Lessons in Action, Agency, and Purpose From Buying a Ghost Town
Episode Stats
Summary
In the 19th century, Cerro Gordo was the largest silver mine in America. It was a place where dreamers came to strike it rich. In the 21st century, Brent Underwood used his life savings to buy what had become an abandoned ghost town and ended up finding a very different kind of wealth there.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
00:00:11.200
in the 19th century cerro gordo which sits above death valley was the largest silver
00:00:16.000
mine in america a place where dreamers came to strike it rich in the 21st century brent
00:00:21.500
underwood used his life savings to buy what had become an abandoned ghost town and ended
00:00:25.960
up finding a very different kind of wealth there brent has spent four years living in cerro gordo
00:00:30.500
and has documented the details of the mines he's explored the artifacts he's found and how he's
00:00:35.100
restoring the town on his popular youtube channel ghost town living now in a book by the same name
00:00:40.200
he takes a wider view lens on his adventures there and shares the big lessons he's learned
00:00:44.200
from his experiences from the original residents of cerro gordo we get into some of those lessons
00:00:48.680
on today's show we first talk about how and why brent bought a ghost town as a way of escaping a
00:00:53.400
typical nine-to-five life and finding a deeper longer-term purpose we then discuss what
00:00:58.100
restoring cerro gordo has taught him about the necessity of getting started and taking real
00:01:01.460
action how learning the context of what you do can add greater meaning to it the importance of
00:01:06.040
understanding the long-term consequences of short-term thinking the satisfactions that come
00:01:10.260
with being a high agency person and more after the show's over check out our show notes at
00:01:14.380
aom.is slash ghost town all right brent underwood welcome to the show oh man thank you for having
00:01:30.820
me so you are the owner of a ghost town that was once a thriving mining town at the edge of death
00:01:38.680
valley how does a guy like you end up owning an abandoned mining town yes that is a question i i
00:01:48.000
seem to ask myself a lot but i think it was about the right project at the right time for me you know
00:01:54.200
i have a background in hospitality and marketing and storytelling and for me i had just hit that age
00:02:01.980
of 30 where i had a comfortable job you know a comfortable apartment i was living in austin texas working
00:02:07.420
in mostly digital marketing i just felt like there was something kind of missing you know that there
00:02:12.580
must be more out there that there was this untapped potential that i wasn't fulfilling and i just
00:02:17.600
wanted to do something real in the real world you know i think that's kind of the driving force behind
00:02:22.180
it to provide a little more context but the practical of how you get it i got a hard money loan
00:02:27.960
which is basically like as close to a loan shark as you can get these days that fronted a lot of the
00:02:32.280
money called up some friends to get the rest of the money and bought it in 2018 and how did you
00:02:37.960
even know that this was on the market i mean that's kind of weird you never really see towns
00:02:41.500
entire towns going on the market how did you figure this out yeah a buddy of mine was living in los
00:02:47.120
angeles and he saw this link that said buy your own town for under a million dollars you know just
00:02:51.940
an amazing headline for an article and he texted it to me in the middle of the night and i was living in
00:02:56.760
austin texas at the time and i was running a bed and breakfast basically down there and he said hey
00:03:01.700
this might be your next project you know lol he kind of sent it over as a joke and for me it was
00:03:06.200
again just like it struck me at the right moment i was just you know enthralled it was just everything
00:03:12.040
that i could have ever wanted i thought and the more i read about it you know i learned about the
00:03:15.680
town i learned that you know once upon a time it was the largest silver mine in california that there
00:03:20.680
used to be 4 000 residents here and there used to just be like a real life it felt like a real life
00:03:26.940
western kind of playing out in front of me and so i just fell in love so when you saw it when you saw
00:03:31.420
the link you went to the the listing what did you think you're going to do with this like i'm going
00:03:35.620
to buy this thing what were you hoping to do with it yeah i think the initial thought was hospitality
00:03:40.540
you know some type of overnight accommodation that was kind of what i had been doing a little bit kind
00:03:44.460
of on the side in austin so i thought hey this is a beautiful property to set the context a little bit
00:03:48.780
more there's about 400 acres here there's about 22 buildings the town was most prevalent in the 1860s
00:03:55.640
and it's about three and a half hours outside of los angeles three and a half hours outside of las
00:04:00.360
vegas up in the mountains and so i thought man this could be like an amazing place to throw up some
00:04:05.080
cabins you know maybe have a little airbnb half people could come they could learn about the history
00:04:09.300
and they could take in the natural beauty all around so that was the initial plans and that was
00:04:13.960
what six years ago now and things have changed a little bit yeah we'll talk about how it's changed
00:04:17.720
so the town is cerro gordo that's that's how do you that's how do you say the american version is
00:04:23.400
it just cerro gordo yeah cerro gordo uh it's usually how i say it which is fat hill in spanish so what's
00:04:29.360
the story what's the story behind cerro gordo what's its history yeah the the town was established in
00:04:34.440
1860s as a as a mining town and originally they were mining galena here and galena is a silver and lead
00:04:40.700
ore and so in about 1865 it was set up as a mining camp by the 1870s it was the boom town it
00:04:47.680
was the place you wanted to be if you're in california looking to mine silver you know this
00:04:51.860
is just after the gold rush and so a lot of miners were kind of looking for the next thing and
00:04:56.700
cerro gordo was it for a lot of them and they started mining the galena originally and that lasted
00:05:02.960
for about 20 years probably until the mid 1880s i would say and then as these mining camps do the vein
00:05:11.240
was lost and so a lot of these miners packed it up and left you know the town went from a peak of
00:05:15.960
having almost 4 000 residents down to just maybe a skeleton crew of 20 or so and then in around 1910
00:05:23.380
there was a guy that came up named ld gordon and he realized that while everybody was paying attention
00:05:27.180
to all the silver nobody was paying attention to zinc and so he in 1912 reinvigorated the town as a zinc
00:05:33.860
mining town and they mined zinc all the way into the 1940s and so as a mining camp it had an active life
00:05:39.480
from the 1860s to the 1940s which is really long you know a lot of these camps were set up to be
00:05:44.480
you know five six years was a good timeline for him so as far as like mining towns go cerro gordo
00:05:49.660
had a really long history so but at its peak had 4 000 people that's a lot of people yeah it's a lot
