Finding Purpose In An Abandoned Ghost Town | Brent Underwood

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2:33Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:26Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I went to the Spurs game in Austin on Sunday. I guess it's the I-35 series. The last two years, they've played here in Austin two games. I missed one of them. I got to go to the other one. And it was awesome. And it's funny because I tell a story in the new book. R.C. Buford is the CEO of the team, was nice enough to give us some tickets. And he's actually come to the book launch, like the philosophy dinners that we did for the Courage book and the Discipline book. He's been a great supporter of my work. And it's funny, I tell the story in the Justice book, which is coming out in June.

4:07You can pre-order that at dailystoic.com slash justice, I believe, or anywhere you get your books and I'll talk about the bonuses later. But anyways, I tell the story in the book about the Spurs coaching tree. Basically, the Spurs organization has maybe the most impressive coaching tree in all the sports. Coach Greg Popovich being essentially running a coach's clinic there. And I've just fallen in love with that team and seen what the organization has built and done. And the culture of not just wanting to win and be successful there in San Antonio, but wanting the people that are part of it to go on and do things.

4:50And basically, I think something like half the coaches in the NBA have some affiliation with the Spurs at this point. I remember RC was telling me one time, like he was bragging even about what their social media employees and salespeople have gone on to do. It's just an amazing organization. And so I was thinking about that when I was recording this interview, because it's about someone who's in my coaching tree. I tell the story at the beginning of the episode, so you'll hear it. But Brent Underwood started as my intern more than a decade ago. And he's gone on to be this hugely successful YouTuber.

5:28He owns a town at 8 ,000 feet, about three hours from Los Angeles called Cerro Gordo. If you've ever followed the YouTube channel, Ghost Town Living, you've seen it. You've probably seen his super viral clips. It's gotten incredible press coverage. But it's a YouTube channel we watch as a family. My oldest, Clark, is obsessed with it. And I've been reading Brent's new book, Ghost Town Living, Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams on the Edge of Death Valley. And I've been actually reading the book the last couple nights. Brent was at the Painted Porch on Tuesday. He did a book signing, an event.

6:02I'll bring you that episode later. But he signed a copy from my son, Clark. It said, Clark, keep exploring. See it at Cerro Gordo. And it's an awesome book. We've been reading it. It's really a great book. It's in that genre of like, you know, Desert Solitaire, Wilds by Cheryl Strayed kind of books. And I think you're really going to like it if you're not following Ghost Town Living on Instagram or YouTube, you're missing out. Brent Underwood is, I think, you know, I think he's going to go on to have an awesome and really cool career. And he's been integral to bringing you the Daily Stoic. This podcast would not exist without Brent.

6:40The YouTube videos would not exist without Brent. The email list would not exist without Brent. He quickly outgrew the intern role and has become my partner in building this business as well as Brass Check, my marketing company. So I'm really excited to bring you this conversation with the one and only Brent Underwood, ghost town proprietor, carpenter, builder, miner, adventurer, explorer, and all around great dude. Oh, and I meant to say Brent actually signed a thousand copies at the Painted Porch and he numbered each one. So these are signed, numbered first editions of Ghost Town Living, Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley.

7:23I'll link to that in today's show notes. If you're going to get a copy, it's a great audio book, which you recorded 900 feet underground in one of the mines, which is pretty cool. But if you want a physical copy and you should get one because it looks beautiful, it's a great book. You can grab that from The Painted Porch and I'll link to that in today's show notes. Check it out.

7:44I thought we should start at the beginning, which is how we came to meet each other. You applied to be my intern, right? Yes. Probably what, 2012, maybe? 2011? I think it would have been 2011 because Trust Me Online hadn't come out yet. Yeah, Yeah, I think it was 2011. The first book I worked on was Trust Me Online. Yes. 11, 13 years ago. Yes. It's crazy. It does seem crazy. And I think it's funny because like mostly internships don't go anywhere, like on both sides. Like they're a dead end for the intern. And then like most of the time, like when you hire interns, it's like you're doing your friend's kid a favor.

8:27and it just doesn't work out. Like it goes nowhere. But I feel like it worked out a little bit for you. I'd say very well. I'm sitting here now, book on the way. It's been crazy. It's been a wild journey. And I say in the back of the book, I'm very appreciative of all your guidance. Oh, am I in the acknowledgments? You're in the acknowledgments. Yeah, you gotta check it out. That's like the weirdest part to write. Like I get it. That one, that Harvard president who was accused of plagiarism, yeah she like partly she like uh plagiarized the acknowledgements but i get it it's so cringe to do the acknowledgements on something she was probably like that's good i'll just do that and i don't think it counts like i don't think like the scandal aside i feel like you can't it's like you can't plagiarize like a greeting card also can you like can you edit acknowledgements as like your feelings towards people change does that work okay so i'm doing the 10 i'm doing the 10 year anniversary of obstacle.

9:20And it's this tension between leaving stuff as it was like pure in that moment, like for the book itself, and then also the acknowledgements. Because I was grateful to that person in that moment. And I remain grateful, but my view of them has changed. So it's like, it's like my, my appreciation for what they did for me is still there. the flowery language with which I describe them is demonstrably untrue. Yes. Subsequently. Well, I imagine there's still a sense that you want to acknowledge that have helped the book significantly, potentially more than the people that were included initially. You know, I actually didn't think about that.

10:01And can you add in people to the acknowledgments? I think you can definitely add people into the acknowledgments. But taking them away. Right. Like the acknowledgments are dated to everyone who's helped you with the project up until like this is the launch day for your book, right? So like the acknowledgements, first off, you have to finish writing them. You can do it late in the process, but like at some point the book is locked and other stuff happens. But the acknowledgements are true up until that exact point and no point further. Even though, yeah, if, I don't know, if some person gets behind the book and makes it a huge hit, they would be integral to its success, but you would not.

10:40right like if it becomes a movie do you think like the movie producer you know what i'm saying like making into a movie or whatever you do well actually i was talking to michael dell uh and i asked him if he recorded his audiobook yeah and he was like i actually did i just he's like i wanted to do it and he's like there was this funny story where he uh was finished and then he started to record the acknowledgments and the guy was like we don't record acknowledgments in audiobooks and he was like on this book we do wait i did yeah well he was he was like he was like i feel so grateful to the people like i'm not not gonna thank them in this right and i i thought back i don't know if i've recorded the acknowledgements of all of my books yeah i didn't get clear instructions because i also recorded my book down in the mine which we can get into yeah so there was no producer on the line yes kind of swinging it i recorded my and by down in the mine you mean how many feet below earth 900 feet underground in the potential in the former largest silver mine in california that's insane um but yeah so so i think i've started doing it because it was true it's like why why not take the extra effort i i guess maybe i thought before like i already wrote it down it's in the book right it's a little weird to do it and then maybe i was like uh what if i mispronounce someone's name right then if i'm reading it i skip someone is a weird i i maybe i was self-conscious about it but i do remember i i thanked my dog by her nickname in one of my books like maybe obstacle.

12:01And like several years later, like a, a translator for some relatively obscure language emailed me and they were like, I'm currently translating, you know, uh, you're there. I I'm doing, you know, your book for the country of Uzbekistan or something. And I need to know what the name McPuppen stuff means or I need to know what the word means. And I was like, uh, yeah, uh, that's just, uh, what we sometimes call my dog. Um, That's funny. No, but it feels like, I mean, that feels like an eternity ago, both like, in terms of actual life. And then like, all of this story is like 10 % of 30 % of that story.

12:48Since you and I met? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we were both living in New York. No, was I? I think I was living in New Orleans. You were in New York. You had a little apartment. I remember I got your couch. you remember like you gave me like this was later but i think i hired you when i was living in the world you did i was still because uh i moved there after the book came out that's true yeah i do remember you showed up in a in a like a man with a van a van and took yeah all my all my uh furniture when i moved back here and then you came here right and then didn't leave right uh so yeah that was funny do you like why do you remember why you apply like do you remember what you were trying to you yeah because i went to school for finance so i just graduated from columbia with a master's in real estate development so i thought i wanted to do real estate development i got a job at a bank and it just sucked it was kind of like one of those things where i went to dinner outside of chicago and i remember sitting at the dinner and like everywhere around me was five years older yeah i was really miserable it's one of those things where you very much can see your future in front of you so i quit traveled came back my only goal was to like not work at a bank and so I remember at the time I was like, well, not just that, but also be more creative in my work.

13:57And so the posting was on Twitter, I believe. And so it was on Twitter. And so I remember I was following you and somebody that you knew. And so I was reading that, applied. And then I remember at the time you were the young whiz kid, right? Because you were like 22, 23. And I was like, he's the director of marketing in American. I was like, damn, that guy's pretty smart. And so I figured it was a great opportunity to learn a bunch. I was living to set the stage where I was living – deep in Brooklyn in Bed-Stuy in a four bedroom apartment I was sharing with five people. So I was paying like$400 a month to basically live where I was.

