Chris Cage and Joe Rogan compare extreme endurance feats—thru-hiking the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail in six months (costing ~$5K) and backcountry hunting with 100+ lb loads—debunking stereotypes of unprepared hikers. Cage’s Green Belly Meals, born from burning 6,000 calories daily during his 2013 shutdown hike, revolutionized trail nutrition, blending science and flavor for long-distance athletes. Their discussion extends to lost civilizations, like the Olmec (900 BC) and Amazonian irrigation grids, hinting at undiscovered ancient histories buried beneath rainforests. [Automatically generated summary]
So, what the fuck, for people who don't know the Appalachian Trail, we've talked about this on the podcast before, but it's a trail where people walk from Georgia, right, all the way up to Maine.
And by month three, I was actually approaching wintertime.
And, you know, wintertime camping is just a fundamentally different experience.
So not only have you been hiking that long, and you're tired, and your body's just, you know, just done doing it every day of hiking, but then the elements of the winter come in, and that was a different ballgame entirely, you know?
I think, so the Appalachian Trail is 2200 miles, and the Pacific Crest Trail I believe is like 25, 26, 2700 miles, but the trail gradient is a lot easier.
So I think like on any given day you can actually hike more miles, even though the trail is longer than the AT, but I think people actually finish it faster than the AT. I like how you call it the AT. That's inside lingo with all you maniacs, all you hiking maniacs.
I joined when I was 14. The pinnacle of the Boy Scout career is getting your Eagle Scout.
I joined with that in mind.
I was like, okay, I'm joining later than most.
I joined when most people are quitting Boy Scouts.
They go from Cub Scouts to 13 and they quit.
I joined and I was like, alright, I want my Eagle Scout, and you have to, in order to get your Eagle Scout, spend 20 nights in the woods.
Not consecutively, but you have to get your camping merit badge and get your camping merit badge.
You have to spend the night, 20 nights in the woods.
So, you know, that was in Georgia, and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains are in North Georgia.
So the beginning of the Appalachian Trail is also right there.
So we went on several trips up there in North Georgia, and I got exposed to it.
And I think just the idea of getting on this small trail and kind of looking down and understanding that this thing goes on for 2,000 more miles was just kind of like...
One, that just seems crazy, right?
You know, there's no way I'm ever going to have enough time or kind of the drive to do that.
But yeah, there was definitely kind of the mystery.
I was like, oh man, that just seems like an adventure I want to do.
So yeah, that was definitely the beginning of it when I was about 14 years old, going up there and hiking on it for overnight trips.
Because I would assume you either have to be independently wealthy or you have to have squirreled away enough money so you can walk for seven months and feed yourself in the process.
I think there's a big misconception that hiking AT takes a lot of money, but in reality it's like, what are your expenses?
It's just food and then gear ahead of time.
Most hikers are kind of known as the athletic hobo.
Grimy.
They're not spending money on hotels.
There's no accommodation.
There's no car payments.
You know, they're walking.
So you can really eliminate all expenses when you do that.
But, I mean, for me, I was an accountant.
So I'd been an accountant for about two years, and I saved up some money.
And I basically knew that I wanted to hike the AT, so I started saving up some money.
Any given thru-hiker, that's what they're called, anybody that starts in Georgia, ends in Maine, or Maine to Georgia, anybody that does that hike in one consecutive run is called a thru-hiker.
But any thru-hike, I would say it takes about $5,000 from gear to sleeping in hotels about once a week to resupplying food.
So if you think about $5,000 for six months of living, like...
That ain't too bad.
You know, you think about $5,000 for six months of living in the real world, like, I've never lived that cheaply, you know?
So you typically are within five to seven days of a town.
So the trail kind of, you know, goes along the mountains and then about every five to seven days you come to a trail crossing, which is a highway or anything that would lead to a nearby town.
And every five to seven days, you're out of food.
That's the biggest thing that I think pulls you into town is you need to resupply.
So you're not out there foraging for nuts and berries or hunting or anything like that.
You're relying on getting to town, getting to a grocery store, and getting all your food.
So every five to seven days, you go into town and you get food.
It's like, oh man, I also haven't showered in five to seven days.
I also haven't done laundry in five to seven days.
And you're hiking with Really one change of clothes.
So you can imagine if you're hiking 20 miles a day, the grime and the dirt that can build up.
So when you come to town, you want to do laundry, resupply food.
You want to stay in a hotel.
You want to clean off your body.
Your feet are starting to grow stuff.
You know, you've been sweating, walking through muddy trails.
There's just a lot of grime.
When you get to town, it's like a big refresh, you know?
You make the intention of going on the trail to get outside of town and outside of society, but one of the biggest things you look forward to is getting back into town, you know?
Yeah, and it's kind of, like you said, when you get to town, it's like, why am I doing this?
