Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, known for being a game, famous for being a movie game. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game concept thing? Well, I would assume that my relation to it would be that I'm only six

degrees away from Kevin Bacon in some way. Yeah. I don't think I've seen a lot of Kevin Bacon movies. I'm trying to think. I know there's Footloose. Footloose is big, yeah. And what else was he in? He's in a lot of stuff. I was looking at what I've seen him in. He's in X-Men First Class.

He's one of the bad guys in that. Oh yeah, he's the bad guy. He's the pre-Magneto bad guy. He's in X-Men First Class. He's one of the bad guys in that. Oh yeah, he's the bad guy. He's the pre-Magneto bad guy. He's like the... Yeah. Like he and January Jones are on a boat. Right. The evil in the Hellfire Club.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But he, and yeah, he's been in a lot of TV shows. He's been in the movie Mystic River is maybe his most like awarded movie. And we'll talk about the rest of his career too. And the first movie I saw him in was Animal House. He has like a medium-sized speaking role in that. Oh, he was in Trimmers too. Yeah, lots of stuff.

Kevin Bacon is an actor who I feel largely neutral to positive about. I've never heard anything terrible about him. Maybe you'll like tell me some terrible things. I don't know. No, he seems good. I did not end up being hugely surprised about him as like a human being or an actor. There's interesting things we'll talk about, but he seems like the pretty alright guy who's pretty good and last stuff that I thought he was. Alright,, good. So I don't feel very strongly about him. I'm not like a huge bacon head, but I feel warm towards him because basically at this point any actor who hasn't done anything just terrible, I'm like, what a cool guy. Right. That is true. Yeah. There's been a lot of prominent figures who just turned

out to be bad and he seems pretty good. Yeah, it seems like it's all right. When I think Kevin Bacon, I have sort of a like, yeah, I know him. I know that guy. I've seen him a lot of places and he's very distinctive too. It's not like he has an everyman face. Like he has got a very distinctive face, not unattractive, but distinctive. And so I find it sort of interesting that it's like, I've seen him like in everything and yet nothing. And in terms of the game, like I am familiar with it. I think I learned about it in high school or something

where it's like, oh, did you know if you go on Wikipedia, everything is only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon. Like everyone or everything. Like clicking. Yeah, you can link back to Kevin Bacon eventually. The original original version of the game is prior to Wikipedia's existence. We can go ahead and get into the numbers because it's a numerical game. All right, let's do it.

And by the way, thank you to Rad Hamster on the Discord for suggesting this. It ran away in the polls. Very popular. Radical Hamster! Thanks for being radical, yeah. And let's lead with our quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called... Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of important stats that started off by counting up all kinds of facts, all kinds of facts.

You know, I have a vague recollection of in high school in band playing a medley of old TV shows, sitcom songs. Yeah. I think Gilgames Island was one of them. It's an all-timer, yeah. Yeah. And then I was like, what's the premise of Gilligan's Island? And I looked it up and it's like, they're stuck on an island. And then I found out about Lost. I'm like, they've already done it. Why would I need to watch Lost?

We have to go back. The Skipper or Ginger, whoever. Yeah. Ginger, right. Yeah, they got to make a car out of coconuts. Got to make skyscrapers out of coconuts, cell phones out of coconuts. Oh, they didn't have cell phones yet. Even though it's a TV theme, that name was submitted by Funny Film Fan on the Discord. Thank you, Funny Film Fan. If you have a new

name for this every week, please make a Missillian way I can best possible, submit yours to Discord or to sifpotatgmail.com. Because the very first number is zero. Kevin Bacon is the only human who's ever lived with a zero number in the Kevin Bacon game, because he is Kevin Bacon. And then the number is how many degrees away from Kevin Bacon you are. Right. This is, this hurts my brain a little bit to think about because it's like, I suppose technically you are zero away from yourself, but that's kind of a philosophical question, right? If you're zero degrees away from yourself, like what if you meditate though, could you be sort of 0.01 degrees away from yourself if you meditate?

Perspective taking, right? Like if he's in therapy doing some perspective taking, maybe he could be a little bit away from himself? Yeah, that's fun because it's very metaphysical and tying the universe together, but also it's a character actor. You know, it's fun. That's exactly how I describe metaphysical. Fun. Other examples of Kevin Bacon numbers. Tom Cruise has a Kevin Bacon number of one.

Ah, yes. Because the way the game works is if you were in a movie or show with Kevin Bacon, you are one degree away and they were both in the movie A Few Good Men in the 1980s. Okay, all right. You don't have to have been in like the same scenes or anything, just if you were in the movie A Few Good Men in the 1980s. Okay, all right. You don't have to have been in like the same scenes or anything, just if you were in the project together to a degree of one. Another example is Mark Hamill who played Luke Skywalker. Mark Hamill has a Kevin Bacon number of two because they have not been in a show or movie

together. But then Mark Hamill was in a movie called Village of the Damned with Keirsti Alley, and Keirsti Alley was in a movie called She's Having a Baby with Kevin Bacon. So Mark Hamill's number is two, Keirsti Alley's number is one. Was Kevin Bacon the baby in that movie? Oh, I wish. It was also a fun game because so many random titles pop up and you're like, I've never heard of that in my life.

