Roots, Memory & The Stories We Carry Forward

Dylan · 0:00
What was your favorite part of the podcast today? My favorite part was making hand gestures at Mary, and then realizing she can't see it the way I did. That's cute. My

Tim · 0:10
favorite part was when Mary shared something very special that

Mary · 0:13
almost made her cry, and I feel like touched me too. I think I can almost cry every episode for you. I

Reggie · 0:18
love that too, but I think my favorite part was when Tim brought up this whole analogy about the tree and the roots, and oh

Mary · 0:27
no, you took so good.

Reggie · 0:30
That was also mine. I liked listening to him, like kind of like metaphysical.

Mary · 0:35
Yeah, I liked realizing how old we all were when Facebook became

Dylan · 0:41
a thing, not when Reggie admitted to make it out with his cousin didn't

Reggie · 0:59
happen. I just told the family 830 is when we have to leave, just in case there's accidents or anything like that. I didn't get to eat, so

Reggie · 1:08
I'm gonna be cranky, right? 730 Yeah, I don't want to leave at 830

Dylan · 1:13
We're that would not

Reggie · 1:14
be good.

Mary · 1:15
We need to start this over again, like,

Reggie · 1:18
oh yeah,

Mary · 1:19
there's a little timer right there, that just to make sure we know it's okay. I think I want to make sure that the alarm is not on too. I need to add that to our checklist. Don't knock

Reggie · 1:28
the light over there,

Tim · 1:30
no promises. Tap the glass,

Reggie · 1:32
guys. Welcome. This is a show that we like to call Age, probably because that's its actual name, and well, your host for today, and to my left is Dylan Garcia, to my right is Tim Scroggs, and over there, last but not least, Mary Green. And if you've been watching, you know we do a little thing where we pull a topic out of a hat, it's very raw, very real, unscripted, and I'm gonna go ahead and get us started. By hat, he means trash can. Yes, I mean this. There's

Dylan · 2:08
a bunny coming out

Mary · 2:09
today.

Tim · 2:11
This could be a hat for somebody. I'm just waiting after last week's topic. I'm on,

Dylan · 2:14
I'm like, sort of scared. Yeah,

Tim · 2:16
interpretation. I'm

Mary · 2:17
really glad you're hosting today, though. I feel like your energy is exactly the kind of host synergy that matches what I needed today,

Reggie · 2:24
which is hilarious, because I have had a stressful morning, but I'm glad we also had

Mary · 2:28
a stressful morning. So,

Reggie · 2:31
okay,

Mary · 2:32
it's a good

Tim · 2:33
one.

Dylan · 2:35
I know I had guys will

Reggie · 2:36
know before they

Dylan · 2:37
also, it's

Reggie · 2:41
roots, roots, right. background, I even know what the hell that means, like, is it a band? Because I could talk about them for a while, Questlove once. It was crazy. I was actually in St. Louis on Washington Avenue. I was with some friends, and they were starting to, okay, put it back in, so we can do it again. Round two, we

Mary · 3:08
would have forgotten that we pulled it. We would just do it twice. So, sorry,

Reggie · 3:11
yeah, no worries. I was walking down Washington Avenue with some friends, and they were all starting to just sputter out. They were getting tired, and they were ready to go home, and I was like, "Guys, I want to dance. It feels so good. It's so nice out. And so they left, and I kept walking, and I stumbled upon this little bar, and it was lit. Everybody in there was just dancing their asses off. They were spilling out onto the street, and I'm like, "What is going on in there? And I walk in, and Quest love was doing a DJ set, spending all this old school hip hop and soul, and like I danced for like two hours. It was awesome, one of my favorite things. So that's

Tim · 3:52
how long ago was that?

Reggie · 3:53
Oh my gosh, this would have been about 25 years ago.

Tim · 3:58
Is that before they were on there? No,

Reggie · 4:00
this would have been some 40. Yeah, this would have been about.. I was about 30, so yeah, this would have been about 24 years ago. I'm aging myself.

Tim · 4:09
Dylan, how old are you then?

Dylan · 4:10
I wasn't even a thought. My mom was in college, she was at Western at that point. Trippy, one

Tim · 4:17
person watches Roots at a little club, and the other one is

Reggie · 4:20
not even about

Tim · 4:21
to be just an

Dylan · 4:21
egg in a uterus.

Reggie · 4:23
Wow, you weren't even that yet.

Tim · 4:26
Yeah, they have,

Mary · 4:28
they're there, man. And

Reggie · 4:32
I was really good at it, but obviously it's all just gone by the wayside. It's

Mary · 4:36
okay. So many, all the eggs are there. All the eggs are there. Little Dylan was there.

Reggie · 4:40
You were the brightest egg in the bunch.

Dylan · 4:43
I think I'm just the one that survived, or like the one that was up for the charge.

Tim · 4:49
Isn't that maybe, maybe that is what is the smartest egg? It's the one that survived.

Dylan · 4:53
Maybe I was thinking of like the roots there was like for like my family, I'm like slowly coming to like. Like we're all like talking about like our generations and everything like that in my family right now, because like I got to see both of my great grandmothers live, and so we were talking about that, and on my mom's side we call it the Bowler gene, and it's like this like crazy, like anger kind of like yeah, not like that, but like the their last name was Bowler, their last name was Bowler, and we've been talking about it because it's like we've came from a long line of like some really like I wouldn't say society now would call them very angry women, I call them very passionate women, and so we've been talking about how, like, my great grandmother carried that gene, and then my grandmother carried it, and then my mom carried it. Now I have it, but I was talking about, yeah, passion,

Reggie · 5:51
passionate,

Dylan · 5:52
no, I call them passionate women, but I'm

Reggie · 5:55
in that camp.

Dylan · 5:56
I was talking with my mom, and my mom was like, when she birthed me. I have like all the DNA of like my great grandmother and beyond, because it all gets passed down through like eggs, like in your uterus. So that's what I thought about when I was thinking of roots,

Tim · 6:11
right? So, back, back, back, there's the egg, is still, yeah.

Dylan · 6:14
So, like, when my great grandmother gave birth to my grandmother, all of like her like DNA and like generational history is like in the egg, yeah. The

Mary · 6:23
idea that women are born with, I'm just gonna say, the minute we start talking about biology, we're treading into really risky territory. I couldn't tell you who wrote the birds, so like, who knows what we're about to say, but the idea that like women are born with all the eggs that we're ever gonna have, and so, like, yeah, all of your eggs were inside of your mom's body, and all of your mom's eyes were inside of your grandma's body, and so on and so forth. So, there's a

Reggie · 6:47
wow, that's what I think

Mary · 6:49
about when I think. So, you think about, like, if someone experiences trauma in your lifetime, we don't think about that as a genetic thing, but it does have an impact on more than one generation of people

Tim · 7:01
just telling Reggie that my youngest son was saying that he wishes he was a girl, and I said, "Why? He said, "Because they get to have babies in their bellies. We're talking about all these eggs. I love that.

Mary · 7:14
I know this isn't the topic of the episode, but can we talk about that for a minute, because I've heard I'm on some, we can talk

Reggie · 7:21
about whatever we want.

Mary · 7:22
It's our podcast. Sorry if you tuned in for Roots. I have heard a lot. I'm on some very liberal sides of the internet, where some very passionate women are talking about the state of the world right now, and I am not of the mind, like there's a big gender divide that works against us as often as it works for us, kind of thing, like we can all agree patriarchy needs to shift away from where we are, but or the society needs to disagree.

Tim · 7:54
I think the maturity of the men in our culture needs to shift. I think that's.. I

Mary · 8:00
don't know that I agree with, I mean, that is true. I don't think that the theory of patriarchy

Tim · 8:05
is serving us, but I think matriarchy or patriarchy can both work. I just feel like the maturity level of leaders has to be to a place to where there is empathy and compassion, and

Reggie · 8:15
also need to be more women in leadership. So,

Mary · 8:18
I think you're right that as systems, they themselves have become really like entangled with the specific people who have gotten to use those systems, and I think that this is what I was kind of trying to bring up, and it's really testy. Maybe today's not the day when Reggie and I are both kind of like bedraggled coming in.

