Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]

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Speaker 2 What is it about the bowling versus bowling alone that the data told you, and what were people reporting that you thought was important to get into?

Speaker 4 Well, first of all, bowling is big in America.

Speaker 2 You may not know this, but more Americans bowl than vote. For example, so

Speaker 2 we got to put we got to put polls at the bowling booth. When you put your fingers in, you should get the little die, and then you vote straight off.
That's what we should be doing. Agreed.

Speaker 2 This is What Now

Speaker 2 with Trevor Noah.

Speaker 2 I cannot tell you how excited I am to have you on the podcast.

Speaker 2 And I think, I think everyone will be because Robert Putnam is one of those names that is surprisingly unknown, but then surprisingly very well known, depending on who you ask.

Speaker 2 So, if you ask a lot of people in the streets, if you said, Do you know Robert Putnam? They would probably maybe say no.

Speaker 2 But if the person in in the street that you asked was somebody like Barack Obama,

Speaker 2 then he'd be like, Yeah, I know Robert and I know him well. And you'd be like, Wow.

Speaker 4 Actually, he would say, Bob, I've been over this. There's a really funny New York Times interview in which the New York Times interview was trying to say,

Speaker 4 I know, I'm, I'm, New York Times reported, pretty well connected. I know Robert Putnam.
And Barack just says, no, it's Bob.

Speaker 2 I like that. Hey,

Speaker 2 that's when you know somebody. So actually, let's talk about that because it's, although it seems crazy, will tie into everything that we're going to talk about today.
Loneliness, community,

Speaker 2 and fundamentally, funny enough, how all of it is integral in making sure that a democracy actually works, which I think is very important in America right now because people are wondering if this democracy can and will work in the next few decades.

Speaker 2 And we're experiencing this around the world.

Speaker 2 But tell us a little bit about that. How does

Speaker 2 Barack Obama, President of the United States, come to know you as Bob? How does this journey begin?

Speaker 4 About 20 years ago, well, maybe not quite that, 15 years ago, maybe,

Speaker 4 I was trying to run a seminar. I was running a seminar of people, and the idea was to bring people from very, very diverse backgrounds together.

Speaker 4 once every three months for a couple of years to try to figure out how to solve the problem of social isolation in America and its political consequences.

Speaker 4 It's not just loneliness, it also affects, as you said, and we're kind of come back to that, the chances of democracy surviving. We had a big multi-dimensional matrix.

Speaker 4 We wanted to make sure we had enough men and women, and blacks, and Asians, and Latinos, and whites, and old and young, and rich and poor, and business and labor, etc.

Speaker 4 You can imagine this multi-dimensional scheme. And we got it all filled, but we had one box that we had not yet filled

Speaker 4 for a young black community organizer.

Speaker 4 And my son, who had been at Harvard Law School, said, You know, you ought to check out this really bright guy I know who I play basketball with.

Speaker 2 Because it turns out, my

Speaker 4 son, this is going to make you believe in the conspiracy theory of American life. My son happened to be on the Harvard Law Review with Barack and

Speaker 4 played basketball together. Wow.
He said, Well, he's a community organizer out in Chicago. I said, bingo, that sort of fits our, you know, the right matrix.
So we got this guy here.

Speaker 4 He's one of the youngest people in the group and he's very ambitious. It's clear he's very ambitious, but he's also cute.
He's a little bit like

Speaker 4 a mascot in this group. And so, you know, in a summer camp, people develop nicknames.
And our nickname for him was the governor, because we thought, what a joke.

Speaker 4 This guy's ambitious and he thinks he's going to eventually become

Speaker 4 governor of Illinois. This is the guy who five years later is the president of the United States.

Speaker 2 So you weren't wrong. Governor was a joke.
It was a joke.

Speaker 4 There was something else that's important about him.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 4 You know, he's very smart, but he's also, at least, he can be very

Speaker 4 quiet. So, and this is a group of big eagles.

Speaker 4 And so the first, you know, we'd gather on Friday night, Friday night and all day, much of Saturday up until lunch, everybody else was doing what we called station identification. That is, they were.

Speaker 4 telling us how important they were and why their views were the most important. And Obama kept silent during all of that.

Speaker 4 And then after lunch, he'd say, you you know i've been listening to this i i've been listening especially to susan and to josh and they think they disagree but i think underneath susan and josh agree and they did and everybody around the table was open-mouthed how did he see that we've been all sitting through the same conversation and there was the whole conversation was polarized in many different ways but he saw a way in which he could frame an issue in ways that would be productive for the whole group going forward.

Speaker 2 Oh, wow.

Speaker 4 He's able to see through

Speaker 4 all this, you know, all the fun AI.

Speaker 2 He's able to connect groups that don't necessarily think they have anything that connects them. But I feel like that's the perfect jumping off point to get into your work.

Speaker 2 And I won't say single-handedly because you always give credit to your team, and I think that's important. But you have been at the forefront of helping us understand

Speaker 2 social isolation

Speaker 2 and why this can very well be

Speaker 2 the reason society crumbles, society as we know it. You know, everyone talks about we're more polarized than ever.

Speaker 2 People say like, oh, you know, and I don't get along with the other parents at school. And people say like, I can't talk to my family because of politics.
And I don't even know my neighbors' names.

Speaker 2 And at the same time, everyone says, I don't even know if this election will be the last one because democracy could be dead. Well, today we're going to be speaking to the man.

Speaker 2 who really has worked on helping us understand

Speaker 2 the data behind the feeling. And you've written a few books about this.

Speaker 2 You know, Bowling Alone was obviously, I mean, you know, your seminal work, which was then, it went on like an interesting journey.

Speaker 2 And we'll talk about some of it, you know, the praise, the criticism. Right.
And then you talked about like making democracies work, et cetera.

Speaker 2 But let's start with the fundamental problem at the bottom of it.

Speaker 4 Sure.

Speaker 2 Why do you think it's such a big deal that people are or say they're lonely? What is the value of minimizing social isolation?

Speaker 4 Well, of course, there are reasons to worry about people being lonely. That's indeed the title of this film that's now

Speaker 4 out and about on Netflix and in

Speaker 2 Join or Die, yeah.

Speaker 4 Join or die, your chances of dying. Well, your chances of dying are high, actually.
I've had, sorry to say that, but your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group.

Speaker 4 And that is their real

Speaker 4 serious

Speaker 4 health effects. And this is controlling for everything you like.

Speaker 4 It is really social isolation that causes premature death but it also undermines the foundation for democracy and that's another part of the title join or die refers to the fact that that um benjamin franklin at the time of the founding of the american republic said unless we join together our democracy is going to die that is it refers both to the personal effects which are big and to the collective effects and the collective effects by the way are not just democracy our our economy grows more slowly our society becomes more unequal.

Speaker 4 The political polarization is a big consequence of

Speaker 4 the lack of social capital.

Speaker 4 And Bowling Alone, the book Bowling Alone, first published in about 2000, but most of it was written in the late 90s, said, we've been going downhill for a long time in terms of our connections.

Speaker 4 All sorts of connections.

Speaker 4 We've been going to fewer club meetings, but we've been going on fewer picnics and we trust other people less and we're less connected to our friends and to community organizations but also to our family all those ways in which we connect all of them turned out to be going down

Speaker 2 um when i wrote that book and now 25 years later it turns out they've gone down even further when you're talking about social connectedness just just to clarify this for people what do you mean because there are people who will say uh but but but robert i i've got followers on instagram and i i talk to people on my facebook and i you know i see people at school and what do you mean also off that i'm i'm curious about the we because my world is predominantly women and people of color.

