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Veritasium
Can you really reach anyone in 6 steps?
Can you really reach anyone in 6 steps?
Veritasium
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33:17 · Sep 30, 2025
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-
In
1999,
the
German
newspaper
"Die
Zeit"
ran
an
experiment.
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0:00
- In 1999, the German newspaper "Die Zeit" ran an experiment.
0:04
They asked a falafel salesman and former theater director, Salah ben Ghaly,
0:09
who in the world he would most like to be connected to.
0:12
He chose his favorite actor, Marlon Brando.
0:15
So the reporters then searched for a chain of friends, family or acquaintances,
0:20
people who knew each other on a first name basis,
0:22
who could connect ben Ghaly to Brando.
0:25
As it happens, ben Ghaly had a friend in California.
0:28
This friend worked alongside the boyfriend of a woman who was the sorority sister
0:33
of the daughter of the producer of the film "Don Juan DeMarco," starring Marlon
0:38
Brando.
0:39
So in total, it took just six steps, six degrees of separation.
0:43
And the idea is that this is not a unique example,
0:46
that you could connect any two people on the planet in six steps
0:50
or less.
0:51
But is it really true?
0:53
And if it is,
0:54
how does it affect our lives? - How is this possible in a world
0:58
of now eight billion people
1:00
that we could be
1:01
that close,
1:02
just six hops or less?
1:03
Does that affect how diseases spread, how information travels?
1:07
Our math showed, the question is not why is the world small,
1:10
it's really how could it be otherwise?
1:12
But then I got a call from the FBI.
1:16
We are making the world smaller all the time.
1:19
Like it's supposed to be good,
1:20
and yet it does expose you to toxicity
1:23
and malevolence that you might've been shielded from. - You look at the net
1:26
effect of it,
1:27
and it's actually been pretty negative by a lot of measures.
1:30
People have suffered. - It's not only dangerous in terms of disease propagation,
1:35
but anything malevolent now has conduits
1:39
that it didn't used to have. -
1:42
If we were all connected to everyone else on the planet completely at random,
1:47
then it would be almost a mathematical certainty
1:49
that any two of us would be connected through fewer than six steps. -
1:54
Let's suppose I have my 100 friends out of eight billion people.
1:58
Each of them knows 100 people.
2:00
So two steps away from me is gonna encompass 100 times 100 people.
2:06
That's already 10-to-the-fourth people.
2:08
And so if you do 100 to the fifth power,
2:12
that's 10 to the 10th, and that's more people than there are on Earth.
2:16
So notice that number is five, I said, "To the fifth power."
2:19
That's the ballpark reason why six degrees (laughing) of separation is true. -
2:24
But the shocking thing about this is,
2:26
the calculation you've just outlined is about having 100 friends at random out of
2:32
10 billion and they're all over the world,
2:35
but we know that in the real world,
2:37
that's nowhere near what the distribution of friends are like. - Yeah, absolutely true.
2:41
So this really crude calculation I did is absurd,
2:45
for the reason that you said.
2:46
The world is very far from random. - The truth is people naturally cluster geographically.
2:52
Most of the people you know live close to you,
2:54
and they also have a higher probability of knowing each other.
2:57
If you calculate the fraction of people you know who also know each other,
3:01
that is a measure of the clustering in the network.
3:04
So let's try a model with a high degree of clustering.
3:08
Imagine all eight billion people on Earth are arranged into a circle,
3:13
and say each person knows the 100 people closest to them.
3:16
So 50 to the left and 50 to the right.
3:19
Well, in this case,
3:20
the furthest person you can connect to is just 50 people away.
3:24
So if you wanted to connect to someone on the other side of the
3:26
planet through a chain of people who know each other,
3:29
well, it would take 80 million steps,
3:32
and to connect any two people would take on average 40 million steps.
3:37
Even just getting 10% to the way there would take eight million steps.
3:41
And six steps would get you, well,
3:44
here. (inquisitive music) This is the paradox of six degrees of separation.
