Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Color Blue

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedian/podcaster Adam Tod Brown (Unpopular Opinion) and comedian/podcaster Jeff May (Sideshow’s Side Show) for a look at why the color blue is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey, this is Alex, and I have good news about the Patreon for this podcast, because we had a huge influx of new supporters over the holidays. Thank y'all. And then a few more people from there, and then a few people increased their support this past week. Long story short, we have reached our next group goal on the Patreon page. We got there. And that goal is democracy. Now that we have a big enough community to do it, every CifPod Patreon supporter gets to submit topic ideas. You get to suggest things for this show to be about, then you get to vote on them in a monthly poll, and then the winning topic in that poll becomes an episode of the show. We're going to do that every month from here on out. So thank you so much for already

supporting the podcast, if that describes you. And congratulations on your new benefit, on suggesting things for this to be about. If you don't support it yet, you can head to sifpod.fun and become a voting listener, become someone who backs this and makes it all possible. That's the good news. I am so excited to find out what the listener chosen topics are going to be and in the meantime here is an alex chosen topic blue known for being a color famous for being your favorite color maybe nobody thinks much about it so let's have some fun let's find out why blue is secretly incredibly fascinating.

Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Bringing back two amazing guests today for the second ever episode about a color. If you heard the third ever episode about the color gray, you know of Adam Todd Brown and Jeff May. They are back for the color blue today. Adam Todd Brown is the creator, host, proprietor, all-knowing, all-seeing leader of the Unpopular Opinion Podcast Network,

which is one of the absolute best things you can put in your ears at all. They're also doing comedy shows on the internet now. They're doing all kinds of other things. And then Jeff May is frequently on that network. He also co-hosts Tom and Jeff Watch Batman on the Gamefully Unemployed Network. He's the host of Sideshow's Sideshow, which is a podcast from Sideshow Collectibles. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Chicory peoples. Acknowledge Adam recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. Acknowledge Jeff recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and K'iche and Chumash and Fernandinho-Taraviam peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still

here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about the color blue, which might be the biggest topic in terms of just the size and scale of it that we've ever done on this podcast before. And this podcast is aiming to be about the absolute most interesting and amazing and fascinating things about something. It is not aiming to be encyclopedic. We're not trying to cover every single thing you could possibly say about a topic. And that's never been more true than with blue. So on this episode, we will not cover one or two things that your science teacher probably did, like why the sky is blue, why the sea is blue, how blue eyes work. There's no pigment in them, actually. There's a lot of stuff like that that

you probably learned in science class or you can Google very easily. We are going to go deeper. We're going to go weirder and we're going to go a lot more historical in particular about this color that the world has decided is pretty much its favorite. So I hope you love it. I'm really excited. And with that said, please sit back or stand in front of a mirror and check if you are wearing any of the color blue right now. Like you probably are. I probably just did a magic trick. And if you're not wearing it, you beat the system. Great job. And either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Adam Todd Brown and Jeff May. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. adam jeff thank you so much for coming back we got a whole new slice of the uh the old rainbow to do very excited thanks thanks for having us back on your freaking show i appreciate it i love

it i'm a huge fan long time listeners second time caller was that jeff is that jeff may that's sorry adam i know i didn't know that was gonna be this kind of show oh sure is it's a bad boy show i didn't know this ice hole was gonna show up look at this i am the bad boy of podcasting ladies and gentlemen and i am here to ruin your day that's true i like that a lot of people will know this is a joke fight and a few people will not like they're totally new to the show and you guys and and uh we'll just be really tense really That's true. I like that a lot of people will know this is a joke fight and a few people will not. Like they're totally new to the show and you guys and we'll just be really tense. Really good.

And here's the thing. We're going to fight those people next. Yeah. Hey, new listeners, batten down the hatches, bro. We're coming for you. Buckle up. We're going to beat you black and wait for it. Blue.

What? We're going to beat you black and wait for it. Blue. What? What? Jeff May is wearing the color that we're talking about and brings up the color we're talking about. Always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. How do you guys feel about the color blue?

I recently joined the Crips. Okay. So it's been really good for me. No, blue tends to be my go-to color. Navy is the official color of the Boston Red Sox. Blue is the official color of my piercing eyes. And I just happen to wear blue a lot. I like it. I often realize I never know people's eye color and did not notice you're a blue-eyed fellow.

Good for you. Congratulations, Jeff. Thank you. I tried very hard, and I feel like I'm quite successful at it. Yeah. He's been cultivating those blues. They were brown when he was born. It's crazy.

You know, most babies have blue eyes when they're born. Gross. And then eventually the pigment comes in. For me and Blue, the jeff said jokingly about joining the crips i grew up in peoria illinois which i've often described as all the violence and poverty of chicago with none of the nightlife and there was a legitimate gang problem in peoria illinois to the point that wearing red or wearing blue could actually get you in some trouble depending on where, like what part of town you were in, which for me,

because I was a huge bulls fan and the colors you, you could not wear were red and black or blue and black, red and black was vice Lords, blue and black was disciples and most of the gang element my sister hung out with were disciples so i spent most of that bulls run not being able to wear bulls gear oh which kind of but also when you're in that town and when you're in that age you're like i don't want to wear bulls stuff i want to wear other colors and cool things. So that's how I justified it anyway. I was too scared to wear a Bulls jacket to school because I would get beat up. Literally.

