Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Pushkin. It was a Thursday night ritual in the Santos House. Like families all over America, we'd settle in front of the TV to watch a sitcom that, from the opening bars of its theme song, really spoke to me. That show was Cheers.

Cheers from before a live studio audience.

Kind of like ten Pounds, a comedy about a bar in Boston owned by washed up baseball star Sam Malone.

You've changed letters, no cants.

The jokes spring from the ups and downs of the bars slightly oddball roster of staff and clientele, from prissy psychiatrist Frasier Crane to beer loving accountant Norm Peterson.

I like drinking there north same. Oh that's too bad.

I was just a kid when Cheers was on the air. I hadn't tasted my first beer, and most of the jokes went over my head.

The Hindus believed that you led a good life. Do you come back and in elevated state like Colorado?

Yet I loved Cheers. I fantasized that as an adult, I'd move to Boston and hang out in a place just like that, night after night after night.

It could be.

Very sad places some people spend their whole lives in the barn.

Just yesterday, some guy sat right here next to me for eleven hours.

But why did I love Cheers so much? I think it mostly came down to the show's theme song, taking a break from My life is tough. The song said, so wouldn't you like to get away and find a spot where community and camaraderie can fix all your troubles?

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your neck.

Even as a kid, I understood the value of a place where you could be known and accepted, where you'd be welcomed among friends.

You don't want to.

Baby where you see it's almost all all as you don't want to be what everybody does. But of course Cheers was just a TV show. It was a fantasy. Deep down, we may all want to go somewhere where everybody knows our names. But those places are getting harder and harder to find. Many are closing their doors, and

Oh, it's very heavily tourists.

Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.

They liked the intimacy of it. It's small, about seven hundred and fifty square feet, so that they were relaxed and could meet other people.

Tom Kershaw is something of a Boston legend, and so is his bar. Long before Cheers appeared on the Santo's Family television, his Bull and Finch tavern was pulling in Bostonian drinkers from all walks of life.

We had college professors, we had college graduates, we had construction workers. I remember one fella, Butchi. I think he kind of was a man of all trades. What a whot he was, and he was there every night.

The Bull and Finch was inspired by the cozy pubs Tom had visited on trip to England. He even had the interior built in Britain and shipped over piece by piece. The tavern opened in nineteen sixty nine and was soon buzzing with locals.

It was just nice people being nice feople, and they became good friends.

And it wasn't just beer that was acting as a social lubricant. Tom had imported another pub fixture from England, a dart board.

That dartboard was the melting pot, the entree into meeting people and becoming friends with people.

The Bullet Finch quickly became what sociologists referred to as a third place. Third places are locations that aren't home or work, those first and second places where we spend most of our time. Third places are another space where people can get together for the sort of informal social interactions that make us all feel happier. And third places aren't just bars. They can be lions clubs, barbershops, community parks,

He said, sure, I'm hoping the business. They walked in, they looked around, looked at each other and said, this is it. They went to the pay phone and called their mates and jey, eureka, we have found it.

The outside of the pub was perfect, but it was what was going on inside that really matched what the producers wanted for their new show. The clientele at the Bull and Finch was the exact oddball mix the writers were looking for.

You know, he had Norm and Cliff and Carla and the other had you had Frazier Lilith.

So did the character seem to map onto any of the actual regulars?

And ye, absolutely we had Fred or that's Susie or that's you know whatever. Yeah, we played that game as to who was the characters they copied.

Tom's a graduate of Harvard Business School, so he can spot a good deal for allowing his bar to feature in Cheers. He was paid just a dollar, but he soon made a fortune from the publicity surrounding the show and from selling Cheers merchandise to the fans who flocked to drink in his now world famous pub. So how many people come here a year?

You knows, a just thousands of people, that's not millions.

But the problem is you can't be one of Boston's top tourist attractions and a place where everybody knows your name. The regulars don't come so regularly anymore. And if someone does know your name at the Bull and Finch today, it's probably a gag that the staff are playing along with.

We have people that come and say I have a friend coming. His name's Fred. When you walk in the door, can't wait, say hi, I've Fred.

People love it.

Thomas thrilled that his pub has become more profitable than ever, especially a time when so many similar businesses have closed their doors. But the Bull and Finch isn't the home away from home it used to be.

Times change, people's attitudes, change people's needs, change the neighborhoods themselves change. The business is a very dynamic business, and what's popular today could be unbopyar tomorrow.

I started with the story of Cheers, not because this is an episode about the mixed fortunes of the tavern business, but because research shows that what happened to the bar I fantasized about as a kid isn't unique. Lots of third places are in trouble.

I'm born on nineteen forty one, so I'm pre boomer. It takes pretty old people to be able to recognize the cycle.

Political scientist Robert Putnam has been keeping a close eye on the decline of third places. He started noticing their demise in his own community thanks to his wife and collaborator Rosemary.

