Welcome to “Ear Biscuits”, I’m Link. And I’m Rhett. This week at the round table of dim lighting we’re going to be talking about our first memories. And in general the nature of first memories. Yes. So yeah we’ll take a trip down, all the way to the beginning of memory lane I guess we’ll call it. Let me just say that you listening, and maybe us talking, it isn’t unlikely that your first memory didn’t even happen. So if you don’t wanna be disappointed. I know my first memory happened, there’s no doubt. Well a lot of people think that. It’s just ’cause it’s so real to me. And I’ve, you know, I had an interesting conversation with my kids about this that led to a practice Realization? Oh a practice. A practice that I think can be applied to any– What? Any parent, or mentor, or if you have influence on a certain type of person. Oh that’s sounds sinister. I’ll just leave it at that. But, you know, we should acknowledge and I wanna acknowledge that the last four weeks in our “Lost Years” series. Now full disclosure we’re recording this just a few days before my episode, which is part four, comes out. So as we’re recording this we don’t really have the benefit of experiencing the response to my episode so I’m still anxiously awaiting that. Everybody hated it. But I do, that’s your prediction? But I do think that, I mean yours has been out, we’ve been processing that, we’ve been talking about it a lot. Well, lots of people A lot of you using #earbiscuits when we’re talking about it. I think that we’ve gotten, I think it’s very safe to say that we’ve gotten more engagement and reaction to this series, so far, even without your episode, your episode’s only gonna help. Just where there’s a conversation that’s happening and there’s lots of questions, thoughts that are being put out there and we have every intention to continue the conversation. So I think that, you know, us talking about our spiritual background and where we’re at now and this is now a part of “Ear Biscuits” in general and so we’re gonna return to that conversation so that it’s not just this hey we talked about it and we’re never talking about it again. So we’re gonna, we’ll use your questions and comments kind of as a springboard to get us back into that conversation but that won’t be the end of it either and we can’t, I don’t know when exactly we’re gonna do that. It won’t necessarily be next week but. Yeah, I’ll say it’ll be sooner versus later. You know we do want to continue that conversation while so many of you are. We just have to process my episode and then, you know, gather up everything that you’ve said using #earbiscuits which we’ve been doing so there’s still time for you to submit questions or your responses. It’s kind of a new experience to have this level of a conversation going on around the show. I mean the fact that I think the first reason that we did it was for ourselves and even without my episode not being out yet I can honestly say that it crossed a big threshold in me even just recording it and I know it was very meaningful to just, for us to put this out there for ourselves and just to know that it resonates with so many people and, or it conflicts with some people even and you know it creates that dialogue and a conversation. I just think we’re honored to have a community of listeners that are, the vast majority it’s cordial, it’s loving, it’s positive. And I will say, yeah I definitely, and I tweeted that out as a result of just the initial reaction that I got to my story. The vast majority of people regardless of where they’re at spiritually, whether that’s, you know, more similar to what we used to be or more similar to what we are now, everyone has been, mostly everyone has been like really. Civil in the least but– Civil and respectful. Even kind. And kind, and understanding and I think that that is again we didn’t talk about this to create some sort of division. I understand that any time you talk about religion or politics you are just stepping right into it especially just sort of the climate of our country right now. You’re asking people to fight and thankfully that really hasn’t happened. It happened a little bit but we just wanna say that this is not about creating an us versus them, an in group and an out group kind of thing. We just wanna have a dialogue, we’re just trying to have an honest dialogue and thank you for being a part of that but let’s just remember to keep it cordial, keep it curious and– Respectful. Respectful and we’ll keep the conversation going. I also thought it was cool that the number of conversations that we’re having with like our friends from college, you know, we’re now having an ongoing conversation with them about all of this because I mean they shared so many of those experiences with us and like if you listen to our conversation about digital relationships or conducting friendships over text that was instrumental in us reconnecting with those friends and now it’s a really rewarding conversation that we’re having with them over this topic. And there’s people coming out of the woodwork who we haven’t heard from in years who are saying that they’re listening. It turns out being on “The Tonight Show” doesn’t do it it’s just talking about your background. That’s what gets all the, that’s where you get all the phone calls and texts. And you know what there’s also a number of people who I think they’re introduction to us has been this series. So there’s people– Well that’s just based on simply looking at the numbers, I mean. Yeah there’s people who are listening I guess right now that weren’t listening five episodes ago. So welcome, welcome to “Ear Biscuits”. If your first introduction to this podcast or us was the series we just wanna say welcome. Welcome to the heard of mythical beasts, that’s what we call ourselves. Yeah, we invite you to stick around and listen to this podcast every week or if you wanna watch it you can watch it on YouTube the following, what is it? Saturday, Sunday. Let’s talk a little bit about what the podcast is. I mean I think it’s also just a moment to kind of recognize for all of you who’ve been listening for a long period of time I think you’ve seen an evolution in this show from, you know, talking to, interviewing YouTubers years ago to doing just a bunch of miscellaneous stuff to kind of settling into this place where it’s just two guys who grew up together, who now work together, who are still best friends just doing life together and processing it and talking about it. Sometimes it’s personal and I think that’s how we got to telling our stories is that we had told you so many things about our past and our experience and the way that we see things and we had never gotten into that specific sort of giant part of who we were so it just sort of, it was just a lot of critical mass building towards this hey let’s just let you guys in on this part of ourselves. But it’s really because the nature