bad for America? Which thing is bad for America? Is it the ICE enforcement and you have protesters who are rightly standing in the way of an UN American operation, or is it that we have a terrible problem with immigration and the fact that our border was open and we don't know who came into the country? There's lots of crime being committed and we have to address it, and it's going to be ugly. But. But that's the price of administering the nation. These two unreconcilable worldviews are being deployed in real time, mostly to their own audiences instead of compelling anybody on the other side. They're preaching to their own choir. So let's look at two. You want to start with, I don't know, Fox News.

[E]

ICE was zeroing in on a foreign fugitive from Ecuador wanted for domestic assault when anti ICE agitators pinned agents down in a narrow street. Border Patrol was attempting to remove the mob when a guy with a concealed gun physically confronted Border Patrol and resisted arrest. Viewer warning. This is graphic.

[B]

You're the people the is wrong with you. Honestly.

[E]

The shooting's now under investigation and body cameras are being reviewed. When Alex Preddy approached the agents, he was packing a fully loaded Sig Sauer 9 millimeter handgun with two full mags. He did have a concealed carry permit. Reports say he did not have an ID on him, and we don't know whether he alerted officers that he was carrying, which is what Everybody with a concealed carry permit is instructed to do when encountered by law enforcement. Resisting arrest with a loaded gun is incredibly dangerous. Video of the shooting shows agents yelling gun, gun, gun. During the struggle. One video is believed to show an agent removing Alex Preddy's weapon before the shooting, but it's still unclear. DHS is investigating whether Alex Preddy's gun may have accidentally discharged. This particular pistol has a history of accidental misfires that may have triggered Border patrol to defend themselves with deadly force. It's a very loud, violent and chaotic scene. And these are the types of things that happen, unfortunately and sadly, when you bring a loaded gun to a dangerous immigration raid, confront agents and resist arrest.

[A]

Let us now just without comment, go to the alternative view of events. This is cnn. Let's look at what they have to say.

[E]

We have a new analysis on some.

[A]

Of the video that we've been showing you. CNN's Josh Campbell joins us now.

[E]

Josh, tell us more.

[C]

Well, Jake, this is critical new information coming from our CNN Investigates analysis of different angles of this incident that we've seen where you actually see the fatal shooting of this Minneapolis man. What we're learning from looking at it appears at one point as Alex Prettie is being held down on the ground, officers are trying to take him into custody. He does appear to be resisting. But at one point it appears that a federal immigration agent actually steps forward into that scrum, reaches towards his waistband and appears to disarm him, appears to pull a firearm away. So there hasn't been a dispute, I don't think by anyone that he actually had a firearm. The Minneapolis police chief said that he was a licensed gun owner, but it appears that that agent then pulls the weapon. He steps away just about one second after that agent steps away. Then you hear gunfire. And it's unclear which agent actually fired the first shot there. It's also unclear whether that agent who appeared to remove his firearm from his waistband actually signaled to others around that he was removing the gun. But that is critical information because there is this question about what type of of threat did the agent who fired first actually perceive. You could hear audio from agents saying, he's got a gun, he's got a gun. But there's no indication in any video that we've seen today that he was brandishing the weapon, that he was pointing it at any of the officers. And I can tell you as a former law enforcement officer, by policy, agents are trained that you can only use deadly force when there is an imminent threat of death or serious physical injury. To yourself, the agent, or someone else, merely someone having a firearm on them does not in and of itself justify the use of deadly force. That person has to pose some type of threat.

[A]

Okay, so you have two different portrayals. In one, you have Fox News pointing out that Alex Peretti was armed and involved himself in a conflict, and that that is known to be a dangerous thing. The advice given to people who are going to carry a weapon is that they now have an extra onus to avoid conflict, because now any conflict that they are involved in is a conflict with a gun in it.

[B]

Just to be clear, though, as far as, you know, in Minnesota anyway, it may be just different across states. A concealed carry permit does not come with it. The onus, the obligation, the legal obligation to inform officers whom you approach that you are carrying it comes with it a recommendation, but not an obligation.

[A]

Agreed, Agreed. He said, I'm asking. That's true. He loses no rights. He's entitled to carry this gun, to say nothing about it. But at the point he's involving himself in an altercation, the chances that something goes wrong are way up. Now, I want to point out that there are a couple of things that I think we truly do not know that radically change the question of what unfolded. You can see in those videos, though, you've got protesters blowing whistles, sharp noises right in the midst of a scuffle, air horns. Right. And the point is, this is designed to make bad judgment happen.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Right. They. They want. I'm not saying that they wanted somebody to get shot, but what they want are examples that clearly on film look like government overreach, abuse, authoritarianism. And they're also going to the hotels of ICE agents and keeping them awake all night, making the hotels want not to have them around because it's chaos. So there's all sorts of stuff loaded in here that you don't even see on these films. That has an implication for the state of mind of the officers, and we really don't know the state of mind of Alex Peretti. Again, he could have just been happening by. It doesn't seem like it. There's some circumstantial evidence that this is not his first interaction with federal officers. In fact, he may have had his rib broken in a recent one, like a week before. And we don't know why he's carrying the gun, what he intends to do. But can you show the video of the office? It's unfortunately very grainy, but there's video of the officer removing the weapon, having just taken it out of Alex Perez Freddy's holster, which is behind him, and attempting to remove it from the scene. And the question that many have is whether or not the gun goes off as he is leaving. And we'll come back to why the gun might have gone off and what it means. And at least one question that I haven't heard asked. The they can see the bullet hit the ground. I'm unconclusive as to what I've seen. It's possible that gun goes off. It's possible it didn't go off. But here's the reason that this is important. There's two reasons, in my opinion, one of which has been widely talked about, which is, is they are wrestling Alex Preddy to the ground. His gun is removed from him. We don't know who knows that that has happened. We don't know. They don't know, presumably, that he doesn't have a second one. And if a gun went off in the midst of that struggle, it is quite conceivable, though not certain, that the officers would have understood themselves to be in immediate threat and that they would have understood Alex Preddy to be the source of that threat. But. And they might have shot him. Is it a tragedy? I will argue that it is for the following reason. He has family, they've lost him. But I would argue there are hundreds, maybe thousands of tragedies a day as a result of federal policy. Stuff that we never see decisions about. What pesticide gets sprayed on, the stuff that you eat, what stuff we're going to inject your kids with, what compounds are going to be sprayed on your sofa so it doesn't catch fire, that will then off gas into your house, that result in people dying in ways that we never understand are the result of government policy. But nonetheless, every time a family loses somebody, it's a tragedy. So we're zoomed in on this one for a reason, but it's not independently 1.