Speaker 5 And our complaint is that we can't get rid of people.

Speaker 2 Like, you know,

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 5 you've started off with like kind of this collective we, which I'd like to disrupt a bit, right?

Speaker 5 Because there is no real collective we, hence this kind of political, the political differences that we have.

Speaker 5 And black women in this country are probably one of the few groups where life expectancy is actually holding or going up, right?

Speaker 5 And one of the reasons they say that and one of the reasons black women vote the way they do and behave the way they do, is because they have this deep sense of community among each other.

Speaker 5 So, I'd say, speaking for black women statistically, these aren't black women's problems. And that's often because we are the carers.

Speaker 5 We are the people that are looking after children, elderly family members, they're looking to us. So, I don't know many isolated black women in the way that you speak of.

Speaker 5 Also, I say just like ethnically, I'm Nigerian British, I'm Igbo. It wasn't just about my tribe, it was about my clan, which is the Ohoho people.

Speaker 5 And we had this group where people pay dues all the time. And when my great uncle died, part of the Jews contributed to his funeral.

Speaker 5 So I think for ethnic minorities in this country, whether it's Latinos, it's African Americans, it's Asians, there are different cultural ties there.

Speaker 5 That the idea of when I pick up the newspaper and I hear a story of somebody dying alone and they don't find the body for months, I'm like, how does that happen?

Speaker 5 Because there's 20 people knocking at your door.

Speaker 5 And I'm not saying that from my personal story.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 So I will say, funny enough, I hear you both saying the same thing, genuinely. So,

Speaker 2 you know, if I listen to what you're saying, Robert, you're saying that our life expectancy is directly tied to how many groups we are a part of, right? How close those are, yeah.

Speaker 2 And how close those are.

Speaker 2 And everything I'm hearing you say, funny enough, is and I understand the delineation of like the we, but I mean, we use the we in many different ways, but I hear you saying the same thing.

Speaker 2 You're going, black women's life expectancy is holding and going up in America because partly they are in these tight-knit groups.

Speaker 2 And so, maybe that's sort of what I would like us to figure out: is what are some groups holding on to that other groups are letting go of?

Speaker 2 Because I agree with you, I think, even if I look at my life, you know, Robert, I grew up in South Africa. I know your life, I read your life story.
So, damn,

Speaker 2 I know your life. Um, and Christiana grew up in London, right? But we have similarities, and the main thing for me was

Speaker 2 till this day, even black women almost never found themselves without a community and they worked towards it.

Speaker 2 So my grandmother was part of a thing called a society where all the grandmothers would come together and they would put their money into a collection and one member would get money every single month.

Speaker 2 And then there was like a funeral society as well. And that was just a group of people who come together to talk about funerals.

Speaker 2 And then there was another church society and that it's self-explanatory. And so maybe that's what I want to try to get to.
Cause I actually hear you both saying the same thing.

Speaker 2 And correct me if I'm wrong. I think the we you're talking about is like all of us, every single human being in a society.

Speaker 2 And Christiana, what you're saying is like, you know, black women don't seem to have the same issues. So maybe let's dig into that.

Speaker 2 You did a lot of this work in Italy, right? A lot of your seminal work came from Italy. Originally, yes.
Yes.

Speaker 2 A lot of the time, you know, when I'm having conversations about what happens in America, I'll say to people, I know America is the be-all and end-all for many people, but I think a lot of America's issues and ideas can be solved or have been solved in other countries.

Speaker 2 You know, you go to Italy and really you're on this journey of trying to understand

Speaker 2 why democracies work better or worse, or even to get more granular.

Speaker 2 You're trying to understand why some people trust government more, why some people trust institutions more, and why some governments and institutions are working better for the people that they're looking after.

Speaker 2 And help me understand how Italy ties the story together for you. What do you learn in Italy?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 I want to step back just a little bit.

Speaker 4 If you were a botanist and wanted to study plant growth, how a plant was influenced by its environment, you'd take genetically identical seeds, you'd plant them in different pots of soil, you'd water them differently, and then you'd measure and see how, you know, which plants flourished and which faltered.

Speaker 4 And then you knew it'd be something that you did in the soil or something or how much you watered them that's what italians did in italy in 1970 they created a new set of regional governments all across italy from the up in the alps to down in sicily they all had the same powers and money they looked the same on paper but the environments into which they were implanted in were very, very different.

Speaker 4 Some were very advanced economically, some were very backward economically, some were Catholic, some were communist, etc. And so we, over for 20, 25 years, followed those regional governments.

Speaker 4 We could see that some of them were very successful, not only in terms of were they able to build daycare centers when they planned to, but also in terms of what did the people think.

Speaker 4 And so we could see there were some successful governments and some failures. And then the question is, well, what was in the soil? And we had a lot of different ideas.

Speaker 4 We thought maybe it was just economic wealth made the difference, or we thought maybe it was education that made a difference.

Speaker 4 But we didn't guess what it turned out to be, which was choral societies, singing groups, and football clubs and so on, by which I mean

Speaker 4 in some places of Italy, people in the region connected with one another across various lines, singing together. So that's what we came to call social capital.

Speaker 4 We were talking about these bonds that brought people in a given region or community together across lines. And in northern Italy, especially north-central Italy around Bologna, for example, there was

Speaker 4 a lot of that kind of, what I came to call social capital, that is these connections among people.

Speaker 4 And they had very effective, still do, very, very effective regional governments. But some places, especially in the south, they didn't.
They didn't have those kinds of groups and

Speaker 4 they had terrible, corrupt, inefficient.

Speaker 4 never answered the phone even, regional governments. Now, what I want to, and now I'm coming back to what Christiana asked about.
Did they just have no groups down there?

Speaker 4 No, they had very tiny little groups, families.

Speaker 4 They looked after their own immediate family, but weren't involved in groups with people, you know, even on the other side of the street, much less on the other side of town.

Speaker 4 Now, what I'm trying to say is their we

Speaker 4 was strong, but very narrow. And what was characteristic up north was that they had

Speaker 4 much broader groups in which people from different families and different walks of life would come together to sing.

Speaker 4 Now, Christiana, I may not have persuaded you in what I've said now, but I've tried to convey the way I hear your objections.

Speaker 5 No, but I actually come from that world, a huge extended family, a huge church family. My husband's an only child, but comes from a big extended family and loads of friends.

Speaker 5 So my conception of as much as I had the depth of my clan and my ethnic group, you know, when it was time to dedicate my kids, I flew back to London.

Speaker 5 So, it happened in the home church where I was dedicated in. Sure.
A man that christened me christened my children. Do you know what I mean? So, like, this is,

Speaker 5 I guess, what I'm trying to articulate is that for a lot of people, maybe from similar backgrounds as mine, that's our conceit already. That, like, the fact that this, it's not foreign.

Speaker 5 Do you get where I'm going?

Speaker 5 Yeah, so, like, it's like, I, but it's like this extended group and clan, and it's very different and it's very diverse.

Speaker 2 So there's one thing I want us to get to in a way.

Speaker 2 Maybe let's start with this part.

Speaker 2 The why.

Speaker 2 Why does it change anything?

Speaker 2 So what I love about this story is, you know, oftentimes when we're talking about an issue in society, as you say, because we don't have all of the data and because we have confirmation bias, we'll pick the thing that we think is the cause and we'll stick with it.

Speaker 2 So we go, oh, society is declining because of social media. Oh, society is declining because of politics.
Oh, society is declining because, okay,

Speaker 2 but you had a natural experiment that very few

Speaker 2 social scientists will ever have.

