Thou Shalt Shut the F**k Up and Learn Something

kind of isolation. Some travel industry people are actively calling it the New South. I guess it's less controversial than calling it Dixie and right. I think what they mean is that a bunch of hipsters have opened up a design centric descourse stores and themed boutique hotels, or found new ways of barbecuing and are getting tattooed whilst they're at it. But for me, if I choose to live in America, I need to travel America. The least I

can do is to get to know it. All. The South sounds so monolithic to me that I was determined to unpack it and allow every region, every county every piece I could discover to show me what it is and what it is not. Charleston and Nashville are the current gems and the travel game, the bride's maids and the cool kids have descended. But I've also wondered about Greenville, South Carolina, and also about Little Rock, Arkansas, and even Atlanta. So I orchestrated a series of road trips across the

South over the course of a few years. Some studies like Memphis, Tennessee, and Savannah, Georgia, I returned to numerous times because there was so much to find that I just simply love. And the road from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Asheville, North Carolina, to Spartanburg, which is also North Carolina, I could possibly now drive in my sleep. But then they parts of the South that I still need to get to, so see you soon, Montgomery, Alabama, and San Antonio, Texas.

My friend Sue and I decided that if we wanted to understand a little more of America, the good and the bad, we needed to road trip through Mississippi. I've always loved the many essays in that wood and those iconic silky essays on the road signs just thrilled me. So we started off with a wild weekend in New Orleans for her birthday, which ended with us in a car driving over the Twin Span Bridge from Louisiana into Mississippi. Oh look, she said, a dollar gen a store And

that was the first of our troop. After a week in the state, we had counted nearly a hundred different of these. It was our official road trip game. We also came up with a new slogan for the Mississippi Tourism Board. Better than you think. You need to say that really fast together, better than you think, and we tried it on locals. They all seem to like it a lot. Our first stop was the Luxe. I was told that had three syllables, so you had to slow

your pronunciation right down. The Luxe a beach town with large casinos, plenty of surf, and even more shrimp. Back in the day, the casinos weren't floating barges for tax and regulation purposes and sneakiness I suspect. But today they're all on the beach. And of course Sue knew how to gamble. In Mississippi, they have crapless craps a craps variant in which the player cannot lose a pass bet on the come out role. Yes, I have no idea what that means, but it was fun to watch Sue

make a couple of thousand dollars within minutes. The town of belux Se also boasts a Frank Gary designed or O'Keefe Museum of Art. Nothing to do with George O'Keeffe. This was just the family who paid for the museum, dedicated to the mad pot of Biluxei. George e Er. In the late nineteenth century, pottery was taking America by storm, and I probably need Holly to tell us more about this, but it was usually a French laurel or Japanese minimal.

But good old George had other plans, like pots in anatomical shapes or a whole filled coffee mug that required you to drink from it in a specific way to avoid a spill. Long after his death, the art world caught up with him, and even Andy Warrell became a collector. So right next to Biloxi is a little extension of the area called Ocean Springs, a sweet little town with incredible chefs and young people who are from the area

and revitalizing it in a sort of entrepreneurial spirit. And this is where I really started to ponder about gentrification. Here it felt less like hipsters moving in and shaking things up by kicking locals out, and more like rebuilding a defunct part of the state. In fact, the whole coast fell under disrepair with weather disasters and people just moving away. But here in the Ocean Springs community, albeit pretty small, pulled together to create a place for progressive

people to come live healthy, creative lifestyle. I entered us into the local Southern biscuit competition, where town folks were competing every Thursday with no family recipe. It's no wonder my sneakily storeboard biscuits lost to the savory bless your Heart a can and cheese entry. No trip to Mississippi is complete without a stop in its capital, Jackson, home to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum that opened not so

long ago. So here we were two white people standing next to a Confederate flag and a ku Klux Klan costume in display cabinets. An eerie darkness descended on Sue and I. This was in some ways America. I was standing in this museum room when an older African American lady came to stand next to me. She looked at me, and I looked at her silence, and then we held hands and we both started to quietly weep. All I wanted to say is I'm sorry to apologize with something