[B]

Diffuse risk does not produce empathy, right? Acute risk produces empathy, apparently in an unspecific way in many women, but diffuse risk does not. It takes work to get the attention of people with regard to diffuse risks, like pesticides on your food, food dyes, adjuvants, excipients, all of the things, right?

[A]

And not only do we have a bias towards understanding the tragedy that has resulted so that we can see it, but we have a total misunderstanding of what it means for somebody to get shot in front of a video camera in Minneapolis. And for us to see this limited subset of the total context, we think we can Interpret it like we're eyewitnesses. But we are not eyewitnesses in the same sense that we would typically be.

[B]

We're not at all. And I mean, you made this point already. But our ancient brains fool us because we cannot have possibly, as we argue over and over and over again in Hunter Gatherer's guide to the first century to the 21st century. It was easier back then to the 21st century that the hyper novelty that we are niche human's niche is niche switching. And we are are so fast at adapting and even we have created conditions that are changing so fast that we cannot keep up. And so our brains still think when we're looking at screens at some level, even if consciously, we know very, very well this is not us perceiving reality in real time, uninterpreted by screens and someone else's perspective, it still feels like we became eyewitnesses. And we did not. We did not. There were very few people who are eyewitnesses to what everyone is now talking about. And the more we talk about it, the more we repl our initial viewing with the discussion of what is happening, and that replaces our interpretation. And suddenly we're memory upon memory upon memory. We're so many levels deep that what is actually true becomes almost indecipherable.

[A]

Yes, it becomes indecipherable and also gamble by people who have an interest in persuading us one way or the other. And in fact, this is a course. Court is a construction that generates justice. A lawyer is not right. A lawyer skews the evidence as far as they can within the bounds of the law to portray a particular interpretation. And then an opposite lawyer does the inverse. And a judge makes sure they adhere to the rules. And hopefully the sum total of all that mess is a reasonable interpretation of what happened in light of the law. But what we are seeing, there's no judge. So we're all, you know, which lawyer do we like better? You know, well, that one's more handsome than this one. So he's probably right.

[B]

CNN lawyer or the FOX lawyer.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Although I will say that those two clips that you showed didn't vary nearly as much as I was expecting. They were not as polarized or clearly ideological as I would have expected either source to be.

[A]

Well, I made a deliberate choice based on your request when we talked about discussing this today to use a mainstream source if you want to see the polarization.

[B]

Well, I asked. What I said was, if you want to talk about this, I would like us to show a couple of mainstream clips from the opposite sides of the ideological divide. But I was expecting the mainstream and I figured Fox because there's not a whole lot else out there on the right. And then, you know, I said, like cnn, msnbc, you know, something over on the. Over on the left and that, you know, he said he was a former law officer himself, law enforcement officer himself. So it just, it seemed, it seemed measured. Both of those, Both of those clips that you showed from the two mainstream media sources seemed measured to me.

[A]

They were. In fact, they're more measured than, you know, the Trump administration, which had. Has portrayed. The language that they have used makes it seem like a couple things. One, already was brandishing a weapon rather than just armed to that he had a clear intent to inflict damage that, you know, these two loaded magazines are taken as evidence that he was out to create a, you know, a mass casualty event. There's no evidence of this whatsoever. But in any case, there's no shortage of highly partisan, skewed by hyperbolic. Yeah, I mean, everything from people saying this was an execution, that they're gunning us down in the streets, which is obviously not what happened based on what we saw. You know, there could be conversations that took place if they. And there is some evidence they may have known who Alex Preddy was based on their past altercation. So it's possible he was targeted. It's possible that there was a discussion in which somebody that they were gonna, you know, they were out to look for an excuse to kill him. There's no evidence of these conversations. But all I'm saying is the range of possibilities of things that are outside of our view is huge. One of them that is vitally important for us to understand, I think, is the question of whether or not that gun went off as it was being carried away. Because if it did that, and that's.

[B]

That should be no appointment at the very least by the guy who was carrying it. He. He will know.

[A]

He should know. He should know. He will have felt it went off in his hand.