of the show that’s what it’s become, it’s become a very personal sort of processing podcast. Yeah I mean it’s a big part of us conducting our friendship, you know, and also like just reporting and processing everything that’s going on in our lives. So is this podcast just gonna be about our spiritual perspectives moving forward? No, but it is, I think now that we’ve, you know, unearthed it that it’ll much more readily be a part of the conversation on any given week which I, we were starting to feel that tension that there were certain things that we could speak about but that we weren’t quite there yet. So I do think it, the “Lost Years” series, impacts the overall complexion and the, I don’t wanna say the tone, but like the subject matters of what we’re gonna talk about. But hey, basically, we’re just here to hang out with each other and to hang out with you so keep doing it and keep coming back, we’ll still be here. It sounds like the end of the podcast. Is that it? All right, see you next week. Nope, nope, nope, no, no, no, no, no. We haven’t even done anything yet. And so sometimes we talk about things that are just interesting to us but we usually try to find a personal connection and that’s why we’re talking about the nature of your earliest memories. Oh, we should also say if you really don’t have a point of reference for this– Okay, yeah, keep plugging things, please. We have five videos a week on a show called “Good Mythical Morning.” Yep there’s that. And every day there’s a “Good Mythical MORE” episode, you can watch that too. Every Saturday we do a vlog where it’s sometimes it’s like a video version of “Ear Biscuits” in terms of a lot of the stories that we’ll tell. I think a lot of those we’re capturing for our Saturday release on our Rhett and Link channel so check that out if you haven’t checked out our vlogs. Youtube.com/rhettandlink. Is that enough of the plugs or should we just go full in with like ads. We should just go straight to an ad. You can get. Full plug, full plug right here. Okay. Look at that. Full plug? Plug, plug into this t-shirt. You can get Link’s t-shirt, not the jacket but the t-shirt at mythical.com and it’s not the only thing that you can get there, there’s lots of other things. Other t-shirts, long-sleeved shirts, hoodies, pens, there are notebooks, beard oil, lip balm, pomade. The list goes on. I mean it’s kind of, a mug. Well the list isn’t gonna go on but it could. Go to mythical.com rep your boys, bam. Okay, so I know we’re gonna share like, we have done this at some point. We talked about everything I think we’ve mentioned things. But I don’t know. We’ve probably mentioned what our first memories are but. I don’t remember what yours is. I don’t remember what yours is. I’ve already forgotten your first memory so that’ll be fun. You should remember your friend’s first memories. I think that they don’t mean as much to someone else if they were to remember them as if you, as you remembering them yourself. And I don’t, maybe we’ll unpack that there’s, when we go through the specifics of our memories, that there is more meaning in it than we even realized. And it’s funny because the other night I was tucking Lando into bed, he’s nine years old, and that’s when we get some good quality time. He has this like hammock seat, hammock chair thing hanging beside his bed. Sometimes I’ll sit in that and just dangle and we’ll just have a little conversation. That’s an odd word to use to put there. And I don’t know what prompted this conversation but I was like, Lando, what’s the first thing you remember? I was just curious at his age and we’d gotten into talking about that and we landed in a place where I felt like I got a big idea. You landoed in a place? I landoed on a big idea. So we can get back to what his memory is our whatever but where do you wanna start? Oh that’s, well you sounded like you we’re gonna tell a story. No I’m just saying that’s kinda why I wanted to talk about this. You’re not gonna disclose his first memory? Oh I can, well he’s, like I said, he’s nine years old and when we moved to Los Angeles he was one, you know, so I was like how long did we stay in that first apartment? We only stayed there six months, there’s no way he remembers that. I’m like, and I was like Lando you don’t remember living in an apartment in Los Angeles right? He was like, “No.” I was like yeah you were in a crib there’s no way you could remember that. And like, I was like then we had this house after that where we moved and we stayed there for three years and I started to describe the place. I was like there was, the driveway was blue do you remember that? And he was like, “No.” I was like there was a hammock in the backyard. Remember that hammock that we got from like Kotulas was a sponsor and it was like this weird like self-supporting hammock? He definitely remembers this place. It was green and I was like do you remember that? And he was like, “No.” And I like called Lincoln in there like am I crazy, do you remember this? I was like you remember all this, you remember it. You mean in Encino? Yeah in Encino when I lived there. And then I started describing the inside of the house and he was like, “Hold on I remember my bunk bed “’cause did we have bunk beds?” I was like yes. And he was like, “And I was on the bottom ’cause I remember “I would have to reach up and grab and hang stuff from “the slats but I had to force my hand in there “because Lincoln was laying on the mattress.” And I was like there you go, do you remember our purple couches? He was like, “No.” He’s not gonna remember that. Not gonna remember that. I was like and then Lincoln came in there and he was like, “Do you remember that neighbor who you’d go over “to his house and play and he had a dog who was deaf?” And Lando was like, “Yeah, I would call him all the time “and he would never respond.” ‘Cause he was deaf. I was like yeah, he couldn’t hear. And then I was like he had a rabbit and when they would go out of town. He was like, “Yeah, we’d go over there and we’d feed “the rabbit and they had a trampoline.” And that is what we determined is his first memory. A rabbit on a trampoline? A deaf dog, a rabbit and a trampoline. Wow. Three totally separate things. It sounds like an adult swim show. Yeah. If you can find those three things you’re in for a good time. Well it’s interesting that the way that you got him to remember that because that’s kinda, that’s one of the articles that I’d read from psychcentral.com entitled “What’s Your Earliest Memory” from August 2018 by Janice Wood. Good old Janice. Got a great last name. So there were these guys at Emory University. Would you like to remember your first memory? Researchers at Emory University. So I’m just gonna quote some of this: few adults can remember anything that happened to them before the age of three. Now a new study has documented that it’s about age seven when our earliest