Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]

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?

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

You may not know this, but more Americans bowl than vote, for example.

Wow.

So we've 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. in, you should get the little die and then you vote straight up.
That's what we should be doing. Great.
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And 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. So if you ask a lot of people in the streets, if you said, know robert putnam they would probably maybe say no but if the person in the street that you asked was somebody like barack obama yeah then he'd be like uh yeah i know robert and i know him well and you'd be like wow actually he would say bob i've been over this um there's a really funny in new york times interview in which the new york times interview was trying to say I'm a New York Times interview in which the New York Times interview was trying to say I'm New York Times reporter pretty well connected I know Robert Putnam and Barack just says no it's Bob I like that 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, 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.
And we're experiencing this around the world. But tell us a little bit about that.
How does Barack Obama, President of the United States, come to know you as Bob? How does this journey begin? About 20 years ago, well, maybe not quite that, 15 years ago maybe, 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 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. It's not just loneliness.
It's also affects, as you said, and we're going to come back to that, the chances of democracy surviving. We had a big multidimensional matrix.
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, et cetera. You can imagine this multidimensional scheme.
And we got it all filled, but we had one box that we had not yet filled for a young black community organizer. 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.
Because it turns out my 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 they 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.
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 a mascot in this group and and he's very ambitious it's clear he's very ambitious but he's also cute he's a little bit like the mosque like like a mascot in this group and so you know in like in a summer camp people develop nicknames and our nickname for him was the governor because we thought what a joke this guy's ambitious and he thinks he's going to eventually become hilarious governor of illinois this is the guy who five years later is the president of the United States. So you weren't wrong.
Governor was a joke. It was a joke.
There was something else that's important about him. Yes.
You know he's very smart, but he's also, at least he can be very quiet. So this is a group of big egos.
And so the first, you know, we'd gather on a 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 telling us how important they were and why their views were the most important. And Obama kept silent during all of that.
And then after lunch, he'd say, you know, I've been listening to this. 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 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.
Oh, wow. He's able to see through all this, you know, all the fighting.
Yeah, 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.
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 social isolation and why this can very well be the reason society crumbles society as we know it you know everyone talks about we're more polarized than ever. 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 neighbor's names.
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 who really has worked on helping us understand the data behind the feeling.
And you've written a few books about this. Bowling Alone was obviously, I mean, your seminal work, which was then, it went on like an interesting journey and we'll talk about some of it, the praise, the criticism.
Right. And then you talked about like making democracies work, et cetera.
But let's start with the fundamental problem at the bottom of it. Sure.
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? Well, of course, there are reasons to worry about people being lonely. That's indeed the title of this film that's now out you know, out and about on Netflix.
That's Join or Die, yeah. 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.
And that is their real, serious health effects. And this is controlling for everything you like.
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 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 economy grows more slowly.
Our society becomes more unequal. The political polarization is a big consequence of the lack of social capital.

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, all sorts of connections.

