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

On this, our 311th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss what is happening in Minneapolis. First: research finds that on average, men and women experience empathy differently: men do not have empathy for people who have done wrong; women have empathy for people regardless of context. Then: Was the Alex Pretti shooting by ICE officers in Minneapolis a cold-blooded murder, or a justified homicide? How would we know? Few of us were actual eye-witnesses to the scene, but our modern media environment tricks us into believing, unconsciously, that we know more than we do. This feels like Portland in 2020. We are being manipulated into disjunct narratives, taught to distrust and fear one another, at ever greater distance from simply being good neighbors and fellow citizens. Finally: an invitation to submit Covid Era Stories.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Singer et al 2006. Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others. Nature, 439(7075): 466-469. Draft pdf: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2636868/pdf/ukmss-3669.pdf

Tucker Carlson and Tim Walz: https://x.com/tcnetwork/status/2016539262230184357

Fox on Pretti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX9y3612Rlo

CNN on Pretti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FR-fz57PEU

Covid Era Stories: https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/covid-era-stories

Chapters

• 0:00 Permutable Prime!
• 3:51 Sponsor: Xlear
• 7:40 Sponsor: Caraway
• 11:04 Sponsor: Masa Chips
• 14:11 Sex Differences in Empathy Minnesota (Context for Minnesota Discussion)
• 24:59 The Feminization of Civilization and the Role of Empathy and Justice
• 35:01 What is Happening in Minnesota?
• 43:40 Media Narratives from Portland to Minneapolis
• 56:00 How Media Creates a Rorschach Trap
• 1:04:34 The Sig Sauer P320 & Gun Safety
• 1:23:48 Political Division Beyond the Incident
• 1:37:24 Why Eyewitness Testimony Often Misleads
• 1:47:03 Invitation to Send in Your Covid Era Stories

Transcript

1:00:08

Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream 311, I think 311, 311. And it's an awesome number. Yes, that it is. Where would we be without it? 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 him because I don't know if I should. A permutable prime. You know what a permutable prime is? Wait, it's going to derive from permutation. Absolutely. And it also called an absolute prime, incidentally, but you're not going to know the Oh, it's the kind of prime of which there is one permutation. No, no. All right. That was a little overly biological, but. And overly literal with regard to the etymology per mutation. Yeah. I don't know. In what way can it be permuted? All of the digits. So 311 is where we're at. Right. 311. You can rearrange those digits in any way you want and you still have a prime. That's lucky. That's cool. Right. And it's, I mean, it's, 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. Premutable prime. There you go. All right. That's cool. I think it's cool. Yeah. I am Dr. Bret Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Heying, if I remember correctly. Yes. And, um, you know, the thing is one has to have a proper level of skepticism about their own conclusions. Everything is provisional. It's including, for instance, how many noses one has. 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. 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, uh, the usual number of noses. And if not, that's a suggestive of something else bigger underneath. 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. So hey, here we are. DarkHorse podcast, live stream, the evolutionary lens, um, here on Wednesday as usual. Uh, thank you to all of our supporters on locals. Check out the watch party there and all past Q and A's. Tuesday. Isn't it Tuesday? Is it not Tuesday? 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. 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. It sure is. It really, it really, really is. Well, maybe we should, um, before we lose the capacity to do so, pay the rent right up at the top and then get to some, uh, some heady issues, um, around current events. Uh, and I'm hoping to get to some, uh, some smaller stories that you haven't planned on, um, talking about as well. But you wanted to talk about Minnesota. I think we should talk about Minneapolis, uh, with your lead in of, uh, lots of, um, uh, intellectual scaffolding useful to this. The paper. Oh, you want me to lead with the paper. I sure do. Oh, I did not expect that. Essential, essential that you do that, I think. Oh, okay. Okay. All right. First, first are, um, our three ads at the top of the hour. None, none others from us throughout, uh, throughout the podcast, as always carefully chosen three awesome sponsors making awesome products this week. And you are up first. I am. And our first sponsor, it turns out this week is Xlear Xlear 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 Xlear, it's Xlear. That's Xlear pronounced clear. This is not clear based on the fact that I'm seeing Xs where you might expect Cs, but nonetheless, the product is called Xlear. It's spelled X L E A R. And why is it spelled that way, because it is a reference to the Xylitol on which the product is based a five carbon sugar. Some of this is going to be recapped here, a five carbon sugar that is at the core of both DNA and RNA. Xylitol, which is also spelled with a C. Not by me, it isn't. And you know, I'm quite a stickler for good spelling. But in any case, the next, therefore Xlear with an X, therefore Xlear 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. 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It's easy and decidedly healthy. If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listened to my conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Xlear, on the Inside Rail in November of 2024, or my conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Xlear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses in May of 2025. We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend Xlear as a daily habit and a prophylactic against respiratory illnesses. That's Xlear with an X. X-L-E-A-R. Get Xlear 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. You're done. I am with that somewhat fraught ad read. I didn't find it fraught. I was enjoying it. My blood pressure is coming down though. I'm all right. Our second sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware. 