There was a critical period in my life where I had to choose between remembering birds and remembering movies. And I chose the birds. So now I remember all the species of birds, but not movies. I think you made the right choice. The other number here for the vastness of it is 107 and 4 upcoming. That's the number of IMDB acting listings for Kevin Bacon. Wow. 107 acting projects and 4 upcoming, either in pre or post production.

Does he have a family? He does. It's actually very delightful. The number there is September 1988. September 1988 is when Kevin Bacon married Kira Sedgwick, a fellow famous actor. Are they still together? And they're still together. So 36 years and counting. And two children. In 1987, they were both in the cast of a PBS adaptation of a stage play, like a 4TV stage play.

They married the following year and had a child the following year after that and have two kids and a long relationship. So she's one degrees away from Kevin Bacon, you would say. Yeah, and then he has directed a TV movie and a theatrical movie. She acted in both of those. He also directed a few episodes.

Right now we get to why he's bad. You know, he's bad. Oh, he loves his wife too much. And she she's been in a whole bunch of stuff, including a long running TV show called The Closer. And he directed like four episodes of that. So that's also a significant node in the Kevin Bacon game is his wife who he has this relationship with. And so if I hang out with his wife, am I then two degrees away from Kevin Bacon? Kevin Bacon. Officially the game is you have to act in something together. Not that there's like laws about this, but like simply meeting each other is not quite

the same. Kevin Bacon laws. Okay, so if the children, but if you acted in something with the children, then you would be two degrees away from Kevin Bacon? Yeah, I believe one of his kids was in the movie Lover Boy, which is a movie that Kevin Bacon directed Keira Sedgwick starred in. Nepotism. So, if you act with the children, that should do it too. The next number is three. That is, I think, my Kevin Bacon number. Whoa, really?

Because here's the thing. Kevin Bacon was in the movie JFK in 1991, directed by Oliver Stone. And one actress in that is a lady named Sally Kirkland. Sally Kirkland, very distinguished actress. She started more than 60 years ago in the weird films Andy Warhol made at his studio called The Factory and in 1987 she won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for the Oscar for bestress for a movie called Anna. So, like, not famous, but in a bunch of stuff.

One of Sally Kirkland's many, many projects is an independent film called Chandler Hall. And one of the few other people in the cast of that is a guy named Sorin Bowie. What? Wait a minute. Who we both know. And we used to work at a website called crack.com. He was a person acting in sketches and stuff there. So if being in internet videos with Sorin counts, I have a vacant number of three.

What about writing a script for a Sorin video? Does that count? That's the thing. I think yours is also basically three because we really did a lot together. Sweet. That's right. Even if you weren't technically on a screen at the same time or whatever, I think we both have a number of three through our buddy Sorin.

Don't tell Sorin this, but I don't remember if I was on... I think I might have been on a screen with him at some point, but Cracked kept me... I was an intern for a while, so they kind of kept me in a little closet and would feed me snacks under the door. You remember that. We were sort of all paid in snacks, but it's fine. Whatever. Yeah. You and me and a lot of people we are friends with, I think, specifically through Sorin Bui, who is now a writer for the show American Dad on television, we should have a bacon number of three. The other weird thing is in 2025, Kevin Bacon guest voice on American Dad. Okay. So if like Kevin Bacon voice acting on something Soren wrote can be a connection, then our

bacon number decreases to two. Our bacon number has dropped. And we leave Sally Kirkland out of the loop. We are slowly approaching the bacon singularity, Alex. We have two data points and if this trend continues, we will become Kevin Bacon and that's just math. That's simply math and I'd like anyone to try to disprove me mathematically that Alex and I are going to become Kevin Bacon because we started at three, we went down to two.

It seems like a linear progression down to zero. It's like becoming crabs. It's becoming Kevin Bacon. Baconization. Delicious, yeah. It does sound, he has a very tasty sounding name. This topic got picked in the same poll as spam the food, like the canned meat. So people were like, there's a lot of meat this poll.

Wow, yeah. It's really meaty. Is he related to Francis Bacon? He's not, no. As far as we can tell. Surprising. I don't know a lot of bacens, only Kevin Bacon and Francis Bacon. The other key numbers here for his career are 1982 and 1984.

Those are the release years of the two breakout movie roles that made Kevin Bacon pretty much a working actor. In 1982, he co-starred in an ensemble drama called Diner, which was a lot of people's kind of first big thing. Steve Gutenberg and Mickey Rourke were some of the other relatively unknown actors in it. And it was the first movie directed by Barry Levinson, who went on to win an Oscar for Rain Man and direct a lot of other movies.

That role in Diner helped get Kevin Bacon into 1984's Footloose. Ah, yes. There's always like kind of fuzzy rumors about people almost getting cast for stuff, but it seems likely Kevin Bacon was not the first choice. Allegedly, Tom Cruise had a scheduling conflict and Rob Lowe injured his ankle and could not do the dancing. Kevin Bacon really took off from there. He also had a weird start to his career because he is the youngest of six kids in a family

in Philly. Not a show business family, his dad is a notable urban planner named Edmund Bacon who helped design Philadelphia and wrote a seminal text on urban planning. Wow. But Kevin Bacon at age 16 wins a scholarship to an arts high school in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Age 17 goes straight to New York City and waits tables. And weirdly he's in two very famous movies without that making him famous. His first ever screen credit is Animal House.

He's in The Jerk Frat and has speaking lines and stuff. He's not just an extra. He's like, hey, you nerds. Yeah, he plays a guy named Chip and there's a scene where they spank him with a wooden paddle as part of hazing and induction in the jerk frat. And he says they really spanked him. They didn't like stunt it. Okay.