memories begin to fade a phenomenon known as childhood amnesia. So, you don’t, now. So everything up until, everything from four years old to seven years old you remember and then after seven you start to lose stuff. I would say three to seven because in this other article and this is very pertinent because so many people think that they remember things. Interestingly my first memory comes from age three. That’s early. Which is they say that’s about the earliest that you can do it. Let me see, what does it say, okay, “About four out “of every 10 people have fabricated their first memory,” according to researchers, this is another article at BBC, the bbc.com called “Can You Trust Your Earliest Childhood Memories?” But basically, okay: they examined the first memories of 6,641 people and the scientists found that 2,487 of the memories shared such as sitting in a prom, I don’t know, I’m not familiar with English terms. Sitting in a prom? Yeah, but P-R-A-M. Oh a pram? A pram, is that like some kind of like. I don’t know what that. Some vehicle or something? A pram is I think it’s like a large like little carriage to put a child in. Oh okay, like a carriage? Oh you put them on a bassinet or like a stroller. Yeah okay, yeah. I think stroller. So 2,487 memories, which is almost half, were from before the participants had reached the age of two with 14% of participants claiming to remember an event before their first birthday and some even before their own birth. Oh gosh, people don’t go– But the fact is. People trying to be overachievers. It’s like you saying your first memory is when you were three because you know that scientifically the earliest you can so you’re trying to achieve. These people don’t know the science and they’re lying too. It basically just says that your brain in not capable, it doesn’t have the structures that it needs to form the kinds of things that you would carry on and you may be like, “Well I was special “and I remember being.” There are people who think they remember being in their mother’s womb or they think they remember their own birth. And then a lot of people think, in fact Freud taught this, that you do have all those old memories but you suppress them. Listen, Freud, all he did was grasp at straws and make stuff up man. But there’s a good– And, by the way, I know nothing about him except he makes stuff up. Okay, here you go. So young children tend to forget events more readily . Now I will say newborns do have memories of being in the womb. They will respond to things on the outside based on what they heard on the inside. Like somehow science does things– No, no I’m not saying, but you don’t have the ability to retain those memories. Retain those memories. And bring them into adulthood. She says, this one researcher says, “Memories are like orzo,” which is a pasta: referring to the rice grain size pasta, little bits and pieces of neural encoding. Young children’s brains are like colanders with large holes trying to retain these little pieces of memory. As the water rushes out so do many of the grains of orzo. Adults however use a fine net instead of a colander for a screen. Then you get to be our age and that net gets a bunch of holes in it. So basically, I would say but the childhood amnesia thing is just the idea that you’ve got these memories that you remember from about age three and then once you turn seven, on average, you begin to lose those memories unless you’ve got some mechanisms to continue to remember them. Right? Yeah. And a lot of times that can be a picture or a video. Yeah I think a lot of people are just, their first, they’re remembering something they projected on a picture that they’ve looked at in a photo album for years afterward. Well yeah ’cause a lot of time you’re constructing that memory. And if you got a photo from inside of a womb. I’ve got lots of those. You are a freak. I’ve got a whole folder. You are a freak. It’s just called. I don’t wanna know what it’s called. A sonograph. I don’t, oh. Right, is that what it’s called? When you get, not sonograph. What do you get when you go to? Sonogram. Sonogram? Yeah, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m trying to remember all, I try to forget. I’m talking about as if a baby took a Polaroid from the inside. That’s what they’re doing now. You pass in a Polaroid? It’s not. And then the baby takes a picture? Yeah, exactly. Well that’s not what happens and I don’t even know how we got on this. It’s not very pertinent because it’s– People use, people will see a picture from a point in their past and then they will construct a memory around it. That’s what happens a lot of times. There’s all kinds of ways to implant false memories but I don’t wanna go too much more into it ’cause I wanna talk about what our memories are but essentially if you think you remember something before the age of three you probably don’t. If you think you remember it before the age of two like when you were like one or younger you definitely don’t remember it and you need to come up with a new memory. And you know what? We still accept you. You know what you don’t have to, you don’t have to remember stuff from way back then for us to love you. I love you. I love you if you don’t remember anything, you know, dang. What’s your first memory? I was three. It was Halloween which means I had just turned three which is pretty unusual but, you know, I’m one of those guys. Maybe you had just turned four? No ’cause it was in Georgia. Okay. After talking to my mom maybe I had turned but it was in Georgia and I think I turned four in California when we moved to Thousand Oaks. Maybe I’d just turned four but I think I’d just turned three but this is my earliest memory. Halloween, I had decided to be Big Bird for reasons that should be obvious. I’m big, I like birds. Do you remember being hypersensitive to being the tallest kid at that age? Of course that might have been your first memory so. I don’t. I think kindergarten. No, I’ve never had a sense of being, like a real sense of being that much bigger and taller than people until people keep telling me that I am, right. So I don’t think I was very self-conscious about it. Even though you look at the pictures and you’re like how did they, why did they let this eighth grader into this preschool class? You know, is he a teachers assistant ’cause he looks a little young for that. I guess choosing Big Bird does reflect like a certain either a confidence or at least an ambivalence to your height. But I mean Big Bird’s tall so if you’re choosing Big Bird it’s like I know I’m tall and that’s, this will work. Well let’s be clear here if I was three years old I did not select Big Bird, Big Bird was selected for me. Oh this is your parents shaming you. Which this is, might need to be something that I explore in therapy is that– That’s right. My mom most likely, my dad’s not picking out Halloween costumes I know how he is, my