People that are very wealthy, if they only have wealthy friends, it doesn't hurt them.

But if you're not wealthy and most of your friends are within your same socio-economic class,

that's where you'll stay.

You know, getting those opportunities and getting that information and getting that motivation

and is really pretty vital to mobility.

Yo!

Technology. What is it all about? pretty vital to mobility. Yo, technology.

What is it all about?

Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and

inside the minds of the top people in tech.

I'm your host Danny Fortson, and this week we headed down to Stanford University, which I just

love going to because it seems always to be sunny when I go there. There's palm trees, there's

Spanish-style roofs. It's just lovely. But I went there to talk about friendship. More to the point, networks, friendly, professional, or otherwise.

And to do that, I sat down in the office of Matthew Jackson. Jackson is an economist who has

spent many, many years studying networks, how they work, and he's recently written a book

called The Human Network.

And it's fascinating because what it does really is pick apart the role obvious and not so obvious

of networks in our lives.

So basically who we know can affect our health, our wealth, prosperity or lack of it.

And of course, we're in the belly of the beast, social media.

And these are basically the world's most powerful accelerants of network effects for both

good and obviously for bad.

...