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The following podcast is a dear media production.
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She s a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire.
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Fantastic.
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And he s a serial entrepreneur, a very smart cookie.
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And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride.
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Get ready for some major realness.
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Welcome to the skinny confidential him and her.
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So one night I was up there by myself.
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A bunch of four-wheelers came into town in the middle of the night.
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It s like 3 a.m.
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They came in and they pulled in front of our museum and they all shut off their headlights.
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I get heightened.
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I m like, what are they here for?
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And so I didn t really know what to do.
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I didn t want to like instigate some type of Wild West shootout.
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So I decided I was going to turn on all the lights.
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So I turned on all the lights in my house.
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They kind of
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left and they went up the hill where, so I didn t really know where they were going.
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I was like, where could they possibly be going?
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And then I heard them talking, but I couldn t make out what they were saying, maybe a half mile away.
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And then five, they were back in town again and they shut off the lights again in the same spot.
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And that was like a more difficult situation.
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I was doing a warning shot.
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You know, what am I supposed to do here?
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Hello, everybody.
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Welcome back to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show.
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Today, we have a very unique guest.
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I would say one of the more unique guests we ve ever had on the show.
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His name is Brent Underwood.
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Let me tell you why our friend Brent is so unique.
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How many of you have spent your entire life savings to go and buy an abandoned
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Ghost Town, an abandoned mining town in the middle of the desert in Death Valley or near Death Valley.
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Most of us haven t done that, but Brent has.
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He actually is the owner of Cerro Gordo, an abandoned boomtown silver mine established in 1865.
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He is also the creator of Ghost Town Living, where he chronicles his adventures on YouTube.
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I have found myself spending hours on his content.
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If you just search Brent Underwood or go on YouTube and see, you ll see why.
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He s living in abandoned mining town.
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He s rehabilitating this old town that has been basically dead to the world for a hundred years or close to a hundred years.
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And it s incredible.
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So in this episode, we talk about what he learned about himself moving into isolation,
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what skills he s learned to develop, how he s had to persevere.
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This is really a story about chasing and pursuing your dreams and going against the grain and doing something differently.
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It s really about striking out on your own path, finding your life s purpose, your life s mission, and doing things differently.
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Brent has definitely done that.
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He s got a new book coming out that I think you guys should all check out and preorder.
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It s called Ghost Town Living.
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And again, if you re just interested in a spectacular human story of perseverance and doing something differently against the grain your own way, this one s for you.
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Brent, welcome to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show.
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This is the Skinny Confidential Him and Her.
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Brent Underwood, the only person I follow on TikTok, I think, the only account I tune into, not that TikTok s not great, I just, I get sucked into your content.
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Doesn t even follow his wife.
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Wow.
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No.
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I appreciate it.
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I m so glad you came here to do this.
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I think this is going to be one of the more unique episodes that we ve done.
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I m really excited to be here.
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For sure.
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We got connected years ago through Robert Greene, who we love.
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And you have been up to some wild shit, my man.
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It s been a journey.
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I ve been up to something.
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Yeah.
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So for the audience that doesn t have context, you have a new book right now called Ghost Town Living.
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Why don t you just give a brief overview as to what you ve been doing and what you ve been up to?
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Because again, I think it s unique.
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So I previously lived here in Austin, Texas.
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I was working with Ryan Holiday, who you guys know as well, and I was kind of doing a lot of book marketing.
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I had a side project of a bed and breakfast on the east side at Cesar Chavez in Chicon, kind of like right there.
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So I ve always had this love of history and hospitality.
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You know, the project over there was an old Victorian mansion.
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And so I was kind of looking for the next project.
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And a buddy of mine that lived in LA sent me this link that said,
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Buy your own town for under a million dollars, which is just an amazing headline to begin with.
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And so he sent it to me in the middle of the night thinking it was a joke.
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He s like, oh, maybe this would be something you d be interested in.
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I woke up, didn t see it as a joke, saw it as kind of the next opportunity, called the real estate broker.
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Long story short, I ended up buying an abandoned mining town in 2018.
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And so just to set the context, it s about three and a half hours northeast of Los Angeles and about three hours west of Las Vegas.
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And we re in the mountains.
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So people think ghost town, sometimes they think like a flat desert town, but we re in like the high desert.
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So it s at 8,500 feet in elevation.
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So we re up in the mountains.
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It s about 400 acres in total.
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And underneath the town, there s 30 miles of mine shafts.
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So there s just like a honeycomb of mines everywhere.
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But here s my question.
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What s the lead up to this?
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Like there must have you said you wanted to switch it up, but there s got to be more than that.
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Were you just like tired of being in gen pop?
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Like was did you have a breakup with someone?
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Like how did you really like get to this decision or was it truly out of nowhere?
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It wasn t necessarily out of nowhere.
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I think, you know, I just I lived here in Austin.
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I had a comfortable life.
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I had a good apartment.
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I had nice friends.
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I have all that type of stuff.
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I still have that feeling that maybe like
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was some untapped potential that I wasn t fulfilling, that maybe there was something else out there.
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I had that kind of call to adventure that I think strikes a lot of people at different times.
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I had just turned 30 also.
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And so I felt like, I don t know, the clock was ticking in certain ways to do something.
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I was like, was this going to be my thing forever, this kind of comfortable life that I was living here?
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And so
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When I think back, growing up, my grandfather used to watch Gunsmoke over and over and over again, the old Western show where all those things would happen.
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There s always been this allure of the American West and the romanticism of it.
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And then I think I went to school for real estate and finance, so that s kind of my technical background, I guess.
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And so I ve always loved buildings, architecture, and that type of stuff.
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And when I saw the listing, Robert Greene talks a lot about your life s task.
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Your main goal is to find your life s task, what you can combine your skills and interests in in a way that nobody else in the world can.
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So I felt like this was an opportunity to combine real estate, storytelling.
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I d been working with Ryan for 10 years then, so it s a way to combine the stories of the town and then also that history and hospitality love that I had.
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So I think that was kind of the
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The reason I would give a lot of people, I think the real reason was just trying to find like, I don t know what I was made of, you know, like, what could I do?
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What, what could I like stretch myself to see what would happen.
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And I highly suggest for those listening, I hate for people to pause the show and stop listening, but to take a second, maybe even just check out your YouTube or your TikTok almost like a, I don t even know how to describe, but it s, it s, it s very highly produced, but it s also just one person.
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Yeah.
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And there s voiceover work.
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It s like you put a lot of time in that.
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And I think for people like, what the hell is he talking about living in a mining town?
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You have to go look at your YouTube channel and your tick tock to get the full context because you could just I go on there sometimes and I ll be like, I ve been on this thing for an hour.
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Well, yeah, I think that like I think he s watching porn upstairs, beating his meat.
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Meanwhile, you re watching you re watching a mining town.
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I m watching Brent in the mine shafts.
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Yes, yes.
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I mean, the videos have set the context more.
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The videos are documented of the last four years being up there and they re long.
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They re not the
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10 minute YouTube videos that are usually like 45 minutes long.
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And I let shots kind of linger for probably too long that I should, but yeah, it s a great place to start.
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But for those interested in YouTube in general, we were just talking right before the show started, you went to over a million subscribers in like a nine month period of time doing this type of content, which just goes to show like there is no special form.
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Like, you know, you said no shorts, it s just long videos you were filming with that were just interesting and unique.
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Also, I remember very early on in this, maybe when I put up three videos and there was this guy that came up and they had like 15 million subscribers on YouTube.
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I remember he sat on the couch with me and he s like, listen, I know that you don t watch a lot of YouTube.
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I was like, why do you say that?
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He s like, you don t shoot in the way that you should for YouTube, meaning you should tease what s going to come next.
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You should do quicker shots.
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You shouldn t let a shot linger more than three seconds.
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He was giving me all these things that made him successful.
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But I was originally just making videos that I thought were cool.
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You know, I didn t watch a lot of YouTube, but I like I was like, this is the type of video that I would want to watch.
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And so I kind of started creating that.
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And I think sometimes listening to that guy, he almost led me down like a bad path for a while.
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I started trying to like make the content that he was describing me to make.
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But I think eventually I kind of pulled myself out of it and started making what I make now.
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I think there s a big lesson there for content creators where they, I think there s a lot of people that listen to guys like that, nothing wrong with that, that have like kind of cracked the code, but it takes them out of what is unique to their style and their creation.
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And it kind of makes it, I guess, not unique in a way, but also not as compelling because maybe the person creating it is doing it then for the wrong reasons, like just to trigger an algorithm as opposed to creating what you find interesting.
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But I also think if you really are thoughtful about the theme of what you re doing, it is slow and you do need to see the whole picture and you do need to pause and take a beat and go a little slower because that s it matches the vibe.
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Does that make sense?
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Oh, definitely.
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I think they re like originally to also your fans become your fans for a reason.
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You know, I think that the fans that were watching it early on wanted that slower pace.
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And I think that it also developed a much deeper resonance because if you re sitting with somebody for 45 minutes and you re talking pretty slowly, it s like a lot of direct to camera shots where I m staring right at the
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camera and talking, it just builds a much deeper connection, at least I found early on.