[B]

He will have felt it even if he couldn't hear it over all the chaos. He will have felt.

[A]

He will absolutely know. Now, do we ever get access to his statement? Especially a statement made immediately the pavement presumably tells the story. The gun is aimed down. There will be.

[B]

I mean, I just, I just, just in terms of the visceral, the tactile experience of holding a weapon, let's put.

[A]

It this 100%, he should, he should know whether the gun went off. There are Lots of ways that you could know, including the gun itself should likely tell that tale. Obviously it could have been fired before, but the state. Well, here's, here's the other thing though. So you've got this video, you've seen it, there's some reason to think the gun may have gone off. There is is reason to worry about this particular gun. And I hate to get into one of these discussions.

[B]

And the, and the Fox commenter mentions this as well.

[A]

He does. So this is a famous gun. This is a Sig Sauer make and model.

[B]

Not this individual gun.

[A]

Yeah, not this individual gun and not the particular version that he was carrying. But I truly think it doesn't matter.

[B]

There's something like sub to model.

[A]

Yeah, he was carrying a fancy version of a famous gun. The gun is actually not famous, it's infamous. The gun is infamous for not being drop safe. In other words, there are many instances in which people claim that they have dropped the weapon and it has fired, which it is not supposed to do.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

I have seen very compelling demonstrations in which people have loaded the weapon with a primer. So not there's no bullet, but the gun is capable of firing and they've dropped it in various ways. And it appears that if you drop this gun on the tail, that it fires almost reliably if there is a round in the chamber as a result of the very light trigger being carried back by momentum and firing the gun inadvertently.

[B]

So, so, but that, that is not relevant to it having been carried away by the man who disarmed him, is it? Are you saying that might be relevant to him being knocked onto the ground?

[A]

Nope, I'm saying the drop safeness is not relevant except in that it tells us that this gun is very easily accidentally fired. So you can imagine. So the point is that very light trigger that fires easily if you drop it is also a light trigger if you bump, bump it. So, okay, there's that possibility that this gun being carried away, you can imagine you're, you know, you've got a gun, you're trying to remove it from the person that you fear it being used by. You're not, it's not the circumstance in which you're holding it. Ideally, you're taking the time to handle it the way you know a firearm should be handled. You're not checking it to see whether there's one in the chamber, any of these things. You're just trying to get it out of there. It's quite conceivable that even if it was the result of an error on that officer's part that he hit the trigger and it went off. But more to the point, and oddly, I have not heard this discussed anywhere, so I'm checking my own model to make sure I haven't misunderstood something. But here's the question as I see it. If the gun went off as it was being removed, that says that there was a round in the chamber. Can't have fired if there wasn't a round in the chamber, unless somebody racked the slide. And there is no reason that an officer trying to get that gun out of. Would have racked the slide. So it is logical if the gun went off, to surmise that he put a round in the chamber. Now, legally, did he have a right to carry the gun? Yes. Did he have a right to carry that gun? Yes. Did he have a right to put a round in the chamber? Yes.

[B]

Is that true?

[A]

Yep. But, wow, would you have to be crazy to do it with that gun? There are guns in which it is. Is around. Is carried in the chamber. I. I would never think to do it. It seems reckless to me. But those guns are guns that have redundant safety mechanisms. This gun does not. And it is known to be unsafe because of that very light trigger. So in my opinion, much rests. I can't even evaluate whether or not, I mean, you know, it's quite possible that the initial shot was justified and that there are then a bunch of shots in which they, you know, emptied a bunch of rounds into him that aren't justified.

[B]

You mean the initial shot at Pretty?

[A]

Yes, the initial shot at Pretty, the one we're certain happened quite possible that somebody got spooked and that that set off a chain of shots, some of which weren't justified. And then, you know, it gets into very messy questions. But. But to me, if Preddy's gun didn't go off, that changes the balance of the analysis in one direction. This is not there. You know, it could be that they had a sudden sense. You know, could be a firecracker went. Could be, you know, you don't know what. It could be that somebody shouted gun. And then the court has to figure out whether or not shouting gun is sufficient to suggest an imminent threat. Probably it's not, because for one thing, these officers are trained to say guns so that people know that there's one present. So anyway, much hinges on this. But at one level, I don't know that Pretty knew he had bought. Bought a infamous gun, one prone to go off that's certainly so widely described in gun circles that I knew it right away. It's widely described, discussed everywhere. But he might not have known. Maybe he walked into a gun, stole the market. Yep. Weirdly weird. Well, Sig Sauer claims to have solved the problem. I think there's a fair amount of evidence that the problem remains. And there's always the question of a manufacturer of anything is reluctant to pull things off the market because it effectively puts blood in the water with respect to lawsuits and things. But it's quite possible that the fancy gun he had, and he had a very fancy version of it was discounted because nobody wants one. And he looked to him like a good gun. Maybe some gun store didn't tell him, hey, there's something you should know. And so he could have walked in unwit.

[B]

But do we know anything about his history as a gun owner, gun user?

[A]

A little. And I think this comes from his ex wife and maybe his parents. They understood that he had a gun, they knew that that was the case and that he was not generally known to carry. So in my opinion, much rests on whether he chose that day.

