Napoleon Hill authored Think and Grow Rich, one of history's best-selling self-help books, and helped shape the DNA of modern hustle culture. Yet historians classify him among the most prolific con men of the 20th century.

This episode traces Oliver Napoleon Hill from a one-room Appalachian cabin through decades of fraud, from lumber scams and fake schools to fabricated meetings with Andrew Carnegie, and on to wealth, ruin, and a lasting influence on the new thought movement.

• Born in Pound, Virginia in 1883 and losing his mother at age nine
• The Acree Hill Lumber Company bust-out scheme and mail fraud warrants
• Claims of a private Carnegie masterclass the timeline makes impossible
• Riches from The Law of Success wiped out by the 1929 crash
• How auto-suggestion shifted the blame for failure onto readers ...