Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Six Degrees of Separation

Starting point is 00:00:00 You may have noticed on occasion that friends you have from totally different parts of your life somehow know each other. It often comes as a surprise, but it actually shouldn't. It turns out that the world is highly connected via personal relationships. In fact, it's been suggested that any two people in the world are only six degrees apart from each other via friends of friends of a friend. In some special cases, this can actually be measured and even make for a fun game. Learn more about the six degrees of separation theory, and it's connection to Kevin Bacon on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Did you ever hear about the selfie that solved a murder or the jury that used a Ouija board to speak to a victim?

Starting point is 00:00:52 If that made you pause, you need to listen to Morning Cup of Murder. I'm Karina B. Minas Durfur, and every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I tell one chilling true crime story tied to that exact day in history. With over 2,500 episodes to binge, you'll never run out of dark stories to start your morning with. Listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. Most of you might be familiar with the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game, also just known as the Kevin Bacon game. The game is pretty simple.

Starting point is 00:01:27 You need to find the shortest path between an actor and Kevin Bacon based on the movies they both appeared in. For example, Sir Lawrence Olivier was in the 1979 movie Dracula with Frank Langella, who was in the 2008 movie Frost Nixon with Kevin Bacon. Shirley Temple was in the 1942 movie Miss Annie Rooney with June Lockhart who was in the 1989 film The Big Picture with Kevin Bacon. I'll be coming back to the Kevin Bacon game

Starting point is 00:01:53 in a bit, but this is just a well-known version of a similar theory that was developed in the 20th century. The Six Degrees of Separation Theory The Six Degrees of Separation Theory is the idea that any two people on Earth are connected by at most six social connections. Or to put it another way, you could reach anyone in the world through a chain of no more than six acquaintances where each link is a friend of a friend. The concept can be traced back to early 20th century thinking about networks and human connections. The Hungarian author Frigueres Karinthi first popularized it in a 1929 short story collection called Everything

Starting point is 00:02:28 is Different. In his story titled Chains, he speculated that advances in communication and travel had shrunked the world such that everyone was linked through only a handful of connections. It was one of the few predictions from this period that was remarkably prescient. The theory gained academic attention in the 1960s with the small world experiment conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. You might remember Stanley Milgram from a previous episode on the Milgram experiment. The Milgram experiment you might remember was a test to see how far people would go when they thought they were shocking other people to follow instructions.

Starting point is 00:03:02 The question that Milgram was trying to answer was, if you pick two random people in the United states, how many intermediate acquaintances would it take to connect them? Milgram carried out the experiment in 1967. He recruited about 300 participants from Nebraska and Kansas and asked them to help forward a folder to a designated target person, a Boston stockbroker named Howard Milgram, who was no relation to Stanley. The rules were, one, participants could not mail the folder directly to the target. Two, they had to send it only to someone they personally knew on a first name basis.

Starting point is 00:03:37 and three, each recipient in turn would follow the same rule, forwarding it closer to the target. Each folder contained instructions, a roster sheet to track its path, and a postcard for recipients to return to Milgram so he could track progress even if the chain broke. The results were striking, although messy. Out of the roughly 300 starting chains, only about 64 successfully reached their target. For those who did arrive, the average length of the chain was about five to six intermediaries. This is where the phrase six degrees of separation originates, although Milgram himself never used that wording. He instead concluded that people live in a small world, meaning that social networks

Starting point is 00:04:19 are much more tightly interconnected than intuition would suggest. The experiment, while groundbreaking, has been criticized. The study had a high attrition rate. Most chains never reached the target, raising questions about the robustness of the results. It also had a strong sample bias. participants were mainly middle-class Americans from limited geographic areas, which might not generalize to broader or more diverse populations. On the flip side, people may not have been strongly motivated to keep forwarding the letters, and thus the experiment may have underestimated social connectivity. Despite these issues, the concept held enormous intuitive appeal

