Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 246: The Fenn Treasure

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Ep. 246: The Fenn Treasure · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: This is me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case, underwear listening Hunt podcast, you
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: where you stand with on X. We're we're sitting here
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: to keep this in the back of your mind while
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: you listen to this episode. We're discussing why, ah, why
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: a woman is topless but a man is shirtless, and
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: why you never say a topless man or a shirtless woman.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Ben share your theory if you said a shirtless woman,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: she could still be wearing a bra. Yeah, that's good.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: It was killing me. Uh. Joined by Ben Wallace, who
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: you just heard from there and Ben is finally the
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: writer Ben Wallace, He's finally written something worthy of us.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Hundreds of articles that just not worthy of us, and
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: finally he's done it. I'm honored. Is that what when
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: you set out you wanted to land on this show?
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: I mean it took me a lot of years, like
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: a career, Uh, to lay off people kind of what
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: you're you know, you're I don't know like, like, how
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: when people say, like, what do you write about? It's
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: hard because you're a generalist long form magazine and I'm
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: mostly a magazine writer, general interest right about everything from
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: you know, you know Nazis to the media business to
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: treasure hunts. Wrote a book about wine. Yeah, it's yeah,
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: I tell people about that real quick. I found myself
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: telling people about that book all the time. So I
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: wrote a book about the most expensive bottle of I
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: ever sold, which was a supposedly a seven Bordeaux red
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Bordeaux that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson and was discovered
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: in a bricked up seller in Paris in the mid
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: eighties and then sold for this record price to the
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Forbes family, as in Malcolm Forbes who started Forbes Magazine
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: and um. But then the sort of questions began, was
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: it really Thomas Jefferson's, was it really hidden in the
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: seller for two hundred years? And was the guy who
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: found it was this German collector named Hardy Rodenstock on
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: the up and up? Or was he a con man?
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: And so the book follows that mystery. Uh, and just
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: cut to it. I don't give away the ending. People
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: gotta buy it to find out that one of the
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: things I learned in that book that was most interesting
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: to me U was that, I mean, besides the story
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: about the wine was the thing I didn't realize that
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: the book has a lot to do with. Like there's
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: a part of the book where Ben needs to explain
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: kind of how wine became uh mainstream like Wall Street
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: dick swinging kind of thing, right, and it got into
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: this thing where people have wine tastings. I had never
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: heard this, that that you have wine tastings. You can
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: have a horizontal or a vertical tasting. That's right, So
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: tell people, like what that is. So, like a horizontal
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: tasting would be one year one vintage, let's say two
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: thousand and twenty vintage, but it would be a bunch
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: of different wines, like maybe it's like ten or twenty
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: or even more wines all from that year and you're
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: comparing so so you have the same sort of weather conditions,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: same growing conditions, but you're comparing the wines against each other.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: A vertical tasting, you're taking a single wine from a
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: single producer and you're looking at it over different years,
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: and it could be like a hundred years or samples
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: from a hundred years of a single wine, and then
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: you can see sort of how that makes a difference
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: in how it tastes. And I don't want to give
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: away the end of Ben's book, but I'll point out
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: that UM once, like Wall Street finance, people got into
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: the not that has happened like definitively overnight, but as
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: it became fashionable to host wine tastings and people were
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: filling out their verticals or horizontals, there would always be
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: these really hard to find bottles. Like there's sort of
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: like the bottlenecks in the process of assembling bottles, and
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: there emerges a gentleman who is always seems to find one.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: But there's some guy who wants this extremely rare you know,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: cheval Blanc, which was one of one of the famous ones.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: And uh, and this guy, Hardy Rodenstock, you know, miraculously
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: just bought a private seller that had a dozen cheval blancs,
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: and over time, so many bottles of cheval Blanc came
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: on the auction market that there were more bottles of
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: it for sale than it's ever been produced. Uh. Doing
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: that led into like you did, you wrote so many
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: other things that have always been, you know, cranking out
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: so much work. But doing that led into a stint
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: for you. It gave you like a temporary stick as
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: the person, like a person who goes and examines what's
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: the most expensive blank one can get? That's true? Yeah,
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: I did two articles, um for GP magazine about I
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: think it's called like the and the one percent, just
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: trying out super expensive or rare things like, um, you know,
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: the Bugatti vey Round sports car, or the most expensive
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: bed the Hostins is the Swedish bed called the Hostins
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: vividous bed um where I mean to try it, I
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: had to sleep in the showroom and for like insurance
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: reasons that the company made us higher security guard just
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: to while I was in there sleeping in the bed
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: with like you know, glaring New York City lights shining
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: in through the plate glass windows. And then you did,
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: did you do the most expensive toilet? I did? It
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: was Japanese Toto toilet delightful experience. Um. The most expensive airplane,
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: the most tends of airplane ride, most expensive airplane ride
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: going to Dubai where you have a you actually have
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: a cabin instead of a seat, and you can take
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: an in flight shower and you get a smoothie afterwards.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: I mean, even though the smoothie is you know, maybe
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: like five dollars out on value, it just kind of
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: caps it for me. Yeah, and then you did the
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: most expensive fishing trip you can go on, the most
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: expensive fishing trip, which I think you went on a
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: similar trip. It's not the same one down in Patagonia exactly.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: I was on the exact same trip fly fishing. I
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: mean I wasn't on up with you, but I was
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: on a similar trip. I think you give me a
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: few pointers with the fly fishing ride. Before I went,
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: my wife was being attracted to those guide dudes because
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: they wore flight suits. I did not know that I was.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: I was. We weren't even married yet. It was an
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: early date. I took her on an early date, which
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: gave her the wrong idea about what our scene was
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: going to be. And then she wand up taking quite
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: a shine to all these young whipper snappers run around
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: the helicopter pilot suits, which is the weird. That's a
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: weird as true when you have a reservation like a
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: hotel or a restaurant or something, or people ever expecting
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Detroit Pistons defensive Player of the Year Ben Wallace. You
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: know now and then every now and then I do
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: get a little bit of a look like you're not
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: what I was expecting. Very different. So you have all
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: all your teeth and everything were lined up. I don't
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: know anything about his dentistry. I just uh, you know,
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: he just yeah, he has he has much more hair
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: than I do. And you know he looks like a
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: professional athlete earlier. Yeah, he's about a foot taller than
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: this Ben Wallace. Um, darker skin, bigger hair, Um much different. Also,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: the Pistons are basketball team, not a hockey team. The teeth,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: Oh why did that hockey? That was perfect st like
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: when you play into its very very on brand. Why
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: did that thig hockey? I don't know what was the
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: position you said? Maybe it felt to me like a
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: hockey position. And he was a powerfulward, he was a
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: defensive that I feel like it must be hockey. Uh.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: The reason the thing that Ben, all that stuff was
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: not worthy, All that all that work was not worthy.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: But what is worthy is Ben is just finished a
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: large piece of reporting on the forest fen treasure. Um.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: You probably have a tained now, I would say, like
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: a high level of subject matter expertise on the Forest
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: Fin Treasure, surpassing, surpassing that of our own Spencer new Heart,
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: who has no a mild interest. Yes, uh, tell what
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: you got. We could give Ben a break and Spencer
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: could explain what he feels the Fen Treasure is, or
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: we just go right to Ben. Go right to Ben.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: Explain the Fen Treasure. All right, the Fen Treasure. We
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: gotta understand Forest Fan, Forest Fu. I got this all
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: planned out to talk about. No, you could do it briefly,
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: but I want to get into the guy. Okay, I
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: want to get into the guy. But first I just
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: want people to be like, oh, that thing. The Fen
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: Treasure is a chest of treasure, including a lot of
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: gold coins, gold nuggets, gems, some ancient jewelry um that
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: was hidden in the Rockies in two thousand ten um
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: and that by an eccentric guy from Santa Fe or
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: wealthy art collects, art art dealer, and that set in
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: motion a treasure hunt that has had you know, possibly
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: several hundred thousand people searching for it for the last decade.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: A million bucks about about a million year, but then
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: a million. But that's not counting its collective value as
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: now a cultural artifact, absolutely, which can make it exponentially greater. Exactly, Um,
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: four people have died looking for it. Five at least
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: five have died trying to find the treasure. Okay, with
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: that established, uh, and I want to jump and explain
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: real quick how I became aware of Forrest Fent. And
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: I feel that I was telling I've been friends with
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: Ben for a long long time, like in excess of
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: a decade, I think thirteen years. And I feel like
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: I was probably from the start, from early on, I
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: mentioned the dude Forrest Fen to you. I knew this
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: this this art well, an art collector, fighter pilot. He's
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: a Vietnam pilot, correct for combat missions. Uh, eccentric antiquities dealer,
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: just man about town in Santa Fe. I heard about
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: them a long time ago when I was when I
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: first got interested in Clovis points, so ice age projectile points,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: spear like spear points from the ice age. UM. When
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: I got interested in Clovis points, you couldn't read much
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: about Clovis points without reading about a collection of Clovis
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: points that had been dubbed the fen Cash and anthropolo.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: I knew a number of anthropologists who were like legit
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: academic and the apologists a number of anthropologists who were
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: kind of like pot hunters, meaning they're there are hobbyists
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: who liked to hunt arrowheads, and they would often sit
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: and argue about and speculate on the legitimacy of the
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Fen cash. And it was just some hand I don't know,
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: a dozen or some handful of Clovis points. And the
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: one guy came to know best, Tony Baker, who passed away,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: would explain to me that he knew for a fact
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: I can say I think I can say this because
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: he's dead. He told me, Now everybody's dead. He told
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: me knew for a fact that some of the Clovis
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: points in the Fen Cash we're phonies. Then I became
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: aware of the Fenn Treasure because I had heard and
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: I was not this is not correct. I had heard
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: that some of these Clovis points had made their way
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: into the fen Treasure, and last I learned that they're not. Yeah,
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, when I started reporting on this, that was
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: one of the first questions I asked, because you had
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: mentioned that to me. And I learned that he had
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: sold the fen cash before he he had the treasure.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: So what give us a rundown of I mean I
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: just touched on a little bit, but give a rundown
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: of like this guy's background and why he would have
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: emerged as a person to like set off at treasure hunt,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Like what is you know what what motivated him? Anyways?
