Special Episode: The Untold Adventures of Leigh Hunt: Gold, Newspapers, and the Birth of Las Vegas

Hello. Welcome to the Big Strategy Podcast. I'm your host and fellow strategist, Jeff Eyett. This is your go to spot for real talk with the masterminds of business strategy.

It's about sharing stories, insights, and those little nuggets of wisdom to help you unlock big growth. Let's turn the key and spring into action. Welcome everyone, to this special episode of the Big Strategy podcast. It's December 2025 and Chris Rand is our guest.

He's a friend of mine for, for over a decade now and kind of getting to know each other and spend some time together. Chris always talked about this famous relative that he had and you know, I'm a sucker for a great story. And so, Chris, tell us about what you know was so exciting and that you and your father are actually joining us to talk about today. Yes.

Thanks, Jeff, for having us on your show. This is a lot of fun for us. And Larry's my father and you know, through his lifelong love of learning, he found a lot of interesting stories. And at one point he stumbled into a story that really is one of the most fascinating stories he ever found.

And it happens to be his own great grandfather who is the subject of our story today. And that's what's fascinating, Chris, is because even though this story takes place over a hundred years ago, there are so many parallels to the entrepreneurs of today. And so I think a lot of times people ask, are you born an entrepreneur? Can you become an entrepreneur?

I think this gives some evidence to the fact that there's some natural tendencies that might be in the DNA that span generations. So tell us a little more about Lee Hunt and what we're going to learn today. Sure. Lee Hunt, he was born in the 1850s on a farm in Indiana, and he was one of 12 children.

And he really wanted to have a life of adventure, something he learned very early. So he was not want to stick around the farm and do what most people did at that time. Yeah. He was not going to be bailing hay for the for the rest of his life.

In fact, he made hay and got out and saw not only the country, but this is a story that spans oceans and continents. So without further ado, let's jump in and pick up Larry telling Lee's story. Well, Chris, Larry, it's great to have you both on the podcast and we're not here to hear your story, but to have you tell us a story about someone whom I had never heard about, but lived an extraordinary life. And I want to just, first of all, thank you for taking the time to share, you know, story from your family tree with us that I know has been deeply researched.

So, Larry, starting with you, just want to say thank you and why don't you set the stage for us? Who are we going to learn about today? All right. Well, we're going to learn about a fascinating man.

I didn't know much about this man for most of my life. The only thing I really knew was that my late sister's first name, Lee L E, I G H, came from the family, my mother's family. Her name was Margaret Lee Reeves, L E, I G H, and that came from her grandfather. But that's all I knew until I was in college and I read a book by Howard Beale, B a L E, entitled Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power.

Well, in various places during this book, Beale refers to a Lee Hunt, who apparently was associated with Theodore Roosevelt. So this struck me as, that's a Lee Hunt. I have a Lee Hunt in my family. And I said, said, granny, Ma, did your father know Theodore Roosevelt?

And she looked at me as if I should have known all along and said, well, yes, of course he did. We used to spend Christmas at Sagamore Hill. And I did a double take. And I said, well, I can't wait to read his biographies.

And they put it in the plural. And she looked at me and she said, there is no biography. And I had just a spontaneous moment, and I said, well, somebody's got to write it. And then I realized what I had just done.

You set yourself up there. So. Myself. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, and. And just to introduce Chris. Chris Rand. You know, you're.

You're in this family tree as well. And thanks for. For putting this conversation together. I may pose the same question to you, Chris.

What was that moment when you kind of realized your connection to this story? I think it. It kind of came at me from several different angles because by way of giving a little flash forward in our story, the family ended up with a little piece of land in a resort town in Nevada, now known as Las Vegas. I've heard of it.

Yeah, a lot of people go there, and it's a great resort town, but, you know, once it wasn't. And so I did hear about him through that channel, but also, I think I was just about a early teenager when my father committed to write this book. And he took a sabbatical for a full year, and he traveled the world, retracing many of Lee Hunt's steps and having great adventures along the way, you know, and True to form, in telling the story of Lee Hunt, just like the man, Lee Hunt had lots of ups and downs.

My dad had lots of ups and downs in writing the story. He know, he even had some of his research taken from him by a criminal. And, you know, so the slings and arrows of good and bad fortune were all over the place. So that was really in my formative years.

So, you know, finding out early in life, I never. I never really had those memories of not knowing who he was because I found out, you know, around the time your permanent memories really start carrying with you and Draddle years. So. Interesting.

Yeah. Well, with that, I mean, Chris, it. It. I'm really excited to have your perspective, along with Larry, recounting Lee's story.

And you sort of. You're recounting your perspective on Larry's adventures through the process of gathering, collecting, and telling this story. But Larry, Lee, Chris set you up a little bit, saying that you had taken this sabbatical and, you know, candidly, taking a. A time off to.

To go write a book that no publisher is lined up ready to buy, but yet you feel called to do this. Just give us that little window into your thinking around that time. And how did you take that leap? I committed myself to this, as I say, spontaneously, and I look at it as both a responsibility and an adventure, because here was this relative of mine who knew reasonably well Theodore Roosevelt.

And I was fascinated in finding out what he had done to get to know Theodore Roosevelt and whatever else was going on. I did know that he in some way got involved in Las Vegas, because when I was six years old, I went to visit my mother, who had been divorced from my dad, and she was living in Las Vegas, and she was living in a place called Hunt Ridge, which is a residential community that was developed on land originally bought by Lee Hunt and developed into a residential community by Lee Hunt's son after hunt died in 1933.

So these were the little elements that I was aware of. But I said to the headmaster of Kent School, where I was teaching, that if he let me go for a year, I was determined to research this man and to write about him. So that was the beginning. And as Christopher said, I did go to a lot of places, one of which we definitely could not get into right now.

That was a Sudan, and. But I was in England, Sudan, South Africa, Western United States, and trying to think if there's anything more, but that's enough. So tell us about maybe that. Where was the first place.

Let's start cracking the book open, if you will, onto Lee Hun's life. And so, you know, before you bought that first ticket to go explore that first facet of his life, what did you begin to learn as you just researched the man from, you know, the documents and information that you had? Well, one of the first things that I did was actually to go to the latter part of his life, and that was his experience in Las Vegas. I did that because I knew that his personal secretary for virtually the entire time he was in Las Vegas, which was 1923 to his death in 1933, was a man named Walter Hunsicker.

I knew Walter Hunsicker was alive, and I knew that he would have a good deal of information on. On Lee Hunt. And so I contacted him, and he did indeed have many papers. In fact, I just looked up online before we got into this discussion, and I think it's.

The University of Nevada has a whole file on Walter Hunsicker's papers. And that's. That's a site that I did not get to. Was unaware of that.

But anyway, I had plenty of material. And also my grandmother gave me access to, I thought, all the papers she had of her father. It wasn't all the papers, but it was a lot of them. And I also learned that Howard Beale, the author of the book that I refer to, was fascinated with Lee Hunt after he did his research on Roosevelt, and he asked the family permission for permission to write a biography of Lee Hunt.