One breakfast, she put the gloves and globe on the table and say, look at this. Apparently they're having trouble getting enough people to go to the PGA. Now in someplace, I've forgotten bill record or god knows where, and she said, so, what's happened to that?

But Robert wasn't worried about school governance. His real concern was that skipping the PTA meetings to work late or bing something on Netflix was affecting our happiness and connection.

One of the things that's shocking is if you ask people what makes them happy, everybody says it's my family and my friends and neighbors. I mean it just hands down. Nobody says, what makes me happy is my buick.

And Robert should know. He's now in his mid eighties and remembers how things were when he was growing up in Port Clinton, Ohio. Back then, Little Bobby Putnam was surrounded by third places where people mingled day in and day out.

My dad every morning went to a diner in town to have breakfast. It was called the Breakfast Club, and it was, you know, sort of a cross section one of the richest people in town, although none of us knew that was in that group.

Robert also found his own favorite third place, but it wasn't a diyner or a bar. It was a bowling alley.

In junior high school, I was part of a five men bowling team, and we did pretty well.

We were not great, but bawling a three hundred game wasn't really the point of hitting the lanes. Being on the team allowed people from different identities to connect. At the time, Port Clinton, just like many neighborhoods across America, was divided along racial lines.

So I don't want to say this was nirvana. It wasn't.

But just like his dad ate breakfast with the town's richest man, Robert's time at the bowling alley was spent crossing the societal divides of the time.

And there's a picture that shows the team which is three white guys, one tall, gangly guy in the middle which was me, and two black guys. And we did not think that was strange.

That Robert says was the power of third places, But it was a power that people back then took for Granted, I didn't know a.

Special and I don't think it was all that special in America in the middle of.

Nineteen fifties, But today's science shows that local hangouts like these were incredibly special. Research shows that the abundance of third places Robert enjoyed not only promoted personal happiness, but produced neighborhoods that were better run, more fun to live in, and even safer. We'll hear why when the Happiness Lab returns from the break.

Giuseppe had a fictitious younger brother who wanted to become an automachetic and he wanted to get the form so that they could apply for a subsidy for automachetic school.

Back in the late eighties, political scientist Robert Putnam was engaging in some mild academic subterfuge. Robert was interested in why some governments worked well while others didn't, so he set up a new study in Italy. He wanted to know why it was easier to access healthcare or enroll a child in kindergarten in some towns but not others. So he created fake Italian characters like Dsceppe and had

And then we counted how long did it take until we got back the forms if we got back almost never did we get the forms back, So then Giuseppe picked up the phone, and then we counted to how many different people was a telephone call passed until at last someone would say they were the right person.

Italy back then was a land of extremes. Some areas were ruled by conservatives, others by communists. Some areas were rich while others were decidedly not.

The Solvidly at that point, economically looked like Nicaragua or Syria or something pretty undeveloped, pretty poor, and the northern regions looked like Holland or Sweden or someplace.

But new reforms began better balancing how the different regions in Italy were governed, and Robert was super excited about these changes. These changes allowed Robert to directly test the role that culture, wealth, and history played in a government's effectiveness.

The first thing we found was that richer regions were better governed than poor regions, and we thought that makes sense because the richer region is going to afford computers and more talented people, and saw it.

But Robert also found that wealth wasn't the whole story.

We had many different ideas, many hypolsitis about what the secret ingredient might be. It might be politics, it might be I don't know. Lots of different things, but we never guessed what turned out to be the best predictor. You can see I'm.

Enjoying this, I know, edge of the sea.

Come on. Choral societies.

That's right, choral societies those groups of people who get together regularly to sing in choirs. Robert found that regions with more of these groups were the ones whose governments ran most efficiently. Now, I'm guessing choral societies probably wasn't the answer you were expecting. But Robert's strange result was about to get even stranger, because, like a good political scientist, Robert decided to look further back in history to figure

It was not that wealth produced choral societies, but the choral societies produced wealth.

The Italian towns where it was easy for Robert's fictional citizen Giuseppe to access healthcare or the forms his brother needed to train as a mechanic weren't just the towns that had the most choral societies. Now, they were also the towns that had the most choirs hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

The number of choral societies in a region of Italy in the thirteenth century predicts, it turns out, not only whether Giuseppe will get his medical buility burst, but predicts the happiness of people in regions Italy today. I mean, think of that.

Robert was excited about these odd findings, but he didn't fully understand the link, that is, until he suffered a temporary of insomnia.

I thought, God, I've got to read something boring that i'll fall asleep over. And there was a big book line open, and I thought, this is clearly going to put me to sleep. It was social theory. Foundations of Social Theory.

