July 10, 2025 • 42 mins
Before Facebook and MySpace, before even Friendster, there was SixDegrees. Dive in today to learn about the first social media site, that was a few years too early.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
here's Jerry, and we're going to take a nice little
stroll down Internet memory lane parent stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
You should Yeah, this is something I had never heard of.
Had you heard of this?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
No? I ran it past. You mean she's like, oh, man, yes,
I think I've heard of it, and I don't know
if she has or no.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Well, you mean is an early adopter.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Yeah. She was definitely more Internetti than I was at
that time.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah. So what we're talking about here is the first
what's regarded as the first social media website, the thing
that started the degradation of all mankind. Way back in
nineteen ninety seven. It was called six degrees dot com
spelled out SixDegrees dot com. I was founded by a
(00:57):
guy named Andrew Weinreich and for about three years in
the late nineties they were able to come online when
a ton of people were online, and garner ultimately about
three and a half million users, which it pales in
comparison to what we look at today, but for the
time wasn't too bad.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, not too shabby. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to get
them over the hump and give them staying power. But
I think they were also a victim of timing, as
we'll see, Yeah for sure, but yes, the deck was
stacked against them, and the fact that they were essentially
very much ahead of their time. They were a social
media site before there were enough people online, not just
(01:41):
enough people to come and use your social media site.
There was only something like I mean, if they had
three and a half million users, there's probably like three
point six million users on all of the Internet at
a time. I don't know if that's a correct estimate,
but something like eighteen percent of households according to the
US in nineteen ninety seven when six degrees launched, only
(02:03):
eighteen percent had internet at home at the time.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, there's a it was a competing stat from Pew
Research Center that said thirty six percent did, but there
was different methodologies and stuff. So let's just say, you know,
somewhere in between those numbers, I bet it was more
more like eighteen. This was you know, ninety seven was one, two, three, four,
(02:26):
five years before Prinster launched Princester. That's hard to say
for some reason. And but by that time the percentage
of people in two thousand and two that had flipped.
It was more like thirty nine percent of people did
not use the internet, and sixty one percent of people did.
So it was right at that, you know, it was
(02:47):
just terrible timing, right there at the end of the
nineties when the dot com bubble burst, and just right
on its heels, other sites came along that did far,
far better.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, and just one thing, I like that Pew Data
because it doesn't have like that small slice of like
don't know, not sure. It's either yes, I use it
or I don't use it. It's a nice solid survey agreed.
So yeah, so there's a lot of what ifs could
have been kind of thing, and we'll get into those
a little bit more. But there were more things that
(03:21):
six degrees was up against. Another really really big one
was the slow speed of internet. Yeah, and you know
today you might look back and think, well, we had
no comparison back then, didn't matter. It was so slow
that it would make you angry waiting around for a
song to download or a web page to even load.
(03:43):
There were transfer speeds using dial up modems of fifty
six kilobytes per second that was what you had to
deal with, not a gig per second, a kilobyte times
fifty six per second. That was the transfer speed at
the time, and that was the maximum.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, I mean we've laughed about it before, but just
the days of just seeing a picture appear on the
screen like three lines at a time, down, down, down,
and you're just I just want to know what this
thing looks like. And if you wanted to know, you
had just sit there for five minutes or whatever.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, I mean you had time to go make and
eat toast, Yeah while a picture was downloading.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, I hate a lot of toast back then.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So that was that was a big challenge for it too.
And then one of the other problems too is we'll
see is that people I mean, if you have a
social media so it's kind of helpful to have pictures,
and they just weren't around at the time.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, and we'll we'll get to that all the reasons
why in a minute, but just to sort of, you know,
locate it on the timeline in nineteen ninety seven when
at launch, like Google dot com had just registered as
a domain, so it wasn't even a real thing yet.
The word weblog had just been coined or you know
what it would become is blog and Netflix was sending
(05:02):
DVDs through the mail. So remember that it seems like
a thousand years ago, but it wasn't that long ago
in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
No, and it's kind of sad that six degrees has
kind of gotten lost to history. Most people think Friendster
was the first social media site. No, six degrees was,
and it wasn't even one of those things where it's
technically the first social media site, even though it really
was not. It didn't resemble social media at all. No,
this was the first social media site, and it essentially
(05:32):
laid the groundwork for all the social media sites to come.
It just was so far ahead of its time that
it got lost to history.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah. For sure, Friendster ultimately got about ten million, but
they had a lot of technical problems, so they didn't last.
MySpace was the next big one. In two thousand and three,
they were the first to reach a million monthly active users,
which was a big deal. Some people say that at
one point it was the most popular site in the
United States.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
I believe that.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Yeah, yeah, even if only for a brief amount of time.
But then in two thousand and eight, Facebook came along
and sort of smashed everything, and just to put a perspective,
three and a half million users for six degrees. Facebook
has more than three billion users and Blue Sky has
thirty three million, and that's looked at as like a
(06:21):
tiny thing.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yeah for sure. So yeah, it kind of puts their
three and a half million users into perspective. Yeah, so
six degrees may sound familiar to people. It's actually very
much related to the six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or
six Degrees of Separation that play by John Gwayer and
(06:43):
then later the movie adaptations starring Stockard Channing, of course,
but it's actually I didn't realize this based on a
study that Stanley Milgram, of the very famous Milgram experiment
where he had people shock some unseen person in another
room to find out just how obedient people were to authority,
(07:05):
even against their own set of morals. You know that one, right.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
He also carried out a study where he was one
of the first to kind of determine how far apart
the average person was from the other from anybody else
in the world.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah, he got together with another psych professor named Jeffrey
Travers and This is pretty cool. I think it was
pretty low fi way to do it. But this is
I mean, what year was this. Was this the nineteen.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Fifties, No, it was the late sixties.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Late sixties, okay. But what they did was they said,
all right, let's get some people in Kansas. Let's get
some people in Nebraska. They said, here's a folder and
it has a document with a target person that we
want you to get this to them. But you can't
just look them up and see if you can find
their address and mail it to them. One of the
people was in Cambridge, one was in Sharon, Massachusetts, and
(07:57):
they said, what you want to do, or what we
want you to do, is send it to a person
that you personally know who you think might be able
to get it to another person who could get it
to another person who could eventually get it to this
target person. And then we will measure that and see
what the average or the mean might be. So literally,
(08:20):
a farmer in Kansas got it, you know, this is
just one example. Got it to the wife of a
student Massachusetts, who gave it to an Episcopalian minister in
this town, who gave it to an instructor at the
theological seminary there who got it to that target? So
that would be one, two, three, four degrees of separation,
(08:41):
which is pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
I think yeah. And I also think chok that it's
kind of funny that to Stanley Milgram, Nebraska and Kansas
are the most socially remote locations in all of the
United States, because that's where he started to see how
long it took to get to I guess civilis like Boston.
But they actually did a lot of analysis of this.
(09:05):
They released a version of the study in Psychology Today,
which was meant for a general audience. But then they
did like the real deal in a journal called Sociometry
in nineteen sixty nine, and they found that there was
a mean length mean is the one in the middle. No,
mean is average, it's another word for average, just say average,
(09:25):
you know, of four point four to five point seven intermediary.
So they found that people have a degree of separation
of four point four to five point seven. And this
was all the way back in the mid to late sixties.
Think about how closer we are now.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah. Well, what I wonder too is did they throw
out the ones? Because apparently most of the folders never
even made it. Did they just toss those and say,
of the ones who got there, this is how they're connected.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yes, but I believe that most of the ones that
didn't get there were because the initial farmers in Kansas
and Nebraska just threw them out. They didn't participate. Oh really,
I think that's what happened to the majority of them.
So yeah, it wasn't like the most robust study of
all time, but it was so fascinating that it just
captured the imagination of people and became kind of a
(10:14):
pop cultural meme. But what's interesting about it is that
later scholarship that was pretty robust studies supported what Milgram
and his collaborator Jeffrey Travers found in that study.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, there was one in two thousand and three that
found a media of five to seven. This is pretty
old data. But in twenty eleven they did the degrees
of separation on other social media sites, and for Facebook
at the time, it was four point seventy four and
for the at the time named Twitter it was four
point sixty seven. But the caveat there is like you're
(10:51):
not necessarily counting just the people that you know, Like,
I know plenty of people when I was on Facebook
that had lots of like what were they in Facebook? Friends? Yeah,
friends who they had no idea who they were. It
was just more of a maybe a networking thing kind
of like LinkedIn.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see six degrees too.
