Oh me, Harty's this is our classic episode for this evening. Oh man, did you guys like treasure stories and pirate stories when you were kids? Yeah's heart? What's a hearty? A hardy? I think it's just pirates slaying. If I'm being honest, it means you don't have the scurvy, you're you're a party. Yes, my dear heart or something. Maybe I've never seen it spelled though. Is it spelled like herty h E A R t y or h A
R d ys and boys? Well, Pirates were known for a lot of things, but literacy was not one, So I imagine they wrote it down several different ways.
Got it, it'd be time to plunder this classic episode.
Yes, yes, yes, Oh there's a German immigrant. His name John Jacob Astor, the first known multi millionaire in the United States. But how did he get this? Agreed to fortune as we were, I think all surprised to learn the answer may lay in hidden pirate treasure. Depending on who you ask. Caveat caveat asterisk, there are she blows yrs. Let's roll it.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. There's a Noll spaced hole to my left.
There's a Noll hole. Indeed, they call me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul mission controlled decand who has recently been rethinking is Moniker and maybe going with Paul Hollywood in a British accent. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. This is a this is a strange episode for us, and and an
interesting story. There's a there are a couple of different conspiratorial myths we run into here, and we also run into the evolution of media and the great game of telephone that we've mentioned in previous previous episodes. But before we begin, Matt, I have to I have to ask you, yes, do you think this summer will be the summer that our hometown burns.
Down, that Atlanta burns again.
Just from the heat, this time not from interesting warfare?
My goodness, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised. We went out my family and I went out to the Candler Park Festival on Gosh was that Saturday? Yes, it was Saturday, and just standing outside uncovered was a terrible thing. I would not recommend it to anyone. Find a tree, get underneath it and you'll be okay. The music is still gonna sound great.
There we go. That's the spirit. It's it's a it's a positive, positive spin on a terrible, terrible thing. I just landed back in town late yesterday night or early this morning, I'm not sure which, and the thing that hit me immediately was the heat. I'm just everyone who lives here enjoys summer and autumn and all the hits, all the all the slow jazz of the seasons until
summer comes. This is terrible, This is horrific. I have no idea how hot or cold it is, you know, in your neck of the global woods, folks, but please send us. What do they say on Facebook? Thoughts and prayers or better yet, ice cubes or those Did you ever have those those weird little popsicles that came in the plastic tubes when you were a kid? Yes, or some of those. I'm burning up so much, you know. The sun is my ancient nemesis anyway, I'm considering ice pops as a treatment.
It really is hot town somewhere in the city, back of my neck, feeling.
Cool cat looking forward, kid, You're going to search in every corner ru the city all around the people looking have to walking on.
Oh, gonna get sued by that town and artists too.
I doubt it. I doubt it. But that is that is a stone cold jam or a hellishly hot day. So assuming that, assuming that the studio doesn't melt into one interminable mass of plastic VOCs that's volatile organic compounds chemicals a ka the basis of new carsmel and why it will slowly kill you along with organic matter and mortar, we will successfully finish this episode. This is a story that encounters, as we said, so many different conspiratorial threads.
And while you were listening, we would like to invite you to participate with us in pseudo real time. I mean time itself is sort of a pseudo thing anyway, right, Yes, So, if the mood strikes you, if the spirit so moves you, as you are joining us today, don't hesitate. Don't feel like you have to wait till the end to write an email, you can go ahead and just give us a call.
We are one eight three three std WYTK. And if you're like one of our listeners that we casually mentioned at the end of the show, and I must say in a way that I knew that only this listener would understand that I was talking to her, you will then leave. Six more message is over the weekends, so please feel free to reach out with any kind of questions, any kind of statements, especially if you come up with something as we're talking about this episode.
Yes, please, So let us begin to paraphrase HENREDA. Balozak. Behind every great fortune, there is a great crime. It's a thought that we've encountered multiple times, and that you have probably encountered in your own life in any variety
of fronts. The concept here is that one cannot, regardless of time and space, one cannot reach, regardless of time and space, a certain threshold of financial success without somehow purposefully or unwittingly gaining some part of that fortune through criminal acts.
And it's not it isn't necessarily criminal acts of that person by gaining that wealth, because that wealth, then many times is handed down right, So perhaps it's a criminal act that your grandparents or your great grandparents, or even further back, committing right right.
So it's a known fact, for instance, that there are people in the world who still enjoy the benefits their ancestors reaped from things like the slave trade or colonialism. There's also another case to be made if we want to make a case about people who are unwittingly perhaps profiting. For this, we could look at Silicon Valley and the technocrats who live there, profiting off of the backbreaking human rights abuses involved in the mining.