That permission was denied. Now, the reason for denial is still a bit of a mystery, but I think it's fair to say that there were some aspects of Lee Hunt's life that the family just as preferred to keep private. Fascinating. Now that there, the intrigue builds.

So you, if you weren't inspired to go out on that journey before I could imagine, you were even more inspired to go out now, knowing that, right, a little bit of knowledge is actually dangerous, and then understanding that there could be more to be discovered as you headed out. It was indeed. And through the letters and my interviewing with Walter Hunsiker, I got a pretty good idea of the various chapters, if you will, of Lee Hunt's life, starting in where he was born in Indiana on a farm, but then going across the country and then to Korea, to Shanghai and China, to South Africa, all over the place.

And there are some places that he went that I did not get any information on until the last moment of my grandmother's life. And I told Christopher this story just yesterday. I frequently went to see My grandmother, when she, she died when she was 102. And so when she was 102, one of the last times I saw her, I went into her room and she was speaking German and she was talking to her father.

Now, this sort of thing happens only before people are close to their end. So when she came out of this particular, whatever you want to call it, phase, and I could speak to her, I said, I just heard you speaking German. How did, how are you able to do that? She said, well, of course, I spent three years in Germany in school.

So her family had to be in Germany for a number of years. But there's no evidence that, that I found suggesting why that was so. So there, you know, there are a lot of little mystery points that, that I couldn't decipher and, and that's so. Common in, in family stories.

We live our lives, but yet we, we. I don't think of who's going to be trying to piece our lives together down the road in these, these gaps, as we. We found, leave more. More questions than answers.

I'm not entirely sure that Lee Hunt would approve of his life being written into a biography, as a matter of fact. Why would you say that? Yeah, he, he. At one point in his life, one of his associates suggested something like a biography.

And Hunt immediately said, no, I don't deserve a biography. And he had an element of humility to him. And it probably that plus a desire not to be made as public as a biography would make him. He had all sorts of contacts, so in that sense, he was a public figure.

But I don't think he wanted anybody writing about him. Yeah, you talked about a biography being public. And Christopher, I'll ask you this question second. But, Larry, from your perspective, from being in this process now, what do you think makes a.

A life worth writing about? I think life has to be fascinating. I think it has to be. I think the author has to be able to make whoever he's writing about come alive.

And I thought that that was something I could do. Whether I did or not, that's the reader's choice. But there were so many adventurous, in some ways, bizarre things that this man did. I was just going over part of the book that I wrote, and it was.

It took place in north. What's now Northern Korea, and hunt is walking 26 miles in one day through pretty rugged terrain. He's on route to see his minds, his prospective minds, and he writes back to his wife, Jessie. He says that he had walked 26 miles.

He said, I never Felt healthier in my life, except my feet are sore. And, you know, how many people would. Would do that sort of thing? He had never seen these mines.

He had already put something like $100,000 of borrowed money into the mines. And, you know, it was. Some people thought he was crazy, but he wanted to take a risk. That he did that his whole life.

Amazing. What's your perspective, Chris? So, to me, personally, I am. I'm a big fan of challenging material.

So, you know, it could be reading ideas that you don'. Agree with. It could be watching a movie that, let's say, does not have a Hollywood ending. You know, I like film noir.

The last movie I saw. Saw with my daughter was no country for Old Men. It's a pretty dark tale. So, you know, there's a lot of easy and fun and light stories in the world because they usually have large, very receptive audiences.

I like to dig a little deeper for the more challenging material. And so when you think about Lee Hunt, the man met with some incredible success. He did many things that people said, as Larry was just saying, let you know you'd be crazy to try. You won't do that.

That'll, you know, that'll make you go broke or, you know, it's just. It's not smart to do. But he didn't really listen to those people. He listened to his inner voice and he followed his calling.

And as a result, his life was more like a roller coaster than a straight line in any given direction. Lots of twists and turns, and the man was born in 1855 and died in 1933. But if I imagine myself doing what this man did 130 or so years prior to my time, a little less than that, maybe 100 years prior to my time, I can't imagine myself or really most people who are alive today with all of the modern trappings of technology and transportation, connectivity, basically, that kind of thing.

You really had to earn it back then, you know, to get from the US To China to Korea to Egypt and then back to Mexico and Nevada and Seattle. You know, like the places that he went. The amount of time spent traveling to pursue your dream and your conviction. To me, that makes for a really interesting story because there are so many different flavors in that one box.

That is fascinating. The different flavors in that box. I like. I like that analogy.

So now that we've. We've, you know, you've talked about your motivation to explore his life further, to dedicate your life and time to documenting this story and kind of your own Values around what makes a life story worth telling. Larry, I'll ask you where should we put the needle on the record, if you will, and start telling Lee's story? Well, he was born on a farm and his father had taken some chances, some risks.

He was also from Indiana and he'd gone out to California seeking opportunity there. That didn't really work for him. He went down to Brazil. That didn't particularly work either.

And then he came back to Indiana. But Lee Hunt took some inspiration from that and he was, he was well read, he was curious. And so he, unlike most of his siblings, decided he wasn't going to stay on the farm. So he got into education, taught in schools, became a superintendent of public schools.

He went on to become the president for three years only of what is now Iowa State College. Then the really key parts of his life began. He married Jesse Noble in, I can't give you the exact year, but that would be when he was approximately 28 or so. And the two of them moved out to Seattle where he, Lee Hunt, felt that he could have adventure and make a profit.

And he started to do this through getting control of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, which at the time was a substandard to say the least newspaper, very unorganized, very non directional. And Hunt got a controlling interest in that and really made the paper a first rate paper. He did this by drawing talent from outside. And this was a pattern in his whole life.

He did a lot of things that he was not skilled at himself, but he found the skill, brought it into play and succeeded. So, for example, he knew that he needed talented journalists, so he raided the Portland Oregonian, which was a first class newspaper, and he got several of, he persuaded several of their editors to come over to him and the PI and so with their expertise as well as with Hunt's organizational abilities, the newspaper really became a quality newspaper. And the people who worked for him were very loyal to him.

And I have a quote that I would like to read because it, it says a lot about Hunt. And this is a letter that was written to him, excuse me, that was written to his, to his wife after Hunt died. And I am assuming that the person who wrote this had to have been an employee of Trump's in Seattle. And he said as an employer, Hunt was adored.

No one wanted to, but would and often did get up at the most unseemly hours because it was for Mr. Hunt. I have never known of such loyalty upon the part of paper employees as that extended to Mr. Hunt.

It was more than Loyalty. I think it's fair to say that this kind of loyalty followed him in whatever he did. This is a description given by somebody after his death. He was a man who, when he entered the room, his presence was felt whether he said anything or not.

And he had a real Persona, and he had an ability to relate to people. So I think that was part of the loyalty. And to. To challenge that a little bit.