Dylan · 8:35
I'm

Tim · 8:36
gonna bear myself, I'm ready,

Mary · 8:38
but you know it's it's not that the men who are alive today are the problem, but I do think that, I mean, some of them certainly are. Oh, yeah, but I think that men, like as a group multi-generationally, are wounded. Like, I just don't feel like we've taken very good care of anyone, but especially men. There's a lot of expectation, there's a lot of assumption about what your role is supposed to be in the world and how you are supposed to behave in the same way that I have expectations, because I'm a woman, but I think they've been very harmful for a really long time, and so that's like how we got here, but the reason this all came up is because of roots, is because of eggs, oh yeah, it's because your son was like, oh, I wish I was a girl, because they get to have children, and somebody on the internet, she's not the first one to say this, was like, oh well, that's sort of like the original wound of men, is that they don't, especially before we understood how sex worked, and before we understood how conception worked, it was probably this just miraculous thing that women got to have children, and there was no question about whose child that was. You might not, as the man, know for sure, you might assume, or you might look at them and see a mark of yourself and hope, but like a mother knows her child, or as a father, sort of, there's that. Room for doubt, I guess, and

Reggie · 10:02
interesting concept.

Mary · 10:03
Yeah, that was the theory that you know, one of the original things that sort of set us on this journey to where we are was the root of

Reggie · 10:12
envy of men, because they didn't have babies.

Mary · 10:15
Yeah, maybe I like.. I don't really love the word envy, because it seems to imply.. I don't know, I want to, I want to almost call it insecurity, or the uncertainty of men, because again, if you go back to a time when, like, we didn't understand it, it was just miraculous, and it probably seemed

Reggie · 10:32
it's still miraculous.

Mary · 10:34
Yeah, I mean, we have a little bit more of a peek behind the curtain, but

Reggie · 10:37
we know what happens, but yeah, you know, the fact that it does happen is a freaking miracle. It's amazing.

Tim · 10:44
Well, the first thing I thought of was hummus, because Roots was a growing hummus, handmade hummus company in Asheville. It was

Reggie · 10:55
a great brand. Speaking of

Tim · 10:56
men, I think that the founder went off the rails, from what I hear, I don't know what the rumors are around town, but it was a growing, amazing company from Asheville.

Reggie · 11:06
Great brand, great.

Mary · 11:07
Did I tell y'all that I first encountered Root Thomas at a Whole Foods in New York City, and I was just like, this stuff is really good. I liked the weird flavors, like the coconut curry, and it was okay. Yeah,

Reggie · 11:20
Chipotle all day long, yeah, with a dollop of chili crisp on top,

Mary · 11:24
but imagine my pride when I'm like, this is so good, I wonder where it's from, and like I'm in branding, I'm looking at packaging all the time, and I turn it around, I'm like, we're on the map, baby, since, since then, gone, they've

Reggie · 11:37
fallen from grace, sadly,

Mary · 11:39
didn't they, wasn't their location, I don't know if it was where they were making the hummus, but it was in River Arts District, right. Well, I, it's always when I think River Arts District, I'm like, well, how would a Helene have affected that? I don't know, but well, it

Tim · 11:53
wasn't Helene, it was, yeah,

Reggie · 11:54
it was definitely not Helene. The

Dylan · 11:56
Rivers Arts District is like under some, like, I'm not even gonna say like spiritual warfare, but like the fire the other day after I haven't seen

Mary · 12:06
this yet.

Reggie · 12:07
Oh yeah, mr.

Dylan · 12:08
Homer Simpson had like fire hair coming out. No, wait, I did see this. I

Mary · 12:12
forgot I was thinking about the salvage station, that's where the new

Reggie · 12:15
salvage station, that was where it was gonna be. I remember

Mary · 12:17
reading it, and I was like, I thought the salvage station was going away, but they were relocating, they were

Reggie · 12:21
relocating there. It was a really, it was a big fight to try to find a place. I know the owners, they're good friends, and so clean,

Dylan · 12:30
and the fires. Yes,

Tim · 12:33
multiple times in life, you're like trying to make

Reggie · 12:36
it, yeah,

Tim · 12:37
flood wipes out your place, then you're trying back

Dylan · 12:39
to your roots,

Tim · 12:40
right? Like, well, that's.. I feel like that's what they were trying to do, right? They were trying to relocate to a better place.

Mary · 12:47
Didn't they?

Tim · 12:49
Can we take this, though? They keep

Reggie · 12:52
rising from the ashes. They are going to make this happen. Absolutely. Somebody actually posted a reel the other day, and it was like that. It showed, like, some flood footage, and it showed the fire, and it was like, but we're still here, we're still coming, we're still thriving,

Mary · 13:09
even before I don't know anything. Let me just go on record and say I had no idea a

Tim · 13:15
lot,

Mary · 13:15
but I feel like I remember hearing it's like 240 was gonna expand, or 26 right? There was gonna expand, and that was partially why, in the beginning, they were like, well, this isn't gonna, this land is gonna become the road, so they knew that they couldn't stay in that location, and it was limited,

Mary · 13:31
right? There's something about that, like, some the world sort of like pushes you out, they're like, no, no, no, time to move on, time to the next thing. All right,

Tim · 13:40
that's the roots of our city, right, and how they change, and how are they, are they growing, are they being ripped out? You know, like when everyone is moving through life at the pace of life, you don't really notice the things that are changing around you, the evolving, and you just wake up 20 years later, like this is very different than what I remember

Mary · 14:01
when I hear roots, I automatically go to, like, the way back before my people were in North America. I'm like, okay, where did we all, how did we all get here? But that it's so strange, because I feel more connected in some ways to the idea of my Scots-Irish heritage than I do to like my more recent, like Appalachian heritage, so to speak. It's almost like I think, especially as someone who moved away, and like you kind of have to reclaim it differently, remix it, sort of. There is this sense of like I have feel connected in the, like, I eat a potato and my heart sings. What kind of potatoes are you eating? I probably feel like the echoes of generational poverty and, like, famine, or at least that's what I told myself on the obesity episode, but I think. Like, yeah, there is also.. it's almost like, which.. which roots am I paying attention to? Like, we all have that tap root that goes all the way back, whether you want to own it or not. And then there's all the like fresher, newer ones. I feel like, in some weird way, New York is now part of my history. Yeah, like I've got people there and places there. I just went back with my mom, and I was like, this is like a different lifetime, you know, but I feel so connected to it. So it is like the difference between stuff that was given to me and stuff that I got to build for myself. Maybe this is my roots.

Reggie · 15:34
What gets you hot about this habit? I can't imagine

Tim · 15:37
what a way

Reggie · 15:39
could see it bubbling up. Well, I

Tim · 15:43
just got back from my grandma's birthday. Interesting topic. Happy birthday heels of this.

Mary · 15:51
My grandma's like 85

Tim · 15:53
and she's an incredibly strong, beautiful person, and all the people that were there, and the legacy of a life, and so one by one they were calling up all of her children, and then all of her children's children, their children's children's children, and the stage was just packed with people, and I was looking at it like this is what happens,

Mary · 16:16
yeah,

Tim · 16:17
this is how life works, and when I was interested, you know, when your grandparents are alive and you're young, you don't think that they're people, you know, that they're humans and they breathe, but they're like these.. I don't know what it is, they're like these features that are there, but you don't realize they had a backstory and they were young and they fell in love and they had a career and they had like this thing, and so as I was getting older I lost my grandpa and I asked and it was before the age where I could really get to know him and the last few years of his life had dementia and it was really bad because you kind of forget who he was but I asked my grandma, this grandma to write his story and she did

Mary · 16:59
really

Tim · 16:59
did it's like it's pages long, talks about where he was born, and how they met, and what he, where he grew up, and all of a sudden I was like, we're missing

Mary · 17:09
it,

Tim · 17:09
yeah, you know, we're missing the root, the, the.. I think I grew up, this is not to say something bad about being Christian, because I am a Christian, but I grew up really Christian, where your roots didn't matter. All that mattered was your Father in heaven and Jesus, your brother. And I didn't know my roots

Dylan · 17:29
as

Tim · 17:30
a person. I didn't know where I was from. I didn't know my grandparents' line, the things they loved and were good at. I didn't know anything about my, my family. This is

Mary · 17:39
fascinating for me to hear, because in my family I feel like those two concepts are so tangled up together in good ways and bad ways, but like Christianity and the relationship with God and Jesus, and all those stories and all those songs, is at least some people believe like what held us together, and I think churches. I wonder, because you were like almost missionary, you know, like going around and almost evangelizing, but like churches were the fiber of the community. Yeah, there are pictures of my grandpa on the walls of the church, because he helped build it, kind of thing. So, was it fascinating?