Was he like, was that okay? Or was he not happy about that? He rolled with it, but he was like left out of New York City acting school by director John Landis and was down for whatever. What's like, are they just like, you can't like, we can't get the sort of facial expressions out of you that would be convincing of you being paddled in a frat. So we really have to do it. It's possible. There's also, there's a really dark story about John Landis where one of his other

movies, somebody got killed by a helicopter blade in an unnecessary way. So I think he had chaotic sets. Yeah. I don't like the idea that like, oh, we got to have stuff being really real on set, even if it means making people like spank each other. That doesn't seem right. Like act, that's the whole point of acting, right? Like being able to act like you're being hazed at a frat. Like it's not, it's not like a documentary on like we've made this cool documentary on

hazing by just spanking a bunch of actors. That's not how acting is supposed to work. I don't like that. Yeah. Poor Kevin Bacon. Yeah, poor Kevin Bacon, because he goes through all this and has lines and is prominent in the movie Animal House.

That movie is a huge cultural phenomenon. John Belushi especially is kind of the central figure of it. But Kevin Bacon goes back to waiting tables. He also picks up another role in the very first Friday the 13th movie. But that's an indie movie. He's not why it's famous. He doesn't really get going as an actor until these two other movies, Diner and Footloose. I see. I see.

But he's weirdly in some landmark movies before he's famous. That's what I'm talking about. He's like in everything and yet not famous for being in everything, which I find interesting. Despite the fact that he really does, and I really don't mean this as an insult because I think he's an attractive man, but he has a very distinctive face. He's not easily mistakeable for other actors. He's got as good as he was in the movie. He's not as good as he was in the movie. He's not as good as he was in the movie. He's not as good as he was in the movie.

He's not as good as he was in the movie. He's not as good as he was in the movie. He's not as good as he was in the movie. He's not as good as he was in the movie. He's not as good as he was in the movie. He's not as good as he was in the movie. He's not as good as he was in the movie. He's not as good as he was in the movie.

He's not as good as he was in the movie. He's not us into a weird flaw in the Kevin Bacon game. The number is 1983, which is the year between the movies Diner and Footloose. 1983 is Kevin Bacon's Broadway debut. He had a robust Broadway and New York acting career on the stage before he was famous. I mean, that's fairly common, right? Like a lot of actors start out on Broadway and then move into film and TV. It is, and it makes this game flawed, at least in terms of how the internet tracks it. Because take away number one...

Most online calculators of Kevin Bacon games fail to include super significant connections in his theater career. He acted with huge future stars. Because movies are the thing that gets so widely distributed. Everyone can go watch a movie, whereas not everyone has access to Broadway. It's the same thing for, I know, in the UK, they have like five actors total, and they're all on the UK's version of Broadway, which is...

The West End. Bloquay, I think. Yeah. Wait, what did you say? Bloquay. Bloquay. Ha ha ha. Broadgov, yeah.

Yeah, BroadGov. And they also continue to do stuff on West End. A lot of them do Shakespearean plays and big names like Ian McKellen. Yeah, yeah. But I know that Broadway acting is a lot different from movie and TV acting because you have to be exaggerated. Otherwise people won't catch subtle things. Whereas if you do that in front of a camera for a TV show or a movie, it's going to look

weird unless that's intentional. Yeah. And the other Broadway thing is so much of it is musical theater, right? There's singing and dancing. Kevin Bacon carved out a really significant career in just dramas, like acted plays in New York. So he wasn't so much in the musical theater. Yeah, apparently that kind of bit him with Footloose. Because Footloose, they aren't singing in the movie, but it's basically a movie musical. There's dancing and acting on top of pop songs.

Oh, I thought it was like about podiatrists. Ma'am, your foot is loose. We need to fix it with podiatry. Foot fix, gotta fix that foot that we fixed. I'll improve those lyrics, okay? Don't write me emails. But yeah, he apparently in Footloose he had like four doubles. In an interview he said he had a stunt double, a dance double, and two gymnastics doubles.

Because the script when he was looking at it just said like, Ren gets out of his car and dances out his feelings in a warehouse. But he didn't know that's like a five minute sequence on top of a song. And he's like, I'm not a trained dancer. I don't know how to do any of this so that's fun a lot of its doubles not him I see that ruins the magic for a movie that I really haven't seen so thanks for that Alex yeah take that he's like a big New York actor in straight drama where you're just acting there's not that many spots that, and he did a good job with it.

And the thing with bacon number calculators is there have been two major ones on the internet. One is a website called the Oracle of Bacon that started way back in 1995. And they originally built it just using IMDB listings, TV movies. And in 2012, Google added a temporary search feature that did bacon numbers and in the same way. Plays aren't really on IMDB. So most of the time

people have generated a bacon number online, they're missing the plays. And in his acting career in New York, especially his Broadway debut, he acted with huge people who he did not proceed to be in movies with. You know this is gonna just completely upend the bacon economy, Alex. This is very dangerous territory you're in. It's very destabilizing, yeah. Yeah, a lot of people's bacon numbers are gonna drop. They're gonna become closer to baconization. I don't know if you want to make this public. I'm ready. Yeah, a lot of people have lower bacon numbers than they think because the key thing here, 1983, Kevin Bacon has just won an Obie Award, which is an award for off-Broadway

