November 7, 2025 • 38 mins
Forrest Fenn never does things the regular way. Despite no formal training and little knowledge of art, he becomes a millionaire gallery owner. An outsider by nature, Fenn’s charm, audacity, and disregard for convention earns him both wealth and respect. When a streak of bad luck threatens to destroy his empire, Fenn dreams up an audacious final act. He'll mastermind the greatest treasure hunt America has ever known. As the legend spreads, and gold fever grips the nation, Fenn begins to lose control.
The story of Forrest Fenn's treasure hunt will continue next week.
This episode discusses death by suicide. If you are suffering emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts, support is available - for example, from the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US, or the Samaritans in the UK on 116 123
Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. If you're in the Bristol area, you might be
interested to know that Cautionary Tales is appearing live at
the Bristol Festival of Economics on the evening of Friday,
the twenty first of November. I'll be speaking to the
Financial Times columnist Sarah O'Connor about what really happens when
the robots come for our jobs. She's brilliant, she's wise.
(00:38):
It's going to be an amazing conversation full of cautionary
tales for us all. If you want a ticket, just
search for Cautionary Tales at the Bristol Festival of Economics.
A warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses death
by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're having
suicidal thoughts, support is available, For example, from the nine
(01:03):
eight eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In the US nineteen
sixty eight, Major Forest Fenn is leading a group of
fighter planes over the Ho Chimin Trail. Their mission bomb
the trail and the North Vietnamese troops traveling along it
(01:24):
from Laos. Inside his cramped cockpit, the smell of hydraulic
fluid mingles with sweat mildew and the stench of burnt
wiring beneath the plane. The jungle blurs into a sea
of green. Major Fen is under fire as bullets tear
(01:47):
into his canopy. The plane starts burning around him. He realizes,
with a further jolt of horror that the gunfire might
have damaged the plane's ejection system. Will he burn to
a crisp with his aircraft. The plane holds together just
long enough for Major Fen to get clear of the action.
(02:08):
He steals an and pulls the ejection lever. The bullet
riddled canopy tears away on the slipstream, and the pilot
punches high into the air. His spine is being crushed.
His vision blurs, and suddenly his neck whips forward and
he slopes, the harness biting into his body. His parachute
(02:32):
is deploying. As he hangs on the breeze, Major Fen
watches his now pilotless plane cruise into a cliff face
and explode. He keeps falling through the air, lurching towards
the tree tops and down to the humid jungle. Eighteen
(02:53):
inches from the ground. He finally comes to a halt,
suspended from creaking branches, enormous orchids tower above him, climbing
the trunks of gargantuan trees. What's that sound, Major Fenn?
Can hear something scuttling and skulking on the forest floor.
(03:17):
He knows there are tigers and cobra's in the jungle.
The North Vietnamese Patrol will be looking for him too.
Because they find him, he'll be tortured. Nightfalls drawing its
cloak of darkness around the stranded pilot. I'm Tim Harford,
(03:40):
and you're listening to cautionary tales. Who from the US
(04:10):
Army Corps of Engineers found the man's body. He'd been
out in the wilderness for so long that his flesh
had given way to bone, and his skeletal remains were
tangled in the undergrowth. The body was removed, and dental
records eventually confirmed what the authorities already suspected. The dead
(04:34):
man was a treasure hunter and had been looking for
a box of gold and jewels said to be hidden
somewhere in the wilds of the American West. For this
was not Vietnam, but the Rocky Mountains. Yet there was
a connection between the stranded pilot and the dead treasure hunter.
(04:57):
It was Major Forrest Fenn, who'd hidden the box of
gold and jewels. This dead treasure hunter was one of
many thousands of people who hung on fens every word,
and who trusted him enough to head into the wilderness
(05:18):
on his promise of treasure and glory. Forest Fenn was
born in Texas in nineteen thirty. He saw the devastation
of the Great Depression, but his school principal father kept
steady employment and the family was shielded for the worst
(05:40):
of it. The Fens were of modest means, but they
had enough money to go on vacation each year. Every summer,
they would pile into their Chevy and drive sixteen hundred
miles to West Yellowstone, Montana, on the edge of Yellowstone
National Park. Forest relished these adventures, and he got to
(06:02):
know the rocky mountains like the back of his hand,
hiking in high pine forests, swimming in warm mountain springs,
and fishing for brown trout in fast flowing streams. At
home in Texas, too, Forrest felt the pull of adventure.
(06:22):
He loved collecting whatever treasures he could find. String, bottle caps,
and marbles all appealed to his magpie sensibilities. He and
his father, Marvin, would scour the local creek beds for
trinkets like beads and old pieces of pottery. He found
his first arrowhead at the age of nine, and it
(06:44):
remained his most prized possession. Grab every banana, Marvin would
tell a rather confused young Forest on these excursions. One day,
he expanded on this maxim Son, the train doesn't go
by that banana tree but one time, so you reach
(07:06):
out as far as you can. Every bar you don't
grab is a banana you'll never have. Father and son
came together on these quests that most of the time.
Forrest felt his poor grades were a disappointment to Marvin.
(07:27):
I didn't think I was very smart, but I didn't
have to be smart to figure out that my parents
weren't really proud of me, he said. Forrest graduated just
but the pipeline of high school to college to work
(07:50):
wasn't for him. For a while, he pretended to be
enrolled at Texas A and M University with his friends.
It took about four days for the registrar to catch
him in his lie. Feeling lost and worthless, he fled
the university in tears. What he really wanted, he decided
(08:14):
was to be a pilot in the Air Force. Forest
knew that this was the domain of academic high achievers,
but he also knew that when you set out on
a journey, there was usually more than one way to
reach your destination, and so Forest enrolled at Radar Mechanics
school on an Air Force base in Mississippi. After learning
(08:37):
all about how to repair and maintain radar systems, he
was eventually accepted into pilot training. In December nineteen fifty three.
With his training complete, he married his high school sweetheart,
Peggy gen Procter. They had two daughters. His life was good,
but domesticity did nothing to curb Forest's craving for adventure.
