Ep. 71: Raleigh 'Round the Flag w/ Brian Rineer & Roland Kays

What's up, you flag nuts, we've got a chock-full episode this week as not one, but two guests answer my Raleigh'ing cry! World traveler and designer of the New Raleigh Flag Brian Rineer drops by the studio, with good friend and enthusiastic new flag advocate Roland Kays for quite a corny talk on why a new flag is needed, why the old one has interesting roots, and how the two branches can meet in the middle. Plus, some flags that are red, white, and... loons???

New Raleigh Flag site

Absolutely follow Roland's YouTube channel on critters HERE

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
We've got and a few margin matters. You might even
get to standards and what they represent. So just tick
my voices and a lit try to understand this.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Logic podcast Factook counts, Flag food.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Count What's up? Back? SAIDs and welcome to episode seventy
one of Flagged for Content. It's the only podcast that
cares about all the same things that you do and
is with you on that one thing. It's also a
flags for good podcast, and you can head on over

(00:43):
to Flagsforgod dot com slash flagged for content for like
the digit the number, what have you? And uh, you
can pick up the flag that's sitting behind me right now,
and the topic of this episode the new flag for Raleigh,
North Carolina. You can all so pick up a couple
of their neighboring cities flags there, which should kind of

(01:06):
give you a hint as to why Raleigh is pushing
for a new one. Those other ones have had some
good symbols for a minute. And in any case, whatever
you get over there, when you go to check out,
use code flagged four content at checkout it is again
flagged four. Like the number content, you'll get yourself equal
ten percent off and help the show out as well,

(01:28):
So as always, we appreciate everything flags for Good does,
and it was a lot of fun going up there
to open their flagship store in Indianapolis earlier this month.
So anyway, thanks as always to them. Not a whole
lot to get into up top here as usual, stick
around for the Patreon At the end, Roland and Brian

(01:51):
and I went into a little bit extra on there,
which I thought was very illuminating, So you can sign
up to that. You can go to patreon dot com
slash flag for content all selled out, you know the
deal with that, And yeah, this was a very fun one.
It was interesting to have two guests on. I don't know,

(02:11):
there's historians of the show that would know better than
I do whether that's been the case or not. I know,
I've had like multiple guests on as far as in
different boxes for some panel discussions and you know, live things,
but I cannot recall having two on it at the
same time, at least for any released episode. There's one
sitting in the vaults that I'm still editing that it's

(02:31):
that bill as well. But yeah, Roland and Brian really
like they know their stuff, so most of this is
just me kind of getting in questions here and there
and them taking it away, And man, I cannot wait
to see this effort fully played out. And I hope

(02:52):
y'all can't wait to see this episode fully played out.
I won't waste any more of your time. Let's go
ahead and get into it right now, bex heads. We've
got a couple big names from the community this week.
The first one you may know as the guy who
runs the Wild Animals YouTube channel. You know him as

(03:13):
the leading expert on kinkajews and as a world champion unicyclist.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
It's Roland Case.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
What's up, Roland, how's it going? Hey? Great?

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Thanks for having us on.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
Oh yeah, fantastic. And speaking of the us in that sentence,
let's go ahead and get to our other guest. You
may know him as a software development manager specializing in
anti financial crime solutions, a world traveler who's visited forty
seven countries, and of course, as the designer of the
new Raleigh flag. It's Brian Ryan.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
Hello, good to be here.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, good to see you both. How's how are things in?
I assume you're in Raleigh now, Yeah, we're downtown.

Speaker 4 (04:00):
It's it's a you know, it's a beautiful day outside
to walk around and see all the flags.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Fantastic. You guys are getting the weather I wish we had.
Then we're here in I'm here in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So
you you may be on the receiving end of this,
but hopefully not too bad. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Whatever weather blows through there will be here tomorrow.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Yep, yeah, it usually is so. Yeah, and I see
you're all merched up. You've got I see the flag
behind you, We've got the shirt, got the hat.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
You guys, this is probably not the first time you've
done any kind of you know, press for this. I
imagine we've been lucky. You had some.

Speaker 4 (04:37):
Yeah, we're trying to get trying trying to get the
word out. My favorite was riding around on my unicycle
with the big flag.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
Oh yeah, yeah, that's a fantastic way to combine those
interests we had.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
We got a PR stunt, We went to city council
for a public comment session, had a little band and
had some unicyclists and whatnot. Right, some other press. Been
on TV a few times here, been in the papers.
A lot of local bloggers written about us, So it's
definitely been getting out there.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah, yeah, I saw. I was on your website earlier
obviously kind of you know, doing my research as as
you will. And uh yeah, there was a couple news
stories that that that I saw, like the video news stories.
One illustrated a point that we'll definitely get to, which
was it was not a windy day when they were
filming it, and the current Raleigh flag was outside one

(05:23):
of the one of the buildings. And yeah, we will,
we'll definitely get to that.

Speaker 4 (05:28):
Speaking of Brian's got a trick for that. Oh yeah, yeah,
it brings along a leaf blower when we were.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Doing Yeah, that's what you have to do.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
That works, Yeah, as long as it's you know, reachable anyway.
Speaking of flagpoles, though, let's go over what's on the
flagpole for today's episode. We've got our usual well more
or less usual under and overrated flags. As predicted, we'll

(05:56):
talk mostly about the effort to get a new flag
for Raleigh, working our way through the classic reporters questions
of who, what, when, where, why, how, and we'll see
if we can't compare and contrast this effort to a
few others going on around the country. So we've got
a lot on our plate today. And guys, before we

(06:18):
get to any of that, I like to ask my guests,
what's a flag that got you into flags? Great?

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Mat me start? Yes, for me, it was the current
well I'm going to call it the nineteen sixty Raley flag,
not because it's a favorite flag, but because just owning
it and seeing people's reactions to it and learning about
it kind of that's what got me hooked and ultimately
led some of us to pick up this effort to

(06:45):
try to get a new one.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
Fair enough.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
Yeah, yeah, And for me it was the Chicago flag.

Speaker 4 (06:52):
I lived in Chicago for a year and really loved
the city and loved the flag as a symbol I'm
sure with the flag on it, and that kind of
got kind of got me excited. And then, you know,
I'm a zoologist, and so my most recent favorite flag,
it wasn't the successful winner, but the when Minnesota had
a contest for the new state flag.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Oh, I know where you're going with this.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
Someone had this amazing loon design that had like a
real close up of the loon's face and the bill
of the loon like separated the two colors, and the
like the spotting on the neck was symbolic of of
I think the stars or something like that. I just
thought that was you know, I mean, there there are
flags that have animals on it, and usually there's you know,
it's some stag, you know, old school stag, and I

(07:36):
just thought this was a really clever model use of
an animal a flag. And I was bummed that it
didn't win, but that that made that's that's my my
favorite modern flag other than the New.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Rally flag of obviously obviously. Yeah, I think there were
quite a few loon ones. Did you see the laser
loon one as well?