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When you cook with Teflon, 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. No, I am literally rooting for you. I know how difficult this reading stuff can be, and I'm here for you. It's going to be a day, isn't it? Yep. Yes, Wednesday it turns out. Yeah, as it turns out, yes. Enter Caraway. Caraway kitchenware is crafted with sustainable non-toxic materials like FSC certified birchwood, premium stainless steel, enamel 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 enamel cast iron. All of Caraway's products are free from forever chemicals, and their enamel cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors. These pots are strong and highly scratch resistant for the last generations. 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. Working with Caraway, and now Zach, our elder son, is two 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 slash DH10, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carawayhome.com slash DH10 or use code DH10 at checkout. Caraway. Non-toxic kitchenware made modern. Our final sponsor. Yes. Yes. Also excellent. But yes, the Caraway cookware. Caraway is excellent. I have not found a use, a way to combine Masa Chips with Caraway, but there's probably a way. Oh, there are ways. Yeah. Oh, I guess. I mean, tortilla soup. Yeah. Right there. Boom. Nailed it. But you don't use chips for that. You can use chips for that. I would never. We've added Masa Chips such as these. These are Cobaneros as a crunchy topping on a Latin American inspired chicken soup, but that's separate from a tortilla soup. Anyway, Caraway's 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 simple ones. For these Cobanero, they have some additional flavors. They have some additional ingredients. Onion, paprika, lime, tomato, garlic, Chipotle, Cobanero, 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, 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. America's South 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 Masa's blue chips, which have a deeper, nuttier flavor and a serious crunch. You love lime, you said last time. So good. So good. Although, having heard the ingredient list on this one, I'm inclined to, you know, see how the other, not in the crunching, be destructive. Yeah, and then we're going to put corn in our teeth. No, no, no. It's a mistake. We can both see it. That's wisdom right there. Podcasting wisdom. Easy earned wisdom. Fair enough. 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.com slash DarkHorse and use code DarkHorse for 20% off your first order. That's masachips.com slash DarkHorse and code DarkHorse for 25% off your first order. And if you don't feel like ordering online, Masa is now available at nationwide at Sprout Supermarkets stop by and pick up a bag before they're gone. They're so good. All right. Well, we know they won't be on before the end of the podcast. It's not even opening them. I know. These aren't out Sprouts. Sprouts. These are here. 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 sides of the same coin. 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 to sex differences and personality traits this week, including from the hat tip goes to a guy named Joaquin Marias. Apologies if I'm butchering your name. An ex 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 "Impathic 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 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 can talk about it. There's a small n in this paper, it's only 16 people, so take that as it is and know that it would be great to have this research replicated. There is nothing that I find in the last 20 years that says, "Eh, they screwed it up, it's not right, failed to replicate, none of that, I'd like to see it replicated." But low end, and of 16, eight men, eight women as in 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 can either be fair or unfair to others. And 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. The subjects of the experiment attributed these things as a result of the experience of fairness or unfairness, is that what you... They are watching Confederates engage in a prisoner's dilemma game. Ah, got it, got it. Okay. And I was actually just trying to describe this to Toby, our younger son, when he called me a couple hours ago, and it is a little bit difficult because there are 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, they are watching people who are acting, accurately assess... In fact, they specifically don't know. Right. They 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 the first thing that these authors did, 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, you know, what do you think? But they've got them, 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 not going to track particularly. And here's where I'm actually just going to read 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 just 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. 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 in 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, and this is a small N and there will be exceptions and these are averages and all of the usual caveats apply with regard to population level truths. But men have what seems to be the normal and expected response on average, which is that when you see someone who has previously indicated a tendency 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 paper, 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 frickin' 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 in 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 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 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. Yes. Now the part of it that surprises me, as you allude to, is the female side of it. It's shocking. It is not obvious to me why this is not a human universal. I, in tolerating 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. Even if you're not a human. You see this, you're like,"But I did the same thing. Give me what I deserve." I deserve a grape. Yeah. And I may be butchering that research. I can do it later. No, no. That's very much how I remember it as well. Yeah. So there's tracking of history, of context, and that's what justice is. 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. 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're attempting to ascertain what the right thing to do is. 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, 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. It might make sense to deploy rules 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. It's not going to be, but 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 he said,"Well, what happened before that?""What did you do?" And 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 weakling idiot bullies who are, many of them will be men because they were encouraged in such behavior early on. Well, I do think 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 and- And the game theory is obvious. Right. And then lo and behold, what do you get? Well, you get the BLM riots, you get a feminization of civilization where everybody is competing. What we used to describe as the oppression Olympics. Everybody is competing for the claim of most victimized because that brings about the most power. And I think this thing I said a couple of minutes ago, I think actually might be important. It's not justice. It's quite the opposite of justice. And yet the sort of oppression Olympics, the progressive stack, the DEI, the woke culture, all of these names for the things that have been grabbing hold of society for 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. Okay. You know, George Floyd was murdered. Probably not. Yeah, actually. Right. But like, that's the only conclusion you're allowed to come to. 