The Bossticks - How To Chase Your Life's Calling & Discover True Purpose Ft. Brent Underwood, Author - Ghost Town Living

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

#678: Today, we're sitting down with Brent Underwood, owner of Cerro Gordo, an abandoned boomtown silver mine established in 1865. He is also the creator of ""GhostTownLiving"" where he chronicles his adventures on YouTube. Brent currently lives on the mountain above Death Valley with no running water, seven cats, six goats, and at least one ghost. We have a discussion about what he's learned about reconstructing an abandoned mining town, what it's like living with no modern amenities, and sharing the entire process on his YouTube channel. He also discusses both his most dangerous and magical experiences throughout his journey. To connect with Brent Underwood click HERE To order Brent's New Book - Ghost Town Living click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts Bosstick click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE To Watch the Show click HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential This episode is brought to you by Kerastase Visit Kerastase-USA.com and use code SKINNY15 to receive 15% off your purchase. Offer valid through 5/31/2024. This episode is brought to you by Caraway Ditch the chemicals with Caraway. Visit carawayhome.com/HIMANDHER to receive 10% off your next purchase. This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market Thrive Market is the go-to for all of your grocery and household essentials- and it's all conveniently delivered to your doorstep. Get 30% off your first order, plus a free $60 gift at thrivemarket.com/skinny or use code SKINNY at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Betterhelp BetterHelp is online therapy that offers video, phone, and even live chat-only therapy sessions. So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. It's much more affordable than in-person therapy & you can be matched with a therapist in under 48 hours. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/skinny. This episode is brought to you by Sun Bum Visit sunbum.com and use code SKINNY15 at checkout for 15% off your first purchase. This episode is brought to you by Nerdwallet NerdWallet lets you compare top travel credit cards side-by-side to maximize your spending, some even offering 10X points on your spending. Visit nerdwallet.com to learn more. Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a dear media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her.

So one night I was up there by myself, a bunch of four-wheelers came into town in the one night. It's like 3 a.m. They came in and they pulled in front of our. museum and they all shut off their headlights. I get heightened down. Like, what are they, why are they here for? And so I didn't really know what to do. I didn't want to like instigate some type of wild west shootout. So I decided that I was going to turn on all the lights. So I turn on all the lights in my house. They kind of left and they went up the hill where so I didn't

really know where they were going. I was like, where could they possibly be going? And then I heard them talking, but I couldn't make out what they were saying, maybe a half mile away. And then five, they were back in town again. And they shut off the lights again in the same spot. And that was like a more difficult situation. I was doing a warning shot. You know what I was supposed to do here. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her show. Today we have a very unique guest. I would say one of the more unique guests we've ever had on the show. His name is Brent Underwood. Let me tell you why our friend Brent is so unique. How many of you have spent your entire life savings to go and buy an abandoned ghost town, an abandoned mining town,

in the middle of the desert in Death Valley or near Death Valley? Most of us haven't done that, but Brent has. He actually is the owner of Sarah Gordo, an abandoned boomtown silver mine established in 1865. He is also the creator of Ghost Town Living, where he chronicles his adventures on YouTube. I have found myself spending hours on his content. If you just search Brent Underwood or go on YouTube and see, you'll see why. He's living in abandoned mining town. He's rehabilitating this old town that has been basically dead to the world for 100 years or close to 100 years. And it's incredible. So in this episode, we talk about what he learned about himself moving into isolation, what skills he's learned to develop, how he's had to persevere.

This is really a story about chasing and pursuing your dreams and going against the grain and doing something differently. So it's really about striking out on your own path, finding your life's purpose, your life's mission, and doing things differently. Brent has definitely done that. So he's got a new book coming out that I think you guys should all check out in pre-order. It's called Ghost Town Living. 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. Brent, welcome with the skinny confidential, him and her show. This is the skinny confidential, him and her. 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. Doesn't even follow his wife. Wow. No. I appreciate it. I'm so glad you came here to do this. I think this is going to be one of the more unique episodes that we've done. I'm really excited to be here. For sure. We got connected years ago through Robert Green, who we love. And you have been up to some wild shit, my man. It's been a journey. I've been up to something. Yeah. So for the audience that doesn't have context,

you have a new book right now called Ghost Town Living. Why don't you just give a brief overview as to what you've been doing and what you've been up to? Because again, I think it's unique. So I previously lived here in Austin, Texas. I was working with Ryan Holiday, who you guys know as well. and I was kind of doing a lot of book marketing. I had a side project of a bed and breakfast on the east side at Caesar Chavez and Chicone, kind of like right there. So I've always had this level of history and hospitality. You know, the project over there was in an old Victorian mansion.

And so I was kind of looking for the next project. And a buddy of mine that lived in L.A. sent me this link that said, buy your own town for under a million dollars, which is just an amazing headline to begin with. And so he sent it to me in the middle of the night thinking he was a joke. He's like, oh, maybe this would be something you'd be interested in. I woke up. Didn't see as a joke.

So it was kind of the next opportunity called the real estate broker, long story short, ended up buying an abandoned mining town in 2018. 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. And we're in the mountains. So people think ghost town sometimes they think like a flat desert town, but we're in like the high desert. So it's at 8,500 feet in elevation. So we're up in the mountains. It's about 400 acres in total. And underneath the town, there's 30 miles of mine shafts. So there's like a honeycomb of mines everywhere. But here's my question. What's the lead up to this? Like there You said you wanted to switch it up, but there's got to be more than that. Were you just, like, tired of being in Jen Pop? Like, was, did you have a breakup with someone? Like, how did you really, like, get to this decision or was it truly out of nowhere? It wasn't necessarily out of nowhere. I think, you know, I just, I lived here in Austin. I had a comfortable life. I had a good apartment. I had a nice friends, have all that type of stuff. But I still had that feeling that maybe, like, there was some untapped potential that I wasn't fulfilling, that maybe there was something else out there. I had that kind of call to adventure that I think strikes a lot of people at different times.

times. I had just turned 30 also. And so I was like, you know, I felt like, I don't know what the clock was ticking in certain ways to do something. It was like, was this going to be my thing forever, this kind of like, kind of comfortable life that I was living here. And so when I think back, growing up, my grandfather used to watch gun smoke over and over and over again, you know, the old Western show where like all those things would happen. So like, there's always in this allure of the American West in like the romanticism of it. And then I think I went to school for real estate and finance. So that's kind of my technical background, I guess. And so I've always loved buildings, architecture. and that type of stuff. And when I saw the listing, you know, Robert Green talks about a lot about

your life's task. You know, your main goal is to find your life's tax, what you can combine your skills and interest in in a way that nobody else in the world can. So I felt like this is an opportunity to combine real estate storytelling. You know, I've been working with Ryan for 10 years then. So it's a way to combine the stories of the town and then also that like history and hospitality love that I had. So I think that was kind of 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? What could I like stretch myself to see what would happen?