Yeah yeah. Laura doctor Claw, who helped us out with this,
points out that social media kind of has a stretch
the definition of what we consider a connection. Like you
just said, and also you said, what used to be
called Twitter. I think it's hilarious because very frequently you'll
see Twitter used in like some sort of article or whatever,
(11:34):
and then in parentheses after that it'll say X.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Yeah, and I mean everyone still says Twitter. It seems like, yeah,
it just didn't take.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Like sorry, the name change for the business you bought
did not take.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yeah, it's because X is dumb.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
I guess. So Twitter was just so perfect.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
I guess well, I mean, I don't know if Twitter
is a good name or not, but it had such recognition.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
It's just like, Yeah, it's like the people who bought
the Sears Tower and try to change the name and
everybody's like, nope, still Sears Tower. Sorry.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah. I love that when a corporate sponsor takes over
and they're like, no, we're still going to call it
the thing at once.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Before it's still the Toastedos Fiesta Bowl. Sorry, sorry, cars
dot Com.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Well, you mentioned Kevin Bacon and we should mention real quick.
The six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was a very popular
thing created by some college students, where in the ideas
that Kevin Bacon has been in so many varied movies
over the years that you can connect any actor in
Hollywood to Kevin Bacon in less than six degrees or less.
But the Bacon number apparently is three point one two,
(12:38):
and they're five hundred and twenty two actors who have
a smaller connectivity number or Bacon number than that.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, they're more connected to people than Kevin Bacon. I
didn't know that, Chuck, did.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
You, Well there were five hundred and twenty two, or
that there were more connected actors both. I figured there
were more connected actors because there are people, well, Eric
Roberts is the number one with two point nine zero
eight four one because he has eight hundred and sixty
five IMDb entries as an actor. So I figured there
(13:14):
were people that were in way more movies. And that's
just Matt, You know.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Sure it is. But also you can make a case
that Kevin Bacon's one hundred and eleven movies typically are
with more stars who have more work, So there it's
likelier that the people he work with are in more
movies with more other people, whereas Eric Roberts is probably
in movies with people like this is their one and
only movie.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Or people who are in like six hundred movies that
you just have never heard of.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
That's true too, That's possible if Rifftrek taught me anything.
It's that. Yeah, Like I know who Cameron Mitchell is
for Pete's sake, is that he's one of those guys
who's in a million movies that you've.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Never heard of, but you recognize his face.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Face name. Yeah, I think I actually know some of
his family members.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Now right, I'm gonna have to look this guy up.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Yeah, oh man, it will take you on an odyssey.
And don't even bother watching the original version of the movies.
Just watch the riff track version of Cameron Mitchell's movies.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Uh a rare in store or in show. Look up
Cameron Mitchell. Huh oh no, he's a restaurateur.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
That's not him. Look at Cameron Mitchell's Space Mutiny.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that guy. Was he in
Plan nine?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Maybe he really might have been?
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Well, and now I'm seeing a picture of him as
an older gentleman, and I've seen him in movies as
an older gentleman too.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Speaking of Space Mutiny, that's a really great rift tracks
to start with.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Those guys are the best.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
And wait, actually I think that's an MST three K
to start watch both versions? How about that?
Speaker 1 (14:49):
All right, well that's what I meant.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
But yeah, okay, so do you want to take a break, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, let's take a break and talk more about old
Internet right after.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
This, okay, Chuck. So we said we were going to
(15:27):
take a stroll down Internet memory lane. And this was
a time when, like I think the year before six
degrees launched, Craigslist launched, Amazon dot Com launched, and they
were just selling books at the time. Yeah. One of
the big search engines was ask Jeeves, and it was
(15:47):
revolutionary because you could use natural language rather than have
to figure out exactly what keyword you needed to put
in to get results with licos. Yeah, yeah, totally, which,
by the way, asked Jesus, ask dot com. Did you
know that?
Speaker 1 (16:01):
I think I did know that. I knew it changed
into something. They just got rid of Jeeves, which is
super sad.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I know, it is pretty sad. They retired him. He
went off to live on a farm, as they say, yeah,
which means they killed him.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
How six degrees worked, though, is interesting because not only
was it the name copped from six degrees of separation,
they actually organized the website in such a way and
it seemed like part of the fun of it. And again,
this is early Internet. If you're a youngster out there,
you may think this is super funny that people thought
this was fun, But it seems like part of the
(16:37):
fund SixDegrees dot com was finding people you didn't know
and then tracing that connection through the website.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Right. So one of the things that you would do
is go through the I guess the registry of other
six degree users, and there were so few initially that
you could do that. Rather than go through three and
a half million people, it was just a few hundred potentially,
and you'd be like, oh, I know them, I know them,
and you would make a connection with them. They would
confirm it, and now you were a first degree connection.
(17:08):
You two were because you actually know each other.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Right, yeah, and you, like you said, you had to
confirm that connection. But you could also include people who
weren't on it yet, like I'm just going to list
out my family members or whatever and put their email
addresses in. Keep in mind, this is at a time
where you didn't get a lot of email. You didn't
get much, if any spam email, and sometimes getting an
email was like, oh wow, look at this, this is cool.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
It's cool.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
So if you think about that now, like oh yeah,
just put all your family and friends and put their
emails in. That's like a fireable offense, like socially.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You go to jail.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
I think you can. But back then it was a
different deal. So you can include people put their emails
and they would get an email asking for confirmation and
saying and also, do you want to sign up for
the school new thing? No, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
So the people that knew the people you knew, but
you weren't directly connected to them, you were now second
degree connected with them. And then those people were connected
to people that you didn't know, and they were third
degree connections. I think it didn't go beyond third degree,
Like they didn't go all the way up to six.
I think that was totally unnecessary. But this was like, yeah,
(18:18):
this is very groundbreaking and revolutionary, and people were just
amazed by people they knew. And the point was like,
who do your friends know that you want to know
that you don't know yet. Now you can make a
first degree connection with those people if they confirm you.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Yeah, I mean that's the way. It was sort of
like a predecessor to LinkedIn. I mean, you'll see again,
like you said, like seeds of all the social media websites.
They were doing it because you could create a profile
with your professional affiliations and stuff like that. You were
encouraged and I think most people probably really did use
their real identities because at the time people were like, well,
(18:55):
what kind of a weirdo would just create some fake
identity on the internet just to mess with people. So
there were real people on there. That was a member
of the trust E Data Privacy Program, which has now
been bundled up under trust ARC. But email was very
central to it all. It was not an app. They
(19:16):
didn't have apps yet. You would get an email asking
for confirmation, you would reply via email. You would add
others via email, so it was just a different time.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, and there were I mean you would add your hobbies,
you would add who you worked for, what degrees you
had maybe so yeah, again, lots of seeds of linked
In for sure. Again no pictures, and this was a
huge stumbling block, as we'll see. But they did have
other functionality that was thrilling. It had basically in network emailing, right,
(19:49):
so you could directly contact your context had they confirmed you.
They are bulletin boards where you could essentially chat, and
I think they had a bunch of other kind of
and whistles that they added over the years. They had
something called channels, which were essentially special interest groups and
you could be like, oh, I'm interested in business and finance,
(20:10):
or I'm interested in games I think, meaning at the
time nothing but Oregon Trail, right, and you could just
go and find other people on these message boards that
were interested in these things and maybe make some context
if they confirmed you.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, again, way ahead of its time with Facebook groups,
that's exactly what they did. We got some and you
can go look these up if you want to see
like screenshots of what the screen looked like. I believe
we were sent one from October nineteen ninety nine a
welcome scream scream screen, and it was it was cute.
