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

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. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  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,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. When Courageous 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, because it was not an easy thing to do, to drive from Texas to California, was that I promised my oldest son, Clark, that I would take him to Cerro Gordo, which is a YouTube channel he loves about this guy living in a ghost town. And you've heard me talk about Cerro Gordo before. It's... My son, of course, refers to him as this guy who lives in the ghost town, as if Brent, Brent Underwood, the guy that lives in the ghost town,

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  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 Stoic. It was his idea to do this podcast. It's his idea to do our YouTube channel. Brent's the best. I've known Brent forever. And my son just really wanted to go visit. I was one of the original investors in Cerro Gordo. I've watched the story unfold. It's this crazy place. It's, you know, 8,000 feet of elevation. It's a ghost town in, right above Death Valley. It's like the highest part in California, looking down on the lowest part of California. And at one point, it was one of the most valuable... Silver mines in the world, hundreds of millions of dollars of silver came out of

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  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 gonna head to Cerro Gordo. And he moved there. We 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

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  of which is to set up today's episode, something I filmed while I was up in Cerro Gordo, 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 Cerro Gordo, I just was struck with a lot of different stoic themes. And I riffed 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 that will challenge you, I think, help put some of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca's and Epictetus's wisdom in more concrete terms. And you can watch this episode on YouTube as well, but I think listening to it will give you the same effect.

• 3:37Ryan Holiday?

  Here are seven Stoic Lessons From An Abandoned Ghost Town.

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  One of my absolute favorite quotes from Seneca, 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, just how obscenely beautiful the world is. Actually, one of my favorite Marcus Aurelius passages 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 ripe 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.

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  You have to cultivate that eye to appreciate it, to see it, to soak it in. You can't be too busy, can't be too preoccupied, can't be too obsessed with yourself not to see it. I mean, even just, look how insanely beautiful the road up to Cerro Gordo is, just carved out of the face of the mountain.

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  On the bookshelf here at Cerro Gordo, I found one of my absolute favorite books, Totochan, 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 of years ago. And we actually sell my bookstore at the painted porch. The person who recommended that book to me was my friend Seth Roberts. And a couple of years ago Seth sent me an email on a Friday. I saw it, I started to read it, then I marked it as unread and I said, I'm gonna 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

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  was this idea of memento mori, which the Stoics talk about, which is that you can't take people or life for granted. You never know, 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 memento mori reminder sticks with you as well.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  Hobbes famously said that, 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, you can get some sort of desolate, dark summations of human existence in Marcus Aurelius 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.

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  Almost none of them ever actually strike it rich. In this union mine up here, there was a cave-in that killed up to like 200 miners, 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.

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  I'm here at Cerro Gordo 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 24/7 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 of these tailing piles. That's 70 feet, multiple hills of millions of pounds of rock. Which reminds me of two great Stoic quotes. One, Marx really says, "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?

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  You do it one ore cart at a time, one trip from the hoist at a time. And then my other favorite quote is actually from Xeno, 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. In itself is small, but cumulatively, it's enormous. Whereas Washington's favorite expression was, "Many mickles make a muckle. Many loads make a giant mountain."

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things I think about when I come to a place like this is like, how did the people live? Like, how did they endure the adversity and the difficulty in the inhospitable weather? And the answer is, they, 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, they lived through it by living through it. It's not that complicated. Just in the same way that you lived through the pandemic, by, as Marcus Aurelius says, by using the weapons that you've always been armed with,

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  your reason, your strength, your power of will. And, 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 Aurelius, and before him, before him, and before her, and before him, all the way back. We come from an unbroken line of survivors. And as I look out over this town, I just take some edification from the heartiness and the perseverance and the, the strength of the people who lived here. And you can choose to do that too. And just, I think, something always worth remembering.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics 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 10 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 it.

• 10:29Ryan Holiday?

  If you don't pay your property taxes, like, someone will come take it. Like, you do not own anything. And there's a story about Epictetus, where this lamp he has is stolen. And he, 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 ephemeral 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. Marx, really, this actually says like, and he gets this from Epictetus.

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  He says, as you tuck your children in tonight, like, say to yourself, like, I might not see them in the morning. Um, 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 Stoics 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 it, you don't see it with the precariousness that it actually exists in.

• 11:56Ryan Holiday?

  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 are, would make that very difficult. And then they come up with a reason not to do it.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:10Ryan Holiday?

  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 you 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?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  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?

• 12:43Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And I think it's obviously a balancing act. But this end of the day, for me, when I'm thinking about Sarah Gordon specifically, there's no manual for restoring abandoned ghost towns. 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 of 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

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  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 going to do it now at this age, I'm never going to do it. And then to pivot from that stuff to ancient philosophy, it's like, if you're not going to do it now, you're probably never going to do it. And so there's this great Latin expression, "focsi facis," basically like, do it if you're going to 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.

• 13:49Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa of Pochyle, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't 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 could talk about like today's episode. You could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts, is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic Meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and 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,

• 14:34Ryan Holiday?

  all our Daily Stoic courses and challenges, totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial, totally for free. Check it out at dailystoiclife.com.