Stuff You Should Know - Do video games produce real-life violence?

Episode Date: May 29, 2012

The disturbing trend of school shootings around the world has dragged violence in video games into the hot seat. But are violent video games actually more capable of producing real violence in gamers or is it just the latest victim of societal hysteria? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can probably hear his forehead scraping against his mic cover. You do not feel like doing this today, do you? No, we do. But we're going to do it anyway.

I mean, yes, we do. Not no, we do. You can't affirm with a negative. Yes, we don't. Well, there it is, Chuck, the cleverest banter we will ever have. Hey, how are you? I'm fine, man. I'm feeling aggressive. I want to punch something. You've been playing violent video games? I've been reading about people playing violent video games. It's apparently the magic bullet. It's what really makes you aggressive. Reading about that kind of thing. Oh, reading about, yeah, articles on that, sure. That's what we need to be watching out for, right? Yeah, people who read like parenting sections on like HuffPo or MSNBC are like some of the most violent criminals now because of those.

Chuck, yes, are you familiar with a little country called Germany? Yeah, bold. Is that that's Russian, isn't it? No, that's German. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you've noticed this or not, Chuck, but over the last few weeks I've gotten increasingly dumber. Have you picked up on that? Who you have? I have. I don't really know. The frequency of mispronouncing words has just gone up dramatically, which is really saying something. Yeah. Getting languages wrong, as I just did. That's a big one. Yeah. Fall asleep in the middle of stuff. Like I'm about to right now. Okay. Okay. Chuck, you've heard of Germany. Yes. In 2006, late 2006, there was something of a

fairly radical proposal that came up from the representatives of Bavaria and Lower Saxony. Okay. Get those two together. Things happen normally, not in this case, but normally. The representatives proposed a bill that would offer fines of, I don't know how much the fines were, but the penalty of jail time up to 12 months for, may I quote, cruel violence on humans or human looking characters inside games. So creating a game inside games. Yes. Is that what it said? Yeah. That's funny. Creating a game where there is violence, violence can happen. Okay. Or playing a video game and inflicting violence, virtual violence could get you 12 months in jail according to these guys. Wow. So you can't play Call of Duty in Germany.

You would spend the rest of your life in jail if these guys had had their rather radical resolution passed. I take it. No, it felt flat on its face. But the whole thing was in reaction to the prior month, the spree killing or almost, I guess, spree maiming by Sebastian Bose, who was 18. He was the worst school shooter Germany ever had. And he wounded 37 people. Didn't kill anybody. Really? But he did kill himself. You remember it. Yeah. He played Counter Strike a lot. I find it interesting that he shot 37 people and didn't kill anyone. I'll bet he found that something other than interesting. Did he try to just wound? No. I know that's probably a dumb question. No, he went on a

rampage and he just missed. Okay. So anyway, thank God. Well, yeah. But he played a lot of Counter Strike. That was his big thing. And nowadays you have grown up and since the 90s. Sure. And you've been paying attention. So you know that anytime there's a spree shooting at a school by a teenager, one of the first things that comes out is what their violent video game of choice was. Right. And legislation like this out of Germany is it is radical by putting someone in jail for acts of virtual violence. But it's getting to be par for the course, you know, which leads us to a very big question, though, before you start throwing people in jail for playing video games or for creating video games, we have to prove whether

or not video games, especially violent ones, cause real life violence. And as I learned after reading this article, the jury is very much still out on that. Yeah. Although both sides have very persuasive arguments. And I think they should explore it. Yeah. I'm just going to go ahead and say it's probably hard to prove anything when it comes to this. Why? Well, because of all the reasons we're going to mention, it's very complicated issue. Yeah. Whether or not that was the thing that pushed someone over the edge or whether or not it was an inspiration or whether or not it had nothing to do with it. It's tough to prove something like that. Right. And there's a lot of people who are like, yes, school shooters are horrifying. Yeah. They're terrifying the idea

that your kid could go to school and get shot and killed by a classmate on a rampage. That would terrify anybody. So yeah, of course, you want to get to the root of it. But a lot of people are saying, don't stop at video games. Right. Even the APA, the American Psychological Association, who are very much in favor of the idea that violent video games cause real life violence, say, don't just stop at video games. Like that's one part of a larger whole. Right. And we've not figured it out because video games, you just lay that at the feet of one thing and go back to work. Sure. Let your kids go back to playing video games. Yeah. I got a quote. I was going to hang on to this. Might as well read it though. There's a book written called Grand Theft Childhood,