Speaker 4 (07:56):
The laser lun I like that a lot as well.
Obviously was never gonna win. I thought the other loon
actually had a chance of.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Winning, but it wasn't in the time. Yeah, yeah, the
laser land was like the Boady mcboat face of you
know exactly. Yeah, for sure. That and the one where
it was just a picture of somebody's dog whatever. That's
fun too.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yeah, so like mixed back, I mean mixed bag as
far as like design wise, like with you guys saying
the current the nineteen sixty Raleigh one and the Chicago
one kind of just goes to show like if you
love like where you live, if you love the area enough,
you're gonna look up and see what is that flag.
If it's a good flag, you're gonna find merch of it,
like like Roland has. Like I guess you've got a

(08:39):
long history of wearing flags on shirts now, and you
know if even if it's less successful from a design point,
it's still gonna get you interested, even if you maybe
can't find quite as much merch. So yeah, I mean
that's uh, we get all kinds of answers. And I
love a good local one like hyper local one too,

(09:01):
so awesome. Well, so did you guys bring any underrated
overrated ones that we can talk about? We can do
that first, Brian. If you've got whatever you've got over
or under, go for it.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
I'll go underrated this one. I think people don't think
about a lot. It was kind of hard for me
to to pick this, But if I was going to
say an underrated flag, I'm gonna go with the flag
of Austria. You might guess why. All right, So it's
not a super exciting flag and there's a lot of
try bands out there, and you know, people may look
at and think Okay, that's their callers and they just

(09:39):
put the stripe on it. Whatever. But if you know
the legend, which you probably do, that Leopold all right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
Pretend that I don't, all right, right, right, So.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
In the twelfth century when the Austrians, it was Leopold
the fifth, I think they're fighting a battle and he
had a white tunic, okay, and he's out all day
in this you know, gruesome battle, came back completely covered
with blood. His tunic was stained white. But when he
took off his sword, his sword belt had left the

(10:14):
line across his tunic that was white. So they then
took that and kind of made it into their standard
and their banner and eventually became the flag. Now that
is a legend anyway, So I don't know if anybody
has direct that, but that's what's passed down. So if
you know that symbolism, then it's really cool. You take
their like kind of simple design that some people might
think is boring, but if you know how it got there,

(10:35):
then it seems really cool. That's why I think it's underrated.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Yeah, the the Austrian one doesn't
get nearly as much shine as the I think pretty
similar Latvian one. I mean similar in several ways. Do
you know that one? Yep, sure, yeah, it's you know,
it's a darker I think it even comes from like
there's a similar legend around it with the you know,
blood stained and then I don't know if it's a

(10:59):
belt in their case or whatever, but I feel like, yeah,
Austria doesn't get nearly as much kind of attention. Underrated
is exactly how I would word it. Yeah, I don't
I can't remember, because I know Austria used to use
like the like black and gold, like the black and
yellow yea, like in their heraldry. And then what'd you say?

(11:20):
It was King Leah.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
Leopold fifth who came up with this new.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
So yeah, I guess somewhere around then that's where that changed. Yeah,
I did not know that that is cool one.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
So yeah, yeah, let's go into it. I don't know
if you want to keep up, But just a second
underrated flag. I really love the flag of Turkey. Okay,
simple again, but the way just I think the designer
put some really brilliant elegance into this. Like if you
look at the tips, yeah, you probably have one the
tips of the moon the way they slightly rotated the

(11:53):
five pointed star in there, so it looks like the
tips are like lined up with the points at the crescent.
It almost looks like it's kind of dancing there. So
it's a really cool idea to build it that way.
And then I've been to Turkey a couple of times,
and their flags everywhere, and if Ton Bull you can
look around and you're just sitting there by the bosporus
and look across the river and there will be a

(12:14):
huge flag on a flagpole on the top of the
hill near the side, fluttering in the breeze. And so
it's literally a big red flag that just grabs your
attention and you see them all over the place. The
branding is great. That is kind of like something we're
trying to achieve with the new Raleigh flag.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
So I thought i'd put that out there because I
may be sighting that later.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
Well, I was gonna say, yeah, so far we've gone
over two flags that are majority red with white.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, imagine that the.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
Type I know this is quite well. Yeah, we'll go
into the design notes in a bit, but all right,
any other like favorites, overrated, underrateds any other ones you
guys want to get kind of touch on here in
this first little bit before we dive in.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
Do you want to go over I think what, I
don't know what people think about this. If I had
to pick one overrated, I would say Colorado because I
say overrated because I know people love it. Yeah, I
just don't like, well, I don't like flags that have
two metals usually, but but also I don't like flags

(13:23):
that have letters on them they use a letter to
represent it, because it's just so arbitrary, Like, okay, it
happens to start with a C. Some people love the
sea on the flag, but to me, it's like, oh, well,
your thing, your place happened to start with that letter.
What if everybody did that?

Speaker 4 (13:35):
You know?

Speaker 2 (13:35):
So anyway, that's if I had to nitpick something that
I think is super popular, that's what I come up with.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, no, that's fair. That definitely is a very pot
I mean I think it's consistently top five and any
kind of rating, whether it's you know, like ratings by
vexillologists or just public opinion type stuff, Yeah, that one
always comes in very high. I do like my only
gripe with it. I like it. I think think if
you're gonna do a letter on a flag, I think

(14:02):
it incorporates it really well as a design element. It
is still so obviously a sea for Colorado, which is
you know, a little hokey, I guess, but I don't know.
I think it does it well. And I just wish
that the kind of like points of the sea lined
up with where the blue and white like go vertically,

(14:23):
because the sea like kind of comes up like a
little bit too far in. But the flags for Good
version one, they just like slightly tweaked it, and I
think that makes a world of difference. But anyway, yeah,
we have not had Colorado being overrated. We definitely haven't
had it being underrated for the obvious reasons that a
lot of people like it. But I think normally when

(14:44):
we've talked about it, it's been as a favorite. So
so do you end up getting hate mail on the overrated?
H oh yeah, oh yeah, and so do the guests,
so you know, oh, get ready, it's yeah, you're ready.
We'll have your contact info come up on the screen
right here.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
Now.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
No, we do get like I'm always glad for any comments,
you know, on the YouTube or on the audio, and
people you know, tend to feel pretty strongly when when
their flag is viewed less favorably, I guess more so
than the opposite. But that's the Internet and just life,

(15:26):
all right. So any more flags to talk about here
in this first part, I think we're good. Yeah, all right,
So we've got a little bit more time before we
need to hit an ad break, So let's go ahead
and delve on into it. Yeah, let's start at the start.
What got you? What got the kind of gears going,

(15:48):
the wheels turning on? Why you wanted to do this
in the first place?