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And I don t know.
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It s been a lot of fun.
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What did you tell your friends and family when you decided to take on this endeavor?
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One of the first people that I told was Ryan Holiday.
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He s always been like a close friend.
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I remember sending him the link.
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He s like, I was like, hey, man, I m going to buy this.
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Do you want to throw in a little bit of cash?
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I didn t have the money to buy the whole place.
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I remember he sent me that meme that was like,
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be a no from me, dog,  like Randy Jackson or whatever.
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That s all Ryan sent back.
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I was like, oh, come on.
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Give me a little bit of a break here.
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So a lot of them were a little hesitant.
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But at the end of the day, I ve been taking a lot of risks since I graduated from Columbia with a real estate degree.
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And so I should have gone into investment banking or something like that.
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And I quit that to do the backpacking thing.
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I eventually
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Just work freelance jobs to do anything but work in a traditional mode.
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So like my parents, my close friends were used to me kind of taking these types of risks.
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So they re, I don t know, they re generally supportive of it.
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How does one prepare to do this?
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Like what were all the things that you did in preparation?
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And also, did you prepare for a week or did you prepare for a year?
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When I moved out there, this was in March of 2020.
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So this is when everybody s trying to figure out where we were going to be during the pandemic.
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You know, everybody was socially distancing, saying, where are you going to go next?
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Yeah, and this was the period of time when there was even like the rumors that they re going to shut down state borders.
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Remember that time when they re like, oh, we re going to shut down the borders.
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So I was on East 6th Street and I was right over there and I was like, I got to go.
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I got to go like now.
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And I thought maybe I d be out there for a couple of weeks because again, we didn t really know how long this thing was going to last.
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Wolfly unprepared to answer your question.
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I got out there in all bird slippers or whatever they were, and no winter clothes.
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The first night I got there, I was driving a two-wheel drive truck, and it didn t even make it all the way into town.
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So the final road to get into town is an eight-mile dirt road where you go from 3,000 feet in elevation up to 8,500 feet in elevation.
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So you re getting almost a mile.
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So imagine
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a very steep, very narrow dirt road that s on cliffs.
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And so I was going up that road, and at the bottom, I couldn t tell that there s a blizzard going on up at the top.
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And so when I got about a mile from town, the truck kind of started fishtailing like this.
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And so I was like, oh my God.
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And I think they re like- And you re all alone?
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All alone, just in my truck with all my stuff from Austin.
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I had cell service barely, no Wi-Fi, there s no running water up there.
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There is power.
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And so I think I went out there looking for an adventure and the adventure found me before I even made it all the way into town.
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And so I wasn t, I wouldn t describe it as prepared.
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It s been kind of like a learning process over the last four years of what you need to do to be prepared like that.
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Because I think that
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There s no handbook on bringing an abandoned mining town back to life.
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And so we re kind of creating that as we go.
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And I think that s kind of part of the appeal of it is that, you know, problem solving nature that you have to get into to figure it all out.
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Someone who s listening that doesn t understand this, when you say town, you mean the town that you re living in that s abandoned.
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There s not a town that has a convenience.
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I m thinking that there s like a 7-Eleven.
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The name of the town is Cerro Gordo.
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So back in the day, 1865, Cerro Gordo gets established as a mining town.
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So they originally found galena there, which is a silver and lead ore.
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And so by, let s say, 1870, five years later,
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The town had about 4,000 residents.
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So it turned into these wild west boom towns where they re setting up, you know, restaurants, brothels, you know, police stations, all these different things.
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Is there a brothel there now?
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There s an old brothel still standing.
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It s called Lola s Palace of Pleasure was its name.
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Perfect name.
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Keep going.
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Owned by Lola Travis, a huge entrepreneur back in the day, actually.
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She had multiple locations.
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And so there was all these 4,000 residents, hundreds of buildings.
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If you adjust it for inflation, they pulled about $500 million worth of minerals out of the hill.
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So it was like a boom town.
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This place was, everybody was coming and going.
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By about 1880, everybody had packed it up and left.
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The silver vein was mostly gone.
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Everybody left.
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And then a guy came in 1910 and he realized while everybody was paying attention to the silver, nobody was paying attention to zinc.
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They started mining zinc again.
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And so they mined zinc till about 1940.
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So for a mining town to have an active life from 1860 to 1940, like 80 years, is crazy.
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Usually they thought these camps were going to last five to eight years at most.
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And so the town these days, when I say town, it s the former mining town of Cerro Gordo.
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There s no more mining going on up there.
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Mining hasn t happened since about 1940, so almost 80 years now.
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And these days there s about
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20 buildings left.
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We have, you know, there s a hotel, a bunkhouse, an old movie theater.
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We have the main mine building.
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There s about 400 acres of land and there s no running water.
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There is power bordering us.
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If you look to the east, you see all of Death Valley National Park.
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So the park s right there.
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And if you look to the west, you see the Sierra Nevada and Mount Whitney.
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And so it s kind of set in between.
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It s probably beautiful.
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Yes, it s set in between because Mount Whitney is the tallest peak in the lower 48 and Death Valley is the lowest.
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So it s kind of this high low contrast that I think
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describes the town really well.
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It s this place where so many people went out there seeking their riches.
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They were going to strike their claim and get rich, and almost nobody did.
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It just has a history of grinding people to dust.
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I mean, there s a cemetery still in the town that has 400 people that were probably very excited, ambitious to go out there.
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And so these days, my hope, my goal of going out there is to try to one, bring it back to life, you know, give it an energy again, allow other people to go up there and both understand the history of the town, but draw the same type of inspiration that I can draw from there.
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And then two, to allow basically people to stay overnight, you know, like basically a destination.
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So we re building a hotel right now.
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We re just about done with it.
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Hopefully this year it s done.
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So it s about seven bedrooms.
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There s a restaurant, there s actually a bar.
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We have a Brunswick bar from the 1870s, the actual bar itself, that came out of Ryan s store in Bastrop.
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And so he used to have a bar, I don t know if you guys remember that, on the record store side of the building.
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I don t remember, we were out there at night, and I don t know how much he s done since then, but it s been like a year or two since we ve been out there, so he s probably, we gotta probably go out there.
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And he gave us this beautiful bar that, he didn t realize until he gave it to me, he s like, listen, if you fly to Austin and grab this bar, you can put it into the hotel.
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And then we looked it up afterwards and they re very rare.
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They re like hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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And he s like, well, I don t want to be that generous with it.
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He had a good tax write off or something.
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So, OK.
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So you re out there.
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What are the initial days look like?
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You get there.
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You re the only person in this old mining town.
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There s all these abandoned buildings.
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There s a graveyard.
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There s a deserted mine.
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Yeah.
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Again, you go see our videos.
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You actually physically go down into the mine, which I think most people, many people would find terrifying because you re not, but what did, what did the first few days look like?
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And what are you actually doing?
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Because I think we talk all the time about kind of getting away, getting off the grid, getting outside or something.
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This is like, you really did it.
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Yeah, the initial days was really exciting because I think the alternative was thinking I was going to be cooped up in an apartment in Austin.
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Again, this is during the pandemic, so everything was a little bit different.
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And suddenly I had 400 acres to just explore and look around.
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So the days would usually be wake up, try to get warm.
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There s no central heat, so it s burning wood, chopping up the wood, putting it in the fireplace, trying to kind of get the evening cold out of there.
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Where did you sleep in the beginning?
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Did you sleep in one of the buildings?
1
SPEAKER_01
So I sleep in what s called the Belshaw house.
1
SPEAKER_01
So the town was originally established in 1865 by a guy named Mortimer Belshaw.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so he was the main guy that brought the financing and made it.
1
SPEAKER_01
What a name.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a great name.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I actually had these like crazy mutton shops too.
1
SPEAKER_01
He s just like, he s an amazing photo.
1
SPEAKER_01
His photo is, he has like a portrait still in his house, which is awesome.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I stay in his old house, which is right in the center of town.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s a two bedroom house, no running water, all that type of stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so usually I would get warm.
1
SPEAKER_01
I did have a little bit of cell service, so I would look to see if there s any emails that were urgent that I needed to handle.
1
SPEAKER_01
And otherwise, it would just be hiking around.
1
SPEAKER_01
I was hiking through three or four feet of snow at that point in time.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I m hiking around, I m looking at the buildings.
1
SPEAKER_01
I m wondering why I had owned the price for two years then and nothing had been really happening.
1
SPEAKER_01
I tried to basically
1
SPEAKER_01
phoned it in from Austin, and an abandoned mining town of 400 acres and 20 falling down buildings is not something that can be a back burner project.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s very much like a front burner project.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so then I started doing what I could.
1
SPEAKER_01
The first thing I did was just starting repairing one of the porches.
1
SPEAKER_01
I thought, listen, I ve been waiting for all the circumstances to be perfect before making the right move.