14:32I thought it was a, didn't you turn it into a hostel? Eventually, yeah. Eventually it was turned the extra rooms, put bunk beds in, turned it into a hostel to like save money basically. And so that was paying my rent. That's kind of how I was existing in New York. And that's how I was able to work essentially for like very little money, you know, early on. And I think that like, when I think back of, I really thought it was exciting kind of the storytelling you guys were doing around press because the idea was let's not just do radio press let's like do interesting things that get enough attention to bring a lot of press towards it and I remember that just being very exciting I remember also on the time I was spending a lot of time on reddit because I was like sitting in my apartment I remember like I understood reddit and maybe a way that like you guys did it at the time I remember that was kind of like a foot in the door I was like oh I'll show you guys how to like utilize this tool in a little bit better way yeah it's interesting though you mentioned that dinner where you like see someone you don't want to be that's like a very powerful experience i had one of those i was at this conference in new york city that i'd come to a couple years in a row and i i i was in marketing and most marketing people like dress well right it's like a client business and it's like i i actually felt like i did marketing and i feel like these people like had meetings where they just like sold people on stuff that they couldn't actually deliver And so I remember I'm going to this conference and I'm sort of the only one not in a suit or the only one not dressed nice.

15:49And I worked in American Apparel. So I was just wearing American Apparel clothes. And then I came back the next year. It was the same thing. And I remember maybe the third year I sort of went, if I keep coming here, I'm going to end up in a suit. Meaning like I would get poached and work at one of these. You can't work in a scene or an industry and be like an outlier for very long. It eventually wears you down and you become, there's an Epictetus thing about how like if you put two lumps of charcoal next to each other, one of them is lit and the other is not. The unlit one will either extinguish the lit one or the lit one will light the unlit one.

16:31and so you'll you'll either get destroyed or you'll be absorbed and you sort of sense that and then you either um pretend you didn't sense it and let it happen or you have to blow up your life yeah i think for me it was like it was very close in like gurney illinois which is outside chicago i remember the bank even was like oh you're gonna go to chicago so they're just lying to me. I wasn't going to Chicago. I was going to some suburb. You were flying to Chicago. I was going to Gurney to do due diligence consulting, which is like digging through boxes of papers. And like everybody posed this as the job to get in school, right?

17:10Because I was going to school, I was paying a lot of money. And then at that table, we were at one of those, you know, like outliers in a strip mall. It must've been like a chili or something similar to that. And everybody just was like waiting for their two full margaritas. And I was like, no, this is it. When I get back to New York, I'm never doing this ever again. And that was kind of like my promise to myself and like pretty shortly thereafter started working with you in the marketing stuff. Did you have a bunch of debt though? Still paying for it. Yeah. Still, still, I mean, literally to this day, I still have a student loan debt.

17:36And so it was, I mean, it costs like a hundred grand to go to Columbia for the time. And I didn't have any scholarships or my parents weren't helping me. So I just got student loans. And then it was a difficult decision to make. I remember going back, I started first writing articles for like a credit card.com or something for like$5. Just things you could freelance. Anything I could do that I could do my house just to not go back into that bank um and here we are isn't it kind of crazy though okay so like obviously uh spending all the money you have in the world to buy a ghost town is insane reckless ridiculous totally irresponsible you could go down the list of all the things but at 18 years old uh taking on as much debt as a house uh by the way debt that can never be discharged, right.

18:23For an industry that you know nothing about, like to get it to potentially get a job in an industry, you know, nothing about that, by the way, is shrinking or most people are wildly unhappy. And that is not only considered to be sane, it's encouraged. It's, it's, it's, it's expected. And in some cases, like backed by the security of the government. Yeah. And it was like, for me growing up, both parents were teachers. So it was almost prescribed. It's like, you will go to graduate school. It's just like, what are you going to choose? It's like, doctor, lawyer, banker. And I was like, oh, banker sounds good.

18:59And like, you are. You're supposed to choose on this premise that you've made up in your mind that you've been. I like, I would see Gordon Gekko on a movie. I was like, that looks cool. I was like, it's not cool. And so, you know. You don't know he's actually the villain. That he's actually. Yeah, that actually he's way cooler and better than most of the people in the thing. That's actually boring. And eventually once you get into the trap, I had to live with five other people deep in Brooklyn, you know, to not work at the bank. So it's kind of like that path gets set by a pretty innocent decision when you're young.

19:32And some people never get out of that path. It's like set for life, basically. Well, but it feel then when you want to do something big or crazy, they're like, that's big and crazy. You can't do that. and you don't realize you've already done something big and crazy. I think where I got lucky dropping out of college was not, obviously all the opportunities that came along with it were great and grateful for them. But it's that I blew up my life and nothing bad happened was like actually the most important thing. So then, you know, five years later or whatever, when I decided I wanted to be a writer, walking away from running marketing in a publicly traded company, it didn't seem that great.

20:16Like I'd done that before. I knew the rhythms of like, you're going to tell people and they're going to be like, what? And it's going to seem scary. And you know, but you've done it. It's like when you've started a company and starting another company, even if that one fails, you've done the thing before. and so you're not doing it for the first time. I think as you do more of those things too, you surround yourself with people that do those types of things. Yes. And so your surroundings change. Like before, everybody in my surroundings was going to graduate school. Yes. And then after I started doing something different, I started meeting more people.

20:49So it's a little bit more comforting to do it the second or third time or fourth time. That's true. You self-select towards people that do even crazier things. And then someone fall out of a chair. You all right? did you really fall out of the chair uh no you you you meet people who have done even crazier things and uh who you're like well i'm not doing anything that risky you know like it makes it makes what you're doing actually seem like pretty tame or conservative and then you're like oh like i and and then also you just you just get older and you have more experience and your understanding of like what is like a hard left turn changes you're like okay you're taking a sabbatical that's not that crazy you know or whatever totally yeah um yeah it's weird it's weird too because that was also kind of early on sort of like remote work and living where you want and making like that i i didn't remember a lot of people doing stuff like that yeah almost nobody i remember like even to this day from my graduating class i don't know anybody that really works in that type of capacity like the majority of my friends i grew up in like suburban tampa and so it's like most of them are selling insurance you know they're pretty standard kind of blue chip type of jobs that they would get into um but eventually like there is some satisfaction in being the person who's not doing that within your group too you know i mean like going back home and being like wow you know like sure i don't know something like that it's kind of do you because i think you are a good example like uh i don't remember paying you like anything i have the first check actually still it was 100 for a month so i have a 100 check signed by ryan holiday i do and i do i i actually okay i actually do remember this because i think i'd never done any of that i never had my own company before yeah and i remember like the checks were connected to the wrong bank account which didn't have any money in it and i think they's they subsequently bounced um not that i didn't have a hundred dollars but i just like i was so green myself like i didn't know how to do any of that stuff right so it's like figuring it all out but it is like the point is like you know working for someone for free or taking a an apprenticeship or like just taking a flyer be like i just want to like be in the scene where this stuff is happening it it obviously is crazy and it usually doesn't work out but it is also one of the best ways to figure out how to do stuff and build like a career and a portfolio and to actually like do stuff.

23:29Yeah. I mean, you have to be around that scene, you know what that scene is going to be. And I think like Steven Pressfield talks about a lot. Robert Green obviously talks about it a lot. And so for me, I didn't know exactly what the scene was that I was getting into. But pretty early on, I remember us going to some author conferences and meeting like Michael, maybe like Michael Ellsberg or, you know, some type of author. Oh, this is like, was that my book launch? An interesting crew. Yeah. Your book launch in New York. And so thinking like, oh, these people are confirmation that there is a different type of life out there you know yeah and also it's interesting because for me i don't even know if i told you this so two pretty important moments when i first moved to new york city when i got my first job my best friend in the world gave me the 48 laws of power and he's like you're living in new york now like you need this book and this is 2011 yeah i need this book i remember reading i was like wow that's good and then after i quit the banking i went to travel for six months yeah my other best friend from growing up gave me a pirated copy of the four-hour work week like LimeWire and I was like oh like there's another way to live here like you can you know whether the methods are still applicable today like the mentality behind it is really cool and then within six months I was working with Robert and with Tim and I was like whoa like full circle moment now to think that like Robert's on the front cover of the book that I wrote yeah that's pretty cool yeah no the the important thing as you're trying to sort of break out in a career or life is there's a Lyndon Johnson said, you have to be, you have to become close to the people at the center of things.

