Pete: [00:00:00] all these people that could be part of your life are hiding behind doors as you walk through the street, and it’s like opening up another dimension to join the civic life or the public life of your city by joining with something.

that’s one of the most common experiences we hear from people who became joiners, as they say. Wow. It’s weird. I’ve been going through my life and I’ve been passing by this building, or I’ve been seeing this person at the grocery store, I didn’t even know that seven blocks away there were people meeting in this room every Thursday night and the most amazing things were happening there. I didn’t know that that was possible. it’s like uh, Narnia

Nina: Welcome to Dear Nina conversations about friendship. You are just going to get a lot out of today’s episode because you write to me about being lonely or you write to me about having friends, but not really feeling like you have as many close friends as you would like or as many variety of friends in your life.

I hear from people who feel that all their friends are exactly the same age, look exactly like them, think exactly like them, and they would [00:01:00] like to expand their world a little bit. I also hear from people who want to do good work in their community, in their local community. We’ve done episodes here already about hyperlocal. That was one of the monthly challenges on this show, was to do something hyperlocal with a person. It was less about an activity and more about a personal friendship.

Because having proximity in our friendships is so important to our happiness and to the success of a friendship is making it easy to see the person, and of course it’s easiest to start with someone who lives near you. Taking that idea further, I had Seth Kaplan on and we talked about the neighborhood.

Today we take that idea even further with co-directors, Rebecca and Pete Davis of the Netflix documentary, Join or Die. You have to see this film. First of all. It’s just entertaining. A lot of it is interviewing Robert Putnam, who is a real character. He’s an academic who’s a funny, charismatic guy.

He wrote the famous book, Bowling Alone, which researched into American [00:02:00] community and the decline of people joining different clubs and organizations that make our country function.

let’s get Rebecca and Pete Davis on here to talk about their incredible film, which I do hope you will see. But you’ll appreciate this episode whether you saw it or not. All right. Rebecca and Pete, welcome to Dear Nina. I am so excited to talk to you.

Rebecca: Thanks for having us.

Pete: Hello. Hello. So great to be here.

Nina: You’re my first brother sister combo, which is kind of cool in, in a podcast about friendship. I don’t have a lot of family people on,

Rebecca: we are also friends, I will say,

Pete: yes,

Rebecca: is

Nina: oh, I love that. That’s great. And you’ve worked together on a massive project and you’re still friends,

Pete: yes.

Rebecca: I should say still friends. We

Pete: Still friends. It’s been a long journey.

Rebecca: Eight years later.

Nina: cause I have read and heard that this project took a long time. I mean, I guess they all do though. Does I mean anything that’s gotta be with this much research and actual filming must take a long time. before we get too deep into it, which one of you wants to do the elevator pitch for join or die?

Rebecca: so Join or Die is a film about why you [00:03:00] should join a club and why the fate of America depends on it. it’s a project my brother Pete, and I here produced. Took about six years. And it features the work of social scientists, Robert Putnam, who famously wrote a book called Bowling Alone that came out in the year 2000 and was looking at the decline in American participation in things like bowling leagues, which is where it got the title from, but then broadened out from there to larger participation trends in religious life, in unions, and even our informal trends. And found that they were taking a, a pretty steep dive. We teamed up to revisit that work now 25 years later. Pete was actually a student of Robert Putnam.

So he had a, a personal connection to Bob, which was, is what kind of brought us into the story.

Nina: So, Pete, did you ask him and can I refer to him as Bob? It’s like, I feel like that’s a little intimate, but is that okay?

Pete: That was the spirit in which we made the film and that’s been one of his great assets in spreading this message is that he’s very relatable. [00:04:00] it was at the end of his teaching career when we approached him. There was kind of a, this confluence of all these different factors. one is he was at the end of his teaching career and ready to look back. Two is we were both feeling like this story was the important story to tell in our life, in my sister’s journey and her video journalism and my journey in studying civics. We felt America was ready for this story.

it’s an interesting pattern here where it’s a story about something that went viral 20 years ago, but may have gone viral too early. This message of bowling alone that there’s been a decline of community in America because some people thought that was very resonant, but others said maybe he’s the chicken little that’s saying the sky is falling. But everyone today believes the sky is falling.