1
SPEAKER_01
I was doing almost what I would call
1
SPEAKER_01
I was setting up spreadsheets and I was putting together pitch decks and all these things that seem like they re good, but they re kind of just wasting time.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so then I started, I was like, you know, I m just going to start.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I started building the deck and that led to like fixing one of the cabins, fixing the other cabin.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so the days early on were split between fixing up the cabins and then just hiking around.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then kind of the side part of that is
1
SPEAKER_01
I borrowed one of Ryan s cameras because I wanted to learn how to do astrophotography, you know, those long exposures.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I started filming some of the stuff, you know, just because I thought, one, it was inherently interesting, and two, my family and friends were like, what s going on in the ghost town?
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I started making the videos probably my third month up there.
2
SPEAKER_01
together.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you didn t go into it to know that you were going to create content and create this brand and book.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that was crazy.
2
SPEAKER_01
I didn t even start make the first video until two and a half years after owning it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the only thing that drove me to do that was it was the pandemic.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, people started doing new hobbies.
2
SPEAKER_01
Some people started making like the sourdough bread and all these different things.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was like, I ll make some videos.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the first video I remember.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was like I spent my life savings on an abandoned mining town, which is a good title for a video.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so the first video did really well.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I remember
2
SPEAKER_01
early on, I still don t understand the power that maybe a popular YouTube channel could have.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so the guy that came up that gave me the advice, he s actually the one who s like, listen, you should take this a little more seriously.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like this could really help your town.
2
SPEAKER_01
It could help it, you know, bring it back to life like you want to do.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so then I started kind of doubling down on the content, making a lot of videos, meeting people and enjoying that creative outlet because my day job is helping other authors.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s how we met through Robert.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I d always been
2
SPEAKER_01
in proximity to other creative people, but I never had like that creative outlet of my own.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I think with the videos, I found my own creative outlet and I really enjoyed it.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s probably so liberating for you that you have helped behind the scenes so much and now you re able to put your energy towards something that s creating something for yourself.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s very cool full circle because the people that are on the book and blurbs are some of my favorite authors in the world.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
So to like work that closely with them now is just it s very satisfying.
2
SPEAKER_00
I have a question.
2
SPEAKER_00
I need some like little details here.
2
SPEAKER_01
As many as you like.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
What are you eating?
2
SPEAKER_00
I need like you to tell me that you re eating like, are you eating Cheez-Its or are you like hunting a chicken?
2
SPEAKER_01
Early on, I got stuck up there where the road, the eight mile dirt road,
2
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t get plowed.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, nobody s plowing this road.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so when the blizzard hit, when I first arrived, it was a function of, I need to eat anything.
2
SPEAKER_01
So there s canned goods.
2
SPEAKER_01
A lot of these canned goods were like expired canned goods that were just up there.
2
SPEAKER_02
You brought them up there or they were just there?
2
SPEAKER_01
No, they were just there, in the different cabins.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I was kind of going cabin to cabin to cabin eating the canned goods.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I would love to say that four years on, it s like a much different situation, but it s still a lot of canned goods and not good stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because the closest market of any sort is about an hour away.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then how are you going to have a restaurant up there?
2
SPEAKER_01
The hotel that we re building, it s from scratch.
2
SPEAKER_01
It has deep commercial freezers and walk-in fridges and all that.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we ll have to have deliveries quite often to handle that part of it.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s electricity up there, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
We have electricity, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think I should open a brothel called Lauren s Treasure Pleasure.
2
SPEAKER_01
Lauren s Palace of Pleasure.
2
SPEAKER_00
Lauren s Palace of Pleasure.
2
SPEAKER_00
I kind of like it.
2
SPEAKER_00
It has a ring to it.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s good.
2
SPEAKER_02
To be honest, hearing you talk and watching your videos, I might just shut down this whole operation and move out to that ghost town.
2
SPEAKER_01
We have plenty of room.
2
SPEAKER_00
My husband loves Solitude.
2
SPEAKER_00
He would love it.
2
SPEAKER_01
I love it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you get to read a lot?
2
SPEAKER_01
I get to read a lot.
2
SPEAKER_01
I get to just...
2
SPEAKER_01
stare at a wall a lot.
2
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes I just need the recharge of staring at a wall.
2
SPEAKER_01
I just love doing that.
2
SPEAKER_01
It is.
2
SPEAKER_01
There is a very romantic appeal to it most of the days.
2
SPEAKER_02
There s two sides to Michael Bosick.
2
SPEAKER_02
There s one side that wants to be on the show and wants to listen.
2
SPEAKER_02
Then the other side that wants to just leave and never come back.
2
SPEAKER_00
Honestly, I could use a break.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you want a friend out there?
2
SPEAKER_00
Come on out.
2
SPEAKER_00
Come on out.
2
SPEAKER_00
I have some more little micro questions.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
Are you drinking alcohol, smoking weed, or doing drugs?
2
SPEAKER_01
No, none of the above.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you re dead sober.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
So like early on, people, when you live in a mine town, they think that you re drinking a lot of whiskey.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I d get gifted just many bottles of whiskey.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s what I would gift you, I think.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
So like in one of the earlier videos, it s like, oh, and if you want to do something for the town, you know, leave a six pack of beer or a bottle of whiskey at the bottom of the road.
2
SPEAKER_01
Thinking it was a joke.
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SPEAKER_01
I was like joking around.
2
SPEAKER_01
But now like probably a couple dozen times, there s bottles of whiskey just waiting for me at the bottom of the road from like fans that come by and just leave them down there.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I don t drink it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then there s a shelf.
2
SPEAKER_01
Nobody ever comes up?
2
SPEAKER_01
They do when the weather s good, you know, in the wintertime, not so much.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you re not drinking whiskey up there?
2
SPEAKER_01
Not drinking whiskey.
2
SPEAKER_01
I d love to, like, eventually start a whiskey thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think that d be cool, like a old mining town whiskey.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m not saying that I don t drink at all, but, like, I ve never one of those ones that it s like a social drinking.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m not going to sit there by myself and stare out the window.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it seems very romantic, but I do think that, like, it could get it could turn from very romantic to very depressing in the way that was kind of the route I was taking.
2
SPEAKER_00
Are you dating anyone when this is happening?
2
SPEAKER_01
Not at the beginning, no.
2
SPEAKER_01
These days I am, no.
2
SPEAKER_00
So how are you maintaining a dating relationship with this?
2
SPEAKER_01
My girlfriend has a profession where she can be very flexible where she is.
2
SPEAKER_01
So she s a musician.
2
SPEAKER_00
Does she come with you?
2
SPEAKER_01
She s been up at the town for many months before, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_00
Are you guys like sleeping in a sleeping bag or is it a bed?
2
SPEAKER_01
No, there s beds up in town these days.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s beds?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re old, but inside we have like Casper mattresses now, you know, Ghost Town, Casper, makes sense.
2
SPEAKER_01
Good plug for Casper.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re like code Ghost Town.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, ghosttown.com.
2
SPEAKER_01
But no, the insides are pretty comfortable.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s no central heat, but the bedding and stuff is pretty good.
2
SPEAKER_02
So early days, you know, it sounds like now you ve got a little bit of infrastructure and you ve like kind of figured it out, but early days, I think this also takes a lot of courage, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
You re, you re up there, you re alone, you re in a mining town.
2
SPEAKER_02
I don t know if you believe in ghosts, but like there s a lot of creepy stuff that s happened up there.
2
SPEAKER_02
There s people that have died in this mine.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right.
2
SPEAKER_02
And there s a lot, there s a graveyard.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re by yourself living in some old guy s house.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s been gone for a long, like, are you scared or nervous in the beginning?
2
SPEAKER_02
And how are you kind of going through those emotions?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, originally there was, I think the excitement overrode any type of nervousness or anything like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
But there were sounds that when you re not used to them, I was like, what is going on?
2
SPEAKER_01
Especially when you don t expect to hear any sounds and you hear sounds, that s when it s the freakiest because you re like, oh, nobody else.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can t blame it on anybody else.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s nobody else.
2
SPEAKER_00
What kind of sounds?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like what kind of sounds?
2
SPEAKER_01
A door closing that you re not around, you know, things like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then that s when you really start to question.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I get the question about Ghost a lot because the town was really
2
SPEAKER_01
dangerous back in the day.
2
SPEAKER_01
The newspapers would show a murder a week, and there was a mining collapse in 1871 that collapsed 30 miners down to the 200-foot level of the mine.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they re still there.
2
SPEAKER_01
There was so much rock that fell on top of them, they couldn t get them out.
2
SPEAKER_01
So to think that there s still entombed miners, you know, 200 feet below where I m sleeping is like an uncomfortable thought to go through.
2
SPEAKER_00
Did you know?
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SPEAKER_00
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And when I decided to change my hair from blonde to brunette, I obviously picked everyone s favorite, Kerastase.
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One thing that I try to do with my daughter at least five times a week is bake with her.
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We love baking.
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SPEAKER_00
It s just like a bonding mother-daughter experience.
2
SPEAKER_00
We bake sugar cookies.
2
SPEAKER_00
We ll put sprinkles on them, chocolate chip muffins.
2
SPEAKER_00
We bake banana bread.
2
SPEAKER_00
We get really creative in the kitchen.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you can imagine, I take my bakeware very seriously.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it should not surprise you that I use CareAway.