Robert just so happened to stumble on a chapter by the sociologist James Coleman which explained the concept known as social capital. Coleman argued that just as regions can have different amounts of physical capital resources like property, roads, and money, so too can they amass different amounts of social capital, social resources like relationships, networks, and communities.

I had never heard the term social capital, but I began reading it. I said, my god, this is what I've been studying. I saw essentially instantly why that was the right concept to use for choral societies.

Robert realized that third places like choirs and bowling leagues make governments work better because they allow people to build social capital. They helped create local networks in which everyone knows each other's names, and research shows that having people around who know our names changes our psychology. It helps us behave more virtuously. When people know who we are, we want to win their trust, and that means we put work into meeting our commitments, playing by the rules,

Trustworthiness is demonstrably increased by social networks. If you and I are engaged in some kind of transaction and I cheat you, you'll be angry at me. But if we're doing that in a setting of networks and I cheat you and he's watching, he knows that I'm not trustworthy because he's seeing me mistreat you, and that means he'll never play a game with me. And we generalize that to everybody. If everybody in town is looking at this transaction. I am a huge incentive not to cheat you.

And this is the reason that choral societies were such an important factor in Robert's study of those local Italian governments. If a city official sang in a choir with other townspeople, their reputation and good name became more important to them. They wouldn't want it getting around town that they couldn't do their job well or send out an application form promptly.

But the more interesting thing is that social capitalis externalities. That is, it has benefits for people outside the networks.

It's not just that an Italian official would work hard for a fellow choir member. The social capital that stems from third places like choral societies encourages people to make the whole system work better, which means that everyone in town gets to enjoy the fruits of more diligence and trustworthiness. And Robert observed other externalities too. Take crime, for example.

The best predictor of a little crime rate in a neighborhood is how many neighbors know wander this first name.

If you hang out with your neighbors in a bar, or a singing group or Residents Association. You'll start to look out for them, and they'll start to look out for you too. Robert himself benefits from living in just such a neighborhood.

And this is the moment for confession. I actually never went to the picnics and barbecues and slaving parties, but I was able to benefit from the networks of reciprocity and people keeping an eye on one of his house and so on, even though I was not in it.

Another example of these social capital building groups is parent teacher associations.

The more the parents are involved in schools, the better the performance of the schools, the better performance of the kids. And that's true for even kids whose parents are not in the PTA. They benefit from the extra anomalies of those networks.

But when Robert's wife, Rosemary showed him the newspaper story that PTA attendance was declining in that nearby Massachusetts community of bill Ricca, he began to worry.

At that point, I had not ever thought about measuring social capital of America. But the first thought is, well, what's wrong with bill Ricca? Is that also true? In intellection? Yes, it turned out to me, could that be true every place?

And So Robert began a careful statistical study not just of PTA membership, but of attendance in third places and social groups of all kinds. He tracked what was happening to rotary clubs, labor unions, religious groups, Scout troops, fraternal organizations, women's groups, and even his favorite teenage third place bowling leagues.

And by golly, it was true everywhere.

Robert published his findings in a groundbreaking academic article which years later became a book. He argued not just that our third places and civic groups were in rapid decline, but also that society should be much much more worried about it. In honor of his own positive experiences in Port Clinton, he titled his article Bowling Alone, America's Declining social Capital. The article rang alarm bells across the entire country.

Within one week, I was invited to Camp David David for goodness, Sex and Rosemary and I were on the cover of People magazine. So this is not the normal experience of any academic.

So Robert's warning was heated. Right he discovered just how important third places were for our happiness and social connection in the late nineties, and people listened and things today should be great. Right. Unfortunately, that's not how the story went. Since Robert's article came out in nineteen ninety five, the story of third places has gotten much, much worse. Is

Saying I'm not really a joiner isn't going to cut it in the coming decades, because we need people in this country to be joiners.

To hear what we can do to rebuild third places. Join me when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Harvard Professor Robert Putnam has taught political science to countless students over the decades. You remember, like when you first heard about bowling alone.

Yep, you know, I was an incoming freshman and he was a professor at the college.

I's gone too. Many were inspired by his lectures, but some have actually decided to act on his dire warnings about the decline of third places.

Hello everyone, I am Pete Davis. I am the co director of Joiner Die, new film out about why you should join a club and why the fate of America may depend on it.

After arriving in college, Pete Davis took a seminar class with Putnam called Community in America. Pete was electrified by his teacher.

You know what's so amazing about Bob is he wasn't just about the academics. He was also about making an impact on the country. He thought the best way he could make an impact on the country was getting people riled up, his students and the people who were reading his books to be excited about rejuvenating community in America. He's had that spirit in the whole time that I've known him these thirteen years.

Robert wanted to rekindle the businesses in clubs he'd known growing up in the fifties. Pete and the other millennials in class had never experienced these third places, but they did feel something about their lives wasn't quite right.

