The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Literal Treasure You Can Hunt For Right Now, A Nuanced Blue, Manhattants

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Jon Collins Black joins the show to talk treasure hunting. Plus, Laura explains why the color blue is very nuanced, and Rachel talks about local ants living in Manhattan. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our Sponsors! Get 20% OFF @honeylove by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST #honeylovepod This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at: https://BetterHelp.com/WEIRDEST Make your fall finances a little greener by working towards your financial goals with Chime! Open your account in just 2 minutes at https://Chime.com/WEIRDEST Chime. Feels like progress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Laura Bises.

I'm John Collins Black. John, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. It's great to be here. Thanks, Rachel. Would you tell listeners a little bit about what you do? What do I do? Well, amongst other things, I'm a dad of two young kids.

I am an author. I own a children's book publishing company. And the last five years, I've been creating a national treasure hunt. Very cool. And you, yeah, tell us more about the treasure hunt. And I know that there is a related and in fact necessary book coming out about the treasure head very soon. There is.

There is. So I'm going to be sharing a story today that this will be good context. I think my story will make a lot more sense when I tell you a little bit more about my treasure hunt. But I've been putting together a national treasure hunt for almost the last five years. I've hidden millions of dollars of treasure and five treasure. boxes spread out across the United States. I know some of your listeners might hear that and be like, well, this is already the weirdest thing I've heard this.

Yeah. Or running out the door. That's kind of my plan right now. Great. Great. And just for a little more context, I selected a large variety of valuable objects to go into the treasure boxes. So I wanted things that would appeal to a variety of interest in ages and people. So, for instance, I have physical Bitcoin, rare Pokemon cards, valuable sports memorabilia.

Jess is like literally, she's out the door. Very wide right now. That's good. That's good. There's the more usual treasure suspects such as gold coins and precious gems and other precious metals. But I also have a number of historical items, things that were owned or made by people like George Washington, Amelia Earhart, Picasso, and several others. And so I've written a book, along with my hiding the treasure,

and the book amongst other things, contains the clues that one needs to find the treasures that I've hidden. And so when we think about going on a treasure hunt, and, you know, we need clues to find a treasure, that it's probably a pretty good idea to pay attention to details, which is exactly what my story is about today, paying attention to the details. That's awesome. When does the book come out? It comes out October 21st this year.

Very cool. Well, I bet some of our listeners will want to check that out. It seems like a really fun time, even if there weren't, you know, potentially millions of dollars worth of stuff to win. You know, also just a good excuse to read up, nerd out, and then get outside and like, what's better than that? Yeah, I think any reason that give people. go off their cell phones or their TVs and out into nature is a win. Totally. Well, awesome. I'm excited to hear a cool treasure-related weirdest fact today. So let's get into the show. On the weirdest thing

I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, hunting for treasure, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Laura, what's your tease? The color electric blue is very nuanced. Well, I do love a good history of color fact, so excited to learn more. John, what's your tease?

Well, I think I gave my tease away earlier. Fair enough. It's a story about pain, the importance of paying close attention to the details. Yeah. My story today is about an aunt that is taking New York by storm. She's a gal about town. Laura, why don't you get us started? You left so much mystery, such a curiosity gap, so I have to know more. All right. One of my favorite things to cover at Popsie are these stories about color. It's something that's all around us. It's kind of mysterious in a way because we can see it, but understanding how it works is generally kind of a little bit of a magic trick,

since it all has to do with what types of light are absorbed and what types are refracted. So any chance I get to do a fun color story, I'm on. I did one about a cotton candy lobster that was discovered in New Hampshire. Does not reportedly taste like cotton candy. That's just, it's probably a good thing. It's just, you know, you know, lobsters can kind of come in crazy color. So that was kind of what sparked this one. So we all kind of know that blue is a very universally beloved color. Crayon giant Crayola actually did a poll in the early 90s that asked kids to name their favorite color and most overwhelmingly chose the standard blue shade from a croola crayon box,