24:55Like you have to, you have to meet the people that are doing the thing, not necessarily that you want to do. Like, I don't think I knew I, I think it took quite a while for me to give myself permission to want to be a writer, but I loved books and I loved writing. and so I just wanted to be like close to writers or authors or the industry and so I was sort of drawn towards that and then marketing was the thing that they knew the least about that I could teach myself the fastest and then was also like the most valuable currency in that world sure and so it's like if you want to be a record producer or you want to be a you like you're drawn towards music like you got to get yourself a job like sweeping floors at a record studio uh or uh production facility because you don't even realize the jobs you don't know exist yeah you're like oh wait there's a person that just does that that's awesome and then maybe you meet that person and they're like let me show you how to do it you just want to be like in the room where it's happening and then you can refine from there but if you're not if you're just on the outside you're just making stuff up you're guessing you're you're you're you're just it's got to start there well what i think is interesting is like not just getting into the room because a lot of people can get into the room it's like then leaving the room to do your own thing meaning like how many people that want to become musicians stay a and r's for their whole life because they never can like for you you could have stayed robert's assistant forever you know or you could have done these things so like i think the first step is getting in the room but then it's like what are you taking away from that and like how are you kind of creating your own path from that that's true but i but i mean maybe you actually do love a and r and that's your thing and and and you just didn't you love music but but maybe actually you're not cut out to be a musician or you're afraid of being there's there could be all these things that are why totally that's not for you but like you just start by like what you don't do is go get as far from the room as possible which is get into a different room that is a classroom no i'm still agreeing i think like first step is it's very hard to get in the room and then i think what's interesting is like then leaving the room so for instance like you with robert doing your own thing or even like sarah gordo in a way that was like learning everything i could about marketing you know having this background in hospitality and then trying to combine them as robert would say into like your life's task or whatever it would be.

27:23So how can you combine your own skills in a unique way? Well, the way to think, yeah, it's like you're accumulating skills and experiences and relationships for that moment where you get tapped on the shoulder or you catch something out of the corner of your eye and you're like, that's my thing. Or that could be really cool. And now you're actually qualified to do something with that thing. But yeah, I was talking to Cal Newport in here the other day and we were talking about how like, you want to get in the room. And then the first step is like people, first off, people don't put themselves out there enough, take the risk to get in the room.

27:55Then they get in the room and they're kind of lazy or entitled or they're crazy or weird, or they don't work hard, you know, all those things. So you get tossed out of the room. Then there's this other thing where like, they're basically like, I don't want to say too good in the room, but it's more like they're, um, they're, they're not showing the promise required or the initiative to get to be too good for the room like what i mean is is like it was very clear very early that like you were not going to be my intern for very long and that you you have to promote that person up or give them more responsibility or you lose them and that's like that's a really critical part of that process like you have to show like i think people think mentorship is this thing that you like humbly submit to which it is but it's also like you're kind of it's more like you're this this bit of energy and there's like heat seeking around like you know like like the cheryl sandberg has a quote about like don't like get a mentor and you'll do well it's like do well and a mentor will find you yeah you have to show that like Like, oh, this person has promise compared to all, like, the record studio that we're talking about.

29:11It's like they have 50 interns. 49 of them, like, they're not going anywhere and they're just doing some small tour of duty. Yeah. And then one of them is like, this kid is worth investing in. Yeah. Something I've been thinking about a lot is like how, when you said, like, how do you see your thing that's going to become your thing? Like, how do you identify that? Because I remember you and I had this specific car. You might not remember this. I do. They're like, we were driving back from San Antonio, a Spurs game. Yeah. I remember you were like, oh, you're like, very good at things. This was probably six years ago, seven years ago.

29:39And you were like, well, what's your thing? And you were kind of like, you have a lot of skills. You've done a lot of different things. But what is going to be like, where are you going to apply all of these skills? Basically, in a way. And then probably like a year and a half later, Sarah Gordo came up. And so I kind of noticed that. I don't know that it was necessarily directly based upon that conversation. But something that I think that people are probably listening to are like, they're in that room. They have the skills. And so they're wondering, I get asked this a lot. How did I find this passion?

30:04How did I dive everything into there? So I'm wondering what you think of like how you identify those and how do you know, like when that's the thing to make the jump into, you know what I mean? Yeah, you just sort of know, like, how did I know that it was my time to write a book and that that was my first book? I don't know, but I really knew, you know, like I really knew I had, I'd had other book offers that had other book ideas. but then I'd read this I'd read this book by Upton Sinclair called The Brass Check and and it was like just a different it was just this unique book that was I was like oh he's doing like an expose of the media of how the system works and I was like I have a similar experience of this other world like I could do a book like that and then I remember looking going like has someone else done this?

30:57Like is, is, does that exist? Because if it, sometimes you have ideas and you realize like, oh, it's already been done or there's all these reasons, but it's, it's when you have that flutter of excitement or connection. And then you look around and you go, oh, this is like open territory. And then you just go, I think this is my thing. And, and you, I mean, you ask around and you go, is this crazy? Is this stupid? And, and hopefully you've cultivated at this point, people who actually know, you know, not like kids who went from high, went to high school with, but other people who have, who are further along in that path.

31:29And they go, Hey, that's actually a, that's actually a good idea, you know? Um, and so, yeah, I think for me, it was this sense later that I was always going to be a writer, but I needed what my first book was. That makes sense. Yeah. I think for me, I was always like, I've always had an interest in hospitality and buildings. I went to school for real estate and I tried to go to architecture school. It didn't work out. I had to drop out. It's too hard. And so like with Cerro Gordo, it's kind of a similar thing. You know, like I had this idea, this background in marketing and storytelling. And so like this abandoned mining town in the West that like kind of triggered those childhood memories of, you know, my grandfather watching gun smoke and all this.

32:05Imagine like hospitality plus storytelling equals. But it's weird. I don't remember you mentioning any of the, like, I don't remember you mentioning the Western stuff. I don't mention, remember you mentioning like doing dangerous terrifying things like like in retrospect you're clearly i think a bit of an adrenaline junkie and you're like building stuff with your hand there were all these things that must have i mean i'm not saying you made them up but they must have been like somewhat latent inside you that and they were unlocked once you found yourself in this world yeah i think that like a lot of it was early childhood stuff like being in rural florida like building stuff building sand castles and all this type of stuff and like wearing west like boots all the time and then like Being pushed into that path like we were talking about before, becoming a banker, you know, having the life of New York City.

32:51And then I think that this is kind of like a, oh, that's cool. You know, this is an exciting thing that I could go down.

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35:53Well, Robert Greene talks about that because people ask, how do I find my passion or my life's task? And I think his answer is a really good one, which is that you don't find it. You already found it. And then you covered it up. And you turned away from it because it was irresponsible or weird or uncertain or dangerous or whatever. And so he's saying it's really about going back to your childhood and this thing that lit you up. And you have a story in the book, which I remember when you told me for the first time, you were scuba diving with your grandfather or your father or someone? My neighbor up in New York.

36:31Yeah, you were scuba diving and you discovered like an anchor from a ship from a naval battle in 1812. Yeah, the war. Yeah, and it goes in this museum. So you had this like life-changing, incredible moment. Like if that was the only thing someone did in their life, that would be a pretty cool accomplishment. They were just like an insurance salesman who once found like a rare naval anchor artifact that's in a museum. That would be pretty cool. Right. And you had that at like 12 years old. And then you're just like, but obviously this can't be a job, be my life. You can't make a living from it.

37:04But now like I do make a living adventuring. So that's pretty. And finding stuff deep underground. So it's pretty, it's pretty amazing. So yeah, you, so I think it's, it's important that people understand, like you, chances are you already found it. You already know what it is. You've been denying it or dismissing it. And you have to like, what was that thing that you just, you were obsessed with that you turned away from? And really, I think in the development of your brain, as I understand it, like, so, you know, kids like they have all these, they know all these facts about dinosaurs and tractors and whatever.

37:39Well, as you get a little bit older, like as you leave being a toddler, your brain has this process where it forgets a bunch of stuff. like so your your mind had this ability to latch on to something that was interested interesting to you and learn everything you can about it and then as you got as you started to develop your brain's like well we can't keep all this stuff and so you discard it it's like even in the movie inside out there's this like giant graveyard of like memories and facts like her imaginary friend is in there all this stuff you just you just throw it all out to become like regular and so i think really like finding that like life's task is is more in kind of an an unearthing or an inward exploration as opposed to just like oh i'm gonna audit a bunch of classes in my college and try to find something yeah and i also think eventually like you kind of decide on your purpose i think in some way it's like it's not going to decide you eventually like at surrogoto it was like oh this is good enough but like i mean mark manson talks a little bit like comfort and commitment, you know?

38:40And so it's kind of like, eventually you have to commit to like something, what are you going to do? Are there than pinging from thing to thing to thing? I think early on, that's easy to like, or it's good to kind of pick up a lot of different skills here and there. I think that like, eventually at Cerro Gordo, I was like, you know what, this is it. This is like what I would like to spend my life on. And for me, there was like, like almost a deep breath out. Cause it wasn't, what's the next project? What's the next project? What's the next project? You know, it's like, oh, this is the project.

39:01And I think that like, I removed a lot of the mental energy of trying to think of what's next, what's next, what's next. But don't you think like at some point you could have got a better paying job than working for me or like I see I could see you having jumped ship earlier and it going very differently for you. Not that I'm responsible for it, but I just mean like like I think what can happen is like you get this opportunity. Someone gets this opportunity and they're going. But like. For me, I was working for Robert Greene. I was working at American Apparel. I wrote this article about socialism.