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: I mean he grew up in Texas. His dad was
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: a school teacher, and growing up, I think really young,
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: he started collecting arrowheads and that ignited a lifelong obsession
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: with collecting things and with you know, in particular Native
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: American antiquities. UM. And when he became a pilot, he
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: joined the Air Force and then was in Vietnam, you know,
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: flew all these missions, was shot down and rescued twice. UM.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: But even as a pilot, he would you know, use
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: his flights to kind of survey the landscape and occasionally
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: like put down own and you know, scour ruins for collectibles.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: And so he was just a real kind of obsessive collector.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: And after he got out of the Air Force, he
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: moved to Santa Fe from Texas, and UM became an
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: art dealer and so then he had a kind of
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: professional way to pursue his passion of collecting and owning things,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: and his house in Santa Fe was full of um,
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: you know, things like sitting bowls, peace pipe and all
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: kinds of you know, kind of fabled relics and um.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: And he was just a lifeline collector. And then eventually
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: in in the mid to late eighties, he sold his
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: art gallery after being a big part of the Santa
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: Fe art boom, and he bought a huge Indian pueblo,
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: the San Lazaro Pueblo, basically as his personal archaeological hunting ground.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: And then he spent the next ten years, they're kind
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: of excavating it himself, courting no shortage of controversy in
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: the process. According no shortage of controversy. There were accusations
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: that he had found human bones. There were, you know,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: various mediations with tribes over you know, certain things he
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: found in the pueblo. Um, well, how much did he
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: buy that thing for? I don't know. I don't think
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: that that number has been published. Yeah, but it was,
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think it was over a thousand acres.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: It was. It was a huge like bought an old pueblo.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: It's like like an old village site. Yep, to dig
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: it up. You mentioned the Santa Fe ar boom as
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: if it was like an event, what what was that
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: it was? So, I guess in the seventies and early
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: eighties Santa Fe became UM a popular place for art
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: collectors to go to buy cowboy art, Indian artifacts, UM
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: sort of new Western art UM and Fenn was at
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: the center of that. I think a lot of kind
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: of Hollywood celebrities got into the Southwestern look, so, you know,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Michael Douglas, Suzanne Summers, Ralph Lauren, people like that. UM
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: three Company, The Regal Beagle Dude. That was a very
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: suggestive television show. I remember one episode where someone's overhearing
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: two people in the bathroom trying to make a shower
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: curtain fit and it's not long enough and someone overhearing
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: the conversation coming to a conclusion about something else going on.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: Very suggestive for it. Yeah. I I've often brought up
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: that I think Shakespeare stole most of his material from
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: Threes Company, because that's where he developed his love for
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: like misheard conversations. You know, but that's a premise for
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: a novel like Shakespeare traveled, traveled back in time from
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: Threes Company too. It started writing his comments like this
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: is going to blow up in the Elizabeth in Europe. Yeah,
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: it's like they're gona people are gonna love this when
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: I get back to where I came from. This idea
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: that you hear a conversation miss only here part of
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: it get a come to a wild conclusion. It's all
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: textbook threes. Come don don knots, should be should have
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: been in more Shakespeare adaptations. Uh okay, So walk through
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: as best you can to how this you know, art dealer,
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Um a little bit of a fable list. I mean
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: he himself breaking tour on. I mean he himself said,
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: you know of what I say is true? You know?
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: And he said he said that, He said, um, it's
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: not what you are, it's what people think you are.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: So there was a little bit of the kind of
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: rogue ish storyteller to him. Always can you quickly tell
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: the story you talk about in your article? Um, at
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: least an early draft to your article. Where he has
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: a thing on display in his gallery, but someone that
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: works for him knows more than he knows about what's
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: on display or not. So he had an intern. This
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: is in I think the early eighties or late seventies,
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: and he had an intern named Linda Durham who would
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: later go on to found like a pretty major Santa
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: Fe art gallery. And she was a playboy bunny. She
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: had been a Playboy bunny, which I think in those
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: days meant you would like actually worked at like a
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Playboy club. This is in New York City, and she
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: was really interested in Egyptology. Go figure, and a customer
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: of hers at the Playboy club UM made a gift
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: to her of a small like something small and mummified. Um,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: and she had an X rayed by a doctor friend
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: I'm using like a medical X ray device, and it
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: was a baby crocodile that had been mummified but for
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: mumified by a real Egyptian mummified baby crocodile and internet
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: stuff man, and like a nile crocodile. I mean, I
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: don't know if, I mean, I don't know which river
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: it came from, but that that's my guess, is that species.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: And they wrapped it up like a little Halloween costume
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: and mummified it. Man, those guys. So at a certain
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: point I think she needed money. She sold it privately
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: to a private collector and eventually, by bizarre coincidence, it
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: ends up in fence hands like he buys it, and
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: he was always buying just like interesting objects. So he
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: buys this for the gallery and he displays it um
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: in a case and says, you know, d accession from
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: the British Museum, you know, and it was sort of
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: implied that it was a human mummy. What's de accession means?
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: That means like sometimes museums have um too much stuff
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: and they maybe need money, so they se all this stuff.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: But does that give is that meant to give it
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: a path of legitimacy? Yes, it gives it. Yeah, it
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: gives it sort of this, you know, or of of
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: of validation and respectability. Is that only in museum lingo
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: or is there another case where you would say private,
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: private collectors who have sort of collections d accession things.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: I learned this working on the Wine book, because the
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: Forbes family collected all kinds of stuff and they would
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: d accession things from their collection. Yeah, a lot of
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: other people do that. They call it selling something. I
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: gonna started switching all this lawnmower. Okay, so continue about
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: the crocodile. Alright, So Linda Durham Young, you know intern
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: in Fenn's gallery sees this thing that used to belong
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: to her and went to to forest then and said,
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: you know that's not the accession by the Bridge Museum,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: Like that's a little baby crocodile I got from some
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: guy who came to the Playboy Club. And you know,
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: she said, Fenn was not happy to have this story
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: he was telling about this object corrected. I think it's
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: important to bring up the uh, it's important to bring
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: up I don't want to call him credibility act. I
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: don't want to call him credibility problems. It's important to
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: bring up the showmanship of Fen or what's the word
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: you would use, showmanship, credibility gap. I don't know. I
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: think he was he was a you know, he was
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: a promoter. He was a salesman. He's not unique in
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: the art business that way. I think there's a fair
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: amount of that among art dealers. You kind of hype things. Um.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: But and he was, as he said, he was a storyteller.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: So you know, you know, it might be good word
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: for him, a bit of a rascal. He's rascally. I
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: think he'd liked to just generate like ideas and and
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: creator ruckets. He wasn't he was a rascal. And actually
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: I talked to this curator at the American Museum of
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: Natural History, David Hurst Thomas, who knew and liked fan
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: Um unlike a lot of archaeologists who thought he was
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: a pot hunter, and Thomas said Forest was a rascal.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: You know. He reminded me of the what you see
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: in the Native American oral literature. A lot got in
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: my head as you use the word. I was thinking
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: my buddy Fred who used to call Bill Clinton the
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: rascal president. That words always stuck in my head. But
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: he was like attempting to build the same age as
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: though like um the dosekis commercial is the most interesting
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: man in the world, like it. It has big that
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: energy totally yeah yeah, but he's got like combat. I mean,
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: there's like a foundation there right absolutely. And in fact,
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: you know, when I went into this, I first thought,
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: am I gonna have to do all this kind of verification,
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: like get his military records, because that's the sounds like
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: a tall story, but it actually is. It is all true.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: And it was somewhere along the way I think, where
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: he had cracked Um a jet and then somebody went
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: into where he said he crashed it and they found
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: it and like verified the whole story about you know
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: this crash that you know who did that. I didn't
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: know this. I met those guys. I have a giant thing.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: That's a long story. Do you mind if I tell
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: us really quickly interesting? I have a box of one
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: thousand meat bags plastic bags that butcher's used to send
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: meat home in because years ago, the production company we
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: work with was doing a show with Pat La Frieda.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: The guys I work with, the camera guys I work with,
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: had been working on that and came over my house
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: and these bags of lamb meat and whatnot, and I
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: was admiring the bags. They passed along to the La
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: Frida's that I was an admirer of the bags. They
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: sent me a thousand of them. I still have them,
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: use them all the time. So when I when the
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: name popped up the Pat La Frida's brother, the famous
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: butcher went to Vietnam to find a chunk of airplane.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: I was planning to but he ended up he hired local.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: He hired some Australians expats in Vietnam to do the
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: on the ground work for him. Um so they actually
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: found it, but he was, you know, in live remote
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: touch with them. He's an engineer. He became electrical engineer.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: He became i think, really interested in the puzzle of
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: seeing sort of the historical research and um, you know,
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: could he cracked this puzzle? Could he? He was a
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: treasure hunter. Oh so he was a fan treasure was
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: a fan treasure guy. And if you're a spinoff exactly
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: so like if you're a fan treasure guy, job one
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: is basically making a study of forest Fan because you're
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: trying to understand like places that might have been special
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: to him, where he might have hit the treasure. So
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: Chris Lafreda happened to go down the rabbit hole of
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: Fens Vietnam experience, and I thought it would be an
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: interesting challenge to try to find this wreckage if it
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: still was still sell it back to Fan. He Oh,
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: he gave him. He gave him a couple of the
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: pieces that he got ship. Yeah. I mean he was
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: using like drone, you know, sending drones over the jungle
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: and then they sent people in on the ground after
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: they had some evidence and they talked to villagers who
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: are like, oh, yeah, there's wreckage over on that slope
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: over there, no kid you know, So get us into
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: how get us into what he's thinking when he decides to,
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: at whatever point a decade ago, build up a little
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: treasure box and hide it. Well, the story of the
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: treasure begins thirty two years ago, Forest Fen was diagnosed
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: with kidney cancer and told it was terminal. His father
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: had died of pancreatic cancer, and his father, when he
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: was diagnosed with cancer, had swallowed and in fifty plus
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: sleeping pills um to spare his family the agony of
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: you know, drawn out death. So when Forest is diagnosed
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: with terminal cancer, he decides he's going to do the
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: same thing, but with the twist that he's gonna go
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: to a remote place that he had already decided upon
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: as the place where he wanted to die, somewhere in
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: the Rockies, and he was going to die there, but
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: he was going to bring a chest of treasure that
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: he was going to create with him, and people could
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: search for his body and when they got there, they
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: could take the treasure. So he's going to create a
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: treasure hunt that would accompany his his burial site, and
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: he was going to create a poem with a puzzle
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: in it as the sort of mystery suicide note. The
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: suicide note was going to be this this kind of
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: you know, encrypted treasure map that people would have to
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: try to crack. That's great, but that's where that's where
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: if you're the centric, that's how you put your money
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: where your mouth is, man, you know what I mean,
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: Like when the rubber meets the road and you keep
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: at it like that, that's like, that's my that's that's
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: great eccentricity right there. But he doesn't die. But then
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: he doesn't die, and probably he did not die. He
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: recovered fully from cancer UM and but he kept sort
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: of toying around with this idea of hiding a treasure chest.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: You would talk about it, Yeah, he talked about it
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: to friends. In fact, you know, when friends came to
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: his house. He had a walk in vault in his
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: house where he kept some of his more valuable um collectibles.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: And when friends came over, he had like bring him
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: into the vault where he also had the bottle of
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: pills that he had planned to take with him, and
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: he would show them this this work in progress, which
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: was this bronze ten by ten treasure chest that he
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: was filling with valuables. Oh that's how big it was?