but three other blues also made it into the top 10. And while that survey is not super scientific and admittedly a little bit old, so more recent and actual scientific research from both the universities of Rhode Island and Wisconsin found that this preference for specific colors actually grows as we get older. Through our lived experiences, we start to apply some more meaning to those shades of color. And it also was a very cross-cultural thing. These, both of these studies looked at a couple of different countries. and blue was a strong preference around the world, which may explain why there are just so many national flags that have a shade of blue in them. It's hard to kind of, you know, it's when you

think of flags a lot of the time, they have at least some sort, some blue in there. And even this, the earliest recorded color studies from the 1800s, that's kind of when scientists started to really drill down into like what makes color works, show how universally loved the color blue is. But why? Part of it, these researchers have found out is that the things that we enjoy most of our lives, most in our lives, will drive our color preferences. It might be linked to childhood memories of playing in the ocean. I can definitely say that for me, that's part of why I like looking at blue or maybe enjoying some clear sunny days under a blue sky. We also might be craving these experiences as adults and unconsciously link those memories to the favorite color. It also changes based on life experiences as you get older, things like a favorite sports team or a university affiliation.

I mean, when you go to, I think the one, the blue that comes to mind most is probably the University of Michigan. That blue with that bright, bright yellow, kind of there's something unifying about being in a group wearing the same colors. One very commonly loved shade is what I teased earlier. It is called electric blue. It's lighter than that University of Michigan shade. It's more similar to like what the tar heels of UNC or the lions of Columbia would wear. And it has a very sciencey connection. It's actually been associated with electricity as far back as the late 19th century,

kind of when electricity was being born. So according to a fantastic book called The Secret Lives of Color by Cassia St. Clair, When air becomes ionized, nitrogen and oxygen molecules become really violently excited. They release these photons that are visible to the naked eye. Some people have called this St. Elmo's Fire, which is kind of what you see on a ship's mast or in a plane window during the storm. And it's kind of the root of this more of a more ominous association with this color electric blue.

This is also from the book, when the nuclear core reactor for it, Chernobyl, exploded in 1986, a nuclear engineer named Alexander Yubchenko recalled, I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light caused by ionization of air. It was light bluish, and it was very beautiful. So even among that obviously catastrophic explosion, he still saw some of the beauty in the actual shade of the color of the light. that same bit ominous tinge of this color has been also included in kind of some more recent examples in sci-fi like if you look at the text some of the text for the matrix wali and inception all of those had that more ominous apocalyptic future of you know having to flee the planet

and sinister dream invasion that kind of said ooh this color blue while it's something that we like as humans, not something you necessarily want to see. However, there's a pretty famous example that goes to the other end of the spectrum where blue is maybe something we want to see. Can either of you guess where in sci-fi there is something blue that we associate, that has a more positive associations? Star Wars. The good lightsabers are blue. Yes, it's Star Wars. Of course it's Star Wars. Teed that one up nicely. white hats of the Star Wars universe. Absolutely.

When I first was reading that, I was like, I would not, you know, I hadn't thought back far enough to things like Chernobyl and just like electricity generation and getting electrocuted. So I didn't see this negative connotation with that blue at all until I started reading that. I'm going to say largely because of Star Wars. A great re-brand for electric blue. Yeah.

Absolutely. You know, thank, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Lucas. Blue lightsaber is arguably the most recognizable lightsaber color in all of the Star Wars canon. I think there's even an episode of the Big Bang Theory where Sheldon is describing like he wants a car that's specifically the Luke Skywalker blue that was pre-edits or something. And it's associated with the heroes of our story. And in some ways, the Jedi order themselves.