Nina: Yeah.

Pete: They’re all looking answers. And we really believe this story of community in America might be one of the most fruitful areas to look into for answers.

Nina: For [00:05:00] me, someone who’s been writing about friendship and community in some aspects too, but you know, I really more deal with the interpersonal friendship stuff, but for over a decade. Nothing about the film surprised me in terms of how important it is that we have community.

I was very surprised though, I was just totally unaware there were people like you just said, who did not agree with his message in the nineties. It was the nineties when it came out, right? The book or, well, the article first.

Rebecca: 95, the book in 2000. You know, what you say to to friendship there and kind of these two different realms between friendship and community. I think from Pete and I’s perspective and working on the film, we kind of see friendship as the foundation building block on which all community ends up getting built. Built, First that neighbor to neighbor connection that says let’s do something with our collective power that’s bigger than ourselves.

Nina: It can really go both directions. I often say that they’re different in that community exists [00:06:00] hopefully, whether you’re friends or not, that you don’t have to necessarily really wanna spend a ton of one, one time with somebody in order to want your neighborhood to be cleaner, better, more functional.

that community exists kind of without you, and whether you’re tired that day and you don’t feel like it, you’re not in the mood hopefully that community is still existing. I think of religious institutions this way and why they function so well and teach a lot to people is you know, I’m Jewish, so that’s my context. That synagogue service is happening every Shabbat on Saturday

whether me, Nina Badzin feels like showing up or not. That to me is community. It’s not just dependent on a couple friends. It is above us and bigger than us and kind of more important than us as individuals. sometimes I think people confuse it, community and friendship. It’s like we have to be willing to give to the community whether or not, personally is something that feels good,

Pete: Totally. You know, and it, it shows so many aspects of this, you know, it’s like a one plus one equals three thing, where a community is somehow more than just the sum of all the relationships. But it also shows, and one [00:07:00] of the points we’ve been trying to make with this film, it’s kind of a subtle point, but it gets across, is the stuff that makes up that important aspects of community, whether it’s religious life or fighting city hall together, or building a democracy or a whole country together is the apparently goofy social aspects of it. Just having fun together. having a potluck, being part of pickleball leagues, things like that. It cannot be separated fully from the quote unquote important work. That usually all of this is kind of running together. we can’t sleep on the basic social skills of running a meeting or throwing a good party or gathering if we care about these other things that are happening on a larger scale.

Nina: Yes. Part of what I do to personally push people towards being involved in their community is to say, you’ll make friends. Hopefully you’ll make friends. So like, as I say, it goes both ways. I push it from both angles, that we need the communities because we need the communities [00:08:00] for all the reason that you talk about in the film, our democracy and learning leadership skills and.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Nina: yeah, we need friends in our lives and that that is one way to do it. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There’s all these groups out there that are desperate for members. Could you talk a little more for the listeners who might not have seen the film or read Putnam’s work, what did he say about social capital and how it even pr

Rebecca: Yeah, so Bob’s foundational idea that a lot of his research was built on not just bowling alone, but work before that. Actually research he was doing in Italy, so not even inside the United States is on this mechanism called social capital. in his fancy social science jargon, it’s the trust and reciprocity that is built in our relationships,

in our communities, that helps things run smoothly. what that means practically is it means when my car breaks down and I need a lift, I’ve got someone to call. When I lose my job, I don’t just go to LinkedIn and throw a resume out to the wind. I have friends that [00:09:00] can put in a good word with me to their boss and try to help get me back on my feet. And this is no small thing because bob through his early research in Italy where he was looking at the connection between this mechanism of social capital, our everyday relationships with our neighbors and fellow citizens in our community, it actually doesn’t just have a big impact on our lives and on our street. It has a big impact all the way up to our democracy functioning well, and he found that areas that he was looking at in Italy where he conducted this famous study that went into a book called Making Democracy Work, The regions with the highest levels of social capital didn’t didn’t just have happier citizens, they had better functioning governments.