Would you. I mean, by poaching reporters from another paper. I'm not saying that he is asking them to betray their loyalty. You know, no man's only really loyal to himself and his creator.

But how did you square those two things, knowing that he was attracting talent from others? Is it because of some magnetic poll, Right. That he offered that others weren't? What were the circumstances of how he approached people, pulled them in and then made them his own?

That's a very good question. Economically speaking, he generally offered better wages. In another sense, he was very skilled at persuasion. I have an example of that.

A man named Peter Kirk, who was a steel magnate from England and had a company, Moss Bay Company, that was located in Workington, England. Kirk came to the United states in roughly 1887, and he was looking for a place to establish a company in this country, a steel center. And he was primarily interested in Tacoma. Well, Tacoma and Seattle had a running battle, running competition.

And Hunt was able to persuade Kirk to come to Seattle instead of Tacoma. And one of the reasons. One of the ways he persuaded him is with land. Hunt was always buying land, and he had land on the eastern end of Lake Washington.

And he said, why don't we name this Kirkland and we can establish a steel center there? And Kirk said, that's great. I want to make Seattle the Pittsburgh of the West. And so that was.

That was an example of his ability to persuade people, key people, people that would help him make his dreams manifest. Interesting perspective. And so with that, Chris, maybe you can help us put a little bit more of a lens onto the dynamics, right. That we saw at that time between Seattle and Tacoma.

And right now, it's just kind of seatac, Right. Or maybe people in the area might view that differently, like people in San Francisco and Oakland, et cetera, but put more of a lens on that. And why do you think he was drawn to that? What were the circumstances there?

And did he exert some sort of magical force over this rivalry, or did things just happen to break his way? Tell me a bit more about just how you understand that played out. I think that when he arrived in The Seattle area, there was an already very spirited economic competition between Seattle and Tacoma. You know, they were.

There were economic rivalries. And I believe when he got there that, that Tacoma might have actually been ahead, you know, as far as the size of its economy. And so I feel like Hunt recognized that there was energy and excitement and perhaps some optimism as well in Seattle. And, and he was able to tap into that.

And he was also able to find synergies between businesses such as the short rail line that Larry would be able to discuss in a little bit more detail, which was a partnership that he started as a means of, you know, leveraging synergies to advance to find those win win, you know, deals that, that are famous all over the world because it's always nice when there's no real losers. So, you know, I feel like he was very good at, at finding those opportunities and then jumping in and, and either, you know, knowing what to do himself, or as Larry was explaining earlier, he would go out and he would find those people that knew how to do what he couldn't do and share with them his vision for a shared success together.

And I feel like that really helped him a lot. Yeah. Larry, what, what would you say about that? Was it.

It's clearly part of it is finding these distressed assets or greenfield opportunities. Right. Where in the spirit of going west, right. New.

I. I recently read the biography of Henry Kaiser. Right. And so he made a lot of his money just by being in the right place at the right time as the west was being tamed, if you will, whether it's through dams or things sort of breaking his way in terms of having the right resources in place when the US bought and Britain and other countries bought a whole bunch of ships.

But even if, when you're in the right place at the right time, it's still about the confluence who can. Has the network to bring things together. And I, I know from our earlier discussions just how strong of a networker he was. So just.

Is there anything you would add to the conversation about his ability to network, his ability to build that. That trust among others and then further this loyalty that ultimately made him a success in the area and tell us what that success looked like. I thought that he was remarkable in his ability to persuade others to invest in his concepts. For example, he borrowed from a lot of people in his effort to create this steel center.

And ultimately, because of the panic of 1873 and 1893, excuse me, Hunt was the one with distressed assets because he. People called their loans in and Hunt Was left with practically no money. But I'm getting a little off of your point. But he networked wherever he was.

And why he was able to do this, it's hard to say exactly because we're far removed from that. But I can just say that he knew so many different people. I mean, I can hardly imagine how he made all these associations. I can say that part of it was his willingness and ability to travel.

Travel? Travel. He was going back and forth from the west coast to the east coast, from Seattle to Shanghai to Northern Korea. And all the while he's making contacts through trying to raise money or talking to people who are political leaders or educators.

He made a close association with Nicholas Butler, who was the president of Columbia University. This was his way make contacts, enable other people to share in his success, which sometimes they did and sometimes they didn't. And so what ultimately came of his time in Seattle? First of all, he, as I said, developed the PI into a first class newspaper.

He also rejuvenated the Republican party in the Seattle area. And some referred to Hunt as the boss of Republican politics in King County. So not only that, he came very close to enabling Kirk to establish a Pittsburgh in the West. Christopher mentioned the rail line that had been developed going from Kirkland all the way around the lake into Seattle.

That was achieved. And the steel buildings, steel mill buildings were constructed. But the process never became manifest because just as they were ready to do this, the panic hit in May of 1893. And then most of his creditors, if not all of them, called their loans.

That happened. Sounds just like the dot com bubble and crash. Well, exactly. I've seen this.

To go back to your early reference, Chris, I've seen this movie. That's right. Yeah, yeah, maybe it is. It is film noir in that sense.

You know, and sometimes fate deals a cruel blow to us in our lives at the wrong moment. So of course, about a month or two prior to the stock market caving in, the crash of 1893, as we're referring to it, his wife had just had their first child. Very inopportune moment to be dealt such a cruel blow. When Christopher mentioned this, I had forgotten the confluence of these two events.

I said it made me think of Theodore Roosevelt, who had one of the hardest days any person has ever had. His first wife gave birth to Alice and she died in childbirth. And on the very same day, Theodore Roosevelt's mother died. And he was extremely close to her.

And this is what made him go out to the Badlands and spend about three or Four years there, so. But Hunt seemed to march on through difficult moments in 1893, and to say a word more about his experience in Seattle, after he had made a fortune in Korea through gold mining and processing, he came back to Seattle and he intended to repurchase controlling interest in the Post Intelligencer, but eventually he could not do so because he had critical kidney difficulty before all of that happened.

When he came back to Seattle, a statute of limitations had run out on his debts, so creditors could not force him to pay. But Hunt came back and invited all of his creditors to dinner at the finest hotel in town, the Butler Hotel. At that time, the best hotel. So he provides this elegant dinner, and after the first course, he gets up and toasts all these industrialists, all of his creditors, and then asks them to look underneath their main plate, and they find there an envelope with a check in it for the original amount plus compound interest.

Amazing. What a story. What a story. Yeah.

But he honored his debts all the way, unless he was not able to do so. And I. There's not. There's no time that I know of where he couldn't.

He lost money a lot of times in 1893, in 1929, there was one area where he was not good, and that was betting on the market. We can all take a lesson from that. We've seen that movie, too. Yeah.

The next phase of Lee Hun's journey. It doesn't strike me as odd, knowing this man's story, but I know not many of us stand on the shores looking across an ocean and think that our next instinct is to cross that ocean. But knowing Lee, I'm not surprised that he did so. Christopher, if I can ask you, where did Lee's journey take him after his washout in 1893?