I was kind of dreading getting back out on the trail a lot of times because it was just so, oh man, I have a hot shower, like I shaved, like, it's just so nice.
Yeah, I was a Boy Scout when I was 13 for one summer, but these fucking inner-city creeps that I went to the Boy Scouts with in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which is like...
Now it's more gentrified, but back then it was kind of a shady neighborhood.
It's kind of like, I want to power through this and see how much my body can handle.
You get those kind of hikers, but you definitely get the hippie, drop-out-of-life kind of guys, you know, where it's just like, I just want to get out there and get away from society for a little bit.
So that kind of stereotype, you definitely, you can get some weirdos out there.
So Pennsylvania, a lot of those ex-coal towns, their economy just plummeted.
And the AT goes through a lot of those towns.
So you'd have some people near town going out there for an overnighter, and they're what are called shelters.
They're like these three-walled wooden structures that are made by, well, all sorts of organizations make them, but in general, they're about every 10 to 20 miles along the AT. So in theory, you can sleep in these every night and not need a tent.
I wouldn't recommend that, but you do try to sleep in the shelters as much as possible.
But the fact that there are these shelters, a lot of people kind of bottleneck to them because they know they're there.
So you will sometimes get to a shelter at night, and it won't only be AT-through hikers there.
There will be people from town.
But I remember one time in Pennsylvania, there was this couple...
Yeah, they were literally, it was pouring rain, so we get there and I was like, there's no way I'm camping out, there's no way I'm hiking on, like I'm sleeping in this shelter, you know, I was drenched to the bone, my gear was drenched, and I was pissed off.
It was like midnight, you know, I'd been hiking all day, I was just exhausted.
So I was so excited to get to this shelter.
And there's a couple, and they are literally yelling at each other.
I can hear them for like a mile, just furiously yelling at each other.
And you get there, and they are...
I never really knew, but I'm assuming they were cracked out.
I saw some little glass pieces going in between their hands.
And just the way they were acting, he kept throwing up his fists at her.
He smashed a bottle on the wall in the shelter.
And yeah, he pulled out a knife at one point and it was just like...
Yeah, they have them and they stock food in them and they leave a log so that hikers can write down.
Like my friend Remy, Remy Warren was in New Zealand and he used one of those and like wrote in the log, you know, where he was from, when he was there.
And I guess it also helps identify if people are missing.
So, you know, you can kind of track down where was the last person seen, you know, where were they last seen.
So if they were, if they logged into, you know, shelter, and then, you know, they can't find them, they can say, okay, on this date, we know that they were here.
So you can give a given radius and know that if they are missing, they're within, at least within a certain, you know, 20 miles of walking distance of there.
But yeah, and I think those things actually turn into like, just fun, you know, some people just go Write full-on poems in there, some confessed life stories in there.
So I was an accounting major and did that for about two years.
I mean, the job was good.
Everybody I worked with I liked, but I definitely was able to recognize that I was not going to be an accountant for my life.
So yeah, I think I knew I was going to do some transition, try to get another job, do something.
And the ATU is kind of like, this seems like the right thing to do, you know, and I'm single at the time, you know, no kids, debt free, like, you know, I didn't have a mortgage, like, time to go.
It's a very strange subset of human beings that don't, not just drop out, but drop out.
I mean, you're like committing to something that is, I mean, was there ever a time where you were like halfway there where you're like, maybe I'll just get a job in this fucking town?
I just had this conversation with someone about this the other day.
Because, you know, I'm hairy.
I'm a hairy dude other than the top of my head.
But I get hairy.
And so...
It's not the best for like keeping clean so one day I was shaving my package and I said let's just get crazy Let's go all the way down there finish it all and I did and one of the things I was shocked was It changes the sound of your farts Did we talk about this on the podcast before?
I did this show a while back on SyFy called Joe Rogan Questions Everything.
One of the things we talked about was mostly conspiracy theories.
It was really interesting to find the mindset of these conspiracy people and how they're all very similar, whether it's Bigfoot or aliens.
They're really similar sort of Bizarre mindset, the way they look at things.
They have this very compartmentalized, fucked up way of looking at things.
But one of the ones that we studied that was really fascinating is something called Morgellons.
Morgellons is a weird disease where people believe that they have these fibers growing out of their skin and they start itching themselves and they create these like legions these scratches and then Things get attached to them like fibers from like perhaps like from a carpet or something like that and they think that they're growing out of their skin and Most people think it's a psychosomatic disorder But one of the guys that I talked to was a doctor who also had Morgellons And he was really very objective
about it.
And he said there seems to be some sort of a neurotoxic effect that's connected to Lyme disease.
And he said that one of the things that these people that have Morgellons have in common, they almost all have Lyme disease.
And what he believes is that ticks contain not just Lyme disease, but a host of other different sort of diseases that you can catch.
