Join or Die with Robert Putnam

Trevor and Christiana sit down with noted author and political scientist Robert Putnam. They discuss why community is now more essential than ever, both for the survival of democracy and for our very survival as a species. The three also debate whether social media diminishes our social capital, and why more people bowl in America than vote. (Hint: If more people bowled America would be more united).

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Trevor Noah?

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• 0:35Trevor Noah?

  This segment is brought to you by Google Pixel. You know what's really frustrating? Knowing the exact information you need is somewhere on your phone, but still ending up wasting your time digging through five different apps just to actually find it. Thankfully, Google Pixel 11 is designed with Gemini intelligence, so it can proactively find the information I need right when I need it. Like my flight info on travel days or my calendar when Eugene texts me to hang out. Oh, sorry Eugene, I'm booked. Learn more about what Google Pixel 11 can do at googlestore.com. These AI features are available in select countries and languages for users 18 and over, and make sure to check responses.

• 1:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, booked forever, forever. 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?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, bowling is big in America. You may not know this, but more Americans bowl than vote, for example.

• 1:38Trevor Noah?

  Wow, so we gotta put polls at the bowling booth? When you put your fingers in, you should like get the little die and then you vote straight off? That's what we should be doing.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 1:54Trevor Noah?

  This is What Now? with Trevor Noah.

• 2:05Trevor Noah?

  I cannot tell you how excited I am to have you on the podcast. 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. 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. But if the person in the street that you asked was somebody like Barack Obama, then he'd be like, "Yeah, I know Robert and I know him well."

• 2:31Speaker 01

  No, 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, "I'm New York Times reporter, pretty well-connected. I know Robert Putnam." And Barack just says, "No, it's Bob."

• 2:49Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 2:49Trevor Noah?

  Hey, that's when you, that's when you know somebody. So actually, let's talk about that because it, 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, you know, in the next few decades. And we're experiencing this around the world. But, but, 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?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  About 20 years ago, not, 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 it's political consequences. It's not just loneliness, it's 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. We want 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 multi-dimensional scheme.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  And we got it all filled, but we had one box that we had not yet filled for a young, black, community organizer.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 4:45Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  And he said, well, he's a, 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, and he's very ambitious. It's clear he's very ambitious, but he's also cute. He's a little bit like the mascot, 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,

• 5:15Trevor Noah?

  Hilarious.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Governor of Illinois. This is a guy who five years later is the President of the United States.

• 5:22Trevor Noah?

  So you weren't, you weren't wrong. Governor was a joke.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  It was a joke.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  There was something else that's important about him.

• 5:28Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  You know, he's very smart, but he's also, at least he can be very quiet. So, and, and this is a group of, of big eagles. And so the first, you know, we gather on a Friday night, Friday night and all day, a month 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, and Obama kept silent during all of that. And then after lunch, he'd say, 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.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:25Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  He's able to see through all this, you know, all the fighting.

• 6:31Trevor Noah?

  He's able to, 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.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Good.

• 6:39Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 6:50Trevor Noah?

  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 neighbors' 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, you know, Bowling Alone was obviously, I mean, you know, your seminal work, which was then, it went on like an interesting journey and we'll talk about some of it, you know, the praise, the criticism.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:36Trevor Noah?

  And then you talked about like making democracies work, et cetera. But let's start with the fundamental problem at the bottom of it.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 7:43Trevor Noah?

  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?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Well, of course, there are reasons to worry about people being lonely. That's indeed the title of this film that's now, you know, out and about on Netflix and in theaters.

• 8:03Trevor Noah?

  Join or Die, yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  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 everything you like. It's, 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.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  And the collective effects, by the way, are not just democracy. Our, our economy grows more slowly, our society becomes more unequal. That political polarization is a big consequence of, 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 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.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  And now, 25 years later, it turns out they've gone down even further.

• 9:38Trevor Noah?

  When you're talking about social connectedness, just to clarify this for people, what do you mean? Because there are people who say, "But, Robert, I've got followers on Instagram, and I talk to people on my Facebook, and I, you know, I see people at school," and what do you mean?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  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 Ibo. It wasn't just about my tribe, it was about my clan, which is a whole people. And we had this group where people paid 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.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  And I'm not saying that from my personal experience, but, you know.