The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do. And this is by Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olsen. And they are co-directors of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media. They wrote this book. And they have a guy that they interviewed a psychologist who specializes in media research called Guy Cumberbatch. Wow. Sounds like a Simpson's character. Yeah. He's real though. And he says, and I'm going to quote, the real puzzle is that anyone looking at the research evidence in this field could draw any conclusions about the pattern, let alone argue with such confidence and even passion that it demonstrates the harm and violence on television, in film, and in video games. While tests of statistical

significance are a vital tool of the social sciences, they seem to have been more often used in this field as instruments of torture on the data until it confesses something which could justify publication in a scientific journal. So basically he's in a very verbose way. Kind of said what you're saying is that it's easy to scapegoat something like a video game by looking at anecdotal research. It is. Very easy. And also, I think part of the reason why school shooters, not just because they're so sensational, they are. Sure. Also, because most, if not all of them, did play violent video games, but also because the school shooting rampage so closely mirrors video game action, even to the casual observer, that I think it's something that's

really been zeroed in on. Well, the army uses it for training. So it's bound to put you in that headspace. Which makes a lot of sense. Sure. Which is, that's an argument on the side of people who say that yes, video games, violent video games create real life violence. Right. So let's explore that. Let's look at the side that says yes, obviously dingbat. If you play violent video games, you're going to be violent. And this isn't new, by the way. We should point out that before video games, it was late at the feet of TV. Well, comic books before that even. Yep, before that. And I wondered though, if you go back far enough, the media is a fairly recent thing. Yeah. At least as far as like entertainment media. So say the advent of radio, big radio in like the 20s say.

What did anybody blame violent on before that? Uh, probably the real reason which is that some people are sociopaths. Well, I think you make an excellent point, Chuck. What you're saying, I think I tend to agree with is that's possible in everybody. Sure. And then probably more possible in some of us than others. Oh, yeah. So is it just a convergence of large public schools where you have a lot of people who you don't like sitting like ducks in one place and converging with access, easy access to guns? Yeah. Is that all the school shooter is? It's a pretty complicated issue. Okay. So go ahead. Sorry about that. That's all right. I guess we can cite a couple of more cases

that in the media at least have placed the blame on video games. In 2006 in Alabama, Devin Moore famously was arrested for car theft suspicion and he was 18, brought him into the station to book him and he kind of went nuts. He attacked the cop, stole his gun, shot him, shot another cop, went down the hall, shot a 911 dispatcher in the head, then grabbed the squad car keys and took off in the squad car. That's crazy. And what game did he play? He played Grand Theft Auto, which is pretty much how that game goes down. And reportedly after he was arrested, he even said, quote, life is a video game. Everybody's got to die sometime.

And he was convicted and sentenced to death. And I could not find out if he's still on death row or if he was put to death. It's so frustrating when you can't find out something that should be so easy to find out. Did you try the Alabama's Department of Corrections website? No. I mean, I was going to call somebody, but it just ran out of time. Yeah. So at any rate, he was convicted and appealed and I think that appeal was denied. But when this happens, a lot of times there are lawsuits filed. In the case of Columbine, one of the wife of a teacher there sued, who'd she sue? She sued Sony and Nintendo and Time Warner and Palm Pictures because Clebold and Harris had also watched the basketball diaries.

