Comedian Matt Lyons— trail name Schmutz— is a thru-hiker who makes a living poking fun at outdoor enthusiasts. With a sharp wit and countless trail miles under his belt, Matt brings humor to everything from gear obsessions to the unpredictable mishaps of wilderness life.
Comedian Matt Lyons— trail name Schmutz— is a thru-hiker who makes a living poking fun at outdoor enthusiasts. With a sharp wit and countless trail miles under his belt, Matt brings humor to everything from gear obsessions to the unpredictable mishaps of wilderness life.
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Shelby Stanger:
Comedian Matt Lyons - trail name Schmutz - is a thru-hiker who's making a living poking fun at outdoor enthusiasts. Here's a clip from his reel called The Guy You Meet at Run Club. In the video, Matt is wearing a sweat-stained hat, rainbow running glasses and short shorts.
Matt Lyons:
"What's up, man? I noticed you're wearing a ridiculous amount of moisture-wicking materials. You must be here for Local Locomotion. It's our twice-weekly club for people with running shoes brighter than the solar eclipse. My name's Skedaddle."
Shelby Stanger:
If you've listened to this show before, you know I love to laugh. My producers always joke that I have the same sense of humor as a seventh-grader, but what kind of adventure is it if you're not having a little fun? Over the years, I've learned that as much as going after our wild ideas is about reaching goals and pushing outside our comfort zones, it's also about joy and laughter, and you can't have those without a solid sense of humor. Matt Lyons has gone viral on TikTok for his skits that impersonate different stereotypes in the outdoor world, like the people who through-hike the PCT, ski at Aspen and run ultra-marathons. His videos are funny, thoughtful, and like any good comedy, they have a certain amount of truth to them.
Matt Lyons:
"First thing we do when everybody shows up is set the daily mileage and pace. Now, that can be done several ways, but primarily it's dictated by the median length of our shorts. If I can see 95% of your thigh, we're running six-minute miles."
Shelby Stanger:
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living an REI Co-Op Studios production, brought to you by Capital One.
Matt Lyons, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. I'm really excited to speak with a comedian.
Matt Lyons:
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Shelby Stanger:
I want to start with your trail name, Schmutz. How did you get this trail name?
Matt Lyons:
Trail name started on the Appalachian Trail in 2019. That was the first long-distance backpacking trip I went on. The first night, I met a group of hikers who I then went on to hike with for the next month and a half. They became some of my best friends on the trail and the third or fourth night by this point, everyone had a trail name. I was the lone person out, and we realized every day when I went to bed or when I started going to bed, I would set up my tent and shake it out above my head just to get all the dirt out and I would say, "I'm getting all the schmutz out of it." And it was just a comical scene. And my buddy, Aquaman, decided to name me Schmutz. Apparently it's a Yiddish term for dirt, but it's pretty fitting for a thru-hike because I'm just dirty and gross for about six months out of the year while I'm out there.
Shelby Stanger:
Was being outdoorsy part of your life growing up, or is it something you just found on your own?
Matt Lyons:
Funny enough, my younger brother was in Cub Scouts and my dad got him into that. I was always more into sports. I was a swimmer. I played soccer, I played baseball, so I wasn't really into that hiking or climbing or whittling sticks type of thing. And then as I got older, the camping trips that we went on annually, my dad always brought us on a camping trip of some sort. Once a year I was outdoorsy.
Shelby Stanger:
That's pretty outdoorsy.
Matt Lyons:
Once a year. And we got to a point where we were hiking some of the 4,000 footers in New Hampshire. We did a trip up to the White Mountains and hiked Mount Washington. This was probably 2011. And when I hiked that, I did a little research beforehand and I was like, "Wait a minute. This is the highest peak in New England in the Northeast." And after that trip, I made it my mission to get to the top of mountains. From there, I ended up getting a summer job in the White Mountains at this traditional summer camp, but I was a part of their outdoor program, so I was leading hikes, day hikes, backpacking trips. Sometimes we went and did some climbing. That was the deep end of it. I really jumped in fully.