39:34I had a chance to write a book about that when I was like 22. Right. But the decision to not do that, to stay in the kind of development phase and to keep learning. Right. And the financial hit that went with that and the ego hit with that. I wouldn't be here if I had taken the leap then. Totally. So what made you take the leap when you did then? I mean, I put in a lot more time. I felt like I was more ready. And then also life had kind of chosen for me because like I'd come to the end of that road instead of jumping early. I let it kind of take it as far as it was going to go. Yeah. I think, I think though something that you did that a lot of people have this myth that they like need to fully jump into the passion and cut all ties, you know, like burn the boats, but like you still maintained your job for a while or being an author.

40:21I still, you know, maintain a job while doing Cerro Gordo. So I think that like a lot of times people write me now after Cerro Gordo, they're like, oh, I quit my job and I bought a castle. I'm like, no, like, please God, no. I still maintain a job that I enjoy that keeps me mentally stimulated. There is a lifeline. It's not that all the chips are pushed into one thing. No, no, that's totally true. You can experiment and build up a viable alternative. And you should build up the viable alternative with as much time and space. What's that? OPM, other people's money. You want to do as much as you can with other people's money.

41:00totally and just at least like it buys you the freedom to experiment a little bit more i think yeah yeah i'm just like you worked for me for a lot like so if we met in 2011 and when did you buy cerro gordo 2020 to nine years later yeah nine years and so it was like nine years of learning understanding seeing opportunities to that there was other crazy properties that came up in that past and there's like lighthouses i really was obsessed with this lighthouse for a while yeah weren't you you told me once you were gonna like buy a ranch and turn into a place for like bachelor parties or something yeah i still think it's a great idea and so and there's like the hotel in upstate new york i was looking at yeah so there's a lot and none of them were like fully grabbing me and holding me and so i think there was i just think that like there wasn't anything that i could do there and maybe that nobody else could and i think that the storytelling around sarah gordo was something that like i thought i could do pretty good i understood at that point this channel was going you know a lot of stuff that i've been learning a daily stoic is happening and so it felt like oh like this could be applied to right ghost town which has inherently more interest than let's say a ranch for bachelor parties outside of austin and so it seemed like there was a whole nother level there that like maybe i could contribute that i couldn't contribute anywhere else that's an interesting point because yeah i guess i would have worked on enough projects and platforms and people's stuff and probably given them advice that that could have worked that they didn't listen to so many times that by the time sort of the idea for the daily stoke book but then like an email list and all this other stuff i was like i think i was at a place where i was like i was tired of doing it for other people or watching other people not do it then i was just like all right this is going to be my thing instead of instead of being the consultant i'm going to be the creator and and so yeah you kind of but but But I think about all the lessons that, again, I learned with other people's money or other people's projects that allowed me to start so far ahead when I was launching the daily.

43:03So there's any number of mistakes that I could have made that would have sunk it before it even started that because I'd done it on a small scale all these other times, it was different. I think in this case, like there wasn't another guy out there rebuilding a ghost town that I can not honor necessarily. So it had to be a leap, a little bit of a leap of faith, a big leap of faith. But I knew that like, I do have a skill set. And so like, if there's qualified people, like I have a degree in real estate, I have a background in storytelling, you know what I'm saying? No, I mean, like you'd started the Daily Stoic YouTube channel and you'd built the Daily Stoic social account.

43:34You had built other things for other people. So then when you, you were not like, how do you do this? No, totally. You know, you, you had, you had done that and, and actually like, I mean, now it's huge, but you'd done it at a big scale, right? So you learn lessons that you don't learn until way on. For me, I'd been on so many calls with publishers that when I did my first book, I knew what was bullshit and I knew what wasn't. I knew what to ask for. I knew what didn't work. And so I was just starting with a store of knowledge that allowed me to make my stuff a success faster and then also avoid pitfalls.

44:16Yeah. so okay so you i remember so it was almost exactly four years ago then moved to sarah well yeah i called you because it was like everyone was just like in lockdown i remember i was sitting on my porch and you were like i think i'm gonna make a run for it and i was like what uh i think i'm gonna make a run for sarah but actually i'm forgetting first i remember i This is a couple of years before. I remember it was kind of late and I was upstairs working in my office at my ranch and you were like, hey, I'm going to buy this ghost. I think I'm going to buy this ghost town. Are you in? Do you remember what I said?

44:56I think you said there's a bunch of ghost towns for sale. This isn't a good idea or something to that effect. Well, I think I remember sending you a link to a lot of different ghost towns for sale. No, what I remember, yeah. Because every couple of years, there's like a popular viral article about like ghost town for sale it's like a thing real estate agents know um but i remember i sent you that randy jackson meme where he goes that's going to be a no from me dog that's my answer i was like it was like hard pass seems like a terrible idea i do i was like already deep like i probably hadn't told you at that point i was already like wired over earnest money i really like wired like did it fifty thousand dollars over to the real as an agent and I was just desperately trying to like get the rest of the money together because I didn't have it and so um I think though like eventually some other mutual friends of ours got involved and then I think you took a second look at it and then that it all kind of worked out but no no I I did I did invest I I do remember asking for somewhat preferential terms because I also knew what it was going to cost I think I invested for two reasons one I I did ultimately think if anyone could do it you could do it but i also knew what it would cost me in terms of like phone calls and like yeah exactly exactly i might as well participate like it's the opportunity cost of this is already enormous for me because it take your eye off the ball from all the other stuff that we do together um but you paid me back because even though you bought a fucking ghost town with money you didn't have, requiring skills you didn't have.

46:32When I was like, hey guys, I think I'm going to open a bookstore. You're like, terrible idea. Definitely going to fail. Don't do it. I was, yeah. I remember like physical locations are terrible. You're going to lose your shirt. Don't do it. Yeah, you were like, you were very adamant and spent, like you gave me a lot, like a very long argument about how miserable it would make me. I think I called it like, it's gonna be a prison of your own making. You're making your own prison. It's gonna be a, I always used to describe like, I had the hustles of like a beautiful prison. You're gonna make it really pretty, but you're always gonna be stuck there.

47:07But look at us now. Who would have thought? I do. That is an interesting thing. So, you know, you get advice from people and they mean well, but you quickly realize they have no idea what the fuck they're talking about. like you and I were standing in the ghost town with another person we've worked with before and I was sort of I was like this is what I'm gonna do I'm excited I was like pitching it I was trying to get both of you involved and uh and he goes the build out of this thing at least 500 grand you know and I go oh man I remember I went home and I was like so down about I was talking to Samantha I was like we can't spend that that's crazy and she was like why don't you like get a bid like she she was like why don't we think about what we actually want to do yeah and then get a bid for that right and it was like forty thousand dollars like not half a million dollars but less than ten percent of that yeah because um people are thinking when people are giving you advice they're usually thinking uh not is it a bad idea generally but like is it a bad idea for them so like even when i was like ghost town like i don't want to live in a ghost town i have kids and a life yeah and i like stability and normalcy you have a very different lifestyle and approach than me you know i don't have normalcy or stability not at all you are already living in you are already living in i don't want to say filth but you are you are you are already living it you already lived i think you've said this before that you are a slumlord to yourself yeah i never i don't like to spend money yeah so it's like you you were already not you were already not like living easily so like for me i'm thinking here i am here's what it would be and you were so much closer to that thing so but but the point is like if i had listened to that advice it would have deterred me from doing it but the advice was not what i was going to do and i remember one of the things i did as i went and i was like well what did these say like and i when i looked online it was like other people were like oh yeah it costs 500 000 to a million dollars to start a bookstore and i thought well i'm not that's crazy you know i don't want to do that and i can't do that and so i was like but what do they say i was like i currently have an e-commerce uh like media business um and i know what that cost to start which was nothing because i bootstrapped it from nothing.