3:48
We know that we live in these local clusters of friends and acquaintances,
3:53
but we also seem to be able to connect anyone anywhere in just six
3:56
steps. 10 years ago,
3:58
I did my own experiment on this,
4:00
and I found that the average Veritasium viewer was only 2.7 degrees of separation
4:05
from me.
4:07
In social science, this is known as the small-world problem,
4:11
named after the phenomenon where you're say on holiday somewhere
4:14
and you bump into a stranger who somehow knows your best friend,
4:18
and you say, "Wow,
4:20
it's such a small world." (light music) In the mid-1990s, two mathematicians,
4:26
Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz,
4:27
set out to solve this small-world problem. - Duncan really sort of had very
4:33
far-seeing imagination at that point. - We had computers
4:36
that allowed us to simulate environments
4:39
that were too complicated for for math to work. - Up until
4:43
then,
4:43
physicists had studied networks that were ordered and regular, like crystal lattices.
4:48
And mathematicians, like Paul Erdos, had done lots of work on totally random networks,
4:53
but no one had studied what happens in between. - There must be some
4:57
enormous middle ground,
4:59
and that's what Duncan
4:59
and I felt like we're starting to explore. - To study this middle ground,
5:04
Watts and Strogatz imagined a simple regular network of people, or nodes,
5:09
dotted around a circle,
5:10
each connected to a few of their nearest neighbors. -
5:13
And so we had this idea,
5:14
"We're gonna start with the physicist end of regular,
5:17
and now we're gonna turn the randomness knob to make it more
5:20
and more random through these random shortcuts." - We all have some experience with
5:26
shortcuts. - I belonged to this club called the Internet Chess Club.
5:29
I got to be very friendly with a guy in Holland.
5:32
That connection makes the world small, because now,
5:35
even though my friends don't realize it,
5:38
they're only one step away from a guy in Holland.
5:41
And so that kind of connection where you sort of connect to someone outside
5:45
your normal circle is what we came to call a shortcut. -
5:50
So they went round the circle,
5:51
disconnecting some of the links
5:53
and reconnecting them at random to a different node in the network.
5:57
And as they did that,
5:58
they watched what happened to the average number of steps it took to get
6:01
from any one node in the network to another,
6:04
hopping between connected nodes.
6:07
In other words, the degree of separation. - This is now the moment for
6:11
the big reveal.
6:12
As Duncan turned the knob in his computer simulations,
6:15
as soon as he introduced a few shortcuts,
6:18
the world immediately gets
6:20
as small as a random graph. -
6:22
When they had rewired just 1% of the links to shortcuts,
6:25
the average degree of separation dropped from 50 in the original fully ordered network
6:30
to 10.
6:31
But Watts and Strogatz also tracked how clustered the network was.
6:35
That's the fraction of a node's connections that are also connected to each other,
6:39
or in other words,
6:40
the fraction of my friends who are also friends with each other.
6:44
What they found is
6:45
that clustering remained high for much longer. - The world immediately gets
6:51
as small as a random graph,
6:53
but it stays as clustered as if it were still regular.
6:57
So you could simultaneously have the clustering
6:59
that we know is real
7:01
and the small world
7:02
that we know is real. - Now,
7:05
in Watts and Strogatz's model, they looked at 1,000 nodes,
7:09
but if you apply their model to the eight billion people on Earth, well,
7:13
then you would only need three out of every 10,000 friendships to be a
7:17
shortcut,
7:18
and the average degrees of separation drops to six. - Our math showed,
7:23
the question is not why is the world small,
7:25
it's really how could it be otherwise?
7:27
Duncan started saying to me, "This is about discovering a whole new universe,
7:31
and its properties and laws."
7:34
I recognized that he was right. - I just wanted to sort of reflect
7:40
on what you said about these sort of shortcuts.
7:44
I think I've had this phenomenon happen to me sometimes in my life where
7:48
I'm sort of invited to an event
7:50
and it seems like a very random event.
7:52
Often I kind of feel like, (sighing) "I don't really wanna go."
7:54
(Steven laughing) "You know, none of my friends are going."
7:57
But then, maybe at the last minute, I just say like, "Well,
8:00
let's just roll the dice."
8:01
And I find that almost invariably those are productive meetings.