Even like in the prequels, you'll see several Jedi's with that blue. So the color obviously dates back pretty far in terms of that lore. And obviously we see Darth Vader and Darth Maul wielding more red and sinister lightsabers that kind of definitely kind of counteract that red. So again, this same shade of blue, depending upon how it's used in storytelling, completely just depending upon the writer. So one other cool thing about the color blue other than it's just generally cool hue is that while it's all over sci-fi, it's very rare in nature. If you think about it, there really aren't that many naturally occurring blue organisms, both plant and animal. Organisms that appear blue must absorb very small amounts of energy

while at the same time reflecting high energy blue light. Since the penetrating molecules that are capable of absorbing this energy have to kind of do this complex process, the color blue is a lot less common in the natural world. because it just kind of takes too much work. And it does sort of make a little bit of sense when you think back to the nuance of the shade electric blue, why a color that is so rare in the natural world shows up a little bit more in sci-fi. And I always like to ask a question at the end. I think it's just kind of the journalist.

It's just what we do. What is your favorite color? Basic. But do you remember consciously choosing it? Consciously saying that's my favorite color and why? So I can answer that one. Mine is blue. I do remember consciously choosing as a child, but I also grew up in North Carolina where

everyone was a Tar Hill fan. I actually went to college at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And I just want to let the readers know that your headphones are very much a Carolina blue color today. Well, I went to grad school at Columbia, so I would say they're more of a Columbia blue, but I will take it because the two are, I should have looked up exactly which, like, They are very blue. Yes. Yeah. They're very, very close. And I, and listeners, I did not know that before this. I have a hard time picking a favorite color.

I think I'm kind of person who more like has favorite shades of particular colors. But if I had to pick one, it would probably be somewhere on the blue-green spectrum. And I don't consciously remember picking that as my favorite color. So yeah, I guess it's just, it's a good one. It's hard to knock it. Yeah, it is. It is. Mine is green.

and I do remember consciously choosing it. I remember watching a Kid Songs VHS tape in the early 90s, and there was a girl coloring a triangle with a big green crayon, and I just remember thinking, ooh, I like that. So hence the green shirt for today. Even though I was talking about blue. Awesome. Yeah, that's so fun.

I love, and we've talked about, it's been years, but we talked about The Secret Lives of Color a little bit when it first came out, and it's such a fun read. There's so much good stuff in there. It's fun if you don't. And it's what I like is you can, it's like vignettes. You don't have to, you know, if you're pressed for time, it's the kind of book that you don't need to just like sit down and read cover to cover.

You can be like, you know, I'm kind of interested in magenta today. And you can look at that. And it's just, it's really pretty. It's definitely one that would be fun to have on a coffee table to show off to people. I love it. It's one of my favorite just kind of like relaxing. And it's very, you know, again, it touched like this podcast, it kind of does touch on all different cool aspects of science and design.

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Hilton, for the stay. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk. about the Manhattan, as several news outlets have called it. So this story starts back in 2011 when this guy named Rob Dunn, who he's a biologist at North Carolina State University, but he was actually visiting to teach some classes at Columbia in New York City. Speaking of Columbia Blue. And you might actually recognize Rob Dunn's name if you read fun science articles like I do. He runs a group now called the Public Science Lab.

And that kind of like seems like it's his vibe in a nutshell. He's very into, quote, making new discoveries about daily life while engaging as many people as possible in the process of discovery. He has been in the news for work on cataloging and studying the microbes involved in sourdough. Very cool stuff. And again, very like engaging stuff for everyday folks who might not realize they're interested in science. So it's not surprising that while he was at Columbia, he worked on helping students study their local wildlife, including ants. And at one point, he decided to take some insect samples from the most pedestrian location possible, the Broadway Medians at 63rd and 76 streets. So those little chunks of like planters in the middle of the road.

And as the New York Post reported back in 2012, he found a surprising ant on the Upper West Side. It was clearly a relative of a cornfield ant, and it looked like a European species. But when he compared it to like 13,000 known European species, it wasn't a good match for any of them. So he was like, it's definitely new to North America, and he thought it might be a new species. So people dubbed it be Manhattan. It wouldn't have been surprising if this was actually something that had evolved solely in New York City. We have seen that before. You know, animals can get relatively isolated in the city.