mom decided for me that I should be Big Bird. Now I remember being very excited about being Big Bird so maybe– Was that your first memory, being excited? No, I’m gonna tell you the first memory. I’m gonna, this only, the story only makes sense in light of me actually being excited about being Big Bird. Okay. Because I wanted to go trick or treating, I was excited to go trick or treating, I was gonna get to go with my brother who was three years older than me. Was he Wile E Coyote? I don’t even remember what he was because this isn’t his memory it’s mine. You didn’t even care, huh? I feel like he might have been a robot but I honestly don’t remember. I was Wile E Coyote one year and I’m not even lying and it might have been the same time. I’ll have to, I know there’s a picture of me as Wile E Coyote and I’ve never realized this until this moment. But Wile E Coyote is like a Warner Brothers character. Oh shoot, I’m getting Big Bird. Are you confusing the Sesame Street universe with the– I’m getting Big Bird confused. Looney Tunes? With the Roadrunner. Hey man, that would have been a good coincidence. Hold on, you were the roadrunner? I was Wile E Coyote. Oh, so that okay and if I was the Roadrunner that would have made. If you, right. But I was Big Bird. I screwed it up man. I thought that would have been serendipity. Back to your story. And of course this was 1980 probably which meant that my costume consisted of like some sort of vinyl. You know what I mean? Plastic. It was very plastic and if you recall. It was like a plastic tarp with a hole that your head goes through and then a mask. If you recall your memory of Big Bird you might not remember his legs. Remember the color of his legs? Orange legs with pink rings? Yeah, I would’ve just said it was orange and pink striped legs. Like horizontal stripes that go up the leg, pink and orange, yeah. And that’s what I remember. I’m not gonna bring up a picture of Big Bird because I want this to be a pristine thing in my mind. Okay. And literally the first step out the door I tripped on something, fell down and fell on my knee and ripped a hole in the vinyl and also kinda skinned my knee up. And at that point it was that I’m embarrassed because my hole, my costume has a hole in it. Yeah I think you knew if people looked at your knee they would know there’s a human under there. They’re like that’s not Big Bird I can see a human knee under there. Yeah. And so the whole plan had fallen apart and I just stayed in, what I remember, again, I don’t know what part is constructed and what part actually happened. I remember staying inside and they had to like bring, you know, like my brother would bring me some of his candy like I had to use some of his candy ’cause I didn’t actually go outside. So you just stayed, you stayed back with your dad probably and your mom took your brother out. Don’t remember those details. I just told you everything that I remember. Okay, so that’s your first memory. There’s a little trauma there. Maybe a lot of trauma. It seems like a lot. I’d be interested in what your parents say about this. What I keep, when I was walking across the parking lot this morning you were sitting in your car on the phone. I thought I heard your mom’s voice. You did. You were talking to your mom in the car? You should have asked her about this. Erm, I didn’t, she’s not gonna remember. You talking about something else? What else is there to talk about? My dad called me last night, this is a side note, I mailed him finally, I mailed him “Lost Causes of Bleak Creek” finally and I also gave him one of our records. You know Mythical Society when we covered Merle and it comes, you know it comes with that sticker in it that says Mythical Recording? And my dad was talking about the record and he said he liked the album cover and all that stuff and how if you turn it over it’s the reverse. And then he said, “And now, you know that little thing “that says ‘Mythical Recording’ on it? “If I were to peel that off would that stick on something “or would that mess it up?” And I was like, “Yeah it’s fine dad it’s a sticker. “It is a sticker. “I think that’s the word you’re looking for.” He was like, “Well okay, I knew what a sticker was “I just didn’t know if this was a sticker.” It sounds like you had a much more interesting conversation than I did with my mom. We didn’t talk about stickers at all. Well, so do you wanna hear my first memory and then we’ll analyze both of ’em? Okay. My first memory was, let’s see, before I went to preschool. So I went to preschool when I was like six and then, or five? No I went to kindergarten when I was six, preschool when I was like five, so from the age of like two to four I stayed at Retta’s house. Loretta, you met her, she was my first babysitter. She only kept me and my first best friend Brad that I talk about in the book of Mythicality and so my first memories are at her house where I would spend the day. I remember one day we would always stay at her house we would rarely leave and maybe that’s why I remember this because it was very unusual because we did leave. We went to a friend of hers house and it was maybe a mile or two away still a way in the country and there was this, we were playing in the backyard and there were some other kids there. I remember being very afraid of other kids. Like even in preschool. I don’t know, I liked the people that I knew man and– But what were you afraid of? I don’t know. What was gonna happen? I don’t know. Just the peopleness of ’em. I don’t know, I haven’t gotten into that. But I do remember I was in the backyard and I was on the swing set thing and you know they got like normal swings and they’re like metal swings but you’ve got this certain type of swing that it’s got two benches that face each other and then so as it swings it kinda stays parallel. You know what I’m talking about? Like a very old-timey type swing. But it’s two people facing each other on this thing. You never been on one of those? And you stay– You were probably too tall. You stay at the same height? You stay parallel to the ground but you move up and down ’cause it’s kinda like a rowboat kinda vibe. I don know it’s kinda, there’s two. I think you’re making this up. There’s two. I think even the swing is a fabrication. There’s two bars. There’s two bars that come down. One in front of one person and one beside the other person. Oh, it’s not on a chain? No it’s on bars and they’re fixed and you’re facing the other person. Okay. I was on it by myself and I was holding onto the bars and I remember– Facing no one. It like, I’m pretty sure it pinched or the way I would have said it at the time was, it pinched me. It pinched my hand and cut it and there was blood and my recollection is there was a lot of blood and I remember running into this stranger’s house and trying to find Retta and– Well first of all before you continue I will say that they don’t make jungle