Life Can Change In A Moment

This week, I bring you the legend of Trek Kelly.  After running a successful marketing business and art gallery on Abbot Kinney, Trek decided to disappear.  Who does this? What does that mean? What was this crazy man thinking?

Trek's journey covers the following:

Live Your Bucket List Now: How Keeping Death Close Energizes Your Life

The History of Abbot Kinney, Venice Beach, CA, and Why Trek Kelly Disappeared

Why A Stranger Picked 12 Countries for Trek to Travel to

Animal instincts Return When You Live Alone in the Desert for A Year

What Is Scarier Than Death, No Toilet Paper

Enjoy

LB

Week's hashtags

#Doctor #Host

#Moments #Podcast #Show

#Legend #Adventure #Life #Death #Thunder

#TrekKelly

Show Notes
● [00:55] We have a great guest for you today, Trek “Thunder” Kelly, an adventure expert.
As an artist, he learned early in his enjoyment in art is to live it. He lives his life in a way
that is a story that’s interesting to him. So, he has something to look back, and he has
chapters that laid out ahead of him as well. He recently wrote the ending of his life. He
knows exactly where he is going to, and that gives him a lot of peace.
● [3:00] Trek knows where he is going to be and probably decides when he will die. Trek
said that when it’s time, he is going to sit on a cliff while watching the sunset, smoke a
doobie and put a blanket over him and just let it go. His parents traveled internationally
as a kid. They didn’t take him, but certainly, he got curious about the world in the early
’20s and started travelling. He got out of college, moved to Venice beach, started
working at a movie studio, and became an artist. At 39 he decided that he is going to
disappear and told his friends and family that he’d be gone for 2 to 5 years. He sold
nearly everything he owns and travelled the world.
● [5:00] He had a stranger choose twelve countries and spent a month in each country.
Trek spent alone in the desert and then saw people twice a month when he gets
supplies. But he wanted even more isolated, so he figured out his caloric needs and
bought enough canned foods to sustain him for the rest of the year. He didn’t have a
tent, a flashlight, or a fire. He lives out there for the rest of the year. For him, it was a gift
to be able to do that, and in the third year, he bought an old van and drove around
America.
● [7:36] One thing that Trek would recommend to people was to travel with inspiration or
have meaning to you for a whole year. Because when you travel for a year or more, you
interface with the world in a much more efficient and direct manner especially if you are
alone.
● [9:33] Dr. Larry was wondering how these experiences changed him. Trek said that he
becomes even more confident. The more world he sees, the more knowledge he gains.
The more he understands the knowledge that he doesn’t have, and being older, he
understands that life is coming at you pretty quickly. Americans keep death far away, but
it’s important to keep death very close because death allows you to prioritize. It is not
something to fear, it is something that energizes you to make the right decisions
because we didn’t know when it would come. You should outline yourself like a bucket
list and start knocking those off.

● [11:40] Trek believes in reincarnation because reincarnation doesn’t necessarily mean
that there is life after our body dies. We can reincarnate in our lives many times. He lives
three different lifetimes in those years. If you realize that change is constant, not only
can we reincarnate in our own lives, but we can have power over what that reincarnation
is. It can give us strength in decision making.
● [13:30] Trek graduated from UCLA. He wanted to do something fun. He applied to
Columbia Pictures and got a job in the Marketing department. Working there for a year,
he saw where the money was going and decided to create his own company. He left and
started a promotional advertising company and immediately got orders from major
studios. He makes a lot of money at that age without a lot of effort. Trek said that life has
the confidence to do what you want to do and have to follow through. One day he bought
a canvas and started painting and enjoyed it. He’s making enough money to have a
gallery in Abbott Kinney, so he runs his advertising company out of the gallery.
● [15:40] At Abbott Kinney, he was one of several vendors that started the first Fridays
around 2005. Back then, it was more focused on the stores, and they had all parties, and
people could buy discounted things. For him, it was a perfect collision of creativity and
the beach that California has to offer.
● [18:00] Trek said that change is going to happen. You can be flattened by it, or you can
be part of it, so if there’s something you want to change, then you become part of that
shift. For 16 years, he has had his company and art gallery. Dr. Larry asked him when
did Trek get to the point that it was time to change it. Trek grew up on survival stories
that his father told him as a kid, from Hugh Glass to Admiral Byrd. He also grew up
reading Tarzan books that brought him the idea to be adventurous so he felt like he is
done LA to the extent that he can.
● [20:36] The best thing to do when you decide is to announce it. Because you will be
forced to be responsible for it when people start to believe it and you don’t want to let
them down. Trek travels without contact with almost anybody for years. They didn’t know
where he was. Dr. Larry thinks that the average person would want to get away but still
want contacts of people close to them, so this is a very foreign idea for him, the
disappearance part.
● [22:15] Trek said that there is stupidity in it, but there’s also a power in knowing that you
are at the end of the line. If you are on the edge, you will be alert, aware, and alive.
When you make it pass death a lot, it makes you feel strong and powerful. It makes you
potentially risk your choices. Trek thinks that meaningful and driven travel is important.
We, as humans, are meaning, driven creatures. We need to feel value, a direction, or a
goal to feel more stable.
● [25:00] Trek decided to ask a stranger for the 12 countries he will travel to. So, he went
to Jerusalem on the summer solstice. While in Old Jerusalem, no one looks at him until
a beggar taps him on the back. He thought to himself that this was the stranger he would
ask about the 12 countries. He has been to some of the chosen countries, but for him,
when you make this choice, you can’t cheat. When you make this decision, you have to
go through with it; otherwise, it taints everything else that you do.