Industry, retaining the things they need to make their chips.
Right right, right, one way or the other. And this quickly descends into a very sticky philosophical conversation. Are you or I, if we own a smartphone, we also benefiting from this? The answer is more or less yes. But in this case, we're talking about the people who become millionaires, multimillionaires, billionaires in the pursuit of these of these ambitions. Right. Yes.
In today's episode, we are traveling back in time, Fellow conspiracy realist, we are exploring the story of one of America's earliest tycoons, literally the first multi millionaire in the United States, or perhaps officially is a better word than literally, and will along the way dive into the speculation about just how this one individual arrived at his fortune and why this speculation continues today.
And as we'll find out in this episode. As many others, these stories have an official version and not so official versions.
Yes, just so, here are the facts. Born Johann Jacob Astor in Germany on j seventeenth, seventeen sixty three, John Jacob Astor was the son of a butcher who would go on to found a financial dynasty that continues in some ways into the modern day.
That's right. When he was, you know, a young man, around seventeen years old, he went to London and he started to work with one of his brothers, his older brother George, and this this guy, George, made musical instruments, and you know, it's interesting enough, but he wanted to try something else. So in seventeen eighty four he left London.
He got out of town. He brought some some of these instruments with him and just a little bit of pocket money around twenty five dollars, and he traveled all the way across the ocean to the United States to try and find something fortune, Yeah.
Right, right to seek his fortune. It's an American dreams story. Right. Let's let's explore the official story about how this German immigrant came to become America's first multi millionaire. So, as you said, Matt, seventeen eighty four, he arrives, he's got some flutes, he's got around twenty five dollars cash money, as they would say. He arrives in Baltimore, and he
eventually makes his way up to New York City. While he is in New York, he opens his own fur trade shop in seventeen eighty six, so about two years after he leaves Germany. He often at this time travels out into the wilderness, just like his fur trappers do, and he wants to find new sources for his shop. This is a huge industry at this time, and this
was before concerns about preserving species were very widespread. It was a foreign concept or an alien concept to many of these trappers and traders that there would ever be a day where it was difficult to obtain as many repelts as one would wish.
Yeah, because the populations all start to dwindle. Because the furred trade ends up being a really big thing well, and just one quick thing here with Johann aka John Astor. Here. He when he went to New York, he met up with another brother, right, and he was working i think at a butcher shop for a while with his brother, and then he ended up trying his hand at baking, cooking and these kind of things. And he was totally like, I'm never gonna make enough money just working with my
hands at this level doing this kind of thing. And that's one of the main reasons he went out to seek out the.
Fur trade exactly because he could have easily spent the bulk of his life laboring as a successful artisan, right yeah, And instead he wanted something more. So he traveled to what even today is known as the Land of Excess,
and the fur trade was appealing. It helped him get a start again, according to the official story, but he saved his he saved his pennies, he saved his scratch, didn't party too hard at whatever their equivalent of Dave and Busters was back then, And so it came to pass that a few years later Astor was able to make his first real estate investment, and as he was diversifying into real estate, he was continuing to grow his fur business. Eventually, Astor's fur trading interest becomes the country's
leading fur company by the turn of the century. He also takes his reach international. He starts exporting fur directly to China. In return, he is importing Chinese silk and tea, which are you know, items of luxury, right with a with a tremendously high profit margin, even counting in all the dangers involved in international shipping at the time.
And yeah, and you can see how that also becomes very lucrative just the fact that he can ship goods back and forth into different places and then even to China, into different places in China. I mean, this is a huge deal. This is how you really really make some money.
Yes, exactly right, You go big, you go international. So all of Astor's fur businesses has different, you know, different interests. We talk about this. This occurs in business today. You may see five different products on the same shelf in the same section of a grocery store, and they're ultimately all owned by the same place. Fingers on a hand, right,
So he goes public with this. He merges all of his fur businesses into something he calls in a burst of creativity, the American Fur Company in eighteen oh eight. And we shouldn't be too hard on the guy. I'm sure he had a lot going on. He just needed something simple and to the point for the name.
Well, and I think if you can call something the American anything, like, if that name hasn't been trademarked already, I mean, go ahead and trademark it.
That's great because that's similar to you know, I bet you've stumbled onto an ad an AD cycle, like an AD copy cycle. Maybe we've mentioned this before, but if you're listening now, depending on how old or young you are, you can probably look back in your life and notice that marketing companies and ad companies go through this sort of industry wide trend towards certain phrases.
Right.
