3 Stories of Crazy Geniuses: Fenn’s Treasure, Michael Saylor’s Infinite Money Glitch + Ralph Lauren’s Bold Bet

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
So, I think the theme of this episode is rich guys, crazy or genius. We've got the Bitcoin guy who's doing the treasure hunt, and he's either crazy or he's a genius, right? Is he crazy or is he awesome? Ralph Lauren, crazy or genius, looks like he came down on the side of genius. I have another one for you. Dude, have you heard about this guy who's doing the $2 million treasure hunt?

**Shaan Puri** (0:32)
No, I have no idea what you're talking about.

**Sam Parr** (0:34)
Okay, well, can I interest you in a treasure hunt story?

**Shaan Puri** (0:37)
Yeah, $2 million, that sounds good to me.

**Sam Parr** (0:40)
There's this guy named John Collins Black, and there's not a lot of info about this guy, but he has basically hidden somewhere between $2 and $3 million across America right now, and different treasure chests. So he's got five treasure chests out there, each with a bunch of treasure inside. And this specifically, it's not just like cash, it's things that are valuable. So he spent the last five years buying valuable kind of artifacts. So one of them has, you know, rare Pokemon cards, a 2002 holographic Charizard card. He's got one with George Washington's Jelly Glass that he bought out of an auction. There's things from ant firm, old shipwrecks. And in total, the stuff is worth $2 to $3 million. He split it between five treasure chests and he's hidden it in physical locations across America. And then he released a book that was, that's called, there's a treasure or something like that. I buried it.

**Shaan Puri** (1:33)
It's called There's a Treasure Inside.

**Sam Parr** (1:36)
Yeah, and it's basically just clues to find his treasure. And so there's maps and clues and you can buy this book right now and go find this treasure.

**Shaan Puri** (1:44)
Wait, hold on.
It's even funnier. It's on Amazon. It's a book on Amazon called There's a Treasure Inside and the book is $35. So he's going to recoup a little bit of his money.

**Sam Parr** (1:55)
A little bit of it, a little bit of it, but probably not as much. So he's got like, you know, a hidden, a Colombian green emerald and all kinds of stuff inside. And I find this kind of fascinating. So this guy's story is interesting. He was like a musician in LA and that didn't really work out. And then he was like, okay, he started creating websites for helping people find jobs and that started going good. He used that to buy Bitcoin earlier, early-ish on. And I guess the story is he's a Bitcoin multimillionaire who was also fascinated by adventure. And so there's this thing called the Fenn Treasure. Have you ever heard of this?

**Shaan Puri** (2:32)
Okay. Yeah. Fenn Treasure. It's a cache of golden jewels that Forrest Fenn, an art dealer hid in the Rocky Mountains. Yes, I actually do think I've heard of this. I believe Zach Crockett, Zachary Crockett, he used to work for me at The Hustle, wrote a big article where he spent a week trying to find this treasure. How did he do? I don't think anyone has found it.

**Sam Parr** (2:55)
So five people died trying to find this treasure because it was like, is it up in the mountains, whatever. So they're climbing. So five confirmed deaths chasing the treasure. Then he announces somebody found it. I think this was in 2020-ish, 2022
He says that somebody found it and then he dies months later. It was revealed that former journalist and medical student Jack Stoof found it and then he auctioned it off for a total of $1.3 million of what he found. And so this guy, John Collins Black, was searching for that in 2020 And so he was like during COVID, he had searched for the treasure. He thought this was really cool. And when we were all in lockdown, he decided I'm going to do one of two things. He either was going to create a children's book publisher or create a treasure hunt. He did both. So he created this. He started accumulating assets for this treasure hunt.

**Shaan Puri** (3:59)
All right, so when I ran my company, The Hustle, I think we had something like two million subscribers, and we made money through advertising. We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter, because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model. And so I remember sitting down, and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off the hustle that aren't advertising? And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Shaan, me and the HubSpot team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business, and we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research, and we call it, very appropriately, we call it the Business Monetization Playbook. Go to the description of this episode, and you're gonna see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link, and you can see it back to the episode.