• 11:23Trevor Noah?

  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?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  And how close those are, yeah.

• 11:42Trevor Noah?

  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'd 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.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  I know your life. I read your life story, so.

• 12:13Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 12:16Trevor Noah?

  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's self explanatory. And so maybe that's what I want to try 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,

• 13:00Trevor Noah?

  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 issues. 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.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Originally, yes.

• 13:15Trevor Noah?

  Yes, and, 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.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 13:32Trevor Noah?

  You know, you go to Italy and really you 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 this story together for you. What do you learn in Italy?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Well, um, 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 pots 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 nineteen seventy. They created a new set of regional governments all across Italy from the up in the Alps to down in Sicily. Um, they all have the same powers and money. They look the same on paper, but the environments into which they were implanted uh in were very, very different.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Some were very advanced economically, some were very backward economically, some were Catholic, some were communist, et cetera. And so we over for twenty twenty five 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. Um, 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 coral societies, singing groups and football clubs and so on.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  By which I mean, some 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, 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.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  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 wanna, 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, 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

• 16:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  No, I, but I, 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.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  The man that christened me christened my children. Do you know what I mean? So like this is, I, I, 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, the fact that this, it's not foreign. Do you, do you get what I'm going?

• 17:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I, I hear what you're saying.

• 17:49Speaker 02

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

• 17:56Trevor Noah?

  So there's, there's one thing I want, I want us to get to in a way. May, maybe let's start with, with this part. The why.

• 18:06Trevor Noah?

  Why, why does it change anything? So what I love about this story is, you know, oftentimes when we, 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.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:21Trevor Noah?

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

• 18:48Speaker 01

  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 know, you, you have a good, good friendship.

• 19:00Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Uh, much less a, a deeper friendship.

• 19:04Speaker 01

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

• 19:41Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  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. Um, in the night, late nineteen fifties. And nobody locked their door. And when I tell my children and grandchildren that, they say, they think grandpa's lying. But no, in that period, and it wasn't about race. There were, there were black kids. I played football. I, there's a picture on the cover of Bowling Alone of me and my bowling league. When I was in the, in junior high school and there are three white guys, I'm the tall, skinny one in the middle, and there are two black guys.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  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 of this. In a small town in the nineteen fifties.

• 20:41Trevor Noah?

  Right, right, right.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  People left their door unlocked. And that's because of what I had my jargon called 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. Um, are in social connection are somewhat more trustworthy. In fact, they. 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.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  On the street with money in them. Sealed but with money in them and addressed. And then they ask of 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?

• 21:41Trevor Noah?

  What a fascinating experiment.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  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. Yeah, you're eighty percent likely to get the money back. So.

• 21:59Trevor Noah?

  That's amazing.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Differences.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:01Trevor Noah?

  So Bob, maybe, maybe help us understand, you know, the, 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.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:11Trevor Noah?

  And, 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.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  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 turned out to be a good title. But what is the difference? What is the experiential difference?

• 22:59Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Christiana, have you ever bowled?

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple of times, but I'm from England.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  So more of a football team culture.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  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, 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 had 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.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Because they, because they bowl 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 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 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 gonna have to get along because the next week they're gonna be back in the same bowling alley.

• 25:06Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  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, I, 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 gotta be fun, too. I mean, it's, it's, it's, so, and that's why I use the example of bowling. It's not saying, oh, go to a, a good government meeting. Well, who wants to go to a good mother, good government meeting? It's gotta 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 bowling, a bowling together came and then the opposite of that was we are just

• 25:49Speaker 01

  less opportunity for encountering people that we know well to talk occasionally about public affairs.

• 25:56Trevor Noah?

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

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:02Trevor Noah?

  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 fifty, sixty years has affected people's ability to do that? Because, you know, when you're talking about, let's go bowling together, I, I, 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 finish this thing for work. Yeah. Yeah, I want to, but I, you know, the, the work and the, and then it's like my kid and I got to see the kid because I don't have childcare. Yeah.

• 26:47Trevor Noah?

  And I've got to, and I, and I wonder, because you are a man who, as you say, you've lived through time. You know, I, 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.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  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 sixty year time trend? And it's very interesting. Invite me back for another two hours and I'll talk about how our, how our lives have changed. For example, um, back in the day in the sixties, we slept, the average American slept uh, seven point five hours a day. And that average is exactly seven point five hours today. There's been no change on average. Some people speak more, some people.