Yeah, you remember that part? Oh, yeah. But what's strange is that that movie came out in what the late 90s, but the basketball diaries were written by Jim Carroll in like the 70s, maybe in the 60s. Yeah. And people were thinking about doing that back then, obviously. Well, and also wonder, and boy, we're going to be all over the place here, but also wonder about what constitutes as far as a lawsuit goes, a negative correlation, like what if someone made a movie about the Columbine massacre and some kid watched that and then later on did his own thing? If some, even if that movie decries it and shows the repercussions, which is one of the big points that a lot of parents make is these video games don't show the repercussions of these actions,

it's all just fantasy. So like, where do you draw the line there as far as a lawsuit goes? Well, that's also a really good question. Like, where do you draw the line as far as legislation goes? Because what we're talking about here basically is say, ultimately, the idea that if video games cause violence in just some people, banning them all together. It's the same thing like we did with booze and prohibition. Sure. There are some alcoholics who couldn't help themselves. So the rest of us who weren't alcoholics could just give it up and let's just do that. Right. But are you going to ban movies and TV and comic books and everywhere else that has any kind of violence portrayed? Yeah, I don't think so. I don't

think that's ever going to be able to happen. And no, I don't, I think ultimately, if you follow that argument to its logical conclusion, no, you come to where you and I are sitting, which is, no, there's some crazy people out there and some are kids. Right. All right. So should we talk about a little bit of the studies and the science behind it? Yeah. So like on the, in the camp where they, where they think that yes, violent video games cause violence, their problem, their most persuasive argument is that yes, TV has been linked to aggressive behavior in kids, right? TV violence has been right through other studies. They've been doing this for years and years and years. Video games are relatively new. But by extension, video games should be even more

prone to generating violence in the player because playing video games is more immersive than watching television. You're interacting, right? Also though, they're based on the reward system of learning. Yeah. Right. Classical conditioning. Exactly. So if I, if I shoot you and behind you is like this magic donut and I get like, I get another life once I grab the magic donut, right? I'm going to shoot you and I'm going to learn the next time that I need to shoot you again. Yeah. I get that magic donut last time I got the reward. That's a pretty broad, basic example, but the whole point of video games is based on, like you said, classical conditioning. They should have a podcast or game where it's like us and Mark Marin and Ira

Glass and Jesse Thorne and we're all like out there trying to kill each other. All right. I think that would do us all a little good. Judge John Hodgman like presides over the whole thing. I don't know though. Adam Corolla going down. Yeah. Who would you take on? First, probably you. It'd be like a golden eye. It just gets trapped in like a corner and just keeps shooting me and waiting for me to come back and shoot me. One of those things where we're supposed to be teammates and like, you know, you can kill your own guy sometimes. And what? Like in Call of Duty, right? Um, I think a lot of those games where you can partner up, you can still shoot your partner. It used to not be the case. Oh, it would just like fire by you or something.

Yeah. You just sit there and like kind of move a little bit, but like nothing happened to you. It didn't have any effect on your life. Oh, good stuff. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as

guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. My name is Adelita Paz, or as some like to call me, the modern day Selena. A podcast series about the crossover dream of a Tejano superstar starring Diane Guerrero and Ana Ortiz. And there comes a time when you must decide whose dreams you will fulfill. What would you do for the world of pop music to know your name? Would you just risk it all or

play it safe? Do you have any idea how many artists have attempted to do just that? Adelita changing the key is the story of Adelita Paz and the compromises she must make to get to where she wants. Listen to Adelita changing the key as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. So those are two big ones. They're immersive and they use classical conditioning. What else? Why else would a video game be more likely to cause violence than just plain old TV? Well, they did one study where they actually hooked kids up to, they didn't actually say what they just said, they scanned the brain. So I'm guessing an MRI.

MRI. In 2006 at Indiana University and they had them play two games, Need for Speed Underground and Medal of Honor, Colin Frontline. One is nonviolent, Need for Speed, I guess, and Medal of Honor is violent. First person shooters we're talking about. If you don't know what that is, crawl out from under a rock. But it's when you are, it's the point of view of the person walking around shooting people is you. Right. It's the gamer. Yes. Okay. And the brain scans show that the kids who played the violent game showed increased activity in the amygdala, which stimulates emotion, decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex or lobe, regulates inhibition and self-control. Right. You realize what you just described, right? A zombie. A zombie. I think you're gonna say that.

