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TEDx Talks
Published: 2012-06-28
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9u-TITxwoM
because I want to start the end %HESITATION most of the contemplated our own death %HESITATION you know you who's gonna be the funeral and are they gonna cry stuff like that I don't think that's morbid honestly I mean I think it's okay to wonder about a world that doesn't have a Senate but I'm an actor so the depths of my self involvement runs very very deep
and %HESITATION at this fancy plays out a little differently from me Bob Dylan once told me never drop a name I was on a %HESITATION airplane one time with Bruce Willis and demi Moore and Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise and all I could think was if this plane goes down I'm not even gonna make the headlines so let's say I don't die in a in a
in a crash with bigger stars than me and I actually get an obituary I lately thought that it probably is gonna read actor Kevin bacon dead no Oscars but at least he has a game named after a the six degrees Kevin bacon case you haven't heard of this game the idea is that any actor or alive or dead can be connected to me through our work
in six steps are less and I'm gonna give you an example that I had to actually go to the oracle of bacon website to %HESITATION define because I'm good at a couple things that playing this game is not one of them I randomly picked Rudolph Valentino Rudolph Valentino in nineteen twenty two was in beyond the rocks I'm sure we all remember that one he was it
with Gertrude Astor who did Daddy long legs in nineteen fifty five with James Cromwell who was in beyond all boundaries in two thousand and nine with me that gives Rudolph Valentino a bacon number of three and I can pretty much guarantee that at this point Rudolph gas Valentina does not give a shit so how did all this start in nineteen ninety four on my you know
my own business I'm making movies on trying to raise my family and I don't remember exactly how I first heard about it that just kinda sat started to seep into my life you know people come up to me say things like you know my cousin made up a game about you or do I'm so hungover minnows in bar last night and we're playing your game I
should the is that I'm a mass I was absolutely horrified I mean I know it's a cliche but actors but you know behind all that you know the that the muscles in the shining white teeth and the and the and the low cut dresses it really is just masking a lot of very very deep deep in security so when I heard this I thought this was
a joke at my expense I thought I'm gonna be a laughing stock people are basically saying can you believe that this lightweight can be connected to the greats like Laurence Olivier or Marlon Brando or Meryl Streep and pathetic things that I was actually working with Meryl Streep at the time someone then told me that the guys who invented this game we're going to be on the
Howard Stern show and I thought to myself okay that's it that's the beginning of the end of my career the game was invented by four college students from Albright college which is in reading Pennsylvania not too far from where I grew up in downtown Philadelphia they're sitting around there dorm room one day one of my pictures when my lease member movies actually is playing on a
on a on a television screen and they say you know maybe we can figure out this connection thing so the internet is just really starting to sort of explode with these these ideas and it moves from Albright college to the web and sort it takes off I'm in the middle of promoting a film I came over which one and I get an offer to be on
a new and T. V. night time talk show called the Jon Stewart show and I come to find out that the Kevin bacon guys which is what they're now being called the Kevin bacon guys are also booked on the same show and I think to myself I'm not doing this show I am going to be the punch line of an hour long joke I was furious
but I stopped and I said to myself you know sometimes you have to confront you have to confront your demons sometimes you gotta face the beast so I said I'm gonna go in and I'm right look these guys in the eyes I'm gonna say listen fellas you know get it get another Patsy okay there's there's Kevin Spacey this Kevin Costner this Kevin Kline you don't find
somebody else I go to the green room and here they come and I was completely and totally disarmed they were nervous they were smart they were funny they were cool all these things I didn't expect and I left there that place and I thought to myself well that's it it's over I'm cool it's not gonna last three months nobody is going to be talking about the
six degrees of Kevin bacon and it just had this incredible hang time and the people start to come up to me on the subway literally go zero zero zero zero %HESITATION the onion had a headline that said Kevin bacon %HESITATION connected to Osama bin laden six that's what is it owes articles about you know politics and and sports and %HESITATION all kinds of stuff science mathematics
a few years down one the plane's fried fly into the %HESITATION the World Trade Center and I go to pick up my my little girl way too early and I see that you know the fear in her eyes and we go to war and %HESITATION everywhere I look man it's like turmoil and %HESITATION sickness and a family member is %HESITATION diagnosed with cancer another friend dies
of %HESITATION addiction and I just feel completely overwhelmed and I say to myself you got to do more you know you gotta figure out a way to do more you know I'm did you know give us some money over here voting over here shown up the you know things doing PSAs whatever I opened up the refrigerator and there's Paul Newman staring at me from a jar
tomato sauce and I think to myself you know that's amazing I love poem them and I love them and as as an actor but I love what he did with time you know his time on this planet any like to make salad dressing and he liked to make tomato sauce and like three hundred million dollars later still this you know kind of juggernaut for for charity
and I thought well what do I have to do I have any and none on though Paul Newman but do I have anything that is branded with me and somehow the Footloose foundation just didn't feel right and then I said well wait a second wait a second degrees so I run to the computer and I type in degrees dot com and it's a well like a
real estate website and then I what other that's not it I need six degrees dot org and I go in it's available if you want it it's called these guys I was like wow I don't know how to do what I had to get a website so I call my buddy will lose a little bit better at this he goes into acces my broker thirty five
hundred hours later I've I own six degrees dot org I have no idea what to do with it I start talking to my friends my family you know I'm I'm a complete neophyte in this world of philanthropy I I really don't know what I'm doing %HESITATION I I kind of thought that I wanted to do something that showed the connective Eddie I sort of knew that
I wanted to do some kind of good the amazes me that people think a do gooder as it as an insult that always blows my mind I I knew that I want to raise money I knew that this couldn't be my main job is a very busy guy so I was talking to somebody at %HESITATION a charity thing that I was doing and he said you