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. 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 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 gameable 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 gameable 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 are more natively male, the competitive rules in which you hold each other's feet to the fire. And that having been feminized science. You 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. 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 imparted from the playground and doesn't belong out here in civilization. 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, you know, 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, I'm forgetting, like there's a framing, 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, you know, masculine acting women and feminine acting men and those aren't inherently bad things. But the toxic forms of both 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. It's like the authors of this paper actually end their paper with by saying, you know, maybe this suggests that in places of things like, you know, law enforcement and injustice, men are the better people to be doing it. And I'm sorry if I butchered what their what their message was. What they say is these findings could indicate a predominant role for males in the maintenance of justice and punishment for of norm violation in human societies. Yep. Well, I feel pretty good that we've arrived to 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 as, you know, cry bullies. That's cry bullies. Yeah. Yeah. We know we we've got it all figured out with regard to the people who are 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 best approach, if you're trying to understand it, will be to hear from from people with different ideologies, with different takes. 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. So it seems to me there have been many events, at least two of similar tenor. You're talking about the more recent shooting of Preti. Yes. Is that the event that you were referring to? Yes. Alex Preti. So I think everybody will know the story, but just so that we all have the same priors walking into the discussion. Alex Preti 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 an ICE raid that was being protested by many on the ground to 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 six hour 320, which is unfortunately in the 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 the 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. He's resisting. He's resisting. He is 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. Now after being disarmed. Well, this is one of the points of contention and one of the things that I think is. Story you just told us that his weapon is removed from his holster and carried away. Let's put it this way. In retrospect, we know that he was disarmed at that moment. The question of the shooting. What did the people who were shooting him know? Right. What did they have in their heads? Did they all know that his weapon had been removed and did any of them have certainty he didn't have another weapon, which is something people sometimes do. They carry a backup. So. Yep. And so, excuse me, this is important. It 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 this is it's utterly and highly relevant. Even even if the man in question was actually fully disarmed and he knew that. 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 imminent threat. 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 the shooting into the air, the person who shot Alex Pretti might well not be based on the fact, even though their belief was mistaken, that they were under imminent threat. So 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 there, 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 Pretti. 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. You know, 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. That 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. 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 kind of were 100 consecutive days of protests 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, you know, 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 for so little resemblance to one another that why anyone trusts that what they were seeing through their screens is true. I do not know. So and I think the key thing is phones and then screens 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 beds who showed up local cops. They were demonizing those people in the most disgusting terms. They literally I remember one night there was a 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 babies at the federal officers with slingshots. That's a that's assault with a deadly weapon. 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 and. Okay. Antifa wants a cop to brutalize somebody on camera and to capture it and say, see, told you fascism. Right. 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 emigulas 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, 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. I mean, yeah. 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, you know, he literally apologized when Antifa broke into the condo building that he lived in, set it on fire. And he moved. He apologized to them. I don't know if he even apologized to his neighbors and he moved. Yeah. That's the kind of spineless idiots we have in so-called leadership. Well, speaking of spineless idiots, and mind you, I'm trying to do this in a non-prejudiced way. Sorry. It should be quite. Tim Walz 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 Walz, who I'm alerted to from Tucker, who showed this clip on his most recent broadcast. Take a listen to Tim Walz talking about the situation unfolding in Minneapolis. So this is now. Yeah. In the last couple of days. Okay. This is a guy who is in the middle of the biggest political scandal in the 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 Walz. We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody's going to write that children's story about Minnesota. And there's one person who can end this now. 