It looked like a fun website of the day. It
(20:48):
had a service marketplace. There was daily trivia on the
homepage that this is hysterical. There was a daily poll,
and on that day in October nineteen ninety nine, this
was the poll. When you get a chain letter from
a friend, you a immediately throw it away, B do
what it says asap, c hold on to it for
a while, and then lose it. So it's clearly they
(21:09):
weren't like super future facing. If they were like chain letters,
that's relatable, right right.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
I found on also Chuck from February twenty ninth, two thousand,
so that was a leap here. It was the question
of the day was Bill and Monica, and then your
choices were love lust and as long as it's not Hillary,
that was the question of the day.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
That's pretty funny. By that time, six or eight months
after the October one that was sent, and probably in
the February one that you saw, there were little nuggets
of engagement boosting that they were trying to use, like hey,
here's some content, here's some like join this mother's day group,
or we're going to spotlight this channel it was. They
(21:56):
would tell how many people were online at that moment,
which in the October nineteen nine Ney No, I was
five hundred and ten people, which sounds very funny. But
I distinctly remember being in like chat rooms where they
would say like like three hundred people are in there,
and I would it would blow my mind.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
That there were that many.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah, it just seemed like, oh my god, dude, I'm
in my living room in New Jersey and I'm on
this computer and there are three hundred people around the
world that I can talk to right now.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
That's neat And what did you say that?
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Well? I did have one specific interaction with someone. Of course,
at the time, I thought it was a real girl
about our love of Cat Stevens, and we had a
real back and forth going and a lot in common.
And I'm sure that was probably a nine year old boy.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
You got cat fished over Cat Stevens.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
I might have, who knows, but I remember thinking like,
hey man, this girl sounds super cool and there are
no pictures so a bit you know, she's cute as
far as I know.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Well, a nine year old boy who's into Cat Stevens
is probably pretty cool too.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah, that probably would have been a better life unfriend
to chat about real music, right.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Another thing I saw on that February two thousand page
was the theme of the week, and this theme was
to thine own self improve. So there was like you
could click on to zen practice Group, self help, functui, Reiki,
there's a book club. They were just throwing everything they
could at this to just get people to interact more
(23:28):
and more and more, because it would the more engaged
you were, the more likely you were to send out
those emails to your friends and be like, hey, join
me on here. It's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
So maybe let's talk about pictures real quick and then
we'll take a break, because the lack of pictures is
the big deal, especially when you look at the modern Internet.
A website with just text and maybe you know, clip
art and stuff like that isn't super engaging obviously. So
the reason why they didn't have pictures is because there
(23:59):
was no way to get pictures there. You know, there
weren't digital cameras. The There was the Apple Quick Take
one hundred that was released a few years before. If
you look up pictures of this it's about the size
of a sandwich, kind of funny looking. It was the
first digital camera. It costs seven hundred and fifty bucks.
The Canon Power Shot was the first digital camera that
(24:20):
could write images to a hard disk. That was released
kind of one yeah, one year before six degrees came
online in nineteen ninety six. That was almost one thousand dollars,
had one hundred and seventy six megs of storage. But
the first camera phone didn't come along until ninety nine,
and that was a Kyo Serrah Visual Phone VP two ten.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, it was actually cheap, considering it's six hundred and
thirty four bucks in today's dollars for a camera phone.
It was a point eleven megapixel camera. For comparison, the
iPhone sixteen has as much as forty eight megapixels. Yeah,
but if you look up some of like the the
promotional images of this, there's like like Japanese women holding
(25:08):
the phone that's showing a picture of themselves. You can
clearly see who it is. Yes, that's another word for it.
I'm using nineteen ninety seven. Yeah, terminology though they like
you can see you can tell it's them. I think
one version of it is in color. It's not that bad,
especially for you can tell them. Yeah, you don't have
(25:31):
to like like squint your eyes to make the pixels
come together. And you're like, is that popeye? It's like
you can tell it's them. I guess yeah. I was
impressed by it.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
So it did its most basic function as an image
capturing device, yes, being able to tell it was that
same right.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Oh. One other thing I saw about the Apple quick
Take one hundred. At its highest resolution, it could store
up to eight photos at once. Whoa, this is so
much fun. I love making fun of the early Internet.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
I know that we live through. This is also a
true story. Winreich, the founder, would get emails where people
would say, hey, can I snail mail you a physical photo?
I have it? Can I send it to you via
the US Postal Service? And can you scan it and
attach it to my profile because you really need pictures
(26:21):
on this thing.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Right, And they were like maybe. And then somebody around
the table at the bull session said, well, what if
people want to start like updating or changing their photos?
And Andrew Wine I think it's wine Rich maybe, said yeah,
let's just skip that, all right. Okay, No, no, I'm
saying wine Rich said that not us. Oh yeah, yeah,
(26:44):
Well there's like a rare intro edit that didn't get
edited on purpose.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Should we take that break now?
Speaker 2 (26:51):
I feel like we need two.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Yes, all right, I'm going to go do twenty pushups
for that and they'll be right back. All right, So Winrich,
(27:25):
it's wine Rich, wine Rich. I think wine Rich.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Okay, Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how. I think it
was Wikipedia that had the pronunciation, and I think he
said wine.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Rich okay, all right, maybe he was trying to seem
less German.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Right. Yeah. That always reminds me of that part in
thirty Rock where Tina Fey is like, well, she's apologizing
and she said, I'm very sorry, like mister Wiener slav
and he said, it's Wiener slave.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
That's such a good joke.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Have you ever seen Unbreakable, Kimmy Schmidt? Have you seen
that yet?
Speaker 1 (28:07):
I watched it when it I mean when it came
out years ago. I watched the first like season or so.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
There aren't that many shows that can make me actually
laugh out loud, and that's one of them. And it's
because Jeter is one of the best comedy writers to
ever live.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Yeah, agreed. I don't have you seen the Four Seasons yet?
Speaker 2 (28:26):
No, I'm avoiding it. I saw that it's a remake
of an Allan all the film, and I have a
strict policy not to watch late seventies early eighties Allen
all the films or their remakes.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Oh God, your distaste for Alan Alda is truly disturbing.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
The thing is, I've got nothing against Alan Alda personally.
It's just those kind of movies. Same with Elliott Gould.
I can't stand those kind of movies like where it's
just like like, hey, I can't even do an impression
of it, but I can't stand those kind of movies.
And somebody out there knows what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Elliott gould kind of movies, Yes.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Whether it's Capricorn one or that Shaggy Dog movie that
he's in he plays the detective.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
I will say that one movie I think you would
like is The Long Goodbye.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
That's the one I'm talking about. That's the Shaggy Dog
Detective one. I don't think I would.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
What does Shaggy Dog Detective mean? I don't know.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
So Shaggy Dog is where like there's this whole build
up of like say, a mystery or something, and it
turns out to be nothing, Like there's really no point
to the movie in the end.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Oh okay, So I thought you would like The Longabye
great Robert Altman.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Noir, and I like Robert Allman stuff too.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Raymond Chandler book. No, still nothing, Huh.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
I wouldn't if you made it. No, I can't make
if you made it before Elliott Gould was in it,
I would probably watch it, all.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Right, fair enough?
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Wait one more thing? Yeah, yeah, speaking of great directors,
I finally saw a ghost dog way of the sam
But Jarmish, did you see that ever?
Speaker 1 (30:02):
I saw that in the theater, Buddy.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
I was guessing that you had. That is such a
good movie, man. I can't believe that slipped under my
radar because that totally was in my wheelhouse for that time.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah. Yeah, Jarmish is the best. And Forest Whitaker was
so good in that. Yes, he was good music too. Yeah,
all right, where how did that start? Winwreck trying to
seem less German? This is the six degrees of that conversation. Yeah,
winter slave. So here's what wine rich.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Wait, there's one other thing that reminds me of too,
can you remember we were talking about the vanity license
plate episode. Yeah, uh huh, And like the greatest misconstrued
vanity plate of all time is where the guy had
j is Lord, like Jesus's Lord, but it's all one word,
so it says jizz lord Lord. That's the greatest vanity
(30:51):
plate anyone's ever had.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Oh, that definitely beats as Man even.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
I think so too, which is a good one.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah, that's really.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Funny, especially taking it in the content.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Yeah exactly. Yeah, who that guy was to be that
you know, dedicated of a Christian to do that on
your license plate, and that's what you end.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Up with rolling up the church with Jiz Lord on
your car.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Man, Well you can make a movie about that.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Was starring Elliott Gould Lord.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
So win Rich said, and this is a quote that
just kind of shows how far ahead of his time
he was. His vision. It is a bun clear to
me that the world will index all of their relations
everyone's relationship in a single database. And that was like
before anyone else is doing it. So they started off
this thing as a just with a launch, like a
(31:48):
physical launch event, a party in New York City. They
had two hundred invited guests, and those were the first
two hundred members, and they were like, now you all
go out and and make this a thing inviting your friends.