I think there are times when everything is organic, or in the nineties everything was digital. It didn't even matter if it was an actual digital product, right, Yeah, absolutely, And so maybe American was one of the first iterations of that. I think that's I think you're probably right. But regardless of our theories on the creativity or lack thereof and the ad community, it turns out that this was a very good move on his part and the US. We have to remember this is just the dawn of
the nineteenth century. The US is still still in its infancy in terms of what will later become the fifty state beheamoth we know today. Lewis and Clark had just ended their expedition to the west coast of the continent. That was in what eighteen oh six, And after this Astor when he learned about this expedition, he bought up some land in Oregon where a fort was built in eighteen eleven, and he had planned to build a settlement called Astoria, not the most humble name, but you know,
he was by far not the only person doing this. Everybody. Everybody was naming crap after themselves.
Yeah, and why not. I mean, that's pretty great eighteen eleven building a thing called a Storia, which sound I mean, it actually doesn't sound that bad. Well, it's not like a story of Asterville or or Fordlandia.
Yeah, but we also have to consider, for being fair, that the people would live there for thousands of years earlier, probably had their own name for it.
Yeah, that's true.
Well, regardless, the reason he did not end up going through with this was because of the War of eighteen twelve, he ended up selling the outpost because Great Britain and the United States had what people today would call a messy breakup.
Yeah, I believe it was with a Canadian company that purchased that from him, or Canadian interests at least.
Right, So he decided to get out while the getting was good, you know what I mean? Because if he had if he had owned that land and the US ended up losing control over it or sovereignty over it, would his deed of ownership still be honored.
Yeah. Well, and indeed they did take over for like forty years.
And so he appeared to have made the right decision. After the War of eighteen twelve, he made even more scratch, even more cheddar, even more pony bones, whatever you want to call it, because he had a bond deal with the US government. At the same time. His wealth is compounded by the fact that all the real estate in New York City he owns begins the skyrocket in value.
And then he ends up getting out of the fur business around eighteen thirties, and then he's really you know, I guess he's realizing that the true money now is in the accrude wealth of those properties. That he owns.
So he's spending a lot of time doing his real estate management and all the estates, the investments he's you know, at this point, he owns hotels, he owns places where other people live, residences where people are paying rent essentially, and that's where his time is spent and his money really is made.
That's where he sees his most significant return. It's not to say that being a landlord is easy by any means, as I'm sure the landlord's listening here can attest. But it is to say it's less work than sending people out into the wild to try to capture dwindling populations of wild animals in the hopes that affur retains its value.
And then sending a lot of the same people or new other people you're hiring to then ship it across the.
World, right and just hope nothing goes wrong. So that's why he goes into real estate. And again, as the official story, by the time Astor dies in eighteen forty eight, he is the most wealthy man in the country. He has an estimated fortune of around twenty million dollars. And just let's give a little bit of perspective here, Paul we're going to have an inflation calculator. Could you throw us a sound cueue somewhere in the middle of this.
So twenty million dollars in eighteen forty eight is roughly equivalent.
To six hundred and forty six million, nine hundred and fifty six thousand, nine hundred and sixty two dollars and three cents.
In twenty nineteen. Yes, so almost like more than half a billion dollars. Yes, most of his wealth, the vast majority, goes to one guy, one of his uh seven children, William Backhouse Astor. Yes, you heard that correctly. His middle name is the words back and house together, William Backhouse Astor.
It just feels like something his friends called him, or like he was a wrestler something.
It does sound like weird. It's one of those yeah, in joke nicknames. I'm sure it's it's it has a logic and reason to it, but it sounds like, you know, you know, how you meet different friend groups and one of the members of the friend group just has has a weird name that no one explains to you, just have it, like.
Like, really, your name's Red Paladin. Okay, Sure, that's pretty okay? Is that whatever you say.
Archie friends at Dragging Con, is that what's going on?
No, my wife's making me watch Riverdale and it's killing me.
It's Riverdale isn't a murder mystery now it is.
I can, like I survive because it is a murder mystery.
But oh my god, is jug Head the killer? He always struck me as the most sinister dude.
Jughead and FP are holding it down.
Who's fph Should I? Should? I? Just uh read the reviews on Vox or something or.
No, just know that FP is skeet ulrich and he makes the show worth it for me, as well as the late unfortunately Luke Perry, who is also awesome. There are a lot of great there. There's the cast is wonderful. The show itself is slightly infuriating.
Okay, slightly infuriating, that's the review.