49:38And I was like, what do those same outlets say it costs to do that? Like a million dollars. Yeah. It was like$250 ,000. And I was like, oh, okay. So these numbers are nonsense, you know? And so one of the things that you can get sort of intimidated by is just wildly inflated or inaccurate senses of how something goes when oftentimes you're either doing something uniquely or you're doing something that's never been done before and no one could possibly tell you whether that's realistic or not yeah and i think sometimes like sometimes people aren't necessarily looking for advice you know they're not necessarily looking for confirmation they're looking for like a little bit of a litmus test and to kind of get feedback i think that sometimes if you're like if you know it's the thing you want to do then i don't know there's a little bit of wiggle room there yeah i mean it is it is uh it's hard though because also the biggest failures in my life people told me was a really bad idea and i should have listened to that but how many people told you that obstacles away was a really bad idea yeah well you know wasn't there someone that told you it's still maybe a thousand copies well i was just gonna say a lot of times nobody says like it's gonna fail right they go like you know like like they kind of damn it with faint praise you know um so it's really hard to get an accurate picture of how something's gonna do yeah so someone uh predicted the obstacles away would sell five or five thousand copies i mean my own publisher didn't think it was going to be that big like looking at the events they gave me like i mean did you think it was gonna be that big no all right yeah but i wasn't but i don't think i don't think i had any sense of how you're open to the idea of it being that big i thought it would be a good book to write that's great do you know what i mean like i wasn't thinking at all like yeah most of the things i've done that have succeeded i had zero idea of the parts of the outcome that were sort of like quantifiable or monetizable right it it was something that i was excited to do sure and that part's up to you like the controlled input not the output yeah like the stoics say like what parts of it are up to you and what parts are not up to you so like when i talk to someone and they're like oh i'm gonna write a book and my goal is to sell a million copies i'm like this i already hate this project you know like first off i'm i know that it's not right because like 99.9 percent of books don't even sell like uh 10 000 copies yeah um but you have you you didn't tell me that i should work on this book with you because it's going to be important or meaningful or nothing's ever existed like it or you know it's the result of this or that you're like you're already leading with like the most meaningless part of it you know what i mean totally and and so most of the things that i've taken big risks on were motivated by something i think more pure than than just like some quantifiable outcome yeah i mean i think there's a lot better ways to spend your money than on an abandoned ghost town yeah i mean if you bought an abandoned ghost town because you wanted to turn it into a big youtube channel yeah i think it's dead in the water yeah or even like a giant resort you know i think that that was kind of some of the metrics moving into it and so i think that i don't know the the the motivations are a little bit different like sometimes there's intangible things that you're benefiting from as well yeah well think about it you bought this ghost town in 2018 right and you don't even start the youtube channel until mid 2020 correct yeah so two and a half fears of flailing around before it even starts to be the thing that it becomes right so if if you had you have to be open you have to genuinely like the thing and genuinely be motivated by some kind of intrinsic motivation or when it in invariably takes longer than expected you get crushed you give up yeah yeah and this is taken i mean we were hoping to get some type of overnight accommodation the first month that we remember like i looked at my original plan it's like all right we're gonna like sweep the floors and put people in beds and then we're gonna start renting it out and now it's six years later and nobody's ever paid to stay overnight at cerro gordo yet you know it's taken a lot of different journeys and they will you know we're working on the hotel that's the hope you know um but yeah i don't know so so for i we're sort of using a shorthand about it because i've been there many times and i love it um and i've watched most to the videos, but describe, like, why do you fall in love with this place?

54:19What is it? Where is it? And why is it? Yes. Cerro Gordo is a, it's a former mining town. It's about three and a half hours Northeast of Los Angeles, about three and a half hours West of Las Vegas. It's in the mountain range where to the East is Death by National Park, which is about six miles from us to the West is the Sierra Nevada and Mount Whitney. So it's kind of cradled in between the lowest point in the U.S. and the highest point in the U.S. They started mining silver and lead there originally in the 1860s. They mined that for about 20 years. That went bust, kind of turned into a ghost town.

54:50Another guy came back in 1910. He mined zinc there for another 20 years. So he mined an active life from about 1860 to 1940, which is a huge life. 80 years is crazy for a mining town. Usually they figured these would have five or eight years. And so since 1940, it sat pretty much abandoned. You know, people have tried to do different things here. They're like tours and this and that. And so... when I got it in 2018, when we got it. it was kind of like a treasure chest waiting to be opened with as far as storytelling goes and stuff because there was an important town you know it's p had 4 000 residents there and you have to figure to put in perspective at that point in time los angeles only had about 6 500 residents when this town is 4 000 and so there are so many interesting stories there and then the more i dug into it the more i dug into it it was just like i don't know like a true town out of the american west and being there was amazing i loved westerns when i was a kid and i felt like i knew all the big towns yeah dodge city and uh deadwood and yeah and and i had never heard of cerro vordo yeah i i wonder if it's like you know tombstone had a big movie about it so it probably helped quite a bit um but yeah the town pulled like 500 million dollars worth of silver out of it so i wonder there's a couple things that had against it first um there wasn't a lot of record keeping and then when they did start keeping record keeping the county courthouse in independence california burned down twice and was lost in an earthquake once during the active years of the town it's like most of the like actual storytelling history got lost in all these earthquakes and fires yeah and there's like nothing exists there's newspaper articles but all the newspaper articles are um unreliable to say the best i think mark twain said like a miner is just a liar standing next to a hole which i think is a good quote yeah um and so there's like all this to wade through and so i think that it was just kind of got forgot over time it was just lost also it unlike a lot of the towns there was no there weren't like the cowboys yeah you know what i mean because it was it was functionally just a mining town yeah and so there wasn't that kind of it's it was hard to get to there wasn't the the infamous shootouts at the okah corral because there wasn't just like the buzzing city of let's say uh a tombstone that you pass through on the way somewhere else if you're going to Cerro Gordo you're going to Cerro Gordo for a purpose and so a lot of those stories and infamous people there was the infamous people that came through town but it wasn't like there's rumors all these rumors butch cassidy mark twain's on a lot of time in owens valley so it's like probably likely that he went up to Cerro Gordo just because of his time there um but then like to me there's people that i think have it as interesting of life as those guys but just weren't ever recorded or talked about like the owners of the town mortemir belshaw was gonna set it up he got robbed a lot of times by tiberico vasquez which the vasquez rocks outside of los angeles is named after and so there's all these characters there that if the light was shining on them a little bit more i think have just as interesting of life and just as like important of impact into western history that just hasn't been told and so i think for me like what got me fired up over the last few years is uncovering these stories you know putting them into the book and just trying to give a little bit more light to them because i think that like belshaw could be a character like we think of when we think of these other towns or Lola Travis, the woman who owned the brothels in town, you know, she was a huge character.

58:05She had like shootouts. She had, you know, she was an entrepreneur. She had a bunch of businesses there. And so I think it's exciting to think that this history that maybe would have been essentially lost is now very much more in the public eye. And I wonder like what that will do in 10, no, let's say, let's say a hundred years and a hundred years. Will they be like, Oh yeah, the big towns in the West, Cerro Gordo, Tombstone, you know, like, will it be part of that conversation? I wonder how much of it is also its proximity to los angeles there's a great book about los angeles called like a history of forgetting okay like you don't think of los angeles as a historical place yeah um but it's just as old as san francisco and it's because los angeles you know sort of destroys all its big victorian mansions right los angeles is constantly reinventing itself because of hollywood it's about even though it's so often the movies are about the past it's also this sense of the future and like sort of it sees itself as a modern city, not a historical city.

58:57And so it's connection to the old West. Like what's mind blowing to me is the silver would come down the hill of Cerro Gordo, get put in a boat, go across Owens Lake, then by train to Los Angeles. And so Cerro Gordo is gone. If you've seen the movie Chinatown, you understand why Owens Lake is gone. The idea of trains in Los Angeles that's gone so like just every part of that has been like physically removed and so like it's it's just not part of the history of it in in in how the state or the region understands stuff like southern southern California feels like Florida like just the like vacation present whatever the fact that there were people there like like that uh like I mean some of them there There's like adobe kilns where they used to process the silver.

59:55Like it goes so far back. There's like hieroglyphs. Yeah. I mean, even before that, like even before trains were removed, you know, mules used to bring them into Los Angeles. So the idea of mule barns being in downtown Los Angeles. And the guy that was bringing the silver from Cerro Gordo to Los Angeles was a guy named Remy Nadeau. And Remy Nadeau opened the very first two-story hotel in Los Angeles. He's the first hotel with an elevator was the guy from Cerro Gordo, which eventually became, which that got torn down and became the LA Times building, which then that got torn down and remade into something else.

1:00:28And so now we're like three buildings removed from Cerro Gordo history. And again, like, because it's not in front of you, you can't touch it. And like the history burned down four times, you know, in the court records. I wonder if to your point, it just kind of like got lost in the shuffle over time. Even like downtown Los Angeles is this sort of old artifact of a city. And then like if when when someone says I'm moving to L.A., there Santa Monica and Venice and Malibu and Hollywood. It's like so. So it's just it is this region that's kind of has this amnesia about its past right down to the fact that there once was a beautiful lake.

1:01:06And so you can understand that somebody like, I worked in storytelling for 10 years. The idea of like bringing the dead town back to life, both like literally and like storytelling wise is pretty exciting. Like the idea that maybe in a hundred years, it is mentioned in the same breaths as all those other big towns, which I think it could be, you know, if people do enough research. Well, that's a very powerful thing when you're like, when you discover something and you're like, this is amazing. Why don't more people know about it? I mean, that was my relationship with stoicism. Totally, yeah. That makes sense, yeah.

1:01:34And, and so, yeah, it seemed crazy at the beginning. Right. And, and yet it was also, it's been this explosive thing because people are having the same, when people are discovering the things I've written or the videos I make or whatever, they're having that same reaction that I had. So you have, you, if it was explosive for you and you discovered it for the first time, chances are when you, if you do a good job and you, you can recreate that for other people, then, you know, you have this explosive thing. That's very interesting. anything but it was kind of a very similar similarities because like stoicism then was probably like with the real academics you know it's popular within them like the real desert rats out you know the middle of nowhere would know about cero gordon they got excited about it but then when you can see it and maybe like apply it through a different lens and different digestible bits suddenly now cero gordon's everywhere stoicism everywhere you know it's kind of i hadn't thought about the parallel well yeah and then you have these tools that didn't exist before and so yeah I can watch a one minute Tik TOK of you going 900 feet underground and discovering a perfectly preserved jacket, right.