So I'm curious who those two hundred people were. That's
a pretty interesting way to start at site like this.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
I think there were a lot of tech savvy people
who were kind of like probably prime to take part
in this to begin with. And I think at first
they were adding like fifty new users a day, wow,
which again that's really small and thin. Even for the time.
This was pretty small. But they're doing this through like
email and stuff, you know, like it's it's really it's
(32:30):
a weird transfer from online world to real world. It
straddled both because it had to. Another good example of
that is that they would use reps to go to
campus to sign people up, just like that same credit
card model that credit card companies used to screw college kids'
parents out of a thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Yeah, I remember I had the AMEX College card. And
the only reason I got it I didn't even really
want need a credit card, but you got three Delta
flight vouchers who when you signed up for that card,
so I got three plane flights.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
So where'd you go, I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Well, I do remember, because I know I went to
LA for the first time to visit my brother when
he lived there. Nice when I was in college.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Did you go visit the six or nine year old
Cat Stevens fan?
Speaker 1 (33:22):
I did, and that was a seventy five year old woman.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Wow. Man, this story goes all over there.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah, it took it quite a weird turn. But we're
still good friends. She's still whether she's one hundred and two.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Oh really, yeah, that's cool. Man. Does she listen to
the podcast or is she like.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Nah, only Cat Stevens all the time.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
That would get kind of old, I think.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
So let's talk about the end of this thing, because,
as we all know, it's not still around. Although doctor
Claw said if you went there had a homepage, I
went there and I got an error.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Gateway time out the old five oh four.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Same here, the old five oh four.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, I I but it's there. It's if it weren't
a domain that was active, it would come back as like, hey,
you want to buy this domain, but it doesn't do that.
It just is so slow that you can't connect to it.
But it does domain to be there. Six degrees dot
com sure.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Yeah, I mean considering the public knowledge of just that term.
It's like you try go to trying going out these
days and getting a better domain name.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
You know, you can't do it, You just can't.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Don't feel too bad for wine Rich or Reich or
Rick because he sold in nineteen ninety nine for one
hundred and one hundred and twenty five million in stock
options in youth Stream Media Networks. But this, you know,
if you know anything about Internet history, you know that
this thing shut down in ninety nine and what that meant.
(34:50):
That dot com bubble right there on the horizon in
two thousand shut down more websites than you could check
a stick out.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yeah, and actually you can feel pretty bad for a
wine Rich because he took it that one hundred and
twenty five million dollars in stock and a company that
folded like months later because it was debt financed. So
I don't know how much he actually walked away with,
especially if there was possibly a blackout in him selling
those stock options.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Oh so yeah, yeah, what you're saying is youth Stream
itself also went under.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because they were just borrowing,
bar and borrowing, and that's how they existed, and then
when the when the dot com bubble burst, they were
worth nothing, and so that stock was worth nothing. I looked,
I couldn't find how much he actually did make from
that sale, like.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
And we'll never find that out.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
No, and that usually means that it's not a very
good amount. Yeah, they like to leak that stuff when
it's like eye popping, but when it's not, they're like, oh,
I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah, good point. The other problem was it was very
early in the Internet and that monetization was a real struggle.
They had some ads, of course, I believe their Question
of the Day had an actual sponsor, but it was
just a little bit too early, Like right after they
fell off, Friendster came along that also failed again, but
(36:07):
then MySpace and Facebook. Just just on the heels of this.
He did make some other dough off of it. I
think the patent that he had with six degrees for
the software for the platform he sold for seven hundred
thousand real dollars to the CEO of LinkedIn and the
CEO Mark Pinkus a website called Tribe and they were
(36:30):
both Friendster investors.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, and read Hoffmann and he said he and Mark
Pinkas were like essentially fans, like they were like Winrich
is a god here he this patent not only is
for the software, it's for the methodology of creating an
online social network. No when it ever come up with
something like that before. So they actually kind of bought
it for a song. I looked and LinkedIn is apparently
(36:54):
definitively not built on six degrees architecture, and it never was.
But it almost seems like they were either taking it
to learn from it or almost like they were buying
like some memorabilia. Oh, they were fans of I almost
got that an impression from an interview with Reid Hoffman.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Oh, very interesting. Andrew Weinreich went on to, do you
know a lot of more things like this. He's kind
of a serial entrepreneur. And again it seems like he
was always right there before the real thing came along,
because he had something called Meet Moi as an Moi
(37:37):
frinch for me, right, Yeah, yeah, I thought so. I
was just making sure. But that was a location based
dating app, and it was basically this idea that like hey,
dating app or dating websites are really tough even at
the time of the early Internet and like, let's at
least connect people who are physically close and it might
be easier to get real dates. The dating part of
(37:59):
that business was bought by the parent company Amatch dot com,
once again just right there next to the thing, and
he and his Memewhile co founder bought out the business
analytics part of their own company and use it to
found a data analytics company called Indicative.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Which is still around from what I can tell.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
And all right, so maybe he's done right there.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yeah, And so this was I mean, this was very
early two thousands too, and they were like they were
using like location tracking data at the time, and that
was huge and new, and so they kept that. I
think they ended up either selling it or licensing to
a company called Xtifi not a very good name. I
(38:39):
should call it twitter Ifi.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah, and they had some like high profile clients. They
had Ritz Carlton, they had Staples, they had Sephora publisher's clearinghouse.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah. So they were they were using those location apps
to advertise to you and send you push notifications on
your phone, which sadly means that Andrew Weinrich is going
to be going to hell for that.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
I mean, did he create that idea.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
I wonder he gave or he sold exsify the ability
to do that, so.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
And then I bought them, right.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, So I'm not sure how much he made from
these buyouts. I hope a lot, because again, this guy
is like coming up with ideas and making stuff happen
long before they can become viable. And a lot of
people probably have gotten very rich off the back of
his ideas too. So I hope he's doing well.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Maybe if he's listening, or if someone knows him through
their degrees of connectivity, just get to him and have
him email us at Stuff podcast at iHeartMedia dot com
and just send us your bank statement. That's right, And
well know.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
I want to specify by doing well, I don't mean
just financially. I mean I hope his well being is
sens of well being is totally nice and inflated and happy,
and you know that he's he's living a good life.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
No, I agree. I cheapened it by making it financial.
And that's why you're the heart of the show.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah, that's me. I'm the one you're not supposed to touch. Remember.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Oh, well, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Oh, one thing that I did see that he's doing
now is a podcast called Predicting Our Future. It's about
what life is going to be like in the fairly
near future. It's pretty cool, fantastic, So, Chuck, I think
there's that's it for six degrees dot com. We got
forty minutes out of it.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Hey, not bad, lots of fun stories in between.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, and what did you just say in between? Right? Well,
then that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Boy. I'm glad I always know the trigger word.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, it's amazing you never fail each episode. Go me yep.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Hey, guys, I'm a forty something man with autism who
lives on his own and the need for impression management
hit close home. So this was I remember about. We
even speculated about impression management that we might hear from
some people with autism.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
This was a great email.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
It's a great This is a Josh curated even I
simply cannot match the body language of others and have
to fake it. I don't instinctively smile or look angry.
People say I have an almost disturbing calm demeanor. Being
calm sounds great, but it has gotten me searched for
additional screening. At twenty airports and even strip searched at one.
When people grill you for questioning a straight answer without
(41:18):
fear frustrates the hell out of people whose job it
is to make you feel uncomfortable. To help mask my autism,
I wear sunglasses to hide my eyes. Because of that,
I've gotten the nickname terminator. A flat affect. Direct language
doesn't help either. Discrimination is very real, guys, But I
like to say, getting angry at a person with autism
who doesn't adhere to societal norms, it's like getting angry
(41:40):
at a person with one leg that doesn't run marathons.
Hopefully people who listen will give people with a bit
of a quirk some slack. Thanks from a long time
listener that is Matt.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
I'm glad Matt wrote that one, and that was a
good email, and I think he probably speaks for a
lot of people in that situation.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Totally good reminder to everybody, and something that, like we
talked about on that episode, as we've gotten older, we
try to sort of think about not just that, but
what everyone's going through in their life and maybe they're
not having their best day when you meet them. You know.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Yep, too true, Chuck, too true. If you want to
be like Matt and send us a world class email,
we would love that. You can send it off to
Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
here's Jerry, and we're going to take a nice little
stroll down Internet memory lane parent stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
You should Yeah, this is something I had never heard of.