[B]

I guess I meant was he a, was he a sportsman? Did he go, did he do target practice? Did he have experience? Did he sort of barely know how to use it? You know, there's, there's a lot of range of, of it's easy to get a concealed carry permit.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

And there, there's there, the range of people with such is presumably almost as wide as the range of people without, in terms of what they know how to do. And I, I, I'm, well, I don't, I don't know that anything else hinges on this. I'm just curious about what, you know, an ICU nurse who has already had interactions with law enforcement in the current environment walks into a known chaotic environment legally armed. Legally armed and being in full, full in full awareness and capacity with regard to how to, how to use your weapon is different from legally armed with a weapon that you, you know, have shot a few times.

[A]

Right. Now, this is, this is kind of what I'm getting at. And I, I want people not to focus so much on the details of the firearm as the analysis from the perspective of somebody who has been involved in these discussions about how, how to think about firearms and behave in a safe way. There are numerous things here which I would say he is legally entitled to do, but I would regard as reckless. And I don't mean legally reckless. I mean reckless in the common parlance sense of the term. He's carrying a loaded firearm into a Zone of conflict with army armed federal officers. I wouldn't do that if I was. Let's say that's not a decision he made. Maybe he happened there by accident and somehow was not focused on the fact that, hey, I need to be extra careful and not go this direction because I'm armed and it could get bad. But then he steps in as the officer is behaving, I think in an illegitimate way towards this one woman, right? This officer shoves this woman to the ground and pretty steps in. I would argue that's reckless if you're armed the way he is because of exactly the sort of thing that unfolds. I don't know that he had one in the chamber because I don't know that his gun went off. But if the gun went off, it says he had one in the chamber. And I would say, wow, that's really reckless, especially with that gun. That's the kind of thing where you shoot your own leg, just taking it out of your holster. Because that gun doesn't have a safety. The only safety you have is not having one in the chamber. So the number of things that suggest that this was not a sophisticated gun aficionado, but that this was somebody wielding a deadly. Not wielding, carrying a deadly weapon in a way that made the situation worse and not better, the number of things that point in that direction is substantial and some of them are ambiguous, like did he have around in the chamber? But we ought to be focused on that question because it does say something about what likely unfolded. Right. And was it a tragedy? Yes, a family lost a son. But it doesn't mean that it wasn't a justified shooting. It doesn't mean that it wasn't mentioned. The first person to shoot may have been justified and the rest may not have been. These are all things we would want to know. But if we can now zoom out for a second because here's my real point. The events in Minneapolis look a lot like the events in Portland. To the extent that one has to step back and say, wait a minute, what is the chance that some doughy politician is amping the. The danger by portraying things in a deceptive way in order to make, to embolden people to challenge officers. What are the chances that that's the same in both of these things? The type of organization that Antifa has and that the protesters in Minneapolis have is also similar. Right? You get these highly organized, effectively paramilitary efforts based on the fact that. Fact that we are in the right, that what is taking place is the federal overreach this is the thing that we told you was going to happen if Trump was elected. So the point is, it's a playbook. What's it for? Well, I think what it's bound to be for is to make sure that we Americans never get to the place where we recognize that we are actually being parasitized, that our entire political structure is hostile to our interests almost all the time. And the fear that that political structure has is that we're going to notice that and stop hating each other and actually get together in some coordinated way and throw the bums out. And so when we are divided over something like this, where we are zoomed in on an event that looks like an execution to some and a justified shooting to others that is so useful to those who us never to understand each other as fellow countrymen and honorable people and all of that. So I'd guess that's where we are. And there's a cartoon. Almost everybody who watches our show will probably have seen it somewhere, but there's a cartoon that sort of captures this idea. It's iconic. People will post it every time one of these scenarios happens. So for those who are just listening, what it depicts is a guy with some kind of a blade chasing another guy down the street. And there's a television camera being used to film the event. And it captures an exact edit of the event that makes the person fleeing the actual victim look like the aggressor against the actual aggressor who looks like the victim. And it's a really good way of remembering that the novel that you think you're an eyewitness to something that you're definitely not an eyewitness to, and that you're being manipulated into seeing it one way, and if you were standing somewhere else, you might see it in exactly the inverse fashion. And that at the very least, we need to walk around with the awareness that our perspective may have been cultivated by somebody, somebody for a purpose. Now, they may have just taken advantage of something that happens. In this case, they may have increased the likelihood that something would happen then standing ready to edit what we would see so that we would come to a conclusion that naturally matched our biases walking in. But we need a level of skepticism that we're not good at, especially when we think we're eyewitnesses to something. Every eyewitness thinks it knows what happens happened.

[B]