And so because of these Weird, different bacterias and different things that these toxins that these ticks potentially possess.
When you get bit by certain ticks, you can actually hallucinate.
And he was talking about how we saw a thread moving across his eyeball.
Yeah, well, it's generally thought to be a psychosomatic disorder.
And that's why it was interesting talking to this doctor, because he was saying yes and no.
Because he was saying, well, he believes there's a real issue, and that issue is Lyme disease.
But that these pathogens that are in these ticks, it's not uniform.
They're different in all these different ticks.
Some of them are more potent than others.
And that there may be a host of different unidentified pathogens.
There's not just Lyme disease, but several others.
And some of them have a neurotoxic effect.
And this neurotoxic effect can induce hallucinations, and some of those hallucinations can be that you think that your body's growing fibers out of it.
And he said that he saw it moving across his eye.
He goes, I know intellectually that it was not there.
He goes, I examined it, I looked at it, it was not there, but I saw it.
Because the more it sinks into your system, the more you let it go without antibiotics, without treatment.
And again, what this doctor was telling me, I'm just relaying what this one doctor who had Lyme disease was saying, is that he believes that there's a host of different pathogens.
There's not just one.
And he said there could be many that are undiscovered.
Like Lyme disease is fairly recent in terms of its discovery or diagnosis of it.
I feel like it's within the last two or three decades at the most.
There's another article when I googled Lyme disease from Connecticut that says that testing on found ticks with Lyme disease is higher this year, more than normal.
Yeah, I will say though, by the end of the AT, you talk about finishing in winter, You know, it's like whenever you stop at these freshwater sources, you know, the water's flowing and I'm, you know, it's like 20 degrees out, 15 degrees, you know, I'm like, I don't want to stick my hand in that freezing water and get my hands cold.
I can't heat them back up, you know?
Right.
So I'll, admittedly, not that I recommend this, but I was, I was drinking it straight, man.
It was risky, but it was just like, I was so done by the end of it, you know, I was just like, I don't have the patience to stop with freezing fingers, like, so numb, you know, the dexterity is just totally gone, you know, I'm like, ugh, it's just like...
Yeah, I mean, you've got a 19-year-old guy who's out of high school that doesn't have any savings.
It's like, oh, I'm going to go hike the AT. This sounds like a great idea.
They haven't done any research, no planning, don't know anything about gear or anything, but they've read A Walk in the Woods, and they think this is a good idea.
It was like the AT is so historic and iconic for long-distance hiking trails that A Walk in the Woods did for the AT what Wilde did for the Pacific Crest Trail.
But Wilde was only released a few years ago.
But I mean, same thing.
It was like Pacific Crest Trail was relatively unknown to hikers.
You know, like, if you're gonna go hitchhiking in, like, New York, you're gonna run into some really weird people.
If you're, like, just outside of Manhattan, you got your thumb out, you're trying to get picked up, you might get picked up by a fucking complete psycho.
But if you're in, like, Wyoming or something, and there's, like, no one out there, and you're hiking, and...
But we'll say like, so before the ATO was in New Zealand, and New Zealand is higher standard of living than the States, and I feel like there's very low crime rate there.
And hitchhiking is not taboo there.
I always heard that New Zealand was kind of like the States was in the 50s.
And it was just kind of like a safe, happy place.
There's no crime.
Everybody's nice to each other, high standard of living.
And in New Zealand, it was like they had...
Some bus stops, the equivalent of a bus stop, and it was like a hitchhiking bench.
So you would sit there, and people would drive on their way to work, and somebody would be sitting on the bench like, hey, pick me up.
It's not something I would ever do, but man, I remember my car broke down once in a snowstorm, and these people took me back to their house, and they were so normal.
They were really normal people.
And they made me...
I was on my way to visit my girlfriend and her mom and her drove to get me at these people's house.
And I was in there.
I was driving up there and we just got caught in a freak snowstorm.
Car broke down.
And I remember thinking like, what kind of person just picks someone up and takes them to their house?
I guess the fear comes from that, like.01%, right?
That's going to do something.
It's like, vast majority are, you know, why not?
I'm just going to help somebody out.
It's the same thing with Airbnb.
There was that fear.
It was like, oh, there's no way I could let somebody come into my house.
Or couchsurfing.
You know what couchsurfing is?
It's like...
Airbnb for free, essentially.
You put up your couch on this website and you offer, yeah, say like, I've got a couch.
Does anybody want to stay on it?
And then you say, I'm coming through on these dates and you request the couch for free.
But I remember when that website was really becoming popular about 10 years ago, people had that same idea.
I was like, No way, this is only for nutjobs, and then it's like, it's hugely popular now, and Airbnb and all that stuff's like, yeah, let somebody come and stay in your house.
