I'm Sam Shaheen and you're listening to Gear 30 on the Blister Podcast Network.

Hemp has been cultivated for centuries around the world and has been used to make just about everything.

Rope, clothing, paper, currency, sales, even the earliest

American flags were made from hemp. But in 1937, at the height of Reef for Madness, the United

States effectively banned the cultivation of hemp. Congress lifted the hemp ban just last year,

but the industry still faces some outdated stigma. So today, in part four of our

What You're Wearing miniseries, I'm talking with Rob Youngman. Rob is one of the pioneers of hemp apparel

in the United States and the owner of Jungmaven apparel. We discuss Rob's history in the hemp

textile industry, the many uses for hemp including building houses and

eating it, how hemp differs from cotton in textiles, shooting hemp t-shirts with a shotgun,

and much, much more. Here we go. Today I'm talking with Rob Youngman.

Rob, can you tell us a little bit about your background in the hemp industry and how that has led to where you are now?

Yeah, hi, Sam.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I started doing the hemp back in 1993, and I was in college at Central Washington University when a university

environmental studies professor said we could stop cutting down all the trees if we started

growing industrial hemp out in eastern Washington, where there was plenty of water and farmland but and not much going on except

for maybe hops and there's actually quite a bit of growing going on there but no hemp and we were

watching our forests in Washington state get clear cut back in the 80s, 90s. So that was my aha moment,

and that's when I started making rock climbing chalk bags, and I started making what were our

version of a camelback. Camelback had just kind of started, and we were making hydration packs

to carry water with, to go mountain biking.

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