Had you heard of this?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
No? I ran it past. You mean she's like, oh, man, yes,
I think I've heard of it, and I don't know
if she has or no.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Well, you mean is an early adopter.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Yeah. She was definitely more Internetti than I was at
that time.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah. So what we're talking about here is the first
what's regarded as the first social media website, the thing
that started the degradation of all mankind. Way back in
nineteen ninety seven. It was called six degrees dot com
spelled out SixDegrees dot com. I was founded by a
(00:57):
guy named Andrew Weinreich and for about three years in
the late nineties they were able to come online when
a ton of people were online, and garner ultimately about
three and a half million users, which it pales in
comparison to what we look at today, but for the
time wasn't too bad.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, not too shabby. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to get
them over the hump and give them staying power. But
I think they were also a victim of timing, as
we'll see, Yeah for sure, but yes, the deck was
stacked against them, and the fact that they were essentially
very much ahead of their time. They were a social
media site before there were enough people online, not just
(01:41):
enough people to come and use your social media site.
There was only something like I mean, if they had
three and a half million users, there's probably like three
point six million users on all of the Internet at
a time. I don't know if that's a correct estimate,
but something like eighteen percent of households according to the
US in nineteen ninety seven when six degrees launched, only
(02:03):
eighteen percent had internet at home at the time.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, there's a it was a competing stat from Pew
Research Center that said thirty six percent did, but there
was different methodologies and stuff. So let's just say, you know,
somewhere in between those numbers, I bet it was more
more like eighteen. This was you know, ninety seven was one, two, three, four,
(02:26):
five years before Prinster launched Princester. That's hard to say
for some reason. And but by that time the percentage
of people in two thousand and two that had flipped.
It was more like thirty nine percent of people did
not use the internet, and sixty one percent of people did.
So it was right at that, you know, it was
(02:47):
just terrible timing, right there at the end of the
nineties when the dot com bubble burst, and just right
on its heels, other sites came along that did far,
far better.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, and just one thing, I like that Pew Data
because it doesn't have like that small slice of like
don't know, not sure. It's either yes, I use it
or I don't use it. It's a nice solid survey agreed.
So yeah, so there's a lot of what ifs could
have been kind of thing, and we'll get into those
a little bit more. But there were more things that
(03:21):
six degrees was up against. Another really really big one
was the slow speed of internet. Yeah, and you know
today you might look back and think, well, we had
no comparison back then, didn't matter. It was so slow
that it would make you angry waiting around for a
song to download or a web page to even load.
(03:43):
There were transfer speeds using dial up modems of fifty
six kilobytes per second that was what you had to
deal with, not a gig per second, a kilobyte times
fifty six per second. That was the transfer speed at
the time, and that was the maximum.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, I mean we've laughed about it before, but just
the days of just seeing a picture appear on the
screen like three lines at a time, down, down, down,
and you're just I just want to know what this
thing looks like. And if you wanted to know, you
had just sit there for five minutes or whatever.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, I mean you had time to go make and
eat toast, Yeah while a picture was downloading.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, I hate a lot of toast back then.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So that was that was a big challenge for it too.
And then one of the other problems too is we'll
see is that people I mean, if you have a
social media so it's kind of helpful to have pictures,
and they just weren't around at the time.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, and we'll we'll get to that all the reasons
why in a minute, but just to sort of, you know,
locate it on the timeline in nineteen ninety seven when
at launch, like Google dot com had just registered as
a domain, so it wasn't even a real thing yet.
The word weblog had just been coined or you know
what it would become is blog and Netflix was sending
(05:02):
DVDs through the mail. So remember that it seems like
a thousand years ago, but it wasn't that long ago
in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
No, and it's kind of sad that six degrees has
kind of gotten lost to history. Most people think Friendster
was the first social media site. No, six degrees was,
and it wasn't even one of those things where it's
technically the first social media site, even though it really
was not. It didn't resemble social media at all. No,
this was the first social media site, and it essentially
(05:32):
laid the groundwork for all the social media sites to come.
It just was so far ahead of its time that
it got lost to history.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah. For sure, Friendster ultimately got about ten million, but
they had a lot of technical problems, so they didn't last.
MySpace was the next big one. In two thousand and three,
they were the first to reach a million monthly active users,
which was a big deal. Some people say that at
one point it was the most popular site in the
United States.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
I believe that.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Yeah, yeah, even if only for a brief amount of time.
But then in two thousand and eight, Facebook came along
and sort of smashed everything, and just to put a perspective,
three and a half million users for six degrees. Facebook
has more than three billion users and Blue Sky has
thirty three million, and that's looked at as like a
(06:21):
tiny thing.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yeah for sure. So yeah, it kind of puts their
three and a half million users into perspective. Yeah, so
six degrees may sound familiar to people. It's actually very
much related to the six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or
six Degrees of Separation that play by John Gwayer and
(06:43):
then later the movie adaptations starring Stockard Channing, of course,
but it's actually I didn't realize this based on a
study that Stanley Milgram, of the very famous Milgram experiment
where he had people shock some unseen person in another
room to find out just how obedient people were to authority,
(07:05):
even against their own set of morals. You know that one, right.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
He also carried out a study where he was one
of the first to kind of determine how far apart
the average person was from the other from anybody else
in the world.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah, he got together with another psych professor named Jeffrey
Travers and This is pretty cool. I think it was
pretty low fi way to do it. But this is
I mean, what year was this. Was this the nineteen.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Fifties, No, it was the late sixties.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Late sixties, okay. But what they did was they said,
all right, let's get some people in Kansas. Let's get
some people in Nebraska. They said, here's a folder and
it has a document with a target person that we
want you to get this to them. But you can't
just look them up and see if you can find
their address and mail it to them. One of the
people was in Cambridge, one was in Sharon, Massachusetts, and
(07:57):
they said, what you want to do, or what we
want you to do, is send it to a person
that you personally know who you think might be able
to get it to another person who could get it
to another person who could eventually get it to this
target person. And then we will measure that and see
what the average or the mean might be. So literally,
(08:20):
a farmer in Kansas got it, you know, this is
just one example. Got it to the wife of a
student Massachusetts, who gave it to an Episcopalian minister in
this town, who gave it to an instructor at the
theological seminary there who got it to that target? So
that would be one, two, three, four degrees of separation,
(08:41):
which is pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
I think yeah. And I also think chok that it's
kind of funny that to Stanley Milgram, Nebraska and Kansas
are the most socially remote locations in all of the
United States, because that's where he started to see how
long it took to get to I guess civilis like Boston.
But they actually did a lot of analysis of this.
(09:05):
They released a version of the study in Psychology Today,
which was meant for a general audience. But then they
did like the real deal in a journal called Sociometry
in nineteen sixty nine, and they found that there was
a mean length mean is the one in the middle. No,
mean is average, it's another word for average, just say average,
(09:25):
you know, of four point four to five point seven intermediary.
So they found that people have a degree of separation
of four point four to five point seven. And this
was all the way back in the mid to late sixties.
Think about how closer we are now.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah. Well, what I wonder too is did they throw
out the ones? Because apparently most of the folders never
even made it. Did they just toss those and say,
of the ones who got there, this is how they're connected.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yes, but I believe that most of the ones that
didn't get there were because the initial farmers in Kansas
and Nebraska just threw them out. They didn't participate. Oh really,
I think that's what happened to the majority of them.
So yeah, it wasn't like the most robust study of
all time, but it was so fascinating that it just
captured the imagination of people and became kind of a
(10:14):
pop cultural meme. But what's interesting about it is that
later scholarship that was pretty robust studies supported what Milgram
and his collaborator Jeffrey Travers found in that study.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, there was one in two thousand and three that
found a media of five to seven. This is pretty
old data. But in twenty eleven they did the degrees
of separation on other social media sites, and for Facebook
at the time, it was four point seventy four and
for the at the time named Twitter it was four
point sixty seven. But the caveat there is like you're
(10:51):
not necessarily counting just the people that you know, Like,
I know plenty of people when I was on Facebook
that had lots of like what were they in Facebook? Friends? Yeah,
friends who they had no idea who they were. It
was just more of a maybe a networking thing kind
of like LinkedIn.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see six degrees too.