You know, they don't like intermingle with animals from elsewhere, especially if we're talking about like something really hyperlocal, like in Central Park. You know, those animals aren't necessarily interacting with animals in Prospect Park. So you can get some, you know, things that. really start to differentiate. For example, people that study the white-footed mouse that lives in New York City have found that they're not identical to country mice anymore. And even like from one neighborhood in New York to another, the mice like have their genetic distinctions. In 2010, researchers found a new breed of Sweatbee in Prospect Park. They found a new breed of centipede in Central Park in 2002. So yeah, it wasn't wild to say this is a,

an ant that is unique to the Upper West Side. And researchers just kind of like didn't do much additional work on this ant. It just wasn't pressing research question. Occasionally people have commented on it since 2012 and there was a suggestion of the species it could be, but now someone has finally officially done the research to identify this ant. And it turns out it has an even more classic New York story, which is that it is a... an immigrant. It came from Europe. We don't know how. I mean, there are many ways an ant can hitchhike across an ocean, but who knows exactly how these guys first got their foothold here. But it is this species called Lasius and Marginatus, which is very common in parts of Europe.

And yeah, this new research paper said, you know, with 93 to 99% certainty, we can say that these are the ants in question. And I should pause to say that Samantha Kennett, who's a PhD student at Clemson University in South Carolina, did this work for her master's. So everything I'm about to share, she had collaborators, including Rob Dunn and some of the other scientists who have been, you know, talking about the Manhattan periodically over the years, but this was led by Samantha Kennett. And yeah, they went out and sampled these ants so that they could, you know, actually like sequence their DNA and look at their behavior and look at how far they've spread, which I will get back to in a second. And they found that, you know, it is not a new species,

but it is indeed one that was not expected to be in New York City. But yeah, in addition to figuring out the identity of the Manhattan, they found that it's been spreading pretty quickly. About a mile per year. It's made it into New Jersey and Long Island. So it is no longer a Manhattan. It is a Another classic New York story. Exactly. So true. The sprawl. The urban sprawl. Yeah, it's moved to the suburbs. It's now a tri-state area ant, which is not as catchy. Researchers who have been, you know, paying attention to this ant for the past decade said that they started to notice that as they came to New York and collected ants, they were finding them in more and more samples. Just to give you a sense of the scope here, when you look at a survey of ant diversity that somebody conducted in New York City in 2006, there were no ants of this species.

Then, yeah, so a 2011 sample found that they were in a third of all park sites and 10% of traffic island sites. And then in 2013, they were in 42% of park sites and 42% of traffic island sites. Also, their sightings on like citizen science apps have been going up. I'll talk more about that in a minute. And yeah, at one point, one of the researchers involved was over in New Jersey to stay at a friend's place. And he got off, I assume the path. They said the subway, but it's the path train, man. And he saw Manhattan's on the ground.

And he was like, they've crossed the Hudson and they're living on the sidewalk, which was also weird because it's pretty rare for ants to want to hang out pavement. These are ants that tend to like being in soil and leaf litter in Europe. It's usually found in forests. In fact, when one of the researchers was on the phone with someone who specializes in insects in Europe being like, hey, I think this is the ant that we found in Manhattan, they were like, are you sure? Those aren't city ants. But indeed, they seem to have adapted. And like, isn't that just New York for you? Maybe it was all like the city aunt. They just didn't know.

Yeah, yeah. It's true. Maybe it's just been looking for the right city. We're just born in the wrong place. Yeah, totally. And, you know, not to anthropomorphize or anthropomorphize, but maybe it just had Broadway dreams. So true. Maybe.

Yeah, they did. They did find it in Lincoln Center. It was really, it was trying to get to the Met. But they say that they say that we can expect the speeches of Ant to continue spreading through much of the eastern U.S. as far north as Massachusetts, as far south as Georgia. And, you know, that's not great. Reading this story, I'm definitely like very pro-Minhattan. I'm a Manhattan apologist.

But I think that's just because I relate to moving from a rural area and taking the city by storm and then moving back to New Jersey. But they aren't like actively dangerous. They're not like bad for people. But the issue researchers say is that they feed on honeydew, which is the sugary substance that certain bugs produce. Afids make it as we talked about on a previous episode, a weirdest thing. Spotted lanternflies also make honeydew. And there's kind of this known phenomenon where ants that eat honeydew will sort of like support the livelihood of the bugs that make honey do.