But we're so obsessed with the news, where you tune in to any news channel, all you're getting is the collective bad news of 7 billion people, because that's what sells.
If it bleeds, it bleeds.
Run with it, Mike!
And Mike runs with it.
Yeah, you know, I mean, this is actually a very...
When you really look at it that way, that's a very positive trend that people are doing this and hosting people.
So do you ever stop and think, like, what if I hadn't gone on this journey of exploration and I stayed an accountant and you would be living that life of the droning existence where every day you're just fucking showing up to the same place and crunching numbers and hating life and wishing for some kind of adventure or something different?
I think when I talk to even a lot of my friends that are still doing, I'm not going to call them crappy jobs, but I think they do provide a lot of things that they like.
Security, some people love that security, like getting a paycheck.
But I don't think they view it like that.
It's not like, oh, this may not be the best thing, but I like it.
It's not like, I don't know.
Some people think, this is so bad, or I just can't, I just have to.
I just don't think that threshold ever crosses most people.
You know, the personality types that go on that trail, I mean, that's like a very, very extreme personality type.
But I think most people have a certain amount of, if not wanderlust, at least curiosity.
It's just a matter of how much of it do you nurture.
How much of that needed to feed?
There's also a real problem in not recognizing the finite nature of existence.
When you're 20, especially, or 21, or whatever it is, when you enter into these jobs, you don't realize, hey man, you've only got a few decades of good times.
And then we've all met those people that have done it for 40 years, and they're just beaten down by life, and they have that dull, desperate look in their eyes.
It's just this sadness in their eyes where their life is just, it's not good.
I was just, yeah, even like that morning I woke up and I was just like, Oh my gosh, this is ending, you know?
It's like so much, just so long.
I'd been thinking about it from, yeah, I mean, childhood, you know?
And then it was like, not only thinking about it for a decade, but then it was actually hiking the darn thing for six months, and it was just like getting there.
By that time, I had stress fractures forming in my feet.
Really?
Yeah, I was just in bad shape.
I wasn't sleeping well, because at night, it was getting down to zero degrees every night, and my sleeping bag was not cutting it.
Yeah, I think there's kind of this theory that your ankles toughen up.
I don't know if that's really true, but I think I kind of fell into that belief that I was rolling ankles so much in the first 100, 200 miles of the trail, and by the end of it, I was just like, just keep going, you know?
Yeah, I've always wondered about that because a lot of people that hunt, they wear these really stiff, very tactical mountain hiking boots where they go up.
So that you can, for people to know what a gaiter is, a gaiter's like a thing that you slip over your shoes and it cinches down tight so that rocks and dirt and stuff doesn't get deep into your shoe.
And I think Kuyu is coming out with a boot that actually has a gaiter built in, which is kind of interesting.
But then you can see the Solomon Trail gaiters.
Yeah.
So the idea is to make sure that you're not getting irritants.
Dirt and pebbles and shit and debris.
Did you ever wear anything like that when you were...
And it's like, you know, part of the AT, I've been backpacking for over 10 years, and I thought I was kind of like, okay, I'm pretty familiar with this stuff.
And I was like, no, I didn't know anything about backpacking.
And yeah, you test everything, you know, and it's like, even after all your research, you start realizing like, hmm, there's a little bit better stuff out there.
Or, yeah, I can actually tweak this and improve this and that.
But yeah, by the end of it, it's like, anybody who's through hike can get into some real nerdy backpacking gear talk, you know?
Yeah, one thing that got Cody and I talking was, Cody was talking about cutting weight from backpacking.
I feel like, my impression at least, you know, when we were talking, I was like thinking, hunters were almost kind of the...
The chubby guy in the blind was kind of my idea.
When my dad and I would hunt, it was kind of just truly sitting there with blue jeans, and it was just kind of like, oh, all right, there's a duck.
Talking to Cody, I think the hunting I was doing was pretty amateur, and Cody was talking about cutting weight significantly, and that hunters have kind of latched on to some of the backpacking ethos, if you will, about shaving every ounce.
It depends on what you're carrying, but there are some lightweight rifles that people use that are like carbon fiber barrels and stuff.
But the issue with those is unless you're prone and you're laying down on something, they move a little bit more, and a lot of people think they're not as accurate as a real heavy rifle.
Sacrifices.
Yeah, they're like a heavy rifle, like a heavy barrel, a thick heavy barrel.
And the same thing with bows.
It's a weird thing.
Some people like heavy bows because you hold steadier.
There's the thought behind it that you have something light in your hand and you're shaking a little bit, like maybe your little nerves.
You might move around a little bit more, but if you've got something that's really heavy, you'll have more stability when you're executing the shot.
You know, some people, they'll sacrifice spotting scopes.
They won't do that.
They won't bring it.
But some people also like to film all their stuff.
So they bring tripods for filming and a tripod for glassing.