(09:02):
When the Air Force took him to Europe, he grabbed
every banana in Italy. Forest rode the train from Naples
to the ruins of Pompeii and secretly sifted to volcanic
cinders for archaeological treasure. He dove in the turquoise waters
(09:22):
off Sabratha and Libya wants a Phoenician trading post. In
the quiet and cool of the deep, he spotted something
intriguing and unwieldy. He dislodged the object a little, then
got out of the water, tied a rope to his jeep,
and hauled it up. Forest was astonished to find that
(09:46):
it was an ancient amphoro filled with bronze coins. He
ventured to the Sahara, too, where he unearthed eight thousand
year old spear points amid the remnants of hand grenades
and burned out tanks. Back in the United States, Forest's
(10:07):
hunger for beautiful, storied objects became, in his own words, insatiable.
Teaching on an Air Force base in Arizona, he learned
how to read the patterns of cacti in the desert
for possible ruins underneath. He traversed canyons in search of
hidden caves where Native American jewelry and art might be stockpiled,
(10:33):
and he traded his artifacts, converting a bracelet into six rings,
and those rings into a necklace, and another bracelet, and
so on. It was on December twentieth, near the end
(10:53):
of his tour, that Forest was shot down and spent
the night in the jungle. As he listened to the
rhythmic croak of the tree frogs and waited to be rescued,
he began to reflect on his time in Vietnam on
what had been doing there. At dawn, his forward air
(11:14):
controller found him that a jolly green Giant helicopter lifted
him up and away to a US Air Force base
in Thailand, where he had a cup of coffee and
some scrambled eggs. He also called Peggy and told her
not to worry about the telegram she had just received
declaring him missing. Later, it wasn't the threat of capture
(11:36):
that stayed with Forest, but the peace of the jungle
and the imperative to hold his nerve in the face
of the unknown. Forest was awarded both a purple Heart
and a silver Star for his bravery. But something shifted
in him after Vietnam, or perhaps something that had always
(11:58):
been inside him pushed to the surface. He started having
nightmares about how many people he'd killed in Vietnam. When
the Air Force offered him a promotion, he knew it
was time to leave. I wanted the world to stop
and let me out, he reflected. Driving away from base
(12:19):
for the last time, he said, he pulled up beside
a field, climbed over the fence, and threw his wristwatch
as far as he could into the open brush. It
was a rejection of the regimented world he had inhabited
for the last twenty years, and he never wore a
watch again. Forrest decided he wanted to go somewhere he
(12:45):
could wear hush puppies and blue jeans and still make
a living. It was nineteen seventy two and he'd heard
about a bohemian city with a burgeoning art scene, so
he and Peggy packed their daughters into the car and
headed west as Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although he had
(13:10):
never bought a piece of art before and had no
education in the art world, he decided to start a gallery.
Before long, Forest Fenn was a millionaire. Cautionary tales will
return in Santa Fe. Forest used his retirement pay to
(13:39):
buy an old Adobe house, and the family slept on
the floor while he renovated and added to the building.
This was to be his gallery, as Forrest saw it.
The fact that he hadn't been educated at a prestigious
liberal arts college or worked for a big auction house
set him apart and gave him an edge. The art
(14:01):
world considered cash to be crude, dirty, but making money
and lots of itist's chief objective. Art is a business
to me not a religion, he declared. Whether art was
just business for Forest is debatable. He craved rare and
(14:23):
fascinating objects, but he certainly kept a close eye on
his profit margins, and he reveled in doing things his
own way. He displayed please touch signs in the gallery,
and when students visited on field trips, he let them
feel the old paint on a portrait of George Washington,
(14:43):
valued at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He owned
everything in the gallery, nothing was there on commission. In
this way, I have complete control of the work, he
told the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper. Of course, Forest
encountered critics, people who were cynical about his dearth of
(15:05):
traditional credentials. He met them with unassailable confidence. It doesn't
matter who you are. It only matters who they think
you are. It's true in Hollywood, in politics, and it's
true with the painting. Forest spun yarns about his outrageous
treasure hunting exploits in Europe, Africa, and the American West,
(15:28):
and he kept a pair of pet alligators in the
pond next to the gallery. He named them Beowulf and Elvis.
And locals chuckled that the gators bore a striking resemblance
to their owner. In short, Forests styled himself as an eccentric,
but he also made sure to tell the press about
(15:49):
his time in the Air Force and the three hundred
plus missions he had flown in Vietnam. People admire veterans,
and they appreciate their sense of honor. His gallery inventory
included some of the artifacts he had gathered over the years,
but he acquired paintings and bronzes too. Here Forrest thought big.
(16:14):
In nineteen seventy five, he hustled his way into the
Soviet Union and negotiated with the Ministry of Culture to
collect paintings for a celebrated show of Soviet and American art.
By nineteen seventy six, just four years after his arrival
in Santa Fe, Forest Fenn had one of the most
successful galleries in the city, and he employed fifteen people.
(16:38):
There were guest houses at the gallery and celebrities were
invited to stay free of charge. Steve Martin and Cher
came to visit, and soon Robert Redford was a customer.
Stephen Spielberg brought a Charles Russell Broms from Forest Ethel Kennedy,
widow of Bobby, was in raptures to singer Andy Williams
(17:00):
about Fenn Galleries, so much so that Williams also paid
Forest a visit. Forrest didn't belong to the elite, but
he recognized that he could borrow their credibility, and he
took that credibility all the way to the bank. Soon
the gallery was grossing around six million dollars each year.
(17:22):
Along the way, Forrest also ruffled some feathers. In nineteen
eighty one, an advert appeared in newspapers all over the world.
A collection of paintings by Elmer de Hory was for sale. Dhi,
who died in nineteen seventy six, had been one of
the most successful art fraudsters of all time. He had
(17:46):
a flare for the modern masters and had forged over
one thousand pieces, including Picassos, Matisis and Moduliani's, and inserted
them into the art market. This gave Forest an idea.