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

Thank you. All sorts of connections.
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 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 to clarify this for people, what do you mean? Because there are people who will say, but Robert, I've got followers on Instagram and I talk to people on my Facebook and I see people at school.
And what do you mean? Yeah, also off that, I'm curious about the we, because my world is predominantly women and people of color. And our complaint is that we can't get rid of people.
Like, you know, like you've started off with like kind of this collective we, which I'd like to disrupt a bit, right? Because there is no real collective we, hence this kind of political, the political differences that we have. And Black women in this country are probably one of the few groups where life expectancy is actually holding or going up, Right.
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. 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. 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.
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 our whole people.
And we had this group where people pay dues all the time. And when my great uncle died, part of the dues contributed to his funeral.
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. 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? Because there's 20 people knocking your door. And I'm not saying that from my personal experience.
But, you know. So I will say, funny enough, I hear you both saying the same thing, genuinely.
So, 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? And how close yeah and how close those are 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 you're going black women's life expectancy is holding and going up in america because partly they are in these tight-knit groups 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? 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.
Damn. I know your life.
And Christiana grew up in London, right? But we have similarities. And the main thing for me was, till this day even, black women almost never found themselves without a community.
And they worked towards it. 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.
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.
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, because I actually hear you both saying the same thing.
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.
And Christiana, what you're saying is like, you know, black women don't seem to have the same issue. So maybe let's dig into that.
You did a lot of this work in Italy, right? A lot of your seminal work came from Italy. Originally, yes.
Yes. And 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. You know, you go to Italy and really you're on this journey of trying to understand why democracies work better or worse, or even to get more granular.
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. And help me understand how Italy ties the story together for you.
What do you learn in Italy? Well, I want to step back just a little bit. 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 parts of soil, you'd water them differently, and then you'd measure and see how, you know, which plants flourished and which faltered.
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 look the same on paper, but the environments into which they were 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 were very, very different. Some were very advanced economically.
Some were very backward economically. Some were Catholic.
Some were communist, et cetera. And so we, over 20, 25 years, followed those regional governments.
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. 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. We thought maybe it was just economic wealth made the difference, or we thought maybe it was education that made a difference.
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, 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.
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 a lot of that kind of what I came to call social capital, that is these connections among people, 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 they didn't, and they had terrible, corrupt, inefficient, 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? No, they had very tiny little groups. Families.
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. Now, what I'm trying to say is their we was strong, but very narrow.
And what was characteristic up north was that they had much broader groups in which people from different families and different walks of life would come together to sing. 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.
No, 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.
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. So it happened in the home church where I was dedicated in.
The man that christened me christened my children. Do you know what I mean? So like this is, 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.

Do you get where I'm going?

Yeah, I hear what you're saying.

It's like this extended group and clan and it's very different and it's very diverse.

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

Maybe let's start with this this part the why why why does it change anything 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 we have confirmation bias we'll pick the thing that we we think is the cause right and we'll stick with it so we go oh society's declining because of social media oh society's declining because of politics oh society's declining because okay but you had a natural experiment that very few you know social scientists will ever have help 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.
Let me see if I can explain it this way. If you see people regularly and you're good friends, I don't mean intimate friends, but you have a good friendship, much less a deeper friendship.
What tends to evolve is a norm of reciprocity. That is, I'll do this for you now 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.
I'll do this for you now without expecting something back. 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.
So in other words, everybody learns that the people in this town are nice to each other. Wouldn't you love to live in a place where people were nice to each

other? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And moreover, and this is the main point of Bowling Alone, we learned when we carried those ideas back to the United States that that has changed over time.
There have been periods in American history when we did have connections with other people. I grew up in a small town in Ohio in the late 1950s, and nobody locked their door.
When I tell my children and grandchildren that, they think Grandpa's lying. But no, in that period, and it wasn't about race.
There were black kids. I played football.
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.
and there's a picture on the cover of bowling alone of me and my bowling league when I was in the junior high school. And there are three white guys.
I'm the tall skinny one in the middle. And there are two black guys.
And so this was not about race. I mean, it didn't 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. But I mean, in terms this, in a small town in the 1950s, people left their door unlocked.
And that's because of what I, in my jargon, call social capital. 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.
There are differences across America, and the places that are still relatively high in social connection are somewhat more trustworthy. I'm sorry, I'm going to tell you more social science than you want to know.
People do an interesting study. They drop letters on the street with money in them, sealed, but with money in them and addressed.
And then they ask, in any given town or a neighborhood, how many of those letters are actually put in the mailbox so the owner can get their money back?

What a fascinating experiment.

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.

And there are places, this is hard to believe, there are places in America where if you drop

an envelope with money in it, you're 80% likely to get the money back.

So big differences.