Glassing meaning, you know, you lock either binoculars or a spotting scope on a tripod so you get a real steady view.
Because it really makes a difference.
Like if you see more animals, yeah, if you're holding up like the binos in your hand, you've got to kind of like put your elbows on your knees and you sit down, but it's not as good.
Like being on a tripod is the best way, for sure.
More heavy equipment.
Then you've got to carry that fucking tripod around.
I think there's a big difference between people that carry their stuff in and then they make a camp versus people that keep their camp on their back all the time.
But again, these guys are not carrying their camp on their back.
But if they do, if they know they have to go in deep and they have to live off their back, like they have a bivvy tent and they do the whole thing off their back, most guys will try to drop it in the 40s.
But you carry around 40 fucking pounds, man.
There's a company called Outdoorsman's in Phoenix, and they make a real high-end pack.
And one of the things that they've made that they actually just sent me, it's a pack frame that has an Olympic plate mount on it.
So you can put a 45-pound plate and another 45-pound plate, like a 90-pound plate, and you train with this fucking pack frame on.
Yeah, well, there's a big difference between blind hunting, like people that sit in these blinds, and what a blind is, is like, for people listening, is like, it's basically like a little structure that's covered with, like, camo, and you're hiding.
You're hiding, waiting for the animal, and then you shoot him.
Or tree stand, same thing.
You're sitting in the tree stand, you're waiting, and then you shoot them.
There's a big difference between that and these western hunters, particularly like elk hunters, because they're going into the mountains where these animals live, or mule deer.
They're going to the high country, and you're climbing up.
You're going up thousands of feet of elevation every day, up and down, up and down, and you have to have massive endurance.
So a lot of these guys start trail running.
A lot of these guys start putting packs on their back with heavy weights in the pack and training, getting ready for these.
Otherwise, You're fucking miserable.
If you're not in, like, real shape, you're miserable.
You know, he's like one of the top bow hunters in the world.
But the point is, these people are athletes.
The group of them...
The elite of the elite, there's so few.
It's a really, really small club of individuals that get to that point.
But the vast majority of them are in spectacular shape, where they're constantly running trails.
They're constantly working out.
They're constantly in shape.
And the reason being is if you're not, you're not going to be successful in the backcountry.
And one of the things that really haunts them is when they can't get to an animal because they're out of shape.
And I've been there before.
I've tried that.
Last year, I was hunting with Cam, and we were trying to get to this elk, and he ran up the hill like a fucking mountain goat, and I'm halfway behind him, like...
I thought I was in pretty good shape, and I am for the stuff I do, but I wasn't in good shape for running up hills.
You've got to do that.
To be in shape for running up hills, you've got to run up hills.
And a lot of these guys, they have these events, these train-to-hunt events that they do where they compete against each other.
And they put backpacks on, and they run, and they try to get from point A to point B faster, which a lot of people are criticizing.
They think it's kind of dangerous, and it's because it's not really...
The barbell thing is completely new and ventured by the outdoorsman.
It hasn't even come out yet.
But most people just pack heavy weights, like sandbags, and strap them down to their backpack.
But it's a different world as far as the perception of what these people are versus what they're actually doing.
And there's a real ignorance when people are talking about hunting.
They think of it as this really easy thing where you just go shoot this animal and they think hunters are cruel because that's the thing that killed Bambi.
You know what I mean?
There's these weird ideas that people have in their head about what hunting is.
But if you took the average person that thinks they're in shape, and I have friends that have done this before, taking people that think they're in shape and take them on these hunts, and these people break down.
Some people say that that's a good way to prepare for hiking as well.
Just box steps over and over again.
Like commit to...
Yeah, just get those quads.
Weirdly, in some ways, trail bikes are apparently very good.
Like doing dirt bikes, because you're constantly pumping one leg at a time, and apparently that is very good for mimicking the type of strength that you need to get up and down hills.
I did a five-mile hike, or a four-mile hike, and one of the miles, I did it with my daughter, who's 50 pounds, and for a mile up the hill, I carried her on my back.
And she's like, if you're too tired, you can stop.
I'm like, no, no, no, it's a good workout.
It's good.
It's good for me.
You know, it probably freaked her out here.
I'm going to go...
Carrying her like thinking I'm gonna fall or something like that, but it wasn't wasn't dangerous like it wasn't like I was about my legs were failing But I was breathing fucking heavy.
That's for sure.
So you got to imagine these guys that are carrying 20 pounds more than that and They're carrying their their weight deep into the mountains, you know or their pack out That's the other thing when you kill an animal like you got a hundred pounds in your pack now and you got to slowly but surely make your way and a lot of guys get like seriously injured doing this and I was going to say, what do you do, drag it?
Now, when it comes to backpacks and things along those lines, how do you choose what kind of backpack you need?