8:07
I'm kind of wondering if there's a takeaway for people here,
8:10
which is that they should put themselves in situations where the probability of forming
8:15
these shortcut links,
8:17
would it sort of increase the luck in your life? - You have just
8:21
put your finger on a very famous phenomenon in sociology
8:25
that is called the strength of weak ties.
8:27
'Cause you ask people how they got their job, and people would say,
8:30
"Oh yeah, I heard about it from, you know, Randy."
8:34
And then he'd say, "Oh, is Randy a friend of yours?"
8:36
and people invariably would say, "No, he's an acquaintance.
8:39
I wouldn't call him a friend, he's an acquaintance."
8:42
That's a weak tie.
8:43
The strong tie is your best friend
8:45
or your circle of friends. - Excited about their breakthrough,
8:49
Watts and Strogatz wanted to test their small-world model on some real-world data,
8:54
but this was 1996. - We had to think, "Well,
8:58
where are we gonna get data on big networks where we could test this?"
9:01
And it was not so easy, the internet was not mapped out,
9:05
Google didn't exist. -
9:07
So they turned to an unusual source. - There was only one nervous system
9:11
that had been mapped at
9:12
that time,
9:13
which was the worm, C. elegans.
9:17
Tiny worm, like a millimeter, that you can find in the dirt.
9:20
A favorite of neurobiologists.
9:23
They knew every cell in the body of C. elegans from the time it's
9:26
a single cell 'til it becomes a whole organism.
9:29
So they had the total wiring diagram of
9:31
that organism. - Watts
9:33
and Strogatz tested their model on the worm's neural network.
9:36
The worm has precisely 282 neurons, and on average, they're connected to 14 others.
9:42
If you lay that all out in a line along the worm's body,
9:46
the neurons at the ends would be separated by around 40 steps,
9:50
and the average degree of separation would be around 14.
9:54
But when Watts and Strogatz ran the calculations,
9:56
they found the average degrees of separation between any two neurons was just 2.65.
10:01
To put that in context, if they were connected totally at random,
10:05
it would be 2.25. - And yes, okay, so bingo,
10:08
that was a small world.
10:09
Then we were popping the champagne.
10:10
I mean, that was really exciting that nature had done that.
10:13
So then we thought, "Well, okay,
10:15
but this should be true of lots of networks
10:17
because nature can't resist this mechanism." -
10:20
So they looked at Hollywood actors
10:22
and power grids across the US.
10:24
Sure enough, they were both small-world networks.
10:27
For example, in the database of over 200,000 Hollywood actors,
10:31
the average degree of separation was less than four.
10:35
Dangerfield was in "Caddy Shack" with Bill Murray,
10:38
and Bill Murray was in "She's Having a Baby" with Kevin Bacon. -
10:42
Then the real payoff for us,
10:44
as people interested in dynamical systems more than graph theory, was, "Okay, so what?
10:50
You know, so what if the world is small?
10:52
Does that affect how things get in sync?
10:54
Does it affect how diseases spread?
10:56
Does it affect how information travels?
10:59
Whatever."
11:00
And so we did a number of experiments, again, in the computer,
11:03
like that. - Take disease.
11:06
I wanted to know how a few shortcuts would affect how disease spreads through
11:10
a network.
11:11
So I asked Casper
11:12
and the team to make a simulation. -
11:14
And then the question to you is,
11:15
do you wanna start with a completely regular world where it's completely clustered
11:19
or do you wanna start with completely random? - I would start with a
11:22
regular world. - Okay.
11:25
There it goes. - There's the spread of infections. - Yeah. - Wow. -
11:29
So it takes over the world,
11:30
completely.
11:31
Well, if every step was a day, it would take 73 days for the,
11:34
you know, infection to take over this entire world. - Well,
11:38
let's introduce a few shortcuts and see. - Okay, let's make it small world,
11:41
like 10%.
11:43
Let's go. - Boom.
11:47
Wow, that's really dramatic. - (laughing) Whoa.
11:49
Right? - That's really dramatic and very fast. - Yeah, so fast.
