Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. It's undoubtedly

very well known at this point that there is a problem with gun violence in the United States,

especially compared to other countries. People debate how best to measure this, but compared

to the countries that the US would generally consider its peers, that is to say other developed,

wealthy, purportedly well-functioning societies, the United States has a lot more gun violence per

capita than any of our comparison nations. Now, I feel a little bit weird because we're going to be

talking today about gun violence, but not about the kind of mass shootings that have been in the

news recently. As I'm recording this intro, recently there was a mass shooting in Uvald, Texas,

there have been others. Really terrible events where someone is able to get a weapon that fires a

lot of ammunition very, very quickly, break into a school or other kind of place where there's

a lot of people and do an enormous amount of damage. This is clearly a problem. We're not talking

about what that one today. There are other problems out there. So today we're talking to Andrew

Papa Christos, Andrew is a sociologist at Northwestern University just outside Chicago,

and what he's doing is using ideas from network theory, something that we talked about before

with people like Steven Strogats, Andrew uses network theory to predict what kinds of people and

specifically which people might be vulnerable to imminent gun violence, but not in the mass shooting

sense, more like the gangs on the street, crews that get into flare ups where they start firing at

each other kind of violence. It's an interesting problem that sort of combines criminology, sociology,

and math because you use the math of the network theory to say, well, this person is in the following

network in the following ways with these other people that puts them at greater risk than they

might otherwise be. For better for worse, we have a lot of data out there on people, on who they

talk to, who they know, who they've been in prison with, who they've been in a gang with, things

...