• 27:43Trevor Noah?

  No, that's impressive though, still, yeah.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  But here's the complicated part, actually. We're spending less time at work than we used to. Less time.

• 27:52Trevor Noah?

  No ways.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  So, less time at work. So what do we do with that extra time? 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. 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.

• 28:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, some social media.

• 28:17Trevor Noah?

  Phones and iPads and whatever, yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  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, I've now, don't quote me exactly, because I mean, I've got the data, I just don't have it in front of me at this moment. I didn't know you were going to ask me this question. Um, we are added, we've added since the advent of, of um, social media, another two hours a day. Two hours a day.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Um, 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.

• 28:55Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 28:56Speaker 01

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

• 29:01Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  I feel called out.

• 29:04Trevor Noah?

  Wow, wow, wow.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Well, you asked me for data.

• 29:07Trevor Noah?

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

• 29:13Speaker 01

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

• 29:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but I mean, wow.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Listen to the podcast on the way to meet your friends.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 29:22Trevor Noah?

  Yes, that's why we love podcasts.

• 29:26Trevor Noah?

  We're gonna continue this conversation right after this short break.

• 29:31Trevor Noah?

  Some of the most interesting things you learn happen while you're doing something completely ordinary. Maybe you're cooking dinner while watching a history video. Maybe you're on a flight catching up on a long form interview. Or maybe you're trying to figure out how to fix something in your house because apparently owning a screwdriver means you're an electrician now. But you see, that's one of the things I love about YouTube Premium. I travel a lot, so I download videos before a flight. That way, I'm not leaving my entertainment in the hands of airplane wifi. Yeah, I've made that mistake before. You think you're gonna watch something in 4K and suddenly everyone's face is pixels. But one of my favorite features is smart downloads.

• 30:12Trevor Noah?

  You see, YouTube Premium can automatically download recommended videos for you based on what you already watch. So sometimes I'll get on a plane, I look at my phone, I'm like, ah, I didn't download anything. Then it's like, no. YouTube already thought about this. They packed entertainment for me in my little lunchbox. And with background play, I can lock my phone, switch apps, and whatever I'm watching just keeps on going. So. If you like YouTube, you will love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Verizon knows that holiday decisions and holiday deals can be complicated. Every year, I tell myself I'm gonna keep the holidays simple. And then the invitations start. They start coming in.

• 30:57Trevor Noah?

  Should I go to the party? Should I stay at home? If I go, do I bring a gift? If I bring a gift, does everyone get a gift? And why does someone have an organized secret Santa where the spending limit is fifty dollars but the minimum is seventy-five? How does that even make sense? It's not a gift exchange, that's a financial audit. And then there's the food. Do I cook? Do I order? Do I pretend I cooked? Because I mean, I feel like if you transfer something into your own serving dish, legally, you've participated in the preparation, alright? Well, if you want a holiday decision that's not complicated, switching to Simplicity Plan from Verizon is the one for you. One plan, one price. Just thirty dollars a line per month for you or the whole family. The holidays are complicated. Switching to Verizon and shopping their best deals is simple.

• 31:42Trevor Noah?

  For new customers, thirty dollars a line includes auto pay and switch discount. Unlimited data is restricted to on-device smartphone usage. Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds. Additional taxes, fees, and terms apply. Earth can be a lot sometimes. Heat waves, gas prices, bad hair days. Why not go where life is good? Escape to Pluto TV. Turn off your problems and turn on your favorite movies and shows. You know, the ones you already love. From Anchorman, The Legend of Ron Burgundy, to Dirty Dancing, to Top Gun Maverick. From Alias to The X-Files. It's all here and all free. Go where the TV is always good. Escape to Pluto TV.

• 32:27Trevor Noah?

  Stream now, pay never.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:46Speaker 02

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

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Christiana, you ask lots of really good questions and they're all complicated. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna try.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  I'm a complicated person, Robert. I'm sorry.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  I'm, did you say Robert? No, it's Bob, please.

• 33:25Trevor Noah?