Wow. I didn't even want to wear this Bulls jersey. But I would wear Bears stuff. I'm a football guy above any other sport. So I can flick with a dark blue but once you start getting into the royal blues and stuff i feel like i'm too fat and i sweat too much and like it's just not not the right color for me man i look like a blueberry there should be an unwritten rule in gang culture that you can't have colors of the local sports team because it's not fair.

That's very true. I also really liked that Eiffel 65 song back in 2000. So let me tell you something. When I was prepping this, I probably spent an entire hour of my life learning about the song Blue by Eiffel 65. And it is not very interesting. The background is just like, there were a couple dudes in an Italian studio who threw it together in two hours and it was a big hit. And later they got in a fight with each other.

Like I watched, there's a Vice documentary that is 28 minutes long about the origin of Blue by Eiffel 65. And it's the least interesting thing I've ever seen. It's the worst. I'm very bad. Yeah. Even that's too much.

That's too much time for me to spend on that song. I hated that song so much. There's something to be said too about something that you think is about to be interesting. And then it's boring. Like if you've ever watched the commentary of Die Hard, it is like, it's like the most boring thing I've ever seen. It makes Die Hard so much worse. I'm like, why am I, why am I doing this when I could just be watching Die Hard? Yeah. But good for them for making a two hour, like spending two hours to

make a song that made them millionaires. Yeah, that's kind of it. Like, and, and they're just three Italian electronic music guys. And there was nothing interesting about making it other than one of them was playing an arpeggio on the piano that became the do do do do do do do do. And that was kind of it. That's the whole story. It's actually not that interesting. Yeah. I'm going to listen to that song. I'm going to listen to that song today.

I hate that song so much. And it was like there was all this. Everybody was like, what are they saying? Is this, is it some sort of like gay subtext or is it like, what is it about being sad? Nobody could tell. And it's like,

I don't, I don't know if there was anything. They threw it together. I don't know if it meant anything. They wanted it to be something that anyone could sing or understand without like really understanding it. It's nothing. Yeah.

You should have had them. You should have had them on the show. Yeah are you having us on for instead of jeff you could have had an eiffel 65 reunion and instead you got these two unpopped heads oh come on i'm not hey i'm not a d head just, Jeff. You snorking dink head. Very nice of you. Speaking of music, guys, on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics, and that's in a segment called N-U-M-B-E-R-S.

Find out what stats mean to be. N-U-M-B-E-R-S. Stats, stats, stats, stats, stats. Stats to me, stats to me, stats to me, stats to me, stats to me, stats to be. N-U-M-B-E-R-S. Stats, stats, stats, stats, stats. Stats to me, stats to me, stats to me, stats to me, stats to me, stats to me. Et cetera. You're going to get sued by Otis Redding. Somebody suggested that to you. Yes, that name was submitted by Jonathan Smookler.

We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. I'm going to get my man a rhyming dictionary rude jeff rude that's what they call me jeff jonathan don't listen to jeff you're doing great i mean everyone else don't either but everyone listen to me tell me some stats alex yeah can we hear some stats about blue stop dragging your gosh darn feet and give us some stats we're thirsty for them so the uh the first number here is the number one because the surveys are not super scientific but they are pretty consistent that blue is the world's number one favorite color. Like for most people, statistically, it's not a

majority of people, but there was a 2015 survey by YouGov and they surveyed people in 10 countries, found that it is the favorite color of all 10 in the UK, US, Germany, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. Number one, blue. Wow. What's your favorite pizza? Number one, blue. Wow. What's your favorite pizza? Pepperoni? Yes.

Like a chocolate ice cream? Like a pepperoni pizza? Imagine talking shit because people like a tastiest thing. You're not arguing that pepperoni is the tastiest thing to put on pizza? I like me a pepperoni pizza, man. Yeah, we can't get into this right now. I'm okay with that. I'm liking me a pepperoni pizza, man. Yeah, we can't get into this right now. I'm okay with that.

Yeah, it's a really common thing to hear when people are asked their favorite color. Yeah. You do hear blue a lot. Are we going to reveal our favorite colors on this podcast? I think I remember on the gray episode, you, Adam, revealed that it's yellow. Oh, yeah. Because it's the madman's favorite color. Amen.

Deep Sif Podheads will know this, of course course but i'm reminding the few who don't deep sift the touring crowd it's a deep sift plot cook cooking grilled cheeses in their vans outside of alex's apartment dropping acid and just vibing out. Yeah, they live on my compound. Sure, whatever. Whatever. But Jeff, that's a good idea. What's your favorite color? Blue. Dab-a-dee-dab-a-die. Dab-a-zee-dab-a-die.

Because when I was a kid, it was extremely very much blue. I would try to wear all blue outfits in preschool and kindergarten because I was that excited about it. Which is strange, but it was something I was into. And now I think it's more like green or red, probably. Like I picked red for the show partly because I like red. Yeah. I don't wear a lot of yellow though, because that's always, that's a risk for so many reasons. Like you're going to drop food on it. There's a lot of shadows that aren't flattering. Yeah. But like whenever I'm, like if I had the option, i was buying an iphone right now and all of the colors of the rainbow were at my disposal yeah i would 100 buy a yellow one

oh fun it's a very 1998 vibe thank you or 1998 was just everyone was like everything's yellow and orange and we're like is this gonna stick and they're like absolutely it is yeah it stuck with me i like it but meanwhile one band refused to go along their name eiffel 65 they shifted so many jackets got exchanged so many yellow jackets traded in for blue yeah it's also uh the survey also found a range of second colors, like the second place in the countries varied between red and green and purple. But blue was number one in all 10 countries. It was number one in the US across all age groups and across every separate ethnicity they broke it out into. It was just blue all the way. That's why we elected that blue M&M back in like 93. That's right. elected that blue M&M back in like 93. That's right. You remember that? I really thought you were going to say Joe Biden, but that's fine.

