Ep. 44 - Pepper Cook, Your Pal Behind the Puns
Bikes or Death
Patrick Farnsworth
4.8 • 563 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2020
⏱️ 112 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pepper Cook is a legend in the bikepacking and touring community. She's known for her witty puns, quirky humour, and almost a decade of epic solo bike trips. I got to meet her at last years Bikepacking Summit where she was a presenter. I've been a fan of her for a long time and listening to her masterfully tell stories around a campfire goes down as a highlight of my life. She is as engaging and funny in person as you may imagine.
The day before we recorded this episode she made a heartfelt post on instagram about some of her personal struggles with happiness and mental health. On this episode we unpack some of what precipitated that post and really shed light on the dichotomy between social media and what's going on in a person's real life. We also discuss the value bike travel has had on personal journey with mental health. These are important topics and I appreciate Peppers willingness to openly discuss some hard topics.
We also discuss her recent sponsorship with Salsa Cycles, her nomadic lifestyle and recent move to alaska, as well as her most recent solo trip on the Baja Divide. Enjoy!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends, and welcome to the Bikes for Death podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | My name is Patrick and I'm your host. |
| 0:06.0 | And on today's episode, we have a special guest. |
| 0:10.0 | Pepper Cook, also known as Book Bike Brew on Instagram, is my guest today. |
| 0:16.0 | You probably are familiar with her with 20,000 Instagram followers and being a staple of this bike packing, |
| 0:22.4 | bike traveling community for quite some time now. She's known for her puns and her quirky, |
| 0:30.0 | witty humor, sometimes some ukulele playing, her Spoon the World Project, and of course, |
| 0:37.0 | all of her bike adventures that she's done, |
| 0:39.7 | most of which have been done solo. |
| 0:42.2 | The day before she and I sat down to record this episode, she made a very heartfelt post |
| 0:49.1 | on Instagram about some real things that really shed some light on some real personal struggles that she's had |
| 0:57.6 | with mental health and depression, anxiety. And so this conversation, we delve into that |
| 1:06.0 | pretty well. We really get to see Pepper as a person and understand her better and understand, you know, we talk a lot about how Instagram is not reality, you know, and that behind those puns and that big smile and all the bike trips that she is going through stuff. |
| 1:29.3 | And her personal happiness takes a lot of work. |
| 1:33.0 | Anyway, I don't want to put words into her mouth or go over it too much. |
| 1:38.2 | But I just wanted to note that these kinds of conversations to me are so valuable, |
| 1:42.9 | that we make that distinction between who we are as real people and this this image that we put on social media. |
| 1:50.8 | I hope that you get as much value out of this conversation as I did. I truly appreciate her coming on. |
| 1:56.6 | So thank you, Pepper. Good luck to you at your new spot out there in Alaska, and we'll all be |
| 2:02.2 | following along your journey. If you've been following along, you know that this show is free from |
| 2:07.0 | advertisers. I'm not going to jump in 20 minutes into the episode and say, hey, this episode is |
| 2:13.5 | brought to you by Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Bl blah is good because of blah blah blah blah blah |
... |
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