should talk to this guy who knows another guide you should check out this thing called network for good I don't want to network for good and I realize that much to my chagrin that they are doing exactly what it was that I wanted to do and of course I was so naive you know to think that I was having some great new idea I thought I
was going to be some kind of do gooder you know intern star something like that and this is like the digital age and ideas are just bursting into like fireworks on the fourth of July but I figure that I would call this guy bill Stratton network for good and and and and just reach out to him and see if he could he could help me much
to my surprise they were actually interested in partner on I mean he saw me more as an opportunity then as some kind of competition not conflict the dog eat dog world of show business it's like every man for himself getting parts of movies and number one and all that kind of stuff but if philanthropy just seems to be a little bit more partnering of course that's
kind of the way it should be so we started to like kind of shape this idea of what what six degrees dot or could be and and we decided that we really want to make it celebrity based and then I thought about UGS okay those groovy boots so actresses they don't like to wear their shoes to the from the trailer to the set %HESITATION I love
actors in America one but that you know sometimes a little delicate and they don't get their toes wet or or or you know slip on the heels of the costumers given these silly boots to wear they walk from the trailer to the set the paparazzi's there to to to to ten they take the pictures goes in the magazines women all over the world start dressing like
Eskimos so I thought is there a way to apply that to charity you know if people are going to buy something because a star uses it what about donating to something that a star cares about so we decided to become sort of the celebrity face of network for good around that time we were going to Sundance and I figured that's going to be the perfect place
to try to sign up famous people for our site we go out there we bring some tee shirts and some buttons and we set up a booth and I walk up to all the celebrities they see every was very very happy to hear that they be famous is great I mean I wouldn't trade it for the world all day long people are nice to me for
absolutely no reason but usually people want something from me I wanted to not be the guy who's going to try to take something from these celebrities sure enough you come up how you doing hug hug kiss kiss listen this is what I need from you I need your picture and I need to know what causes you support and I need you to sign this form and
I could see this sometimes is just subtle kind of shift in people died because all of a sudden I went from being a colleague to being the guy that wanted something but that was cool sometimes it say we have to talk to my sister I was totally great with that we left Sundance and signed up a bunch celebrities and felt really really really good about what
we had done created these badges they're sort of like floating websites you could attach them to blogs you could attach them to E. mails and on those badges there was a picture of the celebrity and the cause that they supported and you could click on to donate and there was a ticker the kept a tally of all the money that was rolling in and I left
Sunday's been I was like that's it I planted the seed I'm just gonna sit back and watch the dough Roland not not so fast what we found was that people wanna you know smell like a famous person or wear a watch if the guy's tough you know in the movie and you want to wear that same watch but when it comes to charity it's a much
more personal thing you know it's more of a connection between family and friends and and and things that you care about and and that have that have affected you deeply and and and personally animals you know are are very very important people because you you you care about them so we put these badges up there and there was some initial traffic but there wasn't really that
much rolling in and the tickers really were turning and I was embarrassed and I felt frankly you know like a failure %HESITATION they were on a conference call and someone said Hey how about if regular people can become celebrities for their own causes and I thought well that's kind of a cool idea what if people can create their own badges and put them right up there
next to someone that they admire that is recognizable kick this idea off we offered six ten thousand dollar grants to the six people who could get them most number of donations and this is important not the most money donated to their causes but the most number of people donating and the reason we did that was we felt the connective itty and the exponential spread of the
idea of giving was just as important as the dollars and cents well the results of that were released stunning %HESITATION vis a vis a couple examples are a woman %HESITATION is diagnosed with MS and she's in the hospital was you know in a waiting room something sees %HESITATION eh us talking about of six degrees dot org in this in this challenge on television it takes she's
like a tri athlete you know like a really energetic person that takes all that energy and all that kind of %HESITATION you know fear and sadness that she had surrounding this illness and puts it into raising money for MS research neither woman has a %HESITATION a son who is autistic takes this challenge up reaches out to people so many people in in in in her community
thousands and thousands of people and not only raises money but spreads the idea personal experiences of her experience with with autism later on down the road we got some corporate sponsors who helped us out %HESITATION and we did subsequent challenges and all of those have been you know extremely successful couple years ago we went back to Sundays we launched on the call good cards good card
is a gift card that you give somebody say you know ten dollars twenty dollars fifty dollars whatever you take that card home after you received it and you think about it and you decide what you want to do with that money and where you want to put it feels great two or three times over I feel good giving it to you you feel good using it
it's a it's a win win situation we're trying to reach out now to college students we're looking for the next big idea believe anybody has the next big idea let me now constantly constantly trying to shift it and change it I mean when we started six degrees is not that many years ago I mean is going so fast and nobody knew what a hash tag was
and %HESITATION Facebook you know was just for hooking up really you know %HESITATION we're trying to stay ahead of the curve if we possibly can and I have learned so much and I'm constantly learning but I do know that I'm no genius when it comes to web paste ideas I do know that you can't just plant plant the seed walk away you have to be willing
to you know water it to fertilize it two if if if need be gotta go out by to grow lamp %HESITATION and most importantly if you take me out of the six degrees idea really is a beautiful concept because we really are well connected the things that we do here now on our block affect people on the other side of the world and they affect