An Army of Normal Folks - How America Lost “We” — And How You Can Help Rebuild It Today

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

America wasn’t always this divided or isolated from one another. In this Shop Talk, Coach Bill unpacks Robert Putnam’s fascinating research on the historical forces that pulled us apart — and the simple, local actions normal folks can take right now to bring “we” back to their communities.Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/#joinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an Army of Normal Folks, and this is Shop talk number 92. Welcome in to the shop. You're going crazy. Hi, Alex. How you doing? Welcome to the shop. Yeah, 92. What do you mean?

Yeah. Welcome in the shop. Is there anything we going to help you with today? Beautiful weather in Memphis after this ice storm. It's actually pretty, but can you believe you should have mounds of ice out here? Do you really? I didn't see it. You said that last time.

Would you just open your eye? How'd you know? You almost hit one with your car probably. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, you've got to be safe driving your facility. There's often a lot of moving things around. You've got to pay attention.

It's a manufacturing yard. It's not for, you know, public whatever. I actually love how you have the massive signs. Like, what does it? Stay safe or pay attention? What's the massive? Well, they all. Safety and stuff all over the place, yeah.

92, Bill. 92. It's going to be a defensive lineman type. and I can't think of one. Reggie White at Tennessee. I swear to you, I was about to say Reggie White. I swear to you, I was going to say Reggie White. And you should have said it.

Why are you holding him back? I don't know. Michael Strayhan. Ah, love him. Yeah, and then Atomic Number 92 represents uranium. That has nothing to do. That is so ridiculous. There's no way I was going to get that.

We don't have to just talk about football. Yeah. I mean, did you say Uranus? What'd you say? I don't even know what you said. There's actually another podcast I listen to. Yeah. They try to drop in Uranus any chance they get.

Yeah, well, why not? It's the greatest planet name ever known. Oh, man. Yeah. This is a family show. If I disagree with somebody, I just say Uranus. Two and a half years of doing this show in our first Uranus. That's it.

Sorry if we have offended anyone. I mean, it's just a planet. How can you be offended by interstellar or nomenclature? Okay. Shep talk number 92. The upswing. How America lost we and how it came back before. How America lost we and how it came back before.

It all makes sense of a minute. Well, I already have some ideas. but we're just going to go through this right after these brief messages from our general sponsors. Eating well shouldn't be complicated, but somehow it turns into recipes, prep, cleanup, and half your Sunday gone. Factor solves all that. These are fresh, ready-to-eat meals designed by dietitians, delivered to your door, and ready in just minutes. No prep, no cleanup, no excuses. And it's not just about convenience.

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That's 11 meals, free shipping, and free size for life, but only with the code fit at factormeals. Facture, Canada's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm in Malmelaq Lamouba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated, and Black America was out of breaking point.

Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's, Almer Mata, Morehouse College. The students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King, Sr., and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution.

I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about privilege. test. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to the A-building on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you get control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of

life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

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Listen to Mind Games on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life.

And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the sixth bureau on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to the shop. ShopTock number nine two. The upswing, semicolon, how America lost we in quotation marks, and how it came back before. There. That's what we're talking about. So it's a book that's helped us make sense of something a lot of us feel, but don't always know how to name. The book is The Upswing, How America Came Together a Century ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert Putnam,

who we visited recently in another shop talk, and Robert Putnam is clearly a cool dude. If the name rings a bell, he's the same guy who wrote. bowling alone. So we did that. All right. The upswing asks a deeper question. How did we get so fragmented and how did we ever come back together in the first place? You know, before I go on, I think we can all think about stuff like 9-11, the Columbine shooting, for Harbor.

I could go on. but you think about all those things that, you know, we find division, everything, but then some shockwave like that seems to bring us together, and then sadly, little by little, that togetherness becomes more and more afraid. That's just my own thoughts. So, before we go forward, who Robert Putnam is. Putnam is a sociologist at Harvard who studies social capital. He's a really bright guy.

That's just a technical term for something very human. Trust, belonging, shared responsibility, and the habits that hold a society together. He doesn't look at trends over five years. He looks at 150 years of American life in economics, politics, civic engagement, culture, and what he found is a clear pattern. And this is some interesting stuff. So pay attention. the big idea the i we i arc i to we to i that arc putnam shows that america has gone through what he calls an i we i we i curve the long period of rugged individualism that a powerful shift toward community and shared responsibility and then over the last 50 years to slide back toward everybody's for themselves the middle period the upswing

Now, there's where the key is. What life was really like in the Gilded Age, the first I. To understand the upswing, you have to understand what came before it. The Gilded Age, roughly 1870 through 1900. On the surface, America was booming. Railroads, steel, oil, massive fortunes. Think the Vanderbilts. Think Rockefeller.

Think Carnegie. That was that period of time. Underneath all that and all that storied history, extreme inequality, child labor, really unsafe factories and operating units, and zero safety net for when the tired and huddled masses ended their 12-hour shifts. Wealth was concentrated at the top at levels comparable to today. Trust was low, politics were corrupt, civic life was thin and fragmented. Putnam's point isn't that people were worse back then. It's that the structure of society rewarded I and punished we. The turn.

Why the upswing happened. Starting around 1900, something changed. Not all at once. And not from Washington, D.C. first. People began responding to inequality, instability, and social breakdown by building institutions that trained cooperation. And here's the remarkable part. A huge number of those institutions were founded in a very tight window, basically between 1905 to 1917.

Consider that, 115 to 110 years ago. The institutional explosion. Listen to this list. The Rotary Club founded in 1905. Boy Scouts of America, 1910. Girl Scouts, 1912. Guantas Club 1915. Lions Club, 1917.