gym equipment like they used to. Oh no. I actually believe, everything is so safe now, I think that there should be a way that a kid could come away from a piece of equipment bleeding just as a life lesson. Maybe with one less ear. Yeah, I mean I think that every piece of playground equipment that is manufactured now should have like one really unnecessarily sharp point. Yeah, like a jagged edge. So that at least once a year one kid really gets snagged on that thing. And then the custodian should come out with a paint brush of tetanus and just kinda like brush it on. Well tetanus is probably over kill but I think you gotta have some blood and some scars. What else are you gonna remember? As we’re demonstrating here. So I run into Retta and I love this woman. She’s very short. I think I bond with people who are of extreme heights. My wife’s pretty tall for her height. For her height? For her age, I don’t know what I was gonna say. Your pretty tall for your height baby. For her sex. Okay, you could say pretty tall for a woman. Okay, yeah, yeah, she’s a woman. That’s beside the point. Loretta was very short. Sometimes the way out– She’s like four, 10. Is a lot easier than you make it. Loretta was like four, 10. She was like the most approachable person to a kid and she made me feel better. That’s my first memory. Did she kiss it? I don’t think. Did she kiss your boo-boo? She cleaned it up, she cleaned up the boo-boo. And I don’t remember Brad being there but I remember, my second memory, and again it may have come first I really have no way to know, was the one I tell in the book of Mythicality and that’s I go into the bathroom right after he came out of the bathroom and he forgot to flush and there was a turd in there that was bright orange and I will never forget that Cheeto colored turd. It shocked me. You gotta have something sensational like an orange turd is definitely something that’s not gonna leave your brain. It was like a guy directing traffic around a construction site on the street, you know. You gotta wear the most like fluorescent orange vest type situation. What if it– It was like he crapped a construction vest. But what if it wasn’t a turd? Have you ever thought about that? It was a turd man. Are you sure that it wasn’t just like a giant Cheeto or like a cheese puff of some kind? That he was like I don’t wanna eat this and he threw it in the toilet and it expanded to turd size. You talking about a Cheeto the size of a baby’s arm. That’s how big it was? Yeah man, I’ll never forget it. So one of those two are my first memory and they’re equally traumatic and I think that’s the common denominator here between our two stories. Right, and I don’t have any other memories from Georgia which is where I spent my first three years. It’s funny because I would have told you that I remembered when it snowed that winter when I was three years old but I don’t actually remember it I’ve just seen the pictures because I do. I’ve seen the pictures of my mom, I’ve seen the pictures of me and my brother with plastic bags tied over our feet. It’s funny like we were in south Georgia– You were very ill prepared. We’re in south Georgia and my mom’s idea of like keeping us safe in the snow is to put slippery plastic bags around our feet and send us out into the snow. You don’t want your feet to get wet. Right, you just want to fall and break something. I think when you’re a parent especially, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna project this on your mom and assume that she wasn’t actually thinking this, but especially back then, you know, you’d put your kids out the front door and you’d say, “Don’t come back for a couple of hours.” Matter of fact there’s a couple of times that I’ve even said that to my kids now. I’m like, you know what? I’m fed up with these screens. Go outside and do not come back in for and I’ll say an hour. An hour’s a long time. But like 15 minutes later they ring the doorbell. Well if you send ’em out in the snow and you don’t put bags over their socks and shoes then once those socks get wet, “I gotta come inside mom. “It’s Rhett, it’s your Big Bird boy.” First of all I was three I’m pretty sure she didn’t I gotta go back inside. leave me and it was snowing in Georgia which was very unusual and I think that’s why I thought that I remember it but I think it’s just a picture. You think your mom put plastic bags around her own shoes? No. It’s like Reeboks that are back in style now. I don’t think so. The additional things that I remember is that there’s just sporadic things from my time in Thousand Oaks, California. What’s your first memory from there? So this will be your second memory. I honestly can not put these in chronological order. I don’t know. Because I remember being taught how to ride a bike and falling and falling a few houses down and then my pants getting caught in the chain and not being able to move and having to yell for my dad to come after me. And that’s probably, I probably combined two memories because there was when I was learning to ride my bike and then me riding my bike probably by myself and that happening. I remember a giant sunflower. What? Yeah this is the only good memory that I have from back, from really early. You know what if you really look at a giant sunflower from up close I would argue that it’s actually pretty damn scary. They’re kinda wicked. When was the last time you stared down a sunflower? It’s like the black part in the center is just, is a lot bigger than you feel like it should be and it looks, and the stuff that’s coming out of it, the seed stuff, to me it’s like, it’s gross looking. But how do you remember it? Well I think of it differently now that you said that. To me it’s like staring at a beautiful sun that you can’t not, that you can look at without looking away. I guarantee it was twice as big as your head if it was a good one. In my recollection it was eight to nine feet tall. Right. It was pretty tall for its height. But you weren’t afraid of it? See that’s the thing for me as a kid I would have definitely been afraid of that flower. And I also remember the first time I heard the F word. Oh really? From Rochelle. Who’s Rochelle? Rochelle was the coolest kid in our neighborhood. She was probably like five to six years older than I was. Okay. And I heard her say it and then I went up and whispered in her ear and I said, I just wanted to make sure I had gotten it right and I was like, “Is a bad word?” And she was like, “What did you say?” And I said. And what did she say? She said, she started laughing and said, “Yes it’s a bad word, you can’t say that.” Even though I just said it, I whispered it twice into her ear. So she just said it in conversation? Yeah, yeah and then this is like 1981 and you got this girl just saying the F word in front of four year olds. I don’t remember the first time I heard the F word. I remember the, when the Beastie Boys