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SPEAKER_00
The reason that I use CareAway for all my kitchen supplies is because it s non-toxic.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like I told you, I, when I moved to Austin, just ditched the chemicals and really tried to be purposeful with each thing in my home.
2
SPEAKER_00
And CareAway is the absolute best.
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And also,
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What I like is it has a super sleek, like a naturally sleek surface.
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So you know when you go there and you grab all your kitchenware, everything is non-toxic.
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That s the one we got.
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They have like a navy, which is really chic.
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One thing I take very, very seriously is my time.
3
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And I can say since moving to Austin, I have not gone to the grocery store.
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I have gone to the farmer s market, but not the grocery store.
3
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And that is because I have Thrive Market.
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It is so convenient because not only do they deliver everything to my door, they do the work for me.
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So they only carry brands with the highest quality ingredients and sourcing methods.
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They also restrict a ton of ingredients so you don t have to worry about buying something that isn t the best of the best.
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They re always looking for like organic kids snacks,
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low sugar alternatives, gluten-free pantry essentials.
3
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They just really help you curate your own shopping experience so you know that you re getting the best.
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And again, I feel like this saves time to have someone who s in there like checking all the ingredients and foods is so nice for someone who s really busy.
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3
SPEAKER_02
Speaking of mining, you re going down 900 feet and hanging out there.
3
SPEAKER_02
Does that not give you the most claustrophobic anxiety?
3
SPEAKER_02
You have to explain, first of all, how you know how to do that and what that s actually like.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s one of those learning on the job situations.
3
SPEAKER_01
Again, I grew up in
3
SPEAKER_01
It was very flat, there s no mines, things like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And originally the idea of mines, I knew that it was like a mining town, but the idea that the mines are the reason that the buildings exist didn t strike me.
3
SPEAKER_01
Meaning, if it wasn t for what was happening underground, nothing above ground would exist.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so for me to understand the history, I felt like I almost had to go into the mines in a certain way.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so originally it was one of those ones where you d walk 20 feet in the mine, get scared and run out, walk 30 feet in the mine, run out.
3
SPEAKER_01
walk out.
3
SPEAKER_01
But eventually, I started learning how to use ropes, how to do different things, talking to people that were on search and rescue in the area, things like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And these days, I ll rappel down the 900 feet, which is fun.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s fun going down the rope 900 feet.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s less fun going back up the 900 feet rope.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s really taxing.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have to imagine pulling yourself up a rope for 900 feet.
3
SPEAKER_02
Wait, how long does 900 feet take to pull up?
3
SPEAKER_02
Is it like five minutes?
3
SPEAKER_01
No.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I was going as fast as I possibly could last time I did it.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was two hours and 45 minutes, like as fast as you possibly can.
3
SPEAKER_02
Wait, can you take a break?
3
SPEAKER_01
You can take a bite, you can hang out on the rope.
3
SPEAKER_01
It won t let you go back down, but imagine 90, 9 Herfey is like a 90 story building with 10 foot ceilings, you know?
3
SPEAKER_00
So imagine- That s what I m saying.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have to kind of like go look at his stuff in parallel with listening to this to understand how wild this is.
3
SPEAKER_00
One of the questions I had in relation, not only to the town, but actually going down in the mines, I was watching one of your videos and you re like, you know, if something happens to you down there and you re alone,
3
SPEAKER_00
Nobody knows, nobody knows you re in an old mine.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re all alone.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s no service.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re in the middle of the dark in many cases.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is kind of like a, I guess a spiritual thing, but what happens to your mindset when you have that kind of isolation?
3
SPEAKER_00
I think many of us fantasize about kind of like getting away and unplugging.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like this is really away and unplugged and the world doesn t know anything about where you are.
3
SPEAKER_00
What is that like?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I love going into the mines because athletes describe the flow state a lot.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re like, oh, we can get into flow state.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think one of the mines, everything else almost dissolves away.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m not worried about the anxieties I m worried about above ground because I have to focus on not dying, to be honest with you.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m only focused literally on tunnel visions because I just see a tunnel in front of me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I enjoy the experiences because I m not worried about an email I didn t answer or an angry phone call at somebody.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m just worried about what s in front of me, getting through the mind, discovering whatever I m going to discover.
3
SPEAKER_01
And to describe what it s down there is like, and I don t think this comes out in videos either, it s darker than you can possibly imagine it being dark because already you re 900 feet underground.
3
SPEAKER_01
Then you go over to the side shafts.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s no idea that even a glimpse of light could get in there anymore.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s quieter than any other place in the world because there s no
3
SPEAKER_01
dripping water.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s no animals down that deep.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s just as quiet and as dark as it possibly could be.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so sometimes just for fun, I ll turn off all my lights and just stand there.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s a very dissociating feeling.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
I really love it.
3
SPEAKER_02
Do you have extra flashlights in case one goes out?
3
SPEAKER_02
Are you using your phone?
3
SPEAKER_02
What if your phone goes out?
3
SPEAKER_02
It s just the iPhone.
3
SPEAKER_01
I went through that thought process.
3
SPEAKER_01
The answer is glow sticks, because glow sticks can t run out of batteries.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I ll have my headlamp and everything, but I usually have a glow stick in my pocket.
3
SPEAKER_01
So if worst case, I could break that and that ll at least illuminate enough to get back to wherever I need to go.
3
SPEAKER_02
That is smart.
3
SPEAKER_00
A glow stick.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you keep track and map out where you are down there?
3
SPEAKER_00
I bet that s a scary part of it, because how do you even know where these paths go?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you re kind of trying to remember where you go.
3
SPEAKER_01
These days, there s a 3D mapping tool where you basically can just hold your phone because phones these days have LiDAR on them, which is capturing dimensions and basically video at the same time.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I can these days walk through a mine like this using PolyCam as the name of the app, and it ll capture the dimensions.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I can go back above ground and I can basically 3D map the mine from above ground, which is really cool because then I d be like, oh,
3
SPEAKER_01
How far was that?
3
SPEAKER_01
And then it s capturing dimensions.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I m going to be like, oh, it s exactly 174 feet back in the mine is when this happens.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I think it s cool for that reason, but it s also cool because these mines are actively collapsing.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, back in the day, there might ve been 30 miles.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now there s maybe 20 miles.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so this is like a digital archive of the mine that it s going to exist forever.
3
SPEAKER_00
How deep have you gone?
3
SPEAKER_01
900 feet is the bottom of the shaft, but then off of that there s probably miles in some of the mine shafts where you re just wandering and meandering back there.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s wild because it s like, I think of it as a city underneath the town because down in the mines there were changing rooms where they re changing in different clothes.
3
SPEAKER_01
There was dynamite vaults where they kept all the dynamite.
3
SPEAKER_01
There was areas where some of the mules that would be down in the mines would stay.
3
SPEAKER_01
There was restrooms down there, break rooms.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so there s all of these things existing 900 feet underground that are just very fascinating to walk into.
3
SPEAKER_02
When you go down there, is the reason that you re going down there to look for minerals or is it to look at what s, like, what s the reasoning?
3
SPEAKER_02
What s your why?
3
SPEAKER_01
The why is, one is understand the history of the town.
3
SPEAKER_01
Again, I think that any time you can understand more context of your surroundings, it means more to you.
3
SPEAKER_01
Meaning like, so let s say that you live by a park, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And you walk by that park every day for five years, but one day you stopped and you decided, I m going to look up the history of that park.
3
SPEAKER_01
The next time you walk by that park, it s going to mean more to you than it did the day before.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so for me, I read about the 900 level of the mine necessarily in a book over and over.
3
SPEAKER_01
But then when I go down there and I see it with my own eyes, it just comes alive when I think about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so part of it s understanding that history, which allows me to feel more connected to the mind and feel more connected to my work, which I think is important.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the other reason is, it s interesting, there s old school stuff down there.
3
SPEAKER_01
The thing that mind explorers are always looking for is Levi genes, which is really interesting.
3
SPEAKER_01
Levi jeans, jeans as we know them, were invented by Levi Strauss in the 1870s.
3
SPEAKER_01
Denim existed before that, but Levi Strauss invented blue jeans as we know them in 1870 for California silver miners.
3
SPEAKER_01
They were supposed to be work pants at first.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so if you can find an original pair of Levi jeans from 1870, it s worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s interesting, not to me necessarily because of the price tag, but because of the rarity that s attached to them.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I love history.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the idea that this everyday item that most of us wear most of the days is, I don t know, originated from something that might be in the mind is cool.
3
SPEAKER_02
I m going to put it out there in the ether that you re going to find Levi jeans.
3
SPEAKER_01
I love that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I need that.
3
SPEAKER_02
Hopefully it s my size.
3
SPEAKER_00
What s the most unique thing you ve found down there?
3
SPEAKER_01
My favorite thing, I have found a pair of Levi s.
3
SPEAKER_01
They were shredded.
3
SPEAKER_01
They were very damp as one of the damp levels of the.
4
SPEAKER_02
Levi s put the rivets on the jeans for the first time.
4
SPEAKER_02
So they had the rivets that said Levi Strauss & Co on them.