  Oh, we get Bob now.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  We get Bob, okay, okay. I was gonna say Professor Putnam.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  No, please.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  I mean, if I get a call, a phone call, and the person says, Robert, I just hang up right away.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  If they know me, it's a nice screener I use as a answering the phone.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob, Bob.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Okay, I want to say a couple of things about

• 33:48Speaker 01

  social media and virtual connections. And then, and how they compare to real face-to-face connections. What in one, what some people call I R L, in real life. When social media first came out, everybody thought it was, you know, unbelievably great. World peace was gonna break out. We would all have, and we would all be friends with each other because we were 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.

• 34:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, of course.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  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'll, you guess what Mark Zuckerberg thought?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  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. But the academic research, I repeat, was always skeptical about that. But then came a terrible natural experiment, COVID. But now, I promise you, it was going to get more complicated. But I can tell that Chris Janizzi likes to deal with complications, so I'm gonna. 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.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Almost all of our networks today are simultaneously face to face and internet based. Yeah. 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 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. They're the same, and I want to use a metaphor here if I, if I can.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  In chemistry, we have the idea of a, um, 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 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, how can we get an alloy that is, has the benefits of both? Yeah.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  That is to say, could we find a way to create a network that has the advantage that the internet has of not depending upon space? But that has the advantages of face-to-face-ness, namely you can actually get together and cooperate with somebody. Do we know how to do that? And the answer is, we sure do.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  We know how to, for example, there are, there are networks that are, 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.

• 37:25Trevor Noah?

  You go get the rake in person?

• 37:27Speaker 01

  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, 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-to-face and connected, and they knew how to use, they conveyed, conveyed the idea that they knew how to.

• 38:00Trevor Noah?

  Oh, they knew how to use their tools to get people to connect in person?

• 38:04Speaker 01

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

• 38:12Trevor Noah?

  You can't sell ads in person, that's another problem. No, it's true 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, th- this seems like a, a similar problem that exists in many different industries and fields. Right? In that, like, let's say food.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 38:32Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:51Trevor Noah?

  Right. 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, ah, I can't believe I did that again. I had too much of it. 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 gonna give you a break. If you have a choice of ten meals, we want you to pick the snacks ten times. And we're gonna design it in such a way that you're gonna pick the snacks ten times. 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 you get what I'm saying?

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:36Trevor Noah?

  And I think the same thing goes for like what you're saying about social capital is. They'll say it, we wanna 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.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:48Trevor Noah?

  Right? If social media companies wanted us to not endlessly use their product. Cause they'll even have a label that's like, hey, remember to take a break now and then. Yo, you can just make me take a break.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:59Trevor Noah?

  You could literally, they could literally just go like TikTok. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Bang, you're done. This is your limit for the day.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:06Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:14Trevor Noah?

  You know what? Like you're chronically online.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Let's not talk about me.

• 40:16Trevor Noah?

  No, we must talk about you.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  I'm an addict, but Bob, it's so funny. You mentioned the neighborhood group and the rake. So recently I joined my neighborhood WhatsApp group. And it's very nimby. I thought it was very nimbyish. 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, 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 when not profile. Like, it was so refreshing for me. 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.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  And this white guy said, hey, guys, we should be careful. And people figured it out amongst themselves.

• 41:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  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, and there's something about that group that's completely transformed. Like, I would be sensitive typically if I read about a description.

• 41:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  But 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. 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 to.

• 41:55Trevor Noah?

  But, but then do you meet in person to what Bob was saying?

• 41:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:04Trevor Noah?

  So you see, that's probably what it is.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  And she organizes neighborhood walks.

• 42:06Trevor Noah?

  Oh, there you see.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  But it's completely changed how I perceive not just people in my neighborhood, but how I even see how others see profiling. But it's the, it's the neighborhood, there's something to the neighborhood group is what I'm trying to say, Bob.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  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 buy, have a lot more cops on the beat, pay cops more and, you know, 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. Um, and what I'm talking about is big, huge studies that have done this experimentally.

• 42:49Trevor Noah?

  This is data. This is not like an opinion. This is data that's been.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm sorry. That's what I do for a living.

• 42:54Trevor Noah?

  No, I mean, that's what I'm, I'm just clarifying for people. I love that. Yeah.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, anyway, 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.

• 43:09Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:25Trevor Noah?