Yeah, sure. That too. I'm talking about something of consequence, actually. There is that rumor that Trump wears all that bronzer because he fell for that scam that was happening in the 2000s where you were supposed to eat silver or something like it was drink uh uh colloidal silver yeah and it ended up turning it literally turned people blue and that is one of the rumors about why trump wears all that tanners because he's blueberry under there there's a guy that looks like blue santa yes because he did that and i'm obsessed with it but yeah they drink colloidal silver and they really go to town on

it it's supposed to make you healthier or something but it turned everybody blue it's very funny use code sif pod at checkout to save 15 off your colloidal silver at alexjones.ru people still people still tout the benefits of colloidal silver try it still a thing that's amazing try it you like blue so much i think it's kind of like when you feed a baby too many carrots and the baby turns orange i love doing that it's so fun yeah changing the colors of your baby. Slamming carrots down a baby's craw. Turn orange! Whole carrots. Just whole Bugs Bunny looking carrots.

It's good times. Speaking of products that people could get into, the next number here is 22 out of 37. So one more time, that's 22 out of 37. That's almost 60%. That is my count of the blue logos in the 2020 Reader's Digest survey of America's most trusted brands. Almost 60% of them had a blue or at least partly blue logo. It's like incredibly common to have a blue logo for a product. People are such sheep. What's a trusted brand? Yeah. people are such sheep what's a trusted brand yeah and the the brand it's a lot of consumer stuff the brands that were blue were lysol tide clorox bosh and lum and then stuff like metlife geico visa southwest airlines uh carnival cruises so

things things they all have yeah like ford motors is one of them. Dove, Coppertone, Claritin. It's just stuff. People trust Ford? Yeah. Let me tell you, from somebody who's owned several Fords, you don't want to do that. Agreed. I mean, I think there's something to be said about primary colors. Most logos, I'm assuming that involve blue, also have some red in them as well, I'm guessing? At least some, yeah, for sure.

Bank of America is one that comes up because it's kind of both yeah you know i mean i know you're doing stats and stuff like that but there's like kind of this unwritten rule in in superhero lore that the heroes wear primary colors and that the villains and anti-heroes wear the secondary colors so you'll see a lot of like reds blues and yellows in superheroes and a lot of greens, purples, oranges and villains. Oh, yeah. I feel like those colors also tell me which heroes are kind of secondary. Like if Hawkeye's in a bunch of purple, I'm like, yeah, that's kind of a lower tier guy. Yeah.

Or the Hulk. The Hulk being like an anti-hero. Oh, interesting. like an anti-hero oh interesting you know not to not to backtrack too far but at the end of the the the last stat you address the crowd of people listening as folks interesting sidebar the gangster disciples whose colors are blue and black that's what they call each other is folks which also made calling someone folks where i grew up a kind of dicey prospect at one point we had a school assembly and the principal called everyone folks and the audience lost it they were like oh my god he's in a gang that's he doesn't even realize what he's saying what an idiot porky

pig is a disciple yeah pretty. I like that. Anyway. That's, I feel like I'm going to keep finding out standard central Illinois stuff that was somehow gang behavior in that town. Like if you ate McDonald's, you were a vice lord. You couldn't get it if you weren't a. If you were Burger King, you were a disciple. Yeah. Next number here is $54 billion American. $54 billion is the value of the world denim industry as of 2011.

And denim, the first Levi's jeans in 1873 were made with indigo dye that looks pretty blue. That led to blue jeans being one of the most popular clothing items in the world. It's also, I remember one of my college professors, because one of my specialties was Russian history, and he would travel to the Soviet Union every year, and he would bring makeup and blue jeans in a suitcase, and he would bribe members of the KGB with those things. The women would get the makeup, and the men would get blue jeans. That's amazing.

And American candy. He used to bring American candy with him. Now that works the other way around. You're going to bribe me. You got to bring me some Canadian sweets. Bring me some Russian mayonnaise. Hey, that's a callback.

I love it. Tying it together. You do a lot of episodes that I'm really jealous that I'm not on. Oh, and you were like, we're doing mayonnaise. I'm like, I would fight to the death to defend mayonnaise on this show. It's fine. People who dip their fries in it are lunatics. I mean, give me a nice aioli, though. It's different.

It's pretty much. Is it? Yeah. You know what? This is now a mayonnaise pot. No. Secretly, incredibly mayonnaise. Next number is 10 hours and 39 minutes.

And 10 hours and 39 minutes is the approximate amount of time Americans spend in front of screens per day. That was a Nielsen survey in 2016. It may be more now that we're all home all the time. But that obviously means getting some blue light brought to you. That was a Nielsen survey in 2016. It may be more now that we're all home all the time. But that obviously means getting some blue light brought to you. And there's kind of mixed research and messages out there about blue light. It seems to be something that messes with people's sleep cycles to get too much of it. But also we'll link an article from Popular Science called Stop Blaming Blue Light for All Your Problems by Alex Schwartz in 2019.

They talked to an ophthalmologist who says that the concern with blue light is based on studies done on individual cells or animals and also using amounts of blue light that we don't really get from screens as people. So it's not clear exactly how it affects us. Yeah, there's a lot of correlation that isn't necessarily causation. When people are like, I look at a screen for 10 hours and i'm miserable curse that blue light and it's like no i think you're just staring at a screen for 10 hours yeah it's the it's glowing it's the only light you're seeing during the winter if you're in the midwest and have a day job you see your computer screen and you don't see the sun yeah all you see is glowing rectangles. That's not good.