4
SPEAKER_02
And these days, not to go on too long of Levi s tangent, but Levi s has a company historian who I ve gotten to know.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so I could text her a photo of the button and she could be like, oh, 1910.
4
SPEAKER_02
She knows exactly when the jeans are from.
4
SPEAKER_02
But my favorite find down there
4
SPEAKER_02
was by a ladder that was connecting an upper level of the mine and lower level of the mine.
4
SPEAKER_02
And there was an old tobacco tin.
4
SPEAKER_02
And in the tobacco tin, there was a note that these miners were passing back and forth.
4
SPEAKER_02
And all they were doing was trying to figure out when they were going to go to lunch.
4
SPEAKER_02
But to me, it just like humanized them in a way where you think all these black and white photos of miners working down in the mine, but they were just guys that were trying to figure out when to go lunch.
4
SPEAKER_02
And that just, I don t know, it struck me in a way being down there in a way that
4
SPEAKER_02
None.
4
SPEAKER_02
I found clothing items.
4
SPEAKER_02
I found a bunch of old dynamite.
4
SPEAKER_02
I found silver ore.
4
SPEAKER_02
I have found some silver ore.
4
SPEAKER_02
I poured it out and refined it and made some jewelry out of it.
4
SPEAKER_02
But humanization of it was really good.
4
SPEAKER_00
When you do this, there s it s so relaxing.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if relaxing is the right word.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s so maybe calm and it s so Zen and it s so not taxing on your nervous system besides the minds.
4
SPEAKER_00
But it seems like it s like you re just you re with the earth.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then you come back here and you ve got Ryan Holiday s podcast and a meet and greet and you re in this room right now with these lights that are so bright.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you feel a lot like it s too much and you need to take a beat?
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think the first day back, I m almost craving it because it s been so long I want human interaction.
4
SPEAKER_02
But I think that my bandwidth for human interaction, to describe it that way, has shortened so much after being up there, where before maybe I would love to be in a crowded space for a couple hours.
4
SPEAKER_02
Now it s 30 minutes and I m good.
4
SPEAKER_02
My first time back, the first year that I lived at Cerro Gordo, I almost never left.
4
SPEAKER_02
I just loved it and I wouldn t go anywhere.
4
SPEAKER_02
It was also during the pandemic, so nobody s doing much.
4
SPEAKER_02
So probably for the first, let s call it 18 months, I never left the hill.
4
SPEAKER_02
Then we go to the town to get some groceries maybe once in a while.
4
SPEAKER_02
And the first time back was to Austin and I went to ACL and like Austin City Limits and it was just,
4
SPEAKER_02
a nightmare, to be honest with you.
4
SPEAKER_02
There s two reasons.
4
SPEAKER_02
One, there s so many people.
4
SPEAKER_02
But then also, I never really met people that were watching the channel up until that point, because it was all just numbers on the screen.
4
SPEAKER_02
But walking into ACL, people were coming up to me.
4
SPEAKER_02
It was like, oh, I love you.
4
SPEAKER_02
And it was very, whoa.
4
SPEAKER_02
Not only are they around people, they re coming in close to me.
4
SPEAKER_02
It was a very interesting experience.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m sure it s like no exposure to all of a sudden, millions of people know who you are.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
What are little things that you or we take for granted that when you come back, you just want?
4
SPEAKER_02
Fresh fruit is number one for me.
4
SPEAKER_02
Vegetables in a sense.
4
SPEAKER_02
Sushi is a nice one.
4
SPEAKER_02
Running water.
4
SPEAKER_01
When you go... Talk about that for a minute.
4
SPEAKER_01
What is it like having running water?
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think you can kind of conceptually think, oh, like running water, that would be difficult.
4
SPEAKER_02
But then you start thinking,
4
SPEAKER_02
washing dishes is hard, washing your hands, washing everything.
4
SPEAKER_02
It almost can consume your whole day.
4
SPEAKER_02
I think there s this quote that Mark Twain said back in the day.
4
SPEAKER_02
He said, whiskey s for drinking and water s for fighting over.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I think that I understand that now because it consumes my whole day sometimes trying to figure out exactly how to get water into the town.
4
SPEAKER_02
These days, we truck it up in an old military truck.
4
SPEAKER_01
I saw you.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is that the one with the giant container, the huge?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
That thing s massive.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
And where does that, once you get it up there, where do you put it?
4
SPEAKER_02
It feeds to the houses.
4
SPEAKER_02
So to the houses these days have kind of a working restroom and a shower.
4
SPEAKER_02
So I ve made a lot of progress since that first period of time being up there.
4
SPEAKER_02
You know, originally it was kind of like camping indoors is how I would describe it.
4
SPEAKER_02
These days there s a restroom, there s a shower, there s all these fine things, but I m still blown away.
4
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I think again, that first trip back to Austin, the thing that really blew my mind is I had been living for 18 months without reliable running water.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I was on the plane back, I went to the bathroom of the plane, I was like,
4
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I m in the air and they can have a sink in this air and I can t have a sink in the town.
4
SPEAKER_01
I guess now with that concept, you can essentially bring this supply of water up consistently and then supply all these houses with water.
4
SPEAKER_01
Will they ever get to the point where they pipe it up there?
4
SPEAKER_02
They would never pipe it up the mountain, but half of my day is thinking about other alternative water sources.
4
SPEAKER_02
So what big one that I ve been experimenting with this winter is gutters.
4
SPEAKER_02
You know, we do get a lot of snow.
4
SPEAKER_02
So when it melts, it has to go somewhere.
4
SPEAKER_02
I d love to capture some of that.
4
SPEAKER_02
I ve explored the idea of drilling a well, which we re at the top of a mountain.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so the estimates that I ve gotten, we d have to drill at least like a thousand feet down, which is a very expensive proposition.
4
SPEAKER_02
And with wells, it s crazy.
4
SPEAKER_02
Wells, there s no guarantee.
4
SPEAKER_02
They said you can drill and it ll be dry.
4
SPEAKER_00
How much is it?
4
SPEAKER_02
about $250,000 to drill the well.
4
SPEAKER_02
So are you taking investors for the hotels or what s the plan with that?
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so I ve been self, originally some friends chipped in money to buy it because I didn t have, it was 1.4 million to buy it originally.
4
SPEAKER_02
I had the property in Austin that I can kind of get a loan against, so that helped a lot.
4
SPEAKER_02
I mean, Austin real estate was a good thing to get into a while back when I got into it.
4
SPEAKER_02
Had some friends chipping in some money, but these days a lot of it s self-funded.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s, I still work the day job with Ryan, you know, we still have our company there.
4
SPEAKER_02
And then the social media, you know, the ad integrations on YouTube and stuff like that pays for a lot of it as well.
4
SPEAKER_02
That s rad.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you love what you re doing right now?
4
SPEAKER_00
Wouldn t change it for the world?
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, absolutely.
4
SPEAKER_02
I think.
4
SPEAKER_02
I love it in a way that I never thought I could enjoy my work when I was living here.
4
SPEAKER_02
I think that s what keeps me there.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s very difficult to live there.
4
SPEAKER_02
I want sugar coat.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s really hard day to day.
4
SPEAKER_02
I m not a guy that could lose a lot of weight and I lost like 40 pounds since living up there just because there s not a lot of food.
4
SPEAKER_02
Health and nutrition used to be a big part of my life and kind of got thrown out the window when I moved up there because I m just focused on rebuilding.
4
SPEAKER_02
But the trade-off is worth it to where I m stoked about what I get to do every single day.
4
SPEAKER_02
That s something I was always love to do.
4
SPEAKER_02
I don t think that I ll be up there full time.
4
SPEAKER_02
I do think that s unsustainable long, long term.
4
SPEAKER_02
I think I would love to split my time almost spend six months, the best, like the summer months up there.
4
SPEAKER_02
Enjoy that time.
4
SPEAKER_02
Winters can get pretty cold and snowy.
4
SPEAKER_02
And being from Florida, I m not about that life necessarily all the time.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, not.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_02
So I think long term, if I m thinking five, 10 years down the road, splitting my time might be the way to do it.
4
SPEAKER_00
What s the craziest story that s happened to you out there?
4
SPEAKER_02
Oh, man.
4
SPEAKER_02
There s different genres of stories.
4
SPEAKER_02
There s like natural disasters, there s social media stuff, there s stalker type situations.
4
SPEAKER_02
Tell us all three.
4
SPEAKER_01
What s the scariest you ve ever been up there?
4
SPEAKER_01
Or the most scared?
4
SPEAKER_02
The most scared... Stalker?
4
SPEAKER_02
There s two moments that came up.
4
SPEAKER_00
How is someone stalking up there?
4
SPEAKER_00
Geez, that s a committed stalker.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m going to tell you what, Brent.
4
SPEAKER_00
If someone was stalking me in the ghost town, I would be like, God, this person really wants to be with me.
4
SPEAKER_02
Maybe I should give them a chance.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s tough because the big premise of the videos is where I live.
4
SPEAKER_02
That means that everybody knows where I live, even down to the house.
4
SPEAKER_02
I live in the Belshaw house.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s like a well-known thing.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so I think Tim Ferriss talked about it once where he said basically like the law of big numbers.
