Can you really reach anyone in 6 steps?

In 1999, the German newspaper Dzite ran an experiment. They asked a falafel salesman and former theater director Salabani who in the world he would most like to be connected to. He chose his favorite actor, Marlon Brando. So, the reporters then searched for a chain of friends, family, or acquaintances, people who knew each other on a first-name basis who could connect Bengali to Brando.

As it happens, Bengali had a friend in California. This friend worked alongside the boyfriend of a woman who was the sorority sister of the daughter of the producer of the film Don Juan Demarco starring Marlon Brando. So in total it took just six steps, six degrees of separation. And the idea is that this is not a unique example that you could connect any two people on the planet in six steps or less.

But is it really true? And if it is, how does it affect our lives? How is this possible in a world of now 8 billion people that we could be that close, just six hops or less? Does that affect how diseases spread, how information travels?

Our math showed the question is not why is the world small, it's really how could it be otherwise. But then I got a call from the FBI. We are making the world smaller all the time. Like it's supposed to be good and yet it does expose you to toxicity and malevolence that you might have been shielded from.

You look at the net effect of it and it's actually been pretty negative by a lot of measures. People have suffered. >> It's not only dangerous in terms of disease propagation, but anything malevolent now has conduits that it didn't used to have. >> If we were all connected to everyone else on the planet completely at random, then it would be almost a mathematical certainty that any two of us would be connected through fewer than six steps.

Let's suppose I have my 100 friends out of 8 billion people. Each of them knows 100 people. So two steps away from me is going to encompass 100 * 100 people. That's already 10 4th people.

And so if you do 100 to the 5th power, that's 10 the 10th. And that's more people than there are on Earth. So that notice that number is five. I said to the ...