But over time, we started adding other moves to it. Gabe, talk about the mechanics of the high five. We thought, What if a car is driving by right now, or there’s another family walking behind us-and they see two random guys walk past each other, then turn around at the exact same time, walk back, give each other a high five without looking, and then just keep walking?Īndy: It would be a weird thing to witness, so we saw it as a gift for anybody who happened to be driving by. Then you just stick up your hand, give a high five, and walk home.Īndy: There’s no acknowledgment of the other person’s existence other than the high five.īeck: Were you able to maintain a straight face? You still don’t acknowledge each other till the very last second. So the rule was: You have to first pass each other without looking at each other, and you can’t smile.Īndy: You take 20 paces, then turn around and come back. If you just gave each other a high five without talking, then turned around and walked past each other again, that would surely be awkward. So we started something called the silent high five. That’s the only communication.īy the time of our fifth high five, we were both too busy that week to take the 30 minutes of walking and then also shoot baskets. Then you respond with a walking emoji, and the other person does the walking emoji. One person sends the high-five emoji then the other person responds with the hand. Has the process evolved at all?Īndy: Yes. Read: Best friends build shared memory networksīeck: It’s now been more than six years of weekly high-fiving. As Andy talks, a few of the things he said are things I couldn’t have told you, but as soon as he says it, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I remember that.”Īndy: I’m not normally one who would just do all the talking. But what I’m dealing with is … I’m still me, but I can’t define “me” as my memories. Gabe: I feel better than I did three months ago. Are you feeling better? Do you remember the origins of the high five, or is it fuzzy? The middle point happens to be a park, so we’d give each other a high five, and then we would shoot baskets, talk for 15 minutes or so, and go back home.īeck: Gabe, I know you were sick recently and had some memory issues. The only rule in the beginning was that we had to do it one time each week. We texted and said, “All right, let’s leave our houses.” We met at the middle point, gave a high five-and then weren’t sure what to do, so we talked for three hours. I have it right here in my high-five journal.īeck: Oh my gosh. ”īeck: Walk me through the high five’s early days.Īndy: The first was probably a day or two after that party. I said, “Gabe since you live so close, what if we just walked and high-fived in the middle? If we do that every week for 10 years, that’s the kind of story they would do on CBS Sunday Morning.
Read: How friendships change in adulthoodĪndy: It wasn’t until 2014, when we were both at the same party and having that same conversation-“Man we’ve got to hang out”-that Gabe told me he had moved just a mile and a half down the road from me. And we hadn’t gotten those two aligned yet. Gabe Scott: You have the routine when you’re on the road, and then you have the routine when you’re home. And then real life comes back, and there are so many variables. Gabe Scott (left) and Andy Gullahorn (right) (Courtesy of Andy Gullahorn)īeck: It seems like it was almost like a camp friendship for a while-where you see each other once a year and you’re best friends in that specific environment, but it can be hard to bring the relationship into “real life.”Īndy: In the music world, being on the road, you’re sleeping in bunks two feet from each other.