00:05:55.320
of people there's 4 000 people a couple hundred buildings up here across the 400 acres and you
00:05:59.460
know if you if you adjust it for inflation they pull something like 500 million dollars with the
00:06:04.040
minerals out of here and at the time the closest port city was los angeles and so a fun fact i like to
00:06:09.600
think about is when cerro gordo had 4 000 residents los angeles only had about 6 500 residents so they're
00:06:16.160
almost like equal trading partners more than you know los angeles being the behemoth and cerro gordo
00:06:21.560
kind of being something behind it but like the demand of cerro gordo and all the people living here and
00:06:26.320
mining here and doing everything necessitated like a port city to get all their supplies because they
00:06:30.580
weren't growing much up here and so i think it's interesting that you know cerro gordo is one of the
00:06:35.920
reasons that los angeles is what it is today and these days almost everybody knows los angeles but
00:06:40.020
almost nobody knows cerro gordo so i feel kind of like one of my goals up here is is changing that a
00:06:45.040
little bit so you pulled together and it's like over a million dollars in a loan to buy this thing
00:06:50.560
got some friends to help you out and kind of become investment partners on this what did your family and
00:06:55.760
friends think when you told them hey i just bought an abandoned mining town i mean my family is kind of
00:07:02.740
used to it i they both my parents are teachers and so they kind of wanted me to go into one of those
00:07:07.560
traditional paths and they realized pretty quickly after college that that wasn't happening and so
00:07:11.940
they kind of had gotten used to my different adventures most of my friends are very supportive
00:07:15.980
too they knew that i just loved doing stuff like this and you know a couple friends were like why don't
00:07:20.640
you stay with the more traditional path i had a very comfortable life in austin you know i had a guy
00:07:24.660
come visit the other day too that was still kind of griping that i should have stuck with kind of what i was
00:07:29.180
doing before but i don't know i think that a lot of them resonated with it and they were pretty
00:07:33.500
supportive okay so you bought cerro gordo in 2018 but then you waited like two years to actually start
00:07:41.760
doing things to restore it and kind of bring to life this idea you have of turning into this
00:07:46.440
place that people can go to sort of a hospitality place why did you wait so long what was the hold up
00:07:51.940
yeah originally it kind of seemed like one of those projects that maybe you could do as a side
00:07:56.240
business that maybe hey i could restore this entire town while still living in austin texas
00:08:01.200
and we did a lot of things that were just i mean i would call them like playing business which you
00:08:05.520
know setting up the perfect pitch deck creating the perfect spreadsheet whining and dining all these
00:08:10.180
different people that could help with the hospitality with these different things but it's really just
00:08:13.920
kind of delaying any real action and so when the pandemic hit in 2020 you know march of 2020
00:08:19.940
my business that was in austin got shut down because of the pandemic and so we were all figuring
00:08:25.000
out where we're going to socially distance and what better place than an abandoned town in the
00:08:28.920
middle of nowhere and so i packed it up came out here and really gave it a shot you know i think for
00:08:33.560
the first time it went from a back burner project to kind of the main project and it just consumed me
00:08:39.660
in a lot of ways and i thought maybe hey i was gonna come up here for a week two weeks something like
00:08:44.140
that and it's now four years later and i'm still here and i you know i no longer have my place in
00:08:50.200
austin i no longer have a business here or there and so it's just all in at cerro gordo at this point
00:08:55.380
all right so the pandemic kind of helped nudge you along to go all in on this thing and you talk
00:08:59.920
about this there's there's a former resident of cerro gordo who inspired you to you know sometimes
00:09:05.880
you just got to get started on something even if you don't know exactly where it's going to go
00:09:10.000
it's this guy named bro schmidt tell us about bro schmidt and what did he teach you about
00:09:14.440
just getting started with something yeah there's there's a guy named bro schmidt and essentially he
00:09:19.720
grew up in rhode island and a few of his siblings had died from tuberculosis and so doctors as they
00:09:25.060
did back then they're like you know you need to really get to a dry climate and so he moved out
00:09:28.780
here and he was a gold miner and he was prospecting all the time and he basically every day he'd have
00:09:34.340
to take his oar around this mountain that he was working to get it to town to sell it and so one day
00:09:39.320
he decided you know i'm not going to take my oar around this mountain anymore i'm going to go
00:09:42.700
straight through it and so he started chipping away every day with his pickaxe you know in a
00:09:48.260
wheelbarrow and he wanted to burrow a tunnel directly through this mountain and about 19 years
00:09:55.000
into this process which is just incredible to think about like in today's timelines of which we think
00:10:00.680
about businesses 19 years into trying to chip through this mountain they built a road around
00:10:05.400
his mountain and so basically his tunnel wasn't good anymore it was for nothing and what i kind of
00:10:09.720
love about the stories is he kept going you know he kept going he got to the other side he finished
00:10:14.520
burrowing through something like a half a mile of solid granite and then after he was done he packed
00:10:19.880
it up and left i think for me kind of what that taught me is that you know the idea if you from the
00:10:24.840
outset you're like hey you know you need to burrow this tunnel through this mountain by hand it would
00:10:29.560
just be overwhelming but i think that like for him he kind of found his rhythm he found his thing that
00:10:33.500
like brought him purpose day in and day out and he did it and i think that one it was just
00:10:38.160
you know start somewhere start something you know stop planning stop like i said playing business
00:10:43.260
and setting up different twitter accounts and just doing all these different things that weren't
00:10:46.300
actually making a difference and just start doing something and then two i mean he's just like a
00:10:51.080
testament to finishing what you started and i think that again in today's day and age like especially in
00:10:55.660
the job that was working before it's very rare i guess is the best way to think about that when i think
00:11:00.400
about somebody like sticking with a project for decades even i think that today it's very popular to think
00:11:07.820
about you know what app can you make to then sell to instagram and have your exit and like what is your exit
00:11:13.020
plan going into businesses but like the idea of sticking with something for nearly 40 years was very it
00:11:20.540
resonated with me and i think that like when i got here i was like you know if i chip away a little bit
00:11:25.200
to use an analogy to what he was doing every day in 40 years what could sarah gore will become