And unfortunately, bugs that make honey do tend to be very bad for. trees. So the concern is that if these ants continue to really spread and dominate that it might be bad news for our trees, which is also true even if just the spotted lanternflies are here. So I was just going to ask, like, does this have a spotted lantern fly connection? Because talk about something that has also taken that and the stomping. It's very fun to watch kids. Kids have really harnessed the stop on the lanternfly call, which is nice to see. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. The paper didn't mention that potential connection at all, but that was my thought that, you know, no wonder these ants are thriving. There are so many spotted lantern flies. And I don't think

the spotted lantern flies really need the ants help. They're doing quite well. But that's definitely, you know, a feedback loop that we don't necessarily want to see continue. But yeah, just to give you a sense of like how well acclimated these ants are now. They found them even in like a planter in the middle of Times Square. And this is a line from Samantha Kenneth's paper that like, bold be over. Samantha, well done. She said, often the only visual non-humans in Times Square are humans dressed as Disney animals.

And yet hidden in this flower pot was a whole society of animal beings. So, yeah, best favorite line in a scientific paper in 2024 so far. And, yeah, apparently they walk really fast. So they're like power walkers basically, which, again, very New York. Tracks. Yeah. And so it's not surprising that they are doing so well. But it also is surprising.

Like, researchers are like, wow, they really did that. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. And, yeah, in terms of, like, how this is impacted. humans. These ants are really good at like climbing on flat surfaces and they've like made it up high rises like people have found them on very high stories and like on roofs. Apparently back apparently a 22 study found that like local hardware stores in New York were selling out of ant baits in like a new way, which may have something to do with these guys. But they prefer living outside because they prefer eating honeydew. So if they're in your house, chances are they're looking

for water, not food. So they're not like the most disruptive of pests when it comes to, you know, indoor life. But again, we do have these concerns about what their eating habits might mean for our trees. And if you are in New York or a nearby city and you're interested in like helping to study these ants, can go on eye naturalist. which is a citizen science platform, and there is a project Manhattan going on on I Naturalist. So you can use that to let scientists know if you see one of these ants where you are, which is especially important if you are not actually in New York, because they are on the move. And then one less thing, this is like not actually an important fact,

but it's just something I learned while I was researching this, and it feels really important to me. So when they collect the ants, and this is common for a lot of small insects, researchers tend to use like little aspirators, which is like it can be as simple as like literally like a straw with a little piece of gauze on it, but they make fancy ones now. But the idea is that it's like you're you're creating a little bit of suction with your mouth to get the bug into a little vessel. And those insect aspirators are called pooters. I don't know who started calling them that, but it feels really important to me. You get yourself a little ant pooter and you go, you hit the town. Wow. That's my story about these urban ants.

These ants having discernible features, do they have any type of New York personality that might identify them if we saw one on the West Coast? So they do, like I said, they are Power Walkers. Their most distinctive features that they have kind of like a little bit of orange in the center of their bodies. They're otherwise sort of more of that like, you know, dark brown that's just sort of I would call like generic ant color. But they have, yeah, little orangey bits on their their bellies. But yeah. Thinking that means they're Mets fans and not Yankees fans. Yeah, I guess so.

Probably. Probably. But yeah, it's kind of, you know, there's no. stopping them, but hopefully more research on them can help scientists figure out how to, you know, keep them from becoming a destructive force. Again, very, very relatable New York behavior. But yeah, that's my fact for today. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Okay, we're back. And John, tell us about treasure, some kind of treasure, I assume. Yeah, so just to mention again, my story is about the topic of the importance of paying attention to details. And I found this particular story that I'm going to share because once I had collected all the items for the treasure that I was going to hide, I myself and a team of researchers spent several months researching all the histories surrounding all the various items that I collected. And it was really the history of the items and the treasure that created the narrative for my book.