I didn't quite understand. I felt some of the pain and I think African Americans must experience walking through the museum, and I felt shame for the world. We stood there for a long time, just trying to process our emotions, and this is often how I feel. In the South. I don't quite grasp the race situation. I was born in Africa as a white boy, and it fences my understanding, and I do wish that I could talk about it more openly, and that maybe I could shut the funk

up and listen to someone for once. Unfortunately, in most schools, and certainly the ones I attended, I just wasn't given the vocabulary to talk about it bravely. I did have an English teacher at high school whom i'm still best friends with, that encouraged reading James Baldwin and black writers from all over Africa. We debated race and class and

ways that felt both respectful and very challenging. But that was the eleventh grade, and this is the real world, so real that when Michael and I found ourselves at a plantation house in South Carolina, just north of Charleston as part of our tour of the South, we both felt pretty uncomfortable staying on property. But somehow this like uneasy feeling was probably something we needed to deal with and not run away from. So we stayed, and it was really hard not to make a run for it.

When there was this bizarre re enacted slavery section as part of the touristy tour of the grounds, I naturally took this opportunity to question our tour guide and rapid fire questions with her about the South and racism. She wouldn't let up. The more I talked about it, the more she wouldn't. The next morning I had my moment. Breakfast was awfully formal, served at this very long table in the old slave master's home. We took our seats, and this now owner of the property brought out family

style food. Soon enough, I asked the woman next to me whether, as a white woman, she felt aren't being there. She looked at me for a split second in silence, and then started talking fast. Hi, I'm Annie, and we're from a small town nearby in South Carolina, and we've come here to understand race a little better. And on she went. Her daddy, who was sitting next to Michael, ran a chain of grocery stores aimed at lower income communities, and her mama helped local women in their community get

kids through school. In fact, her parents had adopted many local kids and helped them get educated. Her brother, for instance, who happens to be African American, was finishing up Harvard in the fall. She herself ran a clinic for woman to get healthcare services at cheaper rates, even abortions. She added, if that's what they wanted. We chatted for about an hour with this whole family, and with the elections going on,

it obviously turned political. And at some point I said, oh, I so wish I could spend an hour of my life with Trump supporters so I could just better understand their viewpoints. The room went silent and Annie said, you just did, and the rug was pulled. Those are the moments that the South keeps delivering to me. In Memphis, I met this glamorous hat wearing woman named Karen who

owns a restaurant called the Beauty Shop. So one night we were sitting at dinner and you can sit under the old hand dryers, and she told me about her staff. I hired the ones who don't feel like they belong, she told me. And it's true. I've been to the restaurant a number of times now and made it my business to chat to the service and bartenders and line chefs. Many of them are lgbt Q and have come from small towns or maybe a farm somewhere in the South

where they are not welcome. They told me stories about being chased from their childhood homes by guns, and how some were sent to gay conversion therapy classes. But luckily news travels and many kids scared for their lives need to run away. Here about Karen's I don't know safe haven, And as she says, I'll hire just about anyone. Everyone's

welcome here. How can I not ponder how fortunate I am to have had an immediate family who embraced my sexuality, who never made me feel lesser because I happen to love men. Of course, the story is about race acceptance, identity are everywhere in the Greatest South, ready for anyone to take and start discussing, like the Savannah College of Art and Design, transform the electric City of Savannah and open it up to a new generation of creatives from

all walks of life and all over the world. There's nothing I love more than people who are Southern and come back to the South to find their roots, like Mashama Bailey, who runs the incredible Africa meets Southern meets New York City restaurant The Gray in Savannah. Nobody embodies the South quite like she does. But just a few hours south of the city, nearby on some beautiful Georgian islands is where I found out Blacks weren't welcome at