Yeah. So Bob, maybe help us understand, you know, the idea of bowling alone.
Because I think, you know, it is important to help people understand that first of all, it is an example, right? 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? Because everyone can go bowling, but it's the alone that really became the signifier that showed what was going wrong in America and in many other parts of the world where people are experiencing this. So help us understand.
There's been virtually no decline in bowling itself, but it used to be that people bowled in teams, in leagues, and there has been a complete collapse of team bowling, of league bowling. 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 turns out to be a good title. But what is the difference? What is the experiential difference? Yes.
Christiana, have you ever bowled? Yeah, a couple of times, but I'm from England. Yeah, that's true.
So it's more of a football team culture. No, no, no.
Okay. So actually, I know where every bowling alley in London is because whenever I've gone over there, I'm selling books.
Every journalist thought their clever idea would be to interview me in a bowling alley so I can take you to every bowling alley in central London. In 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. 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.
And they're mostly talking, you know, and they're talking about what was on TV last night or they're talking about, occasionally they're talking about, you know, the local schools or, you know, whether a bond issue should be passed to cover the costs of the new sewer system or whatever. And now I'm going to suddenly change that description.
Occasionally, they're having a conversation about public civic life. That's highfalutin for saying they just got into a discussion with people they know well.
Remember, these are people they see every week, and they know how to interpret what the people say. They're not total strangers because they fall in a league and with other members of the team, but they're also real human beings.
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 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. It's not just two guys yelling at each other or two gals yelling at each other.
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 so it seemed to me a useful way of describing how bowling in a league, in a team, is not just fun.
I mean, it's important to emphasize this. I really wish I'd done emphasize this more.
Social capital can't just be eat your spinach. It's got to be fun, too.
I mean, it's so and that's why I use the example of bowling. It's not saying, oh, go to a good government meeting.
Well, who wants to go to a good government meeting? It's got to be fun and bowling is fun, but it's also a little bit like a good government meeting. I may be exaggerating here, but that's where the idea of 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 affairs. Right.
If we only meet at a political rally, our conversations will only be political and we'll forget what connects us yeah one one other thing i wanted to throw in maybe here 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 because you know when you're talking about let's go bowling together i just think of personally 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 yeah i wish i could but i've got to Yeah, I want to, but I, you know, the work and the, and then it's like my kid and I got to see the kid because I don't have childcare and I've got to. 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 a 60-year time trend? And it's very interesting. invite me back back for another two hours, and I'll talk about how our lives have changed.
For example, back in the day in the 60s, 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.
Some people speak more, some people say more. No, that's impressive though, still, yeah.
But here's the complicated part, actually. We're spending less time at work than we used to.
Less time at work. No ways.
So less time at work. So what do we do without extra time? All of it is spent in front of screens.
there's's been a steady steady long-term rise in the amount of time we spend in front of screens and the most recent data you might think well okay used to be screens like television and now it's screens like you know yeah yeah you know some phones and ipads and whatever yeah yeah yeah no 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. 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. We've added since the advent of social media another two hours a day, two hours a day.

And yet we're spending less time in the presence of other people.

I mean, the data are just the worst you could imagine.

We've got more free time.

We do have more free time.

Wow.

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

Damn.

I feel called out.

Wow, wow, wow.

Well, you asked me for data.

No, I mean, yeah, I see every binging and every TV show, I see it very differently now.

But of course, I want people to watch this podcast.

This is a different kind. Yeah, but I mean, wow.

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

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. 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? Or do you think that can be an alternative third space that maybe can foster that sense of trust? Christiana, you ask lots of really good questions, and they're all complicated. And I'm going to try.
I'm a complicated person, Robert. I'm sorry.
Did you say Robert? No, it's Bob, please. Oh, we get Bob now.
We get Bob, okay. I was going to say Professor Putnam.
Oh, please. I mean, if I get a call, a phone call, and the person says, Robert, I just hang up right away.
If they know me, it's a nice screener I use as answering the phone. Okay, bump, bump.
Okay. I want to say a couple of things about social media and virtual connections and how they compare to real face-to-face connections, what some people call IRL, in real life.
When social media first came out, everybody thought it was, you know, unbelievably great. World peace was going to break out.
And we would all be friends each other because we'd be all connecting across. That always at that time seemed a little strange to me, but the academic work, although that's true, was always more skeptical 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, 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. But, you know, you can guess what Mark Zuckerberg thought.
And then he at 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. But the academic research, I repeat, was always skeptical about that.
But then came a terrible natural experiment, COVID. 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...
I have so far been phrasing this problem as if the choice we had was between either face-to-face or social media, right? Yes. But actually, that's not true.
Almost all of our networks today are simultaneously face-to-face and internet-based. My wife, Rosemary, and I do see each other a lot every day.
That is, there is a face-to-face relationship there, but she has a different office than mine. And astonishingly, much of the time I sent her an email or sent 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. They're the same.
And I want to use a metaphor here if I can. In chemistry, we have the idea of an alloy is a mixture of two different base chemicals