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: Ten by ten inches yep, but forty two pounds pounds
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: I was thinking of. I didn't know I was thinking
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: of a big Remember I was asking you a lot
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: of questions last night about the actual like stashing of it.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: Ten by ten yeah, yeah. I was picturing like like
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: in a pirate movie, like a steamer trunk size. Yeah, oh,
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: ten by ten Okay, go on it, um, you know,
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: I'm looking at Spencer's pull up a picture of it.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: So he kept, you know, playing around with what was
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: going to be in the chest, and he would take,
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: you know, put stuff in, take it out. And his
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: main goal was to create a treasure that like when
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: the finder opened the lid, they would just be dazzled
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: by it. Like it wasn't just going to be a
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: box with some valuable stuff in it. It was gonna
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: actually look like that treasure chest out of Like you
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: know that it's too small box, a small pirate I
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: would have found it and would have been, like I
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: was expecting something much larger out of walked away and discussed.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: So one of the questions was, well, if he hides
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: this treasure, how's he gonna know if it ever gets found,
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: if it's often some really remote place. And so one
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: of the things he was trying to figure out was
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: how can I what can I what can I leave
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: in the box? UM that will let me know it's
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: been found. And I think at that time, like he
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: was kind of early for GPS, and he wasn't that
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: technically minded a guy, So I don't think there was
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: ever a quite And also the idea was that this
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: might be there for a thousand years, so I don't
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: think he was ever seriously considering a technological solution. But
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: one of the things he considered was putting something like
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: a UM bank doctor, you know, a bank letter or
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: a bearer bond worth enough money that the finder would
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: have to go to the bank to cash it out.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: So between you like a hundred thousand dollar bearer bond,
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: they're not gonna just sit on that and when they
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: went to the bank, he would be notified. He then though,
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: UM thought, well what if the bank doesn't exist anymore?
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: So apparently he he took that out of the chest
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: and he came up with some other item kicked around.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: He's imagine he kicked around, putting some thousand dollar bills
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: in which I didn't know existed, didn't. He actually put
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: in some thousand dollar bills, which you know, as was
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: recently discovered on the internet, futures the face of Grover Cleveland. UM,
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: and then he took them out because he thought they
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: would rot over time. Huh. So the no thousand dollar bills,
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: So no thousand dollar bills, no Clovis points, no Clothus points,
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: but like a lot of like big gold nuggets, eagle gold,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: eagle coins, double eagals, um, other kind of more esoteric jewelry,
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: and some projectile points or no, I don't know. I'm
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: not sure. I thought you mentioned that there are some
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: projectile points in there. I think someone I talked to
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: you said they thought there were, but I don't know
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: for sure. Maybe he put them in and took them
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: out a couple of times because it looks like he's
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: like staging the perfect scenery. Yeah, you might have thought,
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: you know, the point wen't like impressive enough visually, so
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: he stashes it. So he stashes it well, so in
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: in um the summer of two thousand ten, he hides it.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: UM doesn't tell anybody where UM and he self publishes
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: a memoir called the thrill of the chase. With this
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: twenty four lines six stands a poem um that contained
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: what you needed to what you would need to figure
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: out where the chest was hidden. Spencer, Uh, can you
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: read for us some lines? Well's outside you when I
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: started getting bored? Uh? Some lines from the poem that
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: explains where the treasure is. As I've gone alone in there,
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: and with my treasures bold, I can keep my secret
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: war and hint of riches new and old. Begin it
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: where warm waters halt, and take it in the canyon down,
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: not far but too far to walk. Put in below
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: the home of Brown. From there, it's no place for
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: the meek. The end is drawing ever nigh the beano.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: Paddle up your creek, just heavy loads and water high.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: If you've been wise and found the blaze, look quickly
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: down your quest to cease, but terry scant with marveled gaze.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: Just take the chest and go in peace. So why
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: is it that I'm must go and leave my trove
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: for all to seek the answer? I already know I've
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: I've done it tired and now I'm weak. So hear
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: me all and listen good. Your effort will be worth
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: the cold. If you are brave and in the wood,
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: I give you the title to the gold hm that
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: has everything you need to know. And then he, over
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: the decade, makes himself available intermittently in terms of rascaliness. Though,
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: I think before we move on, we gotta back up
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: to two thousand nine, which is a year before he
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: hid the treasure, which is when the FBI knocks on
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: his door and many other art dealers and diggers and
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: holders of you know, artifacts from the Four Corners area. Um,
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: and it's the FBI is uh. I don't know what
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: the name of the ace was, but Fenn was involved.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: And I think they took like ten things from his home, um,
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: some small stuff all the way up to a bison
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: skull that they had taken. But no charges were ever
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: filed in this deal. But they kept his stuff. No,
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: I don't know about that. I think he got them back.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: I mean there were charges filed a bunch against a
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: bunch of other people. I think they're like over thirty
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: people were arrested, but not against him and what but
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: here at home. But now it's interesting to point it out.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: But if the FBI knocks on your door and takes
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff and there's no charges filed and
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: they give you your stuff back. Why is it brought
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: up as though you did something bad because it's like
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: built by like they didn't determine that he did something
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: bad Fenn. Fenn appeared to be like the most minor
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: player in what ended up happening. It was so big
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: that I think there were three people that committed suicide
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: in the case, two people that had their doors knocked
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: down to grab stuff, and then the informant himself killed himself. Um,
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: and Fen never had any charges in the thing. But
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: I said, let's say, I said, oh, I heard the
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: FBI kicked Spencer's door down, and then someone's like, yeah,
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: but they had the wrong door. They meant to go
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: to the neighbor's place. I like, Still, one thing that happened,
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: one thing, one thing that happened. Still he must be
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: a bad person. One thing that happened is the Associated
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: Press falsely reported that Fenn had been indicted, and they
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: had then had to correct that. But so like the
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: day of, he was probably the most best known person
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: of all the people who got rounded up in that
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: whole operation, And so it was kind of hard to
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: you know, bring the horse back into the bar, and
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: after that was reported, people just thought fun was you know,
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: more implicated than he was. And I don't think it's
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: like a far leap either. I don't mean to sound
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: like Alan dersh was here, but I'm just saying it's
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: like there's a little bit like, you know, if he did,
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: if he didn't get in trouble and got his ship back.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: I don't know that that's a bad like understood, but
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: I don't think it's a far leap to like, look
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: at this happening in two thousand nine, and then a
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: year later he hides one or two million dollars worth
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: of UM pieces of memorabilia somewhere in the Rocky Mountains
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: and doesn't tell anybody where. So I think there's like
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: suspicion there, and it's why a lot of people throughout
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: this and like even now that it's pretty much over,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: have suspected that there was no treasure UM or that
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: like this was a ploy to cell books. And I'm
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: sure we'll revisit this part of the story itself, but
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: it plays into the thing of like, uh, this guy
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: doesn't have a perfect past, and so it could be
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: a reason why, Uh, this isn't just like an innocent
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: treasure hunt. Had you encountered that, had you encountered that
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: little plot twisted reporting? Ben? Yeah? Yeah, I mean, but
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: but the idea that he's like, I don't I'll do
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: with all my illegal stuff is putting this box and
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: buried on in the woods. Yeah, but yes, but I'm
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: glad you remember that because I actually had forgotten that part.
