originally published in

Image by Jamie Cary

For the past three years, The Buried Life—also known as Duncan, Ben, Dave and Jonnie—has traveled the globe pursuing the items on their 100 Things To Do Before You Die list. But competing in a krump competition and making a toast at a stranger’s wedding require vastly different wardrobes—or at least they should. As their season finale approaches, we chatted with the boys about their ability to blend in, truck-stop style and the greater meaning of it all.

Sarah Sulzberger Perpich: You seem to wear a lot of jeans, sneakers, hoodies, baseball caps… Can you guys describe your aesthetic to me?

The Buried Life: We’re pretty different. I think the road trip has probably formed a lot of our style, affected [it]. We live on the road and pick up costumes and weird little…truck stop shit. There’s a lot of thrift stops.

Sarah: Is that just because of the show or did you guys like that before?

The Buried Life: We liked it before. I mean, I think that we all have our certain unique styles. For the most part, we love shopping at thrift stores and finding things in different states. You get to glimpse what people have been wearing over the last couple of years at thrift stores, all over the place.

Sarah: Actually, Ben and Duncan, you like collecting clothing, is that right?

The Buried Life: Yeah.

Sarah: And you guys both like theme parties…

The Buried Life: We just grew up in a group of friends that was into dressing up and throwing theme parties and events. So, to raise money for this project, we would throw parties in the early days.

Sarah: Running with the bulls, did you wear a red shirt to make it harder, or…

The Buried Life: Um, I just realized that we were wearing red shirts when we were running. Both of us were. That probably made it a little hotter, and made us run a little quicker. Any time that we go into, like, a new city or a new state, we try and dress like they would in that state. So, for example, when we were doing the bulls, we were in our plaids and cowboy jeans. When we were in Texas, we were in Western shirts the whole time.

Sarah: Is that something you bought or you had?

The Buried Life: We’ve got a huge costume trunk. We usually plan out the tours and we’ll pack accordingly. For a lot of the things on our list, specifically the things we’re going after this season, MTV doesn’t help us with anything. We do it kind of by ourselves, and so to actually accomplish these things, we’ve gotta get pretty creative. And, many times we’ve found ourselves having to kinda dress up to fit the part, because we’re either sneaking into a place or just having to…blend in. For example, in the first episode in Playboy, you have Jonnie and Dave dressing up as, um…

Sarah: Oompa-Loompas.

The Buried Life: And Ben and I dressing up as Cristiano Ronaldo and Cristiano Ronaldo’s manager. So we were wearing really old discarded Armani suits…

Sarah: I saw that episode. That’s the one you where you didn’t do shots. So how did you guys find out about this whole vintage thing?

The Buried Life: I think we kind of came at it from an entirely different angle. We`re not really that self-conscious about it—[we just want to get] where we gonna get. It`s kind of like Lord of the Flies on the road. Another example is that the wedding episode. None of us had suits, so went to this thrift store and found a variety of suits. Mine was an old man`s brown suit, Ben used his Renaldo suit, Johnny looked like from he was from 1920s, like a stable boy or something, and Dave`s was actually ’80s—like a Gordon Gecko Wall Street kind of thing—best ten dollars I’ve ever spent.

Sarah: Do you ever wear the same thing?

The Buried Life: I wear a black plaid shirt in almost every episode.

Sarah: Is that because you love it?

The Buried Life: It is. Well, actually, I`m a little sick of wearing it… because I’ve seen it so many times…in the editing room…

Sarah: Can you tell me why these items were on your list: Growing a mustache, getting a tattoo…were these just cool or were these things that you just had to do?

The Buried Life: I thinks it`s…the second thing. Things we felt we had to experience in our life. I mean, the mustache isn`t serious, tattoo isn`t serious…Well, it’s on my leg forever.

Sarah: All right, What made you do something that everyone secretly wants to do? How did you get over the fear and actually do it?

The Buried Life: I think it was a bigger fear for us not to do it. When we started this in 2006, we were all in college and looking at our own lives. Looking at our friends in June, a lot of people weren’t doing what they actually wanted to do. We had a lot of questions, but not a lot of answers. So, we picked up extra jobs, Dunc and I worked in an oil field… After a couple of months of saving up, we had enough money to hit the road and just experiment with this little project that we came up with. Four years later, we’re still doing it.

Sarah: Can you tell me what your goal was? And also, how did you come up with the idea of helping people?

The Buried Life: When we were starting the project, we wrote down all the things that we ever wanted to do. Everyone went in their own corners, and we tried to come up with a list of a hundred things each. Then we came together and put this list together. When we were looking at it, we were seeing all these things that we wanted to do. It just seemed natural to help someone else do something. It would be selfish to kind of just go after all the things we wanted to do. Then when we hit the road, so many people stepped up and helped us with the things that we wanted to do that it was, like, to pay it back.

Sarah: What message are you trying to tell in your show, through what you’ve done?

The Buried Life: We didn’t want to necessarily spread this message; we just had a lot of questions. You know, we were really uncertain about our future. And so the main question we came up with is: What do you want to do before your die? So, to answer your question, the main message we want to send is that: Try asking yourself that question. What do you want to do before you die? And answer it very, very honestly.

Some people are questioning, you know, are the things you want to do before you die go to the Playboy mansion? We’re not telling people, ‘I don’t believe in our generation’, and that they’re entitled to whatever they want. We’re saying you have the right to try. I think our message is also that you should question things. You don’t have to accept whatever your life is. You can question and look around and question the things around you. That’s why this started. We wanted to know more, and we think everyone has that right.