And I highly suggest for those, listen, 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, I don't even know how to describe what it's very highly produced, but it's also just one person. And there's voiceover work. It's like you put a lot of time in that. And I think for people like, what the hell is he talking about living in a mining town? You have to go look at your YouTube channel and your TikTok 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. Well, yeah, I think that like...

I think he's watching porn upstairs beating his meat. And meanwhile, you're watching, you're watching a mining town. I'm watching Brent in the mine shafts. Yes. I mean, the videos, to have set the context more, the videos are documented of the last four years being up there. And they're long. They're not the 10-minute YouTube videos. They're usually like 45 minutes long.

And I let shots kind of linger for probably too long that I should. But yeah, it's a great place to start. But for those interested in YouTube and John, 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, like, you know, you said no shorts, it's just long videos you were filming with that were just interesting and unique. Yeah, I think that like, 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. And 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. Why do you say that? He's like, you don't shoot in the way that you should for YouTube, meaning like you should teach. You should, what's going to come next. You should do quicker shots. You shouldn't let a shot linger than more than three seconds. He was giving me all these things that made him successful. But I was originally just making videos that I thought were cool. I didn't watch a lot of YouTube, but I was like, this is the type of video that I would want to watch. And so I kind of started creating that. And I think sometimes listening to that guy, he almost led me down like a bad path

for a while. I started trying to like make the content that he was describing me to make. But I think eventually I kind of pulled myself out of it and started making what I make now. 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 kind of cracked the code. Sure. But it takes them out of what is unique to their style and their creation. 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. 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. Does that make sense? Definitely. I think that originally too, also your fans become your fans for a reason.

You know, I think that the fans that were watching it early on wanted that slower pace. 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, but pretty slowly, it's like a lot of direct-to-camera shots where I'm staring right at the camera, you know, and talking. It just builds a much deeper connection, at least I found early on. And I don't know. It's been a lot of fun. What did you tell your friends and family when you decided to take on this endeavor? One of the first person, one of the first people that I told was Ryan Holiday. He's always been like a close friend.

I remember sending him the link. He's like, I was like, hey, man, I'm going to buy this. Like, do you want to throw in a little bit of cash? Because I didn't have the money to buy the whole place. I remember he sent me that meme that was like, you know, that'll be a no from me dog, like Randy Jackson or whatever. That's all Ryan sent back. And I was like, oh, come on.

Give me a little bit of a break here. So a lot of them were a little hesitant. But the end of the day, like I've been kind of taking a lot of, of risks since I graduated from Columbia with a real estate degree. And so I should have gone into like investment making or something like that. And I quit that to do the backpacking thing. I eventually just worked freelance jobs to do anything but work in a traditional mode. So like my parents, my close friends were used to me kind of taking these types of risks. So they're, I don't know, they're generally supportive of it. How does one prepare to do this? Like what were all

the things that you did in preparation? And also did you prepare for a week or did you prepare for a year? Yeah, well, when I moved out there, this was in March of 2020. So this is when everybody was trying to figure out where we were going to be during the pandemic. You know, everybody was socially distant and saying, where are you going to go next? You remember social distance? Yeah, and this was the period of time when there was even like the rumors that were going to shut down state borders. Remember that time when they were like, oh, we're going to shut down the borders? So I was on East 6th Street and I was right over there.

And I was like, I got to go. I got to go like now. And I thought maybe I'd be out there for a couple weeks because again, we didn't really know how long this thing was going to last. Wolfly unprepared to answer your question. I got out there in like all bird slippers or whatever they were, you know, and like no winter clothes. The first night I got there, I was driving a two old drive truck and it didn't even make it all the way into town. 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. So you're getting almost a mile.

So imagine like a very steep, very like narrow dirt road that's like on cliffs. 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. And so when I got about a mile from town, the truck kind of started fish tailing, you know, like this. And so I was like, oh my God. And I think they're like, you're all alone. All alone. Just in my truck with all my stuff from Austin. I had cell service barely, no Wi-Fi. There's no running water up there. There is power. 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. And so I wasn't, I wouldn't describe it as prepared. 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. Because I think that there's no handbook on bringing an abandoned mining town back to life. So we're kind of treating that as we go. And I think that's kind of part of the appeal of it is that, you know, problem solving nature they have to get into to figure it all out. 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. There's not a town that has like a convenience. I'm thinking that there's like a 7-Eleven.

The name of the town is Cerro Goro. So back in the day, 1865, Serogoto gets established as a mining town. So they originally found Galena there, which is a silver and lead ore. And so by, let's say, 1870, five years later, the town had about 4,000 residents. 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. Is there a brothel there now? There's an old brothel still standing. It's called Lola's Palace of Pleasure was its name. Perfect name. Keep going. Owned by Lola Travis, a huge entrepreneur back in the day. Actually, she had multiple locations. And so there was all these are 4,000 residents.

hundreds of buildings. If you adjusted for inflation, they pulled about $500 million with the minerals out of the hill. So it was like a boom town. This place was everybody was coming and going. By about 1880, everybody had packed it up and left. The silver vein was mostly gone. Everybody left. And then a guy came in 1910 and he realized, while everybody was paying attention to the silver, nobody was paying attention to zinc. They started mining zinc again. And so they mined zinc to about 1940. And so for a mining town, I have an active life from 1860 to 1940, like 80 years, it's crazy. usually they thought these camps were going to last five to eight years at most. And so the town these days, when I say town, it's the former time of mining town of Saragoro.

You know, there's no more mining going on up there. Mining hasn't happened since about 1940s, almost 80 years now. And these days, there's about 20 buildings left. We have, you know, there's a hotel, a bunkhouse, an old movie theater. We have the main mine building. There's about 400 acres of land and there's no running water. There is power bordering us. If you look to the east, you see all of Death Valley National Park.

So the parks right there. And if you look to the west, you see the Sierra Nevada and Mount Whitney. And so it's kind of set in between. That's probably beautiful. Yes, it's set in between because Mount Whitney is the tallest peak in the lower 48 and death valley is the lowest. So it's kind of this high, low contrast that I think describes the town really well. You know, it's this place where so many people went out there seeking their riches. You know, they were going to strike their claim and get rich.

And almost nobody did. It just has a history of grinding people to dust. I mean, there's a cemetery still in the town that has 400 people that are probably very, you know, excited, ambitious to go out there. 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. And then two, to allow basically people to stay overnight, you know, like basically a destination. So we're building a hotel right now.