cassette “Licensed to Ill” came out with like “Fight for Your Right to Party” on it and by this point my babysitter’s name– Why do you only remember things in the context of being babysat? Because I was babysat a lot. My mom was working. My mom was working man. I know that but like you also, you did have a home and a mom and like. I think, yeah and we do, I have memories, I’m saying but my mom didn’t use the F word homie. You would have remembered it if she did. My mom didn’t say, “Hey, let me open up the liner notes “to this Beastie Boys album and let’s, I’m gonna highlight “every single naughty word so you can learn it.” That’s what Joe, the older boy, did. He would literally point to every single nasty word and he would also tell me about the female anatomy. Well you need to know about that. Like in detail. You know there’s like certain things you can say in general about down there and then you can also go like really anatomical. Right. Like imagine the most anatomical conversation and I guess I was, I don’t know, you know, I might have been 10. Oh so you passed . But I mean. You’ve passed forward all the way to 10. Well I mean if we’re talking about like– Which is pretty sporadic. What’s my first memory of being taught something illicit is now what we’re talking about. Oh, okay. My first illicit memory is then. And you know what? A few days later Joe’s younger brother got sick and he was laying on the floor, the same floor that we laid on when we were like trying to hide the Beastie Boys liner notes and he started to vomit. And the kid started to vomit and instead of rolling over on his side or standing up or running to the bathroom he rolled over on his back and he was projectile vomiting straight up in the air and you can die from that, you can easily choke. Burgh, like a fountain, like a vomit fountain? Yeah and so I think somebody came and pushed him over. Like did a log roll. It’s like you just can’t, you just can’t let a kid. Do that sideways man. If we’re talking about, I told you this story about my babysitter trying to dare me to pull the wart off her finger. Oh gosh, you have so many– Like she was I mean. Screwed up man. God rest her dead soul but we would sit in the swing and wait for my mom to come to show up and I would always be the last one to get picked up because my mom worked late she was a hard working woman and I was so anxious. I had this separation anxiety and so I was afraid that my mom wasn’t going to pick me up. So while you’re waiting you can try to get a wart off an old woman’s hand. We would sit in the swing and she would, she’d look up and she’d say, she’d look down the street, it was a long, long driveway, she’d look down the driveway and she’d say “There she don’t come.” That was here joke, “there she don’t come.” And I was like, I could tell by the look on her face it was like oh my mom’s coming. And then after screwing with me– You can’t just stop for a second. Well I’m just gonna pile it all on and then you can unpile it. So then in that same scene she would say, in order to occupy my time while I was waiting for my mom and she was taunting me, she would say, “See if you can pull off this wart from my finger.” And I would, it was a big wart it was like– This woman was like a witch. It was the size of an infant’s pinky. She was a witch Link. And it was on the side of her index finger like between the second and final knuckle there was a wart on the side and I would grab this wart and pull. And I actually, I would sometimes I would dig my fingernails underneath it and that would make me happy ’cause I knew that I was hurting her a little bit but she would just grit her teeth and she would not, she wouldn’t, it was like a game of mercy– I think she thought you might actually pull it off one day. She either She was like, “This boy’s gonna get wanted that thing off this wart off.” Or she didn’t want to admit that I was yanking her hard on that wart. Okay, let’s talk about this. I remember all that y’all. These are my memories. Link. Anatomically detailed. This woman was a witch. Do you remember what she looked like? No. She picked me up one day, she had, why are we talking about this woman? She had a long Cadillac but it was two doors but the doors were as long as what would normally cross like a stretch limo’s worth of three doors. It was the longest door. A kid couldn’t open the door. A teacher had to come as she pulled up, opened the door for me and let me get in the back seat and then she had the window rolled down I remember I’m putting my hand out the window one day and I was sitting behind her as she was driving and she’s leaving Boyds Creek Elementary School and she starts rolling up the window and I tried to take my hand out but the window rolled up so quickly that my hand got stuck and I was like, “Oh my hand’s in the window, my hand’s stuck.” And she rolled it down a little bit and as I was about to pull it out she rolled it up again. She kept my hand in the window dude just to screw with me. She was demented. Hold up but why do you have, you don’t have fond memories of her you have horrific memories of her. I don’t understand why that hasn’t registered. This is not Retta. I loved Retta, I still love Retta, she’s still alive and she’s a beautiful four foot 10 inch woman. And I’m not exaggerating, that’s how tall she is. With no warts on her hand. No warts, beautiful small hands. Big hair though. Because when I think– She had the hair of a giant. When I think about those days. Again my first memory was traumatic but like when I think about– I bottled all that shit up too man, I never once told my mom about any of that. Yeah, that’s a problem. Yeah. Like four, five, six I remember there was a guy in our neighborhood who had a pitbull who would pull him at very high speeds while he was on a skateboard bare footed. What, that’s Cali. That’s Cali for you. Yeah but that’s the kind of, I mean I’ve got good memories– Did he have a wart? You have good memories? I remember the Santa Ana Winds would come and my brother and I would put on giant jackets and go and hold them open and lean completely into the wind so it would hold us up. Like I’m not saying I didn’t have bad memories but there were no women with warts that were trying to get me to pull them off and there was no evil woman trying to get my hand stuck in the window or getting my hand stuck in the swing. I mean do you remember anything good? Nobody made me get my hand caught in the swing, okay. Do you have any good memories? But the other two things that happened were both the same woman so at least they were of the same woman. I mean if those are two different women, that would suck. I did have another babysitter who would say, “Go outside.” She’d make me go outside for the hour that she was watching “The Bold and the Beautiful” or whatever soap opera she was into and I hated it because it was just like I would sit on the steps waiting for