Okay, so I want to start at the end. Most of us have contemplated our own death. You know, who's going to be at the funeral and are they going to 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 us in it. But I'm an actor, so the depths of my self-involvement runs very, very deep. And I think that's what I'm going to do. This fantasy plays out a little differently for me.
Bob Dylan once told me, never drop a name. I was on an 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 going to make the headlines. So, let's say I don't die in a crash with bigger stars than me and I actually get an obituary. I've lately thought that it probably is going to read actor Kevin Bacon dead, no Oscars, but at least he has a game named after him.
The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. In case you haven't heard of this game, the idea is that any actor alive or dead can be connected to me through our work in six steps or less. And I'm going to give you an example that I had to actually go to the Oracle of Bacon website to find, because I'm good at a couple things, but playing this game is not one of them. I randomly picked Rudolph Valentino.
Rudolph Valentino in 1922 was in Beyond the Rocks. I'm sure we all remember that one. He was in it with Gertrude Astor, who did Daddy Long Legs in 1955 with James Cromwell, who was in Beyond All Boundaries in 2009 with me. That gives Rudolph Valentino a bacon number of three.
And I can pretty much guarantee that at this point, Rudolph Valentino does not give a shit. How did all this start? In 1994, I'm minding my own business, I'm making movies, I'm trying to raise my family, and I don't remember exactly how I first heard about it, but it just kind of started to seep into my life, you know. People would come up to me and say things like, you know, my cousin made up a game about you. Or, dude, I'm so hungover, man, I was in a bar last night, and we were playing your game, I got shit-faced, and I'm a mess.
I was absolutely horrified. I mean, I know it's a cliche. But actors, you know, behind all the, you know, the muscles and the shining white teeth and the low-cut dresses, it really is just masking a lot of very, very deep, deep insecurity.
So when I heard this, I thought this was a joke at my expense. I thought I am going to be a laughingstock. 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 the pathetic thing is that I was actually working with Meryl Streep at the time. Someone then told me that the guys who invented this game were 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 Redding, 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, one of my least memorable movies actually is playing 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 ideas and it moves from Albright College to the web and sort of takes off. I'm in the middle of promoting a film, I can't remember which one, and I get an offer to be on a new MTV nighttime 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 this same show. And I think to myself, I'm not doing this show.
I am going to be the punchline 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 got to face the beast. So I said, I'm going to go in and I'm going to look these guys in the eyes. I'm going to say, listen, fellas, you know, get another Patsy, okay?
There's Kevin Spacey, there's Kevin Costner, there's Kevin Kline. You know, find somebody else. I go into 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 that I didn't expect. And I left that place and I thought to myself, well, that's it. It's over. I'm cool.
It's not gonna last. In three months, nobody is going to be talking about the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. And it just had this incredible hang time.
I mean, people started coming up to me on the subway, literally, and go, zero, zero, zero, zero. The Onion had a headline that said, Kevin Bacon connected to Osama Bin Laden in six steps or less. And there was articles about, you know, politics and sports and... all kinds of stuff, science, mathematics. A few years down the line, the planes fly into the World Trade Center, and I go to pick up my little girl way too early, and I see the, you know, the fear in her eyes, and we go to war, and everywhere I look, man, it's like turmoil and...
Sickness and a family member is diagnosed with cancer. Another friend dies of addiction. And I just feel completely overwhelmed. And I say to myself, you gotta do more, you know, you gotta figure out a way to do more. You know, I'm giving some money over here, voting over here, showing up at things, doing PSAs, whatever.
I open up the refrigerator. And there's Paul Newman, and he's staring at me from a jar of tomato sauce. And I think to myself, you know, that's amazing.
I love Paul Newman. I love him as an actor, but I love what he did with this time, you know, his time on this planet. And he liked to make salad dressing, and he liked to make tomato sauce.
And like 300 million dollars later, it's still this... you know, kind of juggernaut for charity. And I thought, well, what do I, do I have any, I'm no 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, Six Degrees. So I run to the computer and I type in sixdegrees.com and it's like a real estate website.
And then I went, oh, no, that's not it. I need sixdegrees.org. And I go and it's available.
If you want it, just call these guys. And I was like, wow, I don't know how to do it. How do I get a website?
So I called my buddy Willie, who's a little bit better at this. He goes in, acts as my broker. $3,500 later, I own 6degrees.org.
I have no idea what to do with it. I start talking to my friends and my family. You know, I'm a complete neophyte in this world of philanthropy. I really don't know what I'm doing. I kind of thought that I wanted to do something that showed the connectivity.