We're just about done with it. Hopefully this year it's done. So it's about seven bedrooms. There's a restaurant. There's actually a bar. We have a Brunswick bar from the 1870s, the actual bar itself that came out of Ryan's store and Bastrop. And so, like, he used to have a bar. I don't know if you guys remember that on the record store store side of the building. We were out there. We're out there at night. And I don't know, like, 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've got to probably go out there. And he gave us this beautiful bar that, like, 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. And then we looked it up afterwards and they're very rare. they're like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he's like, well, I don't want to be that generous with it all. But he had a good tax right now for something. So, okay. So you're out there. What do the initial days look like? You get there. You're the only person in this old mining town.

There's all these abandoned buildings. There's a graveyard. There's a deserted mine. Again, you go see your videos. You actually physically go down into the mine, which I think most people, many people would find terrifying because you're knowing. But what did the first few days look like? and what are you actually doing? Because I think we talk all the time about kind of getting away, getting off the grid, getting outside yourself.

Like this is, like you really did it. 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. Again,

this is during the pandemic. So everything was a little bit different. And suddenly I had 400 acres to just explore and look around. So the days would usually be, wake up, try to get warm. There's no essential heat.

So it's burning wood, you know, like chopping up the wood, putting it in the fireplace, trying to kind of get the evening cold out of there. Where did you sleep in the beginning? Do you sleep in one of the buildings?

Yeah. So I sleep in what's called the Belshaw house. So the town was originally established in 1865 by a guy named Mortimer Belshaw. And so he was the main guy that brought the financing and made it. Yeah, it's a great name. And so I actually had these like crazy mutton shops too. He's just like, he's an amazing photo. His photo is he has like a portrait still in his house, which is awesome.

And so I stay in his old house, which is right in the center of town. It's a two bedroom house, no running water, all that type of stuff. And so usually I would get warm. You know, I did have a little bit of cell service. So I would look to see if there's any, you know, emails that were like urgent that I needed to handle. And otherwise, it would just be hiking around. I was hiking through three or four feet of snow at that point in time. So I'm hiking around. I'm looking at the buildings. I'm wondering why, you know, I had owned the price for two years

then and nothing had been really happening. You know, I tried to basically phone it in from Austin. And an abandoned mining town to 400 acres and 20 falling down buildings is not something that can be a back burner project. It's very much like a front burner project. And so then I started doing what I could. You know, the first thing I did was just starting repairing one of the porches. I thought, you know, listen, I've been waiting for all the circumstances to be perfect before making the right move. I was doing almost what I would call playing business. You know, 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 just wasting time. And so then I started, I was like, you know what I'm going to start. And so I started

building the deck. And that led to like fixing one of the cabins, fixing another cabin. And so the days early on were split between fixing up the cabins and then just hiking around. And then kind of the side part of that is I, Ryan says stolen, I say borrowed. I borrowed one of Ryan's cameras because I wanted to learn how to do astro photography, you know, those long exposures. 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? And so I started making the videos, probably my third month up there. So you didn't go into it to know that you were going to create content and create this brand and book. Yeah, that was crazy. I didn't even start make the first video

until two and a half years after owning it. And the only thing that drove me to do that was it was the pandemic. You know, people started doing new hobbies. Some people started making like the sourdough bread and all these different things. I was like, oh, I'll make some videos. And the first video I remember,

it was like, I spent my life savings on an abandoned mining town, which is a good title for a video. Yeah. And so the first video did it really well. And I remember early on, I still don't understand the power that maybe a popular YouTube channel could have.

And so the guy that came up that gave me the advice, he's actually the one. He's like, listen, you should take this a little more seriously. This could really help your town. It could help it, you know, bring it back to life like you want to do. 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. That's how we met through Robert. And so I had always been in proximity to other creative people, but I never had like that creative outlet of my own. And so I think with the videos, I found my own creative outlet. I really enjoyed it. That's probably so liberating for you that you have helped behind the scene so much. And now you're able to put your energy towards something that's creating something for yourself.

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. So to work that closely with them now is just, it's very satisfying. I have a question. I need some little details here. As many as you do that. Okay. What are you eating? I need like you to tell me that you're eating like, are you eating cheez-its or are you like hunting a chicken?

Early on, I got stuck up there where the road, the eight mile dirt road doesn't get plowed. You know, nobody's plowing this road. And so when the blizzard hit, when I first arrived, it was a function of, I need to eat anything. So there's canned goods. A lot of these canned goods were like expired canned goods that were just up there from. You brought them up there or they were just there. No, there into the different cabin. So I was kind of going cabin to cabin to cabin eating the canned goods.

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 because the closest market. of any sort is about an hour away. Then how are you going to have a restaurant up there? The hotel that we're building, it's from scratch. It has, like, deep commercial freezers and, like, walk-in fridges and all that. So we'll have to have, like, deliveries quite often to, like, handle that part of it. There's electricity up there, right?

We have electricity, yeah. I think I should open a brothel called Lauren's Treasure Pleasure. Lauren's Palace of Pleasure. Lauren's Palace of Pleasure. I kind of like it. It has a ring to it. It's good. 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. I'm out. We have plenty of rumors. My husband loves solitude. He would love it. I love it. Do you get to read a lot? I get to read a lot. I get to just stare at a wall a lot. Sometimes I just like need this. The recharge is staring at a wall. I just love doing that. It is. There is like a very romantic appeal to it most of the days. There's two sides to Michael Bossick. There's one side that like wants to be on the show and wants to listen. Then the other side that wants to just leave and never come back. Honestly, I could use a break. Do you want you want a friend out there. Come on out. Come on out. I have some more little micro questions. Yes. Are you drinking alcohol, smoking weed or doing drugs? No, none of the above. So you're dead sober. Yeah. So like early on,

people, when you live in a mind town, they think that you're drinking a lot of whiskey. So I'd get gifted just many bottles of whiskey. That's what I would gift you. I think. Yeah. 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. Thinking it was a joke, I was just like joking around. 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 and I don't drink at them there's a shelf and nobody ever comes up? They do when the weather's good you know, when the wintertime, not so much.

So you're not drinking whiskey up there. Not drinking whiskey. I'd love to like eventually start a whiskey thing I think that'd be cool like an old mining town whiskey. I'm not saying that I don't drink at all but like I've never one of those ones that's like a social drinking.

I'm not going to sit there by myself and stare out the window. 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 if that was kind of the route I was taking. Are you dating anyone when this is happening? Not at the beginning, no. These days I am, though. So how are you maintaining a dating relationship with this? My girlfriend has a profession where she can be very flexible where she is. So she's a musician. Does she come with you? She's been up at the town for many

months before, yeah. Wow. Are you guys like sleeping in a sleeping bag or is it a bed? No, there's beds up in town these days. There's bed. Yeah. Okay. So like that the houses, they're old, but inside we have like Castro mattresses now, you know, Ghost Town, Casper makes sense. Good play for Casper. You're like ghost town.coastown. Yeah. Ghostown.com slash shit. But no, the insides are pretty comfortable. There's no central heat, but the betting and stuff is pretty good. 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? You're up there. You're alone. You're in a mining town. I don't know if you believe in ghosts, but like there's a lot of creepy stuff that's

happened up. There's people that have died in this mine. Yes, right? And there's a lot of them. There's a graveyard. You're by yourself living in some old guy's house that's been gone for a long. Like, are you scared or nervous in the beginning? And how are you kind of going through those emotions? Yeah, originally there was, I think the excitement overrode any type of nervousness or anything like that. But there were sounds that when you're not used to them, I was like, what, what is going on? 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. You can't blame it at anybody else. What kind of sounds?