Tim · 18:19
Was it a root for people without roots? Because America is made up of people that came from random places. There's no one that came from here.

Mary · 18:25
Yeah, well, it's like not just genetically, but community. Like, how do you scratch out a life for yourself? Yeah, and who do you cling to? It's almost like you hear about, like, aspen trees are actually like one big organism connected under the ground. They look like separate individuals, but they're actually like this huge network, or mycelium, that kind of thing.

Reggie · 18:46
I was pretty much aware of my roots, because I, when I was very young, I had great grandparents still, which was awesome, and I got to stay with them sometimes, which was really cool, because they, you know, my great grandmother would cook the best pancakes, she would do this thing where she would like make them, and then I think she would pan fry them in butter, so they got crispy around so good, and I remember those, so but then I think the main reason I was well aware of my roots was because we had photos all everywhere, we had photo albums, so there were pictures of them when they were young, or pictures of them, you know, independently, and when they were together, pictures of my uncle when he was like young and in the military, so there was always some some connection back to what came before me through pictures, which, interestingly enough, I would, you know, obviously grow up and become a commercial photographer, and I love capturing moments. I'm constantly photographing my kids and our lives, and just so they for posterity, so they exist, they're there. But

Tim · 19:58
how much of your history. History, did you learn through oral tradition?

Reggie · 20:04
Not a whole lot. I mean, I would say, though, a lot of times at the dinner table you'd hear these stories about something that happened, you know. Oh, like I would hear about my grandmother, who raised me, and my uncle, who was her brother, things that they will get into, like, so there was there was definitely some oral transfer. Have you ever heard

Tim · 20:27
that photos replace your memory?

Reggie · 20:30
No,

Dylan · 20:30
really.

Tim · 20:31
Oh, yeah,

Reggie · 20:32
I don't believe that's

Tim · 20:33
when photos really came up early, early on, when they were first invented. People thought they stole your soul, but then there's been some new research coming out about when this is why we won't let our kids see pictures of something we went to right away.

Reggie · 20:45
Oh, that makes sense,

Tim · 20:46
because it, it'll hijack your memories. You'll think of it from the third person. So, this, this is something we're getting, actually, with social media, is that we don't, we don't see our lives from inside ourselves, we see our lives looking at us, and pictures cause you to do this too. You're not looking, you're not looking at the world and experiencing the world like a kid doesn't know that they're in their body and experiencing the world, because they haven't defined inside and outside an independent self versus the whole. And so, when you look at pictures, you start to see the world as like this, looking in on things versus looking out into it, and having the experience, letting the experience be the thing that enriches you, versus I remember the way that looks.

Reggie · 21:30
I typically don't show my kids a lot of pictures, like occasionally they'll be like, "Oh, let me see that one shot at me that you took. It's not like we don't go on a trip and then we look at all the photos, like they, we talk about the experience, we talk about like we went on that trip recently, and we talk about what it was like to go to the crazy masons and have the super delicious ice cream shake in a mason jar, we talk about the AI image I made of myself on the alligator, like we talk about the experiences, so I'm.. I feel good that I'm not.. my kids really need

Tim · 22:07
to look at the picture. No, I do not, especially when you're filming, like the little ones are like, 'Let me see, let me see. I think it's because I'm always

Reggie · 22:14
documenting, like it's because it's become.. they are desensitized by me having the phone and taking camera

Mary · 22:20
is a part of your body, yeah. So they're

Reggie · 22:22
like, not like they would just be coming over and constantly checking. So it's well, it's good.

Mary · 22:27
You've really made me think, and I'm.. I want to hear from Dylan on this too. But as someone who's.. I'll tell my story, and then we'll get back to it. I, in 2025 I decided I wanted to completely get off of Facebook. It was not a place that I got on that often, so it's not like a place that people could talk to me. Sometimes people would try to message me on Facebook, and I wouldn't be there to respond. And then I would feel guilty when I finally got to the message, and I was like, "Oh God, do I explain? Do I apologize? It's not really my fault that they're trying to reach out to me on a channel that I don't really use, so like there was a lot of obligation, and it was a bunch of, yeah, I have to tell myself that a lot, but it was also a lot of people from the people I was connected with on there were a lot of people from my hometown, and I have a lot of baggage about where I come from and how I grew up, so

Reggie · 23:22
it was good they couldn't get in touch with you.

Mary · 23:23
I mean, actually, I was like, I'm ignoring this on purpose, and

Tim · 23:28
being there is like this lurking memory, right?

Mary · 23:30
And, and sadly, like a lot of extended family who like don't really know me, but they know of me,

Reggie · 23:36
right? I'm

Mary · 23:37
also not to be weird about it, but like I'm one of very few red heads in my family, so it's like very.. I think I'm somebody that people remember just because I'm the red head, and so.. but I don't have the same experience with them. It was very just emotionally complicated for me, and so in 2025 I was like, I'm gonna actually all the way get off of Facebook. I was like, what am I actually losing if I get off of Facebook? And by get off of Facebook, I meant delete my account, like cease to be fine,

Reggie · 24:05
like they'll, they'll let

Mary · 24:06
you for a certain period of time, absolutely

Reggie · 24:09
disappear. Wow, yeah, the new

Tim · 24:10
rule, they had to delete it, or that was in Europe.

Mary · 24:12
You sure, I think they did say, hey, you can come back within so many days when I deleted my account, and I'm not sure if I

Tim · 24:18
just deleted it,

Mary · 24:20
but I was like, I, I'm ready to do this. This doesn't feel like it's serving me. It feels like baggage. And I was like, well, what am I missing if I get off of Facebook? Facebook Marketplace, which

Dylan · 24:30
number one

Mary · 24:31
in, like, our community, a lot of stuff happens on Facebook, because it's the first social media site that kind of, like, made it to Western North Carolina. I'm missing, like, there's a rolodex of people, right, that I don't have their phone numbers, I don't know how to get in contact with them, and they don't know how to reach me, so I was worried about that, and then the big thing for me was photos and memories, because that was like where we stored Facebook existed, probably from the time I was 10, maybe younger, and I was like, I wanted a face. Book before my parents wanted me to have one. I like snuck onto Myspace and was acting. I lied about my birthday to get on, so like I had all these photos, not only that I had taken and saved, used Facebook as the holder of things on like weird little flip phones, like the quality is so bad, but also pictures that people had taken of me and tagged me in, and I was going through, and I was just like, I'm gonna pull all these photos down, I'll just sort them based on the albums they were in, maybe like chronologically or something, and it just.. it took a while. I was at Alex's parents' house, we were also going through a big culling on their side, cleaning out a bunch of just things that they'd highlighting around, and I was sort of doing it in the background, and I won't call it a panic attack, because I don't really know what that would feel like, but I was like in the process of clearing these photos, and I freaked out. I called my mom's sister, Heather, like she and I are, I call us like the softies in my family, that like we can have feelings, we don't get weird about it, but I was like, even now, thinking about it, I could cry again. I had to lay down on the bed and, like, do deep breathing. It was like, "Oh my god, looking at these photos, one, it took me back to places that I'd forgotten I'd

Dylan · 26:11
been,

Mary · 26:11
and two, I think there was something about seeing myself through someone else's lens. I think when you say looking at photos, it's one thing to say, "Oh, that replaces my memory, and I think it does. Like, I'll look at pictures of myself as a child, and it reminds me of some feelings that I had that I had forgotten, usually the good ones. But it also sort of steals it. It extracts out the other things that were happening, like I can look at a photo somebody took of me and be like, "I was actually miserable when this photo was taken, or whatever. I'm a tortured soul, but for no good reason. My red

Dylan · 26:43
hair,

Mary · 26:43
yeah. I guess this day one, but all I'm trying to say, this long way of saying I think looking at myself suit through someone else's eyes, it's hard to differentiate. Sometimes you see a photo somebody else took of you, and you might like the photo, you might like, not like the photo, you're trying to remember it differently, but I think it took a minute for me to put together, like, one of the experiences I was having is, oh, this person that I've lost touch with, and maybe we had, like, a falling out, or we don't, for whatever reason, we don't talk anymore. It seems like they were really invested in me, and they, like, really want to be my friend. I have, like, 400 photos that this person took of me and tagged me in. I don't know how many other people were getting tagged in photos by that person, but like, wow, such a big part of my history that's been documented was documented by this person, and this is how they saw me during that time. I mean, I was aware when they were