So each chapter in the book shares a theme that is important to treasure hunting. And arguably the most important chapter in the book is the one that discusses the value of paying attention to details. Now, of all the histories that we researched, all the stories that we found out about, one that definitely emphasized this importance. And that was the story of the third imperial Fabergett egg, and it's 95-year-long mysterious journey. Now, there are a couple of objects in my treasure that I've hidden that were made by Faberget,

and that's how I came to learn of this story. And you may know, some of your listeners may know that Faberge is one of the most famous, if maybe arguably the most famous Russian jewelry designer in history. It's probably most famous for its Faberget eggs, are more specifically its 54 imperial Faberje eggs that were made specifically for the Russian royal family

in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And today, these eggs are some of the most famous and iconic jeweled artworks ever created. Now, the Russian family was very fond of their Faberger eggs, and they kept them very close at hand. But in 1917, there was a Russian revolution, and the royal family was arrested. Some of them were killed, and the extended family fled for their lives to other countries.

And all of the royal family possessions were confiscated by the new communist government. And then a few years later, there was a big royal estate sale called Treasure for Tractors. And then the Treasure for Tractors estate cell, they sold almost all the royal family possessions. I don't know how many tractors they actually purchased, but they did feel their coffers pretty well. And because a lot of these eggs were sold, not all of them, but some of them were sold in this state sale, it's become like a fascination for art historians to kind of track. Well, what happened to these iconic works of art? And one of the most interesting stories is about the third imperial Faberger egg. Now, we don't know if this egg specifically was sold in the

Tractors for Treasurer's for Tractor's cell, but we do know that it disappeared for the next 80s. seven years. Then out of the blue, one day in 2004, in an antiques flea market in the Midwest United States, a small gold egg with the watch inside showed up amongst the display of antiques at one of the dealers showcases at the market. Now, it also happened that at this market, there was a scraps metal dealer who was walking around because he was trying to find precious metal that he can melt down for a profit. And so the gold, this gold egg that was sitting there in the display caught his eye because he was like, well, if I can get a good price for this, then I can just melt it down and I can make some profit off of this thing. So him and the antiques dealer

started to squabble and squabble about what the price would be and they went through a long negotiation. They finally came to an agreement. And the scraps metal dealer took the egg home to his modest Midwest home where he put it on his counter in his kitchen, right across from his breakfast table where he'd eat breakfast every day. So every day he'd wake up and have breakfast and look at the egg, and he started to grow an affinity for it. It was a very beautiful object, and he was like, you know, I just can't melt this down. I'm going, I'm not going to destroy this egg. But he had spent a considerable amount of money about $12,000 on it, which was a lot of money for him, and so he was resigned and tried to find someone to sell it to at least recoup his investment.

So he started networking through his contacts, and he started showing this to different people that he thought might be interested. He did this for the next few weeks, then weeks turned into months, and many, many people came, looked at the egg, inspected the egg, considered the egg, and then just said, just said no, they weren't interested. This continued, uh, For years, actually for eight years, this gentleman tried to sell his egg all the way up to 2012 and could not find a buyer. Now, what happened next? We're not quite sure why it happened, but we know it did happen. After having this egg for eight years, the gentleman got the idea one day that he was going to inspect it more closely.

So he walked over to his egg, opened it up, looked at the watch that he knew it was inside, examined it as close as he could, And sure enough, he found a detail that none of the people that he had showed it to had found, that he had never seen before, that the antiques dealer apparently didn't see before he sold it. And the detail was an inscription on the watch that said Basharan Constantine. Now, this gentleman probably didn't know this, but Vacheron Constantine was a very well-known watchmaker back in the day, and they were commissioned to make this watch for the Royal, for the Imperial Faberje Egg. And so he got online, though, went to Google and typed in Vacheron-Constantine Egg, and sure enough, a picture of what looked like the thing in his kitchen came up on his computer screen with an article. And so he got really excited.