like of an alloy is a mixture of two different base chemicals like tin and copper, and you stir it and heat it and so on. And you get something that is neither tin or copper, but I never can remember bronze or brass or something like that.
And brass is different from either the tin or the copper. Okay, so far so good.
Now what I'm saying is all of our networks today are alloys. So the question really is, how can we get an alloy that has the benefits of both? 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, but that has the advantages of face-to-faceness, namely you can actually get together and cooperate with somebody.
Do we know how to do that? And the answer is we sure do. We know how to, for example, there are networks that 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.

But then they're also in the neighborhood, so I could go and get the...

You go get the rake in person.

So it's not a technical problem.

So why don't we have lots of these things?

It sounds like it's wonderful to have this, right?

And it turns out the real answer is these big companies. They know how to do it.
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. And we had a wonderful conversation.
They clearly knew what I meant, and they knew the difference between face-toto-face and connected and they knew how to use, they conveyed the idea that they knew how to... Oh, they knew how to use their tools to get people to connect in person.
Yes, but why don't they do that? Answer, it's much better for their business line if people fight than if they cooperate. You can't sell ads in person.
That's another problem. No, it's though you can't 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 this seems like a a similar problem that exists in many different industries and fields right in that like let's say food 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 those products are oftentimes made to make you crave them and want them way more than you naturally would yeah right and you know this because you as a person just think about you as a person you do not say to yourself i should do that again you don't you're gonna i can't believe i did that again i had too much of it i had 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 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 but it feels like we're in like an arms race against companies who go we're not going to give you a break if you have a choice of 10 meals we want you to pick the snacks 10 times and we're going to design it in such a way that you're going to pick the snacks 10 times but then on the outside they'll say 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 you get what I'm saying? And I think the same thing goes for, like what you're saying 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? The simplest answer is infinite scroll.
Yeah. Right? 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 to take a break now and then yo you can just make me take a break yeah you could literally they could literally just go like tiktok scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll you're done this is your limit for the day yeah and you know what 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 like you're chronically online let's not talk about me no we must talk about i'm an addict but bob is so funny you mentioned the neighborhood group and the rake so recently i joined my neighborhood whatsapp group and um it's very nimby i thought it was very nimby-ish but there was just like legit concerns about crime in the neighborhood and the LAPD getting out when they would come out.
And, you know, sometimes people be 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 we're not profile. Like, it was so refreshing.
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.
And it's a white guy said, hey, guys, we should be careful. And people figured it out amongst themselves.
Yeah. 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.
And there's something about that group that's completely transformed. Like I would be sensitive typically if I read about a description.
but everyone has this trust among each other to say even if we say the wrong thing we don't mean