So this very small building block of our everyday lives and of our communities has very real implications for how our, our governments are, are functioning.

Nina: It feels like everybody who writes about social connections thinks that they invented the idea of social capital. And I appreciate that your [00:10:00] film and his work nods to all the people that came before.

Pete: this goes back all the way. Aristotle wrote that the basis of all government was friendship. so in many ways it’s a story of the rediscovery of Of this insight, despite all the distractions saying it’s about building the perfect technical design for our government, or it’s all about economics or it’s all about education.

And knowing the right facts. it’s a constant rediscovery and Bob’s the latest iteration of this. you know, even beyond Bob, just the people rediscovering and being interested in this movie and this topic, podcasts like yours in the last few years the rediscovery that we can’t do this alone.

We gotta be asking the question, what are we doing alone that we could be doing together?

Nina: Did you feel that COVID was the big push back to Putnam’s work?

Rebecca: Yeah. I mean, and I think that’s always the interesting thing as you’re working on a documentary. You start the project in one version of the world and the project is coming out in another version of the world. [00:11:00] And it’s not fiction. You’re not just making the script up yourself. The story kind of ends up taking you on a ride with it.

And so we approached Robert Putnam in 2017, the year he was retiring from teaching. We’d already been working on the film for about three years at the time COVID hit in 2020. I think, our initial interest was kind of looking at this social capital and kind of democracy connection. What COVID did as we kind of reshifted our focus areas I.

there you know, halfway through production was it brought that personal aspect of social capital. The mental health aspect, the physical health aspect that much more I think to the forefront of the themes that we were digging into in the film. And we ended up bringing in the surgeon general who made loneliness and isolation, you know, a hallmark of his time in office.

As well as a researcher, Julianne Holt Lundestad that was advising the Surgeon General on some of his major reports into the story. And then as we’ve now released the film and been touring it for the last two years, we’re releasing [00:12:00] in a moment that the whole world has just lived through a naturally occurring social science experiment.

So if there was any question as we embarked on this film what would the world be like if we just lived in our computers? We don’t need data to know that it’s not a pleasant world to live in. I think it’s made us that much more ready to really engage with, well then what do we want our world to look like as we move forward and as new technologies increasingly become more of that conversation day after day now as well.

Nina: Tell me about the title and who thought of it, was it one of you or it was a team? How did that come out? Because it is a very powerful title.

Pete: We are defenders of our title. You know, some people have, have said to us, this is a very aggressive title for the most hunky dory film out there about just like friendship and community. we really believe the stakes are that high. We really do believe it is the shortest way we can get across the message of this film. On a personal level, we know join or die is true, which is that your [00:13:00] chances of dying in the next year are cut in half by joining one group. Social isolation is as big a risk factor as smoking. we know why that works. It’s friends that drive you to doctor’s appointments.

It’s friends that encourage you to join a running club. It’s friends that see a mole on the back of your neck and tell you to get that checked out. it’s friends that make you happy as the largest longitudinal study to on happiness. The conclusion was it’s good relationships that lead to happiness and that leads to good health.

So on an individual level, it’s true on a civic level, that’s the whole of Bob’s research. It’s basically 40 years of findings that the most important thing for a nation to survive is if there’s a strong civic culture and associational life in the country. We loved this nod to our American heritage, which is that one of America’s founding joiner, one of the co inventors of the public library in the volunteer fire department and the Continental Congress.

Benjamin Franklin was the original political cartoon that said, join [00:14:00] invented the phrase join or die as one of America’s first phrases. we’re standing by it as the shorthand for everything we’re trying to get across.