11:53
Yeah, after 26 days,
11:54
the whole world. -
11:56
And that ramp up does look exponential at the beginning. - Right? -
11:58
And then it kind of looks linear there
12:00
as well,
12:01
but it's almost like you can't go any faster. - Yeah.
12:04
Okay, so now let's make it a completely random network. (inquisitive music) - Boom.
12:11
- Boom. - Crazy.
12:11
How many days now for a fully random network? - 25. - Basically identical.
12:17
- Which is crazy
12:18
because in the random case,
12:19
all your links are random.
12:21
You know, in the small-world case, it's just 10%.
12:23
It's like if one out of your 10 friends are a shortcut, which,
12:27
you know, for some people might be a bit much,
12:29
but I reckon for you, it's probably about right. - Yeah,
12:32
I got lots of shortcuts.
12:36
(Casper laughing) - But the crazy thing is that in this simulation,
12:39
we only use 100 nodes.
12:41
And if you use the same model to the eight billion people on Earth,
12:45
then you would actually need less than 1% of all your links to be
12:48
shortcuts. - In 1998,
12:51
Watts and Strogatz published their findings in a three-page article in "Nature,"
12:55
and the paper took off.
12:57
Within a few years, the paper already had hundreds of citations.
13:01
By 2014, it was ranked the 63rd-most-cited paper of all time.
13:05
And today, it's got around 58,000 citations.
13:09
That's higher than Peter Higgs' paper on the Higgs boson,
13:12
and almost three times
13:13
as many as Watson
13:13
and Crick's Nobel Prize-winning paper on DNA. -
13:17
So it's probably worth making
13:18
that distinction that citations are one measure of impact.
13:21
We're cited a lot more than Einstein,
13:23
and I think you know who's more important?
13:27
(Derek laughing) It's not us,
13:29
but it does mean people thought it was worth citing.
13:32
We had many tens of thousands of citations from people in far-flung fields,
13:36
from neuroscience, to sociology, to graph theory, to computer science.
13:40
Even, you know, English literature,
13:42
people would do things like draw networks between words. - Is there any irony
13:46
in the fact that this paper on global networks goes viral itself? - (laughing)
13:54
Yes,
13:54
I think so, maybe
13:55
so. (record scratching) -
13:56
But then things got a little weird. - That's
14:00
when I started getting some strange phone calls.
14:02
I got a call from somebody at the FBI.
14:06
I was a little scared, "What's the FBI calling me about?"
14:09
And so I called back, and the person who picks up says,
14:13
"Hair and Fiber." (laughing) I was calling the Hair
14:17
and Fiber network at the FBI,
14:19
the people who do you know criminology based on what telltale hairs
14:23
or fibers are left on the victim's clothes after they've been murdered.
14:26
There was a guy who said,
14:28
"What happens when the police have a suspect and they say,
14:32
"You have fibers on your sweater
14:34
that match the hair of the victim,"
14:36
and then the defense lawyer says,
14:38
"Well, you know, maybe the victim was on a bus
14:41
and left her fibers on the bus,
14:43
and then my client sat on the, a secondary transfer," they would call it,
14:47
"of these fibers, that doesn't prove anything?"
14:50
So the FBI wanted to know,
14:51
what's the probability of secondary transfers compared to primary transfers from actually killing the
14:57
person?
14:58
And like I said, "Well, I don't, what do I know now?"
15:02
(Steven and Derek laughing) - Now, that's a Steve Strogatz problem.
15:04
For most of us,
15:05
a random caller telling you they're an FBI agent is probably a scam.
15:09
Chances are they got your number from a data leak or a data broker.
15:13
Anytime you provide your name, phone number, even your Social Security number,
15:17
that personal information can be scraped, packaged and sold to anyone who will pay.
15:23
And if criminals get hold of it, well,
15:25
they can open credit card accounts in your name
15:27
or even use it to stalk
15:28
or harass you.
15:30
Fortunately, today's video sponsor, Incogni, can help.
15:33
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15:36
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15:41
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16:00
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16:23
So I wanna thank Incogni for sponsoring this video.
16:26
And now back to networks.