Speaker 2 Help us understand the why in that. I would love to know why your government will work better if your community has more clubs in it.
I don't think that correlation is easy for everyone to see.

Speaker 4 Let me see if I can explain it this way.

Speaker 4 If you

Speaker 4 see people regularly and you're good friends, I don't mean intimate friends, but you know, you have a good friendship,

Speaker 4 much less a deeper friendship,

Speaker 4 what tends to evolve is

Speaker 4 a norm of reciprocity. That is, I'll do this for you now

Speaker 4 without expecting something back immediately from you, because down the road we'll see each other at choir practice and you'll do something for me.

Speaker 4 I'll do this for you now without expecting something back.

Speaker 4 And indeed, if everybody in the community is connected, I'll do something for somebody who I don't actually know because if other people watching see that I'm cheating him, they won't play games with me.

Speaker 4 So in other words, everybody learns that the people in this town

Speaker 4 are nice to each other. Wouldn't you love to live in a place where people were nice to each other?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 And moreover, and this is the main point of bowling alone, we learned when we carried those ideas back to the United States that

Speaker 4 That has changed over time. There have been periods in American history when we did have connections with other people.

Speaker 4 I grew up in a small town in Ohio in the late 1950s, and nobody locked their door. And when I tell my children and grandchildren that, they think grandpa's lying.

Speaker 4 No, in that period, and it wasn't about race.

Speaker 4 There were black kids. I played football.

Speaker 4 There's a picture on the cover of Bowling Alone of me and my bowling league when I was in junior high school. And there are three white guys.
I'm the tall, skinny one in the middle.

Speaker 4 and there are two black guys.

Speaker 4 And so this was not about race. I mean, it wasn't bounded.
This trust and reciprocity was not bounded then, there by race. I'm not saying race was not a problem.
Of course it was.

Speaker 4 But I mean, in terms of this, in a small town in the 1950s,

Speaker 4 people left their door unlocked. And that's because of what I in my jargon call social capital.

Speaker 4 So all I'm saying is not that every single person in America has lost trust or has become untrustworthy, but on average, and we've now shown this to be true all over America, people are less connected and therefore less trustworthy than they used to be.

Speaker 4 There are differences across America, and the places that are still relatively high

Speaker 4 in social connection are somewhat more trustworthy. Indeed, I'm sorry, I'm going to tell you more social science than you want to know.
People do an interesting study.

Speaker 4 They drop letters on the street with money in them, sealed, but with money in them and addressed.

Speaker 4 And then they ask in any given town or in neighborhood, how many of those letters are actually put in the mailbox so the owner can get their money back.

Speaker 2 One enough. Fascinating experiment.

Speaker 4 There are cities in America where your odds of getting your money back, if you drop it in an envelope, drop it on the street, are zero.

Speaker 4 And there are places, this is hard to believe, there are places in America where if you drop an envelope with money in it,

Speaker 4 you're 80% likely to get the money back. So that's

Speaker 2 differences.

Speaker 2 So, Bob, maybe help us understand

Speaker 2 the idea of bowling alone, because I think

Speaker 2 it is important to help people understand that, first of all, it is an example. Yes.

Speaker 2 And I think what you liked about it is sort of why it connects with me is that it's a simple example to understand, right?

Speaker 2 Because everyone can go bowling, but it's the alone that really became the signifier that showed what was going wrong wrong in America and in many other parts of the world where people are experiencing this.

Speaker 2 So help us understand.

Speaker 4 There's been virtually no decline in bowling itself,

Speaker 4 but

Speaker 4 it used to be that people bowled in teams, in leagues.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 there has been a complete collapse of team bowling, of league bowling.

Speaker 4 And when I told a friend of mine that, he said, oh, you mean we're bowling alone? And I thought, that's a good title for a book, if ever I write a book about this. It turned out to be a good title.

Speaker 4 but what what is the difference what is the experiential difference yes christiana have you ever bowled

Speaker 5 yeah a couple times but i'm from england so yeah that's true for some more of the football football team culture

Speaker 4 um so uh actually i know where every bowling alley in london is because whenever i've gone over there i'm selling selling books.

Speaker 4 Every journalist thought their clever idea would be to interview me in a bowling alley.

Speaker 2 So I can

Speaker 4 take you to every bowling alley in central London.

Speaker 4 In

Speaker 4 a bowling in a league, there are five people on a team and two teams are playing against each other. And how well you do depends on how well the team does, not how well you individually do.

Speaker 4 And at any given time, two people are up at the lane throwing the ball down, but the other eight people are sitting in a semicircle at the back of the alleys.

Speaker 4 And they're mostly talking, you know, and they're talking about what was on TV last night or they're talking but occasionally they're talking about you know the local schools or

Speaker 4 or you know whether there should a bond issue should be passed to cover the costs of the new sewer system or whatever

Speaker 4 and now i'm going to suddenly change that description occasionally they're con they're having a conversation about public civic life that's highfalutin for saying they just had got into a discussion with people they know well.

Speaker 4 Remember, these are people they see see every week, and they know how to interpret what the people say. They're not total strangers

Speaker 4 because they fall in a league and with other members of the team, but they're also real human beings.

Speaker 4 And so the reason I decided to use that as a metaphor is that it does say, here are people who know each other. If you're in a team, they know each other.

Speaker 4 And they're not doing politics, but occasionally it helps with the politics. Does that make sense? I mean, occasionally they're able to have a conversation that's a kind of a responsible conversation.

Speaker 4 It's not just two guys yelling at each other or two gals yelling at each other.

Speaker 4 It's two people who are going to have to get along because the next week they're going to be back in the same bowling alley. And that is so it seemed to me a useful

Speaker 4 way of describing how bowling in a league, in a team,

Speaker 4 is not just fun. I mean, it's important to emphasize this.
I really wish I'd done emphasized this more. Social capital can't just be eat your spinach.
It's got to be fun, too.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 4 it's, it's, it's, so, and that's why I use the example of bowling leagues. It's not saying, oh, go to a, a good government meeting.
Well, who wants to go to a good mother, good government meeting?

Speaker 4 It's got to be fun and bowling is fun, but it's also a little bit like a good government meeting. Is that, I may be exaggerating here, but that's, that's where the idea of

Speaker 4 bowling together came. And then the opposite of that was we are just less opportunity for encountering people that we know well to talk occasionally about public public affairs.

Speaker 2 Right. If we only meet at a political rally, our conversations will only be political and then we'll forget what connects us.

Speaker 2 One other thing I wanted to throw in maybe here.

Speaker 2 I know your work is all about data, so I don't know if you have the data on this, but how much do you think companies and jobs and capitalism and the way it's been employed in America over the past 50, 60 years has affected people's ability to do that?

Speaker 2 Because, you know, when you're talking about let's go bowling together, I just think of personally

Speaker 2 friends of mine and how we always want to do things. But more often than not, people will say, I would love to, but I work late that day.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wish I could, but I've got to finish this thing for work.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I want to, but I, you know, the work and the, and then it's like my kid, and I've got to see the kid because I don't have childcare and I've got to.

Speaker 2 And I wonder, because you are a man who, as you say, you've lived through time, you know, I would love to know if there's any data or any experience that you've had that has shown you that our ability to engage in a league with other people is directly affected by how much time our work gives us off to do that remarkably i've got good data on how people spend every hour of their day going back to the 1960s would you believe that's 60 year time trend

Speaker 4 and And it's very interesting.