00:11:30.100
and i think that like pretty quickly after starting there was more progress that had been done here
00:11:34.080
in the two years that we had just been sitting around waiting for something to happen yeah
00:11:37.980
burrow schmidt he could have played tunnel maker by coming up some elaborate blueprint and thinking
00:11:43.140
about all the available technology he had at the time to carve this tunnel out instead he just he
00:11:47.880
became a tunnel maker i'm just gonna start digging that's all he did i love that and i just love that
00:11:51.740
he finished it and then he just packed up he's like all right did what i wanted to do
00:11:55.900
i'm moving on yeah i think i think it's cool i just think that you know a lot of people look at that
00:12:01.280
and they just dismiss it as oh this is a crazy guy that did something crazy and like there's that
00:12:05.000
term folly that gets thrown around of like a very impressive feat that had kind of served no purpose
00:12:10.440
but i think that like for the people it resonates with it it resonates deeply like you know i go to
00:12:16.020
his tunnel occasionally and there's hundreds of tourists that visit it every week and it's just
00:12:20.480
something that resonates in today's day and age and so like a lot of serious people that did a lot more
00:12:24.900
quote-unquote serious things beforehand like nobody's visiting them or drawing inspiration from what they are
00:12:30.520
able to leave behind and so i just took away from it that yeah i think that like he found his purpose
00:12:36.240
he found what gave his day's rhythm and he just stuck with it which was really important yeah i think
00:12:41.180
the other thing you learned from him and i think you picked up on is that a task of you know carving a
00:12:46.580
tunnel through a half mile of granite can be so overwhelming that you just don't do anything
00:12:51.660
the idea of restoring an abandoned mining town can be so overwhelming that you don't do anything
00:12:57.500
sometimes all you gotta do is you gotta pick up a hammer in your case and just start start fixing
00:13:02.520
stuff yeah exactly i think that there's also once you get into it a little bit even a couple days
00:13:08.100
there's there's a comfort in that commitment or there's a comfort in that you know laying out what's
00:13:13.100
out there like for me before i would think about what's project is next what project is next even
00:13:17.960
when you're in the middle of one project you're always thinking about what's coming next but like
00:13:21.160
with burrow schmidt he didn't have to think about that you know every day he knew exactly what he was
00:13:24.480
doing and for me i feel like now four years in i feel very relaxed not thinking about you know when
00:13:30.140
this project is done what am i going to do next to bring some purpose or bring some meaning like
00:13:33.680
i hope that cerro gordo is the project that i get to work on for the rest of my life and i think that
00:13:38.140
there's a lot of like relief in that as well did you have any construction or restoration background
00:13:44.160
before you started this thing not a ton you know i had owned a bed and breakfast in austin so i did
00:13:49.040
like minor tasks you know plumbing this and things like that but it was more just out of necessity
00:13:53.260
you know where the town sits at the end of an eight mile dirt road so it's not like i'm running
00:13:57.180
to home depot two or three times a day four or five times a day like there has to be a lot of planning
00:14:01.340
and you just can't get people up here and so it's kind of uh learning as i went kind of okay but you
00:14:06.880
didn't let that deter you because i think that would deter a lot of people no i think that like pretty
00:14:11.420
early on i realized that it was going to be a necessity and so you kind of just start figuring out
00:14:15.760
things to do and i think that i kind of like tapped into one of my original desires to come out here
00:14:20.080
you know i wanted to like do real things in the real world my whole life before that was
00:14:25.600
working on all of these digital projects which are rewarding in some way but i think that
00:14:29.920
there is this feeling that probably a lot of people can resonate with of wanting to like
00:14:34.100
build something with your hands you know something that you can touch something that
00:14:37.260
you could work on for the rest of your life and i think that that desire was being fulfilled here
00:14:41.920
and i figured out the magic of that pretty early on and i think it was just like a reason to keep going
00:14:46.860
and the other thing that you do great in this book is you share your story but you also share
00:14:52.520
these stories of former residents like burrow schmidt of how the town shaped them or how the
00:14:57.400
landscape shaped them and a common theme you see through all these people is that they show up here
00:15:03.040
and they really don't know what how to do the thing they want to do and they just figure i'll figure
00:15:08.440
it out as i start taking action start moving then i'll be able to figure it out yeah i think that
00:15:13.620
like a lot of people sero gordo kind of cast a spell onto people i think you know everybody comes
00:15:18.760
here wanting something a little bit more and everybody comes here seeing the town for having
00:15:24.460
a little bit more than anybody else is seeing and when they all came here for their different reasons
00:15:28.380
but they all came here ostensibly to kind of live out a dream or to like have a little bit of a
00:15:32.940
better life and i think that's what brought the original prospectors here you know they're walking up
00:15:37.300
the wash looking for float which is ore that's left in the wash and they set up shop thinking
00:15:42.240
hey you know maybe this mountain can bring things to me you know that i don't have in my current life
00:15:47.860
and i think that when i showed up here in 2018 i was looking for something as well i wasn't looking for
00:15:53.600
silver in the way maybe they were 150 years ago but i was definitely looking for a change in my life
00:15:59.600
i thought that there was that untapped potential both in me and in the property and then if i were just
00:16:06.380
to stick with it that the skills would come and it would lead me to the life that i was looking for
00:16:11.560
at least that's the hope obviously the history book here is full of stories of people you know
00:16:17.440
being ground into dust by this mountain as well and so um that hope and a dream is what most people
00:16:22.940
come to this town with and uh a few of them are able to see it through to the other side yeah this
00:16:28.040
reminds me of a story from my family on my dad's side one of my great great whatever grandpas was
00:16:35.080
from switzerland when he's a young man he heard all these stories of these pamphlets in switzerland or
00:16:40.340
newspaper ads about all this great farming land in new mexico and if you go out there they're just
00:16:45.820
pretty much giving it away and you'll have this lush verdant farming land so he's like all right
00:16:50.540
i'm going and so he packs up from switzerland comes to new mexico and then he's like oh my gosh it's a
00:16:57.180
freaking desert uh like it's i'm not gonna be able to be a farmer and so he had to adapt and he became
00:17:03.020
