Youre basically saying that our small little social networks, the personal networks, can determine so much about the rest of our lives. And when so many of us, at least in this country, are kind of made to believe that we can do this on our own, its. You know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you can do this, youre basically saying it really is true who you know and how they influence you has everything to do with whats going to happen with your life. Okay, thats right, but the first thing i would emphasize is that people. Okay, so most people, when they hear the words social networks nowadays think, you know, Online Networks like facebook and myspace and orkut, even, in brazil, and so forth. But actually, the kinds of social networks that james fowler, my coauthor, and i are interested in are the real oldfashioned social networks that human beings have been making actually for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. So i have friends, i have relatives, i have neighbo