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Rorschach Trap: The 311th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying - DarkHorse Podcast | Wave AI Podcast Notes

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

DarkHorse Podcast

Wed Jan 28 2026

Summary

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

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

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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

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 (0:00)

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

B (0:10)

311. And it's an awesome number.

A (0:13)

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

B (0:15)

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 (0:28)

Wait, it's going to derive from permutation.

B (0:31)

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

A (0:36)

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 (0:44)

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

A (0:48)

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

B (0:54)

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

A (0:57)

Right.

B (0:57)

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

A (1:03)

That's lucky.

B (1:03)

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 (1:20)

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

B (1:22)

I think it's cool.

A (1:23)

Yeah.

B (1:23)

That's where we are. You are.

A (1:25)

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

B (1:29)

A (4:52)

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 (10:49)

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.

B (14:30)

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.

B (19:17)

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.

B (32:31)

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 (41:26)

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.

A (64:04)

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.

A (81:13)

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 (87:26)

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 (94:05)

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 (97:25)

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.

B (107:05)

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.

B (114:12)

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.

Summary

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

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

Episode Overview

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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