16:29
In 1998, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi was studying the internet.
16:34
At that time, there were around 800 million webpage,
16:38
but despite the web's enormous size,
16:40
Barabasi found that on average you could connect any two sites with just 19
16:44
clicks.
16:45
Apparently the web was a small world too, but the strange thing was,
16:50
it didn't look anything like the small-world network in Watts
16:52
and Strogatz's model. - We ended up mapping out a region of World Wide
16:58
Web,
16:58
and we had a very clear expectation of how
17:01
that network should look like. - Barabasi thought the distribution of pages
17:05
and links would resemble a bell curve,
17:07
similar to what you'd get for people's height across a population.
17:10
Most sites would have some average number of links
17:13
and there would be very few outliers either side.
17:16
But that is not what he saw. (inquisitive music) -
17:18
And so we measured the distribution,
17:20
and it didn't look anything like what we expected. (laughing) - The curve started
17:24
out steep.
17:25
Loads of websites had not many links.
17:28
Then there was this really long tail. -
17:31
And here we saw webpages
17:33
that had not only a little more,
17:36
but sometimes 100 times more links than the average degree
17:40
or the average node on the website. - These were websites like Yahoo,
17:44
super-connectors that linked to thousands of other sites.
17:47
Barabasi called them hubs, because when he mapped out the network,
17:50
they resembled the hub of a wheel,
17:52
with spokes going out to hundreds of other pages.
17:55
And it was these hubs that made the web a small world, not shortcuts.
18:00
So Barabasi wondered, "How could this apply to other networks too?" - Most real networks,
18:07
or virtually all large networks, follow two very fundamental principles.
18:14
First, any large network out there never pops out as a large network,
18:19
but it grows, right?
18:21
You have a tiny World Wide Web in 1991,
18:24
and now we have trillions of nodes on the World Wide Web.
18:28
How did we get one to a trillion?
18:30
One node at a time, one website at a time.
18:33
All the networks out there, no matter how old, how fast they emerged,
18:38
they always emerged with some kind of growth process.
18:41
So if you think about networks, you must build in that growth process.
18:45
Number two, when a new node comes in, you join Facebook,
18:49
whom you gonna connect to, right?
18:51
And it is somewhat unpredictable, but it's biased.
18:54
Your connections are always biased towards the more connected nodes,
18:58
simply because you are more likely to know more connected node than less connected
19:02
node.
19:02
We named this process preferential attachment. - Barabasi reasoned
19:07
that these two principles could explain how hubs naturally emerge
19:11
when a network grows.
19:13
So together with his colleague, Reka Albert,
19:15
he ran a simulation. - We've also got a simulation for this.
19:20
They started with a simple network of just a few connected nodes.
19:24
Then they begin adding new nodes to the network one at a time,
19:28
with just one condition,
19:30
they'd be more likely to connect the nodes
19:32
that already had more links. - That's
19:35
so cool.
19:36
Looks very biological, very organic.
19:39
Also, I like how the nodes come out
19:42
and they don't just sort of stop in one spot,
19:44
they kind of like wiggle around and like find their location.
19:48
I really like enjoy this.
19:51
Kind of like a space station. - That's what I was thinking. -
19:55
Or like a space colony,
19:57
right? - Yeah, yeah, right?
19:58
Like each little center one could be a planet,
20:00
then you've got all the sort of stations going around it. - Yes. -
20:06
So when Barabasi and Albert let these networks evolve,
20:09
hubs emerged. - And we showed
20:11
that growth and preferential attachment together naturally lead to the emergence of hubs. -
20:18
With this simulation,
20:20
Barabasi and Albert showed how hubs could emerge in virtually any complex network.
20:25
Take airports for example.
20:27
In 1955, Chicago O'Hare opened to commercial flights.
20:31
Unlike neighboring airport, Midway,
20:33
it had long runways and plenty of space for new jet aircraft.
20:36
Airlines began shifting service there.
20:39
As more airlines connected flights to O'Hare, passengers had more options to connect,
20:44
making it increasingly attractive.
20:46
After deregulation in the 1970s,
20:48
more airlines were free to add routes and the feedback loop accelerated.