you started up a mercantile shop and married a nice spanish american gal and uh my family
00:17:09.860
has roots in new mexico now yeah that's awesome i think there's like i mean it reminds me of stories
00:17:15.440
a lot of times when the the news of the gold rush you know hit europe a lot of people in europe would
00:17:19.940
get on the boats come out west and by the time they got here the gold rush was done and so in a
00:17:24.440
similar way they had to figure out you know what's next what am i going to do and i think that that
00:17:29.080
adaptability led a lot of them to cerro gordo you know to be honest and then to the comstock load
00:17:33.080
after that if they're thinking about mining specifically but then a lot became you know
00:17:36.760
same thing like merchants like levi strauss you know strauss blue jeans as we know them
00:17:40.160
came out of you know a merchant who came here and wanted to build better working pants for the miner
00:17:45.380
and now we have all those different brands so yeah that western that that allure of the american west
00:17:50.460
is strong i think it's been bringing people out here for a really long time yeah i think what the
00:17:54.160
desert does too and you talk about this the desert is pretty unforgiving and so it forces you
00:17:58.520
to adapt yourself to it yeah absolutely i mean nobody's coming to save you in the desert is kind
00:18:03.700
of what i always think about and i think that's another reason again that i started developing some
00:18:07.360
of these skills is just that out here there has to be kind of that a little bit of not a little bit
00:18:12.140
it has to be a lot of self-sufficiency because this place can like chew you out and spit you out
00:18:15.400
completely and then i think once you're up here you know you start taking ownerships over situations
00:18:20.680
maybe that you weren't before and you kind of start developing that sense of purpose and that
00:18:24.880
confidence that hey i can kind of figure out whatever this place is going to throw me
00:18:28.260
so you started living in surrogordo and then while you were there you met your obi-wan kenobi
00:18:34.260
this mentor who would help you in your quest to restore the town this guy named tip tell us about
00:18:39.900
this guy yeah tip is great tip somebody who you know i've probably made hundreds of videos about
00:18:45.060
my time being up here and i've actually never shown tip in any of the videos he wasn't one
00:18:48.860
that wanted the limelight you know his kind of guiding light and all these were was pretty pure when i
00:18:54.340
think about it but he was a guy that had been wandering around these hills for for just decades
00:18:59.640
and he knew it like the back of his hand and i think that in me he kind of saw somebody to pass
00:19:05.260
along that knowledge and i was green you know i was up here i didn't know like we talked about already i
00:19:10.220
didn't know how to build much i didn't know what i was doing and i felt really fortunate i feel like
00:19:14.060
i came up here and with tip and others i feel like i was adopted or i adopted just a dozen
00:19:20.280
grandfathers you know in the in the first couple years that i was here people just wanting to pass
00:19:24.740
along their knowledge and tip was just a mentor in every sense of the word you know he would have
00:19:29.840
hated that term he was not very sentimental but he was one that wanted to like teach me and he kind
00:19:34.680
of showed me that appreciation for figuring things out you know for understanding what was around me for
00:19:41.520
taking ownership over the situation and going forward with it and i feel that like because of
00:19:46.880
him this whole project has been possible i think it's early on in some of these projects you need
00:19:51.100
somebody like that and you need to be able to like accept somebody like that when they come into your
00:19:55.020
life and tip kind of changed the whole game for me at saragordo yeah one thing he taught you that
00:19:59.940
helped you learn more about the history of the town in the area is this idea of walking the wash what is that
00:20:05.920
yeah so the the wash is basically you call it a canyon you can call basically where the water goes
00:20:12.180
on a mountain when it's flowing naturally you know like when the snow melts where how does it get to
00:20:16.000
the bottom of the mountain and i remember one of my early days on here tip was like hey you know what
00:20:20.520
are you doing tomorrow and i said i'm not doing much lying even though i had a bunch to do he goes
00:20:24.820
all right i'm gonna take you on a hike and so we went on a hike and he brought me into the wash
00:20:28.380
and basically you know his point to me is like we went there looking for different artifacts because
00:20:33.880
as the snow melts and everything kind of goes into the wash you can find stuff from the different
00:20:37.400
mining camps that give you a little piece of what life might have been like back in the day here
00:20:41.820
and that was kind of his main thing he was like listen whenever you need an adventure just kind
00:20:47.180
of walk the wash it's the place of the path of least resistance it's kind of where you're going to
00:20:51.820
find a lot of these adventures it's where you know originally they would have found the ore that led
00:20:55.860
them to the discovery of different mining camps like saragordo was in the wash and i just think that
00:21:00.860
from there many of my best adventures have sprung and so it was just like i don't know it kind of
00:21:06.180
accelerated my appreciation for the town a couple years by him telling me that and something else he
00:21:11.820
was vital in helping you understand were all the mines so not only is this a ghost town there's all
00:21:18.160
these buildings a hotel for example there's tons of mine shafts on this thing and tip he knew the
00:21:24.060
stuff like the back of his hand almost yeah he was so the town the town's about 400 acres like i said
00:21:29.560
but underneath the town there's about 30 miles of mines and the main mine here goes 900 feet straight
00:21:34.040
down and off of it there's branches every 100 feet or so and so i like to think about it that there's
00:21:38.760
almost a city underneath the town here you know people come to the town and look around the buildings
00:21:43.500
that's where the history is but none of the buildings would exist unless the things that
00:21:47.640
happen underneath the town happen and so kind of all the history all of the origin of this place is
00:21:52.380
under the ground and when i came up here tip was one of the only ones that i'd ever
00:21:56.840
found that actually understood that and had been down there before and so he kind of sent me on this
00:22:02.420
quest to better understand the mines you know i think that whenever you can kind of get that extra
00:22:08.680
context of your setting whether that's you know if you live in a town and you walk by a park a dozen
00:22:14.520
times the day that you choose to then look up the history of that park the next time you walk by that
00:22:19.880
park it's going to mean that much more to you and tip showed that to me he said listen if you go down to
00:22:24.620
the 86 level it's going to come alive it's no longer just you know black and white words on a
00:22:28.960
page it's going to suddenly come alive you're going to understand the history here and by understanding
