An Army of Normal Folks - We Don’t Need More Heroes. We Need More Bowling Leagues

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

For Shop Talk, we unpack Robert Putnam's monumental book "Bowling Alone" and the collapse of the civic habits that once held our communities together — from church groups to bowling leagues. And what we as Army members are going to do about it! 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. Welcome to the shop. Hey, Alex. Hey, Bill. How you doing? Molly's about to get married. Oh, you're time stamping it. I leave tomorrow and yes, we go off and my youngest daughter, my third child, hold it. Yes. Second child. She's second. Yes. Youngest daughter, second child is getting married to a guy named Tracy Z, who is really awesome guy. I'm really excited for her, and I feel sorry for him. I agree. She's crazy. My daughter is a handful and Benzo. I think she's a lot of fun, though, for everyone. Oh, she's great. And she's got a good heart. She has a great heart. She's faithful. She's, um, spirited. She's very, very bright. She works hard, and she's just nutty as hell. She's basically her mom. Yeah. I mean, you're a little crazy too.

No, mom. Y'all, everybody thinks, because in social settings, Lisa is kind of this beautiful little thing that kind of keeps her mouth shut and smiles big and just walks around with me. And everybody thinks I'm the way. I'm telling you, Lisa's the one. I haven't seen her crazy yet. I usually just see you hitting on her in front of me. That's like the craziness I see. I hit on her in front of everybody. She's gorgeous and I can't wait. In fact, now I can't wait to get home and see her. All right, everybody. Shop Talk number 91. You know any numbers? That's one of them. Good job, Bill. Oh, that's another one. Dennis Rodman.

Dennis, well, but see, he wasn't always 91. But what it said is on his Bulls championship seasons, he was 91. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. Sergei Federov and hockey. I wouldn't have known that. And Hadeo Nomo, the pitcher? Yeah, he was 91. Yeah. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. Who else? That's it. That's good, though, with Kevin Green, you know that. Yeah, well, Kevin Green, I always thought he was a hellacious defensive end. Okay, everybody, shop talk number 91 in honor of my crazy wife and daughter. It has nothing to do with this.

Alex has teed this up. There's a book called Bowling Alone. Correct. Can't wait to unpack this right after these brief messages. from our general sponsors. Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Inalec Lamoma.

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 Almermata, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history,

Martin Luther King Sr., and a young, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people would die. 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 protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.

Listen to the A building on the I-Heart Radio app. podcast or whatever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen-Yin. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast in the lead-up to the Milan Quartina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Boen, hi, Matt, hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to two guys, five, Rink on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 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 subcontact.

Not just. 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. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.

The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy 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 Gumpbright became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun.

tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Tremaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Germain was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years, only two people knew the truth 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. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the shop. Shop talk number 91, bowling alone, or why everybody's lonely and nobody knows what to do about it. Read by me teed up by your very own lovely and talented Alex Cortez, who woke up at 3.30 in this morning, I'm told to put this stuff together for our reading enjoyment. That's correct. four hours of sleep and then drove up here i'm driving oxford by the way today are you really before i leave

on my airplane at six in the morning i have to go down to do something with the charity bowl oh interesting yeah do you hear the train i do hear the train okay bowling alone or why everybody's lonely and nobody knows what to do about it all right i'm going to tell you about this book it sounds boring as hell, but explains a lot of what's broken. It's called Bowling Alone. And no, it really doesn't have anything to do with bowling. By the way, there's a book out called Go to Hell Ole Miss. Really?

That's on the national bestsellers list. Oh, wow. It has very little to do with Ole Miss. It's about a pilot that got shot down on World War II, and he was kept in this dingy, dark cabin, and he was held captive for, like, two years. and somebody who had been captured before him, this back in the 40s, had written with a knife on a wood panel,

go to hell Ole Miss. And he said, just that connection to home is what saved his life. And the book is about his two years there. Are you reading it? Starting it. Yeah, it really is. I'll look into it.

Yeah. All right. Anyway, bowling alone. The guy who wrote this is Robert Putnam, and he noticed something weird. Americans were bowling more than ever, but they stopped bowling together. No leagues, no teams.

Bowling league participation is declined by about 40%, which I think is sad. I think American bowling leagues are stuff of Americana legend. I also miss the dingy bowling alley with the pitchers of beer and where you could smoke cigarettes. Now it's all these professional, fancy ones that are super expensive

and you can't smoke inside. You could smoke cigars, pipes, cigarette, and you got pitchers of cheap beer. And a cheap bowling alley. It's dingy and awesome. And the floor was sticky, and you could get a cheeseburger at the grill. Now it looks like a bowling alley is supposed to be.

Now it looks like Dave and Buster's all that's so stupid. Yeah. There's other reasons in here. So Americans are bowling more than ever, but they stop bowling together. That's America. We quit showing up. Quit joining. Quit committing.