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: M hm. You chose not to put that in your article?
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: I did, really why because I forgot about There's only
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: so much you can fit. It's a long ass article. Yeah,
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: I was looking looking. I couldn't put the fen cash
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: in there, you know. Yeah. The whole point was to
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: talk about the fen Cash, the project of closus quints.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: That's why I wanted a big, clous point article from
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: Ben Wallace. And what do I get was it was
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: that his only brush up with like the FBI that
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: you know of. Yeah, but he was. I actually I
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: talked to a BLM agent who who was involved in
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: that case, and like Fenn had been on everyone's radar
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: for years. I mean, he was like constantly kind of
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: a figure of suspicion. He knew a lot of the people,
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: and he was someone who really seemed to kind of
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: tread close to the line a lot and was constantly
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: having these skirmishes with you know, archaeologists, with museums, with
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: the state government. Um so I think he was kind
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: of ripe to be under suspicion. Yeah, now we're gonna
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: jump to this. Fen over the decade or over the years,
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: makes himself sort of available to the hundreds of emerging individuals, thousands,
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: thousands who set out to find the treasure. Now, I
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: want you to talk a little bit about who these
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: people are, how they operate, how they communicate. But in
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: that include that Fenn continues to um give little like
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: getting warmer or Nope, not that, or I can assure
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: you it's not this like talk about how that dialogue
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: emerges between the treasure hunters and the treasure hider. I mean,
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: Fenn had always been you know, he loved the media.
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: I mean he was actually controversy. One of the things
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: he was controversial for in the Santa fe Art community
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: was the degree to which he kind of courted press attention.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: And so it was inevitable that when he starts this
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: treasure hunt, like part of the appeal for him would
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: be all the attention it was going to bring him,
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: and so he was very open. Not only he was
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: open to treasure hunters, but he was also very open
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: to the media. He went on The Today Show a
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: bunch of times, which he went on The Today Show,
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: and it kind of blew the whole thing up. I mean,
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: that's when I think a lot more people got into
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: the hunt. But after he did his initial appearance on
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: the Today Show just talking about, you know, this hunt
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: he had started three years earlier, um, he agreed to
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: come back on the Today Show once a month for
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: the next I don't know, nine months and give a
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: clue each time. And he did it maybe three times,
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: and then I think he got he sort of stopped
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: liking them. The pressure of the Today Show was putting
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: on him to give a serious clue each time, because
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: he was giving pretty minor stuff like well, it's not
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: in a graveyard, you know. I think I think that
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: Today Show is kind of like, we need you to
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: do us better than that. They want some of the
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: posts yea more possets like you know, so they wanted
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: to like they wanted to lead to a discovery, right
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: They're trying to force I think so they're trying to
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: yea narrow the search possibilities. UM okay. So so simultaneous
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: with that, there emerges this robust community of treasure hunters
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: around the fin treasure UM and you know, on the
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: Internet they all get together in a bunch of forums
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: that are extremely UM active, and you know, people throwing
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: out their various theories, which they called salves, or people
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: talking about their boots on the ground trips as they
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: refer to their field trips to actually look for the
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: treasure UM. And like you know, like the Internet is
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: about everything, I mean it was. It was a very
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: varied group of people with varying levels of UM evidence
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: backing up their theories. And so you know, there were
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: people who would put forward UM serious interpretations of the poem,
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: and then there'd be other people who would say, Um,
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: did you notice in that interview Fen was wearing a
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: hat and there was a hole in the hat, and
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: if you look closely under a microscope, that hole is
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: the shape of Colorado. So I think that's telling us
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: the treasures in Colorado. Uh. Some of the clues he
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: gave her substantive absolutely, and he one of the first
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: major clues he gave was he narrowed. The initial description
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: of where the treasure was was it's in the mountains
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: north of Santa Fe. And initially a lot of people
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: thought that men it was in New Mexico. At a
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: certain point it kind of broadened. People realized he was
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: talking about the Rocky Mountains as a whole. But he
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: excluded Utah and Idaho. I think he excluded Canada. So
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: then it was basically narrowed to the four search states
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: were Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. And didn't someone
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: think if you went north long enough, you'd eventually wind
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: up back south of his house, and that's must be
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: where it was exactly one one one one of the
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: circumnavigate the globe and wind up in Albuquerque. This was
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: actually a woman who ran one of the main forums.
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: Her theory was that it was buried in fans backyard.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: And I said, but what about it being north of
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: Santa Fanci If you go all the way around the world,
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: you can be in his backyard and still be north
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: of Santa Fe. He then people started dying. Then people
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: started dying. I mean people were interpreting, you know, really
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: like like home of Brown people started interpreting as an outhouse,
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: so he had to eliminate, like say, it's not it's
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: not in an outhouse, it's not under an outhouse. Yeah.
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: But but yeah, so Home of Brown you get into
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: that too. Because there's another interesting thing. Everyone everyone who's
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: read Catchering the Rye, which if you haven't, go read
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: its phenomental book, Catching the Rye, written by J. D. Salinger.
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: J D. Salinger's publisher was Little Brown. The Salinger family
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: ended up owning a property and Wyoming or so there
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: was a Sallenger ranch. It was in Wyoming. I'm not
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: sure whether or not that must be it Little Brown. Um,
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: they're authors families ranch. Ye. Crazy shit. So this the
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: search began just attracting, you know, thousands and thousands of people.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: Some of those people were kind of desperadoes there that
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: you know, they quit their job or they went bankrupt
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: or they you know, they kind of had nothing to
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: lose and they they went out there and a lot
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: of them had minimal, if any, wilderness experience. And I
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: have a great book they should have brought with them.
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: I think I've heard about that available. It's available for
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: pre order. It's called The Mediator's Guide to Wilderness Skills
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: and Survival. It would have saved a lot of lives,
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: a lot of lives. A lot of people are saying
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: it would have saved a lot of lives. Um. So
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: this guy named Randy Bill you um puts into the
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: Rio Grande on a inflatable raft. Um, and he's not
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: heard from again. Kids, Like, wasn't it like only is
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: a child's inflatable raft Because he's got in his head
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: because the words put in are in there, He's got
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: in his head that it's like you need to do
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: a float. You need to do a river float to
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: find it. Like that, he put in somewhere cash the
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: treasure and then proceeded down the river and saw that
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: most so everybody starts doing float trips. Everyone starts doing
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: float trips. So eventually his body is found. He drowned. U.
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: Two more guys drowned, one I think also in the
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: Rio grand d a another in the Arkansas River. UM.
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: A fourth guy died in Yellowstone National Park. He was
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: he slipped on a slope and dropped five feet to
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: his death. And then another guy uh snowmobile into Dinosaur
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: National Monument wearing like a thin get him jeans and
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: froze to death. And that same guy. That's here's why
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: you shouldn't because a month beforehand he had to get
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: rescued for the same thing. Yeah, and it was some
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: of these moments, um that inspired Fenn to like give
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: further clues as he talked about like having his dialogue right,
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: trying to stem the bleeding. So like when when this
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: Randy died in the Rio Grand, I think Fanny just
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: said he's like not in the real Grand or he
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: had said it's like it's not uh south of Santa
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: Fe or something like that, basically eliminating um the Rio Grand.
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: And then Randy's wife you probably covered this banner saw it,
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: but she like came out and was very vocal that, like,
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: this treasure does not exist. This is all a hoax
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: because she wanted to see the guy. Probably, I mean,
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: I'm sure she had many motives um for her husband
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: being killed looking for the treasure, but she was like
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: one of the very vocal people. It was like this
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: this isn't real. And actually they head of the new
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: Mexico State Police, Pizza SETAs Uh, publicly implored Fen to
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: to end the hunt, um, you know, to stop the deaths. Yeah,
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: and I in your article, I was surprised to read
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: too that that the Fen Treasure, in addition to Breaking Bad,
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: the television show, is credited with an influx and tourism
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: to New Mexico. It was that substantial. New Mexico's tourism
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: department created a video featuring Fen as part of like
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: their tourism drive. It's weird because we've had New Mexico
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: advertise tourism and in the notes it says you can't
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: mention Breaking Bad, but didn't say not to mention the
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: Fen Treasure. Interesting. Yeah, I think Breaking Bad sent a
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: lot of people to Albuquerque, and um Fens sent a
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: lot of people to Santa fe uh. He then he
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: gave some other He also started to give some other clues,
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: like he kept saying, keep he said in terms of
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: the put In and river access, this is all just
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: shuding from your article. But in terms of the river access,
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: someone eventually a searcher, what do they call themselves, chasers
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: chasers asked him did you return like when you deposited
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: the treasure? Did you return by the exact same path?
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: And he said yes, which eliminated this idea that he
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: did a river trip exactly and then he said, I
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: guess a number of times he said I was how
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: old eighty when he when he buried it or hit it.
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: It's forty five pounds. I'm eighty years old. I carried
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: it from my car, So keep that in mind. Yeah,
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: to Alip, presumably to eliminate a lot of the people
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: who are doing the crazy. Yeah, he eliminated side like
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: it's not that was the main thing. It's no, it's nowhere.
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: An eighty year old man couldn't have gone. Um, but yeah, specifically,
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: it's not the real grand I think he might even
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: said it's not in a river or beside a river,
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: And I think I think he may be eliminated, like
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: national parks because of the Yellowstone thing. Um never eliminated
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: National parks. Okay, maybe it was the Yellowstone thing. He
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: was like, you don't need rock climbing gear. It was
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: something from one of those insis nothing you're not Yeah,
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: you don't need crampons, or like you're not gonna be
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: repelling down. Although there was a guy, another guy who
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: repelled into the Grand Canyon um and ran out of
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: rope before he got to the bottom. And then when
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: like eleven National Park Service people came to rescue him,
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: and they got him down. He ran away because he
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: was worried one of them was going to steal his
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: solve people. And then there was an Indiana treasure hunter
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: in Yellowstone, Um that got caught in an area he
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to be in Yellowstone National Park doing something
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: he wasn't supposed to be. I think he was doing
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: some rock climbing, and uh, when he got to the judge,
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: he said, you might call me a lunatic what ever,
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: but I feel wholeheartedly I solved that fan treasure thing.