Like what kind of sounds? A door closing that you're not around, you know, things like that. And then that's when you really start to question. And I get the question about ghost a lot because the town was really dangerous back in the day. The newspapers would show a murder a week. And there was a mining collapse in 1871 that collapsed 30 miners down at the 200 foot level of the mine. And they're still there. There's so much rock that fell on top of them.

and get them out. So I think that they're still entombed miners, you know, 200 feet below where I'm sleeping is like an uncomfortable thought to go through. Did you know, water is good for you, but it's actually not so great for your hair. The calcium in our shower water is amplifying the damage that we all have in our hair from coloring and other salon services. And when I decided to change my hair from blonde to burnet, I obviously picked everyone's favorite, Caristos. Carastos is absolutely amazing. So it's this luxury professional hair care line. You all probably recognize it from the nicest, most luxurious salons. And Kerasastas has finally come out with the solution for damaged hair. The new premiere repairing pre-shampeo treatment. Basically what this did for my hair is it took my hair

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purchase at www.k-E-K-E-S-T-A-S-E-E-S-E-A-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-com. One thing that I try to do with my daughter at least five times a week is bake with her. We love baking. It's just like a bonding mother-daughter experience. We bake sugar cookies. We'll put sprinkles on them, chocolate chip muffins, we bake banana bread, we get really creative in the kitchen. So you can imagine I take my bakeware very seriously and it should not surprise you that I use Caraway. The reason that I use Caraway for all my kitchen supplies is because it's non-toxic. 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. And Carraway is the absolute best. All of the

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This deal is exclusive for our listeners. So visit carewayhome.com slash him and her or use code him and her at checkout. Karaway, non-toxic cookware made modern. One thing I take very, very seriously is my time. And I can say since moving to Austin, I have not gone to the grocery store. I have gone to the farmer's market, but not the grocery store. And that is because I have Thrive Market. Thrive Market is my personal mommy wife go-to for all my grocery and household essentials.

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matching program, you join and they give. You should also know they have cleaning categories. So if you're looking for some non-toxic cleaning supplies, they have that as well. It's really everything in one place. Save time and money and shop Thrivemarket today. Go to Thrivemarket.com slash Skinny. You get 30% off your first order plus a free $60 gift. That's T-H-R-I-V-E market.com slash skinny. Thrivemarket.com slash skinny. Speaking of mining, you're going down 900 feet and hanging out there. Does that not give you the most claustrophobic anxiety? Like you have to explain, first of all, how you know how to do that and what that's actually like. Yeah, it's one of those learning on the job situations. Again, I grew up in Florida. It was very flat. There's no mines, anything like that. 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. Meaning, you know, if it wasn't for what I was happening underground, nothing above ground would exist. And so for me to understand the history, I felt like I almost had to go into the mines in a certain way.

And so originally was one of those ones where you'd walk 20 feet in the mine, get scared and run out. You know, walk 30 feet in the mind, run out, walk out. But eventually I started learning how to use ropes, you know, how to do different things, you know, talking to people that were on search and rescue in the area, things like that. And these days, I'll repel down the 900 feet, which is fun. It's fun going down the rope, nine hundred feet. It's less fun going back up the 900 feet. Why?

For you taxing. You have to imagine like pulling yourself up a rope for like 900 feet. Wait, how long does 900 feet take to pull up? Is it like five minutes? No, so I was going as fast as I possibly could last time I did it. It was two hours and 45 minutes. Like as fast as you possibly could. Wait, can you take a break?

You can take a break. You can hang out on the rope. It has like it won't let you go back down. But imagine 90, 900 feet is like a 90 story building with 10 foot ceilings, you know? That's what I'm saying. You have to kind of like go look at his stuff in parallel with listening to this. to understand how wild this is. One of the questions I had in relation,

not only to the town, but actually going down on the minds, I was watching one of your videos, you're like, you know, if something happens to you down there and you're alone, nobody knows,

nobody knows you're in an old mind. You're all alone. There's no service. You're in the middle of the dark in many cases. This is kind of like, I guess, a spiritual thing,

but what happens to your mindset when you have that kind of isolation? I think many of us fantasize about kind of like getting away and unplugging. Like, this is really away and unplugged and the world doesn't know anything about where you are. What does that like? Yeah, I mean, I love going into the minds because, you know, athletes describe the flow state a lot. They're like, I can get into flow state. And I think one in the minds, everything else almost dissolves away. 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. I only focused like literally on tunnel visions because I just see a tunnel in front of me. And so I enjoy the experiences because I'm not worried about, you know, an email I didn't answer or angry phone call it somebody. I'm just worried about what's in front of me, getting through the mind, discovering whatever I'm going to discover. And to describe what'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 nine hundred feet underground. Then you go over to a side shafts. There's no idea that even a glimpse of light could get in there anymore. And it's quieter than any

other place in the world because there's no dripping water. There's no animals down that deep. So it's just as quiet and as dark as it possibly could be. And so sometimes just like for fun, I'll turn off all my lights and just stand there. And that's a very like dissociating feeling. Whoa. I don't know. I really love it. Do you have extra flashlights in case one goes out?

Are you using your phone? What if your phone goes out? Like what are your... It's just the iPhone. Yeah. The, the, the, the, the, the answer is glow sticks. Because glow sticks can't run out of batteries. And so I'll have my head lamp and everything.

But I usually have a glow stick in my pocket. So if worst case, I could bring up. break that and that'll like, you know, at least illuminate enough to get back to wherever I need to go. That is smart. A glow stick. How do you, how do you keep track and like map out where you are down there? I bet that's a scary part of it because how do you even know where these paths go? Yeah, you're kind of trying to remember where you go. 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. And so I can these days walk through a mind like this

using Polycam as the name of that. And it'll capture the dimensions. 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 can be like, oh, how far was that? And then it's capturing dimension. So I'm going to be like, oh, it's exactly 174 feet back in the mine is when this happens. And so I think it's cool for that reason. But it's also cool because these mines are actively collapsing. You know, back in the day there might have been 30 miles. Now there's maybe 20 miles. And so this is like a digital archive of the mine that it's going to exist forever. How deep have you gone? 9 hurt feet is the bottom of the shaft. But then off of that, there's probably miles.

to the mine shafts where you're just wandering and meandering back there. 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 were changing in different clothes. There was dynamite vaults where they kept all the dynamite. There was areas where some of the mules that would be down in the mines would stay. There was restrooms down there, break rooms. And so there's all of these things existing 900 feet underground that are just very fascinating to walk into. 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?