You know, they're not giving you good news all the time. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, most electronics have that night mode now where it goes like sepia tone, like you're taking those old Western glamour shots at the mall. Like an old 1930s iPhone. Yeah. Playing the entertainer is playing while you're trying to fucking sext somebody or some shit.

Wanted, the coward that murdered Jesse James. Your phone starts going crazy like, ah, another outlaw alert. Man, I'm trying to work here. This is frustrating. I'm not going to catch him. A lot of horse information on next door coming out. We're going to get into one more number here. The number is 1876, which is a year. 1876 is a year when a man named Augustus James Pleasanton started a nationwide American health fad based on blue

glass. So this is kind of the reverse of how we think about blue light now. He was a former Civil War general, and he wrote a book called The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Color of the Sky in Developing Animal and Vegetable Life in Arresting Disease and in Restoring Health in Acute and acute and chronic disorders to human and domestic animals that was the whole title of the book uh and we need to we need to talk about 1800s book titles yeah and how they need to calm the hell down it's basically a book like just the title yeah yeah yeah that's like that charles darwin book called on the origin

of species and then the rest of it is like four lines of white nationalist stuff yeah that's you you i remember you quoted that in your ace of base article because ace of base quotes it in one of their videos yeah for some reason and that video blew by Eiffel 65. That's right. All comes back. Feet, ace of base. But this guy, his name's, again, Augustus James Pleasanton, and he was a former Civil War general who just published a book that said, if you surround yourself with blue glass and get blue light projected on you, you and your crops and your animals will all thrive. It'll be like this magic positive health thing for you. Oh, it's like the secret. It's the blue secret.

That shit's been happening for over a century. Yeah, yeah. Power of positive thinking. Yeah, he was a crystal girl. And we'll have a Vox article linked about it because they say that for the next few years in the u.s blue glass prices went up 50 percent uh he also patented a blue glass based greenhouse and then cashed in on that and it was like the goop of its time was like surrounding yourself for a few years with blue windows yeah wow that's crazy that that they just like keep doing that like it's just a system of like what grifts are yeah like consistently or it's just like oh all you need is just like one person to back this thing and things move pretty well we're in the

wrong business yeah that's all it takes i gotta get a good grift i gotta get a good a good grift like a health claim. Where we're messing up is not being like these conspiracy theory podcasters who are constantly like, we got to raise money to fight the deep state. And they'll have like a weekly campaign fundraising thing. And they're bringing in like $100,000 a weekend. It's like, your people put up with that? We should do that.

Yeah. Well, they're cashing in all their colloidal silver for regular silver. Man, that's crazy. Just like surround yourself in blue. Now I'm going to get rich. See you later. He's like the MySpace guy. Exactly.

You just drop something and it just takes off at the peak. Man, I've got to get a good grift or a blue glass house would be nice, too. Or a blue greenhouse. I like the idea of somebody being like, if you surround yourself with blue precious gems, like surround yourself with sapphires and you will be wealthy. And it's like, well, yeah, I think that's kind of the point of the sapphires, right? Right. Surround yourself with stacks and stacks of cash and you will be financially comfortable. Thank you, book. There's no science behind that.

The grift is like you got to write a book that people will want to read that is just a lie. Yeah. And then keep doing it. the secret is that and there's like sequels to the secret i don't i don't get that further secrets yeah yeah they did not get it out in the first one yeah what's the what is it did you do the last thing you're doing great yeah thanks for helping me fulfill my wealth secret by buying my book that's true i would i would be very mad if i bought someone's book with secrets about the universe and then they did another one. I'd be like, why didn't you just put it in the first

one? Obviously you knew you're just like stringing me along at this point. Yeah. The last book was 120 pages. You could have padded them for a little bit. Could have given me an extra 80 pages and it still would have been an easy read. Off of that, we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

Maximumfund.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience,

one you have no choice but to embrace, because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Well, we got a couple takeaways here about further stuff about the color blue. I'm very excited. Going into takeaway number one. For most of history, blue was either an ancient Egyptian technology or a very valuable trade good.

Like the dye? Yeah, like dyes and things to make things blue. Yeah, that was something that was very hard to get and very hard to mine and acquire and create. And the ancient Egyptians were very good at it. It's like one of their main achievements was making stuff blue. That's such a weird achievement to have. And're just like, and one of their achievements is they turn blue. It's just like, wow, that's all right. How did that come about though? Was it, did that, was there something in the region that. It seems like it's more the kind of thing where they figured out how to mix

a couple minerals and they just figured it out before other people and separately from other people. Yeah. Which is strange. We're so used to colors just kind of happening and presenting themselves now but it used to be a lot of legwork all of the time in history to generate colors i don't like that i take i take for granted that i have access to all colors and therefore i'm not interested in that information yeah yeah i'm not that's not a world I want to live in. I don't find that fascinating at all. Well, let's, uh, I sent you guys a sample of what's called Egyptian blue. They kind of had one main shade. They tended to generate the historian. Simon Shama describes it as a soft mid blue is the shade, which I think is about right. It kind of looks like the Dodgers