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 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. Okay, so put aside what Tucker has to say here, which I agree with. You can clearly see that Tim Walz 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 Walz pouring gasoline on Minneapolis. It's the same play. It's, it is the same play, but I mean, in some ways it's even, 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 the standard of evidence. Or believe it. So parents, fucking 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 Walz 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 Hitlerian level invasion in their city. How is that proof? Like what, 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, and I don't even know, Abra Kadabra, you've proven it. A hundred percent. Now let me give you another example. And mind you, I'm not going to 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. You're not saying the opposite of those things. I'm not saying it. Just make a note. I'm 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's 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, you're being, it's being said online that you are justifying, 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. Again, Paul, 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. It's the same playbook. It's the same fricking playbook. Do they look powerful and their 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 stand up. 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 in many cases among those on the liberal left, it's chaos. It's complete chaos. 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. 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. 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 is 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 that's the price of administering the nation. These two unreconcilable world views 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? 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.(Beep) (Screaming) The shooting is now under investigation and body cameras are being reviewed. When Alex Prettie approached the agents, he was packing a fully loaded six-hour, nine-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, during the struggle." One video is believed to show an agent removing Alex Prettie's weapon before the shooting, but it's still unclear. DHS is investigating whether Alex Prettie'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. 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. We have a new analysis on some of the video that we've been showing you. CNN's Josh Campbell joins us now. Josh, tell us more. 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 these different angles, 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 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, you know, as a former law enforcement officer, by policy agents are trained that you can only use deadly force when there was an imminent threat of death or serious physical injury to yourself, the agent, or someone else. Nearly 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. Okay, so you have two different portrayals. In one, you have Fox News pointing out that Alex Preti 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. 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. 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 whistle, sharp noises right in the midst of a scuffle. Air horns. Right. And the point is this is designed to make bad judgment happen. Yes. 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, you know, 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 Prettie. Again, he could have just been happening by 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 Prettie'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 yet.(Music) Uh, they can see the bullet hit the ground. I'm an inconclusive 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 they are wrestling Alex Prettie 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 an immediate threat and that they would have understood Alex Prettie to be the source of that threat 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 one. 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. 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. 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 gatherers guide to the first to the 21st century, it was easier back then to the 21st century that the hyper novelty that we are niche, humans niche is niche switching and we 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 replace 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. Yes. And it becomes indecipherable and also gameable by people who have an interest in persuading us one way or the other. And in fact, this is, you know, a 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? Well, that one's more handsome than this one. So he's probably right. The CNN lawyer or the Fox lawyer? Right. Although I will say that those two clips that you showed, uh, 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. 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. 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, you know, the opposite sides of the ideological divide. Right. But I was expecting, I was expecting the mainstream and, you know, I figured Fox because there's not a whole lot else out there on the, 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. Uh, so it just, it seemed, it seemed measured. Both of those, both of those clips that you showed, uh, from the two mainstream media sources seemed measured to me. They were, in fact, they're more measured than, uh, you know, the Trump administration, which has portrayed, the language that they have used makes it seem like a couple of things. One, Freddie was brandishing a weapon rather than just armed. Um, two, that he had a clear intent to inflict damage that, you know, these, uh, 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. Um, but in any case, there's no shortage of highly, uh, partisan skewed bias. 