in the wrong way 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 i need flour does anyone have flour 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 i don't want to say her name because she probably doesn't want people but then do you meet in person to what she messaged me and she said i she was like 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 and she organizes neighborhood walks oh there you see this completely changed how i perceive not just people in my neighborhood but how i even see how others profiling but it's that it's neighborhood. There's something to the neighborhood group is what I'm trying to say, Bob.
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 arm them and so on.
Or you could know one another's first name. The second is the more important crime-fighting strategy.
That is, it's more effective to have eyes on the street from your neighbors, just as you're saying. And what I'm talking about is big, huge studies that have done this experimentally.
They've taken different neighborhoods. This is not like an opinion.
This is data that's been done. Yeah, well, I'm sorry.
That's what I do for a living. No, I mean, that's what I'm just clarifying for people.
I love that. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, at any rate, the one, I don't want to interrupt this conversation, except that I hope we have a chance to go back to bowling alone and explain and say why it explains Trump.
Let's fast forward to that point. 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 right 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 they don't believe anything will get done 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 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 why does the government do your health care 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 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 be a running group.
It could be a bike club. It could be anything.
does america go from having fewer clubs to creating the movement that leads to donald trump right remember bowling alone said 25 years ago that we were had been for 25 years by at that point had been it'd been 25 years we've been going downhill in terms of our social connections yeah various stories anything that brought people together from different walks of life to connect across different boundaries. 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. 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. 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.
American democracy had these problems long before Trump appeared on the scene. 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 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 bannett has said i could show you the quote well we were trying to figure out how we could get don trump and then we read this book by this crazy guy putnam about bowling alone no ways are you being serious yeah yeah she's quote you can find i mean later on wait so how 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 they said effectively as i said in the book but i wasn't.
You have all these isolated people. 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? Yeah.
Well, that's what Bowling Alone said, and I didn't act on it. Maybe I should have.
Maybe I could the president president president bob putnam and jd vance has said something very similar to this there's lots of empirical evidence i won't bore you with all the data there's lots of data that's saying the strongest predictor actually of support for donald trump of places that support donald trump and people that support donald trump is social isolation. 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 bullying together. 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? 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.
I go, one of the things I'm saddest about in America and I see around the world is the decline of churches. Yes.
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?

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

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. 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. And I think about it through that and it's like, 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. 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 the church was the place where you got you found out about a new job listing you know someone music lesson people learn instruments people learn music people think about how all the greatest singers yeah of like you know the last whatever many decades have all come from church yeah you know so the training the connections the connections, the understanding that it came from.
And it's funny that you say that. When we were still on the Daily Show, I remember the thing I used to talk to everyone about was how Jordan Klepper would say this.
I'll say to him, he'd go to all these Trump rallies. And I said, Jordan, what do you notice when you're at the Trump rallies? 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. 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.
We're going to sell you little scarves that you can all wear. And you're going to come into a room you know what we're all gonna hang out and chant this 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 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 he's got a lot i don't remember that particular you don't remember that moment yeah sure i do this was one of i i remember watching that moment going this man is either he's completely lost it yeah or he is a savant who's completely understood it and now i think he's the latter yeah yeah donald i thought he was a farmer 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 he's the latter.
Yeah. I thought he was a former.
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.
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. 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.

Someone's kids left to go to a big city,

so now they don't have, they've been forgotten.

And it's just a bunch of forgotten people

who are now seen, they come together

and when you go home, watch the video.

I promise you, it is one of the most amazing things.

Trump literally just goes like,

yo, just play my playlist.

He shouted to some person who rolls with him

Thank you. 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, yo, just play my playlist.
He shouted 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 and he just dances. Don't go anywhere because we got more What AudiUSA.com.
Always pay careful attention to the road and do not drive while distracted. 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? Which I think what Trump it as much. 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 club membership. They took care of each other.
They've got uniforms. Yeah.
It's just like, how do we, in this very polarized moment 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. There are different kinds of social capital, different kinds of networks.
And one important distinction is between what I call bridging social capital, that is ties that link you to people unlike yourself, and bonding social capital. Bonding social capital are the ties that link you to people just like yourself.
So my bonding social capital are my friends with other elderly, white, male, Jewish professors. That's my bonding social capital.
And my bridging social capital are my ties to people of a generation. I have a little bit of bridging that I rely on heavily across generations because I've got my grandchildren.
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 that's a little bit what christiana was earlier saying the people who would really take care of her she got who would bring her chicken soup or the equivalent would be bonding social capital i'm saying bonding social capital is not necessarily bad but bridging social capital is crucial for a modern, diverse society like ours. Bridging across racial, across age, across gender, across party, and so on.
So far, so good. Right, right, right.
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.

Right.