blue to me. Yeah. It's just blue. Yeah. It's one of those things where like oh only one shade i'm really impressed great job egypt that's the in and out of of colors where they're just like we do one thing only now tell everybody it's great right i don't think i want to do that wear it animal style gotta love it linda we'll have a few links about it uh peter brown writing for scientific american says that egyptian blue is not only the oldest man-made color blue it is the oldest synthetic pigment of any kind so blue was the first color anybody made out of stuff at all do you think mr brown was just doing color study because of the pun

that that like it would be like if i studied calendars for my life and everyone would be like oh calm down because of may yeah yeah does adam todd brown have any comments on peter brown On the name, when I was a child, my dad would routinely field calls from people asking for Mr. Green. And he would go, no, you have the wrong color, and would hang up. Because that was such a popular prank phone call. You would flip open the phone book, call someone with the last name Brown or Black or Blue, and be like, hey, can I speak to Mr. Green? And they go,

no, this is Mr. Black. And they go, Oh, I have the wrong color and hang up. And my dad eventually would just be like, no,

that's the wrong color. That's not mean enough for a prank. It's not. No, it's just a waste of time. My brother used to prank this one guy and they would just call his house and ask him if he sold drills. And they did that for like several years.

And then he changed his number and they like found it out and they called him again. And that, to me, is great to like harass somebody with such a specific prank, you know? Don't do that, people at home. So Egyptian blue, it was, we think the Egyptians developed it about 5,000 years ago. And according to Peter Brown, quote, color makers fired a mixture of one part lime, one part copper oxide, and four parts quartz in a kiln that left an opaque blue material that can be ground into a fine powder for making paint. So it was just a bunch of like chemistry with minerals. And then they did it. Man, imagine being around at that time, like 90% of everything is a discovery.

Yeah. I bet even then, like they brought out the blue paint and people were like, what do we have to paint stuff for? It looks fine. Like everything they develop, people are like, come on, what's wrong with how we're doing it now? I mean, to be honest, it doesn't feel like it's stuck. Cause every time I see Egypt in a feel like it's stuck because every time i see egypt in a

movie it's just sand colored everywhere well i mean the the paint might have chipped away after well then it wasn't good pyramids you the egyptian pyramids used to be like a glimmering white yeah they were covered in tiles maybe they should have been a little better at the painting instead of the mixing and we wouldn't have had this problem. That's a great point. Sorry, ancient Egypt. I had to study ancient Egypt in like fourth grade. I had to learn all about it.

And I knew, I like still know all the God's names and I'm like, this is useless. It is. I would have, I would have loved to have taken a class on taxes. If Alex asks you to list them off, I'm leaving the podcast right now.

That's how uninterested i am yeah yeah i know then i know that like that name of the eye you know that like eye that they always have floating around that thing's called oojat i remember that from fourth grade i don't remember long division well and with with blue and their gods blue was like a core thing for painting temples and painting artifacts and like a lot of ceremonial things. Apparently we've found artifacts as old as 2500 BC that still have some Egyptian blue paint on them. They also would paint the traditional deity of Amun-Ra would often be depicted with blue skin or hair because that represented like the Nile and vitality and stuff. Because he drank colloidal silver.

Yeah, exactly. That'll do it. Well, and then that like chemistry process I mentioned before is pretty laborious and pretty hard. And so according to Cassia St. Clair, who wrote the book, The Secret Lives of Color, she's a cultural historian and design journalist. According to her, artists after the ancient Egyptians

tried to find like super valuable materials that looked blue rather than doing all that process. And so about a thousand years ago from now, people kind of stopped doing the like careful mixing and burning and stuff that the Egyptians did to make this. It's really hard. The pottery process that they went through to make that. Yeah. And they were just like, well, let's just grind up some blue stuff exactly yeah which is kind of that's pretty smart to be honest yeah because then also the other so we talked about egyptian technology the other way people got you know like blue paints and blue coloring uh other than that is world trade and sort of sort of like that spice

trade with wooden sailing ships we think of there was a trade for blue stuff in the past and because we didn't get more synthetic blues until around the 1700s when a chemist in berlin accidentally invented something called prussian blue but before that we were using stuff like a substance called ultramarine and dyes like indigo that people had to like sail and caravan around the world to get that was how like especially europe would get a lot of their blue i um i used to teach about trade that was like one of my big my big units was sort of the growth of trade and how it leads to the growth of cities and towns which is how it leads to the growth of like and it was really interesting because like at the time

when i taught like i could use malls as like a really solid example as to like malls are like the cities of modern commerce where like all the important trade routes are located malls were always located on like the intersection of two highways generally speaking just like the the biggest cities were on the intersections of two waterways. And it was like this really great unit. It landed really well. And now I think about it. And if I tried to do that unit in 2021, and like malls, and they'd be like, I don't know what that is.

Yeah. It's a weird... God, I miss malls. I miss blue malls. There we go. It's part of the podcast now. There was basically a period between ancient Egypt and the 1700s or so where you could either, if you're in Europe especially,

you could either make blue out of woad, which was not an amazing dye for stuff. You think of Celtic warriors wearing it, but otherwise it's not amazing. For a substance called ultramarine, which is Latin for beyond the sea, they had to get it from one mine in what's now modern Afghanistan, high in the mountains. It's called the Sar-e-Sang mines. And they would mine a rock called lapis lazuli, grind that down, and then turn that into blue pigments for painting, which is a real pain. That's like a lot of labor to do. Lapis lazuli. That's's a fun thing to say yeah i remember like ultramarine

that was a crayola color right at one point i think i remember marine oh maybe it was that but i think you mean aquamarine can we talk about yeah you're probably right but can we talk about how ultramarine is like probably the best name for a color yeah i was just thinking that like that's what blue should switch to it's really ultramarine uh ultramarine blue uh existed from 1903 to 1944 from crayola okay so yes neither neither of us did ever use. No, I had those. I'm 115. I would only take vintage Crayolas to school. Kind of an old soul.