Speaker 4 Invite me back for another two hours and I'll talk about how

Speaker 4 our lives have changed. For example,

Speaker 4 back in the day in the 60s, we slept, the average American slept 7.5 hours a day, and that average is exactly 7.5 hours today. There's been no change on average.

Speaker 4 Some people speak more, some people speak more.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's impressive, though, still. Yeah.

Speaker 4 But here's the complicated part, actually.

Speaker 4 We're spending less time at work than we used to.

Speaker 2 Less time at work.

Speaker 4 So less time at work. So what do we do with our extra time?

Speaker 4 All of it is spent in front of screens. There's been a steady, steady long-term rise in the amount of time we spend in front of screens.

Speaker 4 And the most recent data, you might think, well, okay, it used to be screens like television and now it's screens like, you know,

Speaker 2 some sort of phones and iPads and whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, no, but it isn't. We're actually spending more time watching TV than we used to.
And we're adding to that. Now don't quote me exactly because I mean, I've got the data.

Speaker 4 I just don't have them in front of me at this moment. I didn't know you were going to ask me this question.

Speaker 4 We are added, we've added since the advent of

Speaker 4 social media, another two hours a day, two hours a day.

Speaker 4 And yet we're spending less time in the presence of other people. I mean, it's the data are just the worst you could imagine.
We've got more free time. We do have more free time.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 4 And we've spent more than all of that free time in front of a screen.

Speaker 2 Damn.

Speaker 2 I feel called out. Wow, wow, wow.

Speaker 4 Well, you asked me for data.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, yeah, I'm just, I see, I see every binging and every TV show. I see it very differently now.

Speaker 4 But of course, I want people to watch this podcast. This is a different conversation.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I mean, wow.

Speaker 5 Listen to the podcast on the way to meet your friend.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes. Yes, that's why we love podcasts.

Speaker 2 We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

Speaker 5 Robert, I'm really curious about what you think. Like, I'm a millennial and I have like younger cousins who are Gen Z and we spend a lot of our time on the internet.
Like, right.

Speaker 5 So I met my spouse through Twitter, as crazy as that sounds.

Speaker 5 So this is a world where people meet their spouses, whether it's Tinder or Instagram, and then Gen Z, they spend probably a disproportionate amount of their time online.

Speaker 5 And for some people, and I think in my generation and younger, that's where they found their connections. Would you think that's a problem?

Speaker 5 Or do you think that can be an alternative third space that maybe can foster that sense of trust?

Speaker 4 Christiana, you asked lots of really good questions and they're all complicated.

Speaker 2 And I'm going to, I'm going to try.

Speaker 5 I'm a complicated person, Robert.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 Did you say Robert? No, it's Bob. Please.

Speaker 2 Oh, we get Bob now. We get Bob.
Okay. Wow.

Speaker 5 I was going to say Professor Putnam.

Speaker 2 Oh, please.

Speaker 4 I mean, if I get a call, a phone call,

Speaker 4 and the person says, Robert, I just hang up right away because

Speaker 2 if they know me, it's a nice screener I use as answering the phone. Okay, Bob.
Bob. Okay.

Speaker 4 I want to say a couple of things about

Speaker 4 social media and virtual connections and then and how they compare to real face-to-face connections what in one once some people call IRL in real life

Speaker 4 when social media first came out

Speaker 4 everybody thought it was

Speaker 4 you know unbelievably great uh world peace was going to break out we would all have and we would all be friends with each other because we'd be all connecting across that always at that time seemed a little strange to me but the academic work on whether that's true was always more skeptical than than the people who are making money by getting us onto their websites yeah of course but the real question at that point if i can put it this way was is facebook better or worse than bowling leagues i'm using that as a synonym i mean just as labels for those two things and for a long time the academics said i don't know there's some ways in which facebook is not as good as bowling leagues and but you know you'll you can guess what mark zuckerberg thought

Speaker 4 and then he one point said well okay maybe putnam is right, but we're going to create a new kind of Facebook that's going to be even super dandier and it's going to be wonderful, even better than bowling leagues.

Speaker 4 But the academic research, I repeat, was always skeptical about that. But then came a terrible natural experiment, COVID.

Speaker 4 But now I promised you I was going to get more complicated, but I can tell that Christiana likes to deal with complications. So I'm going to.

Speaker 4 I have so far been phrasing this problem as if the choice we had was between either either face-to-face

Speaker 4 or social media, right? Yes. But actually, that's not true.

Speaker 4 Almost all of our networks today are simultaneously face-to-face and internet-based.

Speaker 4 My wife, Rosemary, and I

Speaker 4 do see each other a lot every day. That is, there is a face-to-face relationship there.

Speaker 4 But she has a different office than mine.

Speaker 4 And astonishingly, much of the time I send her an email or send her a text, and she responds, it's not we have one set of relationships that are face-to-face and a different set of relationships that are internet-based.

Speaker 4 They're the same. And I want to use a metaphor here if I can.
In chemistry, we have the idea of

Speaker 4 an alloy is a mixture of two different

Speaker 4 base chemicals.

Speaker 4 like tin and copper, and you stir it and heat it and so on, and you get something that is neither tin nor copper but I never can remember bronze or brass or something like that right and and brass is different from either of the either the tin or the copper okay so so far so good yeah now what I'm saying is all of our networks today are alloys so the question really is

Speaker 4 how can we get an alloy that is has the benefits of both yeah that is to say could we find a way to create a network that has the advantages that the internet has of not depending upon space,

Speaker 4 but that has the advantages of face-to-face, namely you can actually get together and cooperate with somebody. Do we know how to do that? And the answer is we sure do.

Speaker 4 We know how to, for example,

Speaker 4 there are networks that

Speaker 4 are internet-based for neighborhoods. And it's easy to contact the other people just whenever you get the idea, you want to borrow a rake or something, you just send out an email.

Speaker 4 But then they're also in the neighborhood, so I can go go and get the

Speaker 2 rake in person.

Speaker 4 So it's not a technical problem. So why don't we have lots of these things? It sounds like it'd be wonderful to have this, right? And it turns out the real answer is these big companies.

Speaker 4 They know how to do it.

Speaker 4 They know, and I know this because I've talked personally, they invited me, Bob Putnam, out to wherever it was in Silicon Valley to talk about social capital. Amazing.

Speaker 4 And we had a wonderful conversation. They clearly knew what I meant, and they knew the difference between face-to-face and connected.

Speaker 4 And they knew how to use, they conveyed the idea that they knew how to.

Speaker 2 Oh, they knew how to use their tools to get people to connect in person.

Speaker 4 Yes, but how did, why don't they do that? Answer when it's much better for their business line if people fight than if they cooperate.

Speaker 2 You can't sell ads in person. That's another problem.

Speaker 2 No, it's true, though. You can't.
You can't monetize people's connections when they aren't digital. And so now you're limiting your revenue.
You know,

Speaker 2 this seems like a similar problem that exists in many different industries and fields, right? In that, like, let's say food,

Speaker 2 there's nothing wrong with drinking a glass of Coke. There really isn't.
There's nothing wrong with having a burger from McDonald's or whatever. There really isn't.
However,

Speaker 2 those products are oftentimes made to make you crave them and want them

Speaker 2 way more than you naturally would.

Speaker 2 And you know this because you as a person, just think about you as a person, you do not say to yourself, hmm, I should do that again. You don't.
You go like, oh, I can't believe I did that again.

Speaker 2 I had too much of it.