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: I still feel it's down there, your honor. I dare
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: anybody to figure out a better solve. And so his
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: defense of being in his place he wasn't supposed to be,
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: it was like, that's where the treasure was, your honor,
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: That's why I should be innocent. There were there I
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: just say like there were there were hundreds of people
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: who said I definitely have the correct solve. And when
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: people would say, well, then why don't you have the treasure,
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: they would say either like, well he clearly removed it
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: or it was never there, And this whole thing is
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: a hoax or um, there's there must be like a
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: proxy item there, but the treasure itself isn't going to
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: be there. So instead of just saying, oh, I guess
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: my solve was wrong, can you get into I think
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: we've kind of touched on the crazy ship is like right,
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: the crazy ship is fun, but you can just kind
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: of imagine, right, like the hole in his hat or whatever,
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: and people and you covered how people started getting very
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: interested in his biography and they're kind of looking for
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: that like Rosebud moment from Citizen Kane, right of like
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: what would be some place of particular resonance to him
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: where he would have put this thing because he established
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: that he put it somewhere important to him, so it
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: has to be somewhere that he's been, So how do
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: we find where all he's been and and all this
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: kind of like avenue that this whole avenue approach emerges
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: of like that that you'll find additional materials within his biography,
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: but spend some time on some of the people who
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: are who we're thinking about it probably in the correct way.
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: So a lot of the more serious searchers focused on
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: Yellowstone because Fenn had said, my heart is in Yellowstone,
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: and as a child he had spent a lot of
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: time with his family on fishing and camping trips in Yellowstone.
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: So um, so that's where I would say most of
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: the most serious searchers that I encountered spent most of
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: their time. I mean, there were still some people in
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: New Mexico looking, not that many in Colorado, quite a
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: lot in Montana, but Wyoming and yellow Strand in particular
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: was was sort of the biggest focus for a lot
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: of people. One of the very popular spots was, you know,
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: just like thirty miles from us, the way the Crael
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: flies Hebgen Lake, because he had pictures in his biography
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: um of him at Hebgen Lake and riding horses there
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: and talked about how much he loved it and stuff
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: like that. So that became a very popular place as well,
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: specifically at Hebgen Lake. Do you know that that uh
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: Osborne Russell in his journal this is before Heaven Lake existed.
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: It's a it's you know, it's an artificial lake. It's
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: an empolierment um. They used to call that the firehole
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: as well. They would call holes like sheltered valleys where
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: you could spend the winter because some guy showed up
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: there and the whole thing was on fire. All that
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: timber that used to be in the atom was burning,
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: and they called the fire hole. Then it got like
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: subsumed by Lake hopgan Um. People started to feet realized
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: or started to feel that there has that that that
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: that the poem can't do it like like a literal
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: understanding of the words in the palm, that it can't
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: be adequate, like it can't put you on a spot
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: to find a ten by ten inch box. But it
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: was just so it was so vague. It could be
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: interpreted in so many ways. And just to take one
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: example of the clue where warm waters halt, you know,
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: it could refer to it like uncountable sort of hydrothermal locations.
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: You know, there's I mean, there's so many. I went
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: down to the Boiling River when I first moved to
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: Montana looking looking for this treasure, A big box, you
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: know what I may have, but I wasn't you know,
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: maybe I mistake it for a rock. But because fed
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: But then one of these treasure hunters, that the primary
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: treasure hunter your profile talks about that Fenn had mentioned
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: in some writing or some lecture or something he had
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: mentioned as a kid being in the river and how
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: he would hop around near a hot spring trying to
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: find water was boiling Actually okay, it was, but that
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: he would hop around and talk about places that were
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: too hot, places that were too cold, and so him saying,
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: begin we're warm waters and or whatever. Lad some serious
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: people to think that that's that that that like, that's
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: got to be like kind of where you need to look.
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: And you get another guy that thought Sunlight basin right.
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: That was also the same guy who whose first search
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: location was boiling River. Um really fixed on Sunlight Basin
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: because that was the place where he found, you know,
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: the Salinger Ranch, and there were other sunlight he thought
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: might refer to the warmth Sunlight Creek um and he
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: found there was a mining aim where his clues sort
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: of had led him there that happened to be owned
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: by an LLC company that was registered to an attorney
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: and Cody you sat on a museum board with fen
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: So he thought, you know, that was that seemed kind
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: of interesting. And one of the areas these guys focused
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: was is it on public or private land? And one
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: of the things they looked at was this idea that
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: Fenn probably did some due diligence about the legality and
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: so explained that a little bit of the of the solve.
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, there were so many potential legal issues, right
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: like what what's what are the tax issues depending on
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: what kind of land it's on? Um, you know what
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: are is it government property? Or can a finder claim
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: at his property? Um? You know what's going to happen
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: with this is are the land right stable? Like in
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: five hundred years will the same or the land still
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: be preserved in the same way, or might have come
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: into private ownership or at least out for logging or whatnot.
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: So you know, the was a lot of thought given
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: to what kind of land might find have most seriously
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: considered to to to avoid those issues? And where was
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: the the good money was on? What public or private?
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: I would say public, but um, but even that had
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: a lot of complications. I mean private probably had more complications.
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: You couldn't search it, You couldn't search somewhere where people
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to look. Yeah, unless it was private
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: land that he secretly owned, which was one possibility. People
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: looked at and they tried to search to see if
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: you were looking through public records looking for but you know,
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: things are kind of concealed by corporate ownership, and but
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: there was a lot of attention paid to that possibility. Uh,
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: did he at one point in time, I think Spencer
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: mentioned to me, did he at one point in time
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: announce that someone had been a couple of hundred yards
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: from it? He said, on more than one occasion that
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: a bunch of people have been within five hundred feet
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: and one or two people have been within two hundred
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: feet of the treasure, like actual searchers, actual searchers, because
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: they would send him emails. He was feeling hundred hundreds
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: of emails, like over a hundred a day. UM. Searchers
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: were constantly contacting him, and he was, you know, engaging
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: with them. UM. And so they would say, hey, I
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: just you know, here's my solve. They would want to
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: tell him there solved. I think maybe some of them
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: were hoping he would give him a clue or a
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: hint and um, which he would not do for the
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: most part. UM. And so that's how we knew where
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: people were searching. And like all this dialogue um that
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: kind of happens among fen and searchers. And then Fan
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: and media, um, and these different interviews. It causes like
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: some missing clues that like is it real? Is it not.
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: One of them that it came across a lot was
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: that Fenn had supposedly said at some point during this
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: that he had made a day trip from his house
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: to hide the treasure, which would hung up a lot
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: of people like, Okay, well then it can only be
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: this far north from his house. But you start looking
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: for and you can't actually find where he said that.
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: But there's like a of of the searchers that think
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: that's like a legit clue, but it can't be traced anywhere.
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: And so I think there's a lot of stuff like
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: that specific thing. It's like when that general supposedly said
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: that the way to beat the planes Indians is to
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: kill all the buffalo and then historians eventually realized that
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: that was never said. Yeah, So like the searching community
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: had intentionally and unintentionally created these red herrings, um like
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: this you know, it's a day trip from his house
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: sort of thing. They were also like these super searchers
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: who kind of befriended Fen and would really focus a
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: lot on developing that relationship, and it created a sort
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: of amount of disharmony and politics in the in the
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: Chase community, because people would think that some people were
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: secretly be and given like a leg up that they
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: didn't have, that they were getting tips from fenn Uh.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: I want to bump along to more contemporary realizations here,
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: but a thing that I want to cover um two observations.
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: One was I'm sure there were people that were secretive,
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: but it tended to be collaborative. You would post yourselves,
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: I mean the collaborative people would and the secret ones
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: you wouldn't. So there was a community people who be like, hey,
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: how about this, Hey how about this? Not like hoarding
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: it for themselves, but they just wanted to like see
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: it gets. They wanted to see resolution and not so
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: much take ownership of who Um one of the searchers
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: that the primary search you focused on, tell his name again,
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: justin posey. Who Um takes an extremely organized, passionate, expensive,
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: exhaustive approach to this. He and a friend it on
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: an idea they don't attempt They hit on an idea
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: of this this technological tool that's out there that can
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: track someone's eyeballs and looking at a screen, like what
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: are they looking at? As they're looking at a screen.