Like some hipster third grader. Just like a philosopher at a grade school. Like, ah, I've got my antique crayons ready to go. Yeah. Just stashing up old Indian redian red crayons because you know those are going to disappear at some point that was a what a problematic color to put in a crayon box yeah and here's a racist one well i i was looking at the other elaborate trade process here to talk about is indigo because that comes from the greek word indicon meaning a substance from india so when you said indian red i was thinking about the country of india but oh boy yeah that that other thing was in a box wow no yeah that was and that was in a box like in

the 80s probably the 90s yeah oh yeah like when i i may have crested outside of the crayola uh sort of purview in the 90s but i I certainly wouldn't doubt that they'd be like, ah, we're not going to change the name. But as far as getting a hold of blue, Cassius St. Clair writes that, quote, indigo has been a bedrock of global trade from as far back as records and educated guesswork allow, end quote.

In Roman times, one pound of indigo dye cost 20 denarii, which was 15 days wages for a laborer. And then there's other stories we can link about just entire imperialistic movements happening, such as Spain taking over what's now Guatemala, that then became situations where they tried to grow as much indigo as possible just to get dye, like just to make stuff blue.

Indigro. Ah, there you go thank you but then we got a little more history stuff let's get into takeaway number two blue was unpopular in europe until specific developments in catholic art in the 1100s and i know i know we're all huge fans of 1100s art so we all know this yeah i was gonna i was gonna bring this up if you didn't so i'm glad i'm just glad you finally got to it the the middle ages man i gotta tell you that was the one i mean i guess it makes sense too because if you're looking you said the 1100s and the first crusade started in 1096 which means a lot lot of Europeans were traveling towards areas like the Byzantine Empire and then towards the Middle East. So I guess it would make sense that they would have more access to blue as well.

And that would bring that back. Yeah, that must be part of it. Because, yeah, this is partly a trade thing. And also, like we were just saying, it was incredibly hard to just get blue like to make things blue and so between that and cultural reasons europe was just not that into it and then we'll weirdly have a story here where a couple things dovetail and suddenly europe is way into blue like it's like they're a kid having a new phase or something it's that and that is that has a lot to do with the crusades the crusades brought um different foods

and spices over to uh western europe you know and then uh the other aspect of that of course being you know colors and art styles and things like that so glad those crusades happened i mean let's be let's be honest okay they were only bad for some people it's like a right-wing comic character where they're like i know i'm gonna get canceled but i'm glad acre fell or some weird like really obscure crusades thing yeah i mean there was man i had to watch the same Crusades documentary four times a year back to back because of the different classes that I, and like there was, you learn some shit about the Crusades, like about, there was like a lot of cannibalism happening during the Crusades. And you're like, Jesus. Yeah.

Yeah. There was a lot of things where they were like the the crusaders ended up eating um you know saracen corpses and they were like just like spread the word that we did that and that is a that is a horror to share that information yeah wow there's a bunch of q anon people listening now like there's cannibalism happening now too i mean technically sure I mean, technically, sure. Well, as far as Europe's love of blue, before the 1100s, they were just not that into it across the board. According to Cassius St. Clair, you had Paleolithic cultures who mostly painted in black and white and red. And then the Romans associated blue with barbarians.

They didn't like the Celtic soldiers would paint themselves blue. The writer Pliny said that women would paint themselves blue before participating in orgies, which he thought was a bad thing. And then apparently early Christian writings, there was a 19th century survey of early Christian authors, and they found that blue was the least used color. It was a mere 1% of the total amount of colors mentioned in their writing. So early Europe was just like not that into this color. Didn't do it. Well, yeah, because they couldn't make blue. He's just not that into blue.

And so then this takeaway is very specific about the 1100s, because then we have a couple different things all kind of take off at once. And one of them is a French statesman and historian and abbot named the Abbot Sujet, who lived in the 1100s and oversaw the reconstruction of Saint-Denis Abbey in what is now the suburbs of Paris. In the 1130s and 1140s, quote, it was here the craftsmen perfected the technique of coloring glass with cobalt to create the famous ink blue windows that they took with them to other cathedrals. End quote. So they figured out like a cobalt system to do blue stained glass.

And everybody in Europe was like, this is amazing. Blue glass? You kidding me? Freaking out. Yeah, and then that dude in the 1800s wrote that book. Right. Took him a good 760 years to do it, but he finally did. But yeah, but that really does tie into the timeline and the significance of cause and

effect when you look at, because the seat, like literally the crusade started in Claremont, France, when Urban II called all these leaders to say, hey, stop fighting each other. Let's go fight the Muslims. And then they leave. And then, yeah, so about 30 to 40 years later, they're coming back or like, you know, people have been back. They've established themselves. They have established trade. And now all of a sudden this is blowing up like that makes perfect sense.