No, not in a bad way. It's just you can tell it's written for maybe a slightly younger audience than me. They do They do reference movies that came out the year that they were in production, which is or you know, a couple of years prior to being in production, which is so interesting to have a separate universe. But Baby Driver is still a thing.
So is this on real quick? Is this on CW?
I don't even know it's one of the streaming services. And I just want to play a little gargoyle Griffin's and gargoyles now, So when you're ready, let's let's throw down some dice and get the chalices. Oh God, I don't know why I'm saying.
Okay, Well, that's your official story, and it coincides with the official story of John Jacob Astro. It's very difficult, I imagine, for both of us not to say John Jacob Jingelheimerschmidt every time. But anyway, Johnny j Aster, at this point, posthumously, he looks to be a quintessential example of the American dream. He has all the essential ingredients.
He's a hard working immigrant. He has risen to the top achalons of society, not through undeserved inheritance, not because of who his parents were, but because he combined hard work with sharp wits, good old gumption, and no small dose of good luck. However, for decades and decades, various researchers have proposed another we could say conspiratorial narrative, a less inspiring stranger explanation for the source of Astor's enormous wealth.
What if instead of earning it slowly over time, he stole it all in one go.
And we'll learn about that right after a quick word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. There's an alternate story about John Jacob Aster's wealth. Let's say that the story of his arrival to the North American continent is true up to his early career as a fur trader. Okay, what if the narrative takes a sharp turn shortly afterward. What if, instead of continually evolving his business, Astor has a tremendous amount of help from an unexpected discovery. Could his fortune be based not on business acumen, but on the secret discovery of buried treasure.
Now, before we get into this, this is why it's so interesting to me, because one of the major things you need in order to make money is to have some money. Right, This is something we've established throughout all of time, Memoriam. The connection here is that he just needed a certain injection of funds early on to be able to make some of the investments he made and to grow that into a fortune. That's what everything else we're talking about. That's what makes it so fascinating to me.
So there's this other person, this other person named William Kidd, and he had this thing called pirate treasure. Okay, all right, let's get into his life. So this dude was born William Kidd. He was born in sixteen forty five. He originally had a career focusing on privateering, but eventually he was hired by European royals to attack foreign ships that would encroach on land and would be enemies essentially.
Sure, yeah, or competitors, because we have to consider at this point that trade and state craft were very closely, very closely intertwined.
And much of it is happening on the open seas, and that's where the pirates come in.
Yes, so, as so, he was a pirate hunter, and he took the helm of a ship called the Adventure Galley in sixteen ninety five. English investors had hired him to be a privateer to hunt down the four investors that were endangering there or as you know, his employer's international trade deals. Now, hold on, Matt, hold on, Ben, you might be saying, as you listen along here, I'm pretty sure that Captain William Kidd is one of the
world's most notorious pirates from this era. And you were telling me that he started out hunting pirates, he became one of the same monsters he meant to eradicate. Yes, that is exactly what we're saying.
It's like he got bitten by a pirate and he became.
A which is how it works. That's how it works exactly. So the problem with his pirate hunting days was that they couldn't He and his crew didn't really find the ships they were supposed to attack. They were supposed to attack some French ships, and they found very few of them. And then in January of sixteen ninety eight, he caught sight of something called the Quagda Merchant, which was rounding the tip of India. This was an Armenian ship, weighed
five hundred tons. It carried gold, silk spices, all the hits. They were owned in part by a minister at the Indian Grand Mughal's court. This minister had powerful, powerful connections, and when he learned that his vessel had been attacked, he complained to the East India Company.
M that's an old hit.
Yeah, And now the East India Company and the Grand Mogul are saying, this guy is not legit, he's not a pirate hunter. He's hurting the wrong ships. He is not a pirate hunter. He is a pirate and so begins his life on the wrong side of the law. Turns out being on the wrong side of law did not suit Kid over the long term, and he eventually was arrested in Boston. Then he was shipped back to England for his trial.
And his court date was May eighth, seventeen oh one, and he was found guilty and unfortunately for him, he was hanged on May twenty third of that same year, seventeen oh one. And again like one of the big things here, there are some abhorrent things done to humans and their bodies, you know, within in the past to basically serve as warnings for other people to not do something.
And Captain William Kidd he was one of these people because his body, after it was dead and hung, was then put in a cage and hung up and it was left or rot there for everyone to see. Everybody who went down the Tims River, the one that goes through London, so you know, don't be a pirate. Look at that guy. He was a pirate.
See what happens when you mess with the world's most successful corporation. Right, yeah, So here's the thing. He's dead. No one knows how much treasure he did or did not have, and no one knows where he did or did not put it.