I sort of knew that I wanted to... do some kind of good. It amazes me that people think of do-gooder as an insult.
That always blows my mind. I knew that I wanted to raise money. I knew that this couldn't be my main job because I'm a very busy guy. So I was talking to somebody at a charity thing that I was doing, and he said, you should talk to this guy who knows another guy, and you should check out this thing called Network for Good.
I go on to Network for Good, and I realize, 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, internet star or something like that. And this is like the digital age and ideas are just bursting, you know, like fireworks on the 4th of July. But I figured that I would call this guy Bill Stratton from Network for Good and just reach out to him and see if he could help me.
Much to my surprise, they were actually interested in partnering. I mean, he saw me more as an opportunity than as some kind of competition. And I come from like the dog-eat-dog world of show business, man. I mean, it's like every man for himself getting parts or movies and number one and all that kind of stuff. But in philanthropy, it just seems to be a little bit more partnering.
And of course, that's kind of the way it should be. So we started to like kind of shape this idea of what 6degrees.org could be. And we decided that we really wanted to make it celebrity-based. And then I thought about Uggs, okay? Those goofy boots.
So actresses, they don't like to wear their shoes from the trailer to the set. I love actresses, I'm married to one, but, you know, sometimes they're a little delicate. And they don't want to get their toes wet or, you know, slip on the heels. So the costumers give them these silly boots to wear. They walk from the trailer to the set, the paparazzi is there, they take the pictures, it 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 t-shirts and some buttons, and we set up a booth, and I walk up to all these celebrities I see, and everyone's very, very happy. Here's the thing, being 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 you. So I wanted to not be the guy who was 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's eyes because all of a sudden I went from being a colleague to being the guy that wanted something.
But that was cool. Sometimes they'd say, well, you have to talk to my assistant. I was totally great with that. We left Sundance and signed up a bunch of celebrities and felt really, really, really good about what we had done. We created these badges.
They're sort of like floating. websites. You could attach them to blogs, you could attach them to emails, and on those badges there was a picture of the celebrity and the cause that they supported, and you could click on and donate, and there was a ticker that kept a tally of all the money that was rolling in it.
And I left Sundance Band and I was like, that's it, I planted this seed, I'm just going to sit back and watch the dough roll in. Not so fast. What we found was that people want to You know, smell like a famous person, or wear a watch if the guy is 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 things that you care about and that have affected you deeply and personally. Animals, you know, are very, very important to people because 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 weren't turning. And I was embarrassed.
And I felt, frankly, you know, like a failure. Then we 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?
To kick this idea off, we offered six $10,000 grants to the six people who could get the 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 connectivity. And the exponential spread of the idea of giving was just as important as the dollars and cents.
Well, the results of that were really stunning. A couple of examples, a woman is diagnosed with MS and she's in hospital, you know, in a waiting room, something, sees us talking about sixdegrees.org and this challenge on television, it takes... She's like a triathlete, you know, like a really energetic person that takes all that energy and all that kind of, you know, fear and sadness that she had surrounding this illness and puts it into raising money for MS research. Another woman has a son who's autistic, takes this challenge up, reaches out to so many people in her community, thousands and thousands of people, and not only raises money but spreads the idea from...
personal experiences of her experience with autism. Later on down the road, we got some corporate sponsors who helped us out, and we did subsequent challenges. And all of those have been extremely successful. A couple years ago, we went back to Sundance. We launched something called Good Cards.
Good Card is a gift card that you give somebody for, say, $10, $20, $50, whatever. You take that card home. After you've 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, it feels great. Two or three times over, I feel good giving it to you, you feel good using it.
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 me, if anybody has the next big idea, let me know.
We're constantly, constantly trying to shift it and change it. I mean, when we started Six Degrees, it's not that many years ago. I mean, it's going so fast, nobody knew what a hashtag was. And Facebook, you know, was just... for hooking up really.
You know, 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-based ideas. I do know that you can't just plant the seed and walk away. You have to be willing to, you know, to water it, to fertilize it, to, if need be, you got to go out and buy it a grow lamp. And, Most importantly, if you take me out of the Six Degrees idea, it really is a beautiful concept because we really are all connected.
The things that we do here, now, on our block, affect people on the other side of the world and they affect people on the other side of town. The Internet is the most powerful example of the connectivity of people. We created it, and I believe we created it so that we could stay connected.
And I think we have to keep thinking about ways that we can use it as a force for good. Thanks.