The Daily Stoic - 7 Stoic Lessons From An Abandoned Ghost Town (Cerro Gordo)

Episode Date: February 6, 2022

What can the Cerro Gordo Ghost Town teach you about the art of living? When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March of 2020 Brent Underwood moved to the abandoned ghost town of Cerro Gordo. He's now lived there for almost 2 years entirely alone.Ryan Holiday has known Brent since he first hired him as his intern over 10 years ago. He went to visit the ghost town on his road trip last summer and documented the Stoic lessons that he took from his time on the hill.Watch the video: https://youtu.be/fDzb1XBUJyM Ryan's vlog in Cerro Gordo: https://youtu.be/YAO1CfRcJ-8 Brent's channel: https://www.youtube.com/ghosttownliving As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up athttps://dailystoic.com/life/Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome 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. When courage is calling came out in September, I made a trip out to LA to do some interviews. And one of the reasons we took the trip, one of the reasons we drove, it was not an easy thing we do to drive from Texas to California, was that I promised my oldest son Clark that I would take him to Saragordo, which is a YouTube channel he loves about this guy

living in a ghost town. And you've heard me talk about Sarah Gordo before. It's my son, of course, refers to him as this guy who lives in the ghost town. As if Brent, Brent, under where the guy that lives in the ghost town, has not been in my son's life, my son's entire life. I've actually known Brent since he started

as my intern at Brass Check. He helped me start daily still. It was his idea to do this podcast, his idea to do our YouTube channel. Brent's the best of known Brent forever. And my son just really wanted to go visit. I was one of the original investors in Sarogordo. I've watched the story unfold.

It's this crazy place. It's 8,000 feet of elevation. It's a ghost town right above Death Valley. It's like the highest part in California, looking down on the lowest part of California. At one point, it was one of the most valuable silver mines in the world. Hundreds of millions of dollars. The silver came out of it and Brent moved up there during the pandemic. In March of 2020, I said, Hey, Brent, you can come out to our farm, you know, and crash anytime you want. And he said, you know, what I think I'm going to head to Sarah Gordon, he moved there, where he promptly got snowed in and had to be stoic in a very real way as life conspired to crush

his spirit and kill him in many ways. There was a fire. There was natural disasters. There was loneliness and isolation and all the things we were dealing with in the pandemic magnified and at some point Brent started a YouTube channel which blew up called Ghost Town Living and my son loves watching it. All of which is to set up today's episode, something I filmed while I was up in Sarogordo, but I'd love you to listen to. These are stoic lessons from an abandoned ghost town. While I was up there, and I think it's part of why I love history and why I've been fascinated with Sarogordo, I just was struck with a lot of different stoic themes, and I rift on them while I was up there, and that's what we have in today's episode seven Stoic lessons from an abandoned ghost town things I want you to think about

Uh that will challenge you I think help put some of Marcus Reelius and Senaqas and epictetus's wisdom Uh in more concrete terms and uh you can watch this episode on YouTube as well But I think listening to it will give you the same effect. Here are seven stoic lessons from an abandoned ghost town. One of my absolute favorite quotes from Santa Clara, he says, the whole world is a temple to the gods. When you look out at the insane beauty, it's hard not to be struck by that. When you look out at the insane beauty,

it's hard not to be struck by that, just how obscenely beautiful the world is. Actually, one of my favorite marks to realize passage is when he's sort of talking about the ordinary beauty of life in meditations, talks about nature's inadvertence, the way that bread cracks open, or olives fall right from the tree, or the way that grain bends low under its own weight. You look even like this scrub brush growing out of the side

of a cliff face. You look at the mountains the way they frame the city. It's just incredible. You have to cultivate that eye to appreciate it, to see it, to soak it in. You can't be too busy, you can't be too preoccupied, you can't be too obsessed with yourself not to see it. I mean, even just, the kind of insanely beautiful the road up to Cerro Gordo is, just carved out of the face of the mountain. On the bookshelf here at Cerro Gordo, I found one of my absolute favorite books, Toto-chan, The Little Girl at the Window. But there's a little memento-mori story that I think about every time I touch or think about this book, which I just reread a couple years ago and we actually sell my books