What's your why? The why is, one is understand the history of the town. Again, I think that the context, anytime we can understand more context of your surroundings, it means more to you. Meaning like, so let's say that you lived by a park, right? 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. The next time you walk by that park, it's going to mean more to you than it did

the day before. And so for me, I read about the 900 level of the mind necessarily in a book over and over. But then when I go down there, I see it with my own eyes. It just comes alive when I think about. it. And so part of its understanding that history, which allows me to feel more connected to the mine and feel more connected to my work, which I think is important. But the other reason is, it's interesting. You know, there's old school stuff down there. You know, the thing that mine explorers are always looking for is Levi jeans, which is really interesting. Because Levi jeans,

genes as we know them were invented by Levi Strauss in the 1870s. You know, denim existed before that, but Levi Strauss invented blue jeans as we know them in 1870 for California silver miners. there is supposed to be work pants at first. And so if you can find an original pair of Levi jeans from 1870, it's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And like it's interesting not to me necessarily because of the price tag, but because of the rarity that's attached to them. And I love history. So the idea that this everyday item that, you know, most of us wear most of the days is, I don't know, originated from something that might be in the mine is cool. I'm going to put it out there in the ether that you're going to find Levi jeans. I love that. I need that. I need that type of

mostly. It's my size. what's the most unique thing you've found down there? My favorite thing, I have found a pair of Levi's. They were shredded. They were very damp. That was one of the damp levels of the mine. But they had the Levi's put the rivets on the jeans for the first time. So they had the rivets that said like Levi Strauss and Co.

on them. 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. And so I could text her a photo of the button and she could say, oh, 1910. She knows exactly when the genes are from. but my favorite find down there I was by a ladder that was connecting an upper level of the mine

and the lower level of the mine and there was an old tobacco tin and in the tobacco tin there was a note that these miners were passing back and forth and all they were doing was trying to figure out when they were going to go to lunch but to me it just 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 and that just I don't know it struck me in a way being down there in a way that I found clothing items I found a bunch of old dynamite

I found silver ore. I have found some silver ore. I pulled it out and refined it and made some jewelry out of it. But humanization of it was really good. When you do this, it's so relaxing. I don't know if relaxing is the right word.

It's so maybe calm. And it's so zen. And it's so not taxing on your nervous system besides the minds. But it seems like it's like you're just, you're with the earth. And then you come back here. And you've got Ryan Holiday's podcast

and a meet and greet. you're in this room right now with these lights that are so bright. Do you feel a lot like it's too much and you need to take a beat? Yeah, I think the first day back, I'm almost craving it because it's been so long I want human interaction. But I think that like my bandwidth for human interaction to describe it always like shortened so much after being up there where before maybe I would love to be in a crowded space for a couple hours. Now it's 30 minutes and I'm good. And I remember my first time back, the first year that I lived at Seragold, I was never left. I just loved it and I wouldn't go anywhere else during the pandemic. I was always doing much.

So probably for the first, let's call it 18 months, I never left the hill. Then they go to the town to get some groceries maybe once in a while. And the first time back was to Austin and I went to ACL and like Austin City of limits and it was just a nightmare to be honest with you. Because like two reasons. Like one, there are so many people. But then also I never really met people that were watching the channel up until that point because it was all just like numbers on the screen. But walking into ACL people were coming up to me. It was like, oh, I love your. And like it was very, whoa. Like, not only are them around people, they're like coming in close to me, you know, is a very interesting experience. I'm sure.

There's like no exposure to all of a sudden millions of people know who you are. Yeah. What are little things that you, that or we take for granted that when you come back, you just want? Fresh fruit. Okay. Number one for me. Vegetables in any sense. Sushi is a nice one.

Running water. When you go. Talk about that for a minute. What is it like having running water? Yeah, I think you can kind of conceptually think, oh, like running water that would be difficult but then you start thinking washing dishes it's hard you know washing your hands washing everything and it's just it almost can consume your whole day I think there's this quote that mark twain said back in the day he said whiskey's for drinking and waters for fighting over

and I think they're like I understand that now because it's just like it consumes my whole day sometimes trying to figure out exactly how to get water into the town these days we truck it up in an old military truck that I saw you is that the one with like the giant container like the huge yeah That thing's massive. And once you get it up there, where do you put it? It feeds to the houses. So to the houses these days have kind of a working restroom with a shower. So I've made a lot of progress since that first period of time being up there.

You know, originally it was kind of like camping indoors, as I would describe it. These days there's a restroom, there's a shower, there's all these fine things. But I'm still blown away. 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 about reliable running water. And I was on the plane back. I went to the bathroom with a plane. I was like, oh, like, I'm in the air.

and they can like have a sink in this air and I can't you know I can't have a sink in the town but you can I guess now like what that concept so you can essentially bring this supply of water up yeah consistently and then supply all these houses with like because they're never gonna would they ever get to the point where they pipe it up there they would never pipe it up the mountain but half of my day is thinking about other alternative water sources so what big one that I've been experimenting with this winter is gutters you know we do get a lot of snow so when it melts and has to go somewhere I'd love to capture some of that I've explored the idea of drilling a well, which we're at the top of a mountain. 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. And with wells, it's crazy. Wells, there's no guarantee. They said you can drill and it'll be dry. How much is it? About $250,000 to drill the well. So are you taking investors for the hotels? Or like, what's the plan with that? Yeah. So I've been self, originally some friends chipped in money to buy it because it was $1.4 million to buy it originally. I had the property in Austin that I can kind of get a loan against. So that helped a lot. I mean, Austin real estate was a good thing to get into a while back when I got into it. Had some friendships and some money, but these days, a lot of it's self-funded. I still work the day job with Ryan. You know, we still have our company

there. And then the social media, you know, the ad integrations on YouTube, stuff like that pays for a lot of it as well. That's right. Do you love what you're doing right now, wouldn't change it for the world? Yeah, absolutely. I think I love it in a way that I never thought I could like enjoy my work in when I was living here. I think that's what keeps me there. It's very difficult to live there. I want like sugarcoat. It's really hard day to day. Like I'm not a guy that could like lose a lot of weight and I lost like 40 pounds that's living up there just because there's not a lot of food. You know, health and nutrition needs 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 like focused on rebuilding.

But like the trade off is worth it to where I'm, I'm stoked about what I get to do every single day. And I think that that's something I always love to do. I don't think that I'll be up there full time. I do think that's unsustainable long, long term. I think I would love to split my time almost, six months the best like the summer months up there enjoy that time. Winters can get pretty cold and snowy. And being from Florida, I'm not about that life necessary all the time. Yeah, I'm not. Yeah.