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: It's software that will see what would be to the
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: human eye imperceptible movements and also what you're trying not
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: to look at. So you can show someone a screen
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: and get a sense like this person is is purposefully
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: not putting their eyes in that direction or whatever, and
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: they get this idea that if they could get fed
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: in the room with this software, with this program and
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: flash for him a map of the Rockies, they will
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: pick up what is eyeballs don't want and this eyeballs
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: betray it doesn't want lie to detector tests like CIA
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: next level stuff, and then they would dynamically keep changing
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: what he was seeing. So if like his eye was
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: going towards let's say first it's in Wyoming, like Northwestern Wyoming,
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: then it would immediately like zoom in on a close
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: up of Northwestern Wyoming, and then it would look at
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: what's he looking at or avoiding looking at there, and
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: they would do it like very rapidly. I mean the
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: computer could do it almost instantaneously. And I mean Justin
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: said when he was working on eye tracking technology for
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: a major technology company and he's he's a software um,
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: you know, engineer, Uh, that it's shockingly precise, and he
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: doesn't do it on ethical grounds, right. I mean, first
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: of all, getting fan in the room and looking at
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: a screen already begins to tread close to potentially sounding
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: like kidnapping. But even if he's there voluntarily, Um, it
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: just seemed like not, you know, not fair play. Like
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: it's it's almost like yea, you know, and they're interesting
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: using an unconventional Yeah, they're interested in fairy player. All right,
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: now we're gonna jump ahead. I want to ask Ben
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: what his personal favorite find theory was like if you
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: had to guess um where it was. I mean, I
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: I kind of think that these the solution that I
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: might talk about it a little bit was the correct one.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: I don't know, how about you, Well, I don't know.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: I enjoyed all of it. They're like biased. I liked
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: the idea of it being in Paradise Valley because it's
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: an hour from where we're sitting right now. Um, and
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: there was like a lot of very obvious um stuff
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: in there that seemed to make sense where it was like, um,
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: the warm waters haul at the boiling river, right the
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: canyon down Yankee Jim Canyon HOMEO Brown the Joe Brown
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: boat launch. Um, the end is drawing. Ever Now there's
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: ny Montana, And because I live here, I like the
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: idea of the Paradise Valley thing. And you're kind of
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: a rockhound. Yeah, but rockhound. That's that's actually like probably
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: where I saw the greatest overlap in communities were like
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: people who like to look for rocks and then people
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: who like to look for treasure, way more so than
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: like people who like fishing or mushroom hunting or something like, Dude,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: I need to tell you if you want some yellow
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: stone egg and holy ship, I found the motherload South later.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you later. Like every big news story. Um,
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: I wake up one day not long ago, and I
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: have many, many text messages from various friends. Uh, the
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: fen cash has been discovered. Immediately everyone I talked to
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: says bullshit. M Because I'll tell you why it is bullshit.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: Forest Fan, these five people have died. Forrest Fan is
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: under pressure to uh stop the bleeding. Um, he's being
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: sued by various participants who have devoted the decade of
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: their life to finding the treasure. Uh, there's any like
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: not emerging. There's always been a rumor that it's a lie.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: It's becoming to burden some for him. He's of failing health,
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: which was borne out by the fact that he died
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: a couple of days ago. Is of failing health. Uh,
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: And he just needs to bring it to a close.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: The fun is over. So he bullshits up some photos
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: or whatever, and and and just tries to like wind
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: it down. Not a lot of clarity. The guy that
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: found it doesn't want to be known. It's all a lie.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: And that just goes to show you that it's all
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: a lie. That is the the initial narrative as I
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: understood it is that Ferres Spencer. Um. I don't think
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: everybody was that pessimistic or like you and I were. Uh. Yeah,
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: So I feel that way a little bit right right
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: now now looking back now that he died in like
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: September and it was found in I don't know what
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: was it June June? Right again, Like the timing is
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: a little bit suspicious, just like with the FBI rate
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: and him hiding the thing. Um. But yeah, I don't know,
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: there's like warranted suspicion. Still, I'll let Ben take it
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: from here. Just one other one other part of the
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: burden was like, I mean, his family was dealing with
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: the Like they had a guy break into their house
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: with an axe and his daughter held the guy at gunpoint.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: There was another guy who was stalking his granddaughter. So like,
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: Fenn had a lot of reasons why he might want to,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: you know, he'd created a monster and he might want
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: to to end this. Um, So tell us what's known
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: about the finder and what might be known about where
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: it was found? All right, So Fenn initially just says
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: it's been found. Kind of more details to come, um,
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: you know, people were a lot of people were skeptical,
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: people wanted to know more. Maybe a week later we
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: post a couple of photos of him with what looks
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: like the recovered treasure and what looks like like a
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: lawyer's office at a conference table. Um. But it's got
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: you know, dirt encrustment on some of it and age
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: signs of aging. Um. But still it just wasn't enough,
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: and people were like getting really angry both at him
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: and the finder for not telling more about what where
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: it had been found. And Fenn said, I have always said,
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: and this is true, he had always said, I'm gonna
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: leave it to the finder to choose whether or not
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: to identify themselves and to choose whether or not to
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: reveal the location UM, and the speculation was it was
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: for the legal potential legal implications. What if the guy
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: doesn't want to pay taxes on it and report it
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: to the I R. S. Fenn had always been kind
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: of anti government, so he might be sympathetic to that.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: In any case, he had said that's what he would do,
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: and he did it. But people were really angry about it.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: Everyone wanted closure. A lot of people thought it was
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: a hoax. I mean I was, I was pretty skeptical
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: for all the reasons you mentioned. UM. Anyway, there's a
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: ton of pressure on him. Finally, a couple of weeks
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: after the discovery, he posts online again. He says, the
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: finders agreed, you know, for the benefit of the community,
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: that I can reveal another detail, and that is the
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: state in which it was found. It was found in Wyoming,
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: So some people were satisfied by that. Some people thought
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: it was further evidence of something not on the up
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: and up because the three lawsuits against him concerned Colorado
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: and New Mexico. So by saying it was in Wyoming,
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: he immediately kind of invalidated the premises of these lawsuits,
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: and like the singular details that he had given were
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: that he was a man and he was from back East,
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: which when you live in New Mexico, there's a hell
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: of a lot that's east of you. So that just
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: like the details weren't even deep. Hailes really no best
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: on how back East has used for a guy who hits.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: It's not some dude from Nebraska. Okay, it's not. It's not.
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's not. It doesn't narrow it. It trims
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: off maybe a hundred million Americans, but there's still a
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: couple hundred million left over that way. The Santa Fe
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: New Mexican, which is his hometown newspaper, after like the
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: solve or after it was found and it was announced
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: him stuff, um, they had they made a really good analogies.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: They said, this is like a detective solving a murder
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: without identifying the killer. That's like the feeling that well,
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: if you listen to this podcast, you would be familiar
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: with the story. We had an episode with a guy
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: very similar to this episode, with a writer who Summit
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: missing in Costa Rica. The assumption was that he had
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: been murdered, okay, and it was about his efforts to
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: find his son. Roman Dial wrote a book about this.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: It was his efforts to find his son's body, identify
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: the murderer, and the end his son was killed by
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: a tree that fell in a storm. So he solved
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: a murder but did not identify a killer. Put that
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: in your pipe, Spencer, new Heart. It's like that same
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: unsatisfying feeling though. Oh yeah, I'm with you, but that
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: your pipe and smoke it, Spencer. No, you tell that
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: to the Santa fe New Mexican. All right, Ben, go on,
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: it's found. It's it's found, uh, you know, by a
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: shy guy back east backs real Wallflower. This guy, Um,
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: it's in Wyoming. You know, people were just not people
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: were not satisfied, and so the suspicion and the skepticism,
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: I would say, you know increased. Um. People wanted to
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: know more. They just and they weren't buying it. And
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: a lot of people, including like some of the most focused,
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: um devoted you know, sensible searchers thought thought like Fenn
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: had ended the hunt and and gotten the treasure, retrieved
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: the treasure or had a family member to it, and
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: the searcher again that you spend the time on Posey,
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: Justin Justin Posey. At first, he's like depressed and kind
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: of catatonic. Yeah, but then instead of quitting searching, instead
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: of being like, yeah, I'll move on to whatever the
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: hell's next, like, uh, I'll get a dog and hang
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: out at home, he's like he resumes just searching for
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: the spot where it had been well just as insane
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: as a side note. As a side note, I mean
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: he already had a dog, dog I forgot about. So.
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: One of one of his super methodical, you know, tactics
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: that he used to kind of increase his chances of
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: finding the treasure was he had a visla named uh
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: Tucker Visla, and he had read about how in the
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixties in Russia, in Finland and Sweden they had
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: geologists had trained what we're called or dogs who had
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: an ability to to sniff out mineral deposits you know
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: that are like buried forty deep. And so he began
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: to wonder, what what you know? We know the chest
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: is made of bronze. We also know that searchers have
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: gotten within five two hundred feet of the chest. You know,
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: it would really suck if I got close to the chest,
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: but not close enough. I could at least eliminate that
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: possibility if I trained Tucker to be able to smell bronze.
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: So he trained Tucker to smell bronze, burying dog treats
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: next to the bronze chunks and metal amazon correct, and
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: then eventually just would bury the bronze and give the
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: dog a treat. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, this fella, this gentleman
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: is like, wow, just keep searching and just trying to
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: find a little hole where some other dude dragged a
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: treasure out. I mean, he was not he was not alone,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: and he was not alone. An enormous number of people
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: like I talked to would be like, you know, I'd
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: be like, what are you gonna do now that the
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: search is over? And be like, Oh, I'm going I'm
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: going searching next week. What's that song? The search is over?
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: You were with me? What's that song you were with me?
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: It's like Peter's Terror or something. The search is over.
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm talking about. You were It's
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: like the last thing he says, the searches. Anyhow, you
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: guys don't know the song talk about. I was gonna say,
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: it's like a sun cost like fallacy type thing right
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: where it's just like you've dedicated your whole life to this.
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: It's like, well, I gotta keep going. In the same
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: way that there were people who are like, yeah, my
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: solve is correct, and the fact that the treasure is there,
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: you know, not there means like it wasn't there he
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: took it. These people would say, well, um, you know,
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: they would get like a second there's a second treasure,
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: Like they would have theories like there's a second treasure
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: buried there, or the treasure the treasurer uh finder probably
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: left part of the treasure there because that's what I
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: would have done. So there was there were there were
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: reasonings behind is it Peter Starr? Hit it, Steve, I'll
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: say it again. Let's say it again, dude. When they
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: make this into a movie and Ben's like in the
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: movie and ship and the end, they're gonna have this
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: song play survivor, then you're saying about a second treasure.