her show to be over so I could go back inside. That’s not babysitting. Yeah it’s horrible. And you didn’t think, “I think I need to tell my mom.” I don’t, I think I did complain about that woman and then I stopped going there. Oh good for you. Stopped going there. How did we get on this? So, I mean clearly the trauma. I have good memories too. I have good memories from my childhood. Name one. I remember the wart didn’t come off. Yeah I don’t, I could probably come up with some good memories but what’s the fun in that? Well, okay, kind of getting back to what you talked about with Lando. Yes. In this same article from psychcentral this is pretty interesting, so okay: research is showing that infants do not have the sophisticated neural architecture needed to form and hold on to more complex forms of memory. Okay: for their experiment the researchers recorded 83 children at the age of three while their mothers or fathers asked them about events that they had experienced in recent months such as a trip to the zoo or a birthday party. Bower explained that parents were asked to speak as they normally would to their children prompting them with questions such as, “Remember when we went to “Chuck E. Cheese’s for your birthday party? “You had pizza didn’t you?” The child might then recount details of the birthday party or divert the conversation to another event such as a visit to the zoo. The researchers noted that some mothers might keep asking about pizza while other mothers would ask about the trip to the zoo. Parents who followed a child’s lead in these conversations tended to elicit richer memories from their three year olds according to Bower. This approach also related to the children having a better memory of the even at a later age. Okay and then in this study, ’cause I read about this too, years later they went back and asked them about those same memories to see what was retained and what wasn’t. Yeah, ’cause it says: while the children between the ages of five and seven could recall 63 to 72% of the events the children who were eight and nine years old remembered only about 35% of the events the researchers reported. So if you’ve got kids. Yes, this is what I’m getting at. Now first of all I’m just gonna go ahead and tell you– There’s an opportunity here. For the youngest child between the two of us is nine. Right. So you’ve already missed the window, you should have been doing this at five and seven and so only if you’ve got kids who are younger than seven years old listen up because I think we’ve got a technique for you. Yeah, this is exactly what occurred to me when I just happened to be talking to Lando about this. I was like, “Dude,” and I didn’t know about the seven and nine but I was like: Okay you’re nine years old, you’re so much closer to all of these memories than I am to my memories or even that older kids are to theirs I can help you remember more details. We can sit here, we can talk about the details of that house in Encino, riding the scooter all the way around it, getting in that hammock. He started to remember stuff about the rabbit and like all the stuff in that kid’s house when we’d go feed the rabbit. I was like, “You know what, now that’s your first memory.” It doesn’t involve a wart, it doesn’t involve bleeding and this is a gift that parents, or mentors, or cool uncles or aunts can give– Short babysitters. To your, short babysitters, you can give to your progeny here. You can help them, you can establish richer first memories. I mean it’s, you know, there’s the gift of like our parents gave us the gift of all the pictures that we have, you know. Those, the plastic wrapped around your legs, your feet. You don’t really remember that but you almost could have and if you would have talked about it at age seven and then kept talking about it. We’ve talked about how the act of remembering creates the memory again and makes it more memorable. Well it re-writes it as well. Re-writes it, so, hey this is another weighty thing that you might interpret as pressure, that’s what I would do as a parent say, “You can instill first memories “into your kids.” But I think the technique, I think the technique. Well, I think you’re taking it a little too far but– This is sensational. No what I’m saying is that you’ve gotta use this technique though. When, and I think it sounds like you did this, whether it was intentional or not. It was just two years too late. When Lando started talking about his memory you, when they bring up something like the rabbit we’ll follow the rabbit like literally follow the rabbit and ask them questions about the rabbit that they. Like let them lead it and they’ll kinda be, they’ll be recalling it and also reconstructing it. It solidifies a rich memory that then when they’re 41 and 42 years old and they’re talking about the good old days they’ll have less traumatic things to talk about than we had. Well and I think the video component is a big one because I don’t, I think that the first video of me that’s available is definitely not before middle school. I mean we didn’t Oh wow. Nobody was taking any video of us. Like my parents got a video camera when I was already in high school so we didn’t have a family video camera and it was just like school projects. The first video footage that I have of me is my aunt Teesee. She was big into these camcorders and she would always bring that to Christmas and she would like, she’d set up the tripod and she’d have it in the corner of the room and then she’d come around and film everybody. So every Christmas starting like, yeah, when I was in like, you know, when you started getting those big shoulder mount cameras, I don’t know what year that would be. I would have footage of Christmas at nana and papa’s house and I would take that camera and not tell her and I would film stuff at nana and papa’s house. I’d film like little videos and I’d film this time travel movie that involved flushing the toilet and just filming like zooming in on the water and then like voicing that over as like a time travel portal and then I think that was pretty much the only scene. I remember that. Okay, you think you can get hold of this footage? Mm, I bet she still has all of it but it’s just like all of us opening presents. You mean me filming the toilet? Well that– I think that was pretty much it. Don’t you think that you should like digitize? If she has footage of you as a kid like I think that you should get that digitized. You should talk to her about this. Yeah. ‘Cause VHS tapes are not gonna hold up forever. They’ve already degraded quite a bit probably. I meant that’s, I mean it was definitely grade school. It wasn’t middle school. It might’ve been. Well, I don’t know if I’ve told you this but– Sixth grade maybe. ‘Cause you know I’ve got that 360 degree camera right and so one of the things I’ve started doing on like our vacations is in every city that we went to when we were