some of the resorts until about twenty years ago. The Jews weren't until about ten years ago, and only very recently other gays welcomed. In Dallas, I'm always struck by how Sheik people are on the street, the most sophisticated Southern city by far. Maybe the Nieman Marcus HQ downtown

could take some credit. And close to Lexington, Kentucky, I learned about the Shaker communities who had a model of equality of the sexes in Raleigh, North Carolina, Michael and I became friends with a chef, one of Indian descent by way of the Bronx, and a restaurateur who came to America as an adopted baby from Lao. The expressions of being Southern is what America is all about to me. Yes, I mentioned their ethnicity just to make a wide a point that the South is a place filled with everyone.

The stereotypes of the South are useless and I think dated. They cannot just be this one idea of the South. And people like Cheaty and Van and Raleigh, they show us that every experience is valid and that every single person can open your mind, but only if you let them. Now everyone for a time out, except for sponsors. We'll be right back with more Everywhere trade tables up. You're returning to Everywhere land. Maybe it's time for a little

holly chat about the South. Since she is from the South, Ish Ish, so she says, I wasn't born in the South. I was a military kid. So I was born in Arizona, and I lived in Seattle, and we moved to Florida when I was nine, and then I'm moved to Atlanta for college and I never left, so I am, in practical sense absolutely a Southerner. Although it's kind of funny because I sometimes find myself feeling a little between two worlds.

When I talked to relatives from like Michigan, for example, they think I have the thickest Southern accent they've ever heard, Whereas when I'm in the South, people are like, are you a Yankee? But the real question is in New York, where did they think you're from. Sometimes a lot of people in New York think I'm from New York, which

cracks me up. Like my point of pride is that, like if I'm walking up Eighth Avenue, which anybody who knows New York is like tourism Central, that the people who are trying to hustle and sell you tickets to the any of the things like whether it's a Broadway show or to get to the top of the Empire State Building, they ignore me completely, And I'm like, okay, cool, I'm blended in with New York, So yeah, new Yorkers don't.

I don't think I've ever had an interaction with the New Yorker where they ask of him from the South. That's interesting when I say I'm from New York. People immediately say it, way you really from and I go why, and they go, well, you don't sound like you're from New Yon. And then I have to say, well, New Yon doesn't have a sound it exactly. Interestingly enough, um

Ella's with us in studio. My dog she's from Puerto Rico, and very often people would ask me, always a dog from it, and I'd say, oh, she's Puerto Rican and they'd be like, oh, she's from a foreign country. And I have to be like, well, no, Puerto Rico is American, and they'd be like, no, it's not right. There's some

confusion that still persists on that point. But that's like a weird way where like race and diversity and ethnicity comes through, like even through my dog, this suddenly this like that's the other, Like she's from the other right, And everybody's just trying to process the world and like define things in in the simplest boxes they can. But

unfortunately that leads to a sense of otherness. But like I feel like because I moved to the South when I was nine, which would have been nineteen eighty, because I'm a very grown up person, find no baby, I have all the life experience for you. So, as I mentioned, my family moved to the Panhandle of Florida because my

father is in the military and their bases there. And I think we had been living there about two months when three lots down from our house and we were in a pretty remote area of what is now a very booming beach town. But there was a KKK rally like complete with burning cross and I just remember like looking at my parents and be like, where have you

moved me to? And we even kind of walked down the street tentatively just because like our next door neighbors had said, oh, just f y I this is going on. Maybe don't go out if you don't you want to see any of that. And we were like, wait, no, that can't she can't be don't wear white pajamas outside in the street tonight. It was just so bizarre. But for the longest time, I mean, I grew up in

a community that was almost in tirely white. We had one black kid in my school and he was a unicorn to most people, you know, they were like, what are you like? And he was like a person. Um. I always wondered if he, too, like had been a military kid that just kind of landed in the South

and was suddenly like, what is this experience? And of course I was young enough to not realize like, those are exactly the people you should seek out and find out what their experiences because one they may need an ally, and two that's a unique situation that is definitely a learning thing, which you're not thinking about that when you're a kid, because you're a dumb kid. At least I was. Not all kids are. Some are very bright and insightful.