So I think long term, if I'm thinking five, ten years down the road, splitting my time might be the way to do it. What's the craziest story that's happened to you out there? Oh man. There's different genres of stories. There's like natural disasters. There's social media stuff. There's stalker type situation.

Tell us all three. Yeah, maybe what's the scariestest you've ever been up there? Or the most scared? The most scared. There's two moments that came on. How is someone stalking up there? Geez, that's a committed stalker. I'm going to tell you what, Brent.

If someone was stalking me in the ghost town, I would be like, God, this person really wants to be with me. Maybe I should give them a chance. It's tough because the big premise of the videos is where I live. That means that everybody knows where I live, even down to the house. I live in the Belshall house. It's like a well-known thing. And so I think Tim Ferriss talked about it once where he said basically the law of big numbers.

If you have a big following, I think he said he's like, listen, in high school, in your graduating class, where there are a couple of people that are a little bit difficult to deal with? Yeah, there's like two or three. It's like, okay, how many are in your high school class? 500. Okay, like multiply that by a million. You're going to have tens of thousands of people that are difficult to deal with it in different ways. And so one night I was up there by myself, this is early on in the experience.

A bunch of four-wheelers came in town in the middle night. This is like 3 a.m. 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, you know, you don't happen upon the town. If you're going up to the town, you're going up there for a reason. I get heightened down. I'm like, what are they here for? And so I didn't really know what to do.

And so I was thinking, what's the game plan now? I didn't want to like instigate some type of Wild West shootout by like. You can have a firearm there. I have a fire arm. Yeah, I have a couple just to like protection more than anything else. So I was like, do I want to go that route and potentially start? So I decided I was just going to turn on all the lights. So I turned on all the lights in my house.

They kind of left and they went up the hill where there isn't anything about beyond town. So I didn't really know where they were going. I was like, where could they possibly be going? And then I heard them talking, but I couldn't make out what they were saying, maybe a half mile away. Eventually, I went to sleep maybe around 4 a.m. And then five, they were back in town again for a second time. And they shut off the lights again in the same spot.

And so I'm just thinking at this point, they're aware that I'm here. So at first, I gave them the benefit of the doubt, hey, they didn't know anybody was in town. Maybe they just, you know, wanted to find an abandoned ghost town. But now they knew that I was there and they're stopping it again. And that was like a more difficult situation. I was doing a warning shot, you know, what I was supposed to do here. luckily I just turn on lights and left again for the second time 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 and so I think that's probably the most uncomfortable I had been super under it reminds me when you were talking that Danny DeVito meme and then I started blasting yeah yeah yeah yeah that'd be me I'd be like I don't have time to figure this out these days we do have sense I do know when people are in town just you know is that the stalker I didn't figure out they were another time somebody robbed us up that robbed me up there. That was not like face to face. They stole something out of one of the buildings when I was sleeping. I feel like that's just someone who wants to just take like a souvenir.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, they took like a giant jug full of money. So it's less of a because I had like, you know those five gallon glass jugs that like for water? Yeah. I had one of those where people could put donations because we don't charge people to look around the town. It's like donation based. So people will throw five, 10 bucks in there or whatever. And I didn't realize how to like get the money out of the jar. It's like a more. difficult process. So I just left it in the other. I was like whatever. There's somebody who stole that in the middle of the night one night. What about the stalker? I want to hear about the stocker. Yeah. There's a woman in Karen. We'll use the name Karen. And Karen was going to help us

with some supplies. She wanted to help out the town however she could. She was coming from Utah. I was like, oh, we're building houses. She's like, oh, I can't build any houses. But I can help you some supplies? It's like fantastic. I'll always need vegetables. And how do you know this? Is this via DM or is this email? So we're emailing back and forth. She's like, how can I help the town? I was like, okay, we love fresh fruits and vegetables. I say the same thing to everybody. Fresh fruits, vegetables, water. Bring up whatever you'd like. She's like, okay, I'll bring some up. So she was supposed to arrive around 10 a.m. And I think, all right, so I'm expecting around 10. Not there, not there, not there. Sun setting at, let's say, seven. So 6.30, a car rolls into town.

It's Karen. I look out, and she's just like chain smoking in this Dodge Charger, which shouldn't be able to make it all out of town on the dirt road. So already, that's very strange. I was like, what was going on? And at the time, we had, like, somebody helping me up there. And so he was there. And she was having a difficult time parking the car. I went down to meet her. I was like, oh, hey, how's it going? And she said, oh, I'm sorry, I came so late. You know, I know it's a lot later than you anticipated. She seemed very flustered.

If you're like very flustered with the whole situation, it's like, don't worry about it. Don't worry about driving back down the hill at night. It's really scary. I was like, we have plenty of beds up here. You know, we have the bunk house over here. We have this room, this building that has six rooms in it. And she got very uncomfortable with that prospect.

She said, no, no, no. And like, I thought, okay, she doesn't want to like sleep in a building with other people. I understand that. You know, I could understand that. I was like, we have a trailer over here as a private, like, airstream trailer. And I was like, you can stay in the trailer. And she goes, she kind of regudging.

She's like, oh, okay, okay, we'll go to the trailer. And so my buddy's parking the car for her because she couldn't park the car. And I'm walking up. And she starts quoting the movie, Misery. Have you seen that movie? With Kathy Bates. So basically this movie is about, Jesus Christ.

Yeah, this movie's 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. So she keeps breaking his legs. I'm going to pin that to my. pinboard if Michael fucks up. That's a good one. You just keep breaking the legs. Yeah. So, like, she's an urge. And so this woman, this woman starts quoting misery to me. And I was like, whoa. I kind of know what it was. And then my buddy came up. He's like, dude, you have to get out of here right now.

