What If Your City Had No Laws for 24 Hours

At 7 a.m. every phone in the city buzzes: all laws are suspended for 24 hours, and nothing you do can ever be punished. So you cannonball into the fountain, drive your dad's car at 15, and walk into an open bank vault with an empty bag. But the rule cuts both ways: nothing you own is protected either. By nightfall the city's 6% are out, they're heading for your mom's bakery, and you're holding a million dollars that everybody saw you take. A standalone story with an open ending: somebody was watching you the whole day. Could this really happen? What would YOU do with 24 hours and no laws? Tell us in the comments. Chapters: 0:00 Every phone buzzes 0:54 How it works 2:08 Everything is legal 3:13 The cost 4:38 The trade 6:34 Is any of this real? 7:54 What do you think? Science notes: On October 7, 1969, Montreal's police went on strike for about 16 hours: banks were robbed before lunch, hundreds of shop windows were smashed by night, and the army was called in. The Wallet Test is real: researchers turned in more than 17,000 'lost' wallets in 355 cities across 40 countries, and wallets with money in them came back more often than empty ones (Science, 2019). The 6% Rule comes from about 10,000 boys born in Philadelphia in 1945 and followed to age 18: 6% of them were chronic offenders, behind more than half of all the group's arrests. In 1965 six Tongan boys were stranded on the island of 'Ata for 15 months. They kept a garden and a fire going the whole time, and looked after each other. Every story starts with if. Subscribe for the next one. #whatif #animation #science #laws