  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 healthcare? 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 and I it is crucial to remind everyone, bowling is is one of the things. It doesn't matter what it is.

• 44:07Trevor Noah?

  It could be a book club. It could be a running group. It could be a bike club. It could anything.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:13Trevor Noah?

  How how does America go from having fewer clubs

• 44:18Trevor Noah?

  to creating the movement that leads to Donald Trump?

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Right. Remember, Bowling Alone said 25 years ago that we were had been for 25 years. But at that point, had been it'd been 25 years. We've been going downhill in terms of our social connections.

• 44:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything that brought people together from different walks of life to connect across different boundaries.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  That's right. And they'd been that 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.

• 45:11Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:12Speaker 01

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

• 45:19Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  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 Bennett has said, I could show you the quote. 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 Alone.

• 45:37Trevor Noah?

  No way. So you being serious?

• 45:38Speaker 01

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

• 45:41Trevor Noah?

  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?

• 45:49Speaker 01

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

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 01

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

• 46:14Trevor Noah?

  You could have been the president. Been president. President Bob, President Bob Putnam.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  And J D 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 to 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 bowling together.

• 46:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  I'm not trying to say we ought to reconstruct bowling leagues, but it's got to be something that brings us space to space. Is that making sense, Trevor?

• 46:56Trevor Noah?

  No, you know, 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.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:09Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:22Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Music lesson, people learn instruments.

• 48:04Trevor Noah?

  People learned music.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:05Trevor Noah?

  People, think about how all the greatest singers.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:08Trevor Noah?

  Of like, you know, the last whatever many decades have all come from church.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:13Trevor Noah?

  You know?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:13Trevor Noah?

  So the training, the connections, the, 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, 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 like, what do you notice when you have 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.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:38Trevor Noah?

  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 and then you know what? We're all going to 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?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  I don't remember that particular one.

• 49:19Trevor Noah?

  You don't remember that moment?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure, I do.

• 49:22Trevor Noah?

  This was one of, I, 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.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I thought he was a farmer.

• 49:34Trevor Noah?

  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 gonna 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.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:03Trevor Noah?

  Someone's kids left to go to a big city, so now they don't have the, they've been forgotten.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:06Trevor Noah?

  And it's just a bunch of forgotten people who are now seen, 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 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 and he just dances.

• 50:30Trevor Noah?

  Don't go anywhere because we got more What Now after this. Some of the most interesting things you learn happen while you're doing something completely ordinary. Maybe you're cooking dinner while watching a history video. Maybe you're on a flight catching up on a long form interview. Or maybe you're trying to figure out how to fix something in your house because apparently owning a screwdriver means you're an electrician now. But you see, that's one of the things I love about YouTube Premium. I travel a lot, so I download videos before a flight. That way I'm not leaving my entertainment in the hands of airplane wifi. Yeah, I've made that mistake before. You think you're gonna watch something in 4K and suddenly everyone's face is pixels. One of my favorite features is smart downloads.

• 51:15Trevor Noah?

  You see, YouTube Premium can automatically download recommended videos for you based on what you already watch. So sometimes I'll get on a plane, I look at my phone, I'm like, ah, I didn't download anything. And it's like, no, YouTube already thought about this. They packed entertainment for me in my little lunchbox. And with background play, I can lock my phone, switch apps, and whatever I'm watching just keeps on going. So if you like YouTube, you will love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Thanksgiving is one of those meals where every dish carries a little more meaning because the table is really about the people around it.

• 51:57Trevor Noah?

  Whole Foods Market helps take some of the pressure off with quality proteins, seasonal treats, and easy solutions for the days surrounding the holiday. Start with turkey, or a bone-in or boneless ham from the meat department, all with no antibiotics ever. Add seasonal bakery favorites like holiday cookie platters, tea breads, and pies, all made without high fructose corn syrup. For the days before or after Thanksgiving, marinated meats and prepared sides make dinner easier. A build-your-own-family meal feeds four for $35. In-store only. Seasonal candles and body care essentials can help with gifting or serve as a well-earned treat for the host.

• 52:40Trevor Noah?