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Ryan, Yeah, So, I wish I could take full credit
for it, but there's been a lot of people involved,
fair to say, I think I've led them most recent effort.
And there have been people who in previous times have
tried to get a new flag in Raleigh and they
kind of fizzled. With this latest one, the COVID, it

(16:12):
was really a pandemic project. COVID had a lot to
do with it.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
So I had owned my wife and I and our
kids moved into a new house downtown here in Raley.
We had lived kind of out in the suburbs for
a long time moved downtown out of Flagpole front porch
on the little cottage there out of flag Pole, and
you talked about it's cool, you know, talking about and

(16:39):
maybe owning hyper local flags. A lot of people, of course,
fly the US flag, that's great. A lot of people
here fly the North Carolina flag, which you've got to
bind you, that's very popular here as well. There weren't
that many people flying the Raleigh flag, which I think
we're going to talk about why in a minute. I
didn't actually even know that we had one, and my

(17:00):
wife's call me, Yeah, they have one that's you can
see it down in the museum, and so she got
me one as a gift. It was a Christmas gift. Yeah, anyway,
so I put it up. Okay, good, So I thought
this was so cool. So I put the Raleigh flag out.
And because it was COVID, we couldn't really hang out
indoors with people, so we sat outside on our porch

(17:20):
and when people would come by, they'd look at the
flag and say, what is that? What the flag is that?
And these are people who even lived in Raleigh their
whole life of them just didn't even really know about it.
That got me kind of thinking about and asking questions
and doing some research online and connecting with people and
learning about the history of this flag and why it

(17:46):
really hasn't been very widely used here, and then we
started thinking about what to do about it. So that's
kind of the the background on why I got involved
and rolling shortly after that and when I start talk
him about it, and then a few other people around
here as well.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
Gotcha, Okay. So yeah, like like so many things, I mean,
this this podcast technically I started in twenty twenty two,
but it was more or less a pandemic project. And
I know my sponsor, Flags for Good, they started up
in twenty twenty out of similar you know, origins. So yeah,
that was that was definitely Yeah, Yeah, it makes sense

(18:25):
seeing it on the porch, and I imagine, like, is
it mostly only kind of at government buildings currently?

Speaker 2 (18:35):
If that? If that you said, there's some city buildings
here that just fly to the US flag in the
North Carolina flag right right, ur a few typt the
translations at one of the parks, but yeah, it's not
widely adopted.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Gotcha, okay.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
And this was the other part of the pandemic aspect
is without being able to go out and do normal activities.
Some of us had extra time on our hands to
sit around and surf, surf the web, and go down
rabbit holes. So that's when I and some mothers started
kind of learning about the nineteen sixty flag and learning
about flag design principles, learning about what people have tried

(19:11):
to do before, and then coming up with this new initiative.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
Right. So, okay, so you're like surfing the web, what
is it? Did anything specific that you kind of stumbled
across that?

Speaker 2 (19:24):
Yeah, you encuvered. So I discovered that there was already
a lot of chatter online a few years before about
the Riley flag, and apparently it's come up every so
often for a little while, people just saying, ugh, nobody
really knows about this thing because of the design, because
it's kind of complex, it's not really that unique. This

(19:45):
is not something you're going you're not going to see
it on a shirt, you're not going to see it
flying at everybody's house. There's some things about it. As
you know, it's a double sided flag, so the obverse
and the reverse have different imagery.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah, yeah, so go go into the the design of it,
for don't for the listeners. Well, yeah, I.

Speaker 4 (20:03):
Mean so part of it was just that it was
designed by committee, which that's just like I feel like
that must be like violation number one if you're going
to design something like when you design by committee, you
end up with something that's generally not very universally.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
And I feel like you can just see it when
you look at has two different things on two sides.
It seems like there's probably factions on the committee who
couldn't agree on what they wanted, so they compromised.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
And put two things on it.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
But I want to tell you something that I don't
know if most people around here realize or think about,
which is not only was it designed by committee, but
it was not designed it was not intended to be
a city.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
Flag, right I saw that? Yeah, explain that.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
Okay, So are you ready?

Speaker 1 (20:47):
You're ready to go?

Speaker 2 (20:48):
I think so you want to take it or you
want to yeah, Okay. To understand the history of this flag,
you have to go back all the way to eighteen
ninety nine, Okay, okay, Spanish American War. There's a ship,
the USS Raleigh, and I'm going to forget I have
to look it up what class it was, but it's battleship.

(21:10):
It was in the Philippines, saw action the Spanish American
War in the Philippines. Apparently it distinguished itself over there,
the ship and crew. The people in Raleigh just followed
its exploits in the newspapers, okay, so they kind of
knew about what the ship was up to. And the
war wound down, ship came back to the United States,

(21:31):
got back to the East Coast, and then it was
making its way down the East coast like just kind
of doing a little tour and putting in a different
ports for maintenance and just saying hello to people and
letting people visit it whatever. And so the town officials
at the time, so it wasn't council's aldermen found out
that the ship was going to put in in Wilmington,

(21:53):
North Carolina for a few days. So they had a
little notice on this and decided we want to go
down there with a delegation and thank you know, the
crew for representing the city. And they wanted a gift,
you know, something about Raleigh to give you What do

(22:13):
you give, like, what do you put on a ship
like there's very limited space.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
What do you give the ship that has everything yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Right, And and there's not like a lot of wall
space on a ship, so they couldn't give them a
big painting or piece of art in that, right, and
what else can you do? So they decided to make
a piece of art in the form of a flag.
When you do that, then okay, they could put it
on a pole, you know, in one of the cabins whatever,

(22:40):
and they could pull it out and like look at
it and appreciate all the detail in it, and then
when they want it out of the way, just fold
it up and put it in jow it. Right. So
it's a good thing. It was just kind of a
novelty thing for them to do. So they they put
together this committee and you ended up the two side.

Speaker 5 (22:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
One thing I think they really got right is they
picked the two themes that really kind of represent Raleigh.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
So yeah, because you said it's two sided, so.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
So each side is something different.

Speaker 1 (23:16):
Now, okay, so what's the what's the what's the one
side or I don't know which to start with.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
The city of Oaks, maybe you can fill in on that.

Speaker 5 (23:23):
Well.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, just so, I mean what we call Raleigh the
city of Oaks.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
There are a lot of oak trees.

Speaker 4 (23:29):
We have a giant acorn on New Year's that like
drops down and that's our ball. Yeah, we sort of,
you know, identify as an oak tree city.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
And so they.

Speaker 4 (23:42):
Have on one side is an oak tree and some
other sort of design elements around that.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
So so they got that.

Speaker 4 (23:52):
Uh, And then the other side is more of a
connection to Sir Walter Raleigh, the sort of namesake of
the city and some of the heraldry associated with that.

Speaker 1 (24:02):
And Brian's probably better to talk about that.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
Yeah, sure, it's his achievement, not with supporters, but it
has his discutcheon to the arms and then his motto
and his crest, which is a deer. So that's what
they put on the reverse. Now, one quick add on
to the story about the tree. If you look, and
I'm sure you will, we're looking at a picture of
it right here on the other screen. But I'm sure

(24:24):
you'll show your viewers that tree that you see. Now,
that's not the original, that's not what was on that
eighteen ninety nine piece of art. The artist is They
hired a local artist. She was here at a local college,
Meredith College. She painted the scene of an oak tree
and I think she painted on in a Raleigh, North Carolina,

(24:45):
maybe with a date, and that was later replaced. We're
going to get to that part. But what you're looking
at now is a more modern or it was as
of nineteen sixty, a modern reproduction actually the city seal.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
So that's why you call this the nineteen sixty flag.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
Yeah, okay, so let's let's go forward or is that.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
Am I a jump? Okay? Sorry?