But my question is, it's like, wouldn't it be more cause of concern if there was like zero emotion going on? If these kids are playing these violent games, the amygdala shut down. Yeah. That would freak me out. It's a really good point because the whole idea behind video games is to trick the brain into thinking that it's actually experiencing the gameplay. Right. I get, I like, I don't play much anymore, but when I play Call of Duty, I would wager into it and like my heart would increase and like if someone snuck up behind me and it was like, you know, it puts you there, but that's to me like the fun of those games. Well, yeah, it's the point of them, right? So your fight or flight response is aroused, right?

Your heart rates up, like you said, you're perspiring, you're jumpy, you know, but how does that translate to video games? And I guess an even bigger question is, how long does that state of arousal last? Like if it did translate to violence, really the only person who's in trouble is, you know, your big brother or your best friend who you're playing next to who just killed you and you lean over and you punch him. Like I've done that before. Well, that happens actually. I saw a bunch of cases where, and it wasn't just violent video games. It was like people playing John Madden would like one guy, Wisconsin, I think, hit his buddy with a lead pipe and then, you know, this one guy in England attacked a kid who killed him in Call of Duty,

but they're like, these people are crazy and competitive and they might do the same thing playing Monopoly. So maybe it's not violent, it's competitive video games make you violent. Maybe that's what we should be looking at. Maybe so. Right. Let's see. What else, Chuck? Oh, I've got one for you. All right. These studies are just so awesome. So especially after Columbine, I get the impression that there was like just a rash of studies like this. Oh, sure. And then now the trend is to go back and do meta analysis of these studies. But one study found that it took kids and scored them with like basically inherent hostility, right? And what it found was that kids with the lowest hostility score, they were just the nicest little kids. When they played

violent video games, they were 10 times more likely to get in a physical fight than the kids with the lowest hostility scores who didn't play violent video games. So it was like they were 38 percent. They had a 38 percent likelihood to get in a fight compared to like four, so almost 10 times, right? And then even crazier according to this study, the kids with the lowest hostility score who played violent video games were more likely to get in a fight than the kids with the highest hostility scores who didn't play violent video games at all. Really? So it would make nice kids bad and bad kids who didn't play it, it would just they would maintain that level or whatever. Yeah. The nice kids who played them were worse than the

bad kids, worse than the worst bad kids. Interesting. Yeah. So like studies like these are coming out and it's making it like more and more clear, like yes, all right, video games do cause violence. But there's a lot of ground left to cover before that link can be made if it's ever made. And there's a lot of people trying to put the reins on this, especially when two are saying, well, you're looking, you're barking up the wrong tree. Like maybe so, maybe you're even right, but this isn't it. This isn't the one thing that's right. The problem. So what are some of the criticisms of this science, I guess, explaining or showing a link between the two? Well, one is that it's a lot of anecdotal stories. This, the same guy, Cumberbatch says,

the strong link between video games violence and real world violence and the conclusion that it leads to social, social isolation, poor interpersonal skills are drawn from bad and or irrelevant research, muddleheaded thinking and unfounded simplistic news reports. So yeah, that's a big problem too. For instance, in the Malvo DC sniper case, Lee Malvo remember that? His attorney actually argued that he trained quote unquote, himself to kill by playing Halo on Xbox. Okay. He was even quoted as saying he's trained and desensitized with video games to shoot human forms over and over. In actuality, Lee Malvo trained by shooting paper plates with human faces drawn on them with real guns by what's his face? Who's the guy? I can't remember

his name, but yeah, his sensei and in Halo, you shoot this weird looking space gun at like giant bugs. Right. So this was even brought up in a court of law that like Halo led him to be a DC sniper. So it's definitely a lot of sensationalism going on. And another thing they point out is that video game popularity and youth violence has been going in the opposite direction statistically since it reached a peak. Violent juvenile crime reached a peak in 1993 has been in decline ever since. Between 94 and 2001, arrest for murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault fell 44% and had the lowest juvenile arrest rate for violent crime since the early 80s. So you know, that seems to fly in the face of the research at least. And the reason also people