00:22:32.760
the history you're going to understand your place within it and it's just going to become that much
00:22:36.120
more purposeful that much more meaningful to you and tip very early on and said i want you to go and
00:22:41.500
explore i want you to discover i want you to live that life of adventure that brought you up here
00:22:46.260
and by doing so you're going to feel so much deeper connection to this town and i think that that was a
00:22:51.300
really important lesson to learn early on yeah you talk about how learning about the history of the
00:22:56.160
town it really was fuel to drive your effort to restore the town yeah i just think that context
00:23:02.760
is everything especially it just brings the world to light especially your place within it and again
00:23:08.900
to use that example walking by the park i just think that a fun example when i i lived in manhattan
00:23:13.520
for a while i was going to school and i remember pinning up my wall a map of manhattan and every day
00:23:19.080
that i had some free time i would try to go walk a new street in manhattan and i would kind of like
00:23:22.520
highlight in that street when i would get home at night and i think that for me it just made my
00:23:28.080
experience much richer you know how many times do people just go to work go home live in their little
00:23:34.100
bubble go home to turn on netflix and kind of like allow that to be that and i think that for me
00:23:39.180
the history here is very rich it's very interesting it makes me think about the place
00:23:44.340
in a longer term perspective instead of just thinking about it as my next project i think that
00:23:49.440
like hey in a hundred years this decision that i'm making right now is going to impact what people
00:23:54.820
think of this place what people read about this place and it's just like impossible to ignore in
00:23:59.080
a historic place like this but i think it's possible to do anywhere you know like i said in
00:24:02.440
manhattan the day i decided to walk every street suddenly like my experience of living in new york was
00:24:07.580
a lot better yeah i mean you can do this any in any profession you're in so if you're in i don't
00:24:13.520
know let's think like insurance like learn about the history of insurance in america i'm sure you'll
00:24:18.740
be able to find some fascinating characters that'll give you a deeper appreciation of what you're doing
00:24:23.820
something i try to do with my work with podcasting and writing i love reading about you know great
00:24:30.960
broadcasters or great publishers and seeing how they dealt with the issues that they faced when in
00:24:36.960
their profession at varying times in history and when you look at it it's often the same stuff
00:24:42.720
same problems they're just things are slightly different yeah you kind of feel part of a lineage
00:24:47.920
then you know you feel like oh i'm like part of something here like you're you're like something
00:24:51.520
larger than just yourself and that's why i felt like when i dove into the history here i learned
00:24:55.220
about the different owners over the day years from you know mortemir belshaw that guy originally
00:24:59.920
created the town you know the problems that he ran into or the road for instance or similar
00:25:04.220
problems i ran into the road or ld gordon who came up the guy that discovered zinc you know
00:25:08.680
his problems with access in and out of the mine are problems that i still kind of have problems with
00:25:13.640
and i just feel like once you feel that you're part of something you know and you can to your point like
00:25:18.640
you're part of the lineage of broadcasters in a larger sense you know and so like once you feel
00:25:22.700
part of that i just think that like enriches your experience day in and day out we're gonna take a
00:25:29.300
and now back to the show so another character you write about in the book that was a former resident
00:25:39.900
of cerro gordo is a guy named william mulholland who was this guy and what did he teach you about
00:25:45.720
the long-term consequences of short-term thinking yeah mulholland was actually he was from la and he's
00:25:52.100
a civil engineer who brought water to the city when the city was running out of water back in the early
00:25:57.880
1900s he was the head of what was then called los angeles waterworks which eventually became the
00:26:03.320
department of water and power and if you've ever seen the movie chinatown with jack nicholson that
00:26:07.800
movie is kind of about the origins of la's department of water and power and so basically la was outgrowing
00:26:13.060
its water supply the town was growing too fast they had nowhere to get water william mulholland went out
00:26:17.820
into the desert and he landed right below cerro gordo in the owens valley where there used to play a
00:26:23.520
place called owens lake and owens lake used to just be this massive lake imagine like this about
00:26:28.440
seven miles across 70 feet deep as weather comes off of the ocean it hits the sierra nevada it kind
00:26:34.940
of dumps all its weather on mount whitney and all that place all that melts and goes into owens river
00:26:39.840
which then turns into owens lake and when mulholland saw owens lake he thought you know there it is the
00:26:46.760
future to this city's growth and so mulholland through a variety of sketchy back door deals
00:26:53.880
eventually bought up most of the valley so he bought the water rights from these different cattle
00:26:58.160
ranchers that were living here you know he even did things like would see to the newspapers that there
00:27:02.720
was a huge drought coming so these farmers were a little bit more you know encouraged to sell their
00:27:07.660
property and then once he had all the water rights he actually redirected the entire river
00:27:12.280
to los angeles he built what's known as the la aqueduct and by about 1918 or so by redirecting
00:27:19.900
the river he left owens lake which again once was this seven mile across 70 feet deep lake dry and a few
00:27:28.260
decades later he created that turned into the largest producer of dust for the united states and so me
00:27:34.480
living above owens lake or the shadow of owens lake i kind of see the dust bowl every single day you
00:27:39.720
see the end result of mulholland's wild dream and i think that it's impossible to ignore when you're
00:27:47.780
up here and so for me it's kind of like a constant reminder that you know these things that i am doing
00:27:52.140
in town they are going to have long-term consequences outside of my life lifetime and so it's an interesting
00:27:58.040
story and it's a place that i look to a lot you talk about in your experience in marketing you worked
00:28:04.360
with a lot of entrepreneurs where you saw a lot of that just short-term thinking and it ended up
00:28:09.740
biting them in the butt and other people in the butt in the long run yeah i just think that like
00:28:15.120
that's kind of been the mentality for the last few decades i think that like you know get in get out get
00:28:20.180
your money and kind of like move on and i think that you know when i look at a lot of my friends
00:28:24.120
we kind of grew up in the era when you saw mark zuckerberg start facebook you know what i mean and then
00:28:29.800
cash out for or create a company that's worth whatever it's created today and so that became