1:02:38That's a hundred years old. And you're like, what, you know, or yeah, I can watch you, you know, uh, digging down on the ground and finding, you know, beer bottles that were made by hand or, you know, like it, the, the little things that you, that were amazing for you have the ability to be broadcast and reach huge amounts of people very quickly. Well, I think for both Stoicism and Cerro Gordo, right place at right time almost. Because for Cerro Gordo, the old owner wanted to make it into a bed and breakfast too, back in the 90s. She didn't have social media. It never really worked out. Maybe she was barely scraping by, not really.

1:03:12And so now TikTok, YouTube, they all come under the scene and suddenly the tools are there, the right person's there. And so suddenly these ideas can kind of take off. Okay, so you make a run for it in March of 2020. when you end up in in uh sarah gordon i i remember you sent me a picture you you couldn't even drive you drove it basically the plan went sideways before you even physically got there well yeah i mean to tie it even further i was driving your sister-in-law's former truck yeah i remember that almost nothing yes two-wheel drive base model tacoma packed all my stuff into it and this was of the time of the pandemic when they were talking about shutting down state borders so i was like oh man i gotta get out there i'm gonna get shut down and so i remember calling you and like what if i get shut down in arizona you know i didn't know it was gonna happen and so i made a sprint for i pretty much drove straight for 24 hours the little two-wheel drive truck didn't make it all the way to town it doesn't handle snow very well after being a texas truck and so well first off when people think uh ghost towns in california i don't think they're thinking yeah yeah so that the when people think ghost they often think like desert we're in the high desert so the town's at 8 500 feet in elevation or at the end of an eight mile dirt road that increases a mile in elevation on the way up, which you have run actually, which is very difficult run.

1:04:28So it's a really steep mountain, twisty, turny road to get there. And at night, if you arrive, you can't see what's going on at the top of the hill. You know, you have no idea what's going on up there. And so I had no idea there was a blizzard essentially happening. Right. Cause it, you, you enter at what, like 4 ,000 feet. It's normal weather. Normal weather. Totally fine. Everything looks good. Oh, I'm going to get up there. I'm going to have this adventure. Get halfway up the road. Oh, a little bit of snow. Oh, a lot of snow. And at that point, what are you going to turn around and slip and slide back down the hill?

1:04:55And so parked the truck, packed my bag, walked into the house and never looked back. I was still there. Still there four years later. And by house, you mean which house do you walk in? There's just a couple of houses, a couple of buildings. Yeah, I walked into Mornemere, Belchard, the original owner of the town, his house. We're talking no running water, no Wi-Fi, barely cell phone service. And so a very like call of the wild experience to get into this house. And it's like going, it's like going back in time. Yeah, it's 150 years. And so then wake up the next morning, even more snows there. And I think I went out there a little bit looking for an adventure.

1:05:34I was looking for something to happen. And I was like, oh, well, here's my adventure, you know, pretty much day one. And I remember very early on being excited. I think during the pandemic was an interesting time to be there because nobody was really spending time with a lot of people. Everybody was socially distancing. So the loneliness factor of being around in your town was not really there. It was like, oh, everyone's lonely. So it was actually a very good time to go up there originally. And then I brought up actually our camera that we used to use for daily stoic. Not used to use. You stole the daily stoic.

1:06:06I remember we had shot something at my house like the first or second week of March. and then you'd taken the camera back to like upload the footage and then everyone was supposed to go to their separate quarters so you just had the daily stoic camera and you just took it was it stealing it was a borrowing you know it was a stealing if you give it back eventually i still haven't yet given it back but i one day hope to be yeah i mean does it still exist or did you no it still exists it still exists it's on my desk at serogordo um and so i mean that camera responsible for hundreds of millions of views which is crazy and so the the camera so this place daily soak is very much responsible in many ways about the training and also literally the physical camera that i used to record it i remember being up there and like i wanted to take those astrophotography i started taking those photos of the stars that was everybody during the pandemic was doing different hobbies people started baking sourdough bread a lot you know and i was like oh i'm gonna take photos of stars and i did really i shared one but then i was also like oh this is an interesting experience.

1:07:05I'm going to capture this. Like maybe I'll put it in a video or maybe I'll just have it from my own archive to look back on the pandemic, made a video about it, put it up. First video did really well. And then I just enjoyed it, you know, cause like while I worked around a lot of creative people for a long time, I never had my own creative outlet. I wasn't maintaining a blog. I wasn't writing books. I wasn't making music. And so putting together a video is really interesting to me. How can you tell a compelling story throughout it? And so suddenly I had that creative outlet and I enjoyed it. And I think that I was able to mix in what I thought was interesting videos.

1:07:40And luckily they did pretty good.

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1:10:02I remember you got almost immediately, so you get in there and then almost immediately you start getting attention because we were all bored and all on our phones. And it was like, guys snowed in in Ghost Town during pandemic, which was a compelling story. But I also saw very clearly, oh, this is Brent's marketing ability. Sure. Applied, like put layered on top of the fact that he's in a pretty extraordinary circumstance. Yeah, I remember like, so when I got up there, I got snowed in and that's like, that's what happened. And it was like very difficult to be there. And I remember I was looking online and we were all bored looking at articles.

1:10:37And this person from the New York Post wrote this article about like how people were living shining like experiences. I was like, no, no, no. I am living the shining experience. I am living in a ghost town. I'm snowed in. I'm the caretaker of a hotel. And so I wrote her, I was like, Hey, like I'm living in this ghost town. And I think she saw the appeal of it too. And it turned from, you know, like, Oh, this is what I'm doing to man trapped, having to eat, you know, like his own shoes to survive. It got like sensationalized a little bit. And then the way media does, it just turned into this, it's all momentum that I couldn't almost control.

1:11:08It was like each time it would get a little bit more removed until I remember, I think it was the Daily Mail or some blog like that was like, you know, battling ghosts, man is like drinking his own blood to like survive. And I was like, whoa, like, hold on. And if I look back at the original email, it's like, hey, I came over this town I bought, it's snowing, you know, that might be an interesting life experience. And so kind of sometimes the media has a way of just taking it for its own ride. But again, at the end of the day, like I'm not oblivious to the fact that a guy living in a ghost town during the pandemic is interesting inherently yeah and so i think that helped with the press but also helped with the channel to get going well it's this funny thing like at the beginning you do a thing and nobody cares at all yeah and then like you know you decide to write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy and then one thing one way or another and then all of a sudden the fact that it is crazy or unusual or should be not interesting is what makes it interesting yeah and then then you have the op now you have like more press than you know what to do with and it's it's it's this it can be this sort of weird disorienting experience yeah i can kind of take on his life of his own i remember talking to the manager like one of the biggest music acts out there and they're like we don't do press period because like they can't control because eventually you no longer have control i think at first it's really fun it's rewarding because you're like oh people care about my story they're telling my story but then they're like oh but i didn't say that yeah but i didn't do that and so like it takes like a little bit of leap a little bit of leap a little bit of leap and then suddenly you're like i no longer have control of the wheel this car is taking its own ride and so i think that like that was a little bit of the experience during the pandemic and i can see why certain people wouldn't do press generally um well yeah and early on you feel validated by people seeing you and talking about you and then you go okay the downside is this could be really negative publicity and the upside is actually not you you get enough press hits and you see that it other than some people seeing it doesn't like do anything for you and then you go oh okay i actually don't need to do this and then the discipline of being like i'm just going to ignore that like or i'm just not going to respond to that or i'm i don't actually need to do that interview um that's something i have to talk with the justice book coming out i'm like um the publisher's like well here's like all these places that would have you on and i go i every one of those is like an hour of time at least or two hours of time and it's like what could i make with that time and just talk to my actual audience or make stuff that i care about that would matter but it's hard to say no it's a weird experience too because there is the ego first when the press starts sitting but then even with social media even with anything like clips or whatever you put out certain type of clip and the initial appeal is to make more of the same type of stuff that you've done.