And because the vibe is off. So we get her, we go into the trail. I'm like, okay, very nice to meet you. I'm going to go back to my house. And at the time I was not staying in the Belshaws house, I was staying in the Gordon house. And I was like, I'm staying in the Gordon, but like, nice to meet you. I'll see you later. And so I go into the other house, though, just knowing something was up. my buddy was talking to her and she's like oh she got really flustered again she's like this this wasn't the plan and he's like well what was the plan you know and she was like oh I'm very embarrassed and he's what's the plan and oh like I wanted to spend the night with Brent tonight and and my buddy you know took it and he doesn't even let me do that you know trying to make a joke out of it and I guess she was

like well can I go down and get one of the cats I have some cats out of the Gordon house he's like absolutely not the Gordon house is his house nobody's allowed in there at night like do not go in there and then he comes over to the other house and we watch out the way that the window and less than an hour later, she's like creeping into the house that she thinks that I'm in. And at which point, we were concerned. So we go down to this other building, we changed locations the second time. And we decided, I had her email address. We looked up on Facebook. And her last two posts on Facebook before she came up here were, um, you bring out the inner serial killer in me, was her post. And then that one after that was like, I may be smiling, but in my head, I've killed

you a hundred times. Was there two posts before she came to Cerro Gordo? And so originally we were like, Well, this is like a problem. And so my buddy snuck back and took a photo over her license plate just so that way we had it on file. She eventually leaves like two hours later in the middle of the night, you know, midnight. She just takes off, goes back to Utah. And we thought that was ended up. We were like, oh, that was weird. You know, it was like, oh, the crazy Karen story. You know, we had this story in town. Oh, I forgot to tell you. When she arrived, she handed me five hand painted paintings of me. But like me jacked, like me with like way more muscle like sitting on a bench. To hang those things. Yeah, no, we did. They're in the house now. Yeah, I came up. And so I stole the paintings. And that was concerned. That was her image of you. Just like to see. Yeah. And then and then Jack to minor. I forgot about it. And then I moved houses after that. I was like, I'm moving houses. So I moved to this other cabin. And a couple weeks later, I'm just like on a phone call and the charger pulls up in front of the house again. I see her chain smoking and I was like, no. So I run to a different building and somebody else is there. I was like, hey, go tell that person

they should leave or whatever. And I guess she said, hey, I'm here to pick up Brent. I'm here to take him to Lone Pine for a couple days. There's the closest town. And the person was like, you're not here to like take him to Lone Pine. And she basically wouldn't leave for a while after that. But that was the, that was the stalker story. Where is she now? Have you looked her up on Facebook recently to see her?

I haven't. Oh, I haven't. This has been two years. You got to look it up. He's buried her in the mine. Yeah, I have a lot of mine shouts. I have questions after this story. It sounds like there's a couple people that are up there though with you now.

These days, yeah. Well, that's probably like. That's good. Yeah. This episode is brought to you. by Better Help. All right, if you are looking to do therapy from your couch, I have something to tell you about, and that is better help. This is the best way to squeeze something that's very important into your schedule from the comfort of your own home. I know that therapy is such a tool to so many people,

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terms apply. When you were first starting out, though, and you were by yourself, what was your idea if something went wrong? Like, you must have had like some kind of protocol in your head. Yeah, so I had my cell phone, which always is good to call. But I also have what's called like a garment in-reach. And so like in-reach is there are satellite phones essentially. So you can, if you lose service, no matter what, there's an SOS button on it. So if you press that, a helicopter's coming to you. Okay. And so like, no matter what happens, you press that button, the helicopter's finding that helicopter's finding that hill is finding you're finding you're finding you have to. So that's kind of subscription to like a service you have to. Yeah, it's like a service. Yeah, it's like a service. Yeah, it's like a service. It's like $9 a month. I mean, that's worth it. I mean, that's worth. I mean, that's worth. Yeah. It's worth. It's worth. It's worth. It's worth. It's like a $150 little device that clips right here. And it actually will use Bluetooth to your phone. So you can use your phone as normal, but it's communicating through satellite. I have a random tangent question. What are things people should consider when it comes to survival and taking care of

themselves? 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, like what are the things that they should think about investing? Or even just things that you've discovered like, hey, people should just have this regardless of being, you know, camping or not. I think the government thing's good.

I think the biggest one, which people take for granted is like just telling somebody where you're going. I think the biggest thing that kills people in Death Valley National Park is they go off trail. They want to go somewhere. Nobody knows where they're going. Their car breaks down. They have no cell service.

They're in the middle of the hottest desert in America. They leave their car to go hike out of the town to try to find some help and they eventually die. So like had they told somebody where they were going, maybe they would have been saved. And so I was on a hike once where I was as close. close to not making it as probably I've ever been. But I told my buddy that if these circumstances happened, like, what to do to like start walking up the wash. And that's probably like what got me through that hike. And so I think that like telling somebody where you're going, you know,

having a pain of it. If you don't hear me from this, like what are the circumstances after that? So you mentioned before when I was in the minds. These days, I tell some somebody knows where I'm going in the minds. They know if I'm not out by this time call this specific person that's on search and rescue and that that person has the experience to make a call beyond that. So it kind gets escalated. And so at these points, there's kind of like a fallback plan when I'm in those type of situations. What kind of permissions do you have to get to do all this stuff? Is it because it's your land? It's private landing to everyone. Yeah. What's your closest call that you've had besides Karen? This hike. So there's the thing called the Saline Valley salt tramps. They basically made a tramway

that goes from Saline Valley, which is in Death Valley, up this, it's 14 miles long. And the, the grade of it is 30 to 40 percent, which is an insanely steep grade. It's on shale. And I decided to walk that I wanted to do a hike. 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.

Because it was, and so I was basically, it was 131 in Death Valley that day, degrees. And so it was just so hot that I got, like, many blackouts as far as dehydration things go.

But my buddy, I told, if you don't see me at the bottom of this meetoff point, start walking up the mountain, basically. So he was able to kind of hike up some gate rates. So if you didn't have...

I mean, death valley kills a lot of people each year due to that dehydration and due to what basically what I was doing is hiking unknown trails that are too hard at the wrong time of year because there's no shade either. I was in these kind of rock canyons where you're just getting roasted for 12 hours straight. What do you think has been the biggest point of growth for you? Like what have you learned, like what's changed I guess about you prior to the ghost town to now? Because it sounds like you've had to develop a ton of interpersonal skills. No capacity for bullshit. 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. I think that the biggest one of me I think about is there's that phrase that everything is figure outable. And I think that early on, everything was a crisis to me. Like, let's say a door blew off a building. I was like, oh, my God, like, what are we possible? You know, 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. And then you get confidence by you figure out one small thing. You figure out a bigger thing. And these days, our road to get to town has been wiped out by a flood three times. So the first time it happened, I was like, projects done, the road got washed out. And now I have a back home. I'm like, well, I was rebuild the road. You know?

And so I think that that confidence that comes, like Ryan Holiday describes it as having evidence in yourself. You know, he's like, I don't bank on, you know, hope. I bank on evidence. So he says, I can recall in my own life when I've handled problems like this. And so I think I've been thrown into problems that I've been able to handle more. And so that like everything is figure out of what is probably the biggest one. That's a great one. You're building your resistance muscle.