Yeah yeah. Laura doctor Claw, who helped us out with this,
points out that social media kind of has a stretch
the definition of what we consider a connection. Like you
just said, and also you said, what used to be
called Twitter. I think it's hilarious because very frequently you'll
see Twitter used in like some sort of article or whatever,
(11:34):
and then in parentheses after that it'll say X.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Yeah, and I mean everyone still says Twitter. It seems like, yeah,
it just didn't take.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Like sorry, the name change for the business you bought
did not take.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yeah, it's because X is dumb.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
I guess. So Twitter was just so perfect.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
I guess well, I mean, I don't know if Twitter
is a good name or not, but it had such recognition.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
It's just like, Yeah, it's like the people who bought
the Sears Tower and try to change the name and
everybody's like, nope, still Sears Tower. Sorry.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah. I love that when a corporate sponsor takes over
and they're like, no, we're still going to call it
the thing at once.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Before it's still the Toastedos Fiesta Bowl. Sorry, sorry, cars
dot Com.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Well, you mentioned Kevin Bacon and we should mention real quick.
The six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was a very popular
thing created by some college students, where in the ideas
that Kevin Bacon has been in so many varied movies
over the years that you can connect any actor in
Hollywood to Kevin Bacon in less than six degrees or less.
But the Bacon number apparently is three point one two,
(12:38):
and they're five hundred and twenty two actors who have
a smaller connectivity number or Bacon number than that.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, they're more connected to people than Kevin Bacon. I
didn't know that, Chuck, did.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
You, Well there were five hundred and twenty two, or
that there were more connected actors both. I figured there
were more connected actors because there are people, well, Eric
Roberts is the number one with two point nine zero
eight four one because he has eight hundred and sixty
five IMDb entries as an actor. So I figured there
(13:14):
were people that were in way more movies. And that's
just Matt, You know.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Sure it is. But also you can make a case
that Kevin Bacon's one hundred and eleven movies typically are
with more stars who have more work, So there it's
likelier that the people he work with are in more
movies with more other people, whereas Eric Roberts is probably
in movies with people like this is their one and
only movie.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Or people who are in like six hundred movies that
you just have never heard of.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
That's true too, That's possible if Rifftrek taught me anything.
It's that. Yeah, Like I know who Cameron Mitchell is
for Pete's sake, is that he's one of those guys
who's in a million movies that you've.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Never heard of, but you recognize his face.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Face name. Yeah, I think I actually know some of
his family members.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Now right, I'm gonna have to look this guy up.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Yeah, oh man, it will take you on an odyssey.
And don't even bother watching the original version of the movies.
Just watch the riff track version of Cameron Mitchell's movies.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Uh a rare in store or in show. Look up
Cameron Mitchell. Huh oh no, he's a restaurateur.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
That's not him. Look at Cameron Mitchell's Space Mutiny.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that guy. Was he in
Plan nine?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Maybe he really might have been?
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Well, and now I'm seeing a picture of him as
an older gentleman, and I've seen him in movies as
an older gentleman too.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Speaking of Space Mutiny, that's a really great rift tracks
to start with.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Those guys are the best.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
And wait, actually I think that's an MST three K
to start watch both versions? How about that?
Speaker 1 (14:49):
All right, well that's what I meant.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
But yeah, okay, so do you want to take a break, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, let's take a break and talk more about old
Internet right after.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
This, okay, Chuck. So we said we were going to
(15:27):
take a stroll down Internet memory lane. And this was
a time when, like I think the year before six
degrees launched, Craigslist launched, Amazon dot Com launched, and they
were just selling books at the time. Yeah. One of
the big search engines was ask Jeeves, and it was
(15:47):
revolutionary because you could use natural language rather than have
to figure out exactly what keyword you needed to put
in to get results with licos. Yeah, yeah, totally, which,
by the way, asked Jesus, ask dot com. Did you
know that?
Speaker 1 (16:01):
I think I did know that. I knew it changed
into something. They just got rid of Jeeves, which is
super sad.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I know, it is pretty sad. They retired him. He
went off to live on a farm, as they say, yeah,
which means they killed him.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
How six degrees worked, though, is interesting because not only
was it the name copped from six degrees of separation,
they actually organized the website in such a way and
it seemed like part of the fun of it. And again,
this is early Internet. If you're a youngster out there,
you may think this is super funny that people thought
this was fun, But it seems like part of the
(16:37):
fund SixDegrees dot com was finding people you didn't know
and then tracing that connection through the website.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Right. So one of the things that you would do
is go through the I guess the registry of other
six degree users, and there were so few initially that
you could do that. Rather than go through three and
a half million people, it was just a few hundred potentially,
and you'd be like, oh, I know them, I know them,
and you would make a connection with them. They would
confirm it, and now you were a first degree connection.
(17:08):
You two were because you actually know each other.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Right, yeah, and you, like you said, you had to
confirm that connection. But you could also include people who
weren't on it yet, like I'm just going to list
out my family members or whatever and put their email
addresses in. Keep in mind, this is at a time
where you didn't get a lot of email. You didn't
get much, if any spam email, and sometimes getting an
email was like, oh wow, look at this, this is cool.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
It's cool.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
So if you think about that now, like oh yeah,
just put all your family and friends and put their
emails in. That's like a fireable offense, like socially.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You go to jail.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
I think you can. But back then it was a
different deal. So you can include people put their emails
and they would get an email asking for confirmation and
saying and also, do you want to sign up for
the school new thing? No, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
So the people that knew the people you knew, but
you weren't directly connected to them, you were now second
degree connected with them. And then those people were connected
to people that you didn't know, and they were third
degree connections. I think it didn't go beyond third degree,
Like they didn't go all the way up to six.
I think that was totally unnecessary. But this was like, yeah,
(18:18):
this is very groundbreaking and revolutionary, and people were just
amazed by people they knew. And the point was like,
who do your friends know that you want to know
that you don't know yet. Now you can make a
first degree connection with those people if they confirm you.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Yeah, I mean that's the way. It was sort of
like a predecessor to LinkedIn. I mean, you'll see again,
like you said, like seeds of all the social media websites.
They were doing it because you could create a profile
with your professional affiliations and stuff like that. You were
encouraged and I think most people probably really did use
their real identities because at the time people were like, well,
(18:55):
what kind of a weirdo would just create some fake
identity on the internet just to mess with people. So
there were real people on there. That was a member
of the trust E Data Privacy Program, which has now
been bundled up under trust ARC. But email was very
central to it all. It was not an app. They
(19:16):
didn't have apps yet. You would get an email asking
for confirmation, you would reply via email. You would add
others via email, so it was just a different time.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, and there were I mean you would add your hobbies,
you would add who you worked for, what degrees you
had maybe so yeah, again, lots of seeds of linked
In for sure. Again no pictures, and this was a
huge stumbling block, as we'll see. But they did have
other functionality that was thrilling. It had basically in network emailing, right,
(19:49):
so you could directly contact your context had they confirmed you.
They are bulletin boards where you could essentially chat, and
I think they had a bunch of other kind of
and whistles that they added over the years. They had
something called channels, which were essentially special interest groups and
you could be like, oh, I'm interested in business and finance,
(20:10):
or I'm interested in games I think, meaning at the
time nothing but Oregon Trail, right, and you could just
go and find other people on these message boards that
were interested in these things and maybe make some context
if they confirmed you.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, again, way ahead of its time with Facebook groups,
that's exactly what they did. We got some and you
can go look these up if you want to see
like screenshots of what the screen looked like. I believe
we were sent one from October nineteen ninety nine a
welcome scream scream screen, and it was it was cute.