You must have a weight consideration as well.
As far as volume, how much stuff you need.
You said you carry one change of clothes, so you basically have one pair of socks, one pair of underwear, one pair of pants, other than the stuff you have on, right?
What's interesting about packs is a lot of it is like where it centers the weight on you and you can make one pack with the same amount of weight would feel lighter than another pack.
Just by the way it's designed and the way the load lifters work and all that jazz.
But a lot of it is like certain things you strap to the pack.
Like you strap your bow to your pack.
And some of them have like rifle holsters or rifle scabbards.
You can kind of contain a rifle.
And like a lot of them have...
Little packets or areas where you could strap down a tripod or maybe the top compartment you would keep your binoculars or something along those lines.
But I would think that there would be like a lot of crossover and there's not.
There's like an exclusive sort of segment of the population or of the market rather.
That's the biggest con with that specific type of filter is the fact that you have to manually do it and it can take a while.
So if you had a group of, let's say you wanted to go with your kids backpacking, I don't know if I'd recommend that filter because you're going to have to squeeze all their water through that one little filter.
But if it's just you and you're trying to squeeze a half a liter, a liter at a time, it's fine.
Well, it's also like, you ever, like, especially in Los Angeles, this is a great example of this, have you ever gone to the hills and looked down on the basin of the L.A. area and you see the brown air...
I mean, when you get the volume of people that are here, the amount of humans in L.A. Apparently, though, the basin, especially like the valley, has always been like that.
It's always been kind of like a dust bowl just by the way it's shaped, even back before there were cars.
People always complained about the brown air, just literally from dust and dirt and wind and the dry air and the lack of moisture so the dirt kicks up easy with the wind.
And now Trump has lightened the EPA protection standards, and they're changing the standards of automobiles, what automobiles need to achieve, supposedly to help business, but fuck, man, at what cost?
Well, that has got to be one thing that's positive about doing the Appalachian Trail is that you're constantly in nature and you're constantly around all those trees and walking through the mountains and the clean air.
You're drinking like, well, I'm not going to say that all stream water is clean, but I mean, yeah, you're drinking river water, you're surrounded by trees all the time, you're not near city lights, like air pollution, it's pretty, and you're exercising every day, all day, you know, it's a pretty healthy way of life.
Chiang Mai, Thailand was where I was pretty much all of last year.
There are thousands of young international people running businesses off their laptop.
There are hubs all over the world, like Chiang Mai, where they'll have these co-working cafes.
It's booming right now.
People are all over the world, 20s, 30-year-olds just starting off a business that just makes $1,000 a month income, and then they'll slowly grow it into $2,000 a month.
The next thing you know is they're replacing their old salary at their old gig.
It's cheap, and it's like all these volcanoes around.
You can hike all day long.
And it's like the coolest thing about...
I'm in Antigua right now.
Antigua is like...
There are several South American cities like this, or Central American cities, and they're close to the equator, so you have hot temperature all year long, kind of like, I mean, I guess California, you're spoiled with it, right?
But Antigua specifically is at several thousand feet of elevation, so you have that consistent weather year long.
Well they have a very strange, well at least Mayans did, they had a very strange language where you, it's like the letters or the images represent sounds.
And so the sounds, like you would have an eye.
This is how Terrence McKenna described it.
You'd have an eyeball, a saw, an ant, like a bug, and then a rose.
And that would be the way you say, I saw ant rose.
Yeah, he's a fascinating speaker who was a psychedelic lecturer.
He was a botanist and just did way too many drugs.
Or the right amount, depending on who you ask.
And he got really deep into the Mayan culture, and he's one of those guys that was thinking that December 21st, 2012 was gonna be some crazy event.
Apocalypse.
Well, not necessarily, more of a shifting of consciousness, because it was the end of the long count of the Mayan calendar.
Yeah.
So, well, the Mayan calendar is a really tricky thing, man.
Like, the sort of various different Decipherings of it and the people that are Attached all these different meanings to it that don't necessarily jive with the original meanings It's very hard to tell what the Mayans meant because they're not around anymore You know, so it's not like you're you're studying ancient Russia where people are Russian scholars and they can there's a direct lineage between them and the people now You know when you did culture.
Yeah, it's the the language is gone and hieroglyphics Yeah, there's some translations that took forever to figure out, and there's things that are similar in some ways to Rosetta Stone, where they're trying to match up what it used to be to what it is.
We try to...
Figure out how you would say these words in the context of the culture that existed 2,000 years ago as opposed to today.
And apparently there was a really recent breakthrough where they found a bunch of...
I don't think they call them hieroglyphs.
I don't know what they actually call them.
But they found a bunch of previously undiscovered Mayan language that sort of filled in some pieces that they hadn't filled in before.
Then you look at some of their amazing murals that look like a guy seated in a spaceship with a fire below his seat, and you try to figure out what the fuck this meant.