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: No wait, hold on, So I have a question. Out
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: of all of the searchers who you interviewed, is there
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: common thread, like what's the typical psychological profiles? I mean,
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: there was actually a scholarly study done by a psychologist
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: at the University of North Dakota of the fen Chase
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: community UM and you know, I mean you read the
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: study and which is available online, and it's like, you know,
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: he's using all the psychological terminology like normative you know, personality,
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: and like mood disorder and da da da da. But
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, basically it seemed like most of them were
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: pretty normal. But there were ten percent of the community
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: who described themselves as having an addiction. And those are
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: the people who are most active on the forums. Those
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: are probably most of the people I talked to because
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: that they're the ones who kind of know about each other.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: And you you meet at these events, get into I'm
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: trying to lead you gently where I want you to go.
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: Out here, ben h the dude Posy wants to find
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: the spot because if he can find the spot, he
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: can he can find what the solve was, or he
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: can legitimize, like if he could figure out what it was,
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: then he could reverse engineer whether it was real or not.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: He didn't doubt that it was real, but since for
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: him the main goal was always like the cracking of
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: the puzzle and not the getting of the gold, like
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: the fact that someone had found the gold didn't end
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: the puzzle challenge for him, so he thought he just
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: still wanted to solve the puzzle. And now he was
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: even more motivated because it's been found, and he was,
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: I mean, there was a concern that am I even
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: gonna know that I'm there if the chest has been removed?
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: But maybe if I do it relatively soon, they'll still
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: be at least before this winter, you know, they will
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: still be evidence of where the chest. And he's got
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: photographs to go off now because the finder snapped a
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: couple of cell phone pictures of the box. What happened
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: is so in September, someone calling himself the Finder post
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: an article on a website called Medium saying I'm the
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: Finder and telling the story about but a pretty vague story,
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: but about how they're the finder and now they've they
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: spent twenty five days once they knew the general area,
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: and that you know, they were crying and getting torn
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: by branches and they found the treasure, UM and then
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: they met with Forest and all of this. But they're
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: anonymous UM and normally it would be easy to dismiss
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: them because tons of people throughout this whole thing have
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: claimed I found the treasure um. But in this case
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: they included photographs that had not been We're not among
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: the photographs Fenn had posted, so but they were clearly
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: outtakes from the same photo shoot, so it had to
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: be someone who had some connection to the situation. UM. Also,
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: the Fenn family posted a link to this article on
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: their website, which gave it that validation. So people are like, Okay,
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: this is the finder. Okay. So then a few weeks later,
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: another searcher gets an email from someone who says like,
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: I know who the finder is and I know where
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: the treasure was found um, And that finder gets justin
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: involved and together they go out looking for what is
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: supposedly the real location where the treasure was found, and
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: it was and it was in Yellowstone and the the solve,
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: according to this source was that basically there were words
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: in the poem that sound or looked like numbers. UM.
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: There were either they were called like homophones or which
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: was like sounded like words or kangaroo words where there
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: would be like a number word within another word like
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: done includes the word one right. And basically if you
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: took all of these numbers, that you could take out
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: of the poem. In sequence, Um, they gave you latitude
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: and longitude coordinates, and those coordinates were at a site
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: in Yellowstone Park. Where at in Yellowstone near to s
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: a lake um at the continental divide, which is kind
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: of like like looking at it, it's kind of like
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: an auspicious sort of lake for clue given, because it
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: flows both ways or like a drains. It sits on
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: a continental divide, right and somehow like drains one way
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: and the other or something like that. Apparently it's the
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: only natural lake in the world that drains to two watersheds. Uh.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: It's right off right there, so he could have old
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: man could have carried it right from his car. And
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: this dude justin um starts trying to match up photographs, right,
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, what he's really trying to do is verify
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: the information that this source has provided, right, Um, And
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: the source has provided a few photographs. The sources provided
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: the information of you know, these words in the poem
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: and lead to these coordinates, and so he was trying
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: to verify that what the source was saying and where
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: the source had taken the photos were you know, held up.
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: But there was still a question about like is the
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: source credible? Right? And the reason they were taking the
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: source seriously was because it was like right after the
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: treasure was found, everyone, like the kind of leaders of
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: the forums were being inundated with like you know, I
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: was the Finder. Like literally like more than thirty people
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: said I was the Finder. Um. They were being inundated
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: with like I know what the solve was, like more
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: than three this is what the solve was. So they
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: just ignored them all. And there was this one guy
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: who sent an email that's you know and to Mike
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: Cowling's who ran you know, one of the sites um
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: saying like I know the Finder, I know the solve,
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: and he wrote back coolbro, and that was it. But
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: then in September, the guy writes him again. He says
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: like next week there's going to be some news coming out.
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: And then the next week this media article comes out
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: from the Finder, and so he's like, maybe that guy
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: actually doesn't know something. So then he started talking to
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: him and this this this source basically said he had
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: met the Finder online. There's been a group of them
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: who were discussing these sort of coordinate based and homophone
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: based solves UM and apparently the source was like not
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: very happy that now that he was not the finder,
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: and he was like, so I'm just gonna tell you
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: everything I know. Um. And so that's what Justin Posey
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: was going out there with these two other searchers, Cynthia
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: Mitchum and Christie Thor to try to verify what the
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: source had said and where did they find. So they
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: so they found First they go out um and find nothing. Okay,
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: they go out to the what they think the GPS
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: coordinates are, find nothing. They go back the next day.
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, it gets kind of technical, but basically they figured.
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: They they determined that if you wrapped her and I
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: think they talked to the source again, if you start
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: the poem at the beginning where warm waters halt, you
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: get the first of the coordinate numbers, and then you
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: have to wrap around at the end of the poem
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: to the beginning of the poem, and so the numbers
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: in the first stanza come last. And if you also
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: use like what is apparently standard decimal notation UM for coordinates,
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: you get point to um, which is twelve seconds. And
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: they had previously been treating two as meaning two seconds.
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: Twelve seconds put them exactly at a location that Justin
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: Posey was able, to his satisfaction, to match up with
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: the source photographs based on the angles of leaning trees,
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: the distance between trees, the height of the sun, all
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: of that, although obviously the more kind of the stuff
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: that deteriorates more quickly was less reliable. Well, but there
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: was a thing about there was three species represented on
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: the ground right right, it's fairly ubiquitous in the west,
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: but still there's like he would he was looking at
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: overlays of these three species exactly like in the original photographs.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: One deciduous leaf that they thought was an aspen, there
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: were large pole pine needles, and there was one a
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: cottonwood twig, I think they thought. So he was looking
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: for like the convergence of those three species, which is
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: a mighty big area. But still apparently I mean, he said, actually,
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: it turns out that aspen forestation is not nearly as
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: ubiquitous as you might think in Wyoming. I don't know,
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: you might know what the work. We actually had somebody
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: Steve and mediator Instagram comments that had commented on multiple
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: posts and they were like, my coworkers solved it. It
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: was my coworker that found it. So then I reached
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: out to that guy, and I was like, who's your coworker?
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: Like why should I believe you that kind of stuff?
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: And he's like, this is what he told me. Here
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: you can talk to him. Here's just info. Or no,
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: it's the other way around. He said, well, here's my info.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: Have him contact me. So he contacted me and he's like, yep,
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: I'm the guy that found it. And I was like, okay, uh,
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: like how can you prove it? Can you like show
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: me a picture or something that we can talk about
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: this more um And he's like, well, here's the deal.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: There was no treasure, and it was. It was one
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: of those people, as Bennett said earlier, but he had
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: like multiple days exchanging emails and texts and stuff. He
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: was telling me he was the guy and that he
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: was in maybel uh, Colorado and uh. And then he
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: eventually you know, told me. They're like, oh, there actually
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: was no treasure. But I solved his clue and here
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: the reasons why and and stuff like that. But I
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: was hot on the trail for a few days. I
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: was like, I got it. That'd be cool, little feather
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: like internet sleuthan camp. Yeah, Ben, how how confident are
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: you there like that's where it was. I mean, I'm
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: not very I'm not very confident. I mean, I guess
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: the question I asked justin Posey, how confident is he?
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: And he I think put his confidence at like I
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: think he thinks it is it, but there are reasons
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: to to doubt it. I mean, one one thing that
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: gave him confidence in it was they scooped up some
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: dirt in a plastic bag at the site that the
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: coordinates led them to and brought it back to the
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: parking lot because they hadn't been able to bring Tucker
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: the dog into the park um. And they let's tuck
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: her out of the out of the out of the truck,
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: and he runs around sniffing, and then he gets to
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: the pile of dirt and immediately sits down and his
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: tail starts wagging, which apparently and looks up for a treat,
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: which was apparently the you know what happens when he
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: finds bronze, And so they thought there might be like
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: some sort of you know, menute bronze residue in the dirt.
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: How confident, I just thought, a good idea, man, you
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: gotta get the credit card records of everyone that Fenn
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: knows to see where they were buying gas and see
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: if they were buying gas up thereabouts when they went
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: up to retrieve the box to end the search, and
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: he has relatives who are pilots also though flight records.