Yeah, and I mean, this. This point used to be simpler, and it still seemed incredibly complex. The point was eyewitnesses aren't reliable. And if you have. If you can bring in other senses to having been in a moment, if you have a smell witness and a taste witness, if it's relevant and a touch witness, then you know, then you, then you have more ability to actually assess what it is. But still, and this is the lesson of anamorphic art, if you are standing here and someone else is standing there, how you perceive reality may be totally different regardless of which sense you're using. And you know, there are tools, there are things that we used to do that I used to do with my students in the field and you know, tell them to go out just like the same place week after week after week. It changes, doesn't it? Go to a different place within hours of one another. They're totally different. Okay, you can modify space, you can modify time and know that things are different. But what about the, the fact that you and your friend are standing right next to one another, supposedly seeing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way at exactly the same time, and you come away with different interpretations. So all of that is both true and child's play compared to where we are right now. Because A, we are not eyewitnesses, but are being tricked by our technology into believing that we are. And B, your point? We are being gamed. There are forces out there that not only are doing the interpreting, doing the newscasting, you know, telling us what to think, but in, in the moment about particular stories. But there is very likely to be larger structures that are, that are steering the narrative more broadly. And those larger structures almost certainly do not have our best interests at heart. And so the idea that we are actually, actually witnessing anything and coming to our own conclusions when it's coming through a stream is, is something that we should actually be deeply suspect of. You know, imagine as your default that you don't know what you think you know, that you haven't seen what you think you've seen, and that the story you're being told is a story created either to sell things at best at this point, or to keep you at your neighbors or your loved ones, or your supposed enemies throats at worst. And, and, and to what end? You know, why, why is it important that we be a country divided? Why do we need to be a populace divided? We will always have disagreements. None of us, no two of us, not you and me sitting right here, having been together for decades and agreeing on so much, will ever agree on everything. That won't happen, nor should it happen, nor should we want it to happen happen. You will always have disagreements and some of them will be big, and some people you will not want to be friends with. But that doesn't mean that you have to hate them. And that doesn't mean that you have to put up banners that indicate your pure allegiance to something that is probably a creation of a force that is not on your team.

[A]

You also need to be aware that in addition to you not being able to interpret what you think you saw because you didn't really see it, you've seen that fraction that made it through the wires to your machine. You also have to be aware that the experience of who the other person is is distorted too, right? In general, two people who were standing in the same location who watched an event will likely have seen something similar. Similar. But if you and I are triggering the algorithm differently and it's feeding us different stuff, we may have seen wildly different things. And one thing I see people do again and again is assume that I'm watching the same stuff that they're seeing and ignoring the obvious conclusion, right? Like, how could you feel that way? And the answer is, well, I didn't see what you saw. I saw what I saw, which you didn't see. And so the point is, if you want to set people up, that's the way to do it.

[B]

Well, and this, this is another way that modernity confuses us, right? Used to be, if you were sitting right next to someone and something happened, you might come to different conclusions. You might think, oh, I thought it came from over there, and you thought it came from over there, and you might, like, run in different directions to figure out what the noise was or whatever. But now, if you're sitting right next to someone, if you're doing what so many people do, if you're on your own devices, instead of either having a conversation, playing a game, having drinks, having a meal, even watching the same thing on a screen in front of you. If you're both on your own individual screens, but you're sitting right next to one another, history says you're having a shared experience, but modernity says you're not. And your modern brain hasn't caught up to the fact that you're actually having wildly different experiences, even if you could reach out, out and touch the person.

[A]

So back in the early days of cell phones, not the really early days, not the brick phones, but the early days of people commonly having them, there was this result that became very clear very quickly, which was driving while talking on your phone was radically elevating of your likelihood of having an accident. Accident. And that Makes sense. Okay. You're having a conversation, you're distracted. Except listening to the radio doesn't do it. And talking to the person next to.

[B]

You and you're not talking about. These were hands free experiences. This wasn't a you're distracted physically with your body.

[A]

Right. It didn't matter. But the point is, the control for the experiment is you could perfectly well be talking to that person in the seat next to you. And it didn't have the effect. It's not that having a conversation is so distracting you can't handle it while you're driving, it's that having a conversation with somebody in another location, maybe it puts your mind in that location with them. And so it's not really. You're contributing to your ability to drive. So that thing has now been augmented to all sorts of things that aren't phone calls where you are being transported to the eyes of a drone going around Minneapolis showing you particular things and not other things. And it is distorting of your ability to evaluate anything. But back to the point about the two narratives that are unreconcilable at this point, I want to use a term.

[B]

The extremes being execution justified.

[A]

Yeah, let's say jaw dropping murder of unarmed civilian and justifiable homicide. I would call this a Rorschach trap. Okay. Rorschach test is one in which they show you abstract inkblots and ask you what you see in order to figure out what your state of mind is. A Rorschach trap is going to be an event that divides a population based on its priors. And this goes to your point about the research that you described, in which whether or not somebody has behaved badly causes you to withdraw your sympathy from them in the case that they're a victim or not. But the point is, and especially in the context of these places where if I'm wrong about this, I'm wrong about it. But it sure looks like the intent is to cause egregious behavior in front of a camera so that it can be portrayed to the country and the country's sympathies can be swayed. That's the game, right? I want to create a victim. And in fact I will go one step further. I can't be certain of this, but I believe the game theory in these scenarios in Portland, during blm, in Minneapolis, here is I, we all, all will take a tiny risk of being the victim. The unfortunate, unlucky person who doesn't walk away from the scene in order to contribute my part to creating a Victim that we can all use to turn the tide. Right? Everybody takes a little risk that it's going to be them. And the point is, the objective of the exercise for which everybody is taking the small risk is to get something that we can finally use to shut down the other side. Side. And it's cynical, and I'm. I'm sure it's not explicit right there. Those who are aware, but that's the de facto rule set. And we all in public, who, you know, if the game is actually to persuade us so that we will finally switch sides and, you know, abandon whoever it is that we've been making common cause with, then the point is, oh, well, if you're trying to game me by doing this, I need to shut down that channel. Right? That's the one thing I'm not going to do. I do want to know what happened in Minneapolis, and I want to know all sorts of things that we don't know yet. And so I feel it's premature for us to be judging what we think happened because it hinges on questions like, did he have one in the chamber and did his gun go off as it was being removed? How. How could this not hinge on that question? But, but in any case, knowing that those traps exist and that somebody sophisticated is likely to game us in this way so that whatever our priors are, are they cause us to reach a snap judgment that's useful to them, that's by definition not useful to us, we have a capacity to reason, and somebody is trying to use it against us as they're weaponizing our sympathy and our empathy against us. Right? That's the game is to get our own circuitry to cause us to do their bidding rather than our own.