theater, that helps him get the lead in a Broadway play. It's called Slab Boys. It's written by John Byrne. It's about working class youths in Glasgow, Scotland. So they're all pretending to be like Scottish rough and tumble guys. And then the cast is a bunch of future huge actors. Kevin Bacon's first in the program will link the old playbill. The fourth person in it is Jackie Earl Haley. And Jackie Earl Haley is not a famous name, but he's been in a whole bunch of movies. He was nominated for an Oscar for the movie Little Children in 2006. He's Rorschach in the movie of Watchmen. He played Freddy Krueger in a remake of Nightmare on Elm Street. He's

a really major character actor. And he's an Earl and that's important. You're thinking of bloke way actors where they have titles. That's different. But even bigger than that, two other actors had bit roles in Slab Boys. The actors Val Kilmer and Sean Penn. And you know, all three of those people are famous. Kevin Bacon did go on to do the movie Mystic River with Sean Penn. So that kind of solves that one. Yeah, that kind of cancels out the Bacon disruption.

Val Kilmer and Jackie Earl Haley, he hasn't done a movie or TV show with. Oh no. And so those are two critical major gaps in a lot of bacon numbers. We got to re-crunch the numbers. I think we really do. Somebody needs to fix the bacon system and add his theater career. If you or someone you love have a bacon number that's been affected by the re-baconization number crunch. You may be entitled to a settlement.

Because when I go to the Oracle of Bacon, it says that Jackie Earl Haley and Val Kilmer have bacon numbers of two, and you have to go through other people. But they were on Broadway together. I truly think that counts. So if you've ever been in anything with Val Kilmer, then you do have a lower Bacon number. I'd like to inform everyone. Yeah. Yeah.

It's true. It's weird, specific news. Yeah. Right. And I love a picture that the New York Public Library has. They digitized a photo of Kevin Bacon, Val Kilmer, and Sean Penn, and a fourth actress all on stage together in Slab Boys.

They weren't just in the same show, they all acted together in scenes. I feel like if there's any mathematicians out there, that would be kind of an interesting project because it's not just Val Kilmer being affected by the change in the Bacon numbers, it's everyone because of all of the human connections. That's what's interesting to me about the Kevin Bacon game is not so much, I mean, Kevin Bacon's great. Let's be honest, he's great.

I've got, I like the guy, but like it's more the interconnectedness of people. And then also like if anyone could figure out how the inclusion of just these two more actors into the Kevin Bacon sort of matrix, like how that affects all the Kevin, like the extent to which that creates ripples of Kevin Bacon numbers would be interesting to me. Me too. And you're dead on and it leads perfectly into the next takeaway because takeaway number two, most actors are really just four professional degrees away from Kevin Bacon and most people are six degrees away from

everyone else on earth. Wow. So stop fighting you guys. Knock it off. All right. Calm down. I think it's a good argument for that. I've solved world politics, Alex. Not to be too important of a show.

Welcome back to secretly, incredibly fascinating, the most important podcast where we sold everything. We did it. World peace to everyone. Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, and the name of the game understates how connected actors are and we all are. Almost everyone who's ever acted, especially because there's so many movies in TV now, is four or fewer degrees from Kevin Bacon. You don't need the fifth or sixth degree really.

Yeah. And then everyone on earth in the modern world is six degrees or less, we think, based on a few different studies. That's wild that we have studies that have confirmed that. It was basically a set of three very disparate studies. They were also partly inspired by the six degrees of separation concept in pop culture, partly popularized by Kevin Bacon. Apparently, there's also a stage play that became a movie that's titled Six Degrees of

Separation, starring Will Smith and Stockard Channing and talks about the concept, just in a non-Kevin Bacon way. That just all of us as humans have met enough people that we're six degrees apart. Yeah, if you replace Kevin Bacon with Y and everyone else with X, Yeah, that's, it makes sense to me because the, there are a lot of connections that you make in your life and also like people you're related to and then the connections that they make. So it is, it is wild that there is, there is that degree of connection. It's like one of those, it's, concept, oh I'm trying to think of the name of it. Let me look it up because my brain is too stupid. Why don't you continue while I look it up?

Okay. As far as the interconnection of all of us, the key sources are a piece for the Harvard Business Review by writer Gardiner Morse and an amazing episode of an NPR Science Friday show called Undiscovered. It was co-produced by Annie Minoff and Ella Federer in 2017. This is beyond specifically acting together. It's just people knowing each other. There's been a curiosity about how many degrees are all of us from all of us. And the first study really looking at it was in the 1960s. And it's somewhat flawed. It's also from a controversial psychologist named Stanley Milgram. Oh, Milgram.