20:52
Each new route made the airport more useful to passengers
20:55
and more appealing to other airlines.
20:58
Today, O'Hare is the most connected airport in the United States,
21:01
with direct flights to well over 200 destinations. -
21:05
But we don't just see hubs in manmade networks.
21:07
In food webs, you have a few keystone species, like Atlantic cods,
21:12
that connect hundreds of predators and prey.
21:14
And in the metabolic networks in our cells, you have a few molecules,
21:18
like ATP, that govern hundreds of chemical reactions.
21:21
In the neural networks in our brain, you have a few regions,
21:24
like the prefrontal cortex that link hundreds of different functions.
21:29
Now, as each of these networks evolved and grew over time,
21:32
you had new species,
21:33
new reactions and new circuits that latched on to what was already well connected.
21:38
And so you get this sort of natural growth.
21:41
Now, preferential attachment isn't the only mechanism that can create hubs.
21:45
There are plenty of other factors at play,
21:48
particularly in these more complex biological systems.
21:51
But what Barabasi's and Albert's simulation showed is
21:54
that all it takes is a tiny bias
21:57
when growing a network
21:58
and hubs end up being inevitable. - Once hubs are there,
22:02
they fundamentally change (laughing) the way the system behaves
22:06
and the way we understand
22:07
that system. - Hubs like O'Hare mean you can get pretty much anywhere in
22:12
the world in just a few flights.
22:14
But that connectivity also has consequences.
22:18
In August, 2025, thunderstorms shut down Chicago O'Hare,
22:22
and 280 flights were canceled and 80 were diverted.
22:26
Overflow hit at least six other US airports.
22:30
While some planes stuck in Chicago never left for Europe
22:33
or Asia. - Bad weather in Chicago totally changes not only the the travel
22:38
pattern in Chicago,
22:39
but within 24 hours,
22:41
the whole country is being affected by
22:43
that. - And we see the same phenomenon in natural networks,
22:46
knocking out one keystone species, like Atlantic cod,
22:50
can destabilize an entire ecosystem. -
22:52
So this is what we call the Achilles' heel of networks.
22:56
And this could be good news or it could be bad news, right?
22:58
Good news if you wanna create drugs to kill bacteria,
23:03
then you're gonna go for the hub. - This idea has created a whole
23:06
new field of network medicine where researchers develop drugs to target crucial parts of
23:10
a disease's metabolic network.
23:12
But understanding the role of hubs doesn't just help develop cures for a disease,
23:16
it can help us control its spread. (inquisitive music) In 1990,
23:21
Thailand was facing one of the fastest-growing HIV epidemics in the world.
23:25
The government tried broad campaigns, like posters, TV ads and school talks,
23:29
telling everyone to use condoms.
23:31
But the infection kept spreading.
23:34
So in 1991, the government tried something different.
23:37
They started targeting hubs.
23:39
They told brothels around the country
23:40
that every client must use a condom
23:42
or else they'd be shut down.
23:44
And the impact was huge.
23:46
For example, HIV infections among young men joining the military dropped by more than
23:50
50%.
23:51
And by 2013, Thailand's Ministry of Public Health estimated the policy had prevented over
23:55
five million infections.
23:58
All because they realized the importance of hubs. (upbeat music) - Hubs
24:03
and shortcuts make any complex network more connected than it seems.
24:07
That means things spread quickly, whether that's airport delays, information or disease.
24:13
But could that impact run even deeper?
24:15
I mean, could the structure of our social network influence our very behavior
24:19
and beliefs without us even being aware of it? - Back in 1997,
24:25
Watts and Strogatz investigated just that, using a game called the prisoner's dilemma.
24:30
It's probably the most famous problem in game theory,
24:32
and it's used to represent a ton of different conflicts we see in the
24:36
real world.
24:36
We've actually done a full video on it before, but here's a quick recap.
24:40
The premise is simple.
24:41
A banker with a chest full of gold invites you
24:43
and another player to play.
24:45
You each get two choices, you can cooperate or defect.
24:49
If you both cooperate, you each get three coins.