Speaker 2 But then you want more of it. And then you want more of it.
And then you want more of it. Right.
And we're supposed to be having, quote unquote, a balanced diet.

Speaker 2 So it's like, have your vegetables, have the salad, have the stew, have the this, have the that, and then have your snacks and you'll be fine.

Speaker 2 But it feels like we're in like an arms race against companies. who go, we're not going to give you a break.

Speaker 2 If you have a choice of 10 meals, we want you to pick the snacks 10 times times and we're going to design it in such a way that you're going to pick the snacks 10 times.

Speaker 2 But then on the outside, they'll say, no, no, no, no, no, we want you to eat healthy. And you're like, yes, but you, you made your product so that I can't do it.
Do you get what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 And I think the same thing goes for like what you're saying now about social capital is they'll say it, we want to connect people, but they don't, you know, how you know they don't want you to stop using the product.

Speaker 2 The simplest answer is infinite scroll. Yeah.
Right?

Speaker 2 If social media companies wanted us to not endlessly use their product, because they'll even have a label that's like, hey, remember to take a break now and then.

Speaker 2 Yo, you can just make me take a break.

Speaker 2 You could literally, they could literally just go like TikTok. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.
Bam, you're done. This is your limit for the day.
Yeah. And you know what?

Speaker 2 I almost think that people would actually like the product more because people would go, oh yeah, I finished my TikTok for today. I'm done.
Yeah. You know what? Like you're chronically online.

Speaker 5 Let's not talk about me.

Speaker 2 No, we must talk about me. No, I am.
I'm in the addict.

Speaker 5 But Bob, it's so funny. You mentioned the neighborhood group and the rake.

Speaker 5 So recently I joined my neighborhood whatsapp group and um it's very nimby i thought it was very nimbyish but there was just like legit concerns about crime in the neighborhood and the la pd getting out when they would come out and you know sometimes people were like there's someone walking in the neighborhood this is their description they're a bit suspicious and there was one day it got a bit loaded because it was just like there's a black guy he's in a hoodie or something like that you know very fit the description and it was somebody else in the group who's white said hey let's be careful.

Speaker 5 We're not profiled.

Speaker 2 Like, it was so refreshing for me.

Speaker 5 No, because I live in a majority white neighborhood. And I'm like, I don't want to be the black person in the group being like, you shouldn't say that.

Speaker 5 And it's a white guy who said, hey, guys, we should be careful. And

Speaker 2 people

Speaker 5 figured it out amongst themselves. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Because it's also the same neighborhood group that when there is something suspicious happening, when there is a break-in and LAPD don't get there, there's the same people in the group that may say something offhand about a description that will show up to your house and make sure you're okay.

Speaker 5 And there's this, and there's something about that group that's completely transformed.

Speaker 5 Like, I would be sensitive typically if I read about a description, but that everyone has this trust among each other to say, even if we say the wrong thing, we don't mean it in the wrong way.

Speaker 5 We want to keep our neighborhood safe. And fundamentally, we all trust each other and look out for each other.
And sometimes it's like, I need flour. Does anyone have flour?

Speaker 5 You know, and this is something I've never been exposed to, but it's happening through WhatsApp. But I'd say the critical thing is we have a great leader.

Speaker 5 I don't want to say her name because she probably doesn't want people to be.

Speaker 2 But then, do you meet in person to watch Bob?

Speaker 5 She messaged me and she said,

Speaker 5 she told me her history and she was like, I want to meet your husband and your kids. So we're trying to figure it out.
And she's the person that goes around.

Speaker 5 She organizes neighborhood walks.

Speaker 2 Oh, there you go.

Speaker 5 She completely changed how I perceive not just people in my neighborhood, but how I even see

Speaker 2 profiles. But

Speaker 5 it's the neighborhood. There's something to the neighborhood group, is what I'm trying to say, Bob.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and there's wonderful data on that. If you were worried about crime in your neighborhood and you had one of two strategies, you could have a lot more cops on the beat, pay cops more and

Speaker 4 arm them and so on,

Speaker 4 or you could know one another's first name. The second is the more important crime fighting strategy.

Speaker 4 That is, it's more effective to have eyes on the street from your neighbors, just as you're saying.

Speaker 4 And what I'm talking about is big, huge studies that have done this experimentally.

Speaker 2 This is taken different neighborhoods and they... This is not like an opinion.
This is data that's been.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 That's what I do for a living. No, that's what I'm just clarifying for people.
I love that. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, at any rate,

Speaker 4 I don't want to interrupt this conversation,

Speaker 4 except that I hope we have a chance to go back to Bowling Alone and explain and say why it explains Trump.

Speaker 2 Let's fast forward to that point.

Speaker 2 We are now living in a country, and the world is living in the shadow of this country that is experiencing levels of polarization and levels of vitriol that most people say they've never experienced.

Speaker 2 And one of the key tenets of this moment is that people do not trust the government. They don't believe in the government.
They don't believe that anything can get done.

Speaker 2 They don't believe anything will get done.

Speaker 2 And a lot of people who are being elected into government, ironically, by the way, I always think that's ironic, is that those people are being elected into government because they say government shouldn't be a thing and we should just dismantle it all.

Speaker 2 And fundamentally, they're saying like, hey, everyone, you just take care of yourself. Why does the government do your education? You do your education.
And why does the government do your healthcare?

Speaker 2 You do your healthcare. You do your own research.
You do your own thing. So actually, help us understand how do we go from a world where people spend less time.
And

Speaker 2 it is crucial to remind everyone, bowling is one of the things. It doesn't matter what it is.
It could be a book club. It could

Speaker 2 be a running group. It could be a bike club.
It could be anything.

Speaker 2 How does America go from having fewer clubs?

Speaker 2 to creating the movement that leads to Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 Right. Remember, bowling alone said 25 years ago that we were, had been for 25 years, at that point,

Speaker 4 it had been 25 years, we'd been going downhill in terms of our social connections of various sorts.

Speaker 2 Anything that brought people together from different walks of life to connect across different boundaries.

Speaker 4 That's right. And that had been happening for 25 years.
Now, 25 years later, we've gone back and done the same study, and it turns out nothing has changed. It's still going downhill.

Speaker 4 Despite all of my pleading and talking with people, it's going downhill, which now means for 50 years we've been going downhill. Donald Trump did not cause that.

Speaker 4 And this is the main thing I want to say here. Donald Trump is not the cause of our problems.
He's the symptom of our problems.

Speaker 4 American democracy had these problems long before Trump appeared on the scene.

Speaker 4 And most importantly, we will have those same problems leading to faltering democracy when he's no longer on the scene. Donald Trump exploited this.

Speaker 4 And I mean that, so this is Bob Putnam saying, you know, Donald Trump exploited what I had discovered. That's not just me.
Steve Bennett has said, I could show you the quote.

Speaker 4 Well, we were trying to figure out how we could get Donald Trump elected. And then we read this book by this crazy guy, Putnam, about bowling a little bit.

Speaker 2 Wait, no way. So you mean serious?

Speaker 4 Yeah, he's quote, you can find, I mean, later on.

Speaker 2 Wait, wait, so help. And what did they use? I don't understand.
What did they use from your book to help Trump get elected? What did they identify?

Speaker 4 They said, effectively, as I said in the book, but I wasn't doing it. You have all these isolated people.

Speaker 4 They're ripe for having a kind of populist come to power and say, you're all unhappy and isolated. Trust me, I'm the one.
Does that sound familiar? Does that sound like he's the guy?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, that's what Bowling alone said. And I didn't act on it.
Maybe I should have. Maybe I could have.