We did know that there was about ten thousand pounds worth of treasure that was sent to pay for part of the trial and a couple other things. Right, Yes, there's something like that where it was not a lot of money. I mean, ten thousand pounds at the time is a lot of money, but it wasn't like the full pirate bounty that you would think of.
Right. We do know that he did possess treasure. He did deposit some of it on Gardeneer's Island, hoping to use his knowledge of the treasure as a bargaining chip. He also he also probably puts some in other places. The thing is, no one knows exactly where that would be. No one date has found this huge treasure trove. Before he was hanged in seventeen oh one, he allegedly buried
some of his loot in the Caribbean. This was the popular theory at the time, and despite the generations of treasure hunters who have attempted to verify his claims more or less in over the past three centuries. Nothing has been recovered that would equal the rumors, because the rumors are kind of like like Smoug's Horde of gold level treasure trove, you know what I mean, not just a box with some emeralds. This brings us background. So the life and times of William Kiddon. He did get treasure,
we don't know how much. He put it in a few places, and then he ducked and then he died, and we don't know where those places are. So the Astore connection. Could John Jacob Astor have somehow located a piece of Kid's treasure? We will tell you the actual answer after a word from our sponsors, and we're back. There's more to this story than one might think it first blush. It all traces back to a fellow named Franklin Harvey Head.
Yes, this gentleman, mister Head. He was a lawyer. He was born in New York, and he worked in all over, like really all over the place, Wisconsin, California, Utah, and he ended up in Chicago. He was a bank director and president of this place called the Chicago Malleable Iron Company, another one of those awesome company titles or names that is just if it's not there, we'll take it. But in this case they added Malleable just to let you know that iron was going to be shaped and changed,
which is pretty cool because again it's so funny. Sometimes we forget that shaping iron into things and then cooling it off was such a major advancement in human history. There was a big deal and we need still they needed a ton of iron to be produced.
Absolutely.
So this guy, Franklin Harbyhead, he he's the kind of guy that has some wealth and he also likes to show it off a little bit and also socialize with other people that have some wealth.
Right, he's a social climber.
Yes exactly. And you know one of the things that he likes to do was write and publish these humorous tales that he would use to try and impress his wealthy friends.
Yeah. Yeah, So the kind of people that he wants to hang out with are not the novu riche there is new money, got it. They're the kind of people that he wants to hang out with are the equivalent of American aristocrats. Their idea of success is to not be associated with earning money, and indeed to look down at times upon people who do work for a living. Even if they're working for a living, is just them
owning a company, you know. Let's not forget this is the country where someone once famously derided the Hilton family by saying, oh, the Hiltons are they still letting rooms to people? And for many of us listening, of course, that is that is a surreal and cartoonish concept that you would be condescending to someone for being good at something. But this was the case. These were the sorts of groups with whom had aspired to be associated. And you can see why he is a person between two worlds
because he still has to work for a living. The shame, right, the ignomy.
And just the last the thing that's most important in order to feel as though he's included with those groups the way been talking about here, it's very important to note that the stories he was talking about would make reference to historical figures that those people would recognize and know, but they are made up.
Or or pander a bit to his friends, I would say, more importantly, pander a bit to his friends by mentioning their ancestry or the land that their families got back when, you know, back when one of them had a job. So the most important thing that you just point out there, Matt, is that these stories which were whimsicals, satirical, they were
made up. They were made them upseas and they were to quote Jonathan Strickland, aka the Quister, and they were meant to they were meant to ingratiate him within these circles. They were also not meant to be widely published outside, because you know, the more people have access to a thing, the less interesting or valuable it becomes. In this in again, in this mindset. That's not how the world should work,
but that's how their mindset was functioning. We have some examples in a work of his, a work of heads
called Shakespeare's Insomnia and the Causes Thereof. He claims that newly discovered correspondence between Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, an actor named William Kemp, and a money lender with a tremendously offensive name, Mordecai Shylock all show that Shakespeare had difficulty with money and marriage, and that this led to chronic insomnia, and that his chronic insomnia manifests itself in many of his works because various characters talk about sleeping or not sleeping.
Yeah, they need to get some rest. Finally they can be okay, yeah, fascinating and it's funny in a way. I've not read the book, but just that concept alone is humorous to me.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I get where he's going with it. One of his books is the actual and only source, only primary source for this story about Astor and William Kidd. And here's how it happens. So Harvey Head is having dinner with the daughter of a landscape architect named Frederick Law Olmsted, and the subject of some property in Maine comes up. And this is a place called Deer Island. Olmsted owns land there and he spent maybe like a
summer there before he passed away. And based on this conversation, Head decides he's going to have a little fun. Aha. He thinks it's time for one of my classic moves, one of my in joke books. I'm gonna absolutely kill it with this crowd. What does he do?