Reggie · 27:34
alert, he wasn't even there. I don't know what other photos,

Mary · 27:40
what was publicly accessible. It

Tim · 27:43
brings up a soft spot in a lot of people, and that's what I've noticed, that whenever you get sucked into the photo reel, you start looking through back the images. Usually, it's sadness. I think there's a grieving because you can never be your past self in our world wants to be their younger version of themselves, and I think that's what's causing a lot of the distortion in who we are now, like you see actors and actresses in social

Mary · 28:09
self-altering to try to recapture,

Tim · 28:11
and there was this whole movement after the Zoom COVID era when people were trying to get surgery based on their edited version of their Zoom personality. Oh, that's influx of plastic surgery. That's awful. People trying to.. I want to look like this. They take screenshots. Also, I can go off camera

Mary · 28:29
for three weeks and nobody will ask questions, because they had to come back

Tim · 28:32
into the world. And I think when you look at yourself and you look at everyone else, I think that you remember too much. I think our minds are meant to forget. That's definitely

Mary · 28:41
true, and your memory shifts, by the way. It's not a whole.. and

Tim · 28:44
ancient traditions were passed down through oral traditions, so that the myth could take place of the reality, because the reality is so hard that people have trouble living in it all the time. And so, the myth of a history, the myth of the good and the bad, and people supporting you was what memory was about versus the literal interpretation of memory, but

Mary · 29:06
don't you also think we're talking about oral tradition and storytelling and song, it's also about as a group we collectively are pulling out the pieces of this that we want to remember,

Tim · 29:16
highlighting,

Mary · 29:16
yeah,

Tim · 29:17
because there's only so much you can remember, that's the thing with I think that's happening with AI is we're trying to remember everything now, like every meeting has to be recorded, transcribed, every photo has to be taken. Like I was having, I was having dinner with someone I really, really respect, and I was like, I gotta get a picture of this, because I had this feeling like no one will believe me. And if you know that old saying about if a tree falls in the forest,

Mary · 29:40
take a selfie with me, Tim. Don't worry about

Tim · 29:43
it, but these were like really high-end designers that I had looked up to my whole life, and, and I never got a picture. Yeah,

Mary · 29:49
well, because you're like, I don't want to make it

Tim · 29:51
weird. It didn't replace my memory, but it was like, in this world, are we did something. Happen if you don't have a picture of it or transcription.

Reggie · 30:07
Well, I wanted to say something because you brought up something that I was feeling I was going to share, and you hit it right on, you hit the nail right on the head. I was when Mary was talking about looking at pictures and getting emotional about things, I was reminded of a time when I'm guessing I was probably about seven or eight, and we had this little like picture music wheel thing, it was like a, it was like maybe hexagonal, and it spun, and it played music, and it played this.

Dylan · 30:47
I feel like I'm there. That song to find

Reggie · 30:51
the name of that song, but the song it may.. it's just embedded, because I would just turn that thing, and it had all these pictures of me on it as a baby, and I remember, and I'm sure the song played its part, because it's a really beautiful, you know, emotive sort of nostalgic song, but I started crying because I started thinking seven year olds, yeah, I started thinking about I'm not that little baby anymore, I won't ever be, it was my first, my first time realizing the thing you just talked about, that I will never ever be that person, that little baby again. And you grieve. I laid there on the floor and just kept playing it and looking at the pictures of me and grieving. It was wild, and I remember that moment.

Mary · 31:39
Yeah,

Dylan · 31:39
just Reggie. Well, when

Tim · 31:42
my grandpa was going down with dementia, music is the last thing you forget. It registers deep in your memory. That's why traditions pass down through song, because you can remember a song more than you can remember details and facts about things, which

Reggie · 31:58
is why I can remember that melody all these years later, it's locked in. I'm

Mary · 32:02
curious, because I have a friend, Jake. You may have heard of him. He's got his family discovered.

Tim · 32:11
There's like a famous Jake, and I'm out of the loop on it. I mentioned

Mary · 32:16
Jake like 12 times on this podcast. He's a big part of my life, but he, his family has discovered almost like, like the golden tablets buried in the ground, they've discovered this. Sorry, I just saw the Book of Mormon this weekend. He just found this text of, like, telling the genealogical, like, history of his family, going back to, like, way, way back before they immigrated, they were, they had land, and I think it was England, anyway. So, I wonder, you're saying, like, oral tradition, things are passed down in a different way. I wonder, how much of that is nature versus nurture, or like, since we've learned how to sing, that was the original way to tell stories, and now that we've learned how to write and how to print, that's a new way to tell stories, and we hold on to information differently. Now we've got photos, and I was wondering, like, I think the role of photography - well, you, in particular, the role of photography in each of our lives has probably been different, because access to cameras has been different. I was, when I was thinking about the Facebook, yeah, like, what has it been like to always have a camera on?

Dylan · 33:18
It is so funny you mentioned that, because last night, okay, so I blocked my partner's family on Facebook as soon as we got together, because I didn't want anyone to go down on my digital archive that I have myself as a child.

Tim · 33:32
It wasn't because you didn't like them beginning childhood,

Dylan · 33:36
yes, and I remember, and I was going back last night to like finally unblocked them. They went, 'Are you on Facebook? And I was like, 'Funny, you mentioned that. I'm not, but, like, I was like going last night.

Mary · 33:48
You're like, 'I just got one. It's populated with your photos from the

Dylan · 33:52
last night.

Mary · 33:53
When did you get a Facebook account, I

Dylan · 34:01
got a Facebook account. What was it like? I remember my earliest photo last night from there was like 2010 2011

Mary · 34:09
so that would have been you would have been

Dylan · 34:11
nine seven. Think about that, somewhere nine years old with

Mary · 34:15
a Facebook,

Tim · 34:16
but wasn't it an intimate thing? It was

Dylan · 34:17
pretty cool

Tim · 34:18
when you have, okay, so you have all these pictures and blocking them isn't a bad thing, because it's like a private thing.

Reggie · 34:23
Yeah, I

Dylan · 34:24
was also like a really embarrassing kid, and I found like my early ages of graphic design with like pixel arts, and I found all that, and like Chevron was back in the mustaches. I got a

Reggie · 34:36
few of us blocked on there.

Tim · 34:38
Can we're

Dylan · 34:39
on Facebook? I

Tim · 34:40
kind of am on Facebook, but I'm really on

Mary · 34:44
Facebook.

Dylan · 34:47
I went on a digital, like, delete an archive last night, and I was like, holy shit, like, what was I doing as a child? But it was like, also like that weird, like awkward, like kind of child thing, or whatever. But when you were saying that I've always took pictures, I've always realized, like, I'm the person in the room taking pictures, so when, like, people took pictures of me, I was like, "Oh, I'm understood, like, people are like wanting to, like, spend that time on me, but, and I, like, went back, like, all are saying, and I was like, "Ooh, like, you know, like, I was like, now that I'm like this, like, cool, that was arrogant. No, no, she is not being

Tim · 35:24
arrogant. We all agree,

Dylan · 35:26
but like, now it's like

Tim · 35:29
you came into your own.

Dylan · 35:31
I'm trying to build my own brand of like, what does that look like for me? Is like I am gonna take pictures because it's like in my childhood.

Reggie · 35:38
Yeah,

Dylan · 35:38
like I remember when I was looking down these pictures last night, I was like, oh, this was like the early ages of esthetics for this child, like I was like, this is what Tumblr was, and now it's like Cosmos and Pinterest, but like Tumblr at the time was that for that kid,

Tim · 35:52
yeah,

Dylan · 35:53
but yeah, no, there's a lot of like emotions or whatever, but I deleted like over 200 pictures last night off of Facebook, I really delete,

Tim · 35:59
delete, yeah, you download them.

Mary · 36:01
I regret that for you. Everybody goes, no. I just.. I was in New York this weekend. I'll bring it up six more times before the end of this podcast. I went to the Met. They've got so much, Reggie. You got to go to the Cooper, especially. It's like they met Monday. Monday, I was there. They've got a bunch of Raphael on exhibit, and like, obviously you know him for the paintings, and the, I'll call them murals, they're probably called frescoes, or something very fancy, but you know what else is on display is really early, like charcoal drawings, and like studies watching his craft develop over time, and so I, it hurts my heart that you went through and deleted that stuff, because I think that's how you make an artist, like you've got a point of view, and it developed over time.

