Robert D. Putnam

And the people that are excited about that maybe are the people you hang out with.

Yeah, and there's a social element to it, whether it's Robert Putnam talking about the decline of bowling leagues or all these other ways in which literally anything at all, any activity that brings people together...

in a particular place with some particular common cause, I think is a really lovely thing to be cultivating and encouraging so we're not all just isolated and interacting with each other only via screens.

This is Person Plays Thing.

Perhaps you've heard about it.

Bowling Alone, The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam.

In it, Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since the 1950s.

Bowling alone basically talks about the disaffection in Western society among people.

A researcher named Sarah Conrath found that empathy among young Americans dropped 40% between the late 1970s and 2009.

Robert Putnam had already mapped the retreat.

We were becoming more connected by screen and more isolated in every way that counts.

It is not a comfortable thing to say today, but I think the people who died that morning deserve our honesty.

Another 25 million people left Europe and came, for a whole bunch of reasons that we all know, and came largely to urban areas along the East Coast.

That's 50 million people, okay? And if you look at what we might think of as the modern ritual calendar, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Thanksgiving, wedding showers, baby showers, some of the things that we've been talk- 4H clubs, bowling clubs, all the stuff that Robert Putnam said 100 years later left in bowling alone were invented in that period.

So what happened was there was this widespread dislocation, change, and just upheaval, and the human response was to create new ways of gathering and connecting where the people found themselves largely in cities, and to create a whole calendar that we now think of as the kind of bedrock of the American family.

So if it can happen in that time, I think it can also happen in this time.

So when I was doing the re- doing a lot of research on, on cults and religions, for that matter, it- I was interviewing all these people, but I was also reading a lot of, um, uh, books by sociologists of religion, uh, and, and so on.

And sociologists like, um, Robert Putnam, uh, who wrote Bowling Alone, and, and others.

Um, th- the general consensus amongst those, those academics and experts is that there is a...

A- and I would, a- and this is, and not just academics of religion, but also sociologists, psychologists, is there is a, a need to belong in the human, um, in the human species.

Do, do you think there's more social anxiety today than there was in the past? And if so, why?

Um, I don't know.

But I'm sure that's being measured by the likes of, um, you know, Robert Putnam and other sociologists.

And, um, th- there may well be because there's more fear that has been stoked by, um, you know, demonization basically.

I think about it more from the, I think, the more traditional sense, if you were thinking.

Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone, talks about the value of our weak and our strong ties in the same way that we have financial capital or physical capital or employee capital.

Okay, that was going to be my next question was what's the better way to describe it? The better

definition of it.