In Seattle and in Tacoma area. Well, it took him a little, little while to regroup, but he did, through his network, learn of an opportunity over in China. There were some railway and tramway interests, and so he traveled there with his fellow compatriot and fellow entrepreneur, and they went to Shanghai, and they were investigating the possibility of, you know, winning a contract for a railway interest in China. And very early on in this process, it became apparent to Hunt that he did not have the inside track for this contract.

And it was, I believe it was the government in England or Great Britain who had the leg up the inside track and eventually won that contract. So when he saw that coming, I'm going to turn it over to Larry to describe the process of disengaging from Shanghai and Beginning to think about the opportunity over another body of water in korea. Okay. Well, when hunt realized that he was not going to get this contract, about the same time, he learned from james morse, an associate of his, that a man named horace allen, who was the first american diplomat in korea, Was approaching morse about a gold mine concession.

And the concession was owned by the emperor of korea, but the emperor was interested in getting some money, so he was floating the idea of selling half of the concession, or rights to the concession, to someone who could supply the capital. Well, morse was initially interested in this, but eventually sort of backed off, and hunt saw an opportunity here. Of course, at this point, he owed a lot of money To a lot of creditors in seattle, and none of these people were willing to give him any money.

So hunt had basically one last person that he felt he could call, and that man was Jacob fassett, who was a member of the new york legislature. Fassett himself didn't have a whole lot of money, but he had made a very fortunate, economically speaking, marriage. He had married a daughter of the owner of the southern pacific railroad. At the time, when a woman married a man, Whatever assets she had came under his control.

Outrageous. But that's the way it was. So we're now talking about 1895. And so Hunt said, listen, if you can just give me a.

If you can loan me $100,000, I can start this operation here. I can get a hold of the concession. So fassett says, sure. So he proceeds to sell his wife's bonds in the southern pacific, infuriating her and her family.

But if she had only known at that moment what was going to happen, she would have been okay, I think. Anyway, Hunt went to the mines to inspect them and realized there was an opportunity there. The extent to which he knew about processing gold and mining gold, I can't be specific, but I know this much. He knew who to get in touch with.

I can't give you a name there, Because I don't know who he got in touch with, But I just researched this morning when the cyanide method of processing gold was introduced. It was introduced in 1887. So only eight years after the introduction of this process, which revolutionized gold mining and processing, Hunt was able to contact somebody, an appropriate person, who enabled him to determine how he could install this processing. And so he did.

And to make a long story short, he mined gold very successfully. And jumping ahead a couple of years, the emperor was willing to sell the other half of the concession. And for a fairly substantial amount of Money which put Hunt in a position where he had to make all sorts of approaches to different people to amass that kind of money. But he knew so many people and had become very familiar with other mining magnates, two of whom I will mention here, one was Julius Werner and the other one was Alfred Bernard Bite.

Both of them were German. They had gone to South Africa and made a ton of money on diamond mining and then gold mining and were a huge source of capital that Trump leaned into and established Oriental Consolidated Mining Company. So that's the essence of the story. So I find this fascinating that it was, again, he didn't necessarily go to Asia expecting to mine gold in Korea, but he went to Asia with the confidence in his network, I think, and his ability, not only his existing network, but his ability to expand that network into something greater.

And to the extent that technology allowed him to capitalize on that in an exponential way, I think is what all entrepreneurs would agree is, is that lady luck that smiles on us from time to time. It's certainly not something he could have planned. Agreed. I also would mention that, that I.

It was pretty daring of him to do what he did because this was rough and tumble area and he walked through pretty rough terrain to inspect the mines. And he encountered, while he was developing the mines, Placer miners, native Placer miners who wanted nothing to do with him and felt that he was taking away their property. But Hunt had actually gotten claim to the land. And Hunt decided he was going to face these guys off.

And he actually got the five most trusted people in his company to go with him up on a ridge. And they all had weapons. And they said, if you don't get out of here, we're going to shoot. And they defied him.

And he did shoot. And there was. There were eight of the miners, the native miners who were injured, and one of them later died. Now, I found out about this because I was researching in the New York Public Library the papers of Horace Allen.

And these papers were all typed, but in the margin of one page, I saw handwritten with an arrow toward the typed part, said, this is where Hunt killed a miner. And I thought, wait a minute, this is a charge. I've got to track this one down. I went to the United States archives in Washington, D.

C. where they have a Korean repository. And most of the stuff in the repository is written in Chinese. But they also had some papers, letters from Lee Hunt to Horace Allen.

And they were on this blue letter paper with handwriting in ink, all Lee Hunt's handwriting. And it went from One to another to another. And I'm following this thing getting closer and closer to the confrontation and is so exciting. That was one of the most exciting parts of the research.

And finally I got to the letter and he describes what they did. Now, he doesn't say that one, if I remember correctly. He doesn't say that one of the miners later died, but he does indicate that they shot at these people because they were defying them. That's.

So this was rough and tumble and. Yeah. And I think with. With the 21st century lens, we.

We can. It's easy to pass judgment and look at that through our values, but to understand the time in which he was playing, he. There wasn't a rule of law to the extent that we have today. There wasn't a court system to enforce the rights that he rightly purchased.

Right. And. Yeah. And.

And just for. For others benefit, you know, placer mining is surface mining. Right. They're not.

They're not extracting ore from underground as much as they're just kind of scavengers on the surface. That's right. Yeah. And the streams and on the land.

Yes. Yeah. Which is. I learned that because there is a town, Placerville in California, and there's.

There comes the term where the old hangtown fry was invented. So, Chris. Yeah. Just to.

To append to what Larry was talking about with the mining claim. So we just heard about how Hunt and his associates chased a bunch of Korean native miners off of their mining claim with threats of. And actual violence. So it might surprise some listeners to find out that once Hunt had chased these miners off of his rightful claim, of course he needed labor to do this mining.

Right. And it's not easy to bring people from somewhere else. So of course, he goes back to the well and he approaches these miners who he's chased off of his land, and he ends up rehiring them to do that mining on his very claim. Now, you might guess that he did this by offering them twice the prevailing wage in the local area.

Right. So he gave them the better wages. Hearkening back to when he raided the newspaper and the Portland Oregonian. And so he brings in these miners and he earns their loyalty by offering them a better wage.

So it was a. It was a scenario where he was able to repeat some of his prior success. And I think that's an important point to touch on. Just as an entrepreneur, you're not reinventing the playbook Every time you start a new venture.

Those that are successful find that this is what works for me, this is who I am. And the most successful entrepreneurs have the awareness to know their playbook and find opportunities that match them. Others just kind of go and by through sheer force of will, trying to force their playbook on others. Right.

And I don't know this story well enough to pass judgment on Lee one way or another, but it's interesting to see these commonalities emerge. So to. Not to extend a pun here, but how did Lee end up extracting himself from the mining business or did he stay engaged as he went on to his next venture? Well, he remained a stockholder in Oriental Consolidated, as far as I can tell, until it was sold or well before it was sold because he died in 1933.