  Their standards leave out artificial sweetness, artificial colors, and high fructose corn syrup, helping the flavors you want stay at the center of the table. Shop Thanksgiving favorites with higher standards at Whole Foods Markets. Therapy is one of those things lots of people talk themselves out of without even realizing it. Like it's too expensive, or it's too overwhelming figuring out even where you're gonna start. But Rula is one way to make that first step feel a lot more doable, offering accessible, affordable therapy that fits your needs. Sign up in just a few minutes and get matched with a therapist who fits what you're looking for. Need to talk to someone quickly? Appointments are often available as soon as the next day.

• 53:23Trevor Noah?

  And with insurance, sessions average around a $15 copay. You can also see estimated costs upfront, so there's a lot more clarity going in. And in terms of outcomes, 93% of Rula patients report symptom improvement.

• 53:38Trevor Noah?

  If therapy's been sitting in the back of your mind, Rula is a pretty simple way to take that first step. So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to rula.com. That's R U L A dot com to find a therapist the easy way.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  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 trumped it as much.

• 54:12Trevor Noah?

  That's a good question.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Do you know what I mean? It's just like, cause that that's then my concern.

• 54:16Trevor Noah?

  Because the Ku Klux Klan is definitely a club.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  It's a club, they bonded, they were a community. Yeah, they took care of each other.

• 54:22Trevor Noah?

  They got uniforms.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just like, how do we, in this like very polarized moment where there are, where all sides seem to have deep resentment for each other? How do we make sure these clubs don't become spaces?

• 54:33Trevor Noah?

  Or, or is that even necessary?

• 54:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:55Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  So my, so my bonding social capital are my friends with other elderly, white, male, Jewish professors. That's my, that's, 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

• 55:38Speaker 01

  or the equivalent would be bonding social capital. I'm, 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.

• 55:58Trevor Noah?

  Right, right, right.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:08Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  She didn't think I'd understand. She, 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 birds. But that's the basic point. So here's the challenge. Much of, of 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. And so now I'm back at the question, why doesn't Putnam saying he wants lots of Ku Klux Klan? 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?

• 56:51Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that makes, that makes sense.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  And I want to know how to do it.

• 56:53Trevor Noah?

  Well, but I'm actually going to throw this before we move on.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:56Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:05Trevor Noah?

  So if I look at Barack, I look at Barack Obama's-

• 57:07Speaker 02

  They were bonding and they thought they were bridging.

• 57:09Trevor Noah?

  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 it, let's connect.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:17Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Going to Iowa.

• 57:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, and he was like, yes, we can. Like it was bridging, bridging, bridging, bridging.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely, we, we, we, it's gotta be, yes.

• 57:33Trevor Noah?

  Right?

• 57:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:33Trevor Noah?

  And so as much as it's easy for everyone to be like Donald Trump and blah, blah, 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, oh, you know, white men are this and the, the, the rich have done that. And, 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, struggling people. We all deserve healthcare. 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.

• 58:13Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  I want to know what Bob thinks of that.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  So this is, sorry, I, you, you didn't invite me on here to cite all my books, but I'm gonna cite yet another book.

• 58:34Trevor Noah?

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

• 58:38Speaker 01

  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 that 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.

• 59:06Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  And, 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. Those two groups are increasingly, they don't marry one another. It used to be that there were people would marry across these class lines, but they don't now. They used to be that they, that they would live in the same neighborhood, but they're, we're increasingly living in not racially segregated, but class segregated homes. And I, 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

• 59:52Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:13Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  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. Um, now it sounds like I'm saying, let's forget about uh, black folks and, and I'm not saying that. I'm saying, let's really focus on working class blacks folks, because they're the ones who are falling further and further behind.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, to follow up on that, they um, because a lot has been said about black male increasing vote for Republican. They actually split the vote and they look at the blackmail vote specifically. And the black men most likely to vote for Trump were non-college educated and unchurched.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Exactly, unchurched as well.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  That was the key, they were secular, up to a high school diploma.

• 1:01:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  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, tend to attend church, professionals.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:01:28Trevor Noah?

  I almost want to know what you think the future will be because I, I remember speaking, I, 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, and this woman said to me, she said, um, she said, oh darling, she said, I can't wait for South Africa and, 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, it really was an interesting idea, which has stuck with me because I go like, yeah.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  The most classist society ever.

• 1:02:03Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Very socialist.

• 1:02:31Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Trevor Noah?