Shelby Stanger:
I am a real big fan of camp. I was a camp counselor. I went to summer camp growing up. I went to water sports camp. Obviously you could see it had a really profound impact on my life. But these traditional East Coast Midwest camps, I have a niece and nephew at one right now, and there's water-skiing and there's a lake, there's fishing. It just looks so much fun. But you also are working with kids, so you have no choice but to have a sense of humor because kids are gnarly.
Matt Lyons:
I've learned to be a little bit more witty than I used to be. Having worked with teenagers and I was a teacher for a long time. Having that skill of making things fun. Some kids just naturally hate hiking, so making it fun is a big part of that job.
Shelby Stanger:
Matt clearly had a talent for working with kids, and he decided to pursue teaching. The schedule was ideal for him. He could work with kids for nine months and spend his summers chasing his other passions, mainly hiking. Before he started his first teaching job, Matt tackled his first big thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. He set out from Springer Mountain in Georgia and hiked roughly 2200 miles north all the way to Maine. He encountered all kinds of hikers, beautiful scenery, and a number of bears.
Matt Lyons:
There was this one time that I was in Shenandoah National Park, which is in the Virginia section, which is the longest part of the trail. It's the longest state on the AT and Shenandoah is this 100 mile stretch. At this point, I was hiking alone, so I didn't really have the group I was with. I had just left them. I went off on my own. I was doing some pretty big miles at the time because I had my trail legs under me. My plan was to get through Shenandoah in three days, which is 30, 32 mile days, something like that. And there was one night that I camped out alone. It wasn't near a shelter. The mileage that day just made it so I wasn't at one. I was just off the trail at a pre-existing campsite that somebody had made.
I had heard stories about Shenandoah being the most densely populated section of the trail for black bears. And before this had even happened, I had probably ran into three bears along the way. I turned a corner one day. There's a mama bear and a cub, probably 10 feet from me. I am just standing there, made them aware I was there and they ate their berries, went off and did their thing. I'm like, "Great. Camping - I'm going to hang my food properly, make sure all the food storage and cooking is done to the tee." And the sun went down. It was pitch black. There was no noise, so I could hear every stick break, every leaf fall. And I just heard these thumping footsteps near my tent between my tent and my food.
And I ended up sticking my head out of the tent with my headlamp, looked around, didn't see anything, went back to bed. Probably about 10 minutes later, woke up to the same noise, cracking stick heavy footprints. And I'm like, "I got to keep scaring this bear away. I know black bears are pretty skittish." They're usually non-confrontational unless you're an active threat. I was just making noise, making sure the bear was going away. And it got to a point where this happened five, six, seven times throughout the night. I'm like, "I'm not going to get any sleep. How am I going to hike tomorrow?" And I ended up putting a sweater around my ears and blasting Taylor Swift on my iPhone as loud as possible just to make some noise, to keep this bear away. I had a two-hour Taylor Swift playlist downloaded on my phone because one of the people I was hiking with loved to listen to her, and I do too. Guilty pleasure.
Shelby Stanger:
I appreciate that.
Matt Lyons:
And I was playing this playlist just throughout the night. If anybody hiked by, they'd be like, "What is going on?" It's three in the morning and Enchanted is playing from this tent. And I was blasting this music. Bear never came back. I woke up, I had hung my food well because it didn't get to it, and I made sure to camp at a shelter the next night because that was pretty terrifying.
Shelby Stanger:
That's amazing. We get some good bear stories on this podcast, but none have been scared away by Taylor Swift.
Matt Lyons:
She is a star in many ways.