In the same era, libraries exploded in number. Settlement houses like Whole House multiplied. Faith-based service organizations grew dramatically. These weren't not just charities. They were civic training grounds. They taught people how to lead, how to cooperate, how to serve across class lines, and how to see themselves as responsible for the whole.

Just consider that. Now, what the upswing looked like and data. As these institutions took root, the numbers shifted. Economically, inequality fell steadily from the 1910s through the 1960s. Wages rose alongside productivity. A broad, massive, powerful middle class emerged. Civically, club membership soared. Volunteering became normalized. Church attendance. Peoples. politically, bipartisanship became common. Compromise was not a dirty word. Trust in the institutions as a result of compromise and bipartimanship. Trust in institutions was high. The period peaked between 1945 and 1970. The down swing, back to I. Then, starting in the 70s, early 70s, it turned again.

rising inequality, declining trust, fewer people joining anything, loneliness becoming a public health crisis, and politics turning back to zero sum. His famous line still holds. Americans still bowl. They just don't bowl together. We didn't stop caring. We stopped being connected. First of all, all of that is incredible. incredible research, and the data alone should have bells going off in your brain.

Just for you personally, for the way you look at society, civics, culture, and voting, and politics, and your children's future, and your grandchildren's future. If we stop this thing right there, that should be tingling your spine a little bit. And if it didn't, you're not paying attention. But why does this matter for an Army and normal folks? The upswing didn't start with federal policy. It started locally with people organizing, with service clubs, with shared rituals, with visible contribution. Remember, Boy Scouts, but Rotary Club founded 1905, Boy Scouts, 1910, Girl Scouts, 1912, Juanares Club, 1915, Lions Club.

1917. Those are all local things. Those are all people organizing. Those are service clubs with shared rituals with visible contribution. The upswing was not started by the government. It was started by normal folks. And it lasted into the 70s, 60 years of improved contribution to society, improved trust in civics and institutions started by normal folks. Where are we today? Putnam is clear. Today looks a lot like the Gilded Age again. High inequality, low trust, fragmented communities, weak civic institutions.

But there's one key difference. And we know how this story goes and we know how it turns. The upswing happened once because enough people decided we are responsible for each other. And it can happen again, not through nostalgia, not through politics alone, but through rebuilding the habits of we, where we live. That's what our local service clubs are, guys. That's what service does. That's what happens when normal folks stop waiting. The upswing will not start in Washington.

it will start in your hometown. It will start in your neighborhood. It will start in your community. It will start on your street. Guys, the data is in front of us. The history teaches us how it works

and what happens when it doesn't. And the irony is when we think of all these complicated, complex issues and everything that divides us, the answer is so very, simple it's normal folks joining community to serve and all of that fixes the inequality fixes the low trust fixes the fragmented communities fixes the lack of trust and weak civic institutions all of it if you want proof just look at what we Americans did a hundred years ago look at what the gilded age was leading

up to what we did 100 years ago and view that through a lens of where we are today. The pendulum has swung, and it's up to us to swing it back. Alex. So hopefully we are on the verge of an upswing as a country, but it feels that way is kind of what a lot of people are saying right now, but obviously that only happens if we all act. And we're best to act within the construct of an army of normal folks. It's fair. Self-serving, Bill.

It is self-serving. But it's there. I mean, somebody had to come up with the Rotary Club. Somebody had to come up with the Lions Club. Somebody had to come up with the Qantas Club. And, okay, so maybe those are outdated and different, or maybe they just need a resurgence or whatever. But in today's nomenclature and in today's societal construct,

an Army and Normal Folks Service Club feels just like those clubs felt like under 10 years ago. And to put a couple of recent facts we've discussed together, we mentioned last episode how Rotary's lost 100,000 members. You know, back in the day, it really was like a social requirement. Like if you were a business owner in your town, it was expected of you to be a member of Rotary. Or Aquinas. Yeah. Or, you know, it was expected of you to be a member of your church.

Now that those social expectations are kind of gone, I think there is an opportunity for us to create a new social expectation here. And the best way to do it, like we talked about in that Damon Stintola shop talk, how behavior spreads one, is getting to the 20%. So the real key is, number one, we need to get the leaders to help start these clubs around the country. But also everybody else listening who may not be ready to lead, join in, help be a part of the leadership team, begin member, help get to the 20% so that you can tip over. And eventually it becomes the same kind of social expectation, the same way that Rotarian churches used to be. Yeah, and that's good because a lot of people would think, well, you've got to get to 50% to do anything.

Actually, at 20% is when it becomes big enough that it becomes a movement. Yep. So, that's it. Shop Talk number 92, how America lost we and how we came back before and how we can do it again. So instead of being at the I-wee-I project, it needs to be the I-we-I-wee-wee project. So let's do that. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and on social, subscribe to the podcast, rate and review it. Join the Army at normalfocus.us.

For goodness sakes, do something. Bill, yeah? If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. It's profound, Alex. Have you heard that line before? Yeah. Yeah.

It's right on this topic of I&WI. I think I saw it in a bathroom book one day when I was taking a dump. Shop talk number 92, that's it. We can get wee back. There's a roadmap and a blueprint to it. All we got to do is listen to Putnam, Rita's research, understand what else is, understand what fixed it, and do it again. That's shop talk number 92, guys. We'll see you next week.

What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overall. overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult?

NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 20169, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson,

locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protests and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Mnallick Lamumba. Listen to the A building on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen-Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers.

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