Tim · 36:48
Here's a counter argument: scarce assets are the most valuable, so when we have so many photos of so many things, they actually become worthless,

Dylan · 36:57
or maybe I lie, when the printing,

Reggie · 37:00
depends on what kind of value. When the printing press was invented, yeah,

Tim · 37:03
illuminated manuscripts skyrocketed in value,

Reggie · 37:06
right?

Tim · 37:07
And printed books became cheap when, when photography was first started, and you were like, and you got to stand there for like an hour.

Reggie · 37:15
Oh, yeah, totally. Photography

Tim · 37:16
was very valuable. Now, digital cameras, we have 1000s, we take 10 of each shot. We're like, just case someone blinking, maybe, maybe someone's in the wrong face, maybe they got like

Mary · 37:27
our photographers, literally, like

Tim · 37:30
I haven't. I went on a world trip around the world, that's a good way to say no, and I took tons of pictures, and no one's seen them, because I took so many. If I'd have took it, if I'd have taken one or two, or let's say 10 shots that I loved, imagine who would have seen those 10 shots. Everyone, but I have so many, I've been culled through them, I haven't gone through and picked the ones that are the best, and I think that we're missing out on the scarcity of things. So, like, if you had one picture of you as a child, imagine how valuable that photo is versus the albums that we have of us as children. I think I need to put you through an

Dylan · 38:05
exercise of curating an Instagram monthly photo dump.

Reggie · 38:09
Right?

Dylan · 38:09
I think I need to put you through that.

Reggie · 38:11
You should take

Tim · 38:11
me through it, because I think I need to

Dylan · 38:14
put you through

Reggie · 38:16
capturing different parts of her experiences, and so you can't distill that down to one photo, but it

Tim · 38:22
just, it gets me emotionally. It's hard for me to go through all these pictures, because it's like that. I have to grieve that person. I don't look at photos a lot, because I live present,

Reggie · 38:31
personal experience.

Dylan · 38:32
Maybe I'm not morbid enough yet.

Tim · 38:34
No,

Mary · 38:35
I do wonder if it's like nostalgia compounds over time. I mean, you were doing it at seven, so maybe that's not true. Because

Reggie · 38:42
here's the thing, because I, I would still love to see.. see, I don't have the thing where photos replace my memory. I can see a photo from a particular period of my youth and remember all the things that happen that I hold in my heart, and the good things about, like, there's a picture of me and my cousin from when we went to Hollywood. We were on this, like, it was when I was with my church, my.. when I was in the church when I was young. We did this trip out west. We went to Topeka, Kansas, and Salt Lake City, Utah, and Las Vegas, Nevada. Are you secretly

Dylan · 39:20
a Mormon? Is this what you're trying to tell me? Oh

Reggie · 39:22
no, we made it all the way to California, and we went down California, but we stopped in LA, and we were actually in Hollywood, and my cousin had got, and I got into this big fight, and there's this picture of him that I still have

Mary · 39:38
- it's backwards Reggie Tidwell 39:40 there's a picture of him walking towards the charter bus, and when I see that photo, I remember all the good things and all the bad things that happened on our trip. I remember the big fight, I remember making out with my cousin and being making out, making up.

Tim · 39:59
Oh, I was about to go down the roots path in a different

Reggie · 40:06
family lineage, not mine. No, making up with my cousin and being good again, and in having so much fun. I

Dylan · 40:14
bet you were good after that.

Reggie · 40:16
Memories are still there, like that one photo doesn't replace it, didn't lock in, like this is all that happened. So I have a different connection with photography, and photography is like a slice of a movie, that's how I look at it. It's like one still from the movie, and when I see the still, I remember the whole movie.

Mary · 40:38
So what's the difference between, you know, looking at a photo of a life that you've lived and you were present for that moment, versus getting back to roots, looking at photos of, like, your ancestors, or like the moments that you weren't there for. Does that connect you? You think

Reggie · 40:53
I think it could. I think it has for me, but we

Tim · 40:55
don't have pictures of the roots that I want to look into drawings, maybe, but

Mary · 41:01
mysterious drawings. My family was not that creative or talented.

Reggie · 41:05
Yeah,

Mary · 41:05
I want.. I miss the my favorite photos are candid photos, and I just went all the photos I have of my relatives from way back, because cameras were more scarce. Yeah, it's like, let's all stand beside this.

Reggie · 41:20
Yeah, your

Mary · 41:21
grandfather just built this stairwell. Let's stand next to it, you know? Like, they'd find something they were proud of and mark them all. I want to see my grandmother, like in motion. There's a photo

Tim · 41:34
video I've heard.

Mary · 41:35
Oh my god, I would love there. There's a photo of my grandmother that I'd never seen, I call her my granny. It's my dad's mom, Avery County, North Carolina. And she, Granny, she.. I didn't know this, but I didn't find out till she died that she was like this outdoors woman, and she loved to hike and fish and hunt like this, and there's this photo of her, like, like on a fishing expedition or something, and she's like wearing, I don't know, she looks like she's on safari to me, like relative to how you were, but I was like, I connect with this woman, I see myself, not that I'm very outdoorsy, but just like this active, very alive person, and she seemed so prim and proper, and maybe even sometimes Prissy. When I knew her, I spent a lot of time with her as a child, and people tell me that I'm like her, but I never like saw the full scope of that compliment until I like started to see these snapshots and slices of her life. I'm like, God, how

Reggie · 42:35
do those make you feel seeing those?

Mary · 42:37
Thanks for asking, Reggie. I have a hard time tapping into that on this podcast.

Reggie · 42:43
It

Mary · 42:44
made me feel like almost disconnected in a way. I definitely grieved it. I mean, it was at a funeral, so I was sad to begin with, but she was ready to go on. She kept telling us she wanted to go be with Julian in heaven, but just this feeling of, oh, here's a person that I've literally known my whole life. This is a person who I believed knew, maybe not didn't know me as an adult super well, but like understood my origins in a way that nobody else did. She was definitely.. she gave us a book that, like, gives the story of her lineage, like her vocal. She's very invested. She was doing research. My brother got that from her. He's big into that kind of thing, but it made me a little sad that here's this person that I thought I, you know, not that I knew all her intimate details of her life, but like I felt like I knew her. And then discovering that there was all this distance between us that I never closed, and it was less about, I think, my family harped so much on the story of how we got here, you know, we've been on this land for however many years, and we're proud of that, and we've whatever, but like the personal stories of who we as individuals are, I feel like, get kind of lost in that.

Reggie · 44:03
I will say, when I see, and thanks for sharing that. I love that you were able to go there.

Mary · 44:09
I'm feeling way different than I did when I walked into this podcast, and that's other people that watch this feel the same night

Reggie · 44:17
in terms of photos tying. I think photos are interesting, and they can tie you back to roots that you know nothing about, not your own roots, but other people's roots. One of the things that comes to mind is my on my wife's side, we have this big family reunion out in New Jersey every year. Go, they have the uncles will unks will put the projector on and show all these photos from through the decades through the family, and I'll see all these young photos of my wife playing with her cousins when she was young, and seeing all these people who I have now come to know in their current state. It, but seeing them when they were young, and there's something really remarkable about that, because one, I think it's nice that I'm also hearing stories as people are seeing these folks. Oh, yeah, I remember that, that was when so and so did the such and such, and somebody split their pants, you're like, you're hearing all these stories that are bringing these photos to life. I don't know that I could ever lose that. I'm just harping on you about, but you're, but you're thinking about the

Tim · 45:25
branches. I'm talking about the roots.

Reggie · 45:27
Those are roots, because the branches

Tim · 45:28
are adjacent to our lives. I'm talking about the things that nurture us, the things that these brought nutrition

Reggie · 45:36
to our, our photos that aren't there, are no longer that I never got to meet, and being able to hear stories about them, I

Mary · 45:44
am not tracking with branches and roots.

Tim · 45:48
The tree usually, when someone says they're their family tree, yeah, it's usually the tree in the branches. Yeah, this goes up this way, this goes up this way. The roots is a different story. Who would be the roots is in the ground, it's in the darkness, it's the, it's the part that's in the depth. The

Reggie · 46:02
people that are dead, they're in the ground.

Tim · 46:04
I mean, dead for a long time.