He took pictures of the egg. He flew to London to talk to Faberger experts. They got excited. They all flew back to the Midwest, came to this gentleman's home, circled around his kitchen to inspect the egg. And sure enough, they declared that this was the original third imperial Faberger egg. So, of course, his first question to them was probably, well, how much is it worth? And he said, well, it's worth approximately 33 million. dollars. Whoa. And so he was very excited, obviously, and they found a buyer within days. There was a

private buyer that these experts knew was probably interested. They sold it for a quote-unquote undisclosed amount, but we can kind of assume what it might have been. And it was interesting, because when the buyer got the egg, it had several scratches on it, where several people had taking samples of the gold, considering that they might just melt it down to try to profit. But the buyer was so enamored by that, he thought it just added to the Providence and the history of the egg. It even made it more interesting to him. And to kind of bring this full circle, I mean, we don't know how many people actually own the egg over the course of these 95 years. We do know that it was owned by one other person who died, who sold it in an estate sale in

1964, but there were many, many, many people who were offered to buy the egg, who inspect the egg, and no one found the small little detail that would have led them to a fortune. Now, to kind of bring this full circle, when I was creating my list of items that I wanted for the treasures, I thought, like, kind of tongue-in-cheek, it would be really cool to have a magnifying glass as an object in the treasure, because what's more, you know, know, Sherlock Holmes, find a clue, you know, symbol than a magnifying glass. But I didn't want just any old magnifying glass. I obviously wanted a really cool magnifying glass, and I wound up getting probably one of the

most elaborate, fancy magnifying glasses ever made. It was actually made by Faberge in 1890, and it was made by their head workmaster, a gentleman by the name of Michael Perkin. and Michael Perkins is actually the most famous workmaster to have ever worked at Faberge. And one of the reasons he's the most famous is that he personally made over half of the Imperial Faberza eggs himself. And one little kind of sad side note to kind of end my story on when it comes to details is that Michael Perkin died fairly young. He was 43 years old. And most historians agree.

that he died because he worked himself to death. And he worked himself to death because he was so fixated on details of his craftsmanship that he never left his workstation. He worked day after day, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year, until he literally just passed away. So I guess one note would be I would tell people that details are important if you're going to search for a treasure, but don't let it affect your health in a negative way. But that is my story to share today.

That's awesome. Even right down to that last little moral, the whole thing that did kind of remind me of a folk tale or a fairy tale just in the whole, you know, oh, I'm going to sell this egg, but now I'm attached to it. And if I like it, I don't want to. And then down to, you know, it really, it's, wow. It's wild. It's a fascinating story. I also, I love Faberjay eggs. I actually have a little Faberjay egg necklace that I've had since I was a kid that I got deep.

been my, the classic, you know, Anastasia Romanov obsession era that all young girls are obligated to go through. Yeah, that is such a cool story. And would you remind our listeners what your book is called and when it comes out so that they can get on the treasure hunt? Sure. So the book is called There's Treasure Inside. There's a website, www.com, which kind of explains the book and the treasure and answers a lot of people's questions because when people hear about this treasure hunt for the first time, usually they're like, what? And then they're like, why? And so it answers some of the what's and whys. And then the book comes out on October 21st. Awesome. Well, and I don't want to, you know, I want to leave some stuff for listeners to find out for themselves. But one thing that I do think is

important to note for folks who might just be sort of dismissing any interest in this out of hand, I appreciate that you make a point of saying this treasure, it's all in like locations that are safe to get to, that you don't need like any particular, like, you don't need like mountaineering expertise or like, you know, to get to. So yeah, it seems like everybody should, should check it out. So I can put my shovel away is what you're saying. All right. You can put your shovel away. And also the reason that I hid five treasure chests and not one is I really wanted to make it feel like that. There was something geologically accessible to everyone, you know. Yeah.

I wanted to put them in safe places so no one would get hurt. But at the same time, I wanted to put them in different regions. So people would feel like, hey, you know, I don't have to travel maybe too far to actually find something really cool. Awesome. I have about a million logistical questions, but, you know, I'll leave it because, you know. You're going to check out the FAQ. Yeah, yeah. We can talk off one.

Thanks. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, along with Jess Bodey, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.