So yeah, it's been very interesting to see that and then living, you know, continuing to live in the South as I do, how we haven't haven't progressed in the intervening thirty plus years. Well, the South to me is such a perfect and easy way for anyone to learn these lessons, because like, I've traveled to South Africa with a black friend and have gone to a beach where the entire beach left, Every single person on the beach left, and someone said to me, that is the first black

person to ever come on this beach. And this was two thousand and three. Wow, that's not so long ago. And this was like a segregated beach, and that happened

almost ten years after apartheid ended. I don't. I'm curious because I feel like you have this unique, parallel, but not quite the same experience being from South Africa, where there is sometimes a desire I think in the study of American history for people to go like, Okay, the Civil War happened, and then abolition happened, and then reconstruction and racism was solved, and it's like no, no, no, no, no no. And I wonder if it's similar with apartheid,

Like maybe the legal rules on the books have been done away with, but that doesn't mean that cultural norms magically shift to cool. It takes a while, and it takes to me. I see it generationally, like maybe you grow up in a household that is racist and you don't like it, so then you create a household that is not that, but surely you're probably still propagating some things. And then your kids see that and they do one better, and you know what I mean. So I think it

generationally improves. Not in all cases. Obviously they're outliers to that model. So I do. I mean, I think that when I talked to teenagers today or kids in their early twenties. I'm always wowed by how wise they are about embracing each other for who they are and not needing to do those things like put people in defined boxes with a label on them like that. It's just not the same mindset. My gone dn'ta who's like at high school would never use race as an identifying for someone.

She would never go that and to race the girl. She would identify them with something that's more universal. Right. Well, and there is like this other angle to that, right where I like, you don't want to erase though somebody's identity in that regard, Like to some people their ethnicity is super important and it's a big part of their identity, but you don't want to treat it disrespectfully, as just like an adjective. So I always wonder how those waters

will be navigated going forward. Well, I think the idea of traveling, like I've spent time in Croatia where the friends that I made there had never seen a person of color because Croatia wasn't at the time, So this is like maybe ten years ago, it wasn't as open to tourism, and they would say things like I've never seen a person of color so I'm staring not because I'm being racist, It's because I don't know it, right.

I mean there and then the invos, like you go to India and some rural parts of India, those people have never seen white people and they stare at me and look at me like, who's this person? This alien from wherever? Honey, it's not because you're a white person. It's because you're a tropical fish walking among us human. Yes, just because I'm slightly taller than you, you're a tropical fish. Yeah. I mean it is fascinating, and it gets back to you what you were saying about the other, right, Like

we come to understand what we're exposed to. And so that's like the thing you've talked a lot about being open to meeting people and hearing what they have to say, and that makes them not the other, even even if they are very different from you. There's still part of the greater human experience. Well, as I told you about

my experience with Annie. When I became quiet and was able to listen to Annie, who I met at the Plantation House, telling me about her life, that's when I was learning something instead of just being like my experience, my way this is how I see the South. I was thing to let somebody else explain to me their version of the South, and it shocked me because the stereotypes that people have are so wrong, and they based

on such a small part of the world. Like people say things like New York is a rude Where do you get the stereotype from? That? One always cracks me up a little bit because because my experience to me, I meet some of the friendliest people I've ever met in New York. Why do you think the South has this reputation that's the Southern accent has a reputation, that

very notion of the South has a reputation. Well, there are certainly reasons, right, Like we have a tag on our show where we talk about racism is not something that only happened in the South, but because it was where a lot of high profile civil rights moments happened, it looks like where that like the South is where