Nina: It’s really perfect. What would you call it otherwise? you should really join a club? No, join or die is so good. I really liked the example in there Bob had found in Italy of the regions that had the more daycares, for example. that was like a really good concrete, and I’m not explaining well, you guys explain it

Rebecca: so this study that he embarked on, by the time Bob came out with Bowling Alone, he had already spent 20 years a good one third of his career as an expert in Italian political science. So he was kind of famous for, you know, a whole other field of study before he came to his famous work bowling alone.

And it was a study that he embarked on after. In 1970 Italy went through this incredibly transformative moment where they went from having all of the power in their government centralized in Rome. So Rome was doing all [00:15:00] the decision making and then putting out decrees to the different regions about what would happen.

And they decentralized that central power from Rome to regional power. So distributed among the regions, similar to the system we have in the United States today where there’s federal power, but then also states doing a lot of their own decision making. So Bob came in on year one of this experiment in Italy and decided to say let me follow all of these different regions in Italy and see which does well at their democracy, which has a little bit of a harder time and why. That book that came outta the project is called Making Democracy Work. Bob takes on these incredibly ambitious research challenges similar to what is going on with community in America?

Very large question for a researcher to take on. He did not go into the study with the thought, I bet it’s gonna be social capital. that was something that came out to him later. He went in with open curiosity. Maybe it would be the region with the most education, maybe it would be the region with the [00:16:00] best economics.

But what he ended up finding is, yes, those things did have an impact, but the largest predictor of success of democracy in a region was were the citizens participating in bocce clubs when the government said they were gonna get a childcare center built, as you mentioned.

Did it get built and did it get built in a timely manner? Were the citizens voting. Were they engaged in the civic fabric of the community? And the regions with the highest civic participation ended up being the ones where the government was getting stuff done and where the people were reporting we trust our government and we feel satisfied with the job that they’re doing. it was with that foundational research that when he turned his eyes back to the us in the mid to late nineties it was actually Bob’s wife, Rosemary that tipped him off.

Their local city was having a hard time getting people to join the Parent Teachers Association. And that threw up Bob’s antennas because he said oh, this does not sound good knowing what I know from Italy. And it ended up sending him on a five [00:17:00] year journey down the rabbit hole to see how we were doing, across all the measurements of the ways that we get together.

Nina: Why did people reject his work at first? After the article came out, before he then went on a long time to write the book, what was the deal? I.

Pete: I think there were two things going on there. One is that it was the roaring nineties. This was a time where at least on the surface, there was a lot of optimistic stories. the Cold War was over, the internet was spreading, computers were spreading. the economy was doing well. While everyone else is zigging, he’s saying there’s actually this huge problem in the foundation of the house while we’re all having a party upstairs. the second is I think there are people that feel like they wanna anytime someone says, things seem to be getting worse, they wanna be the smart one that says, well actually everyone always thinks it’s always getting worse. Let’s point to all these times where they said, things were getting worse, but the truth was it was actually getting worse. It was not as the gen [00:18:00] Z would say it was not just a vibe.

And because Bob went out and he spent five years proving that it was not just a vibe that we were joining less. He found studies of unions and we went from a third of Americans being part of unions to 6% of Americans. He found studies of religious congregation membership. We’ve gone from 90% of people being part of religious congregations to in the last few years, we passed under 50%. He went across over a hundred different civic organizations and found the line going down. if people said, oh, well, we’re getting together in different ways, he’s like, okay, I’ll study informal connections. We’re card playing less, we’re going to each other’s house less. We went from five picnics a year to two picnics a year. And if you just ask really general questions like are you a member of any organization

in whichever way you wanna define it, 40% of Americans say zero and only 25% more say one. two thirds of Americans belong to none or only one [00:19:00] organization. Fifty 50 years ago that would’ve been very weird. You would’ve belonged to three or four.

Nina: It does feel like it was the fabric of society in lots of different parts. You know, obviously I speak from the Jewish culture, but lots of different cultures.