Speaker 2 You could have been the president.

Speaker 2 You could have been president. President Bob Putnam.

Speaker 4 And J.D. Vance has said something very similar to this.
There's lots of empirical evidence. I won't bore you you with all the data.
There's lots of data that's saying

Speaker 4 the strongest predictor, actually, of support for Donald Trump, of places that support Donald Trump and people that support Donald Trump is social isolation.

Speaker 4 Now we're not just talking hypothetically, oh, it'd be nice to have more people joining clubs. We're saying the pickle that we're in as a country is precisely due to the fact that we're no longer...

Speaker 2 Socially isolated. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I'm not trying to say we ought to reconstruct bullying leagues, but it's got to be something that brings us face to face. Is that making sense, Trevor? No,

Speaker 2 you know why it makes complete sense is because I think of it through a few lenses. Like you and I have talked about this a bunch.

Speaker 2 I go, one of the things I'm saddest about in America and I see around the world is the decline of churches.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 2 Because I go, I understand that religion has many issues that it's come with, whether it's pastors, whether it's, you know, the way they treat certain people, whatever it might be, right?

Speaker 2 But man, you take for granted what that building did.

Speaker 2 There are very few places in our societies where you can come, and regardless of the language you speak, the color of your skin, your socioeconomic background, your location, whatever it is, you are allowed to join and identify as being part of that group.

Speaker 2 And I've always thought that's maybe the most important thing is the fact that you can become a part of it. Do you get what I'm saying? That's like really, really important to me.

Speaker 2 And I think about it through that and as I go, wow, man, I understand that people go like, oh yeah, religion, I don't care about it. And I'm like, yes, but you're also losing the church.

Speaker 2 And the church was the place where you saw people to tell them you were sick. The church was the place where you got a little help.

Speaker 2 The church was the place where you found out about a new job listing. You know, someone music lesson.

Speaker 5 People learned instruments.

Speaker 2 People learned music.

Speaker 2 People think about how all the greatest singers of like, you know, the last whatever many decades have all come from church.

Speaker 2 You know, so the training, the connections, the, the understanding that it came from. And it's funny that you say that.

Speaker 2 When we were still on the daily show, I remember the thing I used to talk to everyone about was how

Speaker 2 Jordan Klepper would say this, I'd say to him, he'd go to all these Trump rallies. And I said, Jordan, what do you like, what do you notice when you're at the Trump rallies?

Speaker 2 What do you notice that we don't from far? And he said something really fascinating to me once. He said, a lot of people are there for the vibes.
Yes. He said, a lot of people are there for the vibes.

Speaker 2 And you think about it, Donald Trump created many clubs where clubs didn't exist. He said, I'm coming to your town.
I'm going to sell you hats that you can all wear.

Speaker 2 We're going to sell you little scarves that you can all wear. And you're going to to come into a room.
And then, you know what? We're all going to hang out and chant this.

Speaker 2 You know, when I knew that Trump, by the way, Bob, had reached the pinnacle of understanding this is when he was at a political rally, right?

Speaker 2 People are there, ostensibly, to hear about your plan for the future of the country and how you plan to run the economy. And Trump was just like, let's just dance.
Do you remember that moment?

Speaker 5 I don't remember that particular moment.

Speaker 2 You don't remember that moment?

Speaker 4 Yeah, sure. I do.

Speaker 2 This was one of, I remember watching that moment going, this man is either, he's completely lost it or he is a savant who's completely understood it. And now I think he's the latter.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I thought he was the former.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Donald Trump realized in that moment, he's like, man, you guys don't, you're not here because of like what I'm going to do with the economy or not do with the, you just came here to hang out and we're in a club and everyone in that club says the same thing.

Speaker 2 We've been forgotten. So there's a man who grew up in a town where the factory was shut down and that was a piece of his club.
So he's forgotten.

Speaker 2 There's somebody else who grew up in another city, and because that city has lost its population, the church died, and now they don't have a church, so they've been forgotten. That's right.

Speaker 2 And someone's kids left to go to a big city, so now they don't have the, they've been forgotten. And it's just a bunch of forgotten people who are now seen.

Speaker 2 They come together, and you go when you go home, watch the video. I promise you, it is one of the most amazing things.
Trump literally just goes, like, he was just playing my playlist.

Speaker 2 He shouts it to some person who rolls with him, and they just play all of his favorite. And I'm talking everything from YMCA to Ave Maria.
Like, it's the most eclectic mix of music.

Speaker 2 And he just dances.

Speaker 2 Don't go anywhere because we got more. What now? After this.

Speaker 5 So, Trevor, my question is this. Like, you've hit on something with this Trump thing.
How do we guarantee in this crazy world we live in that people don't start clubs of hate?

Speaker 2 Which I think what Trumpet as much.

Speaker 5 Oh, that's a good question. You know what I mean? It's just like, because that's then my concern because the Ku Klux Klan is definitely a club it's a local

Speaker 2 club member they took care of each other

Speaker 5 uniforms yeah it's just like how do we in this like very polarized moment where there is where all sides seem to have deep resentment for each other how do we make sure these clubs don't become spaces or is that even necessary Well, yes, I think it is necessary.

Speaker 4 There are different kinds of social capital, different kinds of networks.

Speaker 4 And one important distinction is between what I call bridging social capital, that is ties that link you to people unlike yourself,

Speaker 4 and bonding social capital. Bonding social capital are the ties that link you to people just like yourself.

Speaker 4 So my bonding social capital are my friends with other elderly white male Jewish professors.

Speaker 2 That's my bonding social capital.

Speaker 4 And my bridging social capital are my ties to people of a different generation. I have a little bit of bridging that I rely on heavily across generations because I've got my grandchildren.

Speaker 4 And I'm not saying, this is important, bridging good, bonding bad, because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to reflect your bonding social capital.

Speaker 4 That's a little bit what Christiana was earlier saying. The people who would really take care of her if she got, who would bring her chicken soup or the equivalent would be bonding social capital.

Speaker 4 I'm saying bonding social capital is not necessarily bad, but bridging social capital is crucial for a modern, diverse society like ours.

Speaker 4 Bridging across racial, across age, across gender, across party, and so on. So far, so good.

Speaker 2 Right, right, right.

Speaker 4 But bridging is harder to build than bonding social capital. My grandmother knew that.
My grandmother said to me, Bobby, birds of a feather flock together.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 4 She didn't think I'd understand.

Speaker 4 What she meant was, Bobby, bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital, but she didn't think I'd understand that, which is why she used the avian metaphor about

Speaker 4 birds, but that's the basic point. So here's the challenge.
Much of

Speaker 4 Trump's support, it draws from different kinds of demographic groups, of course, but it's bonded heavily on politics and not bridging at all.

Speaker 4 And so now I'm back at the question, why doesn't Putnam saying he wants lots of Ku Klux Klan?

Speaker 4 And the answer is, I don't want lots of Ku Klux Klan because it's bonding and I want a lot of more bridging. Does that make sense to what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 That makes sense. And I want to know how to do it.
Well, but I'm actually going to throw this before we move on. I'm going to throw something out here, maybe controversial.

Speaker 2 I would argue the reason the Democrats didn't do as well in this election is because they were bonding. They weren't bridging.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 2 So if I look at Barack, I look at Barack Obama.

Speaker 5 They were bonding and they thought they were bridging.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But if I look at Barack Obama's campaign, right? Barack Obama was going, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, I don't care if you're in Kentucky.
Let's connect. Let's connect.
Do you have this issue?