I have an article here from the New York Times dated August of 1939, and it says that the Japanese are offering $8,174,000 for Oriole Consolidated. And I believe that it was sold. I don't think it was sold in 39. I think it was sold not long before Pearl Harbor.

Yeah, I was going to say there was. There was. It would make sense that the Japanese would be the buyer. They were going to have a need for this.

Yeah. Material in the near future. Well, putting a bow on that chapter of Lee Hunt's life, I wouldn't expect him to be a man who would turn around and head back to America. So where did.

As his endeavors in Korea wrapped up and he became a shareholder but less active in that business, where did his next adventure take him? Ultimately, it took him to the Sudan. But in between his Korean adventure and his cotton adventure in the Sudan, several events took place which are definitely worth mentioning. In 1903, Russia and Japan went to war.

And Theodore Roosevelt, then president, was keenly aware of this conflict and determined to use his authority to try and settle it. Now, most of his advisors, cabinet members and others felt that there was no question that Russia was going to win the war. And they said so to Roosevelt at a dinner. Now, Hunt happened to be at that dinner also, and Hunt disagreed with what his advisors were saying.

And I'm going to read you just a bit describing this. This is from Howard Beale's book. In 1903, Lee Hunt, who had a large concession, gold mine concession in Korea, talked over the far Eastern situation as a guest at the White House and gave Roosevelt detailed arguments as to why Japan would win a war against Russia. And I quote, russia is an old fashioned engine, clumsy, weighty and hard to manage.

Hunt insisted, while Japan is a modern, compact and up to date Machine. Whatever may be said of Japan's commercial integrity, it must be admitted, Hunt argued, that in government expenditures, she's honest, while Russia is hopelessly dishonest. Besides, the Japanese are the most dashing fighters in the world. Roosevelt considered Hunt right.

This, I think, had a good deal to do with the bonding of the two men. And so it also gave Roosevelt a good advice in terms of how to go about negotiating between Russia and Japan. I feel there's a. There's a.

There's a lesson to be learned there. And, Chris, I'd be interested in your perspective. But even in modern times, when it's natural to want to maybe tell the leader what they want to hear or censor your perspective in light of what might be a group consensus, do you think it was Hunt being emboldened by the success in Korea that gave him the confidence to speak out? Was this his nature?

And from whichever you choose, or if it's a third, what about that? Can we take away today to find that confidence to speak up or speak out when we have an informed and, we think, valuable opinion? I think what really led Hunt to be able to offer his confident analysis in that situation, that flew in the face of, I'm guessing, people that even Hunt himself probably thought would be more likely to win the president's ear. I think it's because he really had this lifelong networking that was so strong and he traveled to so many places.

There's nothing like being on the ground, seeing what's going on, experiencing it for yourself, to be able to inform you of what reality is really all about. So by going over there, spending the time getting to know the area and the players involved in that theater, I don't think there's really any way to replace that. You know, for his advisors sitting in Washington or wherever they were, they were viewing it through a very distant lens where, you know, Hunt had everything under the microscope so he could see all the small parts in much more detail.

So really, he put in the work, he spent the time over there, he invested in not only his business, but his relationships, and eventually that bore some really important fruit in the sense of this analysis. And, you know, when I was listening to Larry reading that passage, what occurred to me was, you know, Hunt's analysis of the Russo Japanese War in 1903, 1904, was really 120 years ahead of its time, because who would argue with those two analyses of Russia versus Japan today?

Yeah, and having that idea of we like to talk about first principles as like it's some sort of you know, 21st century invention. But if you go back in time and you understand cultural motivations, we can see a common thread across time as it relates to even evidence of that samurai culture, if you will, that they praised as making them great warriors in the late 19th century can be seen in, in their business pursuits even in the late 20th century and early 21st century. So. And Russia is famously still loose with the purse string, shall we say, after many failed empires between then and now.

So with all that being said, Larry, let's, I mean, that insight on the ground is invaluable. And did he have a direct benefit from that, or was that just sort of an insight into a personality trait or an observation that he had that he used as a springboard to that next opportunity? Well, I, I don't think there was any immediate gain for him in that. He just felt it was very important for the president to know what he, Lee Hunt, had observed.

This was the, you know, this was a period of spheres of influence. And so there were German interests there. There were Japanese, Russian, British, American, all of these. And Hunt dealt with one way or another with almost all of these.

So his observations, as Christopher so succinctly said, gave him a lens that was far more realistic and ground level than what Theodore Roosevelt's other advisors were telling him. Now, around the same time that this dinner took place, that Hunt was about to go back to Seattle and try and repurchase the Post Intelligencer. But as I mentioned earlier, he had a kidney situation that almost took his life. And he, there was no way he could stay in Seattle with its climate wet and cool.

His physician said, you have to get yourself to a dry, warm place. And I don't know if the physician, physician suggested Cairo, but somehow that was Hunt's choice. I'm sure it was on the tip of his tongue. He probably just had a travel brochure sitting in his office for Cairo, I'm sure, not Phoenix or, you know, Mexico City.

Let's go to Cairo. Let's start there. Oh, no. So off he goes.

And he and his family were in Cairo for several years, and Hunt got bored, as he did whenever he had to. So stay in one place. And so he, one way or another, he learned about the Sudan and the possibility of cotton growing in the Sudan. And for, just for the, for our audience's benefit, what is Sudan's geographic relationship to Cairo and Egypt and the Nile river, et cetera?

Sudan is immediately south of Egypt, and the Nile river, of course, flows through both and the areas around either Side of the Nile are extremely fertile. And so Egyptian cotton was and still is very high quality. And so Hunt and people who were working with him figured that there was an opportunity here to grow fine cotton, fine quality cotton. So Hunt and his.

Those who were helping him traveled south and determined that there was some land that they could buy and establish a plantation. So at that point, Hunt had to do his usual networking and figure out how he might be able to successfully create a plantation. And so he came back to the United States and got in touch with Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute, and Booker T.

Washington came to New York City to talk to Lee Hunt. And Lee Hunt planned to have dinner with Booker T. Washington in his hotel. The dining room would not accept Rickerty Washington.

This is New York City showing the same kind of prejudice that was true in the southern states. So Hunt said, okay, we'll dine in my room. So he had the dinner sent up there, and he and Booker T. Washington conferred about this possibility.

And Booker T. Washington agreed to get cotton growers, people who had majored in cotton agriculture, to go with Hunt to the Sudan. So I knew of three. From the letters that I had at my disposal, I knew of three Tuskegee graduates who went to the Sudan with Lee Hunt.

Well, the Sudan, as I said in the beginning, was still open to Americans at that point. So I decided to go. I'll never forget flying in. I was supposed to be staying at, I thought, a hotel.

So I wound up in a cab. And I'm. I feel like I'm in, I don't know, a strange zone. The whole place looks so different.