I think a lot of people my age feel a real sense of lack in the meaning department, and I think it's all connected.

Of course, there are still some spaces that millennials like Pete can go to outside of work at home, But Pete worries these new places haven't provided his generation with the meeting or social capital they crave.

So many of our third places had become unfortunately corporatized. So you know, you meet in a Starbucks, or you'd meet at a McDonald's, or meet at a Panera, and you know, it wouldn't be the story of meeting that our grandparents or even parents would remember of meeting at an Elks lodge, or meeting at a Masonic temple, or meeting at an NAACP headquarters in a state.

So why aren't people nowadays pushing to develop more of these satisfying third places. There are lots of reasons, but Pete says at least one of them is the fact that people today kind of just want to stay home.

One of the culprits Bob pointed to and Bowling alone was television. And I want to be clear, it's not the only culprit, but it is a very significant one. And part of the reason is that TV provided parasocial interaction. You felt like you were friends with the Today Show hosts or the sitcom characters TV.

The irony that television is causing America's decline in third places hits pretty hard. I mean My family was definitely among the people who stayed home to watch Tears on TV while dreaming of someday finding a place where everybody knew our names. In retrospect, maybe we should have been forming real life social bonds at third places instead of hanging out with fantasy friends on TV. But Pete says the temptation of TV was just the first in a series of problematic technological developments.

What's happened in the twenty years since Bowling Alone is we've had an even more supercharged version of parasocial interaction, which is everything that's been happening on the Internet because you have your friends that you're following on Instagram, but you're only experiencing their Internet presence, and so what that's doing is giving us this I would call it, kind of junk social interaction that's not the nourishing, real world social interaction that gives you kind of the full experience

Pete made me realize that we really did squander our chance to heed Robert's warning. The momentum his initial Bowling Alone article had back in the late nineties was huge.

The White House calls him up, and you know, the President and first lady in cabinet have all read Bowling alone and are interested.

In talking with them about it.

But then you know, after kind of nine to eleven, America starts talking about other things.

Nine to eleven brought huge political upheavals that overshadowed concerns about social capital, but it was also an era that saw epic technological change. Many people back then assumed that online communities would eventually replace physical spaces. Why gather in person for your morning coffee at your charity club when you could set up a GoFundMe page that reached hundreds of people. Why attend a political debate when you could

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen Boma for that find.

We're going to clear this, we're going to get this straightened out, and we're going to go.

Back to war.

The events of January sixth are just one reason Pete thinks we need to return to Robert's ideas and act this time.

Love of America. There's just been a very growing drum beat of interest stemming from personal experience of everyone across America, especially young people, that we are living in a social isolation crisis, that we are lonely, that we are hungry deeply for kind of a rejuvenation of community.

So what does Pete propose we do well. First, he thinks we need to understand that we do have a big problem when it comes to social capital, one that's getting worse and worse and worse. And that's where his new movie, Join Our Die comes in.

So we hope that the movie can be a catalyzer, a week up call of wow, you know, if we're going to turn things around as a country, or if I want to get all the joys of community.

I have to become a joiner, Tommy or.

You good brother.

Yeah.

I can see the transition in my life from my joining lodge.

Do like who I own out warden We.

The film chronicles people Pete's age who are doing just this, gig workers who are forming new labor unions, bike associations who are bringing low income communities together, and even new school bowling leagues that are forming where you least expect them. I was a very unhappy attorney and became an extremely happy, bullying out of the owner. It's a grassroots joiner effort that makes Pete feel really hopeful. All right, good evening, Bob Borland.

There's not a switch, you know in Fort Knox that says isolation versus community. The way it's going to change is going to be much more like the growing of a forest. We need a thousand different seeds planted of new ways of being in a community spirit, you know, new ways of getting together with your neighbors, new clubs out there, new cultural ideas about the importance of community and how we can be better neighbors. All of that together in every region across the country is what we need.

Beer under directly.

Pete's film title, Join Our Die sounds a little dramatic, but he thinks there's something important in us that does die when we don't have opportunities to build ties with our neighbors. If you want your neighborhood to be the kind of place where everybody knows you're Pete says, you might have to shut off the TV and head out of the house so that you can form some community

Cities should take seriously the social infrastructure they have. Our libraries are parks, our plazas, where just like how physical infrastructure facilitates things like getting the water moving through it or the cars moving through it, social infrastructure facilitates the building of social capital and the marshaling of social capital for community purposes.

And so in our next episode, we're going to explore how those at the top of government are again waking up to the need to save the little social infrastructure we have left and what plans they have to build back the social capital needed to protect our future.

We have met these truly existential threats in the past when we have adjusted as a nation.

I absolutely believe that we can find a way out. So if you dearly want there to be more places where everybody knows your name, I hope you'll return for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me doctor Lauriy Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Jess