the battle over racism was happening. The other thing too, that I think is that we don't always realize how rooted in history some of these ideas are going all the way back to the Civil War, Like two Northerners, there are still roots of that idea that everyone in the South is a stupid backwards person. Similarly, I mean, I remember going to high school with I had a wonderful teacher, but her family would still talk about people north of the Mason Dixon line as though they were

the enemy. Like she was telling this story one day about how her brother was engaged to a woman from like Pennsylvania, and it was like the family scandal. What that was like more than a hundred years ago, that this actually took place. That you don't have to do the the Yankee versus Confederacy thing. I'm not sure why this is playing out, but I think that those tendrils have continued longer than people realize. Not everyone embraces change,

particularly not social change. And it's like while things may be progressing in one way, the people that don't like it really rally the other way, and those they're passing those ideas to the next generation after that, etcetera. I mean, it's the same thing that we talk about in terms of how we see other races, how we see LGBTQ people. Again, it goes back to that idea of their this way, like it becomes that monolithic idea of Southerners are this way,

Northerners are this way. When really, I mean, you could meet someone from almost any place on Earth, and once you get over any possible like language barriers, they could take an assortment of boxes of identities and descriptors that you would find similar in almost any place in the world, depending on you know, what their culture and geography has

given them to begin with. This is why you get on the plane and you go and see everything else, Yes, so that you can learn that everything else is the same as you. Yeah, I mean it's so cliche, but they're really are more similarities than differences. Usually, at the end of the day, most people just want the basics, right. They wanna, you know, find love and connection and community and a place to call home. Everything else is kind of gravy. I mean, this is the stuff that you

talk about on your show. Yeah, I mean that's the thing that always gets me. Right, Like we have discussed off and when people are like, what is your show about, I'm like the fact that there have always been people in the world of every stripe that we maybe we're not led to believe if you will only read, you know, history books, because those tend to be a lot of old white guys. There have always been women, There have always been people of color, There have always been people

all over the spectrum of gender and sexuality. They were all having the human experience too, and contributing to history, even though maybe their stories didn't get the attention they deserve. That's why you should shut the funk up and learn something. Yes, but I've been talking an awful lot, so you teach me something. If you'd like to listen to more of Holly, you can find at stuff you missed in history class, which is at missed in history everywhere on social media

and missed in history dot com online. Let's take a breather and we'll be right back with Everywhere after a word from our sponsors. The time has come for more of Everywhere. Now where were we? Oh? Hi? There you are only. Cheety Kamar can be both rock guitarist and an indie band and the owner plus chef of a James Beard nominated restaurant. If that's not enough, she's also gorgeous.

I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina with my dearest friend Cheaty Kamar, who is the co owner and lovely chef at her restaurant, Garland downtown and I am in town for her incredible Brown in the South, which she hosted this year. Welcome, thank you so much, so nice to be here with you in person. I am don't see you enough, think of you often, my Indian girl by way of the Bronx into Raleigh. That's right, my convoluted journeys. So firstly,

tell me what is Brown in the South? Okay? So Brown in the South is a collective, I should say it started with five of us. Um Marijuana Rani in Asheville from Chaipani Group and Fishpot is a chef in Oxford, Mississippi, and they were at the Southern Food bas Aligne Symposium a couple of years ago. Every year the symposium has a theme, and I think um the Latin South was

an important theme of that year. And they started talking and they were wondering why we don't have that, We don't have this coalition, We don't have a voice in a platform or at least even just a a structure to have this conversation. That conversation happened with them and they just decided, like, let's just do a dinner because

food is the catalyst for all conversation. To us, So we did this dinner a year ago in January in Decatur at one of Marijuan's restaurants, and it was the five of us and it was just like a mind blowing experience for all of us and kind of life changing, and we decided to do a series and just keep doing it and with everyone. We ask other chefs that are in that community and go to different cities and just like feel that city and invite people that are in that region and cooking and like make it an