Yeah. You wrote a fake book 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. Are you applying that to this book? And what was that experiment if someone wants their book to go to bestseller? That was a shot at Amazon more than anybody else because I think bestseller status is something that's very difficult to do with the book world. And I think for the longest time that meant New York Times bestseller list, which is very, very difficult to hit. You know, that's the New York Times polling independent bookstore from all over the country,

getting their reports, and then once a week they put out the bestseller list, and there's maybe four lists. And so you're selling tens of thousands of books to appear on that list. And so there's a level of prestige that comes with it that I think I saw being cashed in where I would see these packages that were like guaranteed bestseller for $4,000. 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. And so when Amazon came onto the scene,

they created their own bestseller lists. And basically, if you top out an Amazon category for an hour instead of a week, they'll give you the number one bestseller. And there's thousands of categories on Amazon. 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 to be a number one bestseller. And so I was trying to illustrate that when people were paying these companies

all this money, they were kind of getting scammed. And so I mainly wanted to protect some of the authors that I knew I was working with. And so to illustrate that point, I took a photo of my foot because I didn't want to, anybody get, say that, like, the book had merit.

That's why it did good. So I wanted no words in it. I uploaded the photo of my foot onto Amazon. I chose free masonry studies as a category, because I wanted, like, a very obscure category. And then my buddy bought one copy. I bought one copy.

So two copies later, it was the number one bestseller in free masonry studies after an hour. So I was just trying to show that, like, on Amazon, the New York Times is still a different, it's very, like, it's crazy.

It's very hard. like Amazon can be a different story. And so I wrote an article about that. I kind of illustrated it. It got a lot of different attention in the book publishing world. Amazon eventually took down my book. They were like, oh, that's not a book.

And so I, I appealed to Jeff Bezos a lot. You know, his email is public. It's just Jeff at Amazon. And I heard occasionally that he would answer customer service inquiries if you had like the right thing. And so the article started gaining a lot of press. So I kept emailing him over and over and over. And I was like, Jeff, we're both losing money here.

You know, like, let's get my book back online. And then thought, catalog. You know those guys? They're like an old website. So Thought Catalog published all of the articles as a new book that we called, you know, the expanded version of the footbook or whatever. And that got a lot of press. And kind of the, the point was to illustrate the idea of Amazon. The Toronto Star recreated the thing and they made their book a bestseller that way. But the kind of the fun ending of that is I was at a conference a couple years later. And Jeff Bezos and his brother were speaking at the event. And I remember like sitting across from him at this lunch table.

and like kind of be like, oh, I have a bone to pick, you know? And like he didn't remember it all until like, he pretended like he did eventually. He's like, oh, I remember that. And we took a photo together. That's kind of fun. He acknowledged putting my foot down. He did in his own way. You know, I think that like maybe he was just like making me feel good about it. But it was kind of a fun full circle. You're like you. Yeah, you. I've been thinking about you every day. What is the biggest learning tip that you've learned from Robert and Ryan? With Ryan, it's in Robert. You control that. You control that. input, not the output. Obviously, going into the book, sometimes you hear authors are like, my goal is to sell a million copies. That's like kind of a horrible goal to begin with. You start with that goal. It's a difficult game from there. But Ryan just, he's like, I'm going to do the best possible book I can do. I'm going to do my best job of launching it. But from there, any marketing is just hoping to kick off word of mouth. You know, that's what makes books sell year over year. Like right now, Robert's book is probably number 15 on Amazon, 15 years later after it came out.

And it's not there because Roberts promoting it all the time. It's because a word of mouth is taken over. and so Robert and Ryan both try to like control the input like what they're putting into the book and then like kind of like let be once it's out there and I'm trying my best I have a book for the first time it's very hard to like accept that mentality you know you kind of want to try to control your things and do whatever you can but that's kind of what I learned from them well I think it's very good advice too and it's probably freeing 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 be in with yeah and I think what Ryan does better than almost anybody is he never stops you know talking about

books and like or putting out books. And so I think some people see a book launch and they're like, oh, I got one week to like give it my all and then it's done. And Ryan's like, he's writing articles every week about his books for 10 years. And so when people are like, oh, wow, Ryan's books do good. He's putting a lot of work. You know, he's like, the output is incredible. Yeah. The output is unmatched. We haven't had him on for. We've got to talk to him again. Hi, Ryan. If you had to be put back in L.A., 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. Yeah. How are you finding peace, solitude, and zenness? I would find some mountain around me,

you know, if I'm allowed to go to the mountains or even look at them. No, you're not allowed to go to the mountains. I want to know, because I have two kids. I have a husband. I want to know what you would do. I think the point is, is you know, are you going to lock yourself in the closet? What are you doing? I think to me I think like oh yeah the term awesome gets thrown around a lot I think everything isn't awesome

but like awe is a powerful experience and I think you can find awe in different ways so for me I found it in the mountains I look out and the Mount Whitney is 14,500 feet tall so you just like you know you get that moment

where you realize kind of your smallness in it all I think that's the most thing is like zoom out and think my problems would be that big a deal I think if I was in a city you can find awe

in different things it doesn't have to be mountains like I think a an orchestra that's beautiful awesome in its own way. So finding those sources of awe is probably what I would do. 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. I think that's what I would try to. I have a tip for you

when you do come back to maybe L.A. or Austin, get rid of all the lights in your house and just use natural light and red light bulbs. Red light bulbs. That's what I would do. And cut all your plumbing. Just get rid of it. No, I would, I think that that'll be help like the overstimulation. You can do like the Hunter S. Thompson. Like I just have red light in my room. So I don't ever have to feel this light. But don't you feel like now that you've experienced what you've experienced, like there's probably very slim chance of you moving back to a big city. Yeah, I don't think I would spend any significant time in a big city. I really enjoy having the space. I like, I get to play like, I could have dirt bikes and all these types of, you know, fun things that

I get explore on out there that I just value a lot more than the convenience of a city necessarily. Michael will be there. Michael will be there. Come out. We got dirt bikes. We have razors and side by You've had some pretty cool people out. Who, names are the people that have been out there. So yeah, Jeff Goldblum out there. That's a unique character. Jeff Goldblum came out to film something. During the pandemic, it was a cool place because it was close enough from L.A.

where people wanted to go something unique. Cole Sprouse came out before he's a big fan of Mining Towns. G.E.Z. came out one time with his girlfriend. A bunch of different people came through to do a bunch of people in the big YouTube world came out to film different videos. But I think that like it's a place where they know that they can find that piece that nobody's bothering them. They can just relax and rip around in a dirt.

but I can do whatever they want to do. If you would have known each other earlier and you would have sent me the mining pitch, I would have been best. Dang, all right. I would have been your guy. I would have been like, what the hell are we doing? Yes.

We got a mining town in the portfolio. Brent, where can everyone find you, your book, your YouTube channel? Tell us all the things. Yeah, Ghost Town Living is the name of the book. And it's the YouTube channel. That's probably the best place. The channel's the last four years of living up there.

The book is the same with a little bit more depth. And if they want, I mean, we are open every day, nine to five. After five, please don't come up. People can come check out the town around they want. Unless you're Karen. Maybe don't rent a Dodge Charger. Yeah, don't come in a charger. Don't come in the charger.

Brent, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you, Brad. Of course. Thanks for having me. Thank you.