A fake Picasso is only fraudulent if you sell it
as a Picasso, but if you're upfront about its providence,
(18:09):
it's both a faithful copy of a beloved masterpiece and
a beautiful piece of Dark History. The Unorthodox Art Dealer
Club together with former Texas Governor John Connolly, and bought
up the cash of Dehores. Some prospective customers were outraged
(18:30):
when they learned the paintings were counterfeit. If you like
it less because it's a fake, who's the fraud now?
Forest parried gleefully. It was a strategy that worked, and
he sold the dhories on for a huge sum. It
wasn't all plain sailing. Over the years, Forest was raided twice.
(18:54):
The Bureau of Land Management and the FBI both believed
that he'd illegally looted precious items from protected lands, but
no charges were filed against Forest, and he roundly criticized
the authorities for these investigations. In a few short years,
(19:14):
Forest Fenn had gone from Air Force retiree to wildly
successful art and antiquities mogul. What was his secret? I've
always thought of myself as one who plays monopoly, Forest
told the Celebrity Weekly People. It was true that Forest
(19:34):
had rolled the dice and worked his way up from scratch,
but there was more to his success than a willingness
to take a risk. Forrest understood how to win the
trust of those around him, and how to spin that
trust into gold. Trust is the condition that enables all
(19:57):
of us to face uncertainty. As the author of Who
Can You Trust? Rachel Botzman has noted, it's a confident
relationship with the unknown that makes trust a kind of
social glue. It enables acts of exchange and cooperation, both
big and small, and it keeps economies and societies moving.
(20:22):
All businesses draw on trust, But Forrest had understood something
key about his own. In asking people to believe in
the authenticity and value of his wares, he was asking
them to trust him. What Forest Fenn was selling first
and foremost was Forest Fenn. It is curious, though, that
(20:47):
people did trust Forest. He wasn't an archaeologist, he didn't
hold a degree in art history. He liked a joke,
but it wasn't always obvious that his jokes were totally benign.
He'd been known to bend the truth, was a self
declared hustler, and his relationship to the law was a
(21:08):
little high to pin down. And yet people invested in
his artifacts and paintings. They trusted him with transferring cultural
treasures between enemy nations, and they went into business with him.
Why Perhaps the answer lies in the wider landscape of trust.
(21:34):
After his tour in Vietnam, Forrest wasn't alone in his
loss of faith in the military. Trust in the United
States government and the armed forces slumped in the nineteen seventies,
and since then it's kept falling. Confidence in institutions like Congress,
public schools, and banks has tumbled too. When trust in
(21:58):
a system declines, people look for alternatives. Outliers become more appealing.
Those who break the rules, vocally challenged the old guard
of experts and elites, and criticized the authorities may suddenly
seem more dependable. Forest Fenn was a gifted raconteur. His
(22:22):
was a tale of going against the grain, of starting
with nothing and beating the odds. It was a story
that people liked, and they were prepared to buy into
it quite literally. The gallery business might have been thriving,
but Forest met with his share of grief and pain too.
(22:47):
In the mid nineteen eighties, his father, Marvin was diagnosed
with terminal cancer. After a grim illness, he told his
son that he planned to take his own life. Forest
begged his father to wait. He wanted to see him
one last time, said he'd fly to him in his
own plane the next morning, but Marvin was adamant it
(23:12):
was time for him to go, and when Forest reached him,
he was too late. Forrest was still grieving his father
when he received another blow. His doctors had found an
aggressive tumor nestled beneath his kidneys. Treatment had just a
twenty percent chance of success. When the news finally sank in,
(23:38):
Forest was angry. He was fifty eight years old and
in the midst of an exhilarating, adventure filled life. He
didn't want to go anywhere. He decided to roll the
dice and try treatment. A short time later, his friend
Ralph Lauren, the famous fashion designer, came to visit. They
(24:03):
sat together in Forrest's study, a room filled top to
bottom with wondrous cures curiosities. Ralph eyed a Native American
bonnet with carved antelope horns and offered to buy it.
Forest told him it wasn't for sale. Why not. The
fashion designer was baffled, He can't take it with you,
(24:27):
but Forest knew that he couldn't take money with him either.
Later on, when he was alone, he looked around at
his glittering trove a gold dragon bracelet with ruby eyes,
jade figurines, two gold frogs. He thought about his father,
(24:50):
and he hatched a plan to take control of his ending.
Forest decided he would fill a chest with treasure, an
intricate Romanesque lock box dating from the twelfth century, and
bring it with him to a secret location. Here he
(25:10):
would follow in his father's footsteps and take his own
life out in the wilderness. These riches wouldn't be trackable
or traceable by any bank, and he could invite ordinary
people to come and find the chest and claim its contents.
His legacy would be the greatest treasure hunt America had
(25:33):
ever known. The plan was perfect nearly. There was one
thing that Forest Fenn didn't count on. We'll find out
what that was after this short break. Two decades past.
(25:58):
In two thousand and eight, the investment bank Lehman Brothers
crumbled into bankruptcy. Its collapse triggered a seismic wave that
smashed through global markets. Trading floors went dark, Bankers packed
their belongings into boxes. Against the odds. Seventy eight year
(26:20):
old Forest Fenn was still alive and watching on with interest.
He'd lived through another economic crisis as a child the
Great Depression, and he knew the pain and suffering that
mismanagement by the banks could bring to ordinary people. Forrest's
dream of leaving an epic treasure hunt as his legacy
(26:43):
had been derailed by something quite unexpected. He had recovered
from his cancer, it sold his gallery, and was now
enjoying semi retirement, But he hadn't forgotten his treasure hunt idea.
Over the years, he had added to his trove, waiting
for the perfect opportunity to plant it out in the wild.
(27:08):
It now held at least a million dollars worth of
precious items, maybe two million, a Mayan bracelet, salm sapphires,
Alaskan gold nuggets the size of chicken eggs, a copy
of his unpublished memoir crammed into an olive jar. Now,
(27:28):
as the aftershocks of the crash rippled out across America
and beyond, Forrest realized that his moment had finally arrived.
Millions of jobs had vanished, unemployment had surged, wages were stagnating,
and families had lost homes and life savings. But the
(27:49):
treasure chest could promise financial security to the lucky finder.