keep picking on kids is not just because they're school shooters, but the one one of the assumptions that people are trying to prove that yes, violent video games cause violence is that if you are a child, you still have a developing brain. So you're going to be more susceptible to that kind of classical conditioning that a violent video game provides. The thing is like 91% as of I think 2011 survey, 91% of kids play video games. Wow. The average is about nine hours a week. And then a great many of those violent video games are violent, right? So with numbers like that, it makes you wonder why there aren't more school shooters. Well, they make this point in this book. Not a lot more common. Yeah. Why isn't the world like millions of people play these

games? Why isn't it just violent chaotic world out there? Right. All this I might say it is. So again, though, we should we should kind of bring it back a little bit like it's the school shooters are just like the most sensational thing to point to. Sure. They're also worried that like kids are like pump punching each other more or right, you know, a knife in each other more. And the idea behind that is that there's this thing called script theory where we it's an extension of this thing called affect theory, right? We're basically like something happens to us. We have an emotional reaction to something and it triggers a response, a prescribed response. Right. And it's it's fairly specific to the human being, but it's also kind of predictable. Well, over time,

because remember, the brain is very lazy and likes to chunk things and do things as efficiently as possible. Yeah. The same thing happens whenever we we come across the same emotional stimulus, right? Okay, where we build a script. Okay. So if somebody comes up to us, and we have been trained to or we produce a script through violent video games, where if somebody's coming at us, we have to shoot it. The idea behind script theory very crudely put is that we would use violence, right, it would trigger a violent reaction. Because we are script for dealing with this has been built and compiled through violence, right through violent video games. Interesting. It is interesting. It's also totally unproven is the problem. So like number one, there's a lot of

there's a there's despite all the studies, there's not a lot of scientific data out there that shows. Yes. Yes. Violent video games cause violence. Well, they'll study like 30 kids. That's a big problem. You know, another one is like how do you quantify violence in video games? Yeah. How do you say it when you're giving people when you're testing pharmaceuticals, you can get it down to them the milligram or microgram or whatever. How do you do that with exposure to violence in a video game? Well, yeah, because there's all kinds of levels of violence from Mario whacking animals on the head with mallets. Yeah. And that's that's one of the things that this book points out is that they're kind of getting it wrong with the ratings. The ESRB is who rates video games. Yeah.

Ranging from early childhood rating, which is the sweetest of all ratings. Yeah. All the way to mature and adults only. And like I said, one of the problems is people complain that there are no repercussions in video games, but they say they got it backwards in that in the in the lighter rated games, like the dead bodies just disappear. Oh, yeah, instead of showing like this is a dead body or the blood is like super animated and not realistic. And it's basically saying no, these lighter rated games aren't showing negative consequences. Right. Games that do show that are more likely to be rated M or a, which is adults only. Yes, which is interesting. So and also another point is that the average gamer these days apparently is 30. So and lives in his mom's

basement. Yeah, but he's he's also probably not out there committing acts of violence either. Right. You know, I will say when I played like a lot of call of duty or what was the driving one again? Grand Theft Auto Grand Theft Auto that like, it was the same when I played Tetris. I had like Tetris dreams, like it gets into your dreams and it like gets into your craw. And when I'm driving around, you have those thoughts of like, you know, bump the sky off the road and make this move like it's in your head, but you don't do it. Right. You know, like people have thoughts all the time. But that, you know, Clebold and Harris were suicidal, depressed sociopaths. Right. You know, they weren't like just great kids who played call or whatever game they accused them of playing

and just decided to shoot up their school. But that's not to say it doesn't have some impact. You know, that's why it's such a tough issue. Yeah, it's definitely not. There's not one, I don't think there's one side that's ever going to be proven right. I think it's going to be like, yes, okay, this does have this effect that does have this impact on some people more than others. Because just, just from the small amount of games that I've played, like I know what it's like. And yeah, you get around, you get like excited, you fight or flight, and then you start thinking about ways to play it better when you're not playing it. So yeah, it definitely does not, it doesn't have just an immediate effect. It definitely extends to the rest of your real

life, but there is that line. And that's what we need to explore in my opinion is where that line is. And how does that differ from people, from some people to another? And how do you take people who have the line a lot closer than it should be and extend it further out? You, my friend, have hit on it, I think. That's basically the summary of this book is we're asking the wrong questions and looking for the wrong causes. Basically, I'm going to quote again, instead of looking for a simple, direct relationship in all children, we should be asking ourselves, how might we identify those children who are at the greatest risk for being influenced by everything from movies to the freaking news that they watch on TV every night.