● [27:11] Trek arranged the countries when he got back to the hotel room. The order of the
countries was Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Cambodia, Namibia, Mauritania,
Germany, Finland, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Haiti. After ordering the countries,
he needs a reason why he is doing this, so he remembered the two keys on the ground
while he was with the beggar. He decided to use keys as a totem. He will give a key to
someone in each country that is meaningful for him or an amazing person in some way.
● [29:01] The two countries that the stranger didn’t choose that he wanted to go to were
India and China. Trek flew to China and did the same thing in Jerusalem; he saw a kid
that speaks in English. The kid leads him to an antique store, the kid chooses six keys of
the Han dynasty. He went to India and asked an older man to choose six keys for him.
The old man went to a store near Mother Theresa's tomb that has piles of keys. The old
man spent three hours trying to find the six keys. Now he has 12 keys and a quest, so
he bid goodbye to everyone on the internet, then he flew to Bhutan.
● [32:30] One of the other things Trek wanted to do was to find some people who don’t
have long to live. He wants to make them a list of all the things that they want to do, and
he was going to spend the next year living their dreams, and they will be connected on
social media to send them videos and pictures.
● [34:46] Dr. Larry believes why Trek needs a year to spend on the desert. He said that
when he was one of the mountains in Bhutan, he found an isolated house across them,
and at the bottom, there was a town. His guide told him that a hermit lives up there for
15 years, and that challenge him to stay long in the desert.
● [37:25] Imagining the adventure of Trek. A lot of people would feel anxiety. It works for
him because he loves meeting new people and being alone. He looks at the potential
obstacles that he was going to deal with, whether it’s emotional, mental, or physical, and
then anticipated it. That’s why he took a vow on silence in the desert.
● [39:00] Trek didn’t feel fear. That is probably another fault of his that would get him in
trouble one day. But he has discretion more than fear. He thinks about what his options
are when he is in dangerous situations. Travelling the world, he learned a lot of travel
hacks and survival hacks. You can read about them, but the things that he thought that
he learned were very different from the things that he experienced.
● [42:32] Once he knew that letting faith determine things worked, he went to the area of
the desert. He started asking people of Navajo reservations if anybody had a Hogan.
Trek was in Monument Valley of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona, a very desolate
area in terms of population. He found a family that has a Hogan, he can live there, but
they want him to take care of their sheep.
● [44:15] Trek took care of the flock of sheep and lived there. But he wanted more
absolute isolation. That is why he figures out his caloric needs. When someone told him
that there was a place out there that he could go, he found the place and one day he
packed his stuff and went to the desert. Trek said that when you peel civilization away,
you will realize how much your behavior is instinct.

● [46:47] Trek’s opinion about religion is that as animals, we need to be able to recognize
something dangerous in a ray of information to live longer. He can’t speak for anybody
else, but at least for him, we can see a face in the ray of information. Whether it is an ant
face, a spider face or a bear face, but we can spot it in a second. When we see a face in
a tree, we put humanness in that tree because we have this recognition factor. That is
where animism comes from which is considered the first world religion. It is ascribing
human qualities to something that is not human. That is where we start extrapolating
personality into inanimate objects, then we sign those meanings, and that meaning
becomes the various religions that we have today.
● [49:15] Being alone, he learned to appreciate the animals. Trek has huge respect for
ants. He spends hours, days, and weeks following them. He followed a beetle for eight
miles and was amazed by its sense of direction. The first three or four weeks when he
was in the desert, he felt a little bit vulnerable and a little scared. Eventually, he realizes
that he can do it.
● [51:08] Trek set up routines that help him to stay sane. He got a workout routine made
out of lava rocks. He does pull-ups on a windmill two and a half miles away. He has
rituals each Sunday. Dr. Larry thinks of the basic hygiene Trek does, and then he said
that he realizes that when you run out of toilet paper, it was the end of civilization. He
spent five months on the Navajo reservations as a shepherd and did six months alone.
● [53:07] Trek comes back because his year is over. That is the nice thing about choosing
a year. It’s just long enough to own it, but it is shorter enough to see the end coming.
You know that you can make it just like death. It allows you to appreciate what you have.
That is why it is good to have endings on things so you can really be there to enjoy what
you are experiencing.
● [55:06] When it ended, Trek felt great because he did everything he could do out there.
He wanted to experience, so he had depravations at the end of each segment. He
blindfolded himself for a week, and he had an earplug from Germany that was efficient.
He doesn’t have a hearing for a week. He also wore a barbwire collar for a hundred
days. Trek learned something from the depravations.
● [57:00] When Trek took off the barbwire collar to change he felt this anxiety because
something was missing and he realized that the thing that gives him pain. He preferred
the reality of having that pain than not having that pain just like a bad relationship even
though its awful you prefer the familiarity of them being with you than to have it gone.