Pete: Totally. You know, just on a personal level with regard to the Jewish community our Jewish grandfather, we found an old oral history of his while making this film from the early sixties. And it was so funny. It’s, you know, someone in the Jewish community today, they might be part of a synagogue still, but he was asked in that oral history, what are you part of? He was part of a Yiddish theater.

Nina: yeah.

Pete: part of a rotating credit insurance association. He was part of a group of people who had immigrated from the same town, but now we’re living in Pittsburgh and we’re sending, you know, remittances back and he was part of the synagogue. You know, it’s the story of even if there’s still your religious congregation membership, 60 years ago, the same person, and he wasn’t, a super joiner of his time relative to his neighbors, you would’ve been part of seven different things [00:20:00] related to that religious community. We encourage anyone to go into your own family history, ask your grandparents, go to your local historic society. Find pictures of Main Street. You’ll find that there was an ODDFELLOWS building, or any other types of organizational life.

we often talked about the book, the Lorax, while we were making this film. the Lorax is the story about someone being told that there used to be these trufulla of trees everywhere, and it was so amazing how we used to have these trufulla of trees. That’s what we wanted to capture but in this film. There used to be a much richer civic life. And the goal is not to get back to that exact civic life. We’re not nostalgic for the fifties. Lots of problems there. The goal is to repopulate it in our own spirit today at the same levels. And so that’s gonna take a lot of civic creativity on all of our parts.

Nina: It really does, and even when, we’re joining things like sometimes they’re watered down and this will be the last Jewish reference, I promise, but I, so I sometimes can’t help it. I think about like Shiva, which for my listeners who don’t know, [00:21:00] traditionally when someone dies, you have for seven days time when people can come and, pay their respects. And it’s not a party and it’s not tons of food the way it has now become sort of. What has happened in the non-Orthodox community, you can barely get anyone to do it for three days. Usually now it’s one day.

Think about what that is to have everyone come in one day. It’s not the same tradition. It’s like a new thing. And I actually do think it’s a worse thing. It’s very overwhelming for the mourner to encounter 300 people in one day.

Rebecca: That speaks to how foundational community is to our culture. This is not an accident that was by design, that that was baked into that religious tradition. And, countless other examples in, in other religious tradition where the practice of community was deeply embedded in the rules and the tradition. Without community you cannot sustain the work. And I think there’s a lot to learn, you know, from our religious traditions and the practices they build into [00:22:00] them that keep people coming back and that deepen the community and the bonds and the friendship and the connection.

Nina: And the obligation. There’s like, then that’s part of what, I guess, I mean, between friendship and community, you have an obligation to your community if you take it seriously,

Rebecca: You know, and that’s the advice we tell people now, and it’s a little bit counter-cultural we tell people, if you are struggling with membership in your club, you need to think about how can you make it harder, not easier.

Nina: I love that.

Rebecca: it’s harder, it embeds deeper into the hearts of those that are involved and they feel like it means something. if they come and go, the other people in the group will feel hurt by that because they’re important and they need them there to run the meeting. but I think increasingly, as our culture has become more and more transactional telling people, making it harder, making it less efficient is actually the secret to making it sustainable and our great religious traditions, know this well. You don’t carry on [00:23:00] traditions that last for thousands of years if you aren’t baking in that level of commitment.

Nina: Yes. Making it harder. That really is interesting. And then it means something means something. If you’re not there, people miss you. And that’s where the friendship part comes in too. Like you’re missed, you’re noticed, you’re seen, you’re acknowledged. And people care if you show up.

But not if you don’t put anything in, you have to put something in. Right.

Rebecca: Yeah. And you know, I think that dovetails with another question we get a lot, which is, about technology and that’s a way to investigate it if it’s a chat that when you leave the chat, no one says, did Rebecca die? Is she sick? Is she ever coming back? It’s not building the same type of bonds as the person who’s ready to come to your house, who knows where you live and is gonna knock on your door if you don’t show up one day.