Man with the olmsteads? Okay, well, and just another little footnote here about Frederick Law Olmsted the architect who moved there to Deer Mains Deer Island. It really was so soon before his death. He ended up being put in a I guess a facility because he was on his way out almost immediately after moving there. Ended up being a little a tragic little story there about him. You
can read more about in other places. But Head thought it would be hilarious if he came up with this backstory as to how one of Olmsted's I guess ancestors helped John Astor, who was who's known widely known as one of the most wealthy people in the world. All these people know who at the Astor family is, and John Astor came up with his idea of maybe here's this secret, little this tale about how your ancestor helped this guy become the wealthiest person in the world.
Right he writes a book called Studies in Early American History, a notable lawsuit, and in this story. In this work he which you can read online by the way, he describes how Olmsted's descendants sued the Astor family to recover William Kidd's pirate treasure. According to this account, one of one of Astor's agents, or perhaps asked for himself. A fur trapper discovered a buried treasure chest from the pirate William Kidd on land that Olmsted's ancestors owned on Deer
Isle in Maine. This trapper stole the chest, but for some reason did not know its actual value, so he sold the chest to John Jacob Aster, and it became the entire basis for the Astor family fortune in Head's
account generations. Later, the Olmsteds somehow discover this theft, and they decided to sue the Astor clan for compensation, including back rent on all his Manhattan real estate that you know, because he had purchased it with his pirate treasure and the stick there, you know, you see how it's almost like an onion article. It just continues to escalate. But the book itself is full of these nods and these winks,
and these tongues and these cheeks. It's full of tip offs that it is not a work of fact, including references to ancestors that don't exist, like Cod Mather Olmsted or Oliver Cromwell Olmsted, neither of whom are real.
But yeah, he's just throwing Olmsted on the bottom of other important.
Figures right exactly, William Shakespeare, Olmsted, etc. So maybe the biggest indicator that this story is completely fictional was that there is no lawsuit. The book mentions a lawsuit and bases itself on this lawsuit, but the lawsuit does not exist. Yeah, it is not a thing. It's not real at.
Least, it's not written about in any papers and any ledgers and anything that has been kept over all the years.
In any legal documents proceedings. It's not cited as precedent for anything. It doesn't exist.
Well, and in the account of Head, there's it's a very specific claim of asking for five million dollars or the equivalent, Yeah, five million dollars roughly, or just you know, control over all of John Astor's property in Manhattan, which everyone was easier, essentially what he will work with you. Yeah, and it was like minus a couple cents for some other thing. I mean, it's very very specific.
So this is a little bit of conspiracy busting here. This story was published in eighteen ninety two, and again it was originally known to be fiction. The Olmsted's knew it was fiction. The guy who wrote it, Head knew
it was fiction. He was just funny. But the problem is that people at that time, in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, were very, very similar to people in the nineteen fifties or twenty nineteen, or we can go ahead and reach to assume people in twenty fifty They were desperate for news of the world's wealthy and had a difficult time separating fact and fiction, differentiating between you know, one news report on Facebook and in the piece of fake news on Facebook.
Right, Well, and let's talk about fact checking in the eighteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds.
Or how would hundred Yeah, how would you verify?
Well, just how difficult it would be to have correspondence between some like some law office somewhere else, let's say in Maine, even if you're in New York or something, just making that happen and trying to get any kind of correspondence back and forth in a timely manner to write or report on something. If let's say, in New York City or Chicago, you came upon a copy of this this work and you were unsure of it's you know, it's veracity or it's the truth behind any of the stuff.
But it looks real and it's talking about people that you you know. The name sell sound familiar. It looks all familiar and who knows.
Hey, that reminds me. I can't remember if I told you because we this this is the first time this week we're hanging out. I went to Maine this weekend. Oh did you mention? That?
Was that the jumping off point to the other place you went?
No, No, it was actually I had to go to Maine to make it back here.
Oh wow, okay, yeah it was.
It was kind of sketchy. I was in Maine in an undisclosed location on a ramp for two hours or so. Whoa, yeah, because someone went wrong with the plane. That's how I ended up in Maine. I don't know if it counts. I guess I can't say I went to Maine because I wasn't allowed outside of the plane. Yeah, but I'm still gonna count it, and one day I'll one day I'll walk in Maine as a freeman. But today, with
this weekend, was not that weekend. So yeah, if you're listening, you're in Maine, tell me what it's like outside outside of a vehicle. I want to check it out. I here. Now is a good time to visit Maine as well, because it's not you know, snowed in and Stephen Kingy.