It looks like a guy who's leaning back in like a spaceship.
It looks like he's leaning back in a cockpit chair, and he's looking through something that looks like a telescope, and he's moving some levers with his hands, and it looks like there's fire beneath him.
Go full screen with that one right there that you got right there.
Yeah, see?
So, below him is fire.
He's moving some stuff with his feet, he's moving some levers, and you see how he's looking through that thing?
It looks like he's got a gas mask on, like an oxygen mask.
And all those people that, like the Von Daniken guys, they believed that what this showed was a man sitting in a cockpit Using the the levers and machines to operate some sort of a spaceship.
I went in like early 2000s, like 2002 or something like that I think we went.
But it was amazing.
To think that you're standing on the ground where these people existed and they had this bizarre culture that we don't understand that was aligned to the cosmos.
All their structures were based on constellations.
The maps of these structures mirrored constellations.
They were really into astronomy in some sort of a weird way.
Yeah, oh yeah, right over your head.
Like, how the fuck did they?
Apparently there's evidence that they knew about the procession of the equinoxes, which is a 20-something thousand year cycle of wobble of the Earth.
Yeah, because the Earth doesn't just spin, you know, it doesn't just spin perfectly.
It spins with like a little bit of a wobble.
So the night sky changes and goes into this 26,000 year cycle.
Yeah, I guess if you have a lot of time back then and there's no iPhone to constantly distract you with checking your Twitter, oh, look at this picture on Instagram.
Instead, you're just looking at constellations.
I just don't know how they would...
How they would mark it.
I mean I guess that they would see that there's some sort of subtle changing of the night sky in terms of like how it would move a little bit all the time.
Not just move.
Obviously the night sky moves with the seasons.
You're looking at a different image as the sun moves and the planet spins.
But it's just the idea that these people had figured out all these different things in terms of mapping constellations so long ago.
It's fucked up that we don't know what they were saying, you know?
Like, we've never heard their language.
Like, it's one of the things about one of these other documentaries that I watched was that they were trying to mimic what the sound of these Mayan languages could have been like, and they really...
It was kind of guesswork, but they didn't know.
See if there's something that you find.
There's something where they...
Hear what the Mayan language could have sounded like, you know, and there was some sort of a- Like really bizarre like clicks or something?
Well, it was just a weird language, but they don't even know if that's right because there's no one around.
You know, it's weird and then their language got absorbed and obviously these people that you were talking about probably have some sort of a dialect and- Yeah, and I have no idea what the correlation is between the current descendants and what you're talking about.
It is pretty amazing when you stop and think about it.
Think about the bizarre history of the human race.
And that there are these civilizations that had these...
They lived in these sort of isolated environments.
Where they developed, in many ways, parallel sort of building techniques, but different than other parts of the world that were also based on constellations, like very similar to a lot of the hypothesis about Egyptian cultures that they had done that.
If you read what she said, she was saying that she had given this woman a massage, and the woman was speaking to her, and that she recognized a few words in Spanish, but she didn't...
I don't think there's a bridge between that language.
I don't think there's anybody who knows that language and also speaks English that can...
Crazy, man.
That whole part of the world.
And then you go back to, like, the Olmecs.
They don't even know who those people were.
Those strange, almost African-looking faces.
Those gigantic stone structures that they found that could be thousands of years old.
The thing is evidence of hidden cities or evidence of ancient cultures.
No, in the Amazon.
And I think it was Brazil.
I don't think it was Honduras.
But they found what appears to be irrigation structures and things that are carved into the ground and things that look like grids where they might have had cities and streets.
Well, there have always been rumors that there was these lost cities in the Amazon, but now, thanks to satellite imagery, they're starting to see things they never saw before, and they're starting to find patterns and structures, and it's cool shit, man.
But there's a lot of people out there that claim they've seen things.
But I just think they're seeing bears.
Because there are bears up there.
There's a lot of black bears up there.
And you see them in the distance.
And bears do walk on two legs all the time.
And I think if you see one in the distance and you see that image and you convince yourself that that's a bear.
Or that's a Bigfoot rather.
Not a bear.
And after a while your memory starts to bleed.
Memories are so bad.
Like, the human memory is so inherently shitty.
I mean, a few people have, like, very clear, distinct memories from the past, but I think even those, you're sort of repeating them to yourself and ingraining them in your head.
But I think, like, what our memories are good for is, like, recent events.
Like, or things that are catastrophic, like, don't go near the snake, the snake will kill you.
You know, that spider's got venom.
Ah, I remember the spider.
But as far as seeing things and being around, especially unusual events that are very unique, like seeing a seven-foot-tall monkey in the woods or believing you saw that thing.
Yeah, human memory is unbelievably bad and we count on it so much and people are always like telling you stories about their childhood I remember when this happened and you like do you really how much do you really remember?
