And yet, as Bob points out, this is not the first time that we've been in this position as a country.

I can tell you there is a period in American history in which we were as polarized politically as we are now.

That was the five years between eighteen sixty and eighteen sixty-five.

Raise your hand if you know what those five years were.

Right, that was the Civil War.

That's where we-- we're in that territory now, and we're also, and this would take a longer story to spin out, we're also in an unusually self-centered culturally.

We're in a kind of an I mood as a country.

Third, go moral.

Robert Putnam.

I want to begin with just a factual observation.

People will know what I'm saying, but they will maybe not have thought of it this way.

Um, all of our networks today, our connections with other people, are an amalgam of face-to-face connections and electronic connections.

That is, my wife and I, we see each other all the time [laughs], we live in the same place, uh, her study is, like, 20 feet away from my study, but still I will get a text across that 20 feet saying, "It's your turn to do the dishes."

Please

... and then we can finish.

Um, back in about 2020, um, Mark Zuckerberg and his folks invited me to come to Menlo Park and, um, and the whole conference was about social capital, and I was a keynote.

Right

... not instantly, but they, the next 70 years we were on the path.

We can take lessons from that period.

I kind of summarize all of that in three terms.

Go young.

The way you can turn a society around is to, first of all, begin with young people.

Old people like me recognize that there's a problem 'cause we know it doesn't have to be the way it is.

Moral.

This, this is a-an advance release of some of my conversation with Robert Putnam.

Yeah, it's true.

People sometimes don't realize how long we've been on this trend towards increasing polarization.

I'm back upstream to your question about, you know, we are now probably m- more polarized than we have ever been as a country.

The one exception is the period between, um, 1860 and 1865, which is, of course, the Civil War, and we were really polarized then.

But that's-- we're in that territory now.

But we got here not because of Donald Trump.

Uh, you, you talk about a number of things and I want you to talk about them, but, but I want you to talk about one piece which was, uh, technology at the time, which was you noticed the more people watch television, the less they seem to engage in social activism and social ca- and, and build social capital.

Yeah, that's right.

In that study, I looked basically at the period from about 1975 until about 2000 when the book was published, and in that period, as you looked across different generations, the more people had been exposed to television, the more they hunkered down and they were socially isolated, and for that matter, the less they were involved in community activities of various sorts.

I, I, I do think that it's important...

Jean's focus, I would say relatively close focus, on what's happened in the last 25 or 30 years is extremely valuable, but in the book, The Upswing, in which we look at the last 125 years, we can see the ways in which what happened at the beginning of the 20th century is now being mirrored by what's happening in the beginning of the 21st century.

Social media are important, but you can see that the downturn in youthful isolation began, you know, before (laughs), before any of the big names in, um, in, uh, social media were even born.

So it's not just social media.

So Bob, tell, tell us then, what are the things you think at, at a fundamental level were driving the downturn, uh, you know, in earlier periods and then produced the upswing? So what's the cause and what's the solution?

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 pots of soil, you'd water them differently, and then you'd measure and see 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 up in the Alps to down in Sicily.

They all had the same powers and money.

I don't think that correlation is easy for everyone to see.