Forrest decided to launch his treasure hunt. It would be,
in his words, for every redneck in Texas who lost
his job with a pickup truck and twelve kids and
a wife to support. There was nostalgia in his offering too.
(28:16):
Perhaps he remembered those happy missions for trinkets with his father,
because he said that he hoped the hunt would be
a morale booster in dark and difficult times getting families
outdoors to solve a puzzle together. One afternoon in twenty ten,
around his eightieth birthday, Forest Fen slipped away in his car.
(28:40):
He didn't tell his wife or daughters where he was
going or what he was doing. The treasure now weighed
about forty two pounds or nineteen kilograms, so when he
reached his destination, a secret spot amid towering pine trees,
he had to make two trips from his sedan, first
(29:01):
with the box and then with the loot. When he
was satisfied that the little chest was secure, he drove away.
Forest delivered a thousand copies of his self published memoir
The Thrill of the Chase to a small bookstore in
Santa Fe called Collected Works. Any profits from the sale
(29:26):
of the books would go to the store and to
a cancer charity. Forrest wanted people to be able to
trust that this project wasn't about personal gain. Anyone who
bought the book would learn of his days in the
Air Force and his adventures in the art world, of
his love for his wife, Peggy, and their two daughters.
(29:47):
That'd find something else in its pages two a six
stanz a poem containing nine cryptic clues to the whereabouts
of the million dollar treasure chest. The memoir itself was
also peppered with subtle hints to help decode the poem.
(30:08):
It took a while for word of the treasure Hunter spread.
The story appeared in a Southwestern newspaper, and it was
mentioned on some area television stations too. It was a
quirky local tale, a whimsical curiosity. An eccentric, elderly art
dealer had hidden an ancient box of treasure somewhere north
(30:30):
of Santa Fe in the thousand miles stretch of mountains
known as the Rockies. A few blogs devoted to the
quest appeared online. It peaked the interest of practiced treasure hunters,
people who habitually went looking for lost artifacts or liked
(30:51):
solving puzzles. Some people thought the whole thing was a hoax?
How could they be sure the box was really out
there and Forest Fen was eighty? But if he was senile?
What if the whole thing was a fabrication. Others pored
over the memoir and the poem, trading their solutions, which
(31:12):
they called solves. Begin it where warm waters halt, and
take it in the canyon down not far but too
far to walk. Put in below the home of Brown,
where warm water's halt was that near a hot spring
(31:33):
of some kind, which canyon and Brown was capitalized. Was
that a person, perhaps it was a brown bear. Forrest
had included his email address in the book so that
searchers could get in touch with him and tell him
about their adventures. He would reply to their questions about
(31:54):
the clues with mysterious half answers, evasive but also gently
pulling strings from afar. In twenty thirteen, the Today Show
on NBC covered the story, and overnight the hunt exploded.
(32:15):
There was a run on copies of the Thrill of
the Chase, and the Collected Works bookstore printed more to
meet demand. International media outlets followed up with their own
coverage of the story, and before long there were countless
documentaries too. The consummate salesman Forrest flashed his alligator smile
(32:37):
and spun his gripping yarns, though he also admitted a
tendency to embellish the truth just a little. The quest
escaped the fringe world of routine treasure hunters and people
connected to Fenn, and drew in others with no previous
(32:59):
experience of treasure hunting at all, people like Randy bill U,
a fifty three year old grandfather who moved to Colorado
to be closer to the Rockies in hope of finding
the gold. Visitors flooded into Santa Fe, and the mayor
announced a thrill of the chase down to thank Forest
(33:22):
for the boost in tourism. The national parks were also inundated.
Bold treasure hunters marched through protected wildlife zones, digging up
the land in search of the home of Brown. The
park authorities scrambled to keep up, issuing cautions and special
(33:43):
new rules. There were tales too, of people remortgaging their
homes to fund their searches and burning through their savings.
Some of them broke into Forest Fend's property, convinced that
the poem instructed them to do so, and then in
(34:04):
twenty sixteen, a call came in hunter had gone missing
in deepest January. Grandfather Randy Billeu and his little dog,
Leo had ventured alone into the snow capped wilderness, carrying
a GPS device, a wetsuit, waders, and an eighty nine
(34:28):
dollar raft. Randy had planned to float along the Rio
Grande River to the place where he believed the gold
and jewels were stashed. When he hadn't been heard from
for over a week, his ex wife filed a missing
person's report. On January fifteenth, the police found his parked
(34:51):
car and his raft. They also found Leo, the dog, alive,
but there was no sign of Randy Billieu. The treasure
hunting community sprang into action, arriving from Colorado and all
over New Mexico and splitting into teams to find the
missing man. Forrest joined in two, renting a helicopter and
(35:17):
scanning the area from the skies, but he denied any
responsibility for the disappearance. Randy Billeu was an adult who
made his own decisions. People went missing in the wilderness
every year, with or without the prospect of finding treasure.
(35:40):
Forest Fend's Treasure Hunt held an emotional appeal. People were
seduced by the nostalgia and romance of the quest, and
they trusted in his status as an outsider. But trusting
outsiders can still be perilous, and romance and nostalgia can
(36:01):
blind us all to danger. Six months later, Randy Billeu's
skeletal ross were found by the Rio Grande River. He
may have succumbed to hypothermia or dehydration, but his actual
cause of death remained unknown. It was hoped that the
(36:24):
horrible incident was a one off, a mistake made by
someone foolish enough to head out in the bitter midwinter,
wholly unprepared for the conditions. It wasn't a one off.
The Treasure Hunt had metastasized from a whimsical curiosity into
(36:46):
something more sinister. Forrest Fenn, the master Monopoly player, had
lost control of the game, and it was about to
get far grimmer and darker than he had ever imagined.
Next time, on Cautionary Tales, the Quest continues, a grey
(37:09):
is exhumed, a stalker haunts the Fenn family, and death
comes again to the Treasure Hunt. For a full list
of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
(37:36):
Cautionary Tales as written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright,
Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills
and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are
the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by
Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Bend A Daphaffrey edited
(37:56):
the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler,
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Can support Cautionary
Tales by joining My Cautionary Club at Patreon dot com
slash Cautionary Club for exclusive bonus episodes, newsletters, ad free listening,
(38:20):
and other exciting perks. Alternatively, you can join Pushkin Plus
on our Apple show page for continued benefits from our
show and others across the Pushkin network.