I'd never been in anything like this. And of course, I didn't speak Sudanese. They didn't speak English particularly well. And furthermore, we got to where I was supposed to be staying, and it was a house, and the people didn't know anything about.

About somebody coming to stay with them. So I was a complete. Figure out what you're going to do in a. In a zone that I had never been in.

Felt so strange. Anyway, it's a little bit like Lee Hunt going through crazy places. I mean, one can only imagine. I almost.

A question that came to my mind is, I mean, Chris, you and I can relate to this. I don't think you just go home and say, I know you like Seattle, but our next stop is Cairo. And to have the family willingly follow. Well, considering the fact that.

That the Sudan, Khartoum, the biggest city in Sudan, seemed so strange in 1982, I can imagine what it must have been like some 50, 60 years before that. No, 80 years before that. At any rate, I was able to make contact with the manager of the plantation, which in 1982 was owned by the Sudanese government. And I got permission to go and observe.

So when I got to the plantation at Zaidab Z, E, I D, A B, north of Khartoum, I asked if there was anyone who was working at the plantation who had been there when Lee Hunt was there. And I was told There was a 93 year old at that time, he was 93, who was there. And I said, can I talk to him? Do you have an interpreter?

And indeed. And I had a tape recorder with me and I recorded the conversation. And I asked the 93 year old if he remembered any of the people from the United States who had come over to work the plantation. And he said, of course I remember all seven of them.

I knew about three. Well, he proceeded to name every one of them. And I took the names down. And when I got back to the United States, I went to the archives.

No, I went to the archives in Washington, looked up Booker T. Washington's letters. Sure enough, every one of those seven Tuskegee graduates had written back to Booker T. Washington from the Sudan.

Every one of them. So this guy knew them all. And he had good things to say about working for Hunt. He said that when he was very young, which was when Hunt was there, he was a ball boy at Hunt's tennis court.

And I said, oh, I didn't know my great grandfather played tennis. He said, no, he didn't play tennis. Hunt had the. Had the tennis court built only for British soldiers who would stop by over weekends.

You never know what you're going to find out. You never know. That's an incredible, incredible side story. But is there.

Was this marriage with Booker T. Washington and I, an economic marriage? You know, was this purely out of a business motivation, or was that. Did you have fine evidence of a friendship there, or was there a.

Another angle to this story? Tell me more about how these two worlds came together and then, you know, what impact that had on. On them. Okay.

Well, I think that. That, yes, it was a business relationship, but it was also partly a reflection of Lee Hunt's interest in getting Americans good jobs. I mean, he did the same thing with young men from Columbia City, Indiana, where he had grown up. And he persuaded.

Or he offered jobs at the mines in Korea to these young men. And. And so I think it's fair to say that he liked the idea of offering positions for a Reasonable pay to graduates of Tuskegee Institute. So in that sense, there's just a little bit of a.

A little bit more than just a pure business interest. Yeah, and that's as. That's something that I always admire in entrepreneurs are those who have attained a level of success is not just blazing their own path, but blazing their own path with that intention of easing the journey for the next person. Chris, when you were talking to Larry, or just reading your book or doing your own research on this phase of.

Of Lee Hunt's life, what did you learn about him or the business? What. What was your big moment of either pride or, you know, further contemplation as you thought about it? Well, I'm not quite as familiar with a lot of the mechanics of what happened while he was pursuing this chapter of his life.

However, I think one way it really fits in nicely is that it just shows the breadth of his experience, his willingness to go wherever life called him to do the next most important thing on his list, and, you know, his resourcefulness. You would not really think of a country like the Sudan, which is largely desert, as being an agricultural breadbasket of any kind whatsoever. I also, you know, having an outsider come in and. And figure out how to get that agricultural industry off the ground is very innovative.

So, you know, I think, to me, it is really a good reflection of the type of life that he lived and the diverse pursuits that he engaged in. What about you, Larry? This experience in the Sudan, you know, I'm trying to add some depth to it, right? It's.

It existed, but I want to understand more. More in depth. So he had this relationship with Booker T. Washington, and the students from Tuskegee came.

But, you know, is it just another stop on his journey, or was there something unique here either about what he contributed to others or how he developed as an individual? What can we pull from this stop on his journey? That's a good question. I am not sure that this added a different dimension.

I don't see that necessarily. Had it not been for his traveling in other areas, I would say that this was a. Which it was addition of breadth to his world vision. But in some ways, it was similar to the other things that he had done, particularly in Korea, because it involved a lot of networking.

He had to raise the funds to create this plantation, and he did this through some existing contacts of his, but also some new English contacts, including a man by the name of McGillivray, who ultimately took over Sudan Experimental Plantation Syndicate, which Hunted created from Hunt and ran it very successfully. But unfortunately died in the influenza in 1918. So I. That's how I would summarize this experience in his life.

Cool. So with that, let's pick up the story then and take it beyond the Sudan, if you will. And look at. Does this bring him back to Las Vegas?

Extending the thread of dry, warm climates, or is there a stop in between? Oh, there are quite a few stops in between. Why don't you take us through some of those whistle stops? Okay.

Some of them are more fruitful than others. Long term or short term. Anyway, he came back to the United States, or no, he came back and forth, back and forth. But he basically ended his interest in a Sudan experimental plantation syndicate around 1909.

And during the next 14 or 15 years, he tried his hand at a number of different things. One of them was a establishing a residential community outside of Washington D.C. somewhere between Washington D.

C. in the Chevy Chase area. And to be honest with you, I did not know anything about this when I did my research. The only reason I know that he tried this is that some years after I wrote the book, I received a phone call from a gentleman who wanted to know if I was the Lawrence Rand who wrote the book.

And I said yes. And he said, well, I just wanted to tell you that my daughter just bought a house, the deed for which was originally taken out by Lee Hunt. Now, would that be your great grandfather? And I said, yes, it would be.

It just might be. Yeah, it just might be. So what brought him to Maryland? You know, Chevy Chase being a suburb of Washington D.

C. what brought him here? Was it his relationship with Roosevelt or was it something else? Well, it was, yes.

I think it had. Some of it had to do with Roosevelt, but, you know, he had so many different people that he knew in Washington. I've forgotten exactly what it had to do with, but I was just reading, going over some of his business dealings, and he. Oh, I know what it was.

No, it wasn't. It wasn't that. It was when the Boulder Dam was. Was under consideration.

Hunt from Las Vegas writes and contacts numerous congressmen. So he knew these people. Right. And these aren't cold calls.

These are warm outreaches to friends. Yeah, exactly. And so I guess he. In fact, I know he and Jesse lived in Washington D.

C. for a number of years. So it must have been when he was living in D.C.

that he got this interest. And it wasn't the only time that he tried to create a residential community. At any rate, so that didn't work. Why?

I can't tell you because I Didn't have access to that information, but it didn't. Then there are a couple of other things that he did at this time. He was drawn into the possibility of a, a higher end residential polo center spa development in the Ya. Now you're talking.