Reggie · 46:07
Yeah,

Tim · 46:07
like ancient dead.

Reggie · 46:08
So, you have to go back generations.

Tim · 46:10
I'm talking generation like people that lived on a tree. You're dear, you're talking

Reggie · 46:14
about ancestry, you're talking about

Tim · 46:16
on a branch. Sorry, that got dark.

Mary · 46:22
Well, that's all relative to the relative family tree. I mean, it's like you're basing that off of, and for good reason. Like, I am at this point in time, I'm on the tree, you're like putting yourself relative. It's a web at the end of the day, like everybody's connected differently. I'm saying, when you draw a family tree, where do you start?

Tim · 46:43
Oh, yeah, that's a good question.

Mary · 46:44
Yeah, and I'm saying, so what is bridges and what is roots? It's all kind of.. I

Tim · 46:50
feel roots with the way I drew this, and I did a meditation on this one time, and it came to me. I, he has the answer. I feel that the.. where a tree is a good metaphor. I wanted to be a tree. There was a.. I went through this movement where the tree is this thing of stability that is there in the rain and in the sun and in the spring and in the winter and in this.. no matter what it is, it stays, it's steadfast, always lives

Reggie · 47:16
soggy, and then it falls over in the wind.

Tim · 47:18
That's rare, though. I mean, it's.. it's unless there's a big hurricane, but even then it's there's a time for all of us to die. It will soon die,

Mary · 47:24
and they, and they feed the ecosystem. They were

Tim · 47:29
constantly turning oxygen, creating oxygen. So I was really enamored with trees. So I was doing this meditation, and I just saw everyone as trees, and the part on the ground where the root, where the, where the tree

Mary · 47:42
trunk,

Tim · 47:43
trunk goes in is where we are. That's where we, that's where we live. What goes under the ground is like the quantum field, or something that we can't see,

Reggie · 47:54
right?

Tim · 47:54
And it's something that brings

Dylan · 47:57
us, and

Tim · 48:02
then he

Dylan · 48:04
go on,

Tim · 48:05
it's a realm of possibilities, because sometimes when we get into, when we get into pictures, we see,

Mary · 48:11
oh, obviously that's what roots meant, like we should have been talking about the quantum field, sorry,

Tim · 48:17
photos harness our imagination in a way that makes it hard to imagine, because it's really captured literally. It's not a memory, it's not a mythical memory. Mary Potter read the books whole different than watching the movies, and now I can't remember what was in my head when I read the books. Exactly, the books was a magical experience.

Reggie · 48:36
Yeah, the

Tim · 48:37
movie, not so much, because pictures lock you into something, the way they look, the way they dress, the way the era they're in. It doesn't have myth. Myth is timeless. Yeah, so myth is what makes people

Reggie · 48:49
experienced. Myth is

Tim · 48:50
what makes us adults in our..

Mary · 48:52
I did see Dana Radcliffe this weekend, and every brilliant thing go on. Did you

Reggie · 48:55
really? Yes. Oh, really?

Tim · 48:59
Did you bring that in? Did you plan me to

Reggie · 49:02
talk about the question? totally,

Mary · 49:03
that was I am reeling from how we went to here, and I want to keep going.

Tim · 49:10
Here's the thing, so the branches to me are us, our lives going into the, the, the air, the air is like this, the spiritual world, so like the spirit that binds us in our families, in our, in our love, those are like the branches, but the deep endlessness, the thing that allows us to connect with the other trees is the mythological, imaginative, that you and I could be connected at our roots, even though you didn't look at pictures of me at this thing, because you're locked into the branches versus the trees that are connected at the root level,

Reggie · 49:46
so our roots could be intertwined, and

Tim · 49:49
our roots could be definitely intertwined. So, there's metaphor, I think, that we are all connected, you know, that on the layer on the underground, yeah, all the roots are connected, that's what we are as humans, when the astronauts look back at the earth. Earth, they're like this is one being, everyone is coming from the same thing. Yeah, the same source. So, the roots are the thing that make us alive. They're not the thing that birthed you, they're the thing that makes you alive, and it gives you the capacity to connect to something you've never connected with before. So, it's not like some people grab under roots and they're like, you don't know where I came from, deep south, right? Grep too is

Reggie · 50:25
like, right, right,

Tim · 50:25
you don't, you don't belong here, you don't know what's like to be here, you know, like all these things, and we form a barrier boundary where no one can cross unless they understand you,

Reggie · 50:34
right.

Tim · 50:34
And so that's what these photos lock us into, these stories that we tell ourselves about where we're from, but we are actually from something greater than the mother, a mother. We're from the mother. We're like endlessness. So that's what I guess that's what I'm saying, is that we are all rooted together, and there's something about the thought of a root that is different than thought of a branch. A root isn't as affected by wind and storms as a root, a branch

Reggie · 51:05
underground is

Tim · 51:06
really affected, can break, can destruct by light, but you can actually cut it exposed,

Reggie · 51:11
the branch are exposed. Yeah,

Tim · 51:13
you can cut a tree down and a new tree will sprout up from its roots. They're

Mary · 51:16
both life-giving in a different way, but it's like the root has to cover,

Tim · 51:20
right? You get the sun and the air, and the, and then the rain soaked up from the soil, but the soil is completely dark. One under the ground is just dead dark

Reggie · 51:29
photos. Is this photo of the tree system, and it shows the roots going deep down in the ground, and the branches going up into the air, and it's, it's like

Dylan · 51:42
a, it's a, they mirror each other, and I think

Reggie · 51:44
that's really cool. They just have different purposes. The roots are, are I think locking you into your history and your ancestry in your past, and your branches are taking you out into your exploration of what's possible.

Mary · 51:57
Well, and I like, I can get down with a metaphysical metaphor, like I like the idea of the roots, not only being, you know, x beget y, beget z, like the beginning of the Bible, but also like where we all, as life, kind of source from, and like I don't know how much capacity I have to really imagine the full extent of that, since

Tim · 52:20
you brought it up, Jesus's line doesn't go through just men as it did in tradition. He has like two or three women in his line of his bloodline.

Mary · 52:31
I would say he has more than two or three in his blood, like no, like

Tim · 52:35
trace by history.

Mary · 52:36
I see, yeah, there it's like you history, certain

Tim · 52:41
right in kingship in royal lines, everything is through the mail, unless you go to the cultures where it's matriarch, matriarchal, but what I'm saying is that the shift there is that it isn't just a certain way, it changes based on possibilities, what's possible,

Mary · 52:58
sure, and and I think it comes back to me, it's so focused also on the voice of the person writing, or the perspective of the person taking that photo. It's like, I don't.. I think that's the difference between the oral tradition that you were talking about earlier, like the songs we all inhabit, that I guess somebody wrote the song at the end of the day. It's like, yeah, I do. You were talking about scarcity of media, making it valuable, and I was like, I think that's, I think I agree with that for like right now, but I want the Dylan Garcia archive to get dug up one day, and for somebody to just be like, miracle, I found the original works, the unknown artifacts of I think in history you kind of have to prove you were here in some ways, so when you talk about X begat Y big at C, and I, Tim can talk circles around me when it comes to the Bible, but I think it's interesting why the person who wrote that down chose to highlight certain pieces, and I do think we talk about patriarchy as just like a lens through which you might see the world, so it makes sense that you would focus on the men in that story based on where they're coming from. What made the women noteworthy to them to the writer in that moment? I don't know.

Reggie · 54:15
I did have an epiphany, though. I think the reason why those photos affect me differently, I think it's generational, I think, because I'm, I'm 54 so I've been here long enough to where I didn't have Facebook for a larger part of my life than you guys, the digital collection of photos, and so because of that I developed probably a muscle that locked me more to my experiences than to these physical snapshots of things, and I think that maybe that's like a practiced thing. I got a decade on you, two on you,

Mary · 54:50
yeah,

Reggie · 54:51
three on you, where I didn't have to, like, you

Tim · 54:53
were telling that story where she was anymore, and so, yeah,

Reggie · 54:56
exactly, that's exactly right. I don't know, I feel like my,

Mary · 54:59
my mem. Memory has never been all that good, even I definitely don't have a good memory now, but I find photos to be helpful, because it there will be parts of my life that I completely forgot existed, and I'll see a photo and be like, oh yeah, I was there, that's a piece of what made me, and that's kind of a scary thought to be like, I was there, and I don't even remember it until somebody shows me.