Church groups, civic clubs, PTAs, volunteer organizations, neighborhood stuff. They didn't disappear overnight. They've slowly faded. The Rotary Club has lost 100,000 members over the last 20 years. In 2020, church membership dropped below a majority of Americans for the first time in Gallops eight decades. polling history landing at 47%. Think of that, y'all. Over the last 80 years, for the first time in history, fewer Americans attend church than don't. In 1937, when Gallup measured it, 73% of Americans belong to a church, a rate that remained nearly 70% for six decades,

that's into the late 90s, until a sharp decline began around the 21st century. And the percentage of Americans who report attending a public meeting on town or school affairs fell from 22 to 13 percent, a drop of more than a third. And what Putnam says, this is the part that matters, is that what we lost wasn't money or intelligence or talent, what we lost and what we continue to lose is social capital. That's just a fancy way of saying. We've lost trust, relationships, shared responsibility, and the habit of showing up for each other. Here's the line from bowling alone that hit me. Communities don't fall apart because people stop caring.

They fall apart because people stop connecting. That is so true. Now look around. People are lonely. About 30 to 40% of adults report being lonely regularly. They're angry. They're cynical. They don't believe anything they do matters anymore.

And we keep trying to fix that with better our arguments, better politics, better posts. I was about to say, better social media. None of that works, and the numbers bear that out. Because loneliness isn't an idea's problem. It's a presence problem. You don't fix it with a tweet. You fix it by standing next to an actual human being and doing something hard together.

That's where the army comes in. The army of normal folks exists because bowling alone was right. but we think it's incomplete. Putnam told us what we lost, but bowling alone doesn't tell us how to rebuild it. That's our job, the Army of Normal folks. You and me. When Army members like you start an ANF service club in their community,

they're not really starting programs, they're just rebuilding muscle memory, the muscle of showing up once a month, looking somebody else in the eye in a human way, not through a computer screen. Voting together. Serving together. Eating together with human beings and conversation.

A giving circle isn't really about the money. Certainly it's about the money, but that's not really what it's about. It's about doing way more meaningful things together, way more meaningful than we could on our own. Army Activations, the monthly service days, isn't only about the task. It's about sweat, laughter,

and doing something together that matters. Potlucks aren't only a cute little thing. They're radical because neighbors don't eat together anymore. And here's the thing Putnam understood deeply. This stuff doesn't scale fast. It doesn't go viral. It doesn't look impressive on an Instagram. But it works.

Slow, quiet, relational. That's how America, used to run. That's how it needs to run again. We don't need more heroes. We need more leagues. We don't need higher fences. We need longer tables. More normal folks showing up and saying, I don't have all the answers, but I can do this and I'll do it with you. That's how belief comes back. That's how hope sneaks in. That's how an army gets built. And that's how we bowl together and rebuild America together. It's good stuff, Alex. Robert Putnam, bullying alone. He's like the social capital guy. He is the social capital guy, right? And, you know, it's interesting that we have all this data

and we spend all this money to capture all this information about what's wrong and how, but, I mean, we spend all this time, effort, money and hand wringing over figuring out what's wrong and all these dwindling numbers. But the irony is the answer to it is so inexpensive and simple. It's engage. It's simply get off your ass and engage. It's have the courage to sit down across somebody who's not your trusted, most trusted confidant in making them so by growing together in service. And I just feel like the answer is so very simple. If somehow we can inspire enough numbers of people to just re-engage in what made America, the community it was up until about 25 years ago. I think as a Catholic, I've always thought about this example of the Friday fish rice.

I mean, they were so dominant for like the 20th century where even people who aren't Catholic would go to them because they're so good and so fun. I'm not anywhere near Catholic, but I have been to at least, well, in the South, some are fish fries, some are spaghetti dinners. But they were always Catholic. What's that? We do a bowl. You do a bum.

Dishing spaghetti. Perfect. Do y'all still do bingo? Actually, we got one this Friday. Yeah, their church. Bingo was also part of that. Sitting at a long table, you and a friend with eight other people you don't know, all laughing, doing your bingo dots and stuff.

And it's just fun. But it's the kind of thing that would bring somebody rich, somebody poor, somebody black, somebody white, like every type of person in the community to this thing. And we just have such a decline of that. Now it's like rich people go to rich people restaurants and they go to their country clubs and poor people go to poor people restaurants. And it's like you have no place like really to communally get together and meet strangers anymore until our local service clubs.

Think how need it is to walk down the street and bump into somebody you did know and say hello because you met them at one of these things and you know you have common ground. How simple is that? So true. So Robert Putnam's, the bowling thing here is, uh, Just a beautiful, another beautiful example of we understand what's happened to us. And the irony is the fix is so simple. And we at our Army of Normal folks are trying very hard to create that opportunity through our service clubs.

And we really hope you guys will take it seriously and think about just showing up, just slow, quiet, relational work. And even if you don't start a service club, I would say hope many of you do. there's still things you could do like host a neighborhood block parties like block party USA also brings together you could also just host a dinner at your house with all kinds of random different people right there's other ways you can skin this cap so there it is shop talk 91 we got to quit bowling alone and restore american community and american service to its roots so if you like this episode would you please uh share it with friends on on social subscribe to the podcast rate and review it join the army at normalfolks.us.

Just get off your ass and do something. Man, be nice to them. Okay, and do it nicely. How about that? That's shop talk number 91. Quit bowling alone. We'll see you next week. 1969, 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's senior. It's the true story of protests and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles.

I'm Manilic Lamouba. Listen to the A building on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen-Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys' Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan Cortina 2026 winner Olympic Games,

we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bob, hi, hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to two guys, five rings on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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 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. I'm Nancy 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. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.