Who's famous for prison experiments and so on. Oh, Milgram, you little scamp. I'm familiar with the foibles of Stanley Milgram. The study also did not precisely find that everyone's six degrees apart, but what it found is he tried to use the US mail to check how connected Americans are. He picked one retired school teacher in the Boston area, and then he gave a bunch of form letters to people in Omaha, Nebraska. And the form letter had instructions that say, please send me to someone who you at

least know a little bit, like not a random person. We're trying to gradually send these letters through the mail to this school teacher. So then each person who had one, their task was, who do you know who might have a higher chance of knowing this person or be closer to them or something? And in his system, a lot of the chains took 10 or more steps, but he's found an average amount of steps of 6.2. Okay. Yeah, maybe because like the issue if I remember correctly with the prison experiment was that it like purported to find this, the abuse of power that quickly happened when people were given the role of prisoner versus prison guard. But then there was a whole, the actual results

were pretty questionable. Yeah. And this is kind of one of those, because people could just cheat in how they send the letter. Also, he found a bunch of chains that are bigger than six. Like he kind of proved in the 1960s we were not six degrees apart from each other necessarily. But it lends, I don't know, some like extra oomph to the general idea. And then in 1998, a grad student named Duncan Watts and a math professor named Stephen Strogotts, both working at Cornell University, they got interested in this concept of six degrees

of separation and tried to just theoretically mathematically model it. And they found that you can get a world where everybody's six degrees apart if you have the nodes of it, the people form a lot of local clicks and then a few random connections. And that happens to be how our world tends to be. Like we have a lot of local communities that we know because we're near each other. And then each of us brings interesting, seemingly disparate connections to the table. Yes. That to me sounds very plausible. Just because of the exponential way in which

if you know 10 people and each of those 10 people know 10 people, which obviously a lot of people know more than 10 people, but what I'm saying is it's very exponential. So it's like you quickly, that radius of who you know grows in number extremely, extremely quickly because of that exponential nature of it. Like 10, 10 to the 10, 10 to the 10, 10 to the 10, et cetera.

Math. Yeah, and they like in their model, they did basically three versions. They did a version where all of us are in one giant ring, basically, where we only know the person to our left and to our right, and then how many connections that takes. And then they did a version where all of our personal connections are completely randomized. And so then when they kind of merged those and did a mix of the two, they got a theoretical

world where everybody's six degrees apart or less. Right. But it was 1998 and they couldn't prove that very much. They compared it to some other real world networks and found similar situations. But the third study is very, very simple. In 2016, staff at Facebook looked at Facebook. Oh, okay. They were like, how connected are Facebook users?

And we can do that internally and generically. Yeah. I mean, that's a huge data set. Yeah. How connected are you to each Minions meme that you find on Facebook? Yeah, and in 2016, about a quarter of the world had a Facebook account, more than 1.7 billion users. And the data showed those users were within five degrees of each other on Facebook

or less. So then, if everybody on earth knows at least one Facebook user, that's an approximate six degrees of connection between every person in the world. Along with that digital change and how clear we are on our just acquaintances with each other for all of humanity, Internet stuff and databases have also helped confirm and clarify the connection between actors. And one of the creators of Oracle at Bacon, he did an interview with The Guardian in 2012.

He said that when they looked at their data, you don't really need six degrees for the Kevin Bacon acting connections. More than 99% of all actors who've ever had an IMDB listing are four degrees from Kevin Bacon or less. So the name of the game even kind of misstates how truly connected Kevin Bacon is to the rest of his industry. So Kevin Bacon is sort of like the the lodestone of Hollywood. Like he's Atlas, he's holding up Hollywood on his shoulders. One scientific name for the all human connection thing is the small world phenomenon.

You can do this phenomenon with a lot of actors. Kevin Bacon's just one fun one. That's the other thing this kind of shows. Like he could be a midpoint and a whole bunch of other people's. I don't know. I feel like Kevin Bacon might be sort of the carbon molecule of acting where he really is the essential bond that holds everything together.

And that without Kevin Bacon, things will just fall apart. Where did you study? Well, I'm a Bacon based acting form. And let's see Yeah Yeah, and folks that's so many numbers and a couple takeaways We're gonna take a short break and then reveal the many different origins of the Kevin Bacon game Folks, as you know, we exist as a podcast because of direct support from listeners. Thank you to every single one of the Maximum Fund members who make Secretly Incredibly Fascinating a thing.

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was created by three college students in 1994. And those three college students, Kevin Bacon. And those three college students, Kevin Bacon. It's fun because three extremely specific students created it and it also helped lead Kevin Bacon to take a much bigger interest in philanthropy in his personal life. Wow. That's cool. Was he like, wow, I'm so connected to everyone. And then he wanted to give more people money.

Almost, yeah. He was initially upset about the game and then gained perspective on it and then became more of a philanthropist. Why was he upset? Was he like thinking that people were making fun of him? Yes, yeah. Oh, oh.

He's done a few interviews about it and apparently he said, quote, I thought the joke was, can you believe that such a lightweight could be connected to Laurence Olivier or Meryl Streep or whatever in? six steps or less and quote He thought it was a joke about like can you believe Kevin Bacon has met real actors. It's wild I'm sorry. He felt that way He's gained perspective on it. He also said, quote, I know it's a cliche, but actors behind all the muscles and shining white teeth and low cut dresses, it really is just masking

a lot of deep, deep insecurity. I thought I'm going to be a laughing stock, end quote. Oh, I mean, he did get like spanked with a paddle in Animal House. So like it does seem like, you know, it's like when you treat someone with disrespect, they're just going to learn to see disrespect everywhere. Yeah. He's also the Hollow Man in the horror movie Hollow Man, where he's kind of invisible, you know, he's been a lot of weird stuff. He's been eaten by worms probably and tremors. I haven't seen tremors.

Yeah. He does get... Does he get eaten? Probably eaten by worms. Yeah, I'll bet he gets eaten. I think everyone gets eaten. How do you not get eaten? Well, how do you not? It's at least implied.