Reggie · 55:22
We call it short term Mary.

Tim · 55:24
I will argue it's not a bad thing. Short, I think the memory is one of the strongest and weakest parts of our the way we were

Reggie · 55:34
double edged, because there are

Tim · 55:35
things that you shouldn't remember, things

Reggie · 55:38
that you need to forget. Well, definitely, that happens.

Tim · 55:42
Always recall every memory. It's.. it would be a well, you hear about

Mary · 55:46
people who have so much of that, and actually sometimes can become such a burden that drives people crazy. But I.. or, well, I'll say this: the older I get, the less I prioritize memory, especially with all these devices that we now have that help me with that. It's like an accessibility feature in my life, is all. I don't have to know what day of the month it is, like I've done that so many times, like may 12. Mary, did you mean april 12? That happens to me all the time, because I'm just.. but what is the value of memory, and I think the important memories are the ones that I like hold in my body, and memory of emotion and connection to people I don't forget, but the dates and the figures and the names and the exact storyline, the plot of what happened, I'm getting a looser and looser grip on it, and I think I don't know. Alex and I both have grandparents who lost their memory pretty significantly as they got older, and we have a pact where, like, okay, when we get there, number one, let's not carry a bunch of resentment into our old age, where when we start to forget things, we get angry, and two, let's just have a good time, like, what if you let go of needing to remember, and you just, like, we're in the moment for a minute, and you're like, "Oh, who's this man? He's being so nice to me, instead of feeling regret or letting yourself be so afraid. I know you don't have control over all of that, but I'm trying to lean into this part of me that is naturally there. I could probably stand to do some more brain teasers. Stay sharp, but yeah, just like, don't don't feel bad about it. Just be in the moment and carry what what you need to carry, and put down whatever is hard.

Reggie · 57:33
So, we've been exploring what roots mean to us as people. Can a business have roots? Can an industry of roots,

Mary · 57:41
I definitely feel like we're rooted in Asheville, whatever that means, whatever the future holds for us. It feels like Asheville is such an important part of our story.

Tim · 57:50
I, yeah, I think rooted in a place used to be more noticeable, like

Mary · 57:58
this is that blanding thing, land.

Tim · 58:00
Yeah, I think that it's, it's now not as I think it will become more powerful because it will be scarce to be rooted in a place that's that only that place. I think when a place is everything, people like, I've been there before,

Reggie · 58:13
right?

Tim · 58:13
I've already been there, they look just like this other place, but when you're in a place that's very unique, that'll be a valuable thing, but I don't think right now businesses have roots, but usually they're not interesting, so people like us have to make their roots interesting. It's like, yeah, you started your business 15 years ago, so we like, I think we, we make it grandiose, and not that it's false, it's just that we tell the story in a way that makes it memorable, right? Exciting, I

Mary · 58:40
totally agree, we're romanticizing it, especially in hindsight. You look back,

Tim · 58:44
I think businesses like

Mary · 58:47
think of the tree,

Reggie · 58:48
that's the definition of the tree. The

Mary · 58:49
tree will grow, you can see in the rings, the tree will grow differently in times of drought. The tree will grow differently based on what nutrients are in the soil, and I think that that has an impact, like the context in which you arrive matters, and I feel like there are things that we maybe feel permission to dive into that maybe if we were in a different competitive environment we wouldn't, or if we didn't already have lives and connections here in Asheville, we wouldn't. I just feel

Tim · 59:18
like the market informs the story more than the business and the roots and the story informs the story, but

Mary · 59:26
don't you think it's because business historically has leaned so heavily into the market, like we're making every choice based on what the market tells us we're supposed to do, and we're kind of stupid, we're not doing as much of that as maybe people, you might tell me a story you think

Tim · 59:42
people want to hear, and whether or not you're right, I guess, can be determined in the data, and if it works, but what if we were to tell stories that were really interesting and true?

Mary · 59:54
We're gonna do our best, I think that that's the scary thing, right? It's like owning. What, what do you put into song versus what do you let fade away, right? And yeah, I just feel like we've been immortalizing market conditions, and which is a part of what we do, like we know we're in a difficult economic time right now. Design is often seen as a luxury rather than a necessity. We could have a whole episode on that. We think in a way that's pretty unconventional and challenges some norms, and that is not a good thing to be when people are feeling conservative and wanting like a sure thing, and yet if we're able to make a go of this really, we might collapse in two years and find out, but I think that's part I need to knock on some wood, I think that's part of

Reggie · 1:00:42
the do your knock,

Dylan · 1:00:44
no

Reggie · 1:00:44
good, the more the knock the better.

Mary · 1:00:48
No, we got it three times because it cancels out. Yeah, and all I'm trying to say is I think that we have gotten really boring stories about businesses because businesses have been attending to really boring things,

Reggie · 1:01:03
you know. And I will say, I will say that when I think about businesses having roots, I think about businesses that are rooted in their history, like for instance, one business that comes to mind is like Hickory Nut Gap, that is generations of farmers producing, ethically producing, but yeah, but they buy,

Tim · 1:01:23
they buy meat from other farms now, because they scale too big.

Reggie · 1:01:27
Oh, don't say that,

Mary · 1:01:28
hard to hear.

Tim · 1:01:28
I'm just telling you that it's like that, it's that quote again, but I'm pretty sure big enough, and you start to do that. I would imagine, though,

Reggie · 1:01:35
that there still are a lot. They

Tim · 1:01:37
saw the values, yeah. I was gonna say, are as

Reggie · 1:01:40
a company, they are very values-oriented, and the way they treat their livestock has everything to do with the quality and taste of their meat. So, I can imagine they're aligning themselves with companies that have similar values. But that said, I think they have done a successful job of tapping into the roots of their business and using that as their, their feel-good story. I'll

Mary · 1:02:03
try to be quick, but I worked at this company called George P. Johnson. They're a huge experiential marketing company. They laid me off right around COVID because events looked really different in 2020 or 2021 and I remember part of their onboarding. This is something that I would love to see every company do. Part of their onboarding was, I had to sit down and watch. Well, nobody was looking over my shoulder, but I thought it was fun to watch a little five minute video about how the company came to be. And the very beginning of this huge experiential marketing company, global, probably at least 10s of 1000s of employees. They probably staff up for events, and it's in the hundreds of 1000s. Headquarters in multiple continents, they do huge trade shows like IBM Think. They do the.. I forget the name of the Google one. They're like constantly in the mix. They're turning over easily a billion dollars of business a year. They started in, I want to say, Detroit, and they started as a bunting company. Does anybody even know what bunting is anymore? It's like the drapery that you put on the front of a stage, around, you'll see it around, like, the fourth of July, or people are doing, like, a throwback, yeah. And before that, they made flags, they were flag making and bunting like they like flags, they saw an opportunity to make bunting, yeah, right. So they were like, oh, we can take this fabric thing that we're doing and make bunting and get people excited. And then they were in the event space, and they're like, oh, there's more people want other things, and they happen to be right there where the automotive industry was getting propped up. It's over 100 years old. I

Reggie · 1:03:40
love that.

Mary · 1:03:40
So it was so cool to see the origin story of this thing that I'm now involved in, and see how one, there's this culture of like innovation, we talk about the market, like we flow through the market, they weren't like, oh, there's an insight here about the automotive industry, they're like, there's an opportunity, should we be bold and just try it, and they did, and

Tim · 1:04:00
have the data we have, yeah,

Mary · 1:04:01
and they did it again, and then they formed relationships, and as those companies grew, they grew. So it's when you start to look at it that way, it starts to feel like, oh, and my root reached out and found another route, and we connected,

Tim · 1:04:12
that's dark roots, the possibilities. But I want to know if you think brand roots matter, like when you look for brands that you like.

Dylan · 1:04:21
Well, I was thinking, man, I remember like Nike was like my first like diehard like brand. Yeah, athlete, like everybody's an athlete. I remember that.

Mary · 1:04:34
Do you know when you go to Dicks and they're like talking about customers, they call us all athletes?

Dylan · 1:04:38
Yeah, okay. Sorry, I'm sorry

Mary · 1:04:40
that I'm stolen valor when I walk into Dick's morning. Everyone's Annapolis. Sorry, go ahead,

Dylan · 1:04:46
Kathy. No, I just remember like my parents are like diehards on brands, and like when the brands that like we use like put out like a hype reel or like proper. Hand it, I'm like, oh, I'm a part of this, like I feel very seen, which maybe is a little delusional.