1:13:56And I think for me, at least what happens is, you know, anytime you turn on a camera, inherently the room changes, whatever that law is, you know? And so you put on a little bit of like a, maybe it's more peppy, maybe more this. And then I think what happened with me is, you know, a year on you kind of lose the thread of who you are and who the character is a little bit. And then it can be difficult. Even if there is a character, that is the person that you have to become when you turn like writing me and podcast me is different writing me and video me is different and then me just as a person is different than all of those things i think well those we try i try to be like as close to who i am in those as i can and that but like anybody that says it like they're 100 that's a lot like there is some type of character that's being performed it's some type of performative act that's happening and so like i got really like like lost in the what is the character what is me who was the character think what do i stand for and so i think like if you zoom forward from that original burst of attention it got to like a pretty like almost dark place or as i couldn't understand well here's what you know it's a character uh i remember at some point like i'd seen your videos so then we turn on the what we call the big tv in our house that's not ipads sure and and like uh one of your videos like was suggested on youtube and so uh clark must have been like four or five at the time i was like let's watch this and we watch it he gets and he's like fascinated by you're like repelling down this mine you're fine he just falls in love with my son falls in love with your youtube yeah i was like you know you know brent like you've met brent many times and the idea that this person on the tv was a real especially because i don't i don't think i saw we didn't see each other for like a year because of the pandemic because you were there and i was here um he like couldn't it was like i think he knew in it you know on one level that you were a person that he'd met before yeah and on the other hand there was this different person who lives on the screen and and that's i mean that's how it that's there is something i don't want to say false but there's something not real about it what's it's for all creative acts it's by the it's by definition edited right everything about it is edited and so it's just kind of like this edited version that's existing out there and um it's difficult it's difficult to like again to for me to grapple with what am i doing sometimes although i remember so you get up there you're stuck we were talking quite a bit and then with daily stoic we're like we have this other business that we have to figure out i can't like close we have employees and stuff yeah and and so we decided to do that a lifetime dead time challenge uh the i basically the the idea that the stoics talk about is like you don't control what's happening around you you control what you do inside of it um how weird was it to be trapped in a ghost town and then also making like talking about those did the stoic ideas have any sort of extra resonance for you in the situation you're in you know i mean all the time almost every day you know i think that like being exposed to stoicism for the past decade or so we're working so closely with it i mean that by definition it's supposed to be something you're able to call upon in tough decisions and up there yeah going through that experience we're talking about like remember your death and i'm looking i don't know i said like we're saying like we're talking about the practice of a moon to mori and i would look up and i would see the cemetery you know where people were buried from the last pandemic and stuff like that and so there's a bunch of people that died of the great influenza exactly in sura buried in the ground that i own and so it's just like i'm remembering i'm remembering death and then even you know and more like probably the most difficult situation when i was up there was like we had a fire in 2020 of the hotel yeah and i remember like looking at the fire and thinking about the story about edison you know like when he called his kids to come look at the fire and like amor fati and that type of stuff and it was very like very useful in those moments kind of keep going and so i think that like living in the town during that period of time there was almost no escaping stoicism and so it was like a good time to be both practicing it and also putting together the materials that we're putting together for the website.

1:18:08You sink your life savings into this project. You're working on it for years and years. You're starting to make some progress. You just cleaned out this whole, you know, beautiful historic building that it stood for what? 170, 149, 149 years. Yeah. You go to bed and you wake up to the heat. Yeah. There was four of us in town of the time we gone to bed, woke up to what I thought was like firecrackers or something, but it was actually was the cans heating up so much and popping inside of the hotel. And so they're like exploding, woke up very disoriented, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Somebody else was staying in the house.

1:18:50So he woke up and it was like, what's going on? I don't know. And so go outside, eventually realized that the main hotel here, the main building and the whole property was on fire. Um, try to do what we can, you know, grab water, pouring it on it, you know, just completely a mess, trying to figure out what to do next. Um, it's complete loss. You know, everything goes away. I remember staying up the entire night, battling the fire, talking to firefighters, all that type of stuff. And in the morning I remember kind of standing on the porch and just like unsure what I was going to do, where I was going to go.

1:19:22And the old owner of the hotel or the old owner of the property had come up the night before that night. I remember he kind of like came over to me, put his hand on my shoulder and I just like kind of lost it. I was like, Oh my God, this is like too much to handle. Um, and I remember he was like, you know, this is bound to happen. This is part of history. Now you can't change what happened, but what happens from here is up to you. And that was very like, that's like stoicism. Exactly. He was preaching to me stoicism in a different manner. And it wasn't like, he was like, I'm going to tell you some stoicism.

1:19:51This is like part of his nature. And I think in times like that, you try to grab onto something. I think that's what stoicism is so helpful for for people when you're in a tough moment. You need to latch onto something when your life is just going over and high. You just watched the entire future and history of the town. Yeah. Essentially. Everything. Burned to the ground. Yeah, the centerpiece. All of our plans were poised around people gathering in the hotel. That was the whole point of the whole project was that. And to see it go away, I was lost in every sense. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be in any real estate.

1:20:19So for him to say, you can't change what happens. What happens here is up to you. It was kind of what I grabbed onto. And I would repeat that phrase. you know what happens next is up to you what happens next step to you and that was just stoicism repackaged for from him um but it was the only thing that almost got me through those days during after the fire was like holding on to that phrase tightly and just remembering really his compassion in a moment where he didn't have to be compassionate which i think was like a testament as well you know like he could have come up and been like what the hell you know like this is crazy yeah what the hell is going on but like for him to like express even like the slightest bit of compassion was very like profound to me and like something i wouldn't forget for a really long time and i think like holding on to those words what happens next up to you is this like what got the town not just i mean it's not quite back to where it was because the hotel isn't finished yet but like the community the residence the whole property itself is in a much stronger place i think than it was four years ago in many senses it feels a little yeah it feels weird to say like but the video you make of the thing burning down sure is kind of what blows the whole town up because it was so raw and authentic.

1:21:27Like when you say what happens next is up to you, your decision to share and talk about the worst thing that ever happened to you is weirdly what brings all these people on board, both as fans and as contributors. And it makes the story compel. Like if you were scripting it, that's an incredibly devastating end to the second act. Yeah, it was just, I think that people appreciated the raw nature of it. I remember early on when we were doing the videos, I'm like a pretty private person. Generally, I'm pretty reserved, like a private introvert. And I remember when we were making the videos, it was like, I kept thinking about the Simon Sinek, you know, like people don't care what you do.

1:22:09They care why you're doing it. So you're trying to insert more why into the video. It's like, I'm exploring this mine and a thousand people have mine exploration videos where they put on a GoPro and they walk through a mine. and those videos get 50 views because nobody cares. But if I'm like, I'm exploring this mind because it's important for these reasons, it's important to me for these reasons. And you kind of explain that. And I think that the hotel gave me a moment to express why Cerro Gordo was so important to me and to show what I was going to do about it. And I think people were just resonated with that.

1:22:36Yeah, it also gives you somewhere you're going. Whereas before it was like, here's the town and it's staying as it is, more or less, right? Sure. And then for a piece of it to go away and then to have this then story about can it come back sure it becomes a different story yeah i mean it was it it was like a phoenix from the ashes kind of thing it was kind of like really trying to to bring something back and i think that people were able to see me out there until midnight in a backhoe you know like toiling away trying to do whatever i could to bring this place back and i think people resonated with that resonated with the passion that i had towards it and we're almost there the roof's back on the hotel no it's funny i um i have one in my office i'll give it to you but i i was reading about this this pine cone is this species of pine tree not the not what's the what is that the really old one there it's not that one okay it's um it's uh anyways the point is the it's like a standard pine tree drops pine cone you know they're all like really tight and green um it has to be exposed to fire to unlock like so it it and it won't unlock under ordinary temperatures like it's only if exposed to a forest fire that the next generation of trees like the next stand of trees can come and i love the metaphor of um you think this is this devastating destructive event which it is right but it's actually necessary the creative destruction is necessary for the next thing to happen and if you don't get it right it can't unlock it can't become the thing that it's meant to be and so yeah you think it's supposed to be easy you think that you want it to happen a certain way you want to anticipate problems and eliminate them in advance and avoid them or whatever but actually like you don't know what you are depriving yourself of by not doing it gives you the opportunity to come back from it right and so that way like and i think that like as you keep doing that i mean you said it before i think you said something like i look to evidence i don't look to like will or something like that and so oh yeah i don't believe in myself i have yeah and so i think that at this point i've with a lot of help have essentially rebuilt a hotel on the top of a mountain and so that gets puts me in such a stronger place than let's say the last four years just went smoothly and we were building a little cabin and stuff now it's like what can't we do if we can rebuild a hotel in the middle of nowhere you know it just kind of gives you that confidence that evidence to point to in the future as things go wrong yes seneca says you you know someone who hasn't been tested or exposed the difficulty hasn't been knocked down and bloodied in the ring yeah it's actually someone to pity because they don't know what they're capable of yeah right and and probably deep down that they they suspect they're not capable of things yeah and so yeah whatever it is that you've gone through It's a breakup or a bankruptcy or public humiliation, or it's just the pandemic that everyone just lived through.

1:25:30Like, if you wondered if you were capable of living through adversity and difficulty, the fact that you're still standing four years after this historic event happening, like, you should, you actually do have a good sense of it. And I think in your case, like fire and then the logistics of first off, just living alone without running water. And, you know, just you against the elements is one sort of trial by fire. But then building back after a literal fire. Yeah, it probably turns down the volume on anxiety or uncertainty when you, I don't know, you get a flat tire or something. I can solve this.

1:26:11When I first went out there, everything was a crisis, you know? like oh my god this is like the door broke on the kids and so i think that as you figure out those small things it's like i forget it's like everything's figureoutable you know that's like i think a very good thing and i think that's like almost like a figureoutable muscle that like you can grow as you figure out smaller things and smaller things and at this point you know it started off with a porch needed being repaired then a roof needed to be repaired now a hotel needed to be rebuilt from scratch and now our road has washed out four or five times so each time i'm that, I feel like I'm getting stronger.