Yeah. We're all one degree away from that worm or whatever. It's coming. Right. Kevin Bacon started hearing about this around 1994, 1995, because it happened very organically. The Bacon game was created by three college students named Mike Janelli, Craig Fass, and Brian Turtle. Brian Turtle. And I like Brian Turtle's name the most, so I put a blast.

I do too. I like it. And they did an interview with NPR. Apparently they were students at Albright College, which is a liberal arts school in Redding, Pennsylvania. And in the winter of 1994, they got snowed and one night they were drinking and watching movies together in a dorm. The TV channel they were watching inspired this because it was showing Footloose, the 1984 movie.

And then after Footloose ended, it aired a 1986 Kevin Bacon thriller called Quicksilver. Okay. That he was also the leading man in. And then in one of the commercial breaks during Quicksilver, they promote a future airing of a third Kevin Bacon movie. My God. So it was Kevin Bacon O'Clock. Yeah, like 1994 he's been an actor for a while, but you know, his resume was shorter. There's not so many movies, right? Like it's wild.

Right. So they very naturally said to themselves, Kevin Bacon's in everything. Weird. Yeah. Like, why is Kevin Bacon in everything? I don't think about him that much. Turtle says, quote, and then it was sort of like, well, has Kevin Bacon ever worked with Robert De Niro? This was before the movie Sleepers, which has sequently put the two of them together in one movie. But before that, we said no, but Robert De Niro was in The Untouchables with Kevin Costner and Kevin Costner was in JFK with Kevin Bacon. And that was kind of the light bulb statement right there.

End quote. Ah, and then they're like making all the connections on a cork board with Kevin Bacon in the center and countless pieces of red string and they're losing their minds and... Red string because Bacon's red. That's tasty.

Yeah. Or brown. I got boxes full of Bacon. I got boxes full of Bacon. Yeah. They like enjoyed this game, but you know, usually college students' ideas don't get out there. These guys decided, hey, if we send our idea to our favorite national media, maybe they'll talk to us. And it's like a fun thing. And they struck gold. Two big media shows brought them on.

They went on The John Stewart Show, which is an MTV talk show that he did before The Daily Show. John Stewart Show, which is an MTV talk show that he did before The Daily Show. And they also went on the Howard Stern radio show during like the 1990s peak of Howard Stern. Wow. Two media things just kind of spread this parlor game nationally as a fun meme. You know, the internet wasn't really quite going yet, but it got around. So people were really bored. They had nothing to do.

That too, yeah. And in 1995, Kevin Bacon stars in a thriller called Murder in the First, co-starring Christian Slater and Gary Oldman. Again, he's in everything with everyone. But while he's doing press for Murder in the First, people keep asking him about this game he's never heard of instead of the movie. They're like, did you know there's a game where you're in everything with everybody? And he's like, what do you, why is everyone bringing this up to me? Oh, I can see how that would be kind of, it's like, hey, I'm in this new movie. Yeah, but what about the game that you're in where everyone is connected to you? Right.

And it's like funny that you know these people, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so he's initially upset, then gets over it. And then here's another quote from Kevin Bacon. If you take me out of the six degrees idea, it really is a beautiful concept because we really are all connected. The things that we do here now in our block affect people on the other side of the world

and they affect people on the other side of the world and they affect people on the other side of town." And so he starts to take this like really global and charitable and we're all one vibe from the game about himself. I really like that for Kevin Bacon because it just feels like oddly specific that Kevin Bacon is so connected to everyone. That's like, that's what's funny about it. But then when you, but like, as he pointed out, it's like, well, it is, it's also interesting that like every other person who's,

it is oddly specific that every other person is like connected to a huge amount of people when you, when you zoom out. Actually did look up the word and now I know it, the saunder is the term for like, when you zoom out, I actually did look up the word and now I know it, the saunder is the term for like when you have the realization that everyone around you has their own lives and their own mind and their own complicated things going on.

And it's this sort of like heavy realization of like, cause like you'll see a crowd of people and it's like, yeah, that's a lot of people, but then it's specifically this enormous like kind of feeling of people, but then it's specifically this enormous kind of feeling of like, and each of those people has a mind exactly as complicated as mine, as many thoughts and friends and things going on. They're not just random cardboard cutout background characters. They're each as significant as me in terms of all the stuff going on in their lives, all the complicated things.

And it is like, and I've felt this before, like before I knew there was like a word for it. And it's just this kind of like very specific sense of awe of like, oh my God, there's like a lot of brains out there doing stuff. Like it's a weird, it's not necessarily about empathy. It's more the weight of like, there are so many people and every person has this rich inner life that I don't have access to, but it's right there. Yeah, I love that. I had never heard that term. It's really cool to link it.

Yeah, Sonder. Yeah, I think the saying I had heard is everyone you see is fighting a great battle. I don't know who it's from, but it's like that kind of thing. Yeah, everybodyonder. Yeah, I think the saying I had heard is, everyone you see is fighting a great battle. I don't know who it's from, but it's like that kind of thing. Like, yeah, everybody has their own inner life and there's billions and billions of them. It's kind of wild. A lot of people play Age of Empires is what you're saying. That's right. And I'm the best.