[B]

Yes. I'm prompted to think something. Something that may seem like a non sequitur here, but I'm reminded of your take, which I have never been able to resonate with, that you don't want to read a lot of analyses of things and put bad ideas into your own head. And this is exactly how I feel about videos that I. I read and I read and I read, read. And I think that I have capacity to sort wheat from chaff. And I'll be fooled sometimes, but, you know, that's. That's how I accumulate a knowledge base. And that's the. That. That's the. The basis on which I then go out into the world and am informed. And I know that when I start looking at videos, I just feel overwhelmed and know that I cannot know, know that I am not myself. The eyewitness, you know, know enough consciously, but can also feel the emotional pull, the psychological pull, all of the pulls that, that in inexorably happen with video that I think, you know, it may just be a me versus you thing in terms of our different personalities and what kinds of modalities we tend to take in information best and can detect falsehoods best on. But my, you know, my bias is it seems that most people will be easily fooled by video because it mimics the eyewitness experience and that books don't. That, you know, part of, for me, part of the wonder of reading in general, but especially not reading on screens and especially reading non form works on paper, is that it is so depauperate at some level, it is so bereft of so many of the usual signals so that you experience real life that you cannot be mistaken. Like you cannot be confused into imagining that it is reality. And you know, we, we, we talk about joining the worlds and like be, you know, imagining ourselves in the land of Harry Potter or Jane Austen or Solzhenitsyn or whoever it is, but we know that that is our imagination imposing itself and imagining us into those worlds. We know that there is that disconnect. And when it's videos we can too easily forget. We can too easily be fooled by our ancient architecture into presuming that we saw the thing live even as we consciously know that we did not.

[A]

Yeah, I agree. It's both more prone to error and also a better channel for manipulation precisely because of that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I would like to actually close out this segment. I want to show what Ron Johnson had to say because it makes a point that I've been struggling to make privately about the context that set this event in motion. Whatever its nature was, let's say it was a, you know, a murder in cold blood, it still happened in a context that is vital to understand and that causes you to reject formulations like oh yep, it's, it's the Nazis, they're doing it. Look at them. It's right there in the streets of Minneapolis. Yeah, so, all right, let's look at Ron Johnson's tweet here. He says the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Preddy are tragedies that did not have to happen. So were the deaths of Lakin Riley, Jocelyn Nungare, Brianna Kelson, Rachel Moore Warren and many, many other victims of illegal immigrants. All of these deaths are the result of Democrats open border policy and now the incitement of violence and obstruction against federal law enforcement. Based on Mayor Frey's statement, it doesn't appear that Democrat elected officials will admit that the public is safer if they cooperate with, rather than obstruct federal officials trying to clean up Democrat created messes.

[B]

Okay, so, well, and that's, and, and that's exactly in keeping with my objection to Waltz's invocation of Anne Frank. You know, if all you have to do is lock your children inside and claim that you've done that because they are in fear for their lives, and because they are in fear for their lives, they must actually be in danger of losing their lives, then you've gamed the system. And so, you know, if, if we won't, if we won't hear, hear from Mayor Frey, I guess it is in Minneapolis that it's just better for you to, to not obstruct the law enforcement officers. Then of course many people are not going to stop.

[A]

Right. And in fact, they're being egged on. Waltz from, I saw behind the wall of his mansion was egging people on with a bullhorn, telling them they were doing the right thing.

[B]

No, he wasn't.

[A]

Yes, he was. Well, I don't know. I think I saw that. Who's to say? Maybe it's AI video, but it sure looked like Tim Walls. Me sounded like him, which doesn't really say anything these days, but. Oh, I believe they've also been handing out, I don't know, is it cookies? Something to.

[B]

For what?

[A]

For the, the brave protesters who are interfering with ice.

[B]

Well, I do like cookies.

[A]

Yeah. You know, this is one of the things you and I agree on. Cookies. Good. But let's just put it this way.

[B]

Do you remember. Sorry, but apropos cookies. Do you remember when Toby was in 10th grade and we were living in Portland and he came home and said today they were offering that if we went around behind the back of the school where the cars can't go and so parents couldn't see if we got our Covid shots, they'd get give us cookies.

[A]

Yep, I do remember that. Hard to believe such things happened, but that's the way things were.

[B]

He was a smart 10th grader, as he is now a smart college student. And I said, you know, that's not legal. They need our permission for you to get those shots. He said, oh, I know. He said, did you get cookies? No.

[A]

We should immediately have given him cookies. Cookies.

[B]

But I probably did. Yeah, probably. I probably made some awesome cookies.