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Yeah, well that's fine.

Speaker 6 (25:06):
So so, so they hired someone to make this painting,
and the funny part.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
Is she didn't finish it in time, so they had
to go down to the feeling empty handed and tell
that we're making you this flag, you know. And there's
no evidence to show that the flag ever made it
onto the ship because it was decommissioned later. Now it
may have gotten to the ship later somehow, but they

(25:34):
definitely didn't have it there at that first kind of
ceremonial and thank you think, which is kind of funny.
So she made too, so the history you find in
our city museums. So she made the original one for
the gift, and then she made a second or she
painted a replica of it. Right, nobody, that's it. So
that was intended as a gift, might have never reached
the intended recipient. Then it sat in a box in

(25:58):
storage in city Hall for sixty years. Oh wow. And
in nineteen sixty and city Hall was moving, someone was
clearing out storage found this thing in a box in
the basement and some historians knew what it was and
told the story, and that's when the council at the
time decided, up, well, we don't have a flag. I

(26:21):
guess this is our flag. And so then they made
the adjustment of like they had someone kind of illustrate
the coat of arms, not exactly like the painting, but
very close to the painting on the original one, and
they used the city seal, which also has the oak
tree in the laurel, the oak laurels, and they used
that as the obverse of the flag. They still they
decided to keep it as a double sided flag and

(26:44):
make it our official flag.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
And the seal's just hidiot. Like the color.

Speaker 4 (26:49):
It's like it's got these bright greens and yellows that
don't match with it with.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
The dark red at all. So it's it's kind of.

Speaker 4 (26:55):
A Yeah, Honestly, I feel like if they had just
done the seal on both sides.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
It would be okay, it would be great that it would.

Speaker 3 (27:02):
Be okay, but just that seal with a little words
just to carlong to me, Yeah yeah, just to cod us.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
Yeah yeah, but agreed on that the seal.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
Here's what I think is funny about that too. If
you look at it, if you look at it from
a distance, especially if it's moving, it's not even unique
because it looks kind of like the flag of Peru.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
Okay. I was gonna say, as a like kind of
behind the scenes, like whatever type thing. When I was
asking both of them, like what flags to fly in
the back or to put in the background, They're like,
if you have the flag of Peru, the one that's
got like the seal in the middle, throw that up.
I'll explain why later. And I didn't really think that
much of it because I don't own that one. But

(27:40):
then I started to kind of think of why, and
I saw the current Raleigh flag and I was like, oh,
that's exactly why they wanted.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
I saw something I want to read it, which is
someone who wrote, Hey, like they moved here and and
for an embarrassingly long time, like a few years, because
they had seen this flag a few places, uh huh,
and they thought Raley must have a large contingent of
Peruvian immigrants. And then they finally learned that, no, that's

(28:08):
actually an official flag of raleighf you look at it closely,
it's different. So that except that we should point out
that Peru actually changed their flag. They made it simpler,
great right facing emblem off of it. So that's actually
this makes it even kind of more funny.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
Oh my god. All right, well on that fun little
on that fun little tidbit, it might be a good
time to take an ad break when we come back.
I mean, yeah, more on the Raleigh flag, the efforts. Yeah,
more with ROLLINGD and Brian when we get back. All right,

(28:51):
I said, we are back more here with Roland Ks
and Brian Bryan near So. Yeah, Brian, we've we've heard
a lot about the kind of you know, the impetus
behind what got you started everything in twenty twenty and
you know what the current design is. I Roland, I'm curious, like,

(29:12):
what's your role in this? How did you get kind
of roped into this? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (29:16):
Well, so Brian and I are friends for a long time,
and so during COVID, you know, while he was playing
around with new designs. He'd send me, you know, hey,
what do you think about this? And what do you
think about that? And yeah, and just kind of you know,
pointed out and I think he sent me a Ted
talk or something like that kind of more about flag design.
You know, I hadn't I hadn't getten sort of super
into flag design as like a a thing. I like flags,

(29:41):
but you know, I hadn't paid a whole attention, and
so that's when I kind of realized like, oh my god,
our flag kind of sucks, you know, the existing rolly
flag and and I you know, that's not something I
would I would fly.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
And so.

Speaker 4 (29:55):
You know, I was kind of all one hundred percent
behind it, like yeah, let's let's let's get about it design.
And I think we should talk about the design that
Brian came up with and you know what's behind that.
But once we kind of had that, it was like, well,
here's a symbol that people can get behind. And so
you know, in terms of the process, you know, definitely

(30:16):
looking at what other cities had done.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
To get a new flag, like how does that even happen?

Speaker 4 (30:22):
And we we we weren't in a huge rush and
thought it would, you know, like, let's just see if
it has any legs, right, and so see if people
like it, see if people will fly it, and see
if you fly it if other people notice, right. And
so I had one, you know, on on our house,
and our neighbors noticed and they're like, hey, that's a

(30:44):
cool flag. What is it?

Speaker 1 (30:45):
You know, and be like, oh, it's it's you.

Speaker 4 (30:47):
Know, tell them the story and and you know, sort of
the whole thing of like, well, did you know you
know it's not the actual official flag. Do you know
what the ficial flag? Was Like no, I don't, Wow,
this is really cool. So you know, they got behind it.
And one of my neighbors happened to have some experience
on city council and on the city Arts Council and
stuff like that, and so yeah, she gave us some
good advice and and some other people as well. And

(31:07):
Brian was you know, started again just kind of low level,
like giving out some free flags to bars and talking
to restaurants and talking to other people and and and
there was just like a lot of support for the
new design for the new symbol that like, right kind
of realized, yeah, we don't really have a good rally symbol.

(31:27):
This one looks great. Let's let's let's let's move on
from here and see if we can make it official.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yeah. Yeah, and something like like that you kind of
touched on there too, or that you touched on in
a big way. Is having a symbol as well as
a flag, Like when I was designing the flag for
my show, for example, I know it's important for like,
you know, a brand, for like marketing stuff. Not only
is it a flag, but there needs to be some
kind of element from that that you can take Like

(31:55):
it works on a hat, it works on a shirt,
It works like as a circular sticker, you know, a
squar stick. You know, you can put it kind of everywhere.
It's adaptable with different yeah, colors, you know, for sports teams,
et cetera, which.