00:28:34.120
almost the model for entrepreneurship but again kind of like the premise there is always going in
00:28:41.460
with the exit in mind i think which is a kind of a backwards way of thinking about business at least to
00:28:46.480
me you know i think that what i found in sarah gordo kind of speaking at what i talked about before
00:28:51.500
about commitment is a project that i want to stick with forever you know i think that it's very
00:28:55.760
backwards to go into a company thinking from that origin how you're going to sell or who you're
00:29:00.280
going to sell it to i think that there's kind of like a lack of permanence there there's a lack of
00:29:04.080
pride almost to it and it leads kind of this deep feeling of dissatisfaction so i think that like
00:29:09.420
if you can find that thing that you like care about enough to care about the future that want to work
00:29:14.480
on it for a very long time it's just a lot more rewarding yeah i've had that question pop to me
00:29:19.580
a couple times throughout my career doing aom like what's your exit and i'm like um i don't know
00:29:25.740
like when i don't have anything else to write about um when i die like that's that's the exit
00:29:30.440
yeah i think like you know one of my buddies told me this once he goes you know does the owner of the
00:29:36.020
yankees have an exit plan and like i don't know if they do or not but like i understand what he was
00:29:39.180
saying you know like if you're building something that you think is like world class that you really
00:29:42.480
care about why would you be thinking about the exit plan like then you have to figure out what to
00:29:46.960
do next you know like i would love to build something that sticks around you know that we are proud of
00:29:50.940
that we are talking about a century from now or something so you admit in the book while you
00:29:55.340
begrudge mulholland for draining owens lake you kind of have a bit of admiration for him why is that
00:30:00.820
i mean what he pulled off was just amazing in a word he was able to redirect a river 200 miles
00:30:08.260
into los angeles and allowed los angeles to become what it did today and that takes a certain type of
00:30:12.620
vision that takes a certain type of person that takes a certain type of problem solver that after
00:30:17.100
spending a lot of time out in the desert i have to have some admiration for i think that the end result
00:30:22.360
wasn't ideal i think it caused a lot of problems for a long time but i think the scale of the project
00:30:28.040
that he pulled off is admirable you know and if only for the scale yeah well we're gonna talk about
00:30:34.180
this more but he had high agency he saw something and he made it happen absolutely i think that like
00:30:40.200
you know he was able to go out there he set a goal for himself and he achieved it you know he wasn't
00:30:44.800
waiting for something to happen in la to be better you know he brought that sense of control into his
00:30:50.080
own life he wasn't leaving things up to fate or luck and i think to your point that's kind of what
00:30:54.560
high agency means it's somebody that has that belief in their own ability to succeed at whatever
00:31:00.820
they're setting out to do you know even if something is crazy as i'm gonna redirect a river 200 miles
00:31:06.060
which is just it's crazy to think about but he was able to you know figure it out who are some other
00:31:11.160
high agency people who lived in cerro gordo i think from the very beginning it was everybody here
00:31:18.360
you know the original owner of the town mortemir belshaw had to figure out a way to get a road up
00:31:23.040
here and again like right now i'm sitting at 8 500 feet in elevation and the valley floor below me is
00:31:28.960
about 3 500 feet in elevation so you figure there's a mile of elevation gain to go here and when he came
00:31:35.300
it was just a mule trail but if this town is going to pull out 500 million dollars of the silver they
00:31:40.660
obviously were going to have to have a lot better infrastructure than that and so he just believed that
00:31:45.220
he could make it happen and he didn't make it happen you know and because of that it became
00:31:49.120
the boom town that i was going to become and i think that you know when i think about the different
00:31:54.400
high agency people here they all had that you know sense of control over their lives that they could
00:31:59.400
make things happen and during my time here i remember my first year we had a big tragedy here
00:32:05.480
where we lost one of our main buildings and when we were in the rebuilding process the biggest hurdle
00:32:10.080
that we had was to get concrete up to the town and again concrete might not seem like that big a hurdle
00:32:14.600
but when you're living up an eight mile dirt road that's very far from everything else the idea of
00:32:19.880
having to get 10 truckloads full of concrete up here were very difficult i called around and i asked
00:32:24.920
all the local companies like hey can you bring concrete up here and everybody's like no road is
00:32:28.580
too dangerous no road is too dangerous you know a variety of reasons and so i kind of felt stuck you know
00:32:33.560
i called a helicopter company they wanted some crazy amount to do it and then through some of the
00:32:38.140
youtube videos i was making at the time i got connected with this guy named heavy d who's a guy
00:32:41.980
named dave sparks in utah i remember the very first call with dave he was just like i don't know we'll
00:32:46.020
figure that out there was no like even sympathy for like the the routes i had gone down so far
00:32:52.080
almost more of like a come on man you know like we're gonna figure this out and yeah a couple
00:32:57.020
months later dave purchased a concrete truck that we brought up here without any concrete in it
00:33:03.660
we bought a lot of dry concrete that we were able to bring up the road and we mixed and poured
00:33:09.280
essentially about 10 truckloads worth of concrete in a single day to pour the foundation of the hotel
00:33:14.920
that we're building right now and it just kind of like unlocked that feeling within me that hey
00:33:19.240
these things are figureoutable you know i i think that's a term that i think about a lot up here is
00:33:23.600
that the skill of figuring things out is a muscle almost and it grows the more you use it and i think
00:33:29.740
that like when i first got up here maybe it's hey can i figure out how to build a little porch
00:33:33.920
on one of the cabins and after i did that i was like oh maybe i can fix the roof and after day
00:33:37.960
came i was like oh like i just poured 10 truckloads of concrete on the top of a mountain in the middle
00:33:42.760
of nowhere like there's almost nothing that i can't do then and i think that the confidence grows
00:33:47.880
within that you know like each time you figure out something a little bit harder and a little bit
00:33:51.580
harder and a little bit harder that sense of agency that we talked about shines through more
00:33:56.380
and it almost changes your belief about yourself you know now i feel like i am somebody that is
00:34:01.380
going to figure out whatever several girls throws at me and i don't think that i felt that you know
00:34:05.000
four years ago before i moved here yeah this idea of having a sense of agency as a dad that's the big
00:34:11.480