in Scotland and England, you know, I would take a number of these pictures and I put ’em up, I think I talked about it and I posted it. But now I can put on my oculus and I go to that website while I’ve got my oculus on and I can enter into those photos and see, and there’s 360 video which with the camera that I got is not very high res but the photos are great. ‘Cause I can be like, “Oh I remember when we were on “that hike and we stopped and we took that picture.” And there is Loch, there is Shepherd and there is my nephews and nieces and– Because sometime in the future it’s just gonna be, it’s gonna be much easier than putting on an oculus to just explore that photo and you will have some of the earliest ones. Well that’s exactly what I’m talking about and so I still haven’t, and I kind of regret that I haven’t done this yet, but the good news is that my kids’ rooms haven’t changed substantially in the past couple of years since we’ve moved into this house but, you know when you were like, “What was it like in my room as a kid?” Yeah. So what I’m gonna do is go in there and just like, you know, stand in the middle of the room, hold the thing up and take a 360 photo, or let them do it so it’s not dad holding it, and then you’ve got this photo that forever, like for the rest of their lives they can be like, “What was it like in my room when I was 11 years old?” Oh, I can go there right now. Oh and there’s the book that I was reading. Oh yeah, I think that this– There’s my Garfield phone. It’s like that’s something that I would love to be able to have, you know, I would love to be able to do that personally right. But, you know– There’s a side benefit of this too, you know, for insurance purposes. Like if your house burns down, I know I’m a downer today, when your house burns down you can, if you’ve uploaded those to the cloud then you can just send ’em to the insurance company and say I want all of this back. Well, that’s actually, that was actually my first idea when I got this camera. I was like I need to take pictures of every room in the house so that I can actually show the insurance company in case of a fire but then I was like oh but this also creates like a literal memory palace that my kids can go into. That’s right. With these, with an oculus. So what are we concluding here? Your first memories, you might have made ’em up. But if you have influence over a seven year old they’re at the perfect age to just to cultivate out what Rhett said an averred memory garden of first memories. That’s the influence you can over the next generation. You can thank us for it. And you know what when you’re talking to that seven year old say, “Hey, you know what you should listen to ‘Ear Biscuits’ “that’s where I learned this from, you might be into it.” This is our target audience, seven year olds. And you know what I can make a recommendation here based on the camera that I have. Okay, is this your official rec in effect. Yeah this is my official rec. Okay. It’s got 348 ratings on Amazon, four stars, so I guess it’s been fine for me. Like I said the– It looks like a USB drive with a lens on the end of it. This is the– Is it that small? I don’t know, is that Ricoh, how do you? R-I-C-O-H, Ricoh. Yeah, Ricoh. Theta, Richo Theta SC 360 video and still camera. Comes in four colors, I have the white one. Jessie just got this for me at some point. How much is it? It is, the white one’s 180 bucks. What’s the cheapest color? No, for a 360 camera? That’s cheap. You said the white one. The rest of ’em are 200. Everything else is 200 but the white one is cheaper. Okay, ’cause it shows dirt. And again like I said at least the last time that I, now that camera that we used on the– Going back to Boyds Creek for the documentary? Jack can you, do you remember what kind of camera that was that 360 camera that we used when we crossed the river? ‘Cause that one was much more pricey. That was more of a video camera first. This feels more like flip phone. Is it 4K though? No, I mean, well it’s, let’s see what it says here. I don’t know what the video resolution is. Like I said this is basically for pictures like the pictures are adequate to like capture a memory. If you just wanna, you can actually then like upload them to a website and go into it and look at ’em or whatever. It was just a GoPro. Oh it was a GoPro. It was the new 360 GoPro which is, that thing for video is awesome but you don’t have to go, ’cause that one’s more expensive. I’m surprised you can’t just like get a phone that has backward and forward facing lenses, just hold that thing up and there’s a program where you can just push a button. Well there probably is, that probably is a thing that exists. Probably not quite as good as this though. But that one’s the future. Yeah this one is just like pretty seamless. You know what if you don’t wanna take Rhett’s rec just wait a little bit and your phone will probably start doing it. Well I just think in the distant future everybody is gonna have like some sort of headware, even if it’s in your glasses and it’s gonna be like little antenna goes up and now you’ve got the 360 and you’re like I wanna remember this moment, I wanna remember everything about this and I wanna be able to enter into the physical space, I want the sights and the sounds of this situation and you’ll just be able to do that. Yeah. We should invent that. In the meantime you can just buy this. I would call it Google Glasses. All right. We’ll partner with Google. Okay, we can provide the glasses. Yeah, we’re just gonna provide the antenna with a camera on the end of it. Well actually we’re not gonna provide that at all we’re gonna provide the idea. You just heard it, Google Glasses. If you like the idea of us having an antenna installed on your Google Glasses– Yeah I do like it. Hit us up and we’ll tell you all about it. It’s an antenna with a camera on it. Or if you wanna hit us up in general #earbiscuits let us know, join the conversation, what’s your very first memory? I think this is something good, it’s a good ice breaker conversation for your family, friends, loved ones, or for conversations on a plane, what have you. We’re here for ya. And we’ll be back next week. Like I said we’ll still be talking about the “Lost Years” in some capacity. Yeah, thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing this episode with a friend who you wanna remember or you want them to remember their first memory. Tell ’em about our show. We are in your debt. Don’t forget, remember to tell ’em about our show. We’ll speak at ya next week. To watch more “Ear Biscuits” click on the playlist on the right. To watch the previous episode of “Ear Biscuits” click on the playlist to the left. And don’t forget to click on the circular icon to subscribe. If you prefer to listen to this podcast it’s available on all your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for being your mythical best.