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: How confident are you, ah and and as when you
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: answer this, put in the input you have from people
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: who are most obsessive about this, but who are rational individuals.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: How confident are you not that not that there was
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: a leisure and all that? Okay? How confident are you
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: that it was a legit find and that it wasn't
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: a family deciding it's time to wrap it up? I
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: will say, until the latest development with this Coordinate solve,
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: I was actually I was pretty sure the family must
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: have made a decision to wrap it up. This has
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: made me think probably there was a finder it. The
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: chances that you could find latitude and longitude coordinates in
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: sequence in this poem that could lead you of all
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: places on the planet out of billions of possible locations
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: to a spot in the search area is very small,
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: so that carries a certain amount of weight. I also
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: think you know, since this coordinate solve has been announced
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: within the community, I mean, there's been a ton of skepticism,
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: but people are still trying to match the poem clues
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: like home of Brown, where warm waters hall to this location?
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: And I think there's a good chance like none of
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: that ever matter. Yeah, I was going to ask him
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: all of those words were only to lead to get
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: you to figure out the numbers, or if those words
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: also pertained to to cluse. I kind of think so,
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: because even if you know these this location, like, there's
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: no way the words could ever lead you to a
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: price precise place. And if you have the coordinates, you
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: don't need big words. When you need a bunch, you
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: need a bunch of words they have numbers in them.
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: You need a bunch of words that have numbers. And
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: then he also is a fan of the rhyme, so
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: they gotta rhyme, they gotta rhyme. Yep, is it I
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: ambic contameter? I remember learning that in school. I mean
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: that is a meter. I'm not sure if this one
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: is that. I don't remember what it means. I remember
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: needed to learn. I think Shakespeare I am a contameter.
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: You're not gonna have an answer, but like, what will
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: the person do with the treasure how can they possibly
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: use it as a treasure would be used to like
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: get all these riches and not reveal too many things,
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: or like you go back and look for a dude
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: with a lot of jewelry at well, actually would don't
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: expect him to be And they're making a lot of noise.
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: We may have an answer in the medium article posted
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: by the you know Capital Letters the Finder, they said,
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: I'm a millennial and I have student loans, and I
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: cannot afford to keep the treasure. Um. My first attempt
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: is going to be to have it end up in
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: a place for UT wanted it to, which people think
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: was a museum, probably maybe the Buffalo Bill Museum and
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: Cody um. But basically they're going to try to sell
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: it at auction UM, where I think they can maximize
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: the value not just of the actual objects, but of
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: the whole story around it, the historia. It doesn't make
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: any sense to liquidated. Yeah, and then your guy that
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: you spend most of your time with your search, or
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: that you spent because you couldn't spend time with the
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: Finder because he doesn't want to. He doesn't want to,
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: he's too shy, um, too concerned about the whatever economic
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: issue he's faced with now legal issues. The guy, one
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: of the guys you spent time with, was kicking around
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: like how he might like to get it, but acknowledges
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: that it's beyond its probably gonna be beyond his means
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: because it's not even gonna be sticker value. Yeah, I mean,
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: he thinks it will be you know, exponential or multiple.
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: So you know, let's say instead of one million, it's
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: ten million. It was worth a million bucks ten years ago.
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's also based on the you know, fluctuating
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: price of gold, so and whatever, who knows, you know, uh,
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: And you mentioned in the end you close by saying
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: that this searcher chaser is thinking about assembling his own
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: treasure and following in the footsteps and forest Fan. That's right.
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: He found a meteorite which he's confirmed as a meteorite,
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: and apparently there's a lot of there's a lot more
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: where that came from, and so all of them together
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: would be very value able, and that's that would be
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: the basis of this treasure, that he would hide and
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: set up his own treasure hunt. Spencer's perking up. I've
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: had two instances where I thought maybe this is a meteorite,
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: and it like the dollar value on those things is crazy.
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: So if this person has a meteorite to hide, that's
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: that's great, that's a valuable treasure. I and Fraser did
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 1: a piece about meteorites one time, or some aspect of it.
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: He was dealing with a meteorite that it again didn't
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: come through a guy's roof and Montclair, New Jersey, came
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: through his rus and cracked his toilet. Yeah, and he
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: goes upstairs. That a meteorite. So do you think we
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: are going to ever have like the satisfying ending, like
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: the murder solve, but haven't identified the killer thing? Are
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: we going to get all the details someday? I mean,
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: I think the the you know, the combination of the
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: source coming forward if they are legitimate, has kind of
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: taken away a lot of the you know, the best
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: part of the story that the finder has to tell.
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: But I can't see why they wouldn't, especially if they're
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: if if they're concerned about, you know, how much money
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: they have. I mean, the easiest way in the world
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: to make money would be for them to sell their
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: story rights, right, I mean to to They probably published
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: a nice book about it. They could, you know, make
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: a movie about it. Um. So I would. I would
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: think that the finder would want to come forward at
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: some point, especially if it's more than one person, and
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: apparently it might be a team of a few people
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: mm hmm. And that that's also like one of the
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: big red flags for people referring to the forest Fan
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: treasure thing because he self published the book, so he
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: was getting all the proceeds from this treasure map hidden
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: in the poem. And then there was a long stretch
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: there were the books were selling for like a or
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: dollars on Amazon and eBay and it was like incredibly valuable. Um.
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: And so that's it's pretty damn good marketing to be like,
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: here's this book I have, and within it you can
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: find the details to a million dollar treasure that'shidden. I
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: have to say, that's a roundabout way to sell some books.
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: Maybe we should try. And I mean, the one thing
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: I'll say about that is actually the he published three memoirs,
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: and the first one which was self published and sold
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: through this one book store in Santa Fe Collected Works.
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: They got all the profits. He didn't because he wanted
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: people to know, like, I'm not profiting off this. I'm
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: not sure if that's sure of the later books, but
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: that first one he wasn't and he was already wealthy.
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: He was a wealthy guy, so I'm not sure he'd
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: he would do that. Can you close by talk about
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: forest friends death? Nothing suspicious? Nothing suspicious, I mean, and
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: you know he was he turned ninety in August and
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: then um, in early September, there was a kind of
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: last gathering of the most devoted searchers in Yellowstone and
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: a fishing bridge in West Yellowstone and a fishing bridge
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: and which you said, as a sign says you can't fish,
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: which says no fishing allowed. Um. And it was the
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: Labor Day weekend. And then that Monday, uh Fen died
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: of what the Santa Fe police said was natural causes.
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: You know, there was some suspicion or nine years old.
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: He's nine years old. And his wife died a few
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: weeks later, his wife of sixty six years Peggy, Oh,
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: that's touching. Yeah, I like that man. But he held
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: on and my wife dies like fast. Um. One of
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: the things I like the Fenn said was someone was
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: saying him, ah, that he should call the search off,
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: and he said, if there's a pool and people drown
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: in the pool. Do you close the pool or do
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: you teach people to swim? And he had expressed right
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: that that he just wanted people to get away from
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: their devices and ship and go do something and just
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: be outside. If that was true, I wonder if the
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: if it backfired, because it's hard to tell if this
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: lives more in the device internet, Like did he create
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: an Internet thing or did he create a nature thing?
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: If you had to look at it now, I think
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: he did create a nature thing. Um. I mean tons
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: of people, uh, you know, went out on searches you'd
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: never I mean one of the people I interviewed was
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: like a Boston cop who drove across country for three
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: days with his son and spent a week camping in
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: the Rockies. You know which he I mean, you've never
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: been to the Rockies. So I think I think there
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: are a lot of people like that. I think it
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: did get people, But there was definitely a very robust,
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: you know, bunch of armchair treasure hunters who maybe never
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: went to the Rockies, went a lot of time talking
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: on in the forums. So how do people, um, how
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: do people find your article? I think if you go
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: to ny mag dot com. It'll be there on the
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: front page and why mag dot com If you're running
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: another problems ben Wallace type in Ben Wallace fan Benjamin Wallace,
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: unless you want to get the don oh sorry, Benjamin Wallace.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: Type in Benjamin Wallace, something like fen something that treasure
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: New York Magazine. Yeah, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll get there,
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: You'll get there. Uh, thank you for coming on. I'm
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: glad I finally earned a slot on Meat Eater. Are
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: you thinking about doing a book about this? You know?
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: I actually I would like to, And I um emailed
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: my agent about it and he said, there's already like
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: book that's been in the works for a while by
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: a guy who was a treasure hunter involved for years,
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: and you know it's being published by major publishing. How yeah,
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: you're you're a publisher random House sounds a bit. Yeah,
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: I'll buy yours, like your copy better? All right? Thank you, Ben,
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: thank you being here. Are you gonna write more stuff
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: to come and talk to us about? I mean, it's
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: hard to get Meat Eater relevant material into New York Magazine.
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: I got like, I don't think New York is where
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: a lot of like hunting and fishing is happening. Yeah,
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: but this is now it's true. I mean, I hope
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: I will. I hope I will. Yeah. This what makes
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: it relevant is what wasn't in there, which is colopus
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: points which were used for hunting. That's a tenuous that's
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: a tenuous connection. And I had a twist Steve's arm
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: to like talk about this. He's like forest Fan. Oh
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: I never said such thing. I wrote about forest Fan
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: when you still had your mom's milk hanging off. I
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: wrote about forest Fan in two thousand eight. But you
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: were very cool on the idea of like having this
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: be a thing on our website and like getting Ben
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: more involved and having him on the pod cast. You
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: you were not very on this. You have been on
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: the podcast after. I think after some text messages where
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: I'm like, people are gonna want to hear this, dude,
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: I just I do not. I'd have to revisit some
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: of this. I could picture me being a little dismissive
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: of the find. He's he's just holding a grudge because
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: he proved him wrong about the squirrels. Oh no, he
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: doesn't think that, because dude, I have Spencer's coming back
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: on very soon, he goes, I have developed an overwhelming
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: body of evidence. Okay, we'll see to contradicts Spencer's finding,
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: including including a book by the author, the same author
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: who wrote Light in the Forest. Put that in your
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: to be continued. You got me all right, Thank you,
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: Thanks Ca.