24:52
But if you defect while your opponent cooperates,
24:55
you get five coins and they get nothing.
24:57
And if you both defect, then you each get one coin.
25:01
So what would you do?
25:02
Suppose your opponent cooperates, then you could also cooperate and get three coins,
25:07
or you could defect and get five coins instead.
25:11
So you're better off defecting.
25:13
But what if your opponent defects?
25:15
Well, you could cooperate
25:17
and get no coins
25:18
or you could defect
25:19
and at least get one.
25:21
So no matter what your opponent does, your best option is always to defect.
25:27
Now, if your opponent is also rational,
25:30
they'll reach the same conclusion and therefore they'll also defect.
25:34
And as a result, when you both act rationally,
25:36
you both end up in the suboptimal situation of getting one coin each
25:41
when you could have gotten three. (bright music)
25:44
But in 1980,
25:45
Professor Robert Axelrod found that if you play your opponent hundreds of times, well,
25:49
then cooperation wins out.
25:52
He ran a tournament among the world's leading game theorists
25:55
and all the most successful strategies were nice.
25:58
The winning strategy was called tit for tat,
26:01
because its default position was to cooperate and it would only defect in retaliation.
26:06
He also showed that a small cluster of cooperators can work together to overcome
26:11
a world of defectors. -
26:13
So that's kind of the scene we're setting,
26:15
right?
26:15
You get to this realistic place where you get tit-for-tat life strategies to sort
26:20
of dominate the world,
26:21
because in Axelrod's tournament, every strategy played against every other strategy,
26:26
or they only interacted sort of with their near neighborhood, which is, you know,
26:29
the small cluster.
26:30
And now you could wonder, "Well,
26:32
what if we start changing the way this works?
26:36
What if we put them on a network?" - Well,
26:38
Watts and Strogatz simulated their own version of the prisoner's dilemma
26:42
that did just that.
26:43
They set up a regular network where each player was connected to a few
26:47
players on either side.
26:48
Then they would simultaneously play against all of their connections.
26:52
The rules were simple.
26:54
If most of a player's connections cooperated, then that player would also cooperate.
26:59
But if most of their connections defected, then they would defect in retaliation.
27:04
They started with a small cluster of cooperators surrounded by defectors,
27:08
and they watched the network evolve.
27:10
Over time, what they saw was cooperation spread, just like what Axelrod had found.
27:16
But then they reran the simulation,
27:18
this time with a few links rewired to shortcuts.
27:22
And all of a sudden,
27:23
the cooperators were crushed
27:25
and they ended up with a world of defectors. (defectors whirring)
27:29
And when they started from a totally regular network
27:31
and gradually increased the fraction of shortcuts,
27:34
they found there was this critical fraction beyond
27:37
which the percentage of cooperators at the end of the game drops to zero.
27:41
- I think the thing that's really crazy is
27:44
that you've taken the exact same strategies with all the same properties,
27:48
same character traits and personalities, if you will,
27:51
and you're not changing any of that.
27:52
All you're changing is the way they're connected,
27:54
and you go from a world where everyone's completely nice
27:57
and working together to one where it's filled with nastiness
28:01
and people betraying each other,
28:03
only by changing how they're connected. - It's like
28:05
if the bulk of your interactions are sort of negative,
28:08
then you start being negative too and you just contribute to the overall negativity.
28:14
Whereas if like a few people are nice, and you can imagine, "Oh,
28:17
that makes me feel good
28:17
and so I'm gonna be nicer to
28:19
that person." - The intuition for
28:21
that is that cooperation is fostered by having little clumps.
28:25
If I have a little clump of people that are kind of my buds,
28:29
we get to have a lot of encounters,
28:31
and cooperation tends to emerge from familiarity, the same way that iteration helps,
28:36
that if I know that I'm gonna see you again,
28:37
I'm gonna encounter you again, it ends up being to my advantage to cooperate.
28:42
Whereas like the world of the internet,
28:43
where anyone can get on Twitter and badmouth anyone else, that tends to discourage.