Yeah, exactly. That's that's the only reason I really liked history is because it's an, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, exactly. That's the only reason I really liked history is because it's an easy thing to make sense with. Oh, man, I love that. I was like, oh, so it's just like a thing happened, and then another thing happened? I can teach this. Well, and then the other like Catholic spark we have here is this Cassius St. Clair again, quote, at around the same time, the Virgin Mary was increasingly depicted wearing bright blue robes. Previously, she had been usually shown in dark colors that conveyed her mourning for the death of her son, end quote. And that fits with what I saw, like, as a grown up Catholic kid, like Mary wore blue a lot. And I guess it came from this time. And so people were like, and if that'sary's color i should show i'm catholic by like doing a bunch of blue stuff obviously like i love mary you know before that it was in the european colors of the red white and black and it just looked like she was wearing a bulls jersey

she probably was michael jordan's the goat she had the number 40 the 45 jordan on like wow those are rare no that's the worst jordan number yeah but those are like super valuable those original 45 jerseys when they came out they're worth like such a such a huge amount of money yeah i have a friend that had one of those and they died and we were all just like what's going on with that 45 jersey though what he also has he also has a signed photo of nolan ryan punching robin ventura and we were all just like staring at it to get you know like afterwards when we're having like the party at the parents house and we're all just like what do you think's gonna happen on the nolan ryan picture that's the number one song when he passed away by the way blue by eiffel 65 there you go

that's every year's 2000 y2k baby full circle when uh and so between this like church window and crusades thing going on and then also the turning blue into the color of the virgin mary europe gets really really really into blue in a way that is even measurable and recorded. Cassius Sinclair says, for one thing, artists starting around 1400 started depicting Mary wearing bright blue. And so also they started writing in their contracts that we still have, like language that said, you, my patron, will provide either money or money for a trip to Venice so I can get enough blue pigment to paint this blue stuff. There's also one other piece of evidence for blue becoming more popular is the 1100s, the French royal family adopted a new coat of arms,

which was a gold fleur-de-lis on an azure ground, as a tribute to the Virgin, end quote. And she says from there, everybody copied them. And in 1200, only 5% of European coats of arms had blue. By 1250, it was 15%. By 1300, a quarter. By 1400, just under one third. So in about 200 years, we went from almost none to almost a third of European royal families wearing blue because they got way into it. Kind of how I feel doing podcasts. Like you were one of the few and then everybody else showed up. I've been doing it a while.'s all i'm saying go on my ancestral family's coat of arms is so it's like the worst it's like the worst one ever it's just it's a red shield with like four rectangles above and four rectangles below that are just yellow so it's just like

essentially like a red shield with eight yellow squares. Hey, everybody. Jeff's family has a coat of arms. Fancy. That's that fated tattoo that I got. Show the audience. Show the people. Wait. Oh, you have a tattoo of it.

Yeah, because I was trash in New England. That's what happens when you're 18 years old and white in New England. It's either this or a Red Sox tattoo. Yeah, but there's a weird thing where, I don't know, an entire continent decided to get into a favorite color together. And it kind of stuck with us. A third is about the percentage that they find in those surveys for people who blue is their favorite color.

It's very strange. That's cool symmetry. Yeah. And from here, let's get into the last takeaway of the episode. Takeaway number three. Blue raspberry flavoring is an elaborate trick in three different ways. Yeah. I've heard this.

I, blue raspberry, back when I had that blue phase where it was my absolute favorite color in a militant way, I was really into blue raspberry slurpees and candy and everything. I don't know about you guys, but that was my thing. I think that was like the predominant flavor of the early to mid-90s. Yeah, yeah. I remember being into it for a while when it was first a thing, but it got so worn out. And even now, I'm like, I know what you are.

Get out of here. There's no blue raspberries. Get out of here. know what you are. Get out of here. There's no blue raspberries. Get out of here. Get out of here. Get out of here. Blue raspberries are blueberries. You're not tricking me anymore, Illuminati. You're not a fruit if you have a Z.

Oh, yeah. They're like raspberries. It's like, that's not real. It's not real. It's like when you're at a restaurant and you see wings on the menu, but it's spelled with a Y and a Z. You're like, why aren't you just writing wings? What's up?

Or chicken when it's like chicken. Yeah. Like C-H-I-K apostrophe N. You're like, that's not real. And it's always, it's always the mystery flavor. If anything says mystery flavor, I promise you're not going to rip that wrapper off and taste cherry. It's going to be blue raspberry.

Yeah. I was never brave enough to eat a mystery flavor dum-dum, but those mystery flavor airheads, the ones that are just white. I think it's blue raspberry. That's blue raspberry, which is so insulting because they have blue raspberry airheads. The worst airhead, I would argue. That would be funny if the mystery flavor was green onion. Yeah.

Like sour cream and chive airheads or something. Loaded baked potato. Yeah. Wouldn't that be great? Ranch. A nice ranch airhead. Get me going through it. Have either of you played that jelly bean game

where you take turns played that jelly bean game where the the you take turns and the jelly bean will either be an actual jelly bean or it'll taste like boogers like boogers is one of them all flavored um jelly beans from harry potter pretty bad yeah yeah i think it's a similar concept yeah i've done that yeah i did that i did that once on portugal the man's tour bus and got nothing but real jelly beans it was like i get that you won jeopardy a few times but yes you're like i made it i made some grammy winners eat flavored jelly beans so i feel like i'm doing all right exactly it wasn't my idea i'm not I'm not a, who am I? Ashton Kutcher? I did, Adam.