Speaker 2 (32:09):
Is definitely something we were going for.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
Which, yeah, like so, so now that we've touched on that,
let's go into the design itself, Brian, if you want
to kind of walk us through the process here in
the end result.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (32:20):
So, so when we started looking at things online, quickly
found Yeah, there were a number of people who.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
We didn't even know because these are just anonymous like
Twitter and Reddit, and sure, yeah, but there was a
lot of complaints and there was a movement in Actually
one of our city councilors a few years before Twitter
had raised it to the rest of the council about hey,
like we should do something to get a new flag,
and it kind of fizzled out. It didn't go anywhere.
The local paper, ye put out an editorial saying, ed,

(32:54):
we have too much else going on, don't waste time
on that. Why are they talking about It's not important? Right,
just kind of died. So we knew it was going
to be an uphill battle. So we thought, Okay, what
we need to try to do is stick with the
existing symbolism on the current flag. Even though a lot
of people don't know about the current flag, they do

(33:14):
know about that symbolism City of Oaks and Walter Riley.
So right there we had a kind of a starting point.
We weren't starting completely from scratch with no ideas. We
wanted to keep those two themes and weave them into
one flag design if we could do it and still
come up with something good, and we thought we'd have
a better chance of getting people on board if we

(33:35):
did it that way. Yeh. So we basically had the
colors picked out and right away. And I know, like
you said, you're gonna have a lot of heraldry fans
who are your listeners, so they're going to understand that
if we want to keep any elements of the coat
of arms, well probably that's going to be the arms itself.
And some people said, well I want to use the

(33:56):
deer or whatever. Okay, but we decided to keep the
discussion or we got there. I would say we didn't
start with that. We got there, and then that kind
of means, well, that part has to be red. You
change that color, it's no longer Walter Raley's coat of arms,
and and and heraldry fans will understand that makes sense.
So the flag was going to be red. But also

(34:18):
Raleigh's color really is is red like.

Speaker 4 (34:21):
Yeah, so so in it in in North Carolina, in
center for Raleigh, we have Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill,
three cities that are very close to each other, that
have three universities. State which is the colors of NC
state are red and white. And then if you go
to Duke and U NC those are due to two
different blue colors. So we definitely weren't going to use blue. Yeah,

(34:44):
you know the fact that the old flag was already
red and whatever. People already kind of are, you know,
pro red red color for Raleigh. So that was that
was that was maybe the easiest part of it.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah, and Charlotte is green, so you know, starting from scratch,
I bet a lot of people say, well, let's something green,
but Charlotte's green, So we don't want to duplicate Charlotte's color.
But yeah, we have NC State. We also have the
Carolina Hurricanes, so there's a lot of people already wearing
red stuff, maybe flying red flags they have NC State
or Hurricanes like sports flags. So we thought that works. Okay.

(35:18):
Probably the reason why a lot of that stuff is
red is maybe because of the original flag and the
coat of arms, so we knew we're gonna stick with red.
Then probably we thought it would be a good idea
to just like keep it as simple as possible, just
following all those principles that are gonna be well known
to your audience. Okay, how do we keep it as

(35:39):
simple as we can? We know it it's gonna be
somewhat complex if we try to have two themes in
it instead of one. But let's not go crazy. Let's
try to keep the colors limited at least all. Right,
So then you get into okay, what do we do?
How do we capture both City of Oaks and Walter
Raley in this? So we're thinking, okay, well, if it

(36:01):
was just Walter Roley, maybe we just put the diamonds
on and bend, you know, in the diagonal and just
call it a dad and you're done. And that's a
simple flag. And see it's easy, right, But then you
lose City of Oaks. Okay, well, what if we put
an oak tree on it? Well, oak trees look cool.
Everybody would get that.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
But oak trees just kind of look like trees.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
Well that's yeah, that's the thing. So if you didn't know, yeah, yeah,
if you didn't know it was an oak tree, then
you'd just see a tree. There's other issues with it, though.
One is like construction cost, which is like it's hard. First,
it's hard to standardize. How do you get the oak
tree to look the same right? How someone calls it?

Speaker 1 (36:38):
Your neighboring state of South Carolina still hasn't figured out
how to standardize.

Speaker 2 (36:41):
There, that's nothing I was going to say, we already
have a very popular flag in our region with a
tree as the main chart as well.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Yeah, so yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
We wanted to be unique. The acorn is, like Rolan
was saying, the acorn it's kind of a funny thing
seriously too, Like people love the acorn around here. It's
we have the acorn statue downtown all that. So so
we were thinking about, okay, well, what if we do
like the diamonds and then we put a tree. But

(37:11):
and it's kind of maybe just luck, I guess, but
the fact that in Walter Raley's coat of arms those
diamonds appear in Bend rather than say, like in Bend Sinister,
that meant okay, the canton's already taken up, so you
can't put so because we were thinking about what if
we put like a tree or an acorn or something
in the canton and then had the diamonds, but then

(37:32):
you have to reverse the direction, and then that's not
coat of arms.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
Yeah, okay, see where we're going.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
It almost shows itself to be honest, because then we
started thinking, well, what if we use like five acorns,
or what if we had, you know, five diamonds, but
the middle one was an acorn and actually remember like
there were some sketches we had to that and uh
it just they looked ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
So yeah, I do like hearing about the ones that
could have been.

Speaker 2 (37:58):
Yeah, well they didn't stand much chance, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (38:00):
But so.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
One day, you know, I was sending a lot of
different prototypes i'll say, around to different friends. Rolling was
one of them. There's an artist, Nam Julie, who's a
friend that she gave a lot of input on this.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
Well, his sons are both artists and designers as well.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
So my son, one of my sons, actually did the
illustration the artwork. Because so my son's both studied.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree in this case.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
Okay, all right, all right, we see why you're in
the business. Okay, So he's yeah, he was at the time.
He's graduated now, but he was a student studying digital
animation at Savannacollogy of Art Design. And so I got
him to like try different things and send him out
to people, and we and I don't even remember when
or why, but at one point it finally hit us,

(38:50):
like what if the diamonds were just on the acorn,
which totally makes sense. Because you can stylize it a
little bit and then it looks like a shield.

Speaker 1 (38:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
So that's so from there you can see. Then it
was just minor tweaking and that's that's how we got
where we are.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah, it's it's so brilliant. Like it took me. It
took me too long probably to realize that. Like, oh, man,
like obviously a lot of thought went into this, but
like it's such an easy like like when you see it,
you see it kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Yeah, it's like it should be obvious it all right,
it took it like a month.

Speaker 1 (39:26):
I knew it was et cetera. Yeah, but once I
saw that, oh that part of the acorn looks exactly
like a shield. I see what you did there, So.

Speaker 2 (39:35):
Once once that clicked. Yeah, then, like I said, we
had a lot of input from from Julie who's an artist,
and some other people and we kind of like just
tweaked around it a little more on the shield shape
to make it a little more like a shield, you know,
an acorn is a little more squared off or really
so it's not biologically and then but then we had

(39:58):
to also round the cap a little bit. But that's
kind of cool because it for some reason makes you
sort of think of like an Elizabethan sort of like
headwear or something. I don't know, and a lot of
people can say that. I wouldn't have put that into
words until someone else said it way later, but it
just sort of looks like appropriate to the period of
Walter Rowley. I think it was Julie's idea maybe to

(40:19):
break the stem off instead of having that be one
piece with the cap, because it just was too heavy looking.
And there's side benefits too, like Okay, maybe only people
like your audience might appreciate this, but like you can
cut if you're doing an Apple Q flag, you can cut
the stem out of the remnant that's cut out of
like the negative space inside the acorn frame, so that

(40:40):
saves a little money stuff like that. So it was
just really really really minor tweaking, a lot of back
and forth, and then we add something to try. Now
that's the design. I'm mean to talk about what we
did with it, unless you have more design questions.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
No, I mean I would love to just like go
straight on into that.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
All right, So do you remember those Reddit posts and
Twitter posts from like sevent eight years ago with all
the other with the squirrels and all the all right.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
So oh on our vexillology.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, so right and on Twitter here local like I'm wrong.
So what we thought was, we're just kind of goofing
around and we want to restart the conversation. Yeah, because,
like I said, it had been out there, it had
fizzle little it away, but we had a new council.
It's a new time, like maybe we can get some
traction again, right, and if we have something that looks

(41:33):
af decent, we can put that and say, hey, what
do you guys think about this? And maybe that'll just
get the conversation going. But the more we looked at
it and showed it to people, people said, that's really cool.
Like we were getting almost universal positive feedback on it.
So that's when we decided, like Rolling was saying.