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 Pready was based on their past altercation. So it's possible he was targeted. It's possible that there was a discussion in which somebody said, uh, 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, that should be knowable at the very least by the guy who was carrying it. He, he will know. He should know. He should know. He will have felt it. Went off in his hand. He will have felt it. Even if he couldn't hear it over all the chaos, he will have felt it. He will absolutely know. Now, do we ever get access to his statement, especially a statement made immediately. Um, the pavement presumably tells the story. The gun is aimed down. There will be, just, just in terms of the visceral, the tactile experience of holding a weapon. Let's put it this. Yes. No. 100%. He should, he should know whether the gun went off. Um, 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. You've got this video, you've seen it. There's some reason to think the gun may have gone off. There is reason to worry about this particular gun. And I hate to get into one of these discussions. And the, and the Fox commentary mentions this as well. He does. So this is a famous gun. This is a six hour. Make and model, not this individual gun. Yeah. Not this individual gun and not the particular version that he was carrying, but I truly think it doesn't matter. There's something like sub to model. It's like, 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. Sure. I have seen very compelling demonstrations in which people have, uh, 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, uh, almost reliably. If there is a, uh, around in the chamber as a result of the very light trigger being carried back by momentum and firing the gun inadvertently. 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? 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 it. So 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 or 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. You 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 there 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. Is that true? Yep. But wow, would you have to be crazy to do it with that gun. There are guns in which it is around as carried in the chamber. 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. You mean the initial shot at Pretti? Yes. The initial shot at Pretti, the one where certain happened. Yes. 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 to me, if Pretti'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 off somewhere, 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 gun so that people know that there's one present. So anyway, much hinges on this, but at one level, I don't know that Pretti knew he had 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 store. Still in 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 unwitting. But do we know anything about his history as a gun owner, gun user? 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. I guess I meant, 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 a lot of range of, it's easy to get a concealed carry permit. And the range of people with such is presumably almost as wide as the range of people in terms of what they know how to do. And I don't know that anything else hinges on this. I'm just curious about what 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 awareness and capacity with regard to how to use your weapon is different from legally armed with a weapon that you have shot a few times. Right. Now, this is kind of what I'm getting at. And 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 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 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 woman. Right. This officer shoves this woman to the ground and Pretti 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 heart and you're going to shoot your 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 mixed. 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, you know, doughy politician is amping the danger by portraying things in a deceptive way in order to embolden people to challenge officers? Like 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 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 want us never to understand each other as fellow countrymen and honorable people and all of that. So I 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 facing 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 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 happened. Yeah. And I mean, this point used to be simpler and it still seemed incredibly complex. The point was eyewitnesses aren't reliable. And if you can bring in other senses to have been in a moment, if you have a smell witness and a taste witness, if it's relevant in a touch witness, 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 and 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 fact that you and your friend are standing right next to one another, supposedly seeing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, 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 the moment about particular stories, but there is very likely to be larger structures 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 witnessing anything and coming to our own conclusions when it's coming through a stream is something that we should actually be deeply suspect of. 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 to what end? You know, 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, we'll ever agree on everything that won't happen, nor should it happen, nor should we want it to 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. 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. 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. Well, and this is another way that modernity confuses us, right? It 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, you know, 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 and touch the person. 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. 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 you. And you're not talking about these were hands free experiences. This wasn't a, you're distracted physically with your body. 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 here, 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. The dreams being execution justified. Let's say jaw dropping murder of unarmed civilian and justifiable homicide. I would call this a Rorschach trap trap. OK. 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, you know, 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 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. And it's cynical and I'm sure it's not explicit, right? There are 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 could this not hinge on that question? 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, 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. Yes. I'm prompted to think 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 read and I read and I read. And I think that I have a capacity to sort wheat from chaff and I'll be fooled sometimes. But you know, that's how I accumulate a knowledge base. And that's the basis on which I then go out into the world and I'm 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. Know enough consciously, but can also feel the emotional pull, the psychological pull, all of the polls that 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 depoporate 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 talk about joining the worlds and like, 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. Yeah, I agree. It's both more prone to error and also a better channel for manipulation precisely because of that. Yeah. 