Speaker 2 I have this issue. This is something I grew up with.
You grew up. My grandmother looks like you.
My mother looks like you. My father looked like that.
My this. I grew up in this world.

Speaker 2 He was bridging. Going to Iowa.
Yeah, yeah. And he was like, yes, we can.
Like, it was bridging, bridging, bridging, bridging.

Speaker 4 We, we, we, we, it's got to be. Yes.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so as much as it's easy for everyone to be like, Donald Trump and blah, blah, blah, and we're all guilty of that.

Speaker 2 But I think of like the Democrats in this election, a lot of it was bonding stuff as well. It was very much like, you know, like, oh, you know, white men are this and the rich have done that.

Speaker 2 And it became bonding that way, as opposed to the coalition of saying, like, Bernie even did well, by the way, when he was running. He did a lot of bridging, like, you know, hey, let's all join.

Speaker 2 We're all struggling. Let's all come together as struggling people.
We all deserve healthcare. You all, it doesn't matter where you're from, bridge, bridge, bridge.

Speaker 2 And I think in this election in particular, there was a lot of

Speaker 2 bonding from both parties.

Speaker 2 And as crazy as this may sound to a lot of people, I think Donald Trump engaged in a little more bridging than people will give him credit for, which I think is why he connected more than people thought he would in some spaces.

Speaker 5 I want to know what Bob thinks of that.

Speaker 4 So, this is, sorry,

Speaker 4 you didn't invite me on here to cite all my books, but I'm going to cite yet another book.

Speaker 2 No, that's exactly why we invited you on here. You're an expert.

Speaker 4 Okay, I want to talk about the growing gap between rich folks and poor folks in America. And the book was called Our Kids.

Speaker 4 The book was focused on a whole series of charts and graphs that showed the gap between rich kids and poor kids growing.

Speaker 4 And I'll say more about what I meant by that. But in particular, by rich, I didn't mean literally having lots of money.

Speaker 4 The book is based on the upper third of American society, which is basically college educated folks. Okay.

Speaker 4 And the lower two-thirds of America, which is basically people who didn't graduate from four years of college. And what that book showed is a growing gap also among their parents.

Speaker 4 Those two groups are increasingly, they don't marry one another. It used to be that there were people who would marry across these class lines, but they don't now.
They used to be that

Speaker 4 they would live in the same neighborhood, but we're increasingly living in not racially segregated, but class-segregated homes. And what I'm trying to say is that class lens

Speaker 4 was when I wrote the book at least as important as the racial lens.

Speaker 4 And it's becoming, relatively speaking, the class lens is becoming more important

Speaker 4 relative to the racial lens.

Speaker 4 The plight facing working class whites is the same as the plight facing working class blacks. That's what Bernie Sanders noticed.
He was talking about everybody.

Speaker 4 It's down in the, not at the bottom, meaning the poorest of the poor, but the lower two-thirds of the country.

Speaker 4 And I think that the Democratic Party, this may be controversial, I think the Democratic Party has got to start focusing more on those class differences and less exclusively on the racial or other identity issues.

Speaker 4 Now, it sounds like I'm saying let's forget about

Speaker 4 black folks, and I'm not saying that. I'm saying let's really focus on working-class black folks because they're the ones who are falling further and further behind.

Speaker 5 Yeah, to follow up on that,

Speaker 5 because a lot has been said about black male increasing votes for Republican. They actually split the vote and they look at the black male vote specifically.

Speaker 5 And the black men most likely to vote for Trump were non-college educated and unchurched.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Un-churched.

Speaker 5 Un-churched. That was the key.
They were secular up to a high school diploma.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 Black, young black men. That's the group most likely to vote for Trump.
The black men that voted Democrat are college educated, tend to attend church professionals. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And that's where, and they, they vote at similar levels for Democrats as black women do in general.

Speaker 5 So that group that's actually splitting off from the Democratic Party is like the most oppressed class among black people.

Speaker 2 I almost want to know what you think the future will be because

Speaker 2 I remember speaking, I forget who this person was. It was such a wonderful conversation we had in one of my first times going to London.

Speaker 2 And I was talking to them about living in America and I was talking to them about coming from South Africa and everything.

Speaker 2 And this woman said to me, she said, she said, oh, darling, she said, I can't wait for South Africa and America to get over race because then they'll realize that everything's all about class, baby.

Speaker 2 It's all about class. And it really was an interesting idea, which has stuck with me because I go like, yeah.

Speaker 5 The most classy society ever.

Speaker 2 No, yeah, yeah. No, but

Speaker 2 no, but what I liked about it was this, is she forced me to hone in on something that I think people do take for granted. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oftentimes when we talk about issues that are like like pertaining to black people, you'll be like, oh, black people have, that has just become an easy identifier for a class issue, right?

Speaker 2 And that's why like people like, that's why people like Dr. Martin Luther King, like MLK was like, yo, I'm fighting for class.
A lot of his stuff was class related. Very socialist.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he was fighting for class. And black people are disproportionately affected by it.
But that's why like even the Black Panther Party, they found a coalition

Speaker 2 between

Speaker 2 white people who were proudly racist and black people who were militantly fighting against racism. But they were like, yo, union jobs.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the guy was like, hey, man, we should all come together because we're all being affected by this. And in all of these cases, by the way, they formed clubs.

Speaker 2 The Black Panthers formed a mini club that wasn't the Black Panthers that involved all of these poor people.

Speaker 2 Dr. Martin Luther King, he formed multiple clubs and chapters and all of these organizations.
And it's interesting to see what you're saying.

Speaker 2 It's like these clubs came together around the issue of class.

Speaker 2 And so now, let me me ask you this then so do you think say the people who are in the bottom two-thirds yes are they more likely to be negative affect negatively affected by not having a social club yes

Speaker 4 and they're certainly much more likely to be socially isolated i mean

Speaker 4 they've got they've got at least two strikes against them well maybe three a

Speaker 4 they're more socially isolated okay and b they're poorer financially And C, they have got less education.

Speaker 4 So all that, those folks are in a pickle.

Speaker 4 And what that means is it's important to just understand the math. This is simple, simple arithmetic.
We could have a clean system here in which we had all the college

Speaker 4 educated people, you know, vote for the Democrats and all the non-college educated people vote for the Republicans. What's wrong with that? Well, there are a lot more of them than of us.

Speaker 4 We, the Democrats, if we're going to retain power democratically, we've got to begin appealing,

Speaker 4 not ignoring race, I'm not saying that, but appealing more to the class-based interests. I want to try to end with three

Speaker 4 to-dos.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, that's great because that's what Christiana was asking for. What were you going to ask? Because then you can say it and then I'm asking for my homework, the to-dos,

Speaker 2 okay,

Speaker 2 great. So, the what now, the what now, Bob Putnam.

Speaker 4 I'm going to try to keep it simple, not

Speaker 4 because you guys couldn't understand something more complicated, but because I think we've got to understand in very simple terms, one,

Speaker 4 go young.

Speaker 4 It's much more important

Speaker 4 that we focus on young people, regardless of where they are right now, because they are the future.

Speaker 4 And I'm now talking as an historian looking back not just over the last, you know, five, 10, 20, 50 years. I'm looking over the last 125 years.