Pushkin. If you're in the Bristol area, you might be
interested to know that Cautionary Tales is appearing live at
the Bristol Festival of Economics on the evening of Friday,
the twenty first of November. I'll be speaking to the
Financial Times columnist Sarah O'Connor about what really happens when
the robots come for our jobs. She's brilliant, she's wise.
(00:38):
It's going to be an amazing conversation full of cautionary
tales for us all. If you want a ticket, just
search for Cautionary Tales at the Bristol Festival of Economics.
A warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses death
by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're having
suicidal thoughts, support is available, For example, from the nine
(01:03):
eight eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In the US nineteen
sixty eight, Major Forest Fenn is leading a group of
fighter planes over the Ho Chimin Trail. Their mission bomb
the trail and the North Vietnamese troops traveling along it
(01:24):
from Laos. Inside his cramped cockpit, the smell of hydraulic
fluid mingles with sweat mildew and the stench of burnt
wiring beneath the plane. The jungle blurs into a sea
of green. Major Fen is under fire as bullets tear
(01:47):
into his canopy. The plane starts burning around him. He realizes,
with a further jolt of horror that the gunfire might
have damaged the plane's ejection system. Will he burn to
a crisp with his aircraft. The plane holds together just
long enough for Major Fen to get clear of the action.
(02:08):
He steals an and pulls the ejection lever. The bullet
riddled canopy tears away on the slipstream, and the pilot
punches high into the air. His spine is being crushed.
His vision blurs, and suddenly his neck whips forward and
he slopes, the harness biting into his body. His parachute
(02:32):
is deploying. As he hangs on the breeze, Major Fen
watches his now pilotless plane cruise into a cliff face
and explode. He keeps falling through the air, lurching towards
the tree tops and down to the humid jungle. Eighteen
(02:53):
inches from the ground. He finally comes to a halt,
suspended from creaking branches, enormous orchids tower above him, climbing
the trunks of gargantuan trees. What's that sound, Major Fenn?
Can hear something scuttling and skulking on the forest floor.
(03:17):
He knows there are tigers and cobra's in the jungle.
The North Vietnamese Patrol will be looking for him too.
Because they find him, he'll be tortured. Nightfalls drawing its
cloak of darkness around the stranded pilot. I'm Tim Harford,
(03:40):
and you're listening to cautionary tales. Who from the US
(04:10):
Army Corps of Engineers found the man's body. He'd been
out in the wilderness for so long that his flesh
had given way to bone, and his skeletal remains were
tangled in the undergrowth. The body was removed, and dental
records eventually confirmed what the authorities already suspected. The dead
(04:34):
man was a treasure hunter and had been looking for
a box of gold and jewels said to be hidden
somewhere in the wilds of the American West. For this
was not Vietnam, but the Rocky Mountains. Yet there was
a connection between the stranded pilot and the dead treasure hunter.
(04:57):
It was Major Forrest Fenn, who'd hidden the box of
gold and jewels. This dead treasure hunter was one of
many thousands of people who hung on fens every word,
and who trusted him enough to head into the wilderness
(05:18):
on his promise of treasure and glory. Forest Fenn was
born in Texas in nineteen thirty. He saw the devastation
of the Great Depression, but his school principal father kept
steady employment and the family was shielded for the worst
(05:40):
of it. The Fens were of modest means, but they
had enough money to go on vacation each year. Every summer,
they would pile into their Chevy and drive sixteen hundred
miles to West Yellowstone, Montana, on the edge of Yellowstone
National Park. Forest relished these adventures, and he got to
(06:02):
know the rocky mountains like the back of his hand,
hiking in high pine forests, swimming in warm mountain springs,
and fishing for brown trout in fast flowing streams. At
home in Texas, too, Forrest felt the pull of adventure.
(06:22):
He loved collecting whatever treasures he could find. String, bottle caps,
and marbles all appealed to his magpie sensibilities. He and
his father, Marvin, would scour the local creek beds for
trinkets like beads and old pieces of pottery. He found
his first arrowhead at the age of nine, and it
(06:44):
remained his most prized possession. Grab every banana, Marvin would
tell a rather confused young Forest on these excursions. One day,
he expanded on this maxim Son, the train doesn't go
by that banana tree but one time, so you reach
(07:06):
out as far as you can. Every bar you don't
grab is a banana you'll never have. Father and son
came together on these quests that most of the time.
Forrest felt his poor grades were a disappointment to Marvin.
(07:27):
I didn't think I was very smart, but I didn't
have to be smart to figure out that my parents
weren't really proud of me, he said. Forrest graduated just
but the pipeline of high school to college to work
(07:50):
wasn't for him. For a while, he pretended to be
enrolled at Texas A and M University with his friends.
It took about four days for the registrar to catch
him in his lie. Feeling lost and worthless, he fled
the university in tears. What he really wanted, he decided
(08:14):
was to be a pilot in the Air Force. Forest
knew that this was the domain of academic high achievers,
but he also knew that when you set out on
a journey, there was usually more than one way to
reach your destination, and so Forest enrolled at Radar Mechanics
school on an Air Force base in Mississippi. After learning
(08:37):
all about how to repair and maintain radar systems, he
was eventually accepted into pilot training. In December nineteen fifty three.
With his training complete, he married his high school sweetheart,
Peggy gen Procter. They had two daughters. His life was good,
but domesticity did nothing to curb Forest's craving for adventure.
(09:02):
When the Air Force took him to Europe, he grabbed
every banana in Italy. Forest rode the train from Naples
to the ruins of Pompeii and secretly sifted to volcanic
cinders for archaeological treasure. He dove in the turquoise waters
(09:22):
off Sabratha and Libya wants a Phoenician trading post. In
the quiet and cool of the deep, he spotted something
intriguing and unwieldy. He dislodged the object a little, then
got out of the water, tied a rope to his jeep,
and hauled it up. Forest was astonished to find that
(09:46):
it was an ancient amphoro filled with bronze coins. He
ventured to the Sahara, too, where he unearthed eight thousand
year old spear points amid the remnants of hand grenades
and burned out tanks. Back in the United States, Forest's
(10:07):
hunger for beautiful, storied objects became, in his own words, insatiable.