Shelby Stanger:
Amazing. Matt finished his four months on the Appalachian Trail at Mount Katahdin, which is the northern terminus of the hike. It's a breathtaking place. The mountain is a mile high, and the summit looks out over a lush New England Valley below. It's a pretty epic way to end the journey. After finishing the AT, Matt started a teaching job in Maine. He was there for two years before he felt the itch to get back to thru-hiking. This time he came up with a plan to attempt the Pacific Crest Trail.
Matt Lyons:
2021, I said, "At the end of this school year, I'm going to go hike the PCT and then maybe make the move to Boston or Denver some bigger city." I went out, started training for the PCT, and about a month and a half before leaving, I overdid it and really strained my IT band in both my right and left leg. I was in excruciating pain. I went out on the PCT a month and a half later, still in pain, realized this isn't going to work.
I got about a week in after popping a lot of Advil and icing it and rolling it out and stretching. I'm like, "This isn't working. I'm not going to be able to make it 2,600 miles." I ended up calling the trip then. Basically went to PT, went to the gym, strengthened my legs, got a few second and third opinions, and they basically just said it was an overuse injury, so I needed to give it time to rest, let the inflammation go down and properly stretch and strengthen it. And a year goes by and I said, "I'm going to give this trail another go." And I went back out and ended up hiking the PCT fully minus some fire closures in 2022.
Shelby Stanger:
Awesome. How was the PCT different than the AT?
Matt Lyons:
Very. I think it was a lot more remote in sections, particularly the North Cascades and the Sierra section in California, there were a lot more environmental hazards like fires and deep river crossings. Fortunately, my plan was to go southbound. My whole plan was to fly into Seattle and start southbound on the PCT and the snow levels had a different plan. There was pretty much impassable snow from the first access road to the Canadian border, which is where it starts. I said, "I'm not going to be able to start there." I decided to do what's called a flip-flop and start at the California-Oregon border and go northbound and then fly back to that point and hike southbound.
Shelby Stanger:
Nice. I'm wondering, did finishing both of these hikes make you feel a little bit more badass inside to do scary things like post videos online, putting yourself out there?
Matt Lyons:
Yeah, definitely. The confidence levels skyrocketed after doing the trips because I'm like, "If I can do that, I can do anything."
Shelby Stanger:
When we come back, Matt talks about how he started making comedy videos where he gets his ideas and why the ability to laugh at yourself is a must for any adventure toolkit.
Matt Lyons is a thru-hiker who has turned his love of the outdoors into a career in comedy. While hiking the AT and the PCT, Matt met some real characters and his wheels started spinning. Sometimes we outdoor enthusiasts can take ourselves pretty seriously. Matt decided to inject a little humor into the world of hardcore adventure. If you go to his TikTok or his Instagram page, you'll see video after video of Matt poking fun at every outdoor stereotype you can imagine from people who wear socks with sandals to every person who goes long distance backpacking. He's made hundreds of these videos and they're all really funny. Where did the comedy come into the hike? How did you realize the outdoors were so ridiculously funny and cliche, and you wanted to make fun of them?
Matt Lyons:
The sketches didn't really come into full form until after the PCT, but I took a lot of mental notes on the PCT, so I would see people going ultra light or people cutting their toothbrush in half.
Shelby Stanger:
We had that guy on.
Matt Lyons:
Did you?
Shelby Stanger:
We had the king of ultra light hiking on. Glen. He owns Gossamer Gear. He's amazing.
Matt Lyons:
Oh, Glen. Take less, do more.
Shelby Stanger:
He's a wonderful guy. There's so much to make fun of.
Matt Lyons:
There's some sacrifices you have to make going ultra light. I love Gossamer Gear. I use a lot of their stuff.
Shelby Stanger:
You start seeing these things like ultra light hikers, and what else do you see that you're like, "This is fodder to make fun of in a way, make fun with?"