[A]

Yeah, I bet you did. Okay, so I just wanted to point out, at the very least we are Zoomed too far in here. This story goes back to the Biden administration opening the border, creating a completely unsolvable problem. There is going to be no way. We let in a lot of people, we don't know who they are, are. There's a lot of crime being committed. We voted to reverse it. The country voted to reverse it, and there is going to be no way that that can be done. Well, it's going to be messy at best. Now, I think the Trump administration can be counted on to screw it up worse than it needs to be screwed up. And in fact, are. They've got people who are not well enough trained doing this job. Who knows what they're doing their orders actually look like. But the point is, there's a context. We had an open border that is unforeseen by the American founders. They did not tell us what to do in such a circumstance, because under what circumstance would the executive open the freaking border? It's inconceivable. And yet it happened. But it doesn't even start there. I can't remember the first time I heard the word sanctuary city. I remember my reaction to it.

[B]

It was back when we were still professors. Because Olympia was one.

[A]

Yeah. Olympia was one. And my thought was, wait a minute. You're telling me that the city is deciding that it's going to harbor people who violated federal law?

[B]

Oh, we're that dumb.

[A]

Yeah. Well, but I mean, that's like, okay, you're. You might as well just put constitutional crisis on the fricking sign because that's what you've declared. Right. You know, you. You've declared a sanctuary city. Like, what does that even mean? And what does it look like? Well, you know what it looks like? It looks like Minneapolis right now. That's what it looks like.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And my feeling is, okay, what you are telling us is that at the moment that term showed up, that was the moment to have this discussion and say, no, you don't get to do that. You know, I'm not going to quote George Costanza, but he's right. No, I am not. I will not.

[B]

What's he right about?

[A]

Nothing, as far as I know. But the point is, at the point people are saying sanctuary city, they are telling you where we're headed, and we are headed to this, and how they're going to portray it when you get there, that's known. So anyway, that is participating in the Rorschach shock trap. That has us divided against each other to the benefit of others. Not us, certainly. Right. We would be much better to figure out how to talk to each other. And. And anyway, my final point would be if you think you know what happened to Alex Peretti, you're way ahead of the evidence. Because we don't yet have enough evidence to know what happened to Alex Peretti, other than to say it's a tragedy that a family lies lost. A sign.

[B]

Yeah. Your certainty is an indication that you. You aren't. That you don't know yet what is true.

[A]

Yeah. That you're. You're leaping to a conclusion probably because somebody wants you to do exactly that.

[B]

Yeah. Well, I'm going to save a couple of these other stories, but I do want to do one more thing before we go, which is that this week on Natural Selections, my sub stack, I introduced a new project. I want to share that I want to. Actually, I'm just going to read the very. The short post that I made about it and invite people to come along. So. It's called Covid Era. Invitation to submit your Tales Turbo cancers. Jobs taken away. People forced to die alone. Loved ones never to be seen again. Children dismissed as unimportant. They don't need. People they don't need to see faces they don't need to put play. Fear shall be all encompassing. All of us locked down, some of us locked in. People sequestered, no recourse. All in the name of public health. Years lost. Opportunities lost, Lives lost. One mother's tragedy, another mother's choice. Request for exemption from medical mandates on the basis of medicine or religion or science. Requests denied. Individual autonomy revealed to be a surface value. Context dependent. When it's my body, I get to choose. Choose. When it's your body, I also get to choose. Those who had long questioned corporate power over individuals now embracing it. Embracing the conclusions that came wrapped in lab coats and jargon fueled by corporate profits. March 2020 Mask up. Don't go outside. Distance yourself from others. It is other humans that have the problem of whom you must be afraid. Shut down. Wash your mail. Doom Scroll April 2020. Beaches, parks and festivals closed ended. How dare some people come together and be in each other's presence? Don't they know there is a pandemic of foot? A virus has been unleashed on humanity, created in pursuit of goals we do not yet know. Its origin is murky. The product of collaboration between powerful labs in the United States and China. Speaking of this will not be tolerated. Summer 2020. Daily protests become nightly riots in some American cities. How brave of these people to come together and be in each other's presence. They have seen the true pandemic and it is called racism. Fall 2020 a promised vaccine is on the horizon and it shall save us. First, we shall give it to all the healthcare providers. All of them. For even though this is new technology, we already know that it is safe and effective. We just know. Trust the experts. Follow the science. Winter 2021 people rush to get the shot, coming up with ways to jump the line and get early access. Magical thinking abounds and hope for a return to the good old days when life was simpler. Other people waiting for it out, skeptical, concerned. Summer 2021 those who evaded the shot are derided, excluded, demonized. We are killing grandma. We are science deniers, conspiracy theorists. Now is not the time to ask questions. Now is not the time to invoke our rights. Now is the time to comply. Family and friends denied entrance to celebrations and holiday meals. Papers required to dine out, to go to a show, to buy groceries. Those without papers are not worthy of restoration respect. Those without papers are beneath contempt. Those without papers might not be fully human January 2022 many in Canada stand up and say no more. Truckers form a freedom convoy that stretches across Canada. People lining highways and frigid January weather to show their support, to insist on their liberty, to remember the joy of being in the presence of others. We all lived it. We all made choices. But memory is fragile and fleeting. We are forgetting. Some of us want to forget. Others know that we cannot stop the loss even though we try. And so I invite stories, individual personal stories of some aspect of what you, yourself or a loved one experienced during the COVID era. These will not be complete stories and it may be hard to choose what to include. Omitting details that are true can be excruciating. Feel like a betrayal of your own history. As Blaise Pascal, great 17th century mathematician, inventor and philosopher, once wrote to a Frenchman friend, I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Brevity is often more difficult than verbosity. It can also be more powerful. The project is Covet era Stories. Please submit pieces of up to 2, 500 words to assistantmilodonventures.org along with contact information. Depending on the amount of response, we will likely have to pick and choose. Those chosen and chosen initially would be asked to supply contact info for two people who can vouch for what they say. Fiction is powerful, but we want real history, actual lived experience. I have help in this endeavor and the wonderful woman with whom I am collaborating will be working with you to help you pull your story into focus, if that is warranted, and to do light editing and make contact with your references. I will also edit before publication, but you, the author, will have final say on what is published. You may use a pseudonym for publication if you like, but behind the scenes we must know your real name and identity. We will appreciate photos too, of people or places or scenes, so long as you have full rights to use the the images for published vignettes of less than 1,000 words, I'll pay $100 honorarium and for longer pieces 200. All will be posted with free access here on Natural Selections and Comments as usual will be restricted for paying subscribers only. And this is just an amalgam of some of the amazing Dan Aponte's photographs that he shared with me during the truckers convoy in Ottawa in 2022. And I have listed his website and where I posted the full photographs here. And I want to just say as well, and I won' through any of these, that in real time, as we were living it, I published several people's Covid era stories on Natural Selections. There are a few more, but Mila's story is particularly excruciating and beautiful and tragic. But there are several others here that I have linked and I don't know where this will go, if it'll be small or it'll be big, but I was approached by someone in the last month with a story story and she said sort of offhandedly, someone should compile a book and I know that people have been compiling it, but this seems like a place, a place to do it. So I encourage stories.