thing i'm trying to inculcate in my kids like i want them to have that idea or that sense that any
00:34:16.680
problem they have it's figureoutable you can figure it out like you don't have to be passive
00:34:20.820
you can do something about it yeah i think that that term passive is almost what i was trying to
00:34:26.620
fight against coming up here i think that that feeling of helplessness is one that nobody likes
00:34:30.100
to feel and i think that the answer out of that is trying to figure out different little problems
00:34:34.560
and again kind of like developing that muscle as you go figure that figureoutable sense and i think
00:34:39.660
that sarah gordo is kind of like trial by fire i had to figure that out time and time again but now i feel
00:34:44.980
that like because the agency grew again like your confidence grows and you can see it when you know
00:34:49.520
people you know i have i'm sure everybody out there has like encountered somebody where no matter
00:34:53.980
what problem you tell to them they're very calm they're very usually very pretty quiet and they're
00:34:59.300
like all right we'll figure it out it's almost that feeling you get if you've ever been around like
00:35:03.180
special forces people and for me i think about people that i've encountered in the desert you know
00:35:08.820
a lot of them have that kind of calm coolness to them and when i first moved up here i was very
00:35:13.680
envious of that you know i came from the online marketing world where everything was almost like
00:35:18.660
you know a crisis to solve that everything was very you know here now how could we possibly do
00:35:23.960
this and like up here i just find that everybody that chooses to live in the desert you know chooses
00:35:29.300
to live pretty far away from a traditional support system has a very high sense of agency and i feel
00:35:35.600
that living up here that's one of the most important things i would say that it developed over the past
00:35:40.600
four years so you experienced a lot of setbacks in your pursuit to restore sarah gordo you mentioned a
00:35:45.500
big one the biggest one probably is the hotel burned down this is gonna be at the crown jewel
00:35:49.500
of the town what were the emotions you went through when you saw this hotel on fire yeah it was
00:35:56.840
it was the main crux of all the plans here you know it was this beautiful hotel from 1871 that was
00:36:03.020
kind of going to be the gathering point for the cabins we were going to put up this is where everybody's
00:36:06.740
going to experience take photos enjoy the place and the day it burned down it just felt
00:36:11.780
every feeling all at once almost it was a it was seeing your hopes your dreams and like the majority
00:36:19.440
of your life savings go up in flames all at once and it was difficult you know i remember after it i
00:36:25.200
didn't really want to be here but i didn't want to be anywhere else i felt very like sad i felt
00:36:29.240
disappointed i felt like i let history down because at that point i was very deep in the history here like
00:36:33.860
we talked about the lineage of things that had happened and this had happened on my watch and i remember
00:36:38.520
the first day just sitting on the porch still in pretty bad shape when the old owner of cerro gordo
00:36:44.840
the guy that had actually sold it to us came up because he had heard about the fire i remember when
00:36:49.220
i saw him i thought he was gonna just lay into me for a bunch of different reasons and i remember
00:36:53.500
at the moment he kind of put his hand on my shoulder and he said listen this is bound to happen
00:36:58.360
you can't change what happens but what happens from here is up to you and i remember in those moments
00:37:04.440
you kind of look for something to grab onto and that was kind of a phrase that i grabbed onto for
00:37:08.500
a long time you know like what happens from here is up to you because i think it's true you know it
00:37:12.640
seems very basic when you say it out loud but no matter what the circumstance you're in what happens
00:37:17.140
next is up to you and so for me i could have gone back to austin with the tail between my legs i could
00:37:22.040
have thrown in the towel it probably would have been the better move financially everything like that
00:37:26.560
but then i think about the guys like burrow schmidt you know like finishing what you started
00:37:29.580
you know like leaving something behind and we're here you know i'm looking at my window right now
00:37:34.300
and i'm looking at the hotel and it's it's back there's a roof on it you know we're doing some of
00:37:38.960
the plumbing right now inside of it and it'll be open soon and i think that's again one of those agency
00:37:43.060
things where when i look at that i think of all the difficulty that went into rebuilding it but that
00:37:48.360
we finished it i kind of think back to earlier in my life of like when didn't i push myself and like
00:37:53.900
what things didn't i finish that maybe i could have and how could have those changed the direction of my
00:37:58.300
life earlier on and so what originally was by far the biggest tragedy here it kind of turned into the
00:38:03.980
the battle cry you know the the marching orders for a long time and now now that this thing is
00:38:09.540
standing again i i feel like you know what could sarah gordo possibly throw at me that i couldn't handle
00:38:14.000
so you got the you started rebuilding the hotel and that's on its on its way and again you you had to
00:38:19.860
exercise some agency to do that you also talk about in the book you reached a point with this project so
00:38:25.200
you started working on it in gusto in 2020 you're up there non-stop working all the time and you
00:38:33.040
started experiencing some burnout what did working on this town teach you about burnout and how to
00:38:38.600
manage it yeah i think that you know once you find that project that grabs your attention doesn't let go
00:38:44.140
that thing that just you know captures all of you it can consume you in some ways for me i don't think
00:38:50.260
i left the town for more than a day for two or three years and it was just like every day working
00:38:56.320
as hard as we could rebuild this hotel rebuild this hotel what happens is next up to you what happens
00:39:00.360
next up to you and i lost like 30 pounds i wasn't a guy that could probably lose any weight to begin
00:39:04.980
with i just got really bad place mentally it was just every day kind of waking up and just being
00:39:11.000
consumed by this project to the point where a lot of my friends are calling and like dude like
00:39:14.740
you need to relax this is not going to work and i just kind of got to the point where i realized that
00:39:20.800
if i were to like flame out burn out completely then it would kind of suffer the project in total
00:39:26.020
you know then i look back again to the lineage of guys that were here before and when i dug deeper
00:39:30.520
into the history of the mortemir belshaw or the ld gordons that lived and managed this town back in the
00:39:36.140
day you know they all had a time away you know they were able to go away kind of reflect on what
00:39:40.840
they're doing and come back to it and so i think for me i try to develop a little bit of a rotation
00:39:45.540
these days you know where i am here probably a month straight and then i try to take at least
00:39:49.960