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 the Nazis. They're doing it. Look at them. It's right there in the streets of Minneapolis. So, all right, let's look at Ron Johnson's tweet here. He says, "The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Prettie are tragedies that did not have to happen. So were the deaths of Lakin Riley, Jocelyn Nungare, Brianna Kelson, Rachel Morin, 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 Fry's statement, it doesn't appear the Democrat elected officials will admit that the public is safer if they cooperate with rather than obstruct federal officials trying to clean up a Democrat created messes." Okay, so- Well, and that's exactly in keeping with my objection to Waltz's invocation of Anne Frank. 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're in fear for their lives, they must actually be in danger of losing their lives, then you've gamed the system. And so, if we won't hear from Mayor Fry, I guess it is in Minneapolis, that it's just better for you to to not obstruct the law enforcement officers than of course many people are not going to stop. 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. No, he wasn't. 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 Walz to me. It 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... For what? For the brave protesters who are interfering with ice. Well, I do like cookies. Yeah, you know, this is one of the things you and I agree on. Cookies good. But let's just put it this way. 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 give us cookies." Yep, I do remember that. Hard to believe such things happened, but that's the way things were. 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?" He said, "No." We should immediately have given him cookies. I probably did. Yeah, probably. I probably made some awesome cookies. 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. 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, they've got people who are not well enough trained doing this job, who knows what their borders 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. It was back when we were still professors because Olympia was one. 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? Over that dumb? Yeah. Well, but I mean, that's like, okay, you might as well just put constitutional crisis on the freaking sign because that's what you've declared, right? You've declared a sanctuary city. 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. Yeah. 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. What's he right about? 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 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 anyway, my final point would be, if you think you know what happened to Alex Paredy, you're way ahead of the evidence because we don't yet have enough evidence to know what happened to Alex Paredy, other than to say it's a tragedy that a family lost a son. Yeah. Your certainty is an indication that you don't know yet what is true. Yeah. That you're leaving to a conclusion probably because somebody wants you to do exactly that. 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'm just going to read the short post that I made about it and invite people to come along. So it's called COVID era stories, 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 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. 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 afoot? 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 rushed 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 waited 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 respect. Those without papers are not worthy of 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 were loved when experienced during the COVID era. These will not be complete stories and it may be hard to choose what to include. Admitting 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 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 COVID era stories. Please submit pieces of up to 2500 words to assistant at smilodonventures.org along with contact information. Depending on the amount of response, we will likely have to pick and choose. Those 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 images. For published vignettes of less than a thousand words, I'll pay a hundred dollar on ararium 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 wanted to just say as well and I won't click through any of these, but 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 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 to do it. So I encourage stories. Love this project. I think it's going to be great. Looking forward to it. 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 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 it 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 prompt to write something that you know to be true that you think is likely to be lost, could be useful for you even if you don't choose to share it with me or with others or with anyone, just having written it can be healing. 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 it. Right. If you write it and you don't have to look at it. Actually, and I'll just say this one more thing. I've already told you this, but I was recently, my mother had spine surgery and I was in the hospital while it was happening and there was no wifi. 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 is a sort of a regular prompt to just update a bunch of file formats so that I don't lose 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 RCS shared history that I knew to be momentous and important. And I read some of what I'd 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 thought, oh, 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 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 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. Yeah, it's a kind of cultivated agnosticism that one needs in order to arrive at a correct conclusion. Yeah. 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, it goes back to what you said at the very top of the podcast about the instantaneous, the danger of the instantaneous. Yeah. 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 100 times that it's wrong, and you make 100 instantaneous judgments in the, you know, space of an hour, yeah. 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. That's right. That's right. All right. Well, we will be back next week, Wednesday. Wednesday. That's a week and a day. It's still Wednesday. And check out our sponsors this week, which were, let's see, you started us out with Xlear, we've got Caraway and Massa Chips, three awesome sponsors. And until you see us next time, you go to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside. Be well, everyone.