Now I'm interested. This was in Mexico, in the Yaqui Valley in the province. And one of the people who drew him into this thing was forgotten his first name, Whitney, who was a very important and influential American entrepreneur polo player. So it's worth mentioning this because when I reviewed my coverage of that in the book, I noticed that while Hunt did initially put $50,000 into this project, he went to inspect it.

He did his due diligence before he was willing to contribute. Oh, it would have been a lot of money because the estimated cost for building this thing was $12 million, which at that point was a lot of money. That's more than the Japanese were prepared to pay for Oriental Consolidated. Correct.

Hunt looked the whole thing over, got engineers to give their opinion to him and decided this was not feasible for a reasonable amount of money. So he backed out. And I think he was a wise man because this never really got off the. The board.

Well, that's something interesting, Larry, if I can just touch on that for a moment. This idea of when you, when you're writing a biography of someone, it's easy, easy to jump from success to success. But my opinion, and Chris, I'd be interested in your perspective, is sometimes there's not enough paid to the decisions we. We don't make.

Right. Or the opportunities that we sidestep for that reason. Just in your opinion, Chris, do you think that was something that came easy to Lee, or do you think that is. Maybe he was, Was he committed to a fault, to seeing things through what were just as your understanding as you read and learned about him.

To sum it up in one word, I would say that his ability to make those decisions in the way that you were asking was mercurial. There were times when he made very good decisions. I think that his timing of exiting his South Korean, sorry, his Korean gold mine, interesting. Was on the upper end of the good timing spectrum, you know, but he got caught in the gears and in the panic of 1893, really, it financially took him under for a while.

So, you know, there's a lot of variation in the degrees of success that he had in sort of executing good judgment like that. Part of what got him out of Mexico was not just the questionable economic feasibility of the plan and the project that they had conceived. Of. But also at the time, Mexican Revolution was fomenting or beginning, your words, getting.

Caught in the gears once again. Right. So maybe he saw those gears coming, you know, like a big drill mining the ground, and he said, I need. I don't.

I don't want to be in the way. So, yeah, at that. At that point, the project could really, could have come together. I think it was.

Was a Southern Pacific or Union Pacific, was just completing a rail line all the way down to Mexico City. So, you know, Yaqui Valley between the San Gabriel and the Gulf of California or the Sea of Cortez, depending on how you want to refer to it, that would have made it much, much more accessible to many more people. So in a lot of other simulations of the world during that period of time, it might have worked out that that would have been where he really struck his final pot of gold, but it didn't work out that way.

So I think that to some extent, we can credit his judgment there, but to some extent, circumstances may have partially saved him from incurring losses. Well, it's been a while since I wrote this book, as I told you, but as I reviewed that chapter, it appeared to me that he would not go forward with it. Now, it was some time after that he made that decision, that Porfirio Diaz, who had been dictator of Mexico for decades, I believe he died. And whether he died or was executed, I'd have to review that one.

But in any area, the point is that, yes, there was. Who Whitney and others, even if they wanted to continue with this thing, they could not because of the Mexican Revolution, as Christopher points out. And Francisco Maduro was elected president, and he was a very liberal politician who wanted to introduce a lot of reforms, but that didn't work, and he was assassinated. And the rest of the next 20 years or so was the Pancho Villa era in Mexico.

And I'm glad that Lee Hunt and Mr. Whitney and all the others did not get involved. Yes, indeed. Indeed.

So one other area, which I think I should mention, please, is that a Hunt temporarily was interested in some Brazilian adventures. Hunt's son Henry did spend time in Brazil after his father had been there, and Hunt had a position with a company. And I can't remember all of the details here. At any rate, Theodore Roosevelt's son Kermit was interested in getting a job in Brazil.

And so Roosevelt contacted Hunt and said, is there any possibility that Kermit could work with Henry? Henry, your son? And Henry Hunt said, yes, I think I can employ him. So for several Years, Kermit was working with Henry Hunt and Theodore Roosevelt, as you probably know, got quite interested in Brazil himself and went down on a adventure to the central part of the Amazon and almost lost his life.

There's a whole book written about that trip. Wow. I would. I would have to get you the name of it.

I have it here in the house. But at any rate, it's an incredible story. And I think his interest in that area in Brazil stemmed from the Lee Hunt, Henry Hunt story. Those are some of the areas that he explored.

None of them really came to fruition, but it was in 1923 that he was looking around for a place to retire in as much as he ever would retire. And that is when Las Vegas enters the picture. Yeah, that's a great jumping off point into this. It seems as though Lee's story is.

Is coming full circle here as he's. He's traveled the globe and. And now coming back here to the States in the Western US Specifically. And so with that, tell us more about getting into fabulous.

Well, what at the time may not have been fabulous, but getting into the. The dustbin train watering hole. That was Las Vegas. Yes.

Well, okay. So Lee Hunt and. And his wife were looking for a place, a comfortable place to retire. So Lee went to California and he looked at Santa Barbara, decided that was too wet, and Santa Barbara can get pretty wet.

I've been there when it has been. So he went to Palm Springs and decided, no, I don't like Palm Springs. And he kept traveling around various places. And eventually, in 1923, he finds this place.

As you say, it was a watering hole. It had a train station, and it had one Main street, and that was about the only street. Even in 1949, when I was five years old and went to Las Vegas to see my mother, that's about it. Fremont street was the street in Las Vegas, and there was a big train station.

But it fascinated Hunt. Yeah. So Hunt is in Las Vegas and. He was fascinated by this place.

Right. I still have this letter. It's somewhere underneath my desk in a box. One of my favorite letters.

He writes it to Jessie. Jessie is recovering from some injury. She's at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. So Lee writes her this letter.

He says, my darling, 1923. I'm glad he could still call her that. My darling, I have found the place. Mark my words, it will be a resort center of the Southwest.

And he describes the place as exactly what it was then, a watering hole for the Southern Pacific. And nothing more is a Possibility. I mean, I don't know how many people would have seen that at the time. Yeah.

And I guess that comes back to this idea of vision, you know, having a vision. And, Chris, I'd be interested in your opinion. Larry was just telling us of Lee writing back to his. His convalescing wife to understand that this will be the Mecca of the Southwest, just whether it's something about Las Vegas or throughout his life.

What gave Lee this vision, like, you know, from. In your belief, where do you see that that came from? That's a great question. I don't think anybody could.

Could really tell you. They 100% know the answer to that because his life was so rich and complex and filled with so many twists and turns. But, you know, again, it seems to me that that part of what enabled him to see the future that could exist for Las Vegas, that eventually did exist for Las Vegas again comes back to his networking and his breadth of experience and just continuing to. To be resilient, to get back up when he's knocked down, to move on to the next thing, to keep building his network, to keep, you know, just advancing everything.