I'm number one. I play as Spain, a lot of gunpowder units. You have to build up to it, but really fun. Age of Empires II, anyway. Yeah, and so Kevin Bacon, you know, he's always been, it seems like a pretty nice guy. But then around 2007, he founds a charity called 6degrees.org that still operates today. The focus is like youth empowerment in local communities,

also kits of necessary resources for unhoused and underprivileged people. And the concept is if we start very local with helping people, the degrees of connection will go outward. Oh, that's a lovely idea. I love that. And then you can bring attention to it through the six degrees game and Kevin Bacon showing up. That's fantastic. That's a perfect application for that idea. I love that. It's just this concept's notoriety. It let him do a Ted

talk about it in 2012, a South by Southwest panel in 2014, also promoting the charity. And in 2024, he made a podcast called Six Degrees with Kevin Bacon, all about charitable work by his group and other groups, just to try to get the word out. Man, I went from being like modestly warm towards Kevin Bacon to being very warm towards Kevin Bacon, which is- Me too. According to my theory, the progression of baconization where we do all become one with Kevin Bacon in a sort of Elysium-like world of total harmony.

I also, I maybe have been referenced like the food bacon too much, but becoming warm toward bacon is a bit kind of, you know, it just makes me hungry. Yeah. Sizzling with bacon. He could do, he could do a cooking show called Sizzling with Bacon. He also, I couldn't find the clips of it, but apparently he did some ads for egg councils because of an eggs and bacon joke. That's good.

That kind of thing. It's really good. That's the other joke is the game and the food. When your last name is Bacon, you have to lean into it. You can't run from that. Yeah, and apparently a history museum has done a degrees of Bacon with the Elizabethan nobleman, Francis Bacon. And then an art museum has done that with the modern artist, Francis Bacon, and with

another modern artist named Peggy Bacon. There's a lot of this out there with Bacon's. I see. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it is, it does all kind of make sense that we all, at our core, are bacon. Because it's part of a complete balanced breakfast. Butter your bacon, boy, said Homer Simpson, and then Bart puts it on the bacon. We'll link the clip.

Anyway, we have one last takeaway for the main show that debaconizes this. What? Takeaway number four. The true origins of Six Degrees of Connections as an idea might be a vaudeville comedy concept or a Hungarian short story. Oh, okay. We're trying to find like the invention of are all people six degrees apart from each other? Because the Kevin Bacon game piggybacks on that but didn't create it.

Right, right. There was a time before Kevin Bacon. BKC. Wait, no, hang on, BKB. BKB. BKB before Kevin Bacon. Which feels like a Burger King broiler thing to me, so I'm still hungry. Boy. Yeah. Yeah, this is two other touchstones that could have just put the seed in people's minds that we're all six degrees apart from each other because for one thing that hasn't always been

true, especially before the Colombian exchange, also before a lot of mass media, before easy ways to travel, we truly weren't six degrees apart. Right. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. People are more isolated. Yeah. And one thing that might have popularized the idea is a story called Chain Links, which

is really more of a literary essay, but it's by a famous in the literary world Hungarian writer named Fridges Korynthi. That's spelled F-R-I-G-Y-E-S, Carinthi. He was born in 1887. He's mostly famous for experimental writing, including science fiction. He also wrote a memoir of surviving a brain tumor and the experiences of that. Oh, wow. And in between all that- Wait, quick question. Did he survive the brain tumor before or after he wrote the six degrees?

Oh, after. After, okay. before or after he wrote the six degrees. Oh, after. After, okay, because I was gonna say sometimes like weird brain stuff, like I'm not promoting drug use, but drug use or stroke or any kind of like, I'm also not promoting stroke, but like certain brain. Wow, anti-stroke, wow.

I'm a real stick in the mud when it comes to strokes, but like weird brain strokes can sometimes make people feel more connected to the rest of the world. It's a really interesting phenomenon because it's like, because your brain, like it has something to do with like a bunch of things lighting up at the same time, including like your amygdala, which processes emotion, and then other connections that that makes. And then you're like, whoa, I feel emotionally

connected to everything because your amygdala is like firing and going off. And so the same kind of warmth you might feel seeing a loved one, you feel towards the entire concept of humanity. Anyways, that's a digression because apparently that's not the case here. Yeah, it is. I guess it could have been the beginnings of it. He finished the memoir of the tumor in 1936 and this short story is 1929. So he might have had the tumor. He might have not.

I'm also not being pro tumor, by the way. He's not the tumor. We achieved world peace and opposed bad things. We're really great on this episode. We're heroes. Heroes. Hero podcasters. Most of my sources called this a short story. It's really more of like a literary essay of him talking about himself meeting up with

friends at a cafe in Budapest and doing thought experiments. It's called Chain Links because the thought experiment is, quote, we should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the earth, anyone, anywhere at all. Then his friend bet us that using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances." Oh cool. Yeah. So specifically six degrees apart, all the people. I wonder what sort of the urban structure of Hungary was at the time because I have

noticed a lot more. When I live in, and I'll be brief on my soapbox here, but when I live in a city where it's really walkable and you have a lot more urban density, you start to notice, like, first of all, you have like chance run-ins with a lot of people, and then you start to notice, there's like a lot more connections as well, where it's like, oh, like I know you,

and hey, you know, like, you know the architect who worked on this other person's home. Like, I've met people that are connected to my husband's workplace by going to a yoga class that's within walking distance, probably because they're also nearby. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Funny little coincidences pop up like all the time. And it does, I think it also has a really positive psychological effect because I'm like, it feels more like I'm part of the community rather than up like all the time. And it does, I think it also has a really positive psychological effect because I'm like, it feels more like I'm part of the community rather than just an anonymous stranger. Totally. And yeah, that seems to have been part of Carinthi's experience because in the