Teaching on an Air Force base in Arizona, he learned
how to read the patterns of cacti in the desert
for possible ruins underneath. He traversed canyons in search of
hidden caves where Native American jewelry and art might be stockpiled,
(10:33):
and he traded his artifacts, converting a bracelet into six rings,
and those rings into a necklace, and another bracelet, and
so on. It was on December twentieth, near the end
(10:53):
of his tour, that Forest was shot down and spent
the night in the jungle. As he listened to the
rhythmic croak of the tree frogs and waited to be rescued,
he began to reflect on his time in Vietnam on
what had been doing there. At dawn, his forward air
(11:14):
controller found him that a jolly green Giant helicopter lifted
him up and away to a US Air Force base
in Thailand, where he had a cup of coffee and
some scrambled eggs. He also called Peggy and told her
not to worry about the telegram she had just received
declaring him missing. Later, it wasn't the threat of capture
(11:36):
that stayed with Forest, but the peace of the jungle
and the imperative to hold his nerve in the face
of the unknown. Forest was awarded both a purple Heart
and a silver Star for his bravery. But something shifted
in him after Vietnam, or perhaps something that had always
(11:58):
been inside him pushed to the surface. He started having
nightmares about how many people he'd killed in Vietnam. When
the Air Force offered him a promotion, he knew it
was time to leave. I wanted the world to stop
and let me out, he reflected. Driving away from base
(12:19):
for the last time, he said, he pulled up beside
a field, climbed over the fence, and threw his wristwatch
as far as he could into the open brush. It
was a rejection of the regimented world he had inhabited
for the last twenty years, and he never wore a
watch again. Forrest decided he wanted to go somewhere he
(12:45):
could wear hush puppies and blue jeans and still make
a living. It was nineteen seventy two and he'd heard
about a bohemian city with a burgeoning art scene, so
he and Peggy packed their daughters into the car and
headed west as Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although he had
(13:10):
never bought a piece of art before and had no
education in the art world, he decided to start a gallery.
Before long, Forest Fenn was a millionaire. Cautionary tales will
return in Santa Fe. Forest used his retirement pay to
(13:39):
buy an old Adobe house, and the family slept on
the floor while he renovated and added to the building.
This was to be his gallery, as Forrest saw it.
The fact that he hadn't been educated at a prestigious
liberal arts college or worked for a big auction house
set him apart and gave him an edge. The art
(14:01):
world considered cash to be crude, dirty, but making money
and lots of itist's chief objective. Art is a business
to me not a religion, he declared. Whether art was
just business for Forest is debatable. He craved rare and
(14:23):
fascinating objects, but he certainly kept a close eye on
his profit margins, and he reveled in doing things his
own way. He displayed please touch signs in the gallery,
and when students visited on field trips, he let them
feel the old paint on a portrait of George Washington,
(14:43):
valued at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He owned
everything in the gallery, nothing was there on commission. In
this way, I have complete control of the work, he
told the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper. Of course, Forest
encountered critics, people who were cynical about his dearth of
(15:05):
traditional credentials. He met them with unassailable confidence. It doesn't
matter who you are. It only matters who they think
you are. It's true in Hollywood, in politics, and it's
true with the painting. Forest spun yarns about his outrageous
treasure hunting exploits in Europe, Africa, and the American West,
(15:28):
and he kept a pair of pet alligators in the
pond next to the gallery. He named them Beowulf and Elvis.
And locals chuckled that the gators bore a striking resemblance
to their owner. In short, Forests styled himself as an eccentric,
but he also made sure to tell the press about
(15:49):
his time in the Air Force and the three hundred
plus missions he had flown in Vietnam. People admire veterans,
and they appreciate their sense of honor. His gallery inventory
included some of the artifacts he had gathered over the years,
but he acquired paintings and bronzes too. Here Forrest thought big.
(16:14):
In nineteen seventy five, he hustled his way into the
Soviet Union and negotiated with the Ministry of Culture to
collect paintings for a celebrated show of Soviet and American art.
By nineteen seventy six, just four years after his arrival
in Santa Fe, Forest Fenn had one of the most
successful galleries in the city, and he employed fifteen people.
(16:38):
There were guest houses at the gallery and celebrities were
invited to stay free of charge. Steve Martin and Cher
came to visit, and soon Robert Redford was a customer.
Stephen Spielberg brought a Charles Russell Broms from Forest Ethel Kennedy,
widow of Bobby, was in raptures to singer Andy Williams
(17:00):
about Fenn Galleries, so much so that Williams also paid
Forest a visit. Forrest didn't belong to the elite, but
he recognized that he could borrow their credibility, and he
took that credibility all the way to the bank. Soon
the gallery was grossing around six million dollars each year.
(17:22):
Along the way, Forrest also ruffled some feathers. In nineteen
eighty one, an advert appeared in newspapers all over the world.
A collection of paintings by Elmer de Hory was for sale. Dhi,
who died in nineteen seventy six, had been one of
the most successful art fraudsters of all time. He had
(17:46):
a flare for the modern masters and had forged over
one thousand pieces, including Picassos, Matisis and Moduliani's, and inserted
them into the art market. This gave Forest an idea.
A fake Picasso is only fraudulent if you sell it
as a Picasso, but if you're upfront about its providence,
(18:09):
it's both a faithful copy of a beloved masterpiece and
a beautiful piece of Dark History. The Unorthodox Art Dealer
Club together with former Texas Governor John Connolly, and bought
up the cash of Dehores. Some prospective customers were outraged
(18:30):
when they learned the paintings were counterfeit. If you like
it less because it's a fake, who's the fraud now?
Forest parried gleefully. It was a strategy that worked, and
he sold the dhories on for a huge sum. It
wasn't all plain sailing. Over the years, Forest was raided twice.