Speaker 4 (41:51):
Let's just try it just the yeah, so we said, so,
so we had this nice design, we got a lot
of sort of initial early encourage, and so you know,
then it came to okay, let's actually make this a movement, right,
and let's let's let's try to get some ground support
and and and you know, because before you can't just

(42:13):
like show up at City Council and say like, hey,
here's the new flag, and so like, let's you know,
we think that it's got the legs to run.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
Let's see how it does. And so we started finding
it ourselves.

Speaker 4 (42:24):
You know. Uh, Brian got some little ones to share
with people who were excited about it, started selling them online,
eventually started getting some some stores to sell them. You know,
I think there's uh now, I think Brian's sold at
least one hundred and fifty.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
But then there are other stores selling them as well.

Speaker 4 (42:42):
So so there's there's there's hundreds of flags out there now,
you know, in in a couple of years that are
flying at houses, at at local local businesses, local restaurants
and bars.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (42:54):
Some folks have have taken the design and already started
using it in their own artistic rep presentation. There's some
firehouse that made a little coin actually celebrating their firehouse that's.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
Got the the.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
The acorn on it already.

Speaker 4 (43:11):
So so it's like it's already we're already getting derivative products.
You know, people are excited enough about it to say, yes,
this is cool. We think this represents Raleigh to the
extent that a fire station that's you know the city.
One of the city fire stations is using it as
their icon as well. So we think that's got you
know that that was really great. Showed that yes, uh,

(43:32):
this is worth pursuing. And I think also you know,
showed city Council that you know, okay, there is now
actually a you know, a kind of a groundswell of
support for this. Uh it's not just one or two
people that are pushing this idea. And so I think
that helped us get some conversations and uh, you know,
actually get the issue in front of city council as

(43:55):
well as Brian, you know, kind of beating the bushes
and and and and getting the communication with the individual
council people as well.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
Yeah. Yeah, So did either of you prior to this,
like have any experience dealing with city council, like non
not for flag related things, but like trying to get
any kind of like resolutions, pat or you know, any
kind of local ordinance stuff.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
That's what we say, like, how are we going to
do this? Like, yeah, we really think this is a
good idea, how are we going to edit? So it
was very gradual and very grass roots. We have no
marketing experience at first. Now what happened though, is other people,
when they heard about the idea, wanted to join the effort. Yes,
one thing we didn't even talk about is the website,
New orleyflag dot com. But so there was a friend

(44:39):
who has the skills to do web development, and I
was shown him the designs really early on and he
loved it, said I want to do something, I want
to help, and he made the website for us. He
didn't write all the content some of us the rest
of us traded like the actual words and pictures of things,
but he put it together, put a ton of work
into it. He also did other things though, forturement and

(45:00):
fulfillment of flag orders just and it's just kind of like,
you know, volunteerism. Another person, you know, one of my neighbors, uh,
someone she works with, they're in a marketing company, found
out about it, looked at the website, looked at our
social which isn't even really that active, and said, you
know what, I want to help them. I think they
could use some help because so have we talked about

(45:25):
branding movies. So I don't know if you know, do
you know this is another thing we've learned a ton
on this right, so many aspects. But if you look
at marketing, like brand archetypes, I'd never heard of that, okay,
and I guess it showed to marketing people because they're
looking at our website and the messaging and the things
we were doing, and they so I remember having launched

(45:47):
with three of us and this person was explaining, Okay,
you have a product, it's cool, but the brand you're branding,
you've basically been using I think what you would call
like the or outlaw brand archetype, which is like, hey,
you're kind of like, you know, the rebel, you're the babble,
you're going against the grain, You're what this is like

(46:10):
the Andrea agacy kind of like you know that kind
of marketing stuff, know that. But yeah, that's where we
do say, hey, like this is way better than the
current flag, Like let's.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
Go with a cool new kid on the block.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
And what she said is, okay, you can get so
far with that, but why are you doing this? And
so we said, because the current flag just isn't that
good and nobody knows about it. Yeah, yeah, but why
do you care about a flag?

Speaker 1 (46:40):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (46:41):
So once you like zoom out to that, it's like okay,
Pacific pride, right, it's the Chicago symbolism and.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Then and that's just a bigger tent.

Speaker 4 (46:50):
Right, there's like the rebel connects with a certain group
of people, but it also repels ino the group of
people that are like, wait, a second tradition, uh, you know,
and and that that that don't want a new you know,
even if the old flag isn't that great.

Speaker 3 (47:04):
They some people are resistant to that and it kind
of brings up.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
Some of that.

Speaker 4 (47:07):
Whereas if it's the civic pride is is I think,
you know, uh, a sort of a campaign and a yeah,
like you said, like a marketing attitude that that has
a bigger tent.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
That's really what we're after.

Speaker 1 (47:20):
Everyone lives somewhere and everywhere has a flag. Like everyone
cares about flags. They just sometimes need a little bit
more i don't know, time to unlock that, or a
little bit more push in the right direction to unlock that.

Speaker 5 (47:36):
You know.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
Sometimes a lot of it's reactionary, like nobody cares about
the flag until it's going to be changed to this new,
woke one, like in the case of Utah or whatever.
So okay, people who never talked about flags suddenly care
a whole hell of a lot about flags. Yeah, but yeah,
like it's it's awesome to unlock that in such a
positive way, Like it sounds like you've done with uh

(47:57):
with the brand with just like the engagement, volunteerism kind
of like bottom up ground swell of it. Because I mean,
at the end of the day, like hell, like I said,
everyone's if you're proud of your city, you want a
good flag in this case logo, what have you to
identify with it? And and the younil it people will

(48:20):
naturally kind of flock to that and then it can
only grow I think from there.