She didn't think I'd understand. What she meant was, Bobby, bridging social capital is harder to build in bonding social capital, but she didn't think I'd understand that, which is why she used the avian metaphor about birds.
But that's the basic point. So here's the challenge.
Much of Trump's's support it draws from different kinds of demographic groups of course but it's bonded heavily on politics and not bridging at all and so now i'm back at the question why doesn't putnam saying he wants lots of of kukuk's clan yeah the answer is i don't want lots of kukuk's clan because it's bonding and I want a lot of more bridging. Does that make sense to what I'm saying? Yeah, 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.
I would argue the reason the Democrats didn't do as well in this election is because they were bonding, they weren't bridging. Yes.
So if I look at Barack Obama's- They were bonding and they thought they were bridging. Yeah, at Barack I look at Barack Obama's They were bonding And they thought they were bridging Yeah But if I look at Barack Obama's campaign Right Barack Obama was going Hey hey hey hey I don't care if you're in Kentucky Let's connect Let's connect Yeah Do you have this issue? 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 He was bridging He was going to Iowa Yeah yeah yeah And he was like Yes we can like it was bridging bridging bridging absolutely we we it's gotta be yes right yeah and so as much as it's easy for everyone to be like donald trump and you know and we're all guilty of that 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 you know, white men are this and the rich have done that.

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.
We're all struggling. Let's all come together as struggling people.
We all deserve health care. You all doesn't matter where you're from.
Bridge, bridge, bridge. And I think in this election in particular, there was a lot of bonding from both parties.
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. I want to know what Bob thinks of that.
So this is, sorry, you didn't invite me on here to cite all my books, but I'm going to cite yet another book. No, that's exactly why we invited you on here.
You're an expert. Okay, I want to talk about the growing gap between rich folks and poor folks in America.
And the book was called Our Kids. The book was focused on a whole series of charts and graphs that showed the gap between rich kids and poor kids growing.
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.
The book is based on the upper third of American society, which is basically college educated folks. 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. 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 they would live in the same neighborhood, but they were increasingly living in not racially segregated, but class segregated homes.
And what I'm trying to say is that class lens was, when I wrote the book, at least as important as the racial lens. And it's becoming, relatively speaking, the class lens is becoming more important relative to the racial lens.
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. He was down, not down not at the bottom meaning the poorest of the poor but the lower two-thirds of the of the country right 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.
Now, it sounds like I'm saying, let's forget about 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. Yeah.
To follow up on that, because a lot has been said about black male increasing vote for Republicans. They actually split the vote and they look at the black male vote specifically.
And the black men most likely to vote for Trump were non-college educated and unchurched. Exactly.
Unchurched as well. Unchurched.
That was the key. They were secular up to a high school diploma.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Black, young black men.
That's the group most likely to vote for trump the black men that voted um democrat um are college educated 10 to 10 church professionals yeah and that's where and they they vote at similar levels for um democrats as black women do in general so that that group that's actually splitting off from the democratic party is like the most oppressed class among black people i almost want to know what you think the future will be, because 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. And I was talking to them about living in America and I was talking to them about coming from South Africa and everything.
And this woman said to me, 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. It's all about class.
And it really was an interesting idea, which has stuck with me because I go like, yeah. The most classy society ever.
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 Oftentimes when we talk about issues That are like pertaining to black people You'd be like, oh, black people That has just become an easy identifier For a class issue, right? And 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.
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 between white people who are proudly racist and black people who are militantly fighting against racism.
But they were like, yo. Union jobs.
Yeah, the guy 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 the black panthers formed a mini club that wasn't the black panthers that involved all of these poor people yeah 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 is like these clubs came together around the issue of class. And so now let me ask you this then.
So do you think, say the people who are in the bottom two thirds, are they more likely to be negatively affected by not having a social club? Yes. and they're certainly much more likely to be socially isolated i mean uh they've got they've got at least two strikes against them well maybe three a they're more socially isolated okay and b they're poor financially and c they have got less education.
So all that, those folks are in a pickle. And what that means is it's important to just understand the math.
This is simple, simple arithmetic. We can have a clean system here in which we had all the colleges to compete, 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. We, the Democrats, if we're going to retain power democratically, we've got to begin appealing, not ignoring race, I'm not saying that, but appealing more to the class-based interests.
I want to try to end with three to-dos.

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 he'll...

Yeah, I was asking for my homework, the to-dos.

Okay, great.

So the what now?

The what now, Bob Putnam?