Matt Lyons:
Well, we hiked through a lot of sections of trail that showed me different areas of California and Oregon and Washington. For example, around Tahoe, we hiked under the chairlifts at Palisades and just seeing that and just the culture out there, we went into Truckee in South Lake Tahoe and talking with people in those areas, you could just see the culture of some of the people and the activities that they love to do. And I'm like, "This is so interesting. I'm guilty of doing half of these things myself, but you could easily just make a caricature of these people." And that's what I did when I got off the trail. I was back into teaching, but I'm like, "I want to make content as well. How can I use my experience from the trail and make it into something that will laugh at?"
I think I had just moved to Boston. I was in my new apartment and I was fresh off the trail. I had all my backpack with hiking gear in it. And the first video I made when I got back, and this was right when I got back, I'm in a new place, I'm like, "Let's just do it," was your new roommate who is a thru-hiker or your new roommate who's an ultralight backpacker. And I show up. I set up my sleeping pad on the living room floor. At this point, our apartment had zero furniture in it, so it fit the narrative perfectly. And I was just snapping my toothbrush in half, cooking on my jet boil on the counter next to a full gas stove doing all these things that I would do on trail, but in an actual residence. And that was the first video that I did. I made a part two of it, and then the school year started, so I had to work my filming schedule into that schedule as well. I was busy for the first six months doing the teaching in Boston.
Shelby Stanger:
And how did the videos do?
Matt Lyons:
They did really well. I did a couple that went viral pretty immediately, and this was when I first started posting reels on Instagram. I had primarily been doing TikTok before, but I figured let's try posting on Instagram. And Instagram just took off and as I'm teaching, I'm trying to keep up with all this growth, and I have brands starting to reach out to work with me. I'm like, "How do I juggle all of this?" And I finished my long-term sub position, which they then offered me a full-time job for the next school year. I was trying to navigate am I going to go back to this teaching job? Do I want to pursue content? And I ended up making the decision to take a break from teaching, which I'm still doing right now. I'm still on a break going on a year and a half now, and I'm doing content full time.
Shelby Stanger:
What's your creative process for making these videos?
Matt Lyons:
What I do is I'll, in my notes app on my phone, think of a script, and I'll just write six to seven one-liners. I'll film them one at a time and just piece it together in one video. I might do, "What's up?" My name's Bear from Bend. After work at REI, I like to go and drink matcha down by the Deschutes River," or something like that. I'll write a bunch of stuff like that that have to do with that place and people that live out there just eat it up. I feel like I'm not even a local there, and some people can probably tell that, but other people are like, "Dude, what neighborhood do you live in? This is spot on." It's very cool to connect with communities and people in different parts of the country too. And I think that's part of the reason my page grew so much is because I'm pulling people from all these different populations.
Shelby Stanger:
And when you're writing scripts about these cities, what are you looking for in them? The most cliché, outdoorsy, funny commonalities? Talk to me about that.
Matt Lyons:
If I have any connections there, I'll reach out and I'll be like, "Hey, what can you tell me about people who just moved to this city?" Commonalities amongst those people or things I should mention that people would really resonate with. I'll search Google to be like, "First timer in Bozeman, what should I do?" And then I'll incorporate that into the video. It is a lot of research for those location specific ones, but then there are some videos where I can write a script in 10 minutes because it's all about me. It's something that I enjoy doing, so I know everything there is to know about it.
Shelby Stanger:
In one clip called "Every Person Who Runs Ultra Marathons," Matt is dressed like your standard outdoorsman: backwards mesh hat and a puffy hooded jacket. He begins the video by saying that when he was young, his parents told him he couldn't play video games. Instead, his options were to join the chess team or run hundreds of miles through the woods.
Matt Lyons:
"My name's Fasciitis and I'm training for an ultra coming up called Hair of the Dog 250. It's like a beer mile except you do it 250 times. Whenever somebody tells me they're doing 26.2 miles, I just think, "Whoa, that's a pretty solid way to spend a lunch break." Since college, I've been wondering how can I experience hallucinations without psychedelics? And I had no idea that all I had to do was run 24 hours straight, 50K, 50 mile or 100K, I've done them all, and it might look like I'm physically in pain while I'm doing it. That's because I am. But when I finish, I just can't help but think, 'Damn. I want to do that again.'"