Speaker 4 In my last book, which was called The Upswig, I looked over the whole of American history over the last 125 years and big changes are not the creation of old guys like me old guys like me sometimes we've been around so long that we understand that it doesn't have to be the way it is today but we're not the people who have the ideas that will work to build social capital and save america in the i don't know 2050s or something i'm going to be long gone so first thing is go young and inspire the young people to come up with the new bowling leagues it's not going to be bowling leagues it's going to be something else but almost surely will involve something of of of high tech but it will involve real personal relations with others before you move on a perfect example of that for me was pokemon go

Speaker 2 so i don't i'm assuming neither of you played it but i i was a huge pokemon go fan huge huge huge i think this was the best execution of a video game in the modern age because it was a video game that everyone played on it was on your phones right and the goal was to catch pokemon you don't need to know what any of this is just think of a game where you're trying to catch little creatures.

Speaker 2 Okay. But what they did that was amazing was you had to catch the creatures in the real world.

Speaker 2 So they used your camera on your phone, and you would literally have to run out into the streets to catch these digital creatures. And so at first it was just like, oh, this is silly and this is fun.

Speaker 2 But I'll never forget the joy I experienced when one night I was in New York and I was running with a group of people in Central Park,

Speaker 2 strangers at 11:30 p.m. because someone had tweeted and told us that there was a Snorlax, which is one of the creatures.
There was a Snorlax in Central Park.

Speaker 2 And Bob and Christiana, when I tell you, there were, if I was just to estimate, there were like maybe 500 people

Speaker 2 from like, from like little kids who had dragged their parents out of the house all the way through to like adults who are playing the game running.

Speaker 2 And I remember at one point, one of the kids turned, looked at me, well, because we're all running because there's a time limit. You don't know how long the creature will be there for.

Speaker 2 So we're all running through Central Park together. And one of the kids turns, turns, looks at me.
This kid's like maybe like 14, 15.

Speaker 2 And he looks at me and he's like, he's like, Trevor, Noah, he's like, you, you played Pokemon, go. And he's like, now I know I'm in the right place.
And we run together. But

Speaker 2 what I loved about it was to what you're saying, it was the perfect culmination. It wasn't the either-or.

Speaker 2 We were all playing a digital game. It was the alloy.

Speaker 2 You could play the game at home, and we were playing it at home, but you could not help but bump into other people who were playing the game as well in the real world.

Speaker 2 And it was such a beautiful thing because once the Snorlax was gone, all everyone could do now was talk, Where are you from? Hey, where do you live? Yeah, where did you come?

Speaker 2 What's the best one you've caught? What have you? And this was like the game won awards, by the way, even for getting people fit and running and moving.

Speaker 2 But I love that. So, when you say the going young and figuring out the hybrid, I think there are ways to do it.
Because some people be like, Oh, I don't know if you can.

Speaker 2 I think we actually have seen one of the ways, and I know because I played it. But yes, okay.
So, what's rule number two?

Speaker 4 Rule number two is go local.

Speaker 4 Go local.

Speaker 4 All the times that there have been major social revolutions, they bubbled up from the bottom.

Speaker 4 And at local levels, people can more easily cooperate across party and other lines because somebody's got to fix the sewers.

Speaker 4 And so you don't have to have an ideological discussion about how important is the environment.

Speaker 4 Everybody knows that the sewers got to be fixed if we're going to be able to survive in this town or the schools.

Speaker 4 You know, you can have a national debate about, I don't know, some issue in education,

Speaker 4 but somebody's got to fix our schools right here. And so sometimes left-wingers are in favor of national solutions.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 for race, we did have to go national because there were whole regions of the country which were, if we went local, we would have stayed segregated forever.

Speaker 4 So I'm not saying always go local, but if you want to have a major revolution, and this is exactly what MLK did, right? He didn't start with his March on Washington. He started

Speaker 4 in Montgomery. What do you think is the most important social reform in the history of America? I'm going to tell you in just a second.
The high school. When was the high school invented?

Speaker 4 The high school was invented in 1910. God did not invent the high school.

Speaker 2 It was invented recently.

Speaker 4 And where was the high school? By high school, I mean a secondary school, a public high school that everybody could go to.

Speaker 4 We'd had private schools, of course, as like Eaton or whatever, but I'm talking about public high schools. First place in the world was in 1910 in flyover country, in America.

Speaker 4 It was not invented in Massachusetts or in Chicago or in LA or whatever. It was invented in small towns in the middle of America.
And it went viral.

Speaker 4 And within 20 years, every city in America, every city and town in America had a high public high school. That's viral.
20 years, it went from...

Speaker 2 that's amazing.

Speaker 4 So, what I'm trying to say is the really good ideas, policy ideas, the next time they spread.

Speaker 4 And thirdly, and I'm going to come back now to this issue of religion: go morality.

Speaker 4 Stick with me. I'm an academic, but I'm about to start preaching at you, both of you.

Speaker 2 I apologize for that.

Speaker 4 When we look at long-run changes,

Speaker 4 long-run changes in

Speaker 4 political polarization, in economic inequality,

Speaker 4 in

Speaker 4 connections and so on.

Speaker 4 The leading indicator, it turns out, that people in any given period and place actually think they have obligations to other people.

Speaker 4 We need to have a moral reawakening in America. I'm talking about simple golden rule.
Read the Sermon on the Mount.

Speaker 4 I mean, any religion says worry at least as much about other people as you do about yourself.

Speaker 2 Love that.

Speaker 4 Religion should be a we phenomenon, not an I phenomenon.

Speaker 4 So if I had a magic wand,

Speaker 4 I don't, but maybe somebody listened, have a magic wand.

Speaker 4 I'd try to make the magic wand

Speaker 4 make young people, remember young, in localities across America, think that they have obligations to other people. Is that making sense? I mean, that's

Speaker 2 absolutely sense.

Speaker 4 And my basic message is, if we want to fix America, and I desperately want to fix America, it's probably not going to come in my lifetime, but I want to have it come at least in my grandchildren's lifetime.

Speaker 4 And we got to get about it now.

Speaker 4 And that requires mobilizing large numbers of people at the local, large numbers of young people at the local level, thinking about their obligations to other people and not just about themselves.

Speaker 4 Sorry, that's the message.

Speaker 2 No, no, I don't think you have to be sorry. I think it's given us homework.
So

Speaker 2 play Pokemon Go

Speaker 2 with people in your local neighborhood and help them catch the Pokemon that they can't.

Speaker 2 That's essentially

Speaker 2 because you're helping each other.

Speaker 5 And then when you speak to them, talk to them about the spiritual awakening. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So you guys are going to lead this revolution. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Line me up.

Speaker 2 Let me know how I can join.

Speaker 2 Bob, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you, Bob. You know, it's such a simple idea.

Speaker 2 And unfortunately, sometimes the best ideas are so simple that people don't want them. It's simple, but it's hard.
Yeah, no, but that's what I mean. It's the same way, like eating healthy.

Speaker 2 It's a simple idea. Eat the vegetables and don't eat things that come in packets.

Speaker 2 Your body changes. And people are like, Yeah, yeah, but I need something more complicated than that.
But yeah, I want to say thank you very much. Thank you for doing the work.

Speaker 2 Thank you for taking the time with us. And, you know, we started at Robert, we end at Bob.
Thank you very much. It was wonderful getting to know you.
And

Speaker 2 I hope you do get to see some of this in your lifetime. So don't write it off yet.
You keep talking about it, you're going to be gone.

Speaker 2 Maybe some of it will change. We'll see.
We'll do our best.

Speaker 4 Thank you, Christiana. Thank you.
And thank you, Trevor.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much, Bob.

Speaker 2 Bye.

Speaker 2 What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jodi Avigan.

Speaker 2 Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer.
Music, Mixing and Mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 2 Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now?