Starting point is 00:04:55 and sparked decades of research in sociology, mathematics, and network science. One problem is that there wasn't a theoretical framework to explain the small world connections amongst people. The work by Australian researcher Duncan Watts and American Stevens Stogratz in the late 90s transformed Milgram's intuitive small world finding into a precise mathematical framework, opening up an entirely new field in network science. Their 1998 paper, Collective Dynamics of Small World Networks, published in Nature, is one of the most influential studies in modern complexity science. Watts and Strogatz proposed a simple and elegant model.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Start with a regular lattice which each node connected to its immediate neighbor. and two, randomly rewire a small fraction of the edges creating shortcuts across the network. The result was a small world network with two key properties. High clustering, just like a regular lattice, and short average path length similar to a random graph. This meant that you could preserve the local clickishness of real social groups while still allowing long-distance lengths that dramatically shortened the distance between any two nodes. One of the things that radically transformed this field of research was social media. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn made it possible to measure the distances

Starting point is 00:06:08 between people without having to resort to experiments. Studies have repeatedly shown that the average distance between any two users is indeed surprisingly short, often just three or four steps, making Milgram's intuition prescient. In fact, if you look someone up on LinkedIn, it will show you the number of links that you are from them, including what people connect you. While this had been a field of academic study, would brought this into the popular consciousness, was the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game. In 1994, three college students from Albright College in Pennsylvania, Craig Fas, Brian Turtle, and Mike Galini were watching television when they noticed that Kevin Bacon seemed to appear in or be connected to a large number of movies. They joked that

Starting point is 00:06:49 Kevin Bacon is the center of the universe and began challenging each other to link any actor to Kevin Bacon through co-stars. They formalized it into a parlor game where participants tried to connect an actor to Kevin Bacon and six steps or fewer, each step being a film in which two actors appear together. The game was mentioned on the John Stewart Show in 1994 and it rapidly spread as a pop culture phenomenon. And this was his short-lived late-night show on MTV, not his Comedy Central show. Kevin Bacon himself initially didn't like it, but eventually embraced the idea, even collaborating with the creators on a book and appearing on shows where the game was played. In later years, he founded the charitable website, 6Degrees.org, which uses the concept of

Starting point is 00:07:29 interconnectedness to promote social good. The Kevin Bacon game is a direct parody and application of the six degrees of separation theory. Just as Milgram's social experiment demonstrated that people are surprisingly close in a social network, the Bacon game shows that actors in Hollywood form a tight-knit network where, at most, only are a few degrees apart from each other. Because Kevin Bacon had a prolific and diverse career working across genres with many co-stars, he became an ideal hub for the experiment.

Starting point is 00:07:56 In the Kevin Bacon game, everyone who can be linked to him, is given a Bacon number. Kevin Bacon himself has the Bacon number of zero, as he is the font through which all connections flow. If you appear in a movie with Kevin Bacon, then you have a bacon number of one. For example, in the recent remake of The Toxic Adventure, Kevin Bacon is the villain, and the Toxic Adventure is played by Peter Dinklage, giving Peter Dinklage a Bacon number of one. If you didn't star in a film with Kevin Bacon, but you start in a film with one of his co-stars, then you have a Bacon number of two, and so on. It's surprisingly difficult to find a regular working actor with a bacon number greater than three.

Starting point is 00:08:32 Now, you might be wondering, who has the highest bacon number? This was actually difficult to research, but the best I could find was that it was General William Rufus Schaffner, an American general during the Spanish-American War and recipient to the Medal of Honor. He has a bacon number of 10. William Rufus Schaffner appeared in the Surrender of General Torrell in 1898 with Confederate General Joseph Wheeler. Joseph Wheeler appeared. in General Wheeler and Secretary of War Algar at Camp Whitkoff in 1898 with Union Army General Russell Alexander Alger. Russell Alexander Algar appeared in President McKinley's

Starting point is 00:09:10 inspection of Camp Whitkoff in 1898 with President William McKinley. William McKinley was in President McKinley and escort going to the Capitol in 2001 with Nelson Miles, who was also a Union General. Nelson Miles was in the Indian Wars in 1914 with Buffalo Bill Cody. Buffalo Bill Cody was in Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Pawnee Bill's Far East in 1910 with showman Major Gordon W. Pawnee Bill Lilly. Pony Bill Lilly was in The Days of the Thundering Hard in 1914 with actor Wheeler Oakman. Wheeler Oakman appeared in Flash Gordon's trip to Mars in 1938 with Jerry Gardner.