Pete: Yeah. You know, I have a friend who jokingly proposing that there should be a, a movement where people, instead of saying I’m spiritual but not religious, they should start saying, I’m religious, though, not necessarily spiritual. Whether spiritual is good or bad. The point they we’re trying to make was that the religious aspect of [00:24:00] religion, not just the spiritual aspect, you know, there’s one part that’s about belief and God and connection with the divine and the other world. That’s part of it. But the other part is not something you can just drop, because that’s a huge part of it too. That’s the part of the community, the ritual, the connection, that’s applied to religion.

But one of the things we’re trying to get across with the film is this can apply to everything. Every club, every organization has some mission or purpose that is its surface level, mission and purpose. we play pickleball together, we fight city hall together. We do this function publicly together.

We fight for this or that or the other together. These clubs usually when they’re in decline what usually has caused that is they’ve gotten way too efficient at what their stated mission is. They say every meeting should just be about what we’re doing. Why do we have all this other stuff?

If we just wanna play pickleball together, why don’t we just have an algorithm connect us all and we show up at the court one-on-one? Or why are we doing all this fighting when we could do this, that, or the other more efficiently? [00:25:00] What that’s missing is that every club also has a second purpose, which is that all of that organizational aspect, all that material reality of the club.

Rebecca: The religiosity of the.

Pete: of the club lig in religion is the same lig that’s in ligament. The stuff that connects bones is the stuff that builds a community together and keeps you excited about the mission and cares when you don’t show up. We always, like emphasizing one of their goals with the film is to be able to get you to see that. that stuff is not a distraction, is not a thing that needs to be optimized away. That is it at the very least half of what’s going on in all of this associational life.

Nina: I liked a lot the woman in the film who had started a bike club say the name again,

Rebecca: Banza she founded the Red Bike and green chapter of a bike club in Atlanta.

Nina: and she started the sessions by saying try to talk to someone you don’t know already. you need that kind of leadership. You need people to help [00:26:00] people with those social skills because it is intimidating to join something and now let’s move to as, as we kinda wind down, the more practical, the thing that keeps my listeners

sometimes lonely and wanting to meet new people. They’re scared to join stuff. one thing I wanna urge people is, well, there’s two things you can do. You can start something or you can join something. And not everybody needs to be a starter. We don’t constantly need thousands of new clubs in every town.

There are things that exist. How do you join? what is your advice for people to join something and not always have to start something?

Rebecca: I think first we’ll say we get it. We get that it’s intimidating and we’re all out of practice. Looking at the data we are in a moment of low joining. So it is, you know, a big step if you haven’t been spending the last decade of your life, going to meetings every other night. but, we encourage people to like go out and take that first step, be open to the transformative nature that, these clubs can and do [00:27:00] have in people’s lives, certainly in the folks we got to feature in the film. we hope that, that came through, that this isn’t just an extracurricular activity or volunteering that’s going on a resume. This is a chance to be totally transformed in who you are and to have a transformative impact through your collective power on your neighborhood, your workplace, your city, your state. But it also starts at the small unit, which we encourage people too. We’re bombarded with the way the media is these days with problems that seem really big.

And I think a thing that we love about Bob’s work is he puts a lot of power in what comes out of the small interactions that we’re building every day. You don’t have to go out and join the Save the World Club. You can start just by doing a survey of your own life and asking, what am I doing by myself right now that I could be doing with other people? and [00:28:00] you brought up the bike club in Atlanta. For that group it was biking by yourself and let’s try to bike together. It could be cooking by yourself, it could be watching movies. I recently met someone that started a podcast listening club. So they listen to podcasts and then get together and discuss them.

Nina: I love that. Are you getting a lot of notes about stuff people are starting because of it or joining because of the movie? I have to imagine. I hope so.

Pete: is our absolute favorite type of feedback.

Nina: yay.

Pete: know, the whole goal with this was we kind of subscribe to the belief that the point of some media product is not to pour information into your head it’s to spark a thought that you make yourself. And our favorite thought that comes from this is if someone has a new insight about American life or if someone says an insight about their own life and the most excited is this movie got me off the couch to go join up with something or start something. We’ve heard ranging from I’m doing one party with my neighbors to joining a club, to starting a club, to people have started meta [00:29:00] clubs in their cities where they’re throwing adjoining fair,

Nina: Oh, that’s great.