(18:54):
The Bureau of Land Management and the FBI both believed
that he'd illegally looted precious items from protected lands, but
no charges were filed against Forest, and he roundly criticized
the authorities for these investigations. In a few short years,
(19:14):
Forest Fenn had gone from Air Force retiree to wildly
successful art and antiquities mogul. What was his secret? I've
always thought of myself as one who plays monopoly, Forest
told the Celebrity Weekly People. It was true that Forest
(19:34):
had rolled the dice and worked his way up from scratch,
but there was more to his success than a willingness
to take a risk. Forrest understood how to win the
trust of those around him, and how to spin that
trust into gold. Trust is the condition that enables all
(19:57):
of us to face uncertainty. As the author of Who
Can You Trust? Rachel Botzman has noted, it's a confident
relationship with the unknown that makes trust a kind of
social glue. It enables acts of exchange and cooperation, both
big and small, and it keeps economies and societies moving.
(20:22):
All businesses draw on trust, But Forrest had understood something
key about his own. In asking people to believe in
the authenticity and value of his wares, he was asking
them to trust him. What Forest Fenn was selling first
and foremost was Forest Fenn. It is curious, though, that
(20:47):
people did trust Forest. He wasn't an archaeologist, he didn't
hold a degree in art history. He liked a joke,
but it wasn't always obvious that his jokes were totally benign.
He'd been known to bend the truth, was a self
declared hustler, and his relationship to the law was a
(21:08):
little high to pin down. And yet people invested in
his artifacts and paintings. They trusted him with transferring cultural
treasures between enemy nations, and they went into business with him.
Why Perhaps the answer lies in the wider landscape of trust.
(21:34):
After his tour in Vietnam, Forrest wasn't alone in his
loss of faith in the military. Trust in the United
States government and the armed forces slumped in the nineteen seventies,
and since then it's kept falling. Confidence in institutions like Congress,
public schools, and banks has tumbled too. When trust in
(21:58):
a system declines, people look for alternatives. Outliers become more appealing.
Those who break the rules, vocally challenged the old guard
of experts and elites, and criticized the authorities may suddenly
seem more dependable. Forest Fenn was a gifted raconteur. His
(22:22):
was a tale of going against the grain, of starting
with nothing and beating the odds. It was a story
that people liked, and they were prepared to buy into
it quite literally. The gallery business might have been thriving,
but Forest met with his share of grief and pain too.
(22:47):
In the mid nineteen eighties, his father, Marvin was diagnosed
with terminal cancer. After a grim illness, he told his
son that he planned to take his own life. Forest
begged his father to wait. He wanted to see him
one last time, said he'd fly to him in his
own plane the next morning, but Marvin was adamant it
(23:12):
was time for him to go, and when Forest reached him,
he was too late. Forrest was still grieving his father
when he received another blow. His doctors had found an
aggressive tumor nestled beneath his kidneys. Treatment had just a
twenty percent chance of success. When the news finally sank in,
(23:38):
Forest was angry. He was fifty eight years old and
in the midst of an exhilarating, adventure filled life. He
didn't want to go anywhere. He decided to roll the
dice and try treatment. A short time later, his friend
Ralph Lauren, the famous fashion designer, came to visit. They
(24:03):
sat together in Forrest's study, a room filled top to
bottom with wondrous cures curiosities. Ralph eyed a Native American
bonnet with carved antelope horns and offered to buy it.
Forest told him it wasn't for sale. Why not. The
fashion designer was baffled, He can't take it with you,
(24:27):
but Forest knew that he couldn't take money with him either.
Later on, when he was alone, he looked around at
his glittering trove a gold dragon bracelet with ruby eyes,
jade figurines, two gold frogs. He thought about his father,
(24:50):
and he hatched a plan to take control of his ending.
Forest decided he would fill a chest with treasure, an
intricate Romanesque lock box dating from the twelfth century, and
bring it with him to a secret location. Here he
(25:10):
would follow in his father's footsteps and take his own
life out in the wilderness. These riches wouldn't be trackable
or traceable by any bank, and he could invite ordinary
people to come and find the chest and claim its contents.
His legacy would be the greatest treasure hunt America had
(25:33):
ever known. The plan was perfect nearly. There was one
thing that Forest Fenn didn't count on. We'll find out
what that was after this short break. Two decades past.
(25:58):
In two thousand and eight, the investment bank Lehman Brothers
crumbled into bankruptcy. Its collapse triggered a seismic wave that
smashed through global markets. Trading floors went dark, Bankers packed
their belongings into boxes. Against the odds. Seventy eight year
(26:20):
old Forest Fenn was still alive and watching on with interest.
He'd lived through another economic crisis as a child the
Great Depression, and he knew the pain and suffering that
mismanagement by the banks could bring to ordinary people. Forrest's
dream of leaving an epic treasure hunt as his legacy
(26:43):
had been derailed by something quite unexpected. He had recovered
from his cancer, it sold his gallery, and was now
enjoying semi retirement, But he hadn't forgotten his treasure hunt idea.
Over the years, he had added to his trove, waiting
for the perfect opportunity to plant it out in the wild.
(27:08):
It now held at least a million dollars worth of
precious items, maybe two million, a Mayan bracelet, salm sapphires,
Alaskan gold nuggets the size of chicken eggs, a copy
of his unpublished memoir crammed into an olive jar. Now,
(27:28):
as the aftershocks of the crash rippled out across America
and beyond, Forrest realized that his moment had finally arrived.
Millions of jobs had vanished, unemployment had surged, wages were stagnating,
and families had lost homes and life savings. But the
(27:49):
treasure chest could promise financial security to the lucky finder.
Forrest decided to launch his treasure hunt. It would be,
in his words, for every redneck in Texas who lost
his job with a pickup truck and twelve kids and
a wife to support. There was nostalgia in his offering too.
(28:16):
Perhaps he remembered those happy missions for trinkets with his father,
because he said that he hoped the hunt would be
a morale booster in dark and difficult times getting families
outdoors to solve a puzzle together. One afternoon in twenty ten,
around his eightieth birthday, Forest Fen slipped away in his car.