So one thing that he had learned about Las Vegas was that the United States government was going to install a new dam on the Colorado river for the purposes of securing water for the region to use, because, of course, it's so dry. So I believe that one of the reasons that he knew about this before most people would be able to assign any value to this knowledge was not only that he had looked at Las Vegas and seen, well, you know, you could really build very easily in this area and turn it into an intentionally built community, but he simply knew that there were utilities that were going to exist.

So it made it easier for him with that knowledge to take that chance in an area that probably seemed counterintuitive to most people. You know, when he. When he brought investors to the area, he had at least one person come out and take a look at the Las Vegas area. And it was windy and dusty and sandy.

And, you know, of course they were repelled, but they only had that surface knowledge. So because Hunt was able to dig deeper in his life and to, you know, to spread his wings farther in his world, in the space he existed, he examined more of it than most people would. So I feel like he was able to leverage his knowledge in a way that positioned him to take advantage of opportunities that other people weren't able to see, because either they didn't work so hard or they didn't travel as far to see as many different things.

So I think that he was very good at that type of analysis, that. That that sort of complexity never scared him off, and that that was also an asset of his, was that he was up to the challenge. You know, he wanted a life of adventure, but he was also always willing to meet the moment, whether it led to success or failure. You know, he was.

He was giving it his best shot. Before he went to Vegas, he said, you know, I know I've got one good punch left in me. And he had been frustrated several times in other areas. And I think that once he figured out Las Vegas is a really viable opportunity, he was really able to sharpen his focus and apply himself.

Yeah, well said. Well said. And so with that, I think it comes back. Larry, I.

You know, I want. I don't want to jump too far ahead in this Las Vegas story, but you mentioned going to visit your mom and. And living in or staying in a development named after Lee himself and probably piquing your interest in this whole narrative that we've been talking about. So help us come around full circle here to the Las Vegas piece.

Okay, before I do that, I should say that I misnamed the main street. I don't know why I did that. It's Fremont Street. Fremont.

Yeah. It'd be Fremont. Yeah. And I also think that part of what motivated Hunt with regard to Las Vegas is, first of all, he did say to several of his friends, he said, I am a dreamer.

He used that word describing himself. So how to define his dreams, I'm not sure, but I think here he saw weather as a huge asset. And as Christine said, he knew that the federal government was considering, specifically Hoover was considering, as the Secretary of commerce for President Warren Harding and then Coolidge, the idea of putting in a dam. What is this like?

We keep coming back to the dam, Right. And we know that this wasn't done until. This is a New Deal project under roosevelt in the 30s. Right.

But there was obviously the economic need beforehand. So why did or didn't Hunt get in on that project? Well, I think he was pushing for it. And I'm trying to stir this up a little bit, like pushing in.

He's. His whole life, right? He's been that person who's put the network together. Right.

So, okay, as I say, it's been a while since I look at this, but I'm. I'm quite sure that he personally was in contact with Herbert Hoover because Jesse was related to the Hoover family. So there is a personal connection. Right.

In there. I don't think he was the kind of personal friend of Hoover's that he was of Theodore Roosevelt. But anyway, no, he was very involved in getting Washington to move ahead on this project. I think another reason that he wanted to do this is that he felt that he could use the land to create an area that would fit his image of what it should be.

He became far and away the largest land holder in Las Vegas. What an amazing story. I feel like my passport picked up a few more stamps just by listening to that episode. Chris, thank you so much to you and Larry for telling us Lee's story.

The first thing that really jumped out to me was this power of the on the ground intelligence. And again, whether he was in Korea in the mines or in Africa, scouting deals there or traveling the globe, he was always on the front lines of these stories. That's totally my read on this situation. What was yours?

Yeah, I would say that that's a good read on things, you know, particularly like in Korea when he was able to give certain military observations that did help the American military make better decisions. So you're right on point there. He, you know, he, he seems very similar to modern day entrepreneurs in a lot of ways. You know, Elon Musk has figured out some technologies and Hunt certainly figured out the gold technology in Korea and cotton in the Sudan.

That's what's amazing. It's that you can. There's certain people who make the invention, and then there's other people who commercialize and implement those inventions. And while yes, Hunt certainly was an innovator in that respect, I think from what I'm, I'm hearing the majority of his story, the definition was the application of those innovations.

And that really separates the thinkers from the doers. Yeah, that's true. And he was a good community builder as well. When you look at somebody like Tim Berners Lee, who put together the Internet project in the 1990s, he needed a lot of people with specialized knowledge that he didn't have.

And if he didn't go after those people, you and I might not be sitting here talking to each other today. It's amazing to think. And that's just like Lee Hunt going out and talking to Booker T. Washington and building that relationship or his relationships with Teddy Roosevelt.

Definitely the, the importance of networks and the strength of that mutual benefit. Right. Not just getting to know you for my benefit, but back and forth. And then the last thing that really stuck out to me about Hunt was his discipline of knowing when to fold them and how to back away from situations.

What was stuck out to you as maybe one of his more graceful exits in his career? Well, I think one that a careful study of his life might not fully realize was his exit from Mexico. When he was down there and he saw the winds of revolution swirling and certain projects becoming uncertain, he realized that some of his foundational assumptions that led him into that project down there was no longer valid. So he was able to pivot at a time that I think may have saved him from a devastating.

One more financial blow that would have been devastating to him near the end of his time. Yeah. And that's, again, even if it's a great opportunity, if the political and economic wins don't come together, it can certainly be a challenge. And so with that, Chris, I'll.

I'll leave it to you because I always love to know how the story ends. And Lee's story did not end with his passing. So share with us a little bit of a coda that played out after Lee's life. Sure.

All kinds of interesting things happened after Lee Hunt's life. You know, the. His son put together a good residential community there. And something we didn't actually touch on was at one point, the Consulate of Monaco was established in Las Vegas.

And it was largely due to Lee Hunt's son's relationships that he had cultivated with royals over in Monaco. He ended up in a relationship with the Duchess of Monaco, and they set up the consulate in Lee Hunt's old home that he had bequeathed to his son. What an amazing story. So not the typical Embassy row in Washington, D.

C. but in Las Vegas because of these personal relationships. That's. That's right.

So there's. There's residential developments in Las Vegas named after Lee and the family. The Consulate of Monaco had established itself there in Las Vegas. And what else?

Well, there's a small legacy still standing in Las Vegas. It's not really the Hunt legacy per se, but it's. It's on the last parcel that the family owned, which used to be a parking structure. And once the family finally sold the last parcel of land, it ended up in the hands of a company that put up what is now standing as the One World Asia Resort on the site of the old Stardust Casino for those who might know their Las Vegas history.

Fantastic. So when I swing by One World, I'll remember Lee and his legacy and all that he did to bring not only innovation around the world, but prosperity here at home. So, Chris, with that, I think it's a wonderful coded to not only the year from the podcast perspective, but a wonderful culmination of your father's research and the book he wrote on the subject. And I want to just thank you for sharing your family story with us.

Well, it's truly our pleasure. And thank you so much for being a great host. And I hope you have a great and happy new Year to the audience as well. Happy New Year, everyone.

Thank you.