[A]

Love this project. I think it's going to be great. Looking forward to it.

[B]

Yeah, me too. I guess. I will also say, and I said in a comment to someone else's comment here is that while I hope that it becomes a repository for some some stories that act as a kind of history because it's already in the past. So we're already forgetting we're already revisioning our own history. But the act of writing itself is also healing and cathartic and might not be for some, but that even if you don't have any intention of sharing what you write, using this as an opportunity, as a process prompt to write something that you know to be true, that you think is not, is likely to be lost, could be could be useful for you. Even if you don't choose to share it with with me or with others or with anyone, just having written it can be healing.

[A]

I agree it's Amazing how often one regrets having failed to write something. I can't remember the instance in which I regret having written.

[C]

Written it.

[B]

Right. If you write it and you, you don't have to look at it. And actually, and I'll just say this one more thing, I've already told you this, but I was, I was recently, my mother had spine surgery and I was in the hospital while it was happening and there was no WI fi, and I was. And there were a lot of things I can do on my computer with no access to the Internet, of course, but the thing that I chose to do was a sort of a regular prompt to just update a bunch of file formats so that I don't lose app access. And so I was going back through old journals. I've been writing journals. I've been typing journals into computers since the late 80s. And I hit some particular. Some moments in arcsvr shared history that I knew to be momentous and important. And I read some of what I had written then, then when my memory of events is likely to have been very much more accurate than what I know now. And I was surprised at how often I, I thought, oh, I don't, I don't remember it that way. Well, who do I trust? Me then as I lived it, or me now, decades later? I trust me then as I lived it. Not necessarily what I made of it, but, like, in terms of just trying to describe what you see. And this is, this is, of course, also one of the lessons of animal behavior, right? That one of the things that we, that we try to do in ourselves and when I was trying to teach students how to do animal behavior, is that the act of observation? And this, you know, this is to the point of much of what we've talked about today, actually. But, like, you know, eyewitness is a real thing. But mo. Very few of us actually witness things without immediately overlaying what we think it means. And so when I go back into my field notes for my dissertation about, you know, parental care and territoriality and poison frogs in Madagascar, what I find mostly, I find always the attempt and mostly, I think, a success in actually writing literally what I saw happening. And only later did I come back in a different colored pen and say, okay, that when, when it's that series of events, I'm going to call that a fight. When it's that series of events, I'm going to call it a courtship. And then I can come back and label them and number them afterwards. But in the moment, even if I see two males belly to belly sumo, like, and then chasing one another up bamboo and then falling. And, you know, I don't call it a fight at first, and that seems so precious, but it's not. If you realize that we all assume that we know what's happening all the time and we don't. And so trying to back off and go, like, what did you actually just see? What did you actually just experience? What actually happened, Write that down and then separate out the interpretation. And that, you know, that is how we discern. We begin to discern truth.

[A]

Yeah. It's a kind of cultivated agnosticism that one needs in order to arrive at a correct conclusion.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, one thing when an event is, you know, straightforward, you know, I dropped the glass. But lots of events are not straightforward. And the temptation and I. It goes back to what you said at the very top of the podcast about the instantaneous. The danger of the instantaneous.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The instantaneous assessment is not a good thing. It can be right. Maybe it's almost always right, but in those cases where it's wrong, if it's one in a hundred times that it's wrong and you make a hundred instantaneous judgments in the, you know, space of an hour, the point is, oh, you just introduced an error into your model and you don't know how big an effect it's going to have.

[B]

That's right. That's right. All right, well, we will be back next week. Wednesday.

[A]

Also Wednesday.

[B]

Still Wednesday.

[A]

That's a week and a day.

[B]

Still Wednesday. And check out our sponsors this week, which were, let's see, you started us out with clear. We've got caraway and masa chips. Three awesome sponsors. And until you see us next time, we go to the ones you love, eat good food, get outside, be well, everyone.