Where Everybody Knows Your Name

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 14.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cheers was a sitcom hit in the 80s thanks to a theme tune promising that the fictional bar was a place "where everybody knows you name". Venues like pubs - away from our homes and workplaces - are vital for building our social networks and making our lives richer, easier and more fun.

But these so-called "Third Places" are in danger. Neighborhood hangouts are closing and membership of clubs, associations and unions is falling. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has been watching this worrying decline across a lifetime and warns that we need to act before it's too late.

Robert is author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. He also inspired the 2023 film Join or Die.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin.
0:24.0	It was a Thursday night ritual in the Santo's 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.
0:26.0	It's a film before a live studio audience.
0:29.0	It's a comedy about a bar in Boston,
0:31.0	owned by washed up baseball star Sam Malone.
0:34.0	You exchanged letters?
0:35.0	No, pans.
0:36.0	The jokes spring from the ups and downs of the bar's slightly oddball roster of staff and clientele.
0:42.0	From Prissy psychiatrist Frazier Crane to beer-loving accountant norm Peterson
0:46.7	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.
1:00.0	The Hindus believed that you led a good life do you come back in an elevated state like Colorado.
1:07.0	Yet I loved jeers. I fantasized that as an adult I'd moved to Boston and hang out in a place just like that night
1:14.2	after night after night.
1:15.4	The box can be very sad places. Some people spend their whole lives in the bottom.
1:19.6	Just yesterday some guy sat right here next to me for 11 hours.
1:25.0	But why did I love Cheers so much?
1:30.0	I think it mostly came down to the show's theme song.
1:33.0	Life is tough, the song said.
1:37.0	So wouldn't you like to get away
1:39.0	and find a spot where community and camaraderie can fix all your troubles.
1:43.0	Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.
1:50.0	Even as a kid, I understood the value of a place where you could be known and accepted,
	...

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