little essay they talk about how would I contact Henry Ford? How would I contact famous athletes? And it involves kind of people from chance run-ins and this walkable place. Yeah. So that was part of the inspiration for him. That's very cool. And they also just note that, for example, Julius Caesar was not six degrees from an Aztec emperor because there was no contact. And so this is a question about like, how much smaller has our world gotten as we talk about this. This Corinthian story, it defines maybe it could be six degrees and also its main question is like, our same earth, is it just smaller now in this wild modern time of the 1920s? And the other possible inspiration

for this did not do a number of six degrees, but in vaudeville, in countries like the US, people would especially just kind of pass around jokes and concepts. And one that starts getting passed around in the 1890s is the idea that everybody on earth has shaken the hand of a specific celebrity. Because if you do like the transitive property of a person shook a hand and then another

person's hand and another person's hand, eventually it intersects with the celebrity. The premise was around a famous boxer. John L. Sullivan was a heavyweight champion of the 1880s. And so people would do like a vaudeville thing where they're like, I've shaken the hand of the hand that's shaken the hand of the hand that's shaken the hand of John L. Sullivan. And is oh they think they feel like they met John L Sullivan. That's fun. Yeah, but it's also kind of true. I Have this thought experiment that when I try to explain it to people they're just like they think I'm I've possibly Partaken of cannabis which I which I don't Yeah, I'm not gonna come out one way or another against cannabis actually.

420 degrees away, am I right? Oh yeah. But it's serious, which is weed. But the serious part is that every sort of historical fact you hear, right? Like Julius Caesar was a D bag. I don't know, I don't care. Like there is a direct interaction of molecules

from the historic event to your current self, especially if it's like spoken word, right? Because like someone says like, hey, did you hear Julius Caesar got totally stabbed in the back by his boy? And then that goes across the air, it kind of like hits other molecules and then it hits other people's ears. And then there's other interactions, like say you write something down, then the photons from the paper hit the eyeballs and actually cause a physical chain. So every piece of information that we get, like Julius Caesar got stabbed in the back

by his boy, it is connected by physics to us in the present day, either through air movement of molecules or photons hitting the back of our eyes and this like long chain of like physics based events. And when I again, when I try to tell people this, I'm like, isn't that cool? They're like, yeah. Yeah. Did you? What are you smoking?

I want to know what it is. It's cool. I think a lot of people parallel invented that idea and then vaudeville really pushed it as a thing people talk to each other about because otherwise people are a little hesitant to say, hey, I'm having metaphysical thoughts about the whole universe. Do you or a loved one have metaphysical thoughts? You may be entitled to a settlement. That groundswell of that idea, maybe plus a Hungarian short story writer

making it the number six degrees specifically. Those both influenced a Kevin Bacon game in the 1990s and then charity work after. It's weird. Yeah, yeah. Which means that Julius Caesar is how many degrees away from Kevin Bacon? Do we know? We're almost going to do that in the bonus show. He'd be many degrees away from Kevin Bacon? Do we know? We're almost gonna do that in the bonus show. He'd be many degrees, but yeah.

Oh, okay. Okay, okay. Well, we'll save it for the bonus, but yeah. I mean- Stick around, folks. Goodbye. Pay us money if you wanna know how linked you are to Kevin Bacon.

What's one slang for money? Bacon. Perfect. It all fits together. What's one slang for money? Bacon, perfect, it all fits together. Right. Sausage links, bacon, mmm, mmm. I'm so hungry. I'm so hungry. ["The New York Times"]

Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, most online calculators of Kevin Bacon connections fail to include his robust theater career and co-starring with Val Kilmer and Jackie Earl Haley. 2. Most actors are really just four degrees from Kevin Bacon professionally, and everybody in the world might be six degrees apart from each other in acquaintance. 3. The six degrees of Kevin Bacon game comes from three college students in 1994 who also helped launch Kevin Bacon into philanthropy. Takeaway

number four, the true origins of six degrees connections as an idea might be vaudeville comedy or a Hungarian short story. And then of course tons of numbers this week, including the surprise that me and Katie are three or even maybe two degrees away from Kevin Bacon. Also the trajectory of his entire career fitting this game, the wonderful way his wife has a major note of it, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obvious, incredibly fascinating

story related to the main episode. And foreshadowing at the end there, this week's bonus topic is the surprising way two Civil War generals might have Kevin Bacon numbers. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, for a library of more than 19 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a lot of wonderful coverage from NPR, in particular interviews

with Brian Turdle and the other two college students who created the Kevin Bacon game. Also a show from Science Friday about actual scientific studies of six degrees of connection in the world. And we'll link the New York Review of Books for resources about Frigis Corinthi. We'll also link the text of Corinthi's 1929 short story that's really more of an essay. It's called Chain Links. If you want to read it, it's a quick read. It's arguably the first ever documentation of a six degrees of separation parlor game. It's people wondering how they could reach Henry Ford and other

famous people. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinjur people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also KD taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in

this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 96 that's about the topic of car horns. Fun fact there, most car horns are really two sounds from two devices at once. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the BUDDHOS band. Our show logo is by artist Spertan Durand. Special thanks

to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating So how about that? Talk to you then Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.