(28:40):
He didn't tell his wife or daughters where he was
going or what he was doing. The treasure now weighed
about forty two pounds or nineteen kilograms, so when he
reached his destination, a secret spot amid towering pine trees,
he had to make two trips from his sedan, first
(29:01):
with the box and then with the loot. When he
was satisfied that the little chest was secure, he drove away.
Forest delivered a thousand copies of his self published memoir
The Thrill of the Chase to a small bookstore in
Santa Fe called Collected Works. Any profits from the sale
(29:26):
of the books would go to the store and to
a cancer charity. Forrest wanted people to be able to
trust that this project wasn't about personal gain. Anyone who
bought the book would learn of his days in the
Air Force and his adventures in the art world, of
his love for his wife, Peggy, and their two daughters.
(29:47):
That'd find something else in its pages two a six
stanz a poem containing nine cryptic clues to the whereabouts
of the million dollar treasure chest. The memoir itself was
also peppered with subtle hints to help decode the poem.
(30:08):
It took a while for word of the treasure Hunter spread.
The story appeared in a Southwestern newspaper, and it was
mentioned on some area television stations too. It was a
quirky local tale, a whimsical curiosity. An eccentric, elderly art
dealer had hidden an ancient box of treasure somewhere north
(30:30):
of Santa Fe in the thousand miles stretch of mountains
known as the Rockies. A few blogs devoted to the
quest appeared online. It peaked the interest of practiced treasure hunters,
people who habitually went looking for lost artifacts or liked
(30:51):
solving puzzles. Some people thought the whole thing was a hoax?
How could they be sure the box was really out
there and Forest Fen was eighty? But if he was senile?
What if the whole thing was a fabrication. Others pored
over the memoir and the poem, trading their solutions, which
(31:12):
they called solves. Begin it where warm waters halt, and
take it in the canyon down not far but too
far to walk. Put in below the home of Brown,
where warm water's halt was that near a hot spring
(31:33):
of some kind, which canyon and Brown was capitalized. Was
that a person, perhaps it was a brown bear. Forrest
had included his email address in the book so that
searchers could get in touch with him and tell him
about their adventures. He would reply to their questions about
(31:54):
the clues with mysterious half answers, evasive but also gently
pulling strings from afar. In twenty thirteen, the Today Show
on NBC covered the story, and overnight the hunt exploded.
(32:15):
There was a run on copies of the Thrill of
the Chase, and the Collected Works bookstore printed more to
meet demand. International media outlets followed up with their own
coverage of the story, and before long there were countless
documentaries too. The consummate salesman Forrest flashed his alligator smile
(32:37):
and spun his gripping yarns, though he also admitted a
tendency to embellish the truth just a little. The quest
escaped the fringe world of routine treasure hunters and people
connected to Fenn, and drew in others with no previous
(32:59):
experience of treasure hunting at all, people like Randy bill U,
a fifty three year old grandfather who moved to Colorado
to be closer to the Rockies in hope of finding
the gold. Visitors flooded into Santa Fe, and the mayor
announced a thrill of the chase down to thank Forest
(33:22):
for the boost in tourism. The national parks were also inundated.
Bold treasure hunters marched through protected wildlife zones, digging up
the land in search of the home of Brown. The
park authorities scrambled to keep up, issuing cautions and special
(33:43):
new rules. There were tales too, of people remortgaging their
homes to fund their searches and burning through their savings.
Some of them broke into Forest Fend's property, convinced that
the poem instructed them to do so, and then in
(34:04):
twenty sixteen, a call came in hunter had gone missing
in deepest January. Grandfather Randy Billeu and his little dog,
Leo had ventured alone into the snow capped wilderness, carrying
a GPS device, a wetsuit, waders, and an eighty nine
(34:28):
dollar raft. Randy had planned to float along the Rio
Grande River to the place where he believed the gold
and jewels were stashed. When he hadn't been heard from
for over a week, his ex wife filed a missing
person's report. On January fifteenth, the police found his parked
(34:51):
car and his raft. They also found Leo, the dog, alive,
but there was no sign of Randy Billieu. The treasure
hunting community sprang into action, arriving from Colorado and all
over New Mexico and splitting into teams to find the
missing man. Forrest joined in two, renting a helicopter and
(35:17):
scanning the area from the skies, but he denied any
responsibility for the disappearance. Randy Billeu was an adult who
made his own decisions. People went missing in the wilderness
every year, with or without the prospect of finding treasure.
(35:40):
Forest Fend's Treasure Hunt held an emotional appeal. People were
seduced by the nostalgia and romance of the quest, and
they trusted in his status as an outsider. But trusting
outsiders can still be perilous, and romance and nostalgia can
(36:01):
blind us all to danger. Six months later, Randy Billeu's
skeletal ross were found by the Rio Grande River. He
may have succumbed to hypothermia or dehydration, but his actual
cause of death remained unknown. It was hoped that the
(36:24):
horrible incident was a one off, a mistake made by
someone foolish enough to head out in the bitter midwinter,
wholly unprepared for the conditions. It wasn't a one off.
The Treasure Hunt had metastasized from a whimsical curiosity into
(36:46):
something more sinister. Forrest Fenn, the master Monopoly player, had
lost control of the game, and it was about to
get far grimmer and darker than he had ever imagined.
Next time, on Cautionary Tales, the Quest continues, a grey
(37:09):
is exhumed, a stalker haunts the Fenn family, and death
comes again to the Treasure Hunt. For a full list
of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
(37:36):
Cautionary Tales as written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright,
Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills
and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are
the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by
Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Bend A Daphaffrey edited
(37:56):
the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler,
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Can support Cautionary
Tales by joining My Cautionary Club at Patreon dot com
slash Cautionary Club for exclusive bonus episodes, newsletters, ad free listening,
(38:20):
and other exciting perks. Alternatively, you can join Pushkin Plus
on our Apple show page for continued benefits from our
show and others across the Pushkin network.
Host
Tim Harford
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Ruthie's Table 4
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home. On River Cafe Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers. Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt, and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks. Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation. For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/ Web: https://rivercafe.co.uk/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/therivercafelondon/ Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/ For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iheartradio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.