28:50
We don't have pockets,
28:52
you don't have communities. - It kind of explains this keyboard warrior phenomenon, and that,
28:58
yeah, people say things on the internet they wouldn't say to-- - They wouldn't.
29:01
Most people are nice in real life. - (laughing) Yeah. - It's funny
29:05
that the small world,
29:05
I know, you'd think the small world's, well, 'cause it's a Disney song, right?
29:09
♪ It's a small world after all ♪ Like it's supposed to be good,
29:12
and yet it does expose you to toxicity
29:14
and malevolence that you might've been shielded from in the small town.
29:19
Social media has kind of been toxic.
29:23
The initial idea being 'hey we connect up a bunch of people
29:26
and people who have been separated geographically we connect you with your old friends.'
29:29
You look of the net effect of it
29:31
and it's actually been pretty negative by a lot of measures.
29:35
Intrigued by the findings,
29:36
Watts started wondering if the results applied to the real world too.
29:41
For years after I did this work I had wanted to test the hypothesis
29:48
with actual human subjects
29:50
So he got some volunteers to play a similar game called the public goods
29:54
game across different network structures He was expecting
29:58
that,
29:58
like they found previously, more shortcuts in a network,
30:01
would make cooperation less likely to emerge.
30:04
But what he found was, the structure of the network had no effect.
30:09
Cooperation was just as likely to emerge in a totally clustered network
30:13
as it was in a totally random one. - We were very puzzled by
30:17
this result.
30:18
And then we kind of did some more work. - When Watts dug deeper,
30:22
he realized that the network structure did matter.
30:25
In the more clustered networks, people were more likely to copy each other.
30:29
So if by chance someone started out cooperating, then everyone would cooperate.
30:34
But it was equally likely that someone would start out by defecting,
30:37
in which case everyone else would defect.
30:40
And over all the games they played, these two effects canceled each other out,
30:44
which is why it seemed like the network structure didn't matter. - It's sort
30:48
of on a knife edge,
30:50
right?
30:50
Where like one person does something selfish and everything goes south.
30:57
In another world, everybody kind of holds it together and everything goes well.
31:03
It's crazy that the world could be like on a knife edge like that,
31:06
you know, could tip one way or the other,
31:07
kind of just depends on how someone gets out of bed that day.
31:11
But then Watts realized something.
31:13
See, in real life, you can choose who you hang out with.
31:17
So he reran the experiment allowing players to change who they were playing with.
31:21
And this time he used the prisoner's dilemma
31:23
so that players could easily identify the defectors. -
31:26
And the finding was clear,
31:28
the more you allowed players to choose who they were playing with,
31:31
the more likely they were to cooperate. - You can make this a lot
31:34
better for yourself by just acting
31:36
and being decisive and being proactive about things. - Yeah,
31:39
yeah, it's a thing I try to teach my kids too,
31:42
like if someone's annoying you, just ignore them.
31:45
Like there's nothing to be gained by continuing to interact with people who are
31:50
bringing negativity into your life. - In fact,
31:52
making a choice can be powerful in more than one way.
31:56
There's something about the world that makes it prone to those upheavals.
32:00
Meaning it's always kind of poised on an edge of instability.
32:04
And that gives each of us more power than you'd think we would have.
32:07
It is actually possible for individual people to start movements
32:12
that grow and take off.
32:14
And ultimately, if you look at history, that is what happens.
32:17
It's always one person who is stubborn
32:20
and does something that leads to 10 people,
32:22
1,000 people, and things change because of it.
32:26
It always starts with one person somehow.
32:28
It's the Steve Jobs quote, right?
32:30
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are
32:33
the ones who do.
32:34
And the wonderful thing is,
32:36
it all starts with you believing you have
32:37
that power. - Yeah Learning all about network science has taught me many things,
32:43
but perhaps the most important is that our networks shape us,
32:47
but our actions shape the networks.
32:50
So choose both wisely. - Hey, if you made it this far,
33:02
all the simulations we ran through with Derek,
33:04
we will actually make them available on a website
33:06
that you can go to
33:07
so you can play around with them yourself.
33:10
So thank you so much for watching, we really appreciate it.
33:13
And yeah, see you for the next one.
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