through the Pader Borts. The person who recommended that book to me was my friend Seth Roberts. And a couple years years ago, Seth sent me an email on a Friday. I saw it. I started to read it and then I marked it as unread and I said, I'm going to get to it on Monday. I was editing an article or something. He was writing and I said, I'll do it Monday. But that Sunday, he dropped dead of a heart attack on a hike. It's obviously tragic that he's gone. But the final lesson I took from that was this idea of a Memento Mori, which is still a talk about, which is that you can't take people or life for granted. You never know how long you get with someone. You never know if you'll get another chance to

respond to that email. And I think about that email all the time. I could have responded. I could have just said hello. We would have connected one last time before he died. And this is a great book. You should definitely read it. It's a beautiful book. But I hope that momentum or a reminder sticks with you as well. Hobbs famously said that life is nasty, brutish, and short. And Aristotle said something pretty similar

about the lives of slaves back in ancient Greece. And you can get some sort of desolate, dark summations of human existence in the markets really is too. But you think about the lives of these miners. You know, they're making four bucks a day, maybe. They're literally carving out rock piece by piece bucket by bucket, just getting destroyed. Almost none of them ever actually strike it rich. In this Union mine up here, there was the cave in the Killed up to like 200 miners or something like that. They're just stuck there.

They never, they never got out. And who remembers them? To me, the point isn't to be dark and morbid, although, you know, we're all fragile and mortal today. To me, the lesson is like we should be immensely grateful for the privileges and advantages that we have in the modern world. We're so lucky. I'm here at Saragordo, and I'm standing on top

of a 70 foot mound. The mounds, the stuff that comes out of a mine are called tailings. So this hoist house here, tiny cage, every day running 24 or 7 would bring up rocks, right? All the excess that they're trying to get out of the mine, not even just the ore, but the excess. So these tailing vials, that's 70 feet, multiple hills of millions of pounds of rock, which reminds me of two great stoic quotes.

One marks the release as we assemble our life action by action, no one can stop you from that. The idea that you're going to build a 70 foot pile of refuse is insane, but how do you do it? You do it one or a cart at a time, one trip from the hoist at a time, and then my other favorite quote is actually from Xenon, the founder of stoicism, he says, well being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing, right? Each one of these, just a tiny little load of rocks, and itself is small, but cumulatively it's enormous.

Whereas Washington's favorite expression was, many Michaels make a muckle, many loads, make a giant mountain. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo. I'm just the name of you. Now, I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans

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of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want wanna know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night.

But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music.

Download the Amazon Music app today. One of the things I think about when I come to a place like this is like, how did the people live? How did they endure the adversity and the difficulty in the inhospitable weather? And the answer is they dealt with it one day at a time, they dealt with it with quiet stoicism and endurance, just like you would do if you lived then or if those conditions returned. Like, we think about how our ancestors lived through the Great Depression or the Great Influenza, or any of these things, and they lived through it by living through it. It's not that complicated, just in the same way that you live through

the pandemic. As Mark has really said, by using the weapons that you've always been armed with, your reason, your strength, your power of will, and so that's how you have to think about it. Like, you're not that different from them. And in fact, we're all descendants of people who have been through much worse stuff. We come from an unbroken line of survivors dating back to Marcus Rielius and before him, before him and before her and before him, all the way back. We come from an unbroken line of survivors. As I look out over this time, I just take some edification from the hardiness and the perseverance and the strength of the people who lived here, and you can choose to do that too,

and just, I think, something always worth remembering. The Stoic say, like, all of this is ours in trust only. Like, you possess it briefly, however long you have it. But, like, undoubtedly, it goes with your death. It goes to someone else. But it can also be stolen from you. It can burn down like it did earlier this year. Like it's yours in trust.