It looked like a fun website of the day. It
(20:48):
had a service marketplace. There was daily trivia on the
homepage that this is hysterical. There was a daily poll,
and on that day in October nineteen ninety nine, this
was the poll. When you get a chain letter from
a friend, you a immediately throw it away, B do
what it says asap, c hold on to it for
a while, and then lose it. So it's clearly they
(21:09):
weren't like super future facing. If they were like chain letters,
that's relatable, right right.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
I found on also Chuck from February twenty ninth, two thousand,
so that was a leap here. It was the question
of the day was Bill and Monica, and then your
choices were love lust and as long as it's not Hillary,
that was the question of the day.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
That's pretty funny. By that time, six or eight months
after the October one that was sent, and probably in
the February one that you saw, there were little nuggets
of engagement boosting that they were trying to use, like hey,
here's some content, here's some like join this mother's day group,
or we're going to spotlight this channel it was. They
(21:56):
would tell how many people were online at that moment,
which in the October nineteen nine Ney No, I was
five hundred and ten people, which sounds very funny. But
I distinctly remember being in like chat rooms where they
would say like like three hundred people are in there,
and I would it would blow my mind.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
That there were that many.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah, it just seemed like, oh my god, dude, I'm
in my living room in New Jersey and I'm on
this computer and there are three hundred people around the
world that I can talk to right now.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
That's neat And what did you say that?
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Well? I did have one specific interaction with someone. Of course,
at the time, I thought it was a real girl
about our love of Cat Stevens, and we had a
real back and forth going and a lot in common.
And I'm sure that was probably a nine year old boy.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
You got cat fished over Cat Stevens.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
I might have, who knows, but I remember thinking like,
hey man, this girl sounds super cool and there are
no pictures so a bit you know, she's cute as
far as I know.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Well, a nine year old boy who's into Cat Stevens
is probably pretty cool too.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah, that probably would have been a better life unfriend
to chat about real music, right.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Another thing I saw on that February two thousand page
was the theme of the week, and this theme was
to thine own self improve. So there was like you
could click on to zen practice Group, self help, functui, Reiki,
there's a book club. They were just throwing everything they
could at this to just get people to interact more
(23:28):
and more and more, because it would the more engaged
you were, the more likely you were to send out
those emails to your friends and be like, hey, join
me on here. It's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
So maybe let's talk about pictures real quick and then
we'll take a break, because the lack of pictures is
the big deal, especially when you look at the modern Internet.
A website with just text and maybe you know, clip
art and stuff like that isn't super engaging obviously. So
the reason why they didn't have pictures is because there
(23:59):
was no way to get pictures there. You know, there
weren't digital cameras. The There was the Apple Quick Take
one hundred that was released a few years before. If
you look up pictures of this it's about the size
of a sandwich, kind of funny looking. It was the
first digital camera. It costs seven hundred and fifty bucks.
The Canon Power Shot was the first digital camera that
(24:20):
could write images to a hard disk. That was released
kind of one yeah, one year before six degrees came
online in nineteen ninety six. That was almost one thousand dollars,
had one hundred and seventy six megs of storage. But
the first camera phone didn't come along until ninety nine,
and that was a Kyo Serrah Visual Phone VP two ten.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, it was actually cheap, considering it's six hundred and
thirty four bucks in today's dollars for a camera phone.
It was a point eleven megapixel camera. For comparison, the
iPhone sixteen has as much as forty eight megapixels. Yeah,
but if you look up some of like the the
promotional images of this, there's like like Japanese women holding
(25:08):
the phone that's showing a picture of themselves. You can
clearly see who it is. Yes, that's another word for it.
I'm using nineteen ninety seven. Yeah, terminology though they like
you can see you can tell it's them. I think
one version of it is in color. It's not that bad,
especially for you can tell them. Yeah, you don't have
(25:31):
to like like squint your eyes to make the pixels
come together. And you're like, is that popeye? It's like
you can tell it's them. I guess yeah. I was
impressed by it.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
So it did its most basic function as an image
capturing device, yes, being able to tell it was that
same right.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Oh. One other thing I saw about the Apple quick
Take one hundred. At its highest resolution, it could store
up to eight photos at once. Whoa, this is so
much fun. I love making fun of the early Internet.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
I know that we live through. This is also a
true story. Winreich, the founder, would get emails where people
would say, hey, can I snail mail you a physical photo?
I have it? Can I send it to you via
the US Postal Service? And can you scan it and
attach it to my profile because you really need pictures
(26:21):
on this thing.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Right, And they were like maybe. And then somebody around
the table at the bull session said, well, what if
people want to start like updating or changing their photos?
And Andrew Wine I think it's wine Rich maybe, said yeah,
let's just skip that, all right. Okay, No, no, I'm
saying wine Rich said that not us. Oh yeah, yeah,
(26:44):
Well there's like a rare intro edit that didn't get
edited on purpose.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Should we take that break now?
Speaker 2 (26:51):
I feel like we need two.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Yes, all right, I'm going to go do twenty pushups
for that and they'll be right back. All right, So Winrich,
(27:25):
it's wine Rich, wine Rich. I think wine Rich.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Okay, Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how. I think it
was Wikipedia that had the pronunciation, and I think he
said wine.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Rich okay, all right, maybe he was trying to seem
less German.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Right. Yeah. That always reminds me of that part in
thirty Rock where Tina Fey is like, well, she's apologizing
and she said, I'm very sorry, like mister Wiener slav
and he said, it's Wiener slave.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
That's such a good joke.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Have you ever seen Unbreakable, Kimmy Schmidt? Have you seen
that yet?
Speaker 1 (28:07):
I watched it when it I mean when it came
out years ago. I watched the first like season or so.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
There aren't that many shows that can make me actually
laugh out loud, and that's one of them. And it's
because Jeter is one of the best comedy writers to
ever live.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Yeah, agreed. I don't have you seen the Four Seasons yet?
Speaker 2 (28:26):
No, I'm avoiding it. I saw that it's a remake
of an Allan all the film, and I have a
strict policy not to watch late seventies early eighties Allen
all the films or their remakes.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Oh God, your distaste for Alan Alda is truly disturbing.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
The thing is, I've got nothing against Alan Alda personally.
It's just those kind of movies. Same with Elliott Gould.
I can't stand those kind of movies like where it's
just like like, hey, I can't even do an impression
of it, but I can't stand those kind of movies.
And somebody out there knows what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Elliott gould kind of movies, Yes.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Whether it's Capricorn one or that Shaggy Dog movie that
he's in he plays the detective.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
I will say that one movie I think you would
like is The Long Goodbye.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
That's the one I'm talking about. That's the Shaggy Dog
Detective one. I don't think I would.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
What does Shaggy Dog Detective mean? I don't know.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
So Shaggy Dog is where like there's this whole build
up of like say, a mystery or something, and it
turns out to be nothing, Like there's really no point
to the movie in the end.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Oh okay, So I thought you would like The Longabye
great Robert Altman.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Noir, and I like Robert Allman stuff too.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Raymond Chandler book. No, still nothing, Huh.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
I wouldn't if you made it. No, I can't make
if you made it before Elliott Gould was in it,
I would probably watch it, all.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Right, fair enough?
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Wait one more thing? Yeah, yeah, speaking of great directors,
I finally saw a ghost dog way of the sam
But Jarmish, did you see that ever?
Speaker 1 (30:02):
I saw that in the theater, Buddy.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
I was guessing that you had. That is such a
good movie, man. I can't believe that slipped under my
radar because that totally was in my wheelhouse for that time.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah. Yeah, Jarmish is the best. And Forest Whitaker was
so good in that. Yes, he was good music too. Yeah,
all right, where how did that start? Winwreck trying to
seem less German? This is the six degrees of that conversation. Yeah,
winter slave. So here's what wine rich.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Wait, there's one other thing that reminds me of too,
can you remember we were talking about the vanity license
plate episode. Yeah, uh huh, And like the greatest misconstrued
vanity plate of all time is where the guy had
j is Lord, like Jesus's Lord, but it's all one word,
so it says jizz lord Lord. That's the greatest vanity
(30:51):
plate anyone's ever had.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Oh, that definitely beats as Man even.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
I think so too, which is a good one.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah, that's really.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Funny, especially taking it in the content.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Yeah exactly. Yeah, who that guy was to be that
you know, dedicated of a Christian to do that on
your license plate, and that's what you end.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Up with rolling up the church with Jiz Lord on
your car.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Man, Well you can make a movie about that.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Was starring Elliott Gould Lord.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
So win Rich said, and this is a quote that
just kind of shows how far ahead of his time
he was. His vision. It is a bun clear to
me that the world will index all of their relations
everyone's relationship in a single database. And that was like
before anyone else is doing it. So they started off
this thing as a just with a launch, like a
(31:48):
physical launch event, a party in New York City. They
had two hundred invited guests, and those were the first
two hundred members, and they were like, now you all
go out and and make this a thing inviting your friends.
