Ep. 267: From Kansas to California — Moves, Memories & Pop Culture with Chris Taylor

“Pop culture isn’t just a source of entertainment; it’s a powerful force in society. It influences our beliefs, it affects our personality, and it often reflects the importance of our lives.”

~ Aiza Shahid as published on Medium

Between kindergarten and 12th grade, Chris Taylor moved five times, attended four different elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools, across four states spread across the country, namely Kansas, Michigan, Virginia and California. There’s no way to downplay how challenging changing schools, let alone changing states, can be for a kid, yet, Chris says the moves taught him “so much about learning to make new friends and adapt to new environments. It really helped me learn to reinvent myself and discover who I was.”

Through all the changes, Chris had the consistency of two loving parents, a brother three-and-a-half years younger than him, and pop culture. Taylor talks fondly about everything from Star Wars to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse to Nintendo to his Fisher Price record player. Things like this remained familiar friends when everything else changed around him. These cultural references, known from coast to coast, also offered great bonding tools for making new friends.

Chris talks with great passion about the importance of remembering the music, movies, TV shows and hobbies we loved when we were younger. Sometimes, we think that we become too “adult” to entertain the things that brought us joy in our youth. However, those things might not only bring us joy now, but could also hold the key to core memories that inspire our creative ideas and passion projects. For instance, as an award-winning graphic designer, Chris loves to combine imagery from the many eras of pop culture he’s witnessed into artwork that is at times parody and at other times satirical. He calls this emerging body of work Culture Pop. Chris Taylor explains, “It’s all about turning pop culture on its head and experiencing it from a different perspective. If Culture Pop makes you think, makes you laugh, makes you examine how pop culture has shaped your own identity, then it’s functioning as designed.”

I’m fascinated with how Chris uses pop culture references and memories of being a kid to energize the life he lives now. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!

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**Video broadcast available** on YouTube @imperfectbest

**Learn more about Jason Freeman** at AwkwardlyAwesome.com