All right, well I'll definitely.
Do you want to go to Maine sometimes? Yeah, let's go to Maine, Paul, Do you want to go to Maine? Paul Hollywood. Okay, he's given us a nod.
Definitely.
That was an enthusiastic nod. Well, yes, you're you're absolutely right. It's easier now to differentiate between fact and fiction. But then it took a lot of legwork. Right. The problems starts a compound when a magazine called Liberty publishes an account of this story as though it is fact. And this is for comparison. This is the very similar to the Internet rumors about celebrities that will uh that will still make the rounds today, like what's that? What's that one?
Richard gear in the Gerbil? Remember that that old chestnut?
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Okay, good, because we still want this to be a family show. Yes, google it, but not on your word computer. This was presented as though it were factual when it was literally the equivalent of a mad magazine for insiders or an onion newspaper. And then it gets even worse. It gets codified into history nineteen twenty six, when a historian in California presents this story as though it is true,
and everyone essentially falls for it. It's published. Not just in papers in California do they say this historian figured this out, Not just in papers in New York do they say this historians figured it out? And not just
in Maine do they say this. They say it around the world, and now people continue to believe it, and you'll hear it floated as some sort of his historical conspiracy, right that that not only is it true that at the heart of every great fortune lay a great crime, but that we know the great crime of John Jacob Astro, which is stealing from pirates, and that's escape Architects.
Well, there's even a I think it's a History Channel show, I don't even know if it's in production right now, called Unearthed, uh huh, where at one point they, you know, they craft this whole episode about how this guy finds out that there's a secret number of correspondence and within this book that was written by Head that basically translates or represents the coordinates to this place on Deer Island where the treasure still remains, and they apparently they go
throughout the entire episode just pretending like it's real until they end up, you know, discussing at the end and finding out, oh, this was all just in historical fiction account.
Oh yeah, America Onearthed, that's the name. Yeah, so a bit about that genre of show, Matt, You and I have had run ins with creators of shows like this, not specifically America on Earthed. I don't want to dign them. I haven't watched the show, but I am aware of what you're talking about. Uh, what we have seen is that the companies creating these shows have a propensity to prize you know, what they see as as a clickbaity headline,
the broadcast equivalent thereof, over facts and investigations. So we've been in situations where and not to brag about us or anything or this show, but we've been in situations where we have just walked away from offers to collaborate these sorts of projects because we feel that they are at the very least wildly misleading. Yes, I am I being diplomatic enough. When they saw that you really are.
I think. I think at the heart of it, you would say that sensationalism is paramount because it will get eyeballs on the screen on the correct channel configuration that you're looking for.
I mean, I mean, I guess, but but that leaves
but that leaves people in such a lurch. You know, when when you see this kind of wackado presentation of things at the very end someone says, you know, it's like at the very end of a pharmaceutical commercial, which is a crazy thing anyway, or the very end of a car commercial where the fine print person comes in and they say, you know, the following account is based on a satirical fictional work published in the late at hundreds by Franklin Head, which has little or nothing to
do with the facts of the matter. It's so great, you know what I mean, that's it and I get it that it's entertainment, but it should not be entertainment disguised as you know, disguised as some sort of factual investigation.
I always think about the Mermaids show.
Yeah, have we mentioned that on Era? We have, right, we did.
I think we did an podcast episode on it, but we definitely did a video on it.
Yeah. So, years and years back, Matt, you and I were asked to participate in something between participating something that was again wildly misleading and not a not a small bit exploitative. Someone had put out this documentary documentary that was purporting to be a documentary about the discovery of mermaids roommates have finally been discovered. They were real. Here they are, And we were asked to I think we talked about this on our Facebook group earlier. Here's where
it gets crazy. As our Facebook group, we were asked to dive into, dive into this documentary and present our take on it as though it were true. We refused. This was also, I think one of the only times anyone had ever specifically asked us to do something.
Yeah right, And it's also why Discovery sold the whole company because they were like Ben, Matt, Nope.
Won't play ball, right, We were the mice that right in the elephant. That's that's also myth elephants don't care. Frankly I wrote that yet. So, if anything, this is a cautionary tale.
It is.