Pete: they’re trying to build civic culture of all the clubs in their city to help more people join up with each other. You know, it’s amazing.

Nina: There seems to be a little bit of a revival of people wanting to get off their phone. I feel it. I feel it in the letters I get. People are tired of text groups and they just want to live, and then they just go, okay, where to start. I think these kind of things where there’s faires, even if it is an online website that is an aggregate of all the things in your town, those things exist. I know they’re out there and And that’s a place to start because otherwise you do have to start something and there’s nothing wrong with starting something, but it would be nice if we had more joiners so that every club doesn’t have four people in it.

Pete: yeah, and, and you know, the question of like, why do this at all, I think is a, is probably a hardest question. why join? The best answer I’ve heard so far it really resonates with us, if you feel everything is going perfectly and will always go perfectly, don’t change anything in your life. Keep that going. But if there is anything that’s off. If you [00:30:00] feel you deserve to be treated better at work, if you don’t feel seen or understood, if you feel that there’s not enough fun things to do, if you feel that you’re lonely at all, if you feel that something’s off about our time or about our place or about what’s going on in your life if you feel that anything could be

Rebecca: in your marriage and you need a break from your spouse.

Nina: Yeah. Or I’d say if you feel like you have friends, but, and, and this is really our final push here. You have friends, let’s say, or acquaintances. It could be casual friends, but everyone looks like you, thinks like you, and you kind of know that you should have friends who are older, younger, different. Yeah.

Pete: I don’t have any old

Nina: Mm-hmm.

Pete: different. All of those can be answered with an organization. All of those can be answered with a connection you know. I’ve been really excited by the idea of all of this is already there. all these people that could be part of your life are hiding behind doors as you walk through the street, and it’s like opening up another dimension to [00:31:00] join the civic life or the public life of your city by joining with something.

That’s one of the most common experiences we hear from people who became joiners, as they say. Wow. It’s weird. I’ve been going through my life and I’ve been passing by this building, or I’ve been seeing this person at the grocery store, I didn’t even know that seven blocks away there were people meeting in this room every Thursday night and the most amazing things were happening there. I didn’t know that that was possible. it’s like uh, Narnia or whatever,

Nina: I was gonna say like Harry Potter, it’s like there’s a parallel life. Yeah.

Pete: a parallel life waiting there called public life.

Nina: Mm-hmm.

Pete: and we just are inviting people.

We hope the film is a, a great giant billboard for this magical world you can access just by signing up for something I.

Nina: You guys are doing amazing work. Pete and Rebecca Davis, brother and sister extraordinaire. Thank you so much for coming to talk to me. Everybody needs to see this movie. I will have all the links ’cause you can see it on Netflix, but you could also see it on the join or Die website and you can download it or stream it from the website, right.

Rebecca: We are actually encouraging people [00:32:00] to watch it together. We are on a big community tour with the film right now. We’ve done about 400 community screenings and counting. And so we encourage anyone that’s looking for an excuse to get together with people to host a screening in your community.

use it as a chance to bring together 20, 30, 40 of your neighbors. for a screening. We try to keep the barrier to entry on the tech skills that you need to host a screening in your town accessible to people as possible. But if you do head to join or dive film.com, we have a host a screening button right there on our website. we would love for you to see the film together in community instead of alone.

Nina: There you go. Now you have something to plan. You’re gonna plan a screening of Join or Die with other people, and then together think of something to do maybe as a group after you watch.

Rebecca: exactly, exactly. Thank you so much for.

Pete: Thank you. Nina.

Nina: I end all my episodes saying that when our friendships are going well, we are happier all around. And I will add to today’s episode and your community when it is functioning and going [00:33:00] well, we are happier. Thank you so much.

Pete: Thanks.