  Between. White people who are proudly racist and black people who are militantly fighting against racism. But they were like, yo.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Union jobs.

• 1:02:48Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Trevor Noah?

  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, let me ask you this then. So do you think, say, the people who are in the bottom two thirds?

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:20Trevor Noah?

  Are they more likely to be negative effect negatively affected by not having a social club?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Yes. And they're certainly much more likely to be socially isolated. I mean, they've got, they've got at least two strikes against them. Well, maybe three. A, they're more socially isolated.

• 1:03:41Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  And B, they're poorer financially. And C, they have got less education. So all that, those folks are in a pickle.

• 1:03:52Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  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 colleges to compete educated people, you know, vote for the Democrats and all the non-collegiate 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.

• 1:04:29Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, that's great because that's what Cristiano was asking for. What, what were you going to ask? Because then you can say it and then he'll.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  I was asking for my homework, the to-do's.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 1:04:38Trevor Noah?

  So the what now, the what now, Bob Putnam?

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  I'm going to try to keep it simple, not, not because you guys couldn't understand more something more complicated, but because I think we've got to understand in very simple terms. One, go young.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  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, five, 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.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  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 personal relations with other people.

• 1:05:49Trevor Noah?

  Before you move on, a perfect example of that for me was Pokemon Go. So 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.

• 1:06:34Trevor Noah?

  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 PM, 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 five hundred people from like, from like little kids who had dragged their parents out of the house, all the way through to like adults who were 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.

• 1:07:14Trevor Noah?

  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 fourteen, fifteen. And he looks at me and he's like, he's like, Trevor Noah, he's like, you, you play Pokemon, girl? And he's like, now I know I'm in the right place.

• 1:07:30Trevor Noah?

  What I, what I, what I loved about it was, it, to what you're saying, it was the perfect culmination. It wasn't the either or. Yeah. 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, it was such a beautiful, 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, what's the best one you've caught? What have you, and this was like, the, the game won awards, by the way, even for getting people fit and running and moving it. But I, I, I love that. So that, when you say the going young and figuring out the, the hybrid, I think there are ways to do it. Because some people 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?

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  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 cooperate 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. You, 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. Um, uh, you know, you can have a national debate about, I don't know, some issue in education, but, but somebody's got to fix our schools right here.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  And so sometimes left wingers are in favor of national solutions.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  And, and for race, we did have to go national because there were whole regions of the country, which were, if we went local, it would, 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, this is exactly what MLK did, right? He didn't start with his March on Washington, he started in, 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. And where was the high school? By high school, I mean a secondary school, a public high school that everybody could go to.

• 1:09:44Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  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. It was not invented in Massachusetts or in Chicago or in LA or what? 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.

• 1:10:14Trevor Noah?

  That's amazing.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:21Trevor Noah?

  They spread.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  And thirdly, and I'm going 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, 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.

• 1:10:59Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:13Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  Love that neighbor.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Religion should, religion should be a we phenomenon, not an I phenomenon.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  So if I had a magic wand.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  I don't, but maybe somebody listens and have the 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. Does that make you sense?

• 1:11:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that makes complete sense.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  And, 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.

• 1:12:10Trevor Noah?

  No, no, I don't think you have to be sorry. I think it's, it's given us homework. So, play Pokemon Go with people in your local neighborhood

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Trevor Noah?

  and help them catch the Pokemon that they can't.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Trevor Noah?

  That's essentially because, because you're helping each other.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

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

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you guys are gonna, you're gonna lead this evolution.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Find me up, let me know how I can join you.

• 1:12:36Trevor Noah?

  Bob, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  Thank you, Bob.

• 1:12:39Trevor Noah?

  You know, it's such a simple idea, and unfortunately, sometimes the best ideas are so simple that people don't want them.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  It's simple, but it's hard.

• 1:12:47Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  And move your body.

• 1:12:55Trevor Noah?

  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, 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 gonna be gone. Maybe some of it will change. We'll see. We'll do our best.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Thank you, Cristiano.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  And thank you, Trevor.

• 1:13:24Trevor Noah?

  Thank you so much, Bob.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:13:32Trevor Noah?

  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. Our senior producer is Jess Hackel. Claire Slaughter is our producer. Music, mixing, and mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

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