Shelby Stanger:
You have these characters. They have goofy names and they just spew a bunch of hilarious stereotypes about people who do certain activities. How do you get these names? How do you come up with this material?
Matt Lyons:
I think the funniest ones are the ones that have no right being the name of a human being, like Carnage. Who's going to name their kid Carnage? And I just think of words associated with the activity that I'm making a video about. I did an A-frame house video, people who live in an A-frame, and I think the name was Pythagoras because he's just a mathematician who worked with angles and triangles. I'm like, "That's perfect." But then there are other ones where I struggle, and I just try and think of the funniest word that's associated with that activity, and I'll just toss it in there.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you have a favorite character you have created?
Matt Lyons:
Yeah. My favorite one is probably the guy who skis at Aspen. He spends most of his days drinking $700 bottles of champagne up at Cloud Nine, which is this basically bar restaurant on the side of, I think it's Aspen Highlands, which is one of the four peaks in the Aspen Snowmass family.
"What's going on? My name's Caviar, last name is Chalet. Welcome to Aspen. The snow is incredibly deep. So are our pockets, though. I've been coming here since I was a kid and I had zero clue you could even get here via car. Also, if your goggles don't have interchangeable lenses, don't even talk to me. I'm thinking now that we took our two runs of the day on our $3,000 ski setups, we hit the White House Tavern and grab a couple of chicken sandwiches. Did you see Gucci and the North Face made a jacket together? It's perfect because I needed a backup layer anyway. Why don't you guys come back to Casa de Caviar and we'll have some apres shrimp cocktail, maybe some beef tenderloin?"
He lives in a, I think, 16,000 square foot chalet at the base of Ajax and just drinks IPAs and has bottomless bowls of beef tartare for his golden retriever.
Shelby Stanger:
Matt told me he has some fun characters coming up like Fennel, the guy who frequents the farmer's market and Bushwack who lives in a Sprinter van. I went down a real rabbit hole watching these videos, and I've encountered so many people who are exactly like the characters Matt creates. As an outdoorsman himself, Matt has gathered plenty of material from the hikers, climbers, and runners he's met. He doesn't take himself too seriously, and he hopes that his audience doesn't either. I've always thought the highest form of a compliment and the best test of a character is if you can laugh at yourself. Have you always been like that or have you ever been a little sensitive? I also know some comedians that are pretty sensitive.
Matt Lyons:
I'm pretty hyper aware of my qualities as an outdoorsman. I buy all means tried to get my backpack as light as possible on the PCT. I did get some ultra light gear. I also snowboard. I wear bibs when I go snowboarding, which is another video I did. A lot of these things.
Shelby Stanger:
You wear bibs. You don't just wear a snowboard jacket and pants, you wear the full bib.
Matt Lyons:
Right. You need the whole deal.
Shelby Stanger:
I love that.
Matt Lyons:
Not only is it fun to poke fun at, but a lot of these things are very practical. It makes sense that people do these things and have these items in their armory, if you will. I think I have pretty thick skin. I don't really take offense in many things. If they're poking fun at stuff that I do, I jump right on board and I'm like, "Yeah, that is ridiculous, huh?" I roll with the punches if I can.
Shelby Stanger:
I love a good joke, especially one that I can relate to, even if it's poking fun at something that I do or a place I live. Matt recently came out with a video titled Every Person Who Lives in San Diego, and he's wearing the same Birdrock Surf hat I actually own. My team also got a laugh out of Matt's video called That Friend Who Takes Spike Ball Too Seriously. We'll link to it in our show notes. To watch more of Matt's sketches and follow along on what he's up to, you can find him on Instagram and on TikTok @mattslyon. That's M-A-T-T-S-L-Y-O-N. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hanna Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas and laugh when you do it.