It's like you might really and how delusional are you?
That's the other part of the problem.
Like how much do you remember of things?
Like what is how much do you distort reality to fit within your narrative that you enjoy?
So you have no disturbance, and you have all these bears.
So we'd be hiking at night.
I was actually alone at this point.
But yeah, I was hiking through the night one night, and yeah, the sun was rising.
You know, like, bears will go up to sleep at night in the trees.
And when you pass by them, you tree a bear, and they'll come out of the tree, and they'll, you know, claw their way down the tree, you know, to slow their fall.
But it was like, I think I saw 15 bears that morning.
So, this company that you have, Green Belly Meals, which I've enjoyed these things very much, you came up with this because you needed more nutrition while you were out there?
And prior to the AT, I was doing the term cycle touring.
It's backpacking on a bike.
You hop on a bicycle, and you cycle 50, 100 miles a day, and then you camp out at night.
So I did that in New Zealand for three or four months, and it was the same thing.
I was just burning a ton of calories, man.
And I needed everything to be light and ready to eat.
And then, yeah, I came over to the States and right after that trip to the Appalachian Trail.
And the backpacking food consisted of, you know, those dehydrated freeze-dried meals that you add hot water to.
Those things, like...
I don't like stopping and cooking at all.
If I can keep going, particularly at meals like lunch, just keep going.
The meal options were other bars.
Bars usually cap out at 200 calories, 250, even meal replacements.
The highest calorie meal replacement bar on the market was a 400 calorie, I believe MedRx, some of those workout high protein bars.
Not to mention they're heavily processed.
I just didn't want to put a bunch of that crap in me.
I mean, to add another thing was just balanced nutrition.
Some bars would have fiber, some wouldn't.
Some would have protein, some wouldn't.
Some would have carbs, some wouldn't.
And I was like, dude, I need nutrition.
Like, I'm really burning up to 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day, you know?
So that kind of idea of the need for a big nutrition, ready-to-eat, fast diet, You know, kind of eat and go kind of meal was something that had been forming in my mind as I hiked.
You know, a lot of times we were drinking olive oil practically and drinking honey and drinking peanut butter.
It's like anything you can get to load in the calories.
So, you know, I'm not a big dude.
So it's like I couldn't afford to lose that much weight and I was losing weight.
So Green Belly kind of came up with the idea when I was hiking like...
Let's make something that packs in some calories, you know?
Like, for people that are listening, I'm holding this bag, and it has two bars in it, and, uh, dude, I eat, I've eaten these before, I've eaten two bars, and I'm good for fucking a day.
I mean, it's just a normal day, like, not hiking or anything crazy, but it's really dense.
It was a concept for this ultimate backpacking meal.
And then I worked with a food scientist.
So I knew that I knew nothing about nutrition.
I just kind of knew...
I wanted to scratch my own itch.
I had an itch, and I wanted a better backpacking meal, so I knew conceptually what I wanted it to be.
And then after playing around my mom's kitchen trying to get something, I was like, this is way over my head.
Trying to get the nutritional profile where I want it to be, get it to taste good, get ingredients that don't react with each other and spoil, and then trying to get it To literally form together and not fall apart, you start having this really complicated stuff.
I tried to search around and see what kind of person could help me.
I was looking around nutritionists and chefs and all that kind of stuff and ended up coming with the term food scientist.
Food scientist helped me really formulate the meal.
Then it was just kind of a feedback game from what he could do.
From a nutritional point of view, from a shelf life and flavor profile, then it was just making sure the darn things tasted good, you know?
So I went to a hiking festival and handed out hundreds of samples, just got a bunch of feedback from hikers, and then, yeah, kind of ran with it.
Yeah, there's ways you can manipulate your metabolism in that way where it specifically burns fat.
There's a lot of benefits.
One of the big benefits is your appetite.
Appetite suppressants are amazing because if I go on, and I do switch over, like if I cheat, like if I go on vacation or something like that, and I just start eating tacos or whatever, when your body goes into a carbohydrate-burning state, you get way hungrier.
Like, you burn through that carbohydrate pretty quickly, it's quick burning fuel, and then your body doesn't have the carbs anymore, so you go into this real hungry state.
Whereas if you're in a ketogenic state, your body's burning fat, you're eating fats, and then when there's no more food, your body starts burning its own fat.
And so you don't get that crazy hunger craving that you get when you're on a carb-based diet.
There's arguments for both sides, and I'm going to bring in some people that are anti-ketogenic diet as well, so get a balanced perspective on it.
It's really a fascinating time when it comes to nutrition, and also what's really good about him is he's constantly experimenting.
He's very honest and very open about his experiments, and he's also really adamant about the possibility, not the possibility, but the reality, rather, that People are very different.