Mary · 1:05:05
No, but

Dylan · 1:05:07
when the Helene, when the Helene Carhartt like video came out, my dad was in that video,

Reggie · 1:05:13
really. Yeah,

Dylan · 1:05:14
and so I was like, it's us, right? Yeah, so like I feel like some deep roots with just like some personal brands, granted they're probably doing some like very sick shit, but like, like bad, I mean, like probably treating employees bad, but there

Tim · 1:05:30
is like, but they've

Mary · 1:05:31
invested in you, so they've

Dylan · 1:05:32
invested in me somehow, like whether it's like

Tim · 1:05:35
was it their marketing that invested in you that everyone's a did that help you become an athlete?

Dylan · 1:05:38
No, okay, it was just like when you put a piece of clothing on, it's like the kind of swagger. Yeah, I think I relate heavily with brand with like clothing right now, just because, like, I'm not.. that's what I'm a really die-hard about, is brands. It makes me a little snobby, but like brands of clothing.. like, I remember like certain feelings buying these kind of certain clothes, and we've got some roots, like my mom primarily shopped at, like, Eddie Bauer, so I remember, like, the vibe of that, and, like, I think those are my early recollections of, like, die-hard rooted, like, brands.

Tim · 1:06:13
I like that you're making the roots your roots with the brand versus the brand's roots.

Dylan · 1:06:17
Yeah,

Tim · 1:06:18
that's such a cool perspective.

Reggie · 1:06:20
I like that. I was,

Tim · 1:06:21
I was immediately going to like the how do we give this brand root, so people, the origin story, but it was a, it was a personal rooting in those brands.

Dylan · 1:06:30
Yeah, and I also have like just very early memories of like I'd either go to Tractor Supply with my dad, and like that would be like our fun little shopping experience, and then like my grandmothers, they were very shopping oriented, very clothing oriented, so I remember being like a very young kid and just like seeing them try stuff on, and like how they felt when they came out of like the fitting room, and I was like, oh, I was like, oh, this is like what something here, this is like what the brand does to the personality, or like how it like morphs together, so when you guys were talking, I was like, my earliest memory of like jeans was like American Eagle jeans, and yeah, like, yeah,

Tim · 1:07:10
my parents took me for Christmas one time, we didn't get clothes on normal times like normal kids, because we weren't that rich, so we got clothes for Christmas, we got new clothes, yeah, and they took us to American Eagle and bought us all these clothes that were way too big, like jeans at American Eagle. They did make me feel so..

Dylan · 1:07:31
I'm still buying American Eagle jeans,

Tim · 1:07:33
yeah,

Dylan · 1:07:34
at like 22 and my earliest memory was like when I was like 10 or 12, buying American Eagle jeans with my mom.

Mary · 1:07:40
There's something about that, like we are now deep enough into the commercialized whatever in America, where like you can love a brand that your mom loved, you can love a brand that you're growing, like Diet Coke on this show. I love Diet Coke. You

Tim · 1:07:56
like

Dylan · 1:07:57
it? I love, see, I'm

Mary · 1:07:59
a full sugar girlie, I'll get a regular Coke

Tim · 1:08:04
when Diet Coke was cool, and then you could, you, but you had to drink Diet Coke because you're trying to lose weight all the time. Yeah, so when you're like, oh, Diet Coke's out, we can drink real Coke. Yeah, this is good.

Reggie · 1:08:13
You know how yesterday I had a real Fanta in the bottle. Oh, wow. When I was in Rwanda, I drank those every day. So good. I was thinking about a company I just wanted to give a shout out to another company. I had a really interesting segue, like you were the company that you would work for, Astral Shoes. You know, they're known for they white toe

Tim · 1:08:41
shoes, white toe box,

Reggie · 1:08:43
I guess they are kind of a wider toe box, but what's so, is they're like really they have the like zero draw,

Tim · 1:08:50
right early on that can climb over

Reggie · 1:08:53
wet rocks and stuff with them, which I love

Dylan · 1:08:55
outdoors, but

Reggie · 1:08:56
what's great about them is they started off as a life jacket company, like life jackets, yeah, yeah. They did a whole pivot like that. What were you gonna say?

Tim · 1:09:07
Well, I was just interesting how she brought up clothes too, as, as where she's finding her love of brands, her connection to brand, because I will commonly tell clients that the brand, what people think about brand now is basically just the clothing on a person, so imagine the entity is really the brand. The clothing is like the last part of the brand that gives it the style, it gives it the thing that helps it walk into a room and feel a certain way, or blend in with a certain crowd. And so I think it's interesting too that we've come all the way to the surface from like these deep-rooted memories, and we talked about photos a lot, and it's interesting to me because Roots doesn't relate to photos, except that it helps us remember, but Roots is such a deeper,

Mary · 1:09:56
it's very values-like when you sing a song.

Tim · 1:10:00
Yeah, values, it's like something, it's a reason you live just a memory of a black and white photo of your grandparents when they were young, but when I went to this party with my grandma, I was like, I saw large part of my family that I have to make myself feel close to, and I do that so that I can feel close to them, because I don't live with them,

Reggie · 1:10:21
you know,

Tim · 1:10:22
we live out of touch with those roots, and so, but I know them, and I know they know me, and I know we come from a similar place, so I'm like, just open myself, even though this feels strange, like it does at reunions,

Reggie · 1:10:33
and you know

Tim · 1:10:34
that feeling, but there's this, like, we've come from this deep values rooted, why do we live to the surface? Like, what is what are the leaves on our tree? You know, like, what is the clothing?

Reggie · 1:10:46
What if our what if we allowed our roots to play a bigger role with who we are today and what we seek out?

Dylan · 1:10:55
You can change your hair and you can change your clothes, but you'll always find your way back home, and

Reggie · 1:11:00
you, having a really fashionable grandma, like I love that you have this connection to your roots through fashion. Her grandmother worked for Vogue, which is really bad. Met Monday,

Dylan · 1:11:11
Met Monday.

Tim · 1:11:11
And another thing, it's okay to not remember your roots and not to be able to see them. You're still taking nutrients up through the roots. Yeah, it's if there's like an openness to take that nutrients up.

Mary · 1:11:22
It's almost like I have been trained to receive certain things because of how my ancestors received certain things, and I can work with that or against that, but there's stuff that I wouldn't think feeds me in the way that it does, and I think coming geographically, coming home to Western North Carolina opens those things up again, things that you were like, "Oh, I wasn't getting fed this way when I lived in other places, but being here, I joke, like I go somewhere else and you can see a lot of beauty in a lot of different places, but I come home and I'm like, "This is what the land is supposed to look like. These mountains are perfection to me, and

Tim · 1:12:02
matters where we are. Like, people say it doesn't matter where you live, you can work online, all that's like bullshit.

Reggie · 1:12:07
Yeah, it matters

Tim · 1:12:08
where you are. Places feel different deep down. Everybody wants to be rooted in a local,

Reggie · 1:12:13
absolutely. Yeah,

Mary · 1:12:14
even if you have to pretend it for a little while,

Dylan · 1:12:16
make it

Mary · 1:12:16
happen.

Tim · 1:12:17
Yeah, connection, like to find that like you belong somewhere.

Reggie · 1:12:21
Roots equal connection. I love that, guys. I know these people need to get to work. Somebody's probably just lingering in their car, going, 'Guys, just wrap it up. I thought you were talking about us. Yeah, I was like, 'I'm talking about our audience. The calling to wrap up this episode on photographs. I mean, Ruth, maybe we

Mary · 1:12:52
want nobody's like guarding this. We'll come in tomorrow, and Tim will have watered up like 30 topics,

Tim · 1:13:00
want some feel

Reggie · 1:13:02
guys. Thanks for we know you could spend your time doing any number of things. Thanks for spending it with us. We'll see you next time.

Dylan · 1:13:09
Love you. Oh, how sweet you love people. I do. I do.

Mary · 1:13:14
I work with Claude to like write shit, and I'm like more tender with more love. Thanks for listening. This podcast was created and developed by our hosts Reggie Tidwell, Tim Scroggs, Mary Green, and Dylan Garcia. Produced by me, Mary Green. Live production and editing by Will Canady. Graphic design by Dylan Garcia and set design by Megan Scroggs. Today's episode is presented lovingly by 40 Hearts, creators of enduring value.