4
SPEAKER_02
If you have a big following, I think he said, he s like, listen, in high school,
4
SPEAKER_02
and you re graduating class where there are a couple of people that are a little bit difficult to deal with.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s like, yeah, there s like two or three.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s like, okay, how many are in your high school class?
4
500.
4
SPEAKER_02
Okay, look, multiply that by a million.
4
SPEAKER_02
You re going to have tens of thousands of people that are difficult to deal with in different ways.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so one night I was up there by myself.
4
SPEAKER_02
This is early on in the experience.
4
SPEAKER_02
A bunch of four-wheelers came into town in the middle of the night.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s like 3 a.m.
4
SPEAKER_02
And they came in and they pulled in front of our museum and they all shut off their headlights, which I was like, oh, why?
4
SPEAKER_02
You know, you don t happen upon the town.
4
SPEAKER_02
If you re going up to the town, you re going up there for a reason.
4
SPEAKER_02
I get heightened.
4
SPEAKER_02
I m like, what are they here for?
4
SPEAKER_02
And so I didn t really know what to do.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so I was thinking, what s the game plan now?
4
SPEAKER_02
I didn t want to instigate some type of wild west shootout.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can have a firearm there.
4
SPEAKER_02
I have a firearm.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I have a couple just to like protection more than anything else.
4
SPEAKER_02
So I was like, do I want to go that route and potentially start?
4
SPEAKER_02
So I decided I was going to turn on all the lights.
4
SPEAKER_02
So I turned on all the lights in my house.
4
SPEAKER_02
They kind of left and they went up the hill where
4
SPEAKER_02
there isn t anything beyond town, so I didn t really know where they were going.
4
SPEAKER_02
I was like, where could they possibly be going?
4
SPEAKER_02
And then I heard them talking, but I couldn t make out what they were saying, maybe a half mile away.
4
SPEAKER_02
Eventually, I went to sleep maybe around 4 a.m., and then 5, they were back in town again for a second time, and they shut off the lights again in the same spot.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so I m just thinking at this point, they re aware that I m here.
4
SPEAKER_02
So at first, I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
4
SPEAKER_02
Hey, they didn t know anybody was in town.
4
SPEAKER_02
Maybe they just
4
SPEAKER_02
you know, wanted to find an abandoned ghost town.
4
SPEAKER_02
But now they knew that I was there and they re stopping it again.
4
SPEAKER_02
And that was like a more difficult situation.
4
SPEAKER_02
I was like, do I do a warning shot?
4
SPEAKER_02
You know, what am I supposed to do here?
4
SPEAKER_02
Luckily, I just turned on the lights and left again for the second time.
4
SPEAKER_02
But it s still the understanding that people can be in the town when I m not aware of them at night when I m sleeping is not a comfortable feeling.
4
SPEAKER_02
And so I think that s probably the most uncomfortable I had been.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was super unnerved.
4
SPEAKER_01
It reminds me when you were talking that Danny DeVito meme where he s like, and then I started blasting.
4
SPEAKER_01
That d be me.
4
SPEAKER_01
I d be like, I don t have time to figure this out.
4
SPEAKER_02
These days we do have censors.
4
SPEAKER_02
I do know when people are in town just, you know.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is that the stalker?
4
SPEAKER_02
I didn t figure out who they were.
4
SPEAKER_02
Another time somebody robbed us or robbed me.
5
SPEAKER_02
there.
5
SPEAKER_02
That was not not like face to face.
5
SPEAKER_02
They stole something out of one of the buildings when I was sleeping.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so that was difficult.
5
SPEAKER_00
I feel like that s just someone who wants to just take like a souvenir.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know what I mean?
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
Well, they took like a giant jug full of money.
5
SPEAKER_02
So it s less of a because I had like, you know, those five gallon glass jugs that like for water.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
I had one of those where people could put donations because we don t charge people to look around the town.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s like donation based.
5
SPEAKER_02
So people will throw five, 10 bucks in there, whatever.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I didn t realize how to get the money out of the jar.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s like a more difficult process.
5
SPEAKER_02
So I just left it in there.
5
SPEAKER_02
I was like, whatever.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then somebody stole that in the middle of the night one night.
5
SPEAKER_00
What about the stalker?
5
SPEAKER_00
I want to hear about the stalker.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, there s a woman named Karen, we ll use the name Karen.
5
SPEAKER_02
And Karen was going to help us with some supplies.
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, she wanted to help out the town however she could.
5
SPEAKER_02
She was coming from Utah.
5
SPEAKER_02
I was like, oh, like we re building houses.
5
SPEAKER_02
She s like, oh, I can t build any houses, but I can help bring you some supplies.
5
SPEAKER_02
I was like, fantastic.
5
SPEAKER_02
I ll always need vegetables.
5
SPEAKER_00
And how do you know this?
5
SPEAKER_00
Is this via DM or is this email?
5
SPEAKER_02
Emails, emails.
5
SPEAKER_02
So we re emailing back and forth.
5
SPEAKER_02
She s like, how can I help the town?
5
SPEAKER_02
I was like, OK, we love fresh fruits and vegetables.
5
SPEAKER_02
I say the same thing to everybody.
5
SPEAKER_02
Fresh fruits, vegetables, water, bring up whatever you d like.
5
SPEAKER_02
She s like, OK, I ll bring some up.
5
SPEAKER_02
So she was supposed to arrive around 10 a.m.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, all right, so I m expecting around 10, not there, not there, not there, sun setting at let s say seven.
5
SPEAKER_02
So 6.30, a car rolls into town, it s Karen.
5
SPEAKER_02
I look out and she s just like chain smoking in this Dodge Charger, which shouldn t be able to make it all the way to town on the dirt road.
5
SPEAKER_02
So already that s very strange.
5
SPEAKER_02
I was like, what is going on?
5
SPEAKER_02
And at the time we had like somebody helping me up there.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so he was there and she was having a difficult time parking the car.
5
SPEAKER_02
I went down to meet her and I was like, oh,
5
SPEAKER_02
Hey, how s it going?
5
SPEAKER_02
She s like, oh, I m sorry I came so late.
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, I know it s a lot later than you anticipated.
5
SPEAKER_02
She seemed very flustered, like very flustered with the whole situation.
5
SPEAKER_02
Don t worry about it.
5
SPEAKER_02
Don t worry about driving back down the hill at night.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s really scary.
5
SPEAKER_02
I was like, we have plenty of beds up here.
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, we have the bunkhouse over here.
5
SPEAKER_02
We have this room, this building that has six rooms in it.
5
SPEAKER_02
And she got very uncomfortable with that prospect.
5
SPEAKER_02
She said, no, no, no.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I thought, OK, she doesn t want to sleep in a building with other people.
5
SPEAKER_02
I understand that.
5
SPEAKER_02
I could understand that.
5
SPEAKER_02
I was like, we have a trailer over here.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s a private Airstream trailer.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, you can stay in the trailer.
5
SPEAKER_02
And she kind of regurgitated.
5
SPEAKER_02
And she s like, oh, OK, OK, we ll go to the trailer.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so my buddy s parking the car for her because she couldn t park the car.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I m walking up.
5
SPEAKER_02
And she starts quoting the movie Misery.
5
SPEAKER_02
Have you seen that movie?
5
SPEAKER_02
With Kathy Bates.
5
SPEAKER_02
So basically this movie is about... Jesus Christ.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, this movie is about an author that has an accident and this woman s a nurse in the movie and takes him into her care and keeps breaking his legs to keep her in her control.
5
SPEAKER_00
So she keeps breaking his legs so she can... I m going to pin that to my pin board if Michael fucks up.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s a good one.
5
SPEAKER_00
You just keep breaking the legs.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so she s a nurse and this woman starts quoting Misery to me.
5
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And I was like, whoa, I kind of knew what it was.
5
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And then my buddy came up, he s like, dude, you have to get out of here right now.
5
SPEAKER_02
And because the vibe was off.
5
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So we go into the trail.
5
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I m like, okay, very nice to meet you.
5
SPEAKER_02
I m going to go back to my house.
5
SPEAKER_02
And at the time I was not staying in the Belshazzar s house.
5
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I was staying in the Gordon house.
5
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And I was like, I m staying in the Gordon, but like, nice to meet you.
5
SPEAKER_02
I ll see you later.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so I go into the other house though, just knowing something was up.
5
SPEAKER_02
My buddy was talking to her and she s like, oh, and she got really flustered.
5
SPEAKER_02
She s like, this wasn t the plan.
5
SPEAKER_02
And he s like, well, what was the plan?
5
SPEAKER_02
And she s like, oh, I m very embarrassed.
5
SPEAKER_02
And he s like, what s the plan?
5
SPEAKER_02
And she s like, oh, I wanted to spend the night with Brent tonight.
5
SPEAKER_02
And my buddy took it in stride.
5
SPEAKER_02
He s like, oh, well, he doesn t even let me do that, trying to make a joke out of it.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I guess she was like, well, can I go down and get one of the cats?
5
SPEAKER_02
I have some cats out of the Gordon house.