inclusive conversation. So when you say brown, you mean Indian. Um, we mean Indian because we're Indian, but it can mean anything. Because I hosted this one, I really was considering inviting Van and our good friend Van is from Laos, And then it becomes a little tricky because then you can't. Our personal experience has become so varied in a way

that um, but they're also the same, you know. The immigrant experience is very similar and inherent as a part of being new in the country is a feeling of being isolated, a little bit shameful of your accent. Your childhood experiences are not the same. You didn't watch the same cartoons, you didn't like I mean, it's just a whole set of experiences that make you feel like you're the other. And a lot of that is self inflicted.

It's not necessarily people that tell you that. Some do for sure, but you're you're constantly evaluating your difference, chitty um. As you know, when I met you, I was doing my very own road trip of the South Johney of the South with my husband, and the idea it was that I wanted to shut the funk up and learn something instead of judging the South. I wanted to stop thinking of the South and my Daniel way and stop

thinking of the South and a Southern way. Well, I think I remember when I first told my parents that I'm moving to North Carolina. They said, oh, why, they're they're very racist there, you know, And I said, no, you know, you just have to be here. It's different and this is not like the Deep South. And then I started a band and then we toured, and so I did a lot of road tripping too, and playing in the South is always different. It's comfortable, it's uncomfortable.

The food is good, the people are warm, and you can judge them if you want to. But again, if you just stop and get out of the way. Um. You understand that this is a complicated place with a very slow a journey, and unlike I think some of the places in the country that are you know, different or have a different feel, commerce seems to be like the driving force, and here I think such a part of the history of our commerce here in the South

is so awful and it's so ugly. There's um, I think there might have been some subconscious shift away from money as a priority. So I know there's economic reasons for commerce not being the driving force. And it ends up being about if you listen, if you're connected to that, it's about relationships, and it's about a connection to history, family history, and and the land and nature a little

bit more. There's more space, and there's more time, and it's a little bit easier to live here because it is economically or it has been, or recent history has been economically cheaper. It's a place where you and be creative without having this pressure of being you know, um, of compromising to make it, to make more money. And that's the thing that appealed to me when I was

a kid just graduated college and and came here. Wow, you know, these bands are really cool here, and people practice in their house and they buy a used van from the state surplus and then they go on tour and they book it themselves, and they're not worried about having a manager or getting a record deal, and you know, eventually you do worry about that, But it was just

like you just invent your life, you know. And I think that there's a certain amount of creative invention at the South to me Fosters that I did not find when I was growing up in New York in the Bronx or went to school in Massachusetts. Like I could not have imagined myself in Boston, you know. Can you see me in Boston? Yeah? Right. You feel so quintessentially Southern to me, which is for me beautiful because when I talk about my like quintessential Southern bellfriend, it's you.

But I like that. I like the idea of you, you embodying something so southern, and your sense of hospitality is so Southern, Like the South is not this monolithic thing that people think like. And part of my whole journey of traveling the South was if I choose to live in America, I needed to understand the South as part of the whole. I needed to come here and not just see the divide. I needed to come here

and see everything and uncover that stuff. Of course, I'm a white, privileged person who comes from a certain place. I'm clouded by my stuff. But I try and travel and unburdened myself of those ideas by just being quiet and not coming to the South with my notions of what it needs to be. So I arrived and I'm like,

what is Raleigh. Let Raleigh show me. I came here and you showed me that there's a place for everyone in the South because everyone and anyone can be summon I think it's a matter of staking your claim and understanding what your intention is in being here. And yes, there's still so much to be done. Race is an issue, but it's not just an issue in the South. It's an issue everywhere. It's just that it's maybe, uh rightfully so a more present and sore wound. Still it's not healed.