I'm going to try to keep it simple,

not because you guys couldn't understand something more complicated,

but because I think we've got to understand in very simple terms. One, go young.
It's much more important that we focus on young people, regardless of where they are right now, because they are the future. And I'm now talking as an historian looking back, not just over the last, you know, 5, 10, 20, 50 years, I'm looking over the last 125 years.

In my last book, which was called The Upswing, 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 high tech, but it will involve real relations with other people before you move on a perfect example of that for me was pokemon go so i don't i'm assuming neither of you played it but 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.
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. But what they did that was amazing was you had to catch the creatures in the real world.
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 but i will 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 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

I'm going to go. 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 and bob and christiana when i tell you there were if i was just to estimate there were like maybe 500 people 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 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 so we're all running through central park together and one of the kid turns turns looks at me this kid's like maybe like 14 15 and he looks at me and he's like he's like trevor noah he's like you you play pokemon go and he's like now i know I'm in the right place and we run together but I what I loved about it was to what you're saying it was the perfect culmination it wasn't the either or we were all playing a digital game it was the alloy 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 and it was such a a beautiful, because once the Snorlax was gone, all everyone could do now is talk.
Where are you from? Hey, where do you live? What's the best one you've caught? And this was like, the game won awards, by the way, even for getting people fit and running and moving. 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 would be like, oh, I don't know if you can.
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? Rule number two is go local. Go local.
All the times that there have been major social revolutions, they bubbled up from the bottom and at local levels people can more easily collaborate across party and other lines because somebody's got to fix the sewers and so you don't have to have an ideological discussion about how important is is the environment everybody knows that the sewer's got to be fixed if we're going to be able to survive in this town or the schools. You know, you can have a national debate about, I don't know, some issue in education, but somebody's got to fix our schools right here.
And so sometimes left-wingers are in favor of national solutions. And 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.
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 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? The high school was invented in 1910.
God did not invent the high school. It was invented recently.
And where was the high school? By high school, I mean a secondary school, a public high school that everybody could go to. We'd had private schools, of course, 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. It was not invented in Massachusetts or in Chicago or in L.A.
It was invented in small towns in the middle of America. And it went viral, 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- That's amazing.
So what I'm trying to say is the really good ideas, policy ideas, the next time- They spread. And thirdly, and I want to come back now to this issue of religion, go morality.

Stick with me.

I'm an academic, but I'm about to start preaching at you, both of you.

I apologize for that.

When we look at long-run changes, long-run changes in political polarization, in economic inequality, in connections and so on, the leading indicator, it turns out that people in any given period and place actually think they have obligations to other people. We need to have a moral reawakening in America.
I'm talking about simple golden rule. Read the Sermon on the Mount.
I mean any any religion says worry at least as much about other people as you do about yourself religion should religion should be a we phenomenon not an i phenomenon yeah so if i had a magic wand i don't but maybe somebody listen and go have a magic wand. I try to make the magic wand make young people, remember young, in localities across America, think that they have obligations to other people.
Is that making sense? Yeah, that makes complete sense. 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. And we got to get about it now.
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. Sorry, that's the message.
No, no, I don't think you have to be sorry. I think it's given us homework.
So play Pokemon Go with people in your local neighborhood and help them catch the Pokemon that they can't. Yes.
That's essentially because you're helping each other. And then when you speak to them, talk to them about the spiritual awakening.
Yeah. So you guys are going to lead this revolution.
Find me up. Let me know how I can join.
Bob, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you, Bob. You know, it's such a simple idea.
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 like, it's the same way like eating healthy.
It's a simple idea. Eat the vegetables and don't eat things that come in packets.
And move your body. 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. 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 I hope you do get to see some of this in your lifetime. So don't write it off yet.
You keep talking about you're going to be gone. Maybe some of it will change.
We'll see. We'll do our best.
Thank you, Christiana. Thank you.
And thank you, Trevor. Thank you so much, Bob.
Bye. 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 Jody Avigan. Our senior producer is Jess Hackle.
Claire Slaughter is our producer.

Music, mixing, and mastering by Hannes Brown.

Thank you so much for listening.

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