Virtually certain that more myths like this propagate, mass grading this fact in your day to day experiences. For your entire life, you know what I mean? There are tons of things that the equivalent of three kids in a trench coat pretending to be an adult, which I'm just that's just a great image. That's why I'm putting that
in there. So the good news is that armed with this information, more and more people are not wasting time trying to trying to find some kind of William Kidd treasure in Maine instead, because even in that story, that's a weird thing about Dear Island. Even in that story the treasure is taken. But more and more people are searching for kids treasure in other places that are based on their understanding as actual voyages, and oddly enough, more and more people claim to find this treasure with each
passing decade. There's a recent example which makes a lot more so, Vents from Madagascar in twenty fifteen, and the title of it get this, You're gonna love this.
How many times are we going to find Captain Kid's treasure?
Right? So, the first line is from New Jersey to Vietnam. There's barely a swatch of the world left untouched by the swashbuckling pirate. Captain Kid's evasive legacy. In twenty fifteen, an explorer named Barry Clifford says he's discovered a sunken treasure at the bottom of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar. He found a one hundred pound silver bar with strange markings on it, and he said, this is a remnant of the pirate's wrecked ship, because he
did wreck as ship in Madagascar. So the thing is that there are so many shipwrecks throughout these oceans of hours. Finding something is one thing, but then proving its providence is another, and it's more difficult, perhaps than you might think. So Kid's treasure may have been discovered. It leads us to a larger question, though, do you think that there is still buried treasure out there that remains undiscovered? Where
could it be located? And I know this episode may have been a bit of a bummer because we did bust a conspiracy kind of, but this leads us to I would argue more important conspiracy for our day and age. Do you think that someone could pull off something like Franklin Head did.
Ooh and like make up a story and then the modern day make everyone think it's real. Yeah, ah, yeah, for sure. Think about some of the viral videos that have occurred where it's one of these small groups of video audio video professionals that are making fake things about a bear attack or like an almost bear attack, or I'm trying to think of some of the exact examples, and if you know some of these or give us a call. But there's somewhere it's been absolutely proven to
be false. Oh the one there was like Justin Bieber eating a burrito like from the middle or something like that, where it became a national news story in all of these places, but it was just these guys. Somebody dressed up like Justin Bieber and ate a burrito from the center and it became a thing. I think it's probably pretty easy now because of the rapid rate that everyone wants to pick up a story and you kind of have to in order to be relevant. You've got to
get it in your feed somehow. So I think it's I bet it's easier. Now.
That's interesting. We should do an episode on deep fakes in general, right, yeah, yeah, So let us know what your examples are, or if you were to perpetuate a myth of this nature, what would it be and why There's one example that someone recently posted on Here's Where It Gets Crazy that I would like to read because it just sounds like a great time. You want to hear it?
Yes? Please?
This comes from Wayward Sun, who said, in the latest episode you fellas pose the question what mystery would you like to leave the world trolling? Of course, I want to rob a house, he says. Stay with me. I want to steal someone's entire house. Now, this would take a lot of resources, but the mechanics are pretty straightforward. It would have to be a rural area where there are less neighbors and they are farther between. Wait for some poor, unsuspected family to go on a long vacation,
then hire a house moving company. Of course, there would have to be planning a fluid capital to asswash the house movers from spilling the beans. Then you simply jack the house up and off we go with everything inside. The family comes home to an empty space, disbelief and hilarity ensue, and then we go down in historical anonymity as the unknown perpetrators of the greatest unsolved mystery of all times. Step aside, go Beckley Teppe.
Wow, I want to say I'm on board. You're still stealing a house, even even jokingly.
There, I'm on board. I'm on board if through some ridiculous series of circumstances they get their house back. Yes, so I think it's more of a troll move for the house to show to show up later all their stuff.
I think it's way funnier if it's moved only slightly. Maybe it's only a couple of feet over, like beyond a gate or something. Now it's behind the gate and it used to be on the other side of the gate.
Yeah. Yeah, David Kope says, break into a house and move everything over two to three inches.
There you go.
Uh. And then you know, also I had this idea too, Uh why not don't why not replace the house, don't just steal it, replace it with a nicer house.
But all the stuff is still in All.
The stuff is still in the house, all the same stuff. And then have one empty room. Yeah that doesn't exist in the in the old house. And in there leave leave the room absolutely blank except for a Manila envelope on the floor, and it has a VHS tape of the bearn steam Bears. Right.
But see, you're just describing the Netflix revival of Queer Eye. Really just put a whole new house there.
What happens? I've watched it.
All your facial care products are replaced. I don't know how it works. My wife makes me watch a lot of TV.
I see, I see.
Well.
I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying some of it.
I really am.
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy to find online. Find it to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook X and YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok. We're conspiracy Stuff.
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