But I feel like when I went to high school in the Bronx, you know, uh, that school was segregated. We had two separate entrances, so the people on the south side came in one way and the people from the north side came in a different entrance and in that symbol right there. It's like even in one high school, you know, that's a that's a big conversation for the whole country. Um. But I think I dare say that Southern culture has always been pushed forward secretly by brown

and black people. The white folk maybe own it and they have the face, but really we're the ones who are pushing it. And the African Americans not only influenced the table, they actually made the table from the seed to the plate. I mean, there was everything had to do with their hands and their history and their um, their heart and their family lure that they didn't have the benefit of writing and sharing in an any official way.

When you have that strong culture of storytelling, it becomes ingrained in the fabric of a place, and that economic privileges. You know, it's not everything, it's it's a lot, and

it can certainly make life easier. But I think that the that heart force has always been pulsing really hard in the South, and the revolutions that happened to give people more rights on the Civil rights movement, I mean, what a beautiful story story of connection and um, multi layers of people banning together, and people don't talk that much about that part of it, you know, but that's

the Southern history. And when we talk about brown in the South as recent Indian immigrants, I mean, that's a new story to us, because you know, you have to also think about the immigration laws, you know, and we weren't really allowed to be in this country until the fifties when the Chinese people are finally allowed to be here and and be norm like quote normal citizens. You know, there's there are a lot of forgotten laws and historical facts that it is exactly why things are the way

they are. They're very specific reasons, and it's a matter of just like learning about it, you know. I think as I've had and have been so humbled by my experience because I thought that the South was this one thing, So how do we break up the monolithic idea this? So I think it's about experience. I think it's about understanding the nuances. And I think that's always the answer to most questions, is to understand the nuances. It's not a black and white like literally, it's not black and white.

It is a whole many shades of brown and all the other colors. Um. I mean what what's uniting maybe is agriculture is maybe a way of um of eating and of thinking about your neighbor um. Ideally, it's a sense of community and it's hopefully a sense of inclusiveness really when it comes down to it. I mean, you can talk about the word redneck, and that can mean a whole lot of different things. I've certainly seen a

lot of rednecks in Massachusetts, um. And there's some folks here that on the surface you might say, oh, that's a redneck, but then you start talking to them and they're brilliant and talented and kind and open hearted. I mean, it's really just a matter of getting into it and and not just writing things off because of preconceived notions. That's for me, so pivotal for people to understand and

change the notion. Like I would love if people could travel to the South and come to places like Raleigh, Greenville, South Carolina, Pigeon Forged, like go and see that, look for Dolly Parton and not just go to Charleston in Atlanta, which is amazing. But there's all this other stuff available

to you. I mean, I think there's a place for all that kind of travel, but there's an artificial presentation of a place and a culture that is sold, and it's often really fun and delicious and creative and comfortable and luxurious, but then there's just a place for its own sake, you know. And actually we talked about this with the visitors bureau here and Raleigh, and there's a comple caated conversation like how do you market a city that doesn't have a baseball stadium or soccer stadium or

like a big landmark. We're not on a river kind of new really in the in the scheme of things, we don't have anything that draws people except us. We realize at the end of this meeting that the draw is a community and those of us who have businesses are a part of that. But it's also just like the fact that the city embraces that and people come all the time, and they come to the restaurant and they often say, like, I love Ralli, Like it just

feels really good here. And I hear that so much, and I think that's just because there's an open heart here and I think that if you choose to be connected to that, it's it's palpable. And I really like being intangible, no tagline marketing scheme. You know. I love that, Like the idea that there's nothing here just me. Yeah, it's a beautiful thought. I agree, it's not. I think it takes a certain amount of confidence to just say, yeah, that's actually our draw, like that's our value. You know,

I'm gonna find me. Yeah, exactly right. Thanks Jutty, Thank you. I love seeing you. Thanks for hanging out. Connect with us on Twitter at everywhere Pond, Instagram at Everywhere podcast, or on the website at everywhere podcast dot com. I'm Daniel Scheffler. I'll be seeing you everywhere For more podcasts from