5
SPEAKER_02
He s like, absolutely not.
5
SPEAKER_02
The Gordon house is his house.
5
SPEAKER_02
Nobody s allowed in there at night.
5
SPEAKER_02
Do not go in there.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then he comes over to the other house
5
SPEAKER_02
And we watch out the window and less than an hour later, she s creeping into the house that she thinks that I m in.
5
SPEAKER_02
And at which point we were concerned.
5
SPEAKER_02
So we go down to this other building, we change locations a second time.
5
SPEAKER_02
And we decide, I had her email address, we looked her up on Facebook.
5
SPEAKER_02
And her last two posts on Facebook before she came up here were, you bring out the inner serial killer in me, was her post.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then the one after that was like, I may be smiling, but in my head I ve killed you a hundred times, was her two posts before she came to Cerro Gordo.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so originally we were like,
5
SPEAKER_02
Whoa, this is like a problem.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so my buddy snuck back and like took a photo of her license plate just so that way we had it on file.
5
SPEAKER_02
She eventually leaves like two hours later in the middle of the night, you know, midnight.
5
SPEAKER_02
She just takes off, goes back to Utah.
5
SPEAKER_02
And we thought that was the end of it.
5
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We re like, oh, that was weird.
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, it s like, oh, the crazy Karen story.
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, we had this story in town.
5
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I forgot to tell you.
5
SPEAKER_02
When she arrived, she handed me five
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hand-painted paintings of me, but me jacked.
5
SPEAKER_02
Me with way more muscle sitting on a bench.
5
SPEAKER_01
Did you hang those things up?
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No, we didn t.
5
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They re in the house now.
5
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I hang them up.
5
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And so I still have the paintings.
5
SPEAKER_02
That was her image of you, just like this jacked miner.
5
SPEAKER_02
I forgot about it.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then I moved houses after that.
5
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I was like, I m moving houses.
5
SPEAKER_02
So I moved to this other cabin.
5
SPEAKER_02
A couple weeks later, I m just on a phone call and the charger pulls up in front of the house again.
5
SPEAKER_02
I see her chain smoking and I was like, no.
5
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So I run to a different building and somebody else is there.
5
SPEAKER_02
I was like, hey, go tell that person they should leave or whatever.
5
SPEAKER_02
I guess she said, hey, I m here to pick up Brent.
5
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I m here to take him to Lone Pine for a couple of days, which is the closest town.
5
SPEAKER_02
And the person was like, you re not here to take him to Lone Pine.
5
SPEAKER_02
And she basically wouldn t leave for a while after that, but that was the stalker story.
5
SPEAKER_00
Where is she now?
5
SPEAKER_00
Have you looked her up on Facebook recently to see her?
5
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I haven t.
5
SPEAKER_02
This has been two years.
5
SPEAKER_02
You ve buried her in the mine.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, there s a lot of mine shouts.
5
SPEAKER_00
I have questions after this story.
5
SPEAKER_00
It sounds like there s a couple people that are up there, though, with you now.
5
SPEAKER_00
These days, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s probably like... That s good.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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When you were first starting out, though, and you were by yourself, what was your idea if something went wrong?
6
SPEAKER_00
Like what were you must have had like some kind of protocol in your head?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so I had my cell phone, which always is good to call, but I also have what s called like a Garmin inReach.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so like inReach is our satellite phones, essentially.
6
SPEAKER_01
So you can, if you lose service, no matter what, there s an SOS button on it.
6
SPEAKER_01
So if you press that, a helicopter is coming to you.
6
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so like, no matter what happens, you press that button, the helicopter is finding you.
6
SPEAKER_02
So that was kind of the- Is that a subscription, like a service you have to pay for?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s like $9 a month.
6
SPEAKER_01
But for me, I mean, that s worth it by so much.
6
SPEAKER_02
But that s interesting.
6
SPEAKER_02
I didn t know they had that.
6
SPEAKER_02
So for anyone that s like sitting up thinking about hiking or going out anywhere, that s like.
6
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s, it s complex to save my life many times.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s just, it s $9 a month.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s like $150 little device that clips right here.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it ll actually like, it ll use Bluetooth to your phone.
6
SPEAKER_01
So you can use your phone as normal, but it s communicating through satellite.
6
SPEAKER_02
I have a random tangent question.
6
SPEAKER_02
What are things people should consider when it comes to survival and taking care of themselves?
6
SPEAKER_02
I mean, most people are safe in a metropolitan environment around a bunch of people, but for someone like yourself that s gone off grid or even someone that s going camping or taking a trip out into a park, what are the things that they should think about investing?
6
SPEAKER_02
Or even just things that you ve discovered, like, hey, people should just have this regardless of being camping or not.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think the government thing is good.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think the biggest one, which people take
6
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For granted, just telling somebody where you re going.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think the biggest thing that kills people in Death Valley National Park is they go off trail.
6
SPEAKER_01
They want to go somewhere.
6
SPEAKER_01
Nobody knows where they re going.
6
SPEAKER_01
Their car breaks down.
6
SPEAKER_01
They have no cell service.
6
SPEAKER_01
They re in the middle of the hottest desert in America.
6
SPEAKER_01
They leave their car to go hike out of the town to try to find some help and eventually die.
6
SPEAKER_01
had they told somebody where they were going, maybe they would have been saved.
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SPEAKER_01
And so I was on a hike once where I was as close to not making it as probably I ve ever been, but I had told my buddy that if these circumstances had happened, like what to do to like start walking up the wash.
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And that s probably like what got me through that hike.
6
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And so I think that like telling somebody where you re going, you know, having a plan of like, if you don t hear me from this, like what are the circumstances after that?
6
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So you mentioned before when I was in the mines, these days,
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I tell somebody, somebody knows where I m going in the minds.
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They know if I m not out by this time, call this specific person that s on search and rescue.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then that person has the experience to make a call beyond that.
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SPEAKER_01
So it kind of gets escalated.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so at these points, there s kind of like a, a fallback plan when I m in those types of situations.
6
SPEAKER_02
What kind of permissions do you have to get to do all this stuff out there?
6
SPEAKER_02
Is it because it s your land?
6
SPEAKER_01
It s private land.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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What s your closest call that you ve had besides Karen?
6
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This hike, so there s a thing called the Sailing Valley Salt Tram.
6
SPEAKER_01
So basically made a tramway that goes from Sailing Valley, which is in Death Valley, up this, it s 14 miles long.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the grade of it is 30 to 40%, which is an insanely steep grade.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s on shale.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I decided to walk that.
6
SPEAKER_01
I wanted to do a hike.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I thought I brought enough water, but basically like I slid down this dry waterfall and my water broke and my little Garmin thing broke.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I was basically, it was 131 in Death Valley that day.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so it was just so hot that I got like many blackouts as far as dehydration things go.
6
SPEAKER_01
But my buddy, I told, if you don t see me at the bottom of this meetup point, start walking up the mountain basically.
6
SPEAKER_01
So he was able to kind of hike up some Gatorades.
6
SPEAKER_01
So if you didn t have... I mean, death valley kills a lot of people each year due to dehydration and due to what basically what I was doing, just hiking unknown trails that are too hard at the wrong time of year.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because there s no shade either.
6
SPEAKER_01
I was in these kind of rock canyons where you re just getting roasted for 12 hours straight.
6
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What do you think has been the biggest point of growth for you?
6
SPEAKER_02
Like, what have you learned?
6
SPEAKER_02
What s changed, I guess, about you prior to the ghost town to now?
6
SPEAKER_02
Because it sounds like you ve had to develop a ton of interpersonal skills.
6
SPEAKER_00
No capacity for bullshit.
6
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Resiliency, there s probably, I mean, a lot of skills you ve had to learn up there that we don t have to even think about when we re living in the cities.
6
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I think that the biggest one of me I think about is, there s that phrase that everything is figureoutable.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think that early on, everything was a crisis to me.
6
SPEAKER_01
Let s say a door blew off a building.
6
SPEAKER_01
I was like, oh my God, what are we possible?
6
SPEAKER_01
And then you do a little bit harder task, you do a little bit harder task, and it s almost exercising that muscle of you re going to be able to figure things out.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then you get confidence by you figure out one small thing, you figure out a bigger thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
And these days, our road to get to town has been wiped out by a flood three times.
6
SPEAKER_01
The first time it happened, I was like, project s done, the road got washed out.
6
SPEAKER_01
Now I have a back home, like, well, I ll just rebuild the road.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I think that that confidence that comes
6
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Like Ryan Holiday describes it as having evidence in yourself.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, he s like, I don t bank on, you know, hope, I bank on evidence.
6
SPEAKER_01
So he says, I can recall in my own life when I ve handled problems like this.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I think I ve been thrown into problems that I ve been able to handle more.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so that like everything is figured out what was probably the biggest one.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s a great one.
6
SPEAKER_00
You re building your resistance muscle.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
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You wrote a fake book.
6
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It s called Putting My Foot Down and you wanted to do it as a literary experiment to show how easy it was to have a bestseller.
6
SPEAKER_00
Are you applying that to this book and what was that experiment if someone wants their book to go to bestseller?