You have so little control over it. And we're basically just reacting to these forces outside of our control. Whether you live to be a hundred, whether there's one pandemic, whether there's ten pandemics, whether there's natural disasters or whatever Like you don't own any of this like I heard someone say about their ranch, which I think about with mine

They're like I don't own this the bank just lets me make payments on it I mean you don't own if you don't pay your property taxes like someone will come take it You know like you do not own anything and there's a story about epic teetis where this lamp he has is stolen and instead of being upset, he just goes like, you can only lose what you have. And when you feel possessive of things as opposed to seeing them as a femurally yours,

that's where you get those feelings of anger and resentment because you lied to yourself, you told yourself it was yours. When we feel like stuff's ours, when we feel like we own it, we're more vulnerable than a person who, again, sees these things as only temporarily theirs, which is, I think another important stoic exercise. Mark Sereo actually says,

like, and he gets this from my particular thesis, he says, as you touch your children in tonight, like, say to yourself, like, I might not see them in the morning. Which feels like horrible to do. You would never like look at something you love and own, let alone a person and be like, well, like, goodbye. But when you do that, the stoic say,

when you wake up the next day, you're like, you actually appreciate it, you see it as yours. You're grateful for it in a way that if you have begun to take it for granted or like you've woken up with so many mornings, every morning you have it, you don't appreciate, you don't see it with the precariousness that it actually exists in. Everyone has a thing they would like to do and then they look at the numbers or they get dissuaded or they look at the entrenched interests that would make that very difficult and

then they come up with a reason not to do it. There's this great story where Jeff Bezos has the idea for Amazon and he's telling his boss he's working on Wall Street and there they go for this walk in Central Park and his boss says, that sounds like a great idea for someone who doesn't have a job. Meaning like somebody else should do it, not you. And I do think one of the big elements of courage is this idea of like, if not me, then who? Right? Like, why would I just let someone else do it? I want to try it. Why shouldn't I risk it?

Yeah, I think like to your point, like instead of finding let someone else do it? I want to try it. Why shouldn't I risk it? Yeah, I think like to your point, like instead of finding ways not to do it, find ways or find reasons to do it, you know what I'm saying? Sure. And I think it's obviously a balancing act, but this end of the day, for me, when I think about Sarago specifically,

there's no manual for restoring a band and ghost town. There's no degree in turning a ghost town into something. And so like to your point, if not me, then who? I think that like, I don't have all the tools necessary, but I have the confidence that I could figure it out. And so if I'm not going to do it, well, it's not just if not me, then who? It's also if not now, then when? And I found that in my career, it's like, okay, yeah, I could wait another year and then go do this stuff in Hollywood, but I probably would have never done it. Then I had this corporate life and it was like But I want to be a writer and then to leave that it's like if I'm not gonna do it now at this age

I'm never gonna do it and then to pivot from that stuff to ancient philosophy It's like if you're not gonna do it now You're probably never gonna do it and so there's this great Latin expression Foxy Fox basically like do it if you're gonna do it. And so there's this great Latin expression, Foxy Foccus, basically like, do it if you're gonna do it. Like, you can't put it off, you can't tell yourself like, when I'm more established, when it's safer, when it's more proven, because that's when you miss your moment.

You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pocula, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously we can all get together in one place, because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people, and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa, we're calling it Daily Stoic Life.

It's an awesome community. You can talk about like today's episode. You can talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts, interacting with all these people who are using stoicism to be better in their actual real lives. You get more daily stoke meditations over the weekend, just for the daily stoke life members, quarterly Q&As with me, cloth bound edition of our best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and this is the best part, all our daily stoke courses and challenges, totally

for free hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our new year, new year challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two week trial, totally for free. Check it out at dailystokelife.com. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery

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