you know three or four days off the mountain every couple of times because it also provides
00:39:54.080
that perspective where you're not so stuck in it and it originally i felt guilt for that i thought
00:39:58.360
you know every day that i'm not at cerro gordo is a day that progress isn't getting me done but
00:40:01.960
eventually you get to the point where if you're so burned down burned out there's not progress
00:40:06.100
happening even when you're there and so i think that like some healthy retreat is almost
00:40:10.460
necessary when you get into one of these giant projects yeah you talk about you found a book
00:40:14.560
in the belshaw house in the town it was about world war ii and you flipped through it and you
00:40:20.680
found this section about how they rotated soldiers on the front line so they could avoid battle fatigue
00:40:25.940
yeah it was a requisite you know it was prescribed to them that there was going to be a set number of
00:40:30.660
days you could be on the front line then there's a set number of days you had to be in the very back
00:40:33.580
then a set number of days you're kind of in the middle and this is the way they're able to like
00:40:36.640
prevent this horrible burnout of these soldiers in war and like i don't think that any of us are
00:40:41.560
in a situation akin to being soldiers in war especially me you know rebuilding a town that
00:40:46.100
i live in but i do think that there was lessons to pull away from that to where you know them even
00:40:51.220
the kind of the most experienced soldiers out there needed that little break and that was
00:40:54.300
comforting in its own way for me to take a little bit of time away yeah so if you're working on a big
00:40:58.560
project make sure you rotate yourself off the front line regularly you also talk about how
00:41:03.360
this town taught you a lot about humility and developing a sense of awe tell us more about that
00:41:09.700
yeah the town's set in just one of the most beautiful settings i can imagine you know if i
00:41:14.560
look out my window right now i see mount whitney which is the tallest point in the lower 48 i see
00:41:19.260
the sierra nevada i see owens lake and if i turn my head the other way i see all death valley beyond me
00:41:24.460
like the the desert just as far as i could possibly see and it's just awe-inspiring you know i think
00:41:29.520
awe is one of those terms that's thrown around far too often these days you know not everything is
00:41:33.600
awesome even though we we say that kind of is almost the knee-jerk response to when somebody
00:41:38.220
texts us something like oh that's awesome but like true off to me is something that just you know
00:41:42.540
stops you in your tracks and like instinctually tilts your head up you know it is that giant mountain
00:41:48.260
that makes you feel small it's that desert for as far as you can see it's even being in you know a
00:41:52.960
concert with musicians that are just amazing you know you can get that sense and for me out here at least
00:41:58.180
in the mountains it just reminds me of your place in the world you know there's a stoic term called
00:42:03.040
sympathia which is basically talking about the interconnectedness of it all and there's a marcus
00:42:07.840
really's quote that says you know what hurts the hive hurts the bee basically like what's bad for the
00:42:12.260
world is bad for you individually as well and so i think that like taking that time and zooming out
00:42:16.780
and understanding like how your life your project or whatever fits into the world allows you to put your
00:42:23.180
problems into perspective that kind of allows you a little break from that oh man my problems are
00:42:29.360
everything this this and that and for me being out here in the nature just it brings me to that place
00:42:34.640
of mind that i haven't found anywhere else you know living in austin i never found those places where
00:42:39.580
it was truly awe-inspiring and it brought that sense of peace to me and i think that like it was just a
00:42:45.060
constant reminder to get out in nature as often as i could yeah i love going to the desert that's my place
00:42:49.620
where i go when i need to restore myself i just love the emptiness of it i love seeing big mountains
00:42:56.380
in the in the distance i love seeing the mesas there's a solace in such a desolate place i don't
00:43:03.000
know it just recharges me i love i'm actually planning a trip out to get out the desert now and
00:43:08.060
i'm looking forward to it yeah it's just it's also like for me when i think about the desert i just feel
00:43:12.260
like there's nowhere to hide it feels very honest to me is the word i look about when i think the desert
00:43:16.940
just because like everything's kind of laid out in front of you and it just goes and goes and it
00:43:21.200
just leaves you that time to think there's not a lot of distractions not even as much color as you're
00:43:25.300
used to when you look at like a hillside or something and so it just like i don't know it's
00:43:29.060
amazing what's the future of sero grotto like where where can people learn more about it what you're
00:43:34.180
doing yeah we're so i'm hoping that this year we finish up the hotel you know that's been a big
00:43:38.240
project over the last few years we're going to add some cabins over the coming years maybe
00:43:41.560
some campsites as well but we're open to the public every day if people want to come up
00:43:45.260
and check out the town we're open from nine to five there's no charge for people to come up i've
00:43:49.600
i've made a little museum of different artifacts that i found on my hikes or down in the mines
00:43:53.740
people can check out so hopefully this year we introduce long-term accommodation or overnight
00:43:57.920
accommodation and then long-term who knows you know i would love to see this place stick around for a
00:44:02.780
few more generations so people can keep you know being inspired by the history and the beauty here
00:44:07.280
and i i kind of document all of it on my youtube channel which just called ghost town living which is the
00:44:12.020
same name as the book ghost town living which chronicles the past four years here
00:44:15.120
so that'd probably be the best place to check out fantastic well brent underwood thanks for your
00:44:18.660
time it's been a pleasure of course thank you my guest today was brent underwood he's the author
00:44:23.880
of the book ghost town living it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find
00:44:28.060
more information about his work at his youtube channel ghost town living check that out also check
00:44:32.100
out our show notes at aom.is ghost town we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic
00:44:36.880
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:44:48.380
artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that
00:44:52.360
we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of and if you haven't done
00:44:55.740
so already i'd appreciate it if you take one minute to get your view on the podcast or spotify it helps
00:44:59.440
out a lot and if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the show with a friend or
00:45:03.680
family member you think we get something out of it as always thank you for the continued support
00:45:07.960
and until next time it's brent mckay reminding you to listen to aom podcast but put what you've heard