And then put them in jail prematurely. I just said freaking. Man, can we do that now? I'm pretty hopped up. So yeah, I think you hit on it. Like these games aren't going away, violent movies aren't going away. The history channel, which shows more violence than anything on television, didn't go in a way. None of these things are going anywhere. So maybe it's up to the parents to get involved a little more. Yeah, but you have to stop watching TV to do something like that. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana.

Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. My name is Adelita Paz, or as some like to call me, the modern day Selena.

Sonoro and my culture represent Adelita changing the key. A podcast series about the crossover dream of a Tejano superstar starring Diane Guerrero and Ana Ortiz. And there comes a time when you must decide whose dreams you will fulfill. What would you do for the world of pop music to know your name? Would you just risk it all or play it safe? Do you have any idea how many artists have attempted to do just that? Adelita changing the key is the story of Adelita Paz and the compromises she must make to get to where she wants. Listen to Adelita changing the key as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

You got anything else right now? I don't think so. Well, it's a tough issue. I get it, you know. It is. This is definitely not one we're just going to explain everything. But I feel like we explain both sides, right? I think so. The people on the pro side saying, hey, here's all the science, the people on the con side saying, hey, you got to do a little better. Right. Yeah. We'll see where we are in 2015. We'll come back here. Okay. If you want to learn more about this, you can type violent video games in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. It will bring up this really good article and I said search bar, which means it's time for the listener mate. Josh, you're going to call this gas chromatography mass spectrometer explained.

Of course. Remember, I brought that up in the body other thing and I didn't have time to look it up. Luckily, we have smart listeners. Guys, I just heard the body odor podcast nicely done, as always. In the show, you mentioned that you didn't have time to look up gas chromatography mass spectrometer. Is there not an abbreviation for that? You call it GCMS. Okay. This is exactly the type of situation I'd be glad to help with. And he's basically offering his services in the future too. Like whoever like, I don't have time. He said, just pick up the phone. I'll explain it to you. Who is this guy? He's an associate professor of physics at Thomas More College in Kentucky. That's awesome. And he says in a single sentence, a gas chromatography mass spectrometer is

essentially a machine for identifying the composition of molecules in a sample, which you clearly presume. In a brief essence, he says this, it has two parts. The gas chromatograph, which essentially breaks the sample into its component molecules and emits them on a delay based on their chemical properties. And then the mass spectrometer, which essentially finds the mass of the molecule. The combination of these processes identifies some molecular makeup, the amount of each type of molecule of the sample. And he said this only, and then he had a longer version too, which I read, but I'm not free now. He said this took me about 10 or 15 minutes to type out guys. I hope it encourages you to ask

if you need a short overview of some minor detail. My goal in this offer is to maximize the number of times kids are exposed to the idea that the world around me is understandable. And he would be happy to donate his time to help us out in the future. This guy would make a great mascot. That's right. That is Joe Christensen of Thomas More College. The fighting. Geez, I don't know if they have, it sounds like a smart school. I don't know if they have sports. Thomas More, he wasn't the one with the social contract. Westview Hills, Kentucky. Yeah, that's not where the social contract came from.

But it's upheld there every day. That's right. Thank you very much, Professor Christensen. Let's say, sure. Thanks, Professor. And I think we will take you up on your offer at some point. Let's see. If you ever want to explain something to us, we're always in the market for that kind of thing. Specifically, I would love it if somebody can explain to me what's so great about Prague Rock, because I don't get it. You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can go on to Facebook with its stupid timeline at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can email us at stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Langston Kermit. Sometimes I'm on TV. I'm David Borey and I'm probably on TV right now.

David and I are going to take a deep dive every week into the most exciting, groundbreaking and sometimes problematic Black conspiracy theories. We've had amazing past notable guests like Brandon Kyle Goodman, Sam J, Quinta Brunson and so many more. New episodes around every Tuesday, many episodes out on Thursdays where we answer you, the listeners conspiracy theories. Listen to my mama told me on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.