Starting point is 00:09:44 Jerry Gardner was in Natural Born Killers in 1994 with Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Pruitt Taylor Vince appeared in 24 hours in 2002 with Kevin Bacon. Many of those early films weren't films as we would consider them today, but they were shot on film and they were released to the public. And this got me wondering if I had a Kevin Bacon number. And it turns out that I do. I have a Kevin Bacon number of five. In 2007, I appeared in a documentary as myself with my friend Haley Chamberlain. The documentary was titled 50 States in 50 Days.

Starting point is 00:10:19 In 2015, Haley was in a small film called The Telephone Game with, Jesse Lovercombe. Jesse Lovercombe was in a 2019 film titled Chubby with Mark Ingram, who was in Sesame Street, Sing Yourself Silly with John Candy, who was in She's Having a Baby with Kevin Bacon. Once the internet movie database was created, researchers wanted to know if, in fact, Kevin Bacon was the center of the acting universe. They plowed through all the data to check every relationship with everyone to see had the lowest average score. When they first checked, the center of the universe was not Kevin Bacon. It was actor Rod Steiger. The reason he had such a high score is that he appeared in a wide variety of movies, a lot of movies, and had a long career.

Starting point is 00:11:00 However, this has changed over time as more movies have been released. The Oracle of Bacon website calculates this periodically, and the new center of the acting universe as of January 2025 is Eric Roberts. He is followed by Michael Madsen, Willem Defoe, Samuel L. Jackson, Harvey Keitel, and Danny Trejo. The Kevin Bacon game isn't the only such link. linking game in town. The Erdish number was created as a way to measure a mathematician's collaborative distance from the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdisch, who authored or co-authored more than 1,500 academic papers. The rules are the same as the Kevin Bacon game, but instead of appearing in a film, the links are made via co-authoring academic papers. From mathematics,

Starting point is 00:11:43 you can then link to any number of fields, including physics, biology, and economics. For example, Albert Einstein had an Erdish number of two, and Milton Friedman has an Erdish number of three. Of course, someone has then taken this to the next step and developed the Bacon Erdish number, which is the sum of your Bacon and Erdish numbers. Very few people have them because not many academics are in movies and vice versa. The person with the lowest Bacon Erdish number is mathematician Daniel Clytman, who has a Bacon Erdish number of three, as he co-authored a paper with Erdish himself and briefly appeared in Goodwill

Starting point is 00:12:16 Hunting with Minnie Driver, who is in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon. Other people with a Bacon-Urtish number include Danica McKellar, Natalie Portman, Colin Firth, Christian Stewart, and of course, Carl Sagan. There's one other number I'll mention, which is a bit different than the others, the Morphy number. Paul Morphy was arguably the greatest chess player of the 19th century. Your Morphy number is based on the distance that you are from Morphy, based on who you've played a game of chess with.

Starting point is 00:12:43 This is different from the bacon or urdish numbers because it connects people through time. Every generation gets a higher number as time goes. on. For example, Gary Kasparov has a four and Magnus Carlson has a five. And oddly enough, this is how early Christian communities in the first and second century established authority, based on their connection to Jesus. In the system, the apostles would have a score of one, and the people whom the apostles trained and made bishops would have a score of two, etc. The bishops, especially in key seas like Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, were seen as custodians of the authentic teaching because of their short chain of succession going back to the apostles.

Starting point is 00:13:20 This concept of apostolic succession still underpins Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican understandings of church authority today. You'd be surprised how fast you can link yourself to people around the world. In the course of my travels, I met people who had totally unexpected connections with people that I previously knew. So it turns out that Walt Disney had it right. It is a small world, after all. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

Starting point is 00:13:49 The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you two can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Six Degrees of Separation

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