Everyone Cael asked told him the same thing: be patient. They weren't being unhelpful — within what they knew, there was nothing else to say. This episode looks at why the answer to a problem you're stuck on so rarely comes from the people closest to you. Mark Granovetter's 1973 study found people hear about new opportunities from acquaintances rather than close friends, because your close circle moves through the same world you do and knows what you already know. We also look at why brief conversations with near-strangers lift us more than we expect — and at the honest limit of all this, which is that you can't engineer it. Cael didn't go looking. His mother put the seed in his hands at the door. A companion to The Exchange, a tale from Crosshollow.