Speaker 2 (48:24):
And there is a lot of civic pride here and
there has been. This is uncovered a latent desire for
some kind of symbolism. Yes, show off that civic pride.
So and a lot of answer the question you're asking,
which is like do we have any like content. No,
like we're not involved in any local politics or anything
like that. But along the way people got involved. Who

(48:47):
are and kind of where to advise or make connections
or make introductions and just that networking so that the
power of networking is another thing we learned. Yeah, just
getting it in front of people and getting awareness and
we kind of build up and build a strategy then
for just like the more aggressors, like more talking to people,

(49:08):
getting it very gradually in front of people who may
eventually be decision makers. Until that culminated about spent six
months now. But things move slowly in government at all levels.
But we did then officially take it forward in a
public comment session, like we said, out a little pr
stunt there, people gave some speeches and that that generated

(49:29):
some additional press and that's just kind of our process.
I think most cities work like that. That's the way
you officially bring forward or request or an idea proposal.
Did it publicly because it's you know, you're you're there
in the city hall talking on the stump. Now since
then we had that was in October last year, so

(49:50):
we had elections, we had a couple of new councilors,
including a new mayor, were seated, and in December then
we had holidays and then beginning of this year, the
first quarter, a lot of was tied up and there
was some already some other big like in cases in
front of council, the big decisions they had to make
one other issues budget season, but I think we're now
about at the point I heard this is unofficial, Okay,

(50:12):
but we'll still tell you anyway that we think within
the next few weeks this is going to be formally
taken up and discussed by council here.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
Okay, that is big news. Yeah, let's get into that.
Let's take one more break before we do get into that.
But yeah, I think that's gonna be a fun, cool
way to kind of kind of close this out as
it were, for at least a Yeah.

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Speaker 1 (52:23):
Okay, back here the final part, Part three. Uh So,
as just mentioned before the break, things are moving forward
and uh, Brian, you were just about to go into
kind of the next steps as far as the council
and all that goes. What's what's going on next?

Speaker 2 (52:38):
Yeah, you took it.

Speaker 1 (52:40):
Well.

Speaker 4 (52:40):
So the point is we you know, we had we
went to the public comment period and had a number
of people speak about why we think there's being a
flag yeah, and that and that was coming after They've
been a variety of discussions with with certain city council
people and other people kind of you know under so
they knew it was coming and so, but that that

(53:01):
kind of launched it onto their more forward facing agenda,
and and so there's been some other things going on,
but it looks like it's now like on the agenda
for them to discuss as as a formal thing.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
And you know how.

Speaker 4 (53:14):
Exactly this goes next, We don't know. They could just
decide they're going to adopt the acorn flag and then
were and they were done. Or they could decide that, yes,
we think we should have a new flag, but that
there'll be a whole there'll be a process for it
that you know, might and this is what a lot
of a lot of other folks have done right other

(53:36):
cities and states. Invites a lot of a lot of
people to submit and then usually there's.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
Some council so they don't get another boat boat face.

Speaker 4 (53:45):
So we don't know which way they're going to go,
you know, be happy with either. I kind of joke
around with Brian that I hope they do the the
invitation because I've got this cardinal flag design that's going
to be like the loon, you know, cardinals. It's also
so I'm going to put in a little competition, and
cardinals also eat acorns, so I think it's a smash.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
That would be awesome.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:09):
So okay, So so when they when it comes to them,
what are they looking at? Are they just kind of
looking at like a proposal or do they vote on
like you said, basically how to move forward? Like there's
not like a cut and dry kind of it's not
cut and dry.

Speaker 4 (54:27):
It's kind of like city Council's got a lot to do,
right Is the flag important enough to take up their
time when there's all this other stuff?

Speaker 1 (54:36):
And so that's what we've been pushing that.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
Yes, okay, we think it is important enough.

Speaker 4 (54:40):
Look at how important it is to have have a
symbol that people get excited about it, enriches civic pride, businesses.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
Will fly it, all that kind of stuff. So that's
kind of where we're at.

Speaker 4 (54:51):
And Brian could talk more about the mechanics of how
it might actually work.

Speaker 1 (54:55):
Yeah, yeah, I was gonna ask like, is is it
kind of one of those where it's open to public comment?
Like is it where you can like bring people with
you and kind of have them be like, yeah, I
think we need this because for the way, yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
The way things would work here at least is after
our public comment session and we actually did a couple
of those. Okay, the mayor at the time, she's retired now,
but back in October, the mayor at the time asked
the city manager to have staff prepare like a feasibility report. Okay, okay,
what what would it mean to adopt a new flag
or a second flag, because that's our official ask right

(55:28):
is not to and I'm sure you're gonna want to
get into that, but yeah, let's the current flag, with
the existing one, with with the new one. I mean,
so then staff will have been looking at that, looking
at the legal aspects of it. How much would it cost,
which I would have to think wouldn't be very much
because it's just I mean, they could do it with
just a piece of paper, right, it's a resolution flag,
and then maybe over time they could flags and hang

(55:51):
them on. You don't think they would, yeah, but again
for a city given city budget, and you could probably
secure private funding for that kind of stuff. So I
don't think lost is really going to be the deal
breaker on this. But what they're going to want to
look at is the different options and staff can present, like,
what would we do if we adopt this one that's

(56:13):
pretty simple to do. What if we wanted to get
more public input, not just doing an up or down?
What do people think about it? But what about other options?
Our case is a little bit unique somewhat because we
have this option that's out there, and it's like and
we've lost track of how many flags. I mean, I

(56:33):
know through our site we've sold and given away and
sold over one hundred and fifty and now there's a
couple independent vendors just that we know about. Yeah, sure
the one you got right now, and there's another local
store here is making their own and selling them, so
we don't really know. I'm going to guess between one
hundred fifty and two hundred that are out there in
the community and then just all the like people buying
glassware and hats and shirts and different kinds of merch

(56:54):
and making trinkets and things. So it would be for
some people feel like a little bit of a rug
pool to say, well, okay, yeah we're gonna have a
new flag, but not that one or maybe that one,
but maybe what something different, but they could. So it's
that's what they have to deliberate against, and I guess
take public input on. Then there's the consideration of you yeah, yeah, right, it's.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
I'm already thinking of like kind of ones to compare contrast. Yeah, sorry,
go ahead.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
Yeah. So, so there's good examples of cities that held
design contests and they were successful. But in those cases,
almost always they were starting from scratch, without an existing
popular design that people that you had this grassroots effort
that has sort of grown organically. There are then examples
of cities where it was just like this, it was

(57:44):
grassroots and someone designed it, took it up, and you
mentioned Bellingham. I think that's one provo. I think same
thing happened there Springfield, Missouri. I really like their flag,
and I think that's the way that one went. So
it's not totally without precedent that someone just comes up
the flag, it gets popularized, and eventually it becomes official.
So that's what we're asking. But if you want to know, okay,

(58:06):
well what does it mean for a process? Those are
the kinds of things that the council will need to
deliberate over and will there be publican But yeah, for sure.
So they might be able to do like a work
session in which staff just presents the results of their
research and then council kind of kick it around. Then
maybe they're going to want to have a hearing. Maybe
they get out and talk to constituents in their own
districts see what people think. I don't know how long

(58:27):
the gap would be between an initial discussion and a decision,
you know, I don't know if it would be super
fast or if it would be months. Who knows, you know,
there's like, like Roland said, there's a lot on their plates.
I think the flag is important, you know, because it
it boosts the civic pride and boosts city spirit exactly.

(58:48):
But they have some very concrete, time bound things that
they also need to decide on specific issues, So we'll see.
The Other thing, though, is if they decide they want
to adopt this flag or a new flag, do they
replace the existing flag?