6
SPEAKER_01
That was a shot at Amazon more than anybody else.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because I think bestseller status is something that s very difficult to do with the book world.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think for the longest time that meant New York Times bestseller list, which is very, very difficult to hit.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s the New York Times pulling independent bookstores from all over the country, getting their reports.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then once a week they put out the bestseller list and there s maybe four lists.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so you re selling tens of thousands of books to appear on that list.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so there s a level of prestige that comes with it that I think
6
SPEAKER_01
I saw being cashed in where I would see these packages that are like guaranteed bestseller for $4,000.
6
SPEAKER_01
And what they were doing is they re trying to capture people s desire for that status, but without having to do the New York Times list.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so when Amazon came onto the scene, they created their own bestseller lists.
6
SPEAKER_01
And basically, if you top out an Amazon category for an hour instead of a week, they ll give you the number one bestseller.
6
SPEAKER_01
And there s
6
SPEAKER_01
thousands of categories on Amazon.
6
SPEAKER_01
So instead of four different lists that are really hard to hit, you can pick a very obscure category on Amazon, and you can top it out for an hour, be a number one bestseller.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I was trying to illustrate that when people were paying these companies all this money, they were kind of getting scammed.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I mainly wanted to protect some of the authors that I knew I was working with.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so to illustrate that point,
6
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I took a photo of my foot, because I didn t want anybody to say that the book had merit.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s why it did good.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I didn t want no words in it.
6
SPEAKER_01
I uploaded the photo of my foot onto Amazon.
6
SPEAKER_01
I chose free masonry studies as the category, because I wanted a very obscure category.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then my buddy bought one copy.
6
SPEAKER_01
I bought one copy.
6
SPEAKER_01
So two copies later, it was the number one bestseller in free masonry studies after an hour.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I was just trying to show that on Amazon, the New York Times is still a different, it s crazy.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s very hard, but Amazon can be a different story.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I wrote an article about that.
6
SPEAKER_01
I kind of illustrated it.
6
SPEAKER_01
It got a lot of different attention in the book publishing world.
6
SPEAKER_01
Amazon eventually took down my book.
6
SPEAKER_01
They were like, oh, that s not a book.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I appealed to Jeff Bezos a lot.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, his email is public.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s just Jeff at Amazon.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I heard occasionally that he would answer customer service inquiries if you had like the right thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so the article started getting a lot of press.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I kept emailing him over and over and over.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, Jeff, we re both losing money here.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, like, let s get my book back online.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then Thought Catalog, you know, those guys like thought they were like an old website.
6
SPEAKER_01
So Thought Catalog published all of the articles as a new book that we called, you know, the expanded version of the foot book or whatever.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that got a lot of press.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the point was to illustrate the idea with Amazon.
6
SPEAKER_01
The Toronto star recreated the thing and they made their book a bestseller that way.
6
SPEAKER_01
But the fun ending of that is I was at a conference a couple of years later and Jeff Bezos and his brother were speaking at the event.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I remember sitting across from him at this lunch table and being like, oh, I have a bone to pick.
6
SPEAKER_01
And he didn t remember it all until he pretended like he did eventually.
6
SPEAKER_01
He s like, oh, I remember that.
6
SPEAKER_01
And we took a photo together.
6
SPEAKER_01
That was kind of fun.
6
SPEAKER_00
He acknowledged putting my foot down.
6
SPEAKER_01
He did in his own way.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think that maybe he was just making me feel good about it, but it was kind of a fun full circle.
6
SPEAKER_01
He was like, you.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you.
6
SPEAKER_00
I ve been thinking about you every day.
6
SPEAKER_00
What is the biggest learning tip that you ve learned from Robert and Ryan?
6
SPEAKER_01
With Ryan and Robert, you control the input, not the output.
6
SPEAKER_01
Obviously, going into the book, sometimes you hear authors are like, my goal is to sell a million copies.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s kind of a horrible goal to begin with.
6
SPEAKER_01
You start with that goal, it s a difficult game from there.
6
SPEAKER_01
But Ryan just is like, I m going to do the best possible book I can do.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m going to do my best job.
7
SPEAKER_00
launching it.
7
SPEAKER_00
But from there, any marketing is just hoping to kick off word of mouth.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s what makes books sell year over year.
7
SPEAKER_00
Right now, Robert s book is probably number 15 on Amazon, 15 years later after it came out.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it s not there because Robert s promoting it all the time.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s because a word of mouth has taken over.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so Robert and Ryan both try to like
7
SPEAKER_00
Control the input like what they re putting into the book and then like kind of like.
7
SPEAKER_00
Let be once it s out there and I m trying my best.
7
SPEAKER_00
I have a book for the first time.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s very hard to like accept that mentality.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know you kind of want to try to control your things and do whatever you can, but it s kind of what I learned from them.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think it s very good advice too and it s probably freeing in a lot of ways because I think a lot of people stress over a lot of the stuff that they just really have no control to deal with.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think what Ryan does better than almost anybody is he never stops talking about his books or putting out books.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think some people see a book launch and they re like, oh, I got one week to give it my all and then it s done.
7
SPEAKER_00
And Ryan s like, he s writing articles every week about his books for 10 years.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so when people are like, oh, wow, Ryan s books do good.
7
SPEAKER_00
He s put in a lot of work.
7
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His output is incredible.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the output is unmatched.
7
SPEAKER_01
We haven t had him on for, we got to talk to him again.
7
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Hi, Ryan.
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If you had to be put back
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in LA, let s say you had to be put, we ll put you right in West Hollywood today and you can t go to a mining town and you can t, you can t go underground 900 feet.
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How are you finding peace, solitude, and Zenness?
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I would, I would find some mountain around me, you know, there s some in LA.
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If I get, if I m allowed to go to the mountains or even look at them.
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No, you re not allowed to go to the mountains.
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I want to know, cause I have, I have two kids.
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I have a husband.
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I want to know what you would do.
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I think the point is, is are you going to go lock yourself in the closet?
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What are you doing?
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I said to me, sweating.
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Yeah, I know.
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The term awesome is thrown around a lot.
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I think everything isn t awesome, but like awe is a powerful experience.
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And I think you can find awe in different ways.
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So for me, I found it in the mountains.
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I look out and Mount Whitney is 14,500 feet tall.
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So you re just like, you know, you get that moment where you realize kind of your smallness in it all.
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I think that s the most thing is like zoom out and think my problems would be that big a deal.
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I think if I was in a city, you can find awe in different things.
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It doesn t have to be mountains.
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Like I think a
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An orchestra that s beautiful is awesome in its own way.
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So finding those sources of awe is probably what I would do.
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I don t know exactly how I would do it in those circumstances if I was like a prisoner in a house or something, but I would, I don t know, find some way to experience awe.
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I have a tip for you when you do come back to maybe LA or Austin.
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Get rid of all the lights in your house and just use natural light and red light bulbs.
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Red light bulb.
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That s what I would do.
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Cut all your plumbing, just get rid of it.
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No, I think that that ll help the overstimulation.
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You could do like the Hunter S. Thompson.
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It helps me.
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I just have red light in my room, so I don t ever have to feel this light.
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But don t you feel like now that you ve experienced what you ve experienced, there s probably a very slim chance of you moving back to a big city?
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Yeah, I don t think I would spend any significant time in a big city.
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I really enjoy having the space.
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I get to play, I get to have dirt bikes and all these types of fun things that I get to explore around out there that I just value a lot more than the convenience of a city necessarily.
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Michael will be there.
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Michael will be there.
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Come out.
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We have dirt bikes, we have razors, we have side-by-sides.
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You ve had some pretty cool people out.
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Names of the people that have been out there.
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So you had Jeff Goldblum out there.
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That s a unique character.
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Jeff Goldblum came out to film something.
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During the pandemic, it was a cool place because it was close enough from LA where people wanted to go to something unique.
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Cole Sprouse came out before, he s a big fan of Money Towns.
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That s cool.
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G-Eazy came out one time with his girlfriend.
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A bunch of different people came through to do, a bunch of people in the big YouTube world came out to film different videos.
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But I think that like, it s a place where they know that they can find that peace, that nobody s bothering them.
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They can just relax and rip around on a dirt bike and do whatever they want to do.
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That was awesome.
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If we would have known each other earlier and you would have sent me the mining pitch, I would have invested.
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I would have been your guy.
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I would have been like, what the hell are we doing?
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We got a mining talent on the portfolio.
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Brent, where can everyone find you, your book, your YouTube channel?
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Tell us all the things.
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Yeah, Ghost Town Living is the name of the book and it s the YouTube channel.
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That s probably the best place.
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The channels, the last four years of living up there, the book is the same with a little bit more depth.
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And if they want, I mean, we are open every day, nine to five.
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After five, please don t come up.
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People can come check out the town whenever they want.
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Unless you re Karen.
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Unless you re Karen.
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Maybe don t rent a Dodge Charger.
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Yeah, don t call it a Charger.
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Don t call it a Charger.
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Brent, thank you for coming on the show.
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Thank you, Brent.
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Of course.
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Congrats on the book.
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Thanks for having me.
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Thank you.