1:26:42And these days, like the thing that stressed me out four years ago is not even gonna come close to stressing me out, you know, whether that's anything related to the property of like the road washing away, you know, a roof flying off and that type of stuff. And I think that's just like something that if you stretch yourself a little bit time, now I look back and I think about the time before the fire and I'm like, well, what was I selling my short self short on before, you know, I kind of use it as a reason to look back and being like, oh look at how much I was possible of doing like what wasn't I doing before you know that I could have been doing more yeah I also think about like my it your the change of your time horizon so when you go through like so like Samantha and I've been together almost 20 years now right so like when you're first in a relationship you have like a couple bad days you're like is this not gonna work you know then you've been married a long time or you've been together a long time and you're like there have been bad years right you know like i imagine you talk to someone who's been married for 60 years there were bad decades they're like you know like the two decades while our kids were our kids in our house were just the worst you know like you it changes your time horizon because you've dealt with stuff longer right and so when you're young or you're starting a project you're like man yeah like the last like two months i feel like we've not been making any progress.

1:28:02But then, you know, six months later, you had this huge breakthrough. And then six years later, that all blurs together. And you don't think about it in terms of like that at all. You just know that's what it took to do what you did. And so I think as you do more things, expose yourself to more things and experience adversity and obstacles, your perspective about that, they're still the same, but your perspective about them is different. And with that like when you zoom out more they they by definition sort of shrink or when you when you go am i am i looking at this obstacle in terms of the problem is it's going to cause for me in uh one day or am i looking at it in terms of a decade right and now i it's like it's nothing in terms of a decade well i think that's also just like the opposite of the mentality that's promoted especially within business these days it's like month over month growth you know like it's like what are you doing today like exactly so it's like the opposite of what you're put up to but if you can like think about it in those decades it's just it's more comforting well i remember i was talking to you about cerro gordo once you had this problem with like a business partner a bunch of stuff and i go are you ever planning on selling cerro gordo right and you're like no i'm gonna die here and i was like well that pretty much solves this problem for you like it that should help change how you think about it because like yeah if you're building this thing to get to a certain speed uh by in a certain amount of time to sell it right then then you've got a lot you've got to do here yeah if actually there's there is no realistic exit here it's a this is a lifetime commitment you made and i think you you think about the same thing in terms of marriage or having kids or um you know, calling, then you're like, oh, okay, like, this is, I need to stop stressing about what this means right now.

1:29:54It only really matters, does it change the overall trajectory of where I'm going? Right. So when you're thinking about Saragorda, then this is a place that's been there for 150 years. Yeah. So the fact that it's, you know, taken you four years to rebuild the hotel, Oh, it's nothing. Yeah, it's a book on the timeline. I mean, even before that, the area's been there for millions of years, I guess you should think about that timeline. But yeah, I'm trying to think of it as a decades project, as the long-term horizon. And I think that that, it's also honestly, I think a part of the resonance of the content and stuff I put out because people are like, I think pushing back a little bit against that short-term mindset, you know, that tomorrow, tomorrow, kind of month over month earnings type situation.

1:30:34And they know this is like a project I've settled in on. And I think it's fun to watch somebody settle into something that is kind of like their life's calling yeah i think that's like an appealing thing no matter what that is like i want even if that thing's totally different than what you're interested in or your life's calling just to see someone going after it is inspiring yeah i've watched people like i watch this guy on tiktok that does like marble carving and he has some business about carving marble i don't care about marble at all or carvings or statues but like he's so into it and he's so like you know it just like fires me up and i feel like by association i get fired up about whatever i'm going through in the same moment yeah sam i've been following this woman who's like sailing around the world like zero interest in sailing but like this person's going after that thing and they're sharing it yeah i think there's like anytime somebody's like fully going for it you can't help but like watch yeah yeah and and i think in terms of being a blip on the timeline to me that's like sarah gordo in little crevices and canyons and i guess there's one sort of planted right there in front of the general store that thankfully didn't burn down but there's a bunch of trees that are the oldest living things on earth yeah the bristlecone pines i think that the oldest one is six to eight thousand years old it's called methuselah you know name it for um and so these pine cones these trees have been living not just like existing they're not it's like a rock when you say a rocks been there for a million years it's hard okay but this thing is like breathing and you know like reproducing continuing on for you know way before the store it was old when the stoics were run it was old when you know the egyptians it was like it's it's older than the pyramids it's older than the pyramids and so the the thought that this tree has been growing at that time you know i don't have an illusion that cerro gordo in its state as it is it's gonna be there for 6 000 years but like if the idea of the like resonance of the town in some way exists for that long but that's like i don't know a pretty cool metric to shoot for yeah i am there's a there's a tree in mckinney's state park here that's like one of the oldest trees in texas is called uh old baldy and it's 600 years old you know like so 10 percent yeah yeah of of the age of like these trees which there are quite a few of yeah but you go like oh this tree was just poking out of the ground as like Shakespeare was writing his plays.

1:32:53Right. And it kind of blows your mind to think about. Well, to your point too, it puts everything in perspective. It's kind of like Sympathia or Rural and describe it as is like, if I zoom out far enough. Oh, the still concept? Yeah. Still concept of Sympathia. It's like, am I really, I'm upset about, like before this, I was upset because my book right now is not available in the UK for some reason. And I was very upset. and like in 6 ,000 years will anything care that the book you don't know yeah um in six days will I care probably not in six hours will I care and so I kind of like you just looking around and all these old stuff is just a reminder of that yeah there there's something about understanding that sort of time abides and the earth abides and all our stuff sort of comes and goes like some of the people at Cerro Gordo were someone like extremely rich they're totally forgotten yeah you know uh People were mad about things, fighting about things, dreaming of things.

1:33:47And like sort of where is all that now? It's gone. I mean, I think like one of the most profound things I did that I found early on was that briefcase. So I found a briefcase that's essentially like the entire life of this minor, I found a briefcase that was full of pay stubs, love letters, divorce settlements, lawsuits, all these different communications. And like no one's ever heard of this guy. But he was pretty important at Cerro Gordo. And like all of his stuff fits into this tiny little briefcase. and so i started thinking like what am i leaving in my briefcase yeah that's kind of like an interesting way to think about it um yeah kind of a similar reminder yeah they call those trees witness trees and they think about like what they've seen and experienced over uh the years yeah and yeah they were just there i remember we were talking because a couple months ago there was that crazy hurricane yeah that like hit california in uh and filled up lakes in death valley but i remember the news reports were like this has never happened right and i remember thinking i bet the bristlecone pines would disagree totally like not just have seen it before but like dozens of times over totally even if this hasn't happened in 500 years 10 times yeah 10 times over yeah that's wild or or just the fact that yeah like humans have been fight like You think about the battles that have been fought there by like tribes that we don't even remember.

1:35:13I mean, there's Petricus there that are 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 years old. They're so old that from my understanding, the historians don't have an exact name for who left them there. Humans did in some capacity. We don't know who it was. But so long ago that we've forgotten those humans and their entire civilization. Exactly. But their paintings are still there on the walls, which is just off the property of Cerro Gordo, so it's hard to ignore. well and then so there's those and then also a hundred years ago someone was uh writing what's that what's the thing they would write on the walls with carbide yeah with carbine uh oil like just you know graffiti that that in time will become as old as that thing yeah it's i mean the town is just filled with those as the reminders and i think being out there is i don't know very important in that way so last thing talk to me about the memento mori of it so you can look up from your house and see the grave of miners, but you opened the book with that line about how most of the miners died at the age you currently are.

1:36:16Like, Cerro Gordo was a place that chewed people up and spit them out. Yeah. It's not like a romantic history. It can be romanticized in the future, but like most of the miners that went up there did not get whatever they were searching for. yeah you know i think that i went up there searching for something probably not definitely not silver maybe nowhere in the way but like meaning purpose fulfillment you know some different things like that and the ending is to be told you know i think i've been up there so far but i've been trying to take it as it goes is like the winds as they come i guess the reminders that we're talking about and yeah to your point it's impossible to not think about day-to-day hour-to-hour minute to minute even.

1:36:58But I mean, is there the memento mori of just like, you could be crushed by a falling rock at any moment? I could be crushed by a fall. Entombed underground. There are still miners still down in the mines that are entombed. So yeah, I could be crushed at any moment. So I think that like, it gives me that urgency. I work pretty long days out there. I try pretty hard to like, do what I can for the town when I can. Although I know that I could be working on it for decades. I don't take that for granted. And I try to do as much as I can every single day make sure the things that are doing are things that i'm excited about that i think are important well it's been fascinating it's only just begun it's not terrifying yeah uh and uh i worry about you on there but i'm glad the book is out it's awesome and uh i'm glad you're here to actually work for change yeah i'm here in person i'm excited this is a fun full circle moment and i i have you to thank for a lot of it so thank you my pleasure

1:37:55Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.

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