CLASSIC: Did John Astor steal Captain Kidd's treasure?
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
iHeartPodcasts
4.2 • 11K Ratings
🗓️ 15 October 2024
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
German immigrant John Jacob Astor was the first multimillionaire in the United States, and his descendants would go on to play prominent roles in the country's history -- but how exactly did he get this enormous fortune? According to the official story, he started off in the fur trade and later expanded into real estate. Yet for more than a century people rumors about the real origin of Astor's wealth have been floating around the fringes of converation -- what if he wasn't a legitimate businessman in the beginning, but instead engaged in less savory endeavors? Learn more in tonight's Classic episode.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Ahoy me Hardys this is our classic episode for this evening. Oh man did you guys like |
| 0:08.6 | Treasure stories and Pirate stories when you were kids? Yar. |
| 0:14.0 | What's a hardy? |
| 0:16.0 | A hardy, I think it's just pirate slang, if I'm being honest. |
| 0:19.0 | A hardy, it means you don't have the scurvy. You're hearty. Yes. My dear heart or something maybe. |
| 0:26.4 | Okay. I've never seen it spelled though. Is it spelled like hearty? H-E-A-R-T-Y or H-A-R-D-Y as in boys? |
| 0:33.3 | Well, pirates were known for a lot of things, |
| 0:35.4 | but literacy was not one. |
| 0:36.8 | So I imagine they wrote it down several different ways. |
| 0:39.8 | Got it. |
| 0:40.8 | It be time to plunder this classic episode. |
| 0:44.0 | Yes, yes, yes. |
| 0:47.0 | Oh, there's a German immigrant, his name John Jacob Astor, the first known multimillionaire in the United States. But how did he get this egregious fortune? |
| 1:01.5 | As we were, I think think all surprised to learn and the answer may lay in hidden |
| 1:06.9 | pirate treasure depending on who you ask caveat caveat asterisk there she blows |
| 1:11.9 | yarsh. caveat, |
| 1:13.4 | there are she blows. |
| 1:13.4 | Yars! |
| 1:15.0 | Let's roll. |
| 1:17.0 | From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies history is riddled with unexplained events. |
| 1:27.0 | You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. |
| 1:32.0 | A production of I-HeartRadio's How Stuff Works. |
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