So I'm curious who those two hundred people were. That's
a pretty interesting way to start at site like this.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
I think there were a lot of tech savvy people
who were kind of like probably prime to take part
in this to begin with. And I think at first
they were adding like fifty new users a day, wow,
which again that's really small and thin. Even for the time.
This was pretty small. But they're doing this through like
email and stuff, you know, like it's it's really it's
(32:30):
a weird transfer from online world to real world. It
straddled both because it had to. Another good example of
that is that they would use reps to go to
campus to sign people up, just like that same credit
card model that credit card companies used to screw college kids'
parents out of a thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Yeah, I remember I had the AMEX College card. And
the only reason I got it I didn't even really
want need a credit card, but you got three Delta
flight vouchers who when you signed up for that card,
so I got three plane flights.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
So where'd you go, I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Well, I do remember, because I know I went to
LA for the first time to visit my brother when
he lived there. Nice when I was in college.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Did you go visit the six or nine year old
Cat Stevens fan?
Speaker 1 (33:22):
I did, and that was a seventy five year old woman.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Wow. Man, this story goes all over there.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah, it took it quite a weird turn. But we're
still good friends. She's still whether she's one hundred and two.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Oh really, yeah, that's cool. Man. Does she listen to
the podcast or is she like.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Nah, only Cat Stevens all the time.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
That would get kind of old, I think.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
So let's talk about the end of this thing, because,
as we all know, it's not still around. Although doctor
Claw said if you went there had a homepage, I
went there and I got an error.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Gateway time out the old five oh four.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Same here, the old five oh four.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, I I but it's there. It's if it weren't
a domain that was active, it would come back as like, hey,
you want to buy this domain, but it doesn't do that.
It just is so slow that you can't connect to it.
But it does domain to be there. Six degrees dot
com sure.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Yeah, I mean considering the public knowledge of just that term.
It's like you try go to trying going out these
days and getting a better domain name.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
You know, you can't do it, You just can't.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Don't feel too bad for wine Rich or Reich or
Rick because he sold in nineteen ninety nine for one
hundred and one hundred and twenty five million in stock
options in youth Stream Media Networks. But this, you know,
if you know anything about Internet history, you know that
this thing shut down in ninety nine and what that meant.
(34:50):
That dot com bubble right there on the horizon in
two thousand shut down more websites than you could check
a stick out.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yeah, and actually you can feel pretty bad for a
wine Rich because he took it that one hundred and
twenty five million dollars in stock and a company that
folded like months later because it was debt financed. So
I don't know how much he actually walked away with,
especially if there was possibly a blackout in him selling
those stock options.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Oh so yeah, yeah, what you're saying is youth Stream
itself also went under.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because they were just borrowing,
bar and borrowing, and that's how they existed, and then
when the when the dot com bubble burst, they were
worth nothing, and so that stock was worth nothing. I looked,
I couldn't find how much he actually did make from
that sale, like.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
And we'll never find that out.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
No, and that usually means that it's not a very
good amount. Yeah, they like to leak that stuff when
it's like eye popping, but when it's not, they're like, oh,
I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah, good point. The other problem was it was very
early in the Internet and that monetization was a real struggle.
They had some ads, of course, I believe their Question
of the Day had an actual sponsor, but it was
just a little bit too early, Like right after they
fell off, Friendster came along that also failed again, but
(36:07):
then MySpace and Facebook. Just just on the heels of this.
He did make some other dough off of it. I
think the patent that he had with six degrees for
the software for the platform he sold for seven hundred
thousand real dollars to the CEO of LinkedIn and the
CEO Mark Pinkus a website called Tribe and they were
(36:30):
both Friendster investors.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, and read Hoffmann and he said he and Mark
Pinkas were like essentially fans, like they were like Winrich
is a god here he this patent not only is
for the software, it's for the methodology of creating an
online social network. No when it ever come up with
something like that before. So they actually kind of bought
it for a song. I looked and LinkedIn is apparently
(36:54):
definitively not built on six degrees architecture, and it never was.
But it almost seems like they were either taking it
to learn from it or almost like they were buying
like some memorabilia. Oh, they were fans of I almost
got that an impression from an interview with Reid Hoffman.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Oh, very interesting. Andrew Weinreich went on to, do you
know a lot of more things like this. He's kind
of a serial entrepreneur. And again it seems like he
was always right there before the real thing came along,
because he had something called Meet Moi as an Moi
(37:37):
frinch for me, right, Yeah, yeah, I thought so. I
was just making sure. But that was a location based
dating app, and it was basically this idea that like hey,
dating app or dating websites are really tough even at
the time of the early Internet and like, let's at
least connect people who are physically close and it might
be easier to get real dates. The dating part of
(37:59):
that business was bought by the parent company Amatch dot com,
once again just right there next to the thing, and
he and his Memewhile co founder bought out the business
analytics part of their own company and use it to
found a data analytics company called Indicative.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Which is still around from what I can tell.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
And all right, so maybe he's done right there.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yeah, And so this was I mean, this was very
early two thousands too, and they were like they were
using like location tracking data at the time, and that
was huge and new, and so they kept that. I
think they ended up either selling it or licensing to
a company called Xtifi not a very good name. I
(38:39):
should call it twitter Ifi.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah, and they had some like high profile clients. They
had Ritz Carlton, they had Staples, they had Sephora publisher's clearinghouse.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah. So they were they were using those location apps
to advertise to you and send you push notifications on
your phone, which sadly means that Andrew Weinrich is going
to be going to hell for that.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
I mean, did he create that idea.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
I wonder he gave or he sold exsify the ability
to do that, so.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
And then I bought them, right.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, So I'm not sure how much he made from
these buyouts. I hope a lot, because again, this guy
is like coming up with ideas and making stuff happen
long before they can become viable. And a lot of
people probably have gotten very rich off the back of
his ideas too. So I hope he's doing well.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Maybe if he's listening, or if someone knows him through
their degrees of connectivity, just get to him and have
him email us at Stuff podcast at iHeartMedia dot com
and just send us your bank statement. That's right, And
well know.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
I want to specify by doing well, I don't mean
just financially. I mean I hope his well being is
sens of well being is totally nice and inflated and happy,
and you know that he's he's living a good life.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
No, I agree. I cheapened it by making it financial.
And that's why you're the heart of the show.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah, that's me. I'm the one you're not supposed to touch. Remember.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Oh, well, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Oh, one thing that I did see that he's doing
now is a podcast called Predicting Our Future. It's about
what life is going to be like in the fairly
near future. It's pretty cool, fantastic, So, Chuck, I think
there's that's it for six degrees dot com. We got
forty minutes out of it.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Hey, not bad, lots of fun stories in between.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, and what did you just say in between? Right? Well,
then that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Boy. I'm glad I always know the trigger word.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, it's amazing you never fail each episode. Go me yep.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Hey, guys, I'm a forty something man with autism who
lives on his own and the need for impression management
hit close home. So this was I remember about. We
even speculated about impression management that we might hear from
some people with autism.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
This was a great email.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
It's a great This is a Josh curated even I
simply cannot match the body language of others and have
to fake it. I don't instinctively smile or look angry.
People say I have an almost disturbing calm demeanor. Being
calm sounds great, but it has gotten me searched for
additional screening. At twenty airports and even strip searched at one.
When people grill you for questioning a straight answer without
(41:18):
fear frustrates the hell out of people whose job it
is to make you feel uncomfortable. To help mask my autism,
I wear sunglasses to hide my eyes. Because of that,
I've gotten the nickname terminator. A flat affect. Direct language
doesn't help either. Discrimination is very real, guys, But I
like to say, getting angry at a person with autism
who doesn't adhere to societal norms, it's like getting angry
(41:40):
at a person with one leg that doesn't run marathons.
Hopefully people who listen will give people with a bit
of a quirk some slack. Thanks from a long time
listener that is Matt.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
I'm glad Matt wrote that one, and that was a
good email, and I think he probably speaks for a
lot of people in that situation.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Totally good reminder to everybody, and something that, like we
talked about on that episode, as we've gotten older, we
try to sort of think about not just that, but
what everyone's going through in their life and maybe they're
not having their best day when you meet them. You know.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Yep, too true, Chuck, too true. If you want to
be like Matt and send us a world class email,
we would love that. You can send it off to
Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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