Speaker 1 (59:06):
Yeah? That's what I wanted to get into is as
far as like you touched on, it would not as
planned out anyway currently. It would not replace the current one.
It would add to it. So was that a decision
on your part? And if so, was it kind of
is it kind of just strategic, Like in the case
of Utah, I know that's obviously state level, but uh,

(59:28):
I guess, like, what's the thought that went into that,
And was that thought yours are there?

Speaker 4 (59:31):
Yeah, it's it's just it's a strategic thought that you know,
there there are there are people who don't like the
idea of getting rid of tradition, and and I.

Speaker 1 (59:41):
Can respect that. Sure, you know, that's a better way.

Speaker 4 (59:43):
You know, I don't love the old flag, so I'd
be kind of fine to retire it personally and have
one new flag.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
But it's an easier ask to just say, let's have
a second flag.

Speaker 4 (59:52):
Yeah, and lots of cities have done that, and so
you know, we think we think it'll you can fly
both of them. Uh, And that that doesn't you know,
cancel the old flag. It just just you know, recognize
its the limitations of the old flag and introduces a
new symbol.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
Remember we said near the beginning. Again, I'm looking at
it right now, but the symbolism on the current flag
is something I think the designers got right, even though
they weren't intending it to be a city flag. So
those two themes are important. So I like that aspect
of the current flag. It's just that it wasn't going
to take off in its current form.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
There's a better way to hybridize those themes than having
just one habit. It's complete, right, but you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
Can still keep it around and there could be put
people who continue to fly it or display it in
the right context. It's on the wall hanging up at
a popular like breakfast place downtown, but you can stand
there and look at it stationary and appreciate all the
little things that they didn't. That's fine, But for something
that's going to be popularly used, we think this design
is going to work better that way. And there's precedent

(01:00:58):
even right down the road. Charlotte the same thing. Yes,
about around nineteen eighty.

Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
So they got the one that's green with the like
crown tiara. However it's the.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
Crowd because it's the Queen city crown. That's their motto. Yeah,
so they had the old Their old flag is basically
the Scottish salter with the city seal slapped on top
of it. Oh fun, the same thing. It just wasn't
popularly used. You know, it's got a lot of detail.
You don't make all that out when it's far away,
so they adopted the second one. That's that's simpler. But
they have two official flags.

Speaker 1 (01:01:27):
Well yeah, and to that point, like like about usage
as well, it's I imagine I have not been to
or had to buy a flag that's dual sided city,
state or otherwise. But like I imagine, since we had kind
of touched on you know, cost and everything, I imagine
is it is it harder to get slash more expensive

(01:01:47):
to get a current Raleigh flag there? Yeah? I would
say they're probably QW and far between and as a
result kind of expensive.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
Yeah, so there is someone there's a guy down here
making and selling them civic flag and Raleigh. Here's the
thing about it, when you have a two sided flag
like this, and especially because the center band is white, Okay,
if you so first around of detail, you can't really
make an applica flag like that. You'd have to embroider

(01:02:15):
it and it would just be so expensive and time
consuming to do it. It's not practical.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
Yeah, so they screen them.

Speaker 2 (01:02:21):
Okay, then when you screen it, you're limited the material
you can use, and I think a lot of them
actually cotton what they're making. So it's screened on. But
then if you screen those two different images on two
sides of one sheet of material, Now that flag's up
there flying in the sun, you see a silhouette of
the reverse side showing through. So that doesn't work. So

(01:02:45):
then you have to sew.

Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
So what you do is plus it's probably waited, very weird.

Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
Okay, I want to talk about that too, right, Okay,
so you okay, where do I want to start with this?
So you you have to take two pieces of material,
screen them into visually, and then sow a liner in
between them to block the sun and block the shadow
of the reverse side. Okay, So that makes it expensive.

(01:03:10):
It also makes it heavy, and when it doesn't then
it doesn't fly. And when one of those gets wet,
it's even worse. So I had one and the first
flagpole we got was just like a gift from our
mortgage agent. I think when the we have an outrigger flagpole.
And I had this Raleigh nineteen sixty Raleigh flag on
it not wet in a rainstorm and it actually bent

(01:03:31):
the flagpole. Flagpole. Yeah. So this and then if you
go like at Lake Johnson, there's a flag of the
current city flags. It's a city facility at the boat
house there, and you can see that the liner has
become detached inside, so the flag is hanging there like
a pillowcase with a wadded up sheet in it, just

(01:03:51):
hanging down. Yeah. It just it doesn't work, you know, ultimately,
So just like symbolism, but practically speaking, it's expensive to produce,
hard to maintain and own one, and just kind of
a frustrating experience.

Speaker 1 (01:04:05):
To be Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I mean I joke
about the being the ultimate dishonor, but really, if you
are trying to honor the place where you live, having
that be even like a possible outcome is not ideal.
Yeah yeah, wow. So all right, So, I mean that's
we've touched on most of what I wanted to hit today.

(01:04:28):
Is there any any kind of last notes that you
guys wanted to get into, I know, Brian, did you
still want to talk maybe some heraldry stuff on the
Patreon for like a few after this or we.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
Can do that. We can talk about, you know, just
kind of like what I've been seeing with flag prices.
You know, I'm given inflation and now we've got tariffs
and all that, so we can talk about that kind
of thing. But I don't know for for main audience,
what do you think?

Speaker 4 (01:04:52):
Yeah, I think we've covered the main points, told the story,
told why people are excited, and why we're optimistic that
Raleigh will have a you signed me for long?

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
Yeah, yeah, I share in that optimism. I'm definitely rooting
for y'all. All right, hoping it's not a for everything
like the People's flag of the Milwaukee People's flag. Where yeah,
come on, get get to the finish line.

Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
So I would just say, wish us luck. Check the website.
Yeah you're here local listen to this, Yeah, sure you're
Drop the I'll.

Speaker 1 (01:05:24):
Have it up on screen for the viewers, but for
the listeners, drop the what's the name of the website? Like,
how can we can we volunteer? Can we?

Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (01:05:31):
How can we help? Basically get this thing.

Speaker 2 (01:05:34):
New flag dot com And there's an email address on there,
but it's info at New Raleigh Flag dot com. Send
us your ideas and if you want to help out,
let us know. This is a so the way we
say it is, this flag is community property and this
is creative common zero. It's out there, anybody can use it.
It's community property. But this is also a community effort

(01:05:54):
getting it adopted. So any and all help and ideas
are the bigger commun it better.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
Yeah, yeah, good way to put it. Well. On that note, well,
here I'll go ahead and say for the show's plugs,
if you've gotten this far you probably already know them.
But anywhere with an AT sign, we are at flagged
for content for like the number we have a link
tree just search linktree dot com slash flagged for content

(01:06:21):
all spelled out. That's got all of our pretty much
everything you could need to know want to know about
the show, including uh merch, guest request forms, things like that.
So I think that's it for me, and if that's
it for y'all, Yeah, guys, you know, I never know
how to close these things out. Is there is there
any way you can help me out here with some
kind of phrase anything like that? Yeah, we're ready. It's

(01:06:44):
uh flags cheers, y'all, catch y'all on the fly side.
Great Flag for Content is proud to be sponsored by
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