I definitely imagined that story as they were about to go on stage. And then like John can't sing right. Cause he just had this weird jelly bean and you're like, I'm doing fine. Like, I mean, it was pretty close. It was pretty close to showtime. Adam just, I don't remember who got all the trash jelly beans. I think Scottott the road manager which is fair oh he can do it that works for me he's that is a that man is he's a strong man i feel like he could take it yeah he's one of my favorite people in the whole world i love scott

i always assume scott hates me i was like hey you like hate me right and he's like no i'm just busy i'm like all right and that's why he hates you well we uh so there's three reasons here that blue raspberry is an elaborate trick one of them is that that's not really a fruit the other one is that that's not really a flavor and then the other one is that it's a way of getting around u.s federal law so we'll talk about each of these in order uh It's all like, I think people understand that it's artificial in general because it's Technicolor, but there's like a lot of deception here going on. I find it hard to believe that the sugar peddling industry would deceive us in any way. Do we know what like the formula is for the flavor?

Yeah. Our main sources are Bon Appetit and also Mental Floss. They've both done great articles about this. But the first thing, the flavor here, Bon Appetit reached out to Jerry Bowman, the executive director of the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association of the United States. So that's a person. Sure, sure, sure. He says that the flavor profile of artificial raspberry was developed using quote mostly

esters of the banana cherry and pineapple variety end quote so it's really just made of other fruits i can't taste the banana in it though yeah when you say it that way it actually sounds a little more appetizing let's just call it cherry banana and, and pineapple, was it? Yeah, banana, cherry, pineapple. Yeah, that's like cherry pina colada. Yeah. Yeah, like if it had been that this whole time, I'd be like one of my favorite candy flavors, honestly. Yeah, it's like tropical cherry way into it. I like when they make the cherry really pop.

Yeah. And then it's partly made of those things because there are real raspberries, obviously. But according to Bon Appetit, there aren't really anything close to that bright blue raspberry in nature. There is something called the white bark raspberry. And I sent you guys a picture of it. The white bark raspberry, if it gets extremely ripe, it can start to be a little bit bluish, but still really, really dark. And that's what some of the flavor people say. Like they say, hey, see, it's real, but it's not.

It's made up. We used to call those blackberries. And then when I had real blackberries, I was like, oh, that's a very different thing. We used to have those wild bushes at my family's old place back home. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's a flavor really made of banana, cherry, pineapple. It doesn't really exist in nature.

And then the other thing going on here is that in the mid-20th century, you have frozen treat manufacturers making like a box of Otter Pops or trying to make Icy's or something. And they realized that a bunch of good fruits are reddish, including raspberries, because you also have cherry, you have strawberry, you have like watermelon is pinkish red. And so they said, hey, we need like different reds for each of these fruits and the artificial flavor. Here's Mental Floss quote, scientists soon found out though, that the most inexpensive and widely available dye for the deep red of raspberries provoked severe reactions and was deemed a possible carcinogen. And this is FD&C Red No. 2

was initially used for raspberry flavors, because it's like a deep red that looks like a red raspberry. But then they decided it might be bad for you. And good old Louis Blue Raspberry reaps the benefits. Yes. Bon Appetit talk to Ai Hisano, who is a Harvard business historian, who says that there was research in 1957 saying that the dye was safe, but it was a report funded by the dye industry and possibly not valid. And then other studies in the 60s and 70s suggested that it's bad for you. And

in 1976, the FDA banned it. It's still used in the UK and in some other countries. It's not actually clear whether it's bad for you or not. But in the meantime, food companies had this blue color just sitting around. And according to University of Pennsylvania food historian Nadia Berenstein, the blue dye was, quote, the final frontier for food coloring. And she says that basically just some loose flavor was going to get it, and it was a matter of time. And they ended up picking raspberry.

That's what happened. The forbidden blue. Yeah. Congratulations, raspberry. Yeah. So they developed this fake flavor for a fake fake fruit to get around finding out that a dye they were using before was maybe bad for you, maybe not. It's all like illusions and mirrors and smoke. Everybody wins.

Gotta get to the UK, get some of that red number two. I believe it's pronounced red number two. There's an O in number. Number two. Two. Number. You can only get it from people who look and talk like Mick Jagger. That's the only way.

Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Adam Todd Brown and to Jeff May for being just the best. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. and blue lobsters. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than two dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring the color blue with us. Here is one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, for most of history, blue was either an ancient Egyptian technology or an exotic trade good. Takeaway number two, blue was unpopular in Europe until specific developments in Catholic art in the 1100s. And takeaway number three, blue raspberry flavoring is an elaborate trick in three different ways. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. And I, because I already

told you about the Unpopular Opinion Podcast Network, you know, created and built by Adam Todd Brown. Jeff May is often there. He also podcasts elsewhere. Also, I want to read you a tweet from somebody else that I think captures something important about these guys. The tweet is by a fan of the show named Michael, username at bad underscore Shakespeare, which is just a fun username too. And Michael tweeted this in August when this show was pretty much brand new and I went on their show to like partly talk about it, which is really nice to get to do. And here's this tweet from Michael quote, if I knew nothing else about at Unpops, I would

judge it on the fact that a friend of the network was fired from his full time job and started his own podcast. So they dedicated this week's episode to promoting him ban for life for both podcasts. And quote, and I think that's a better plug than anything I have. Like, please check out Unpopular Opinion, created and run by Adam. Please check out Jeff's other shows with Gamefully Unemployed and with Sideshow's Sideshow. They're making awesome stuff anyway. Like, it stands on its own. And then on top of that, they're wonderful guys and wonderful friends.

So I implore you to support them if you can in any way. And you'll also have a good time doing it. So win-win. So yeah, wonderful guests this week. We also had many research sources this week, and here are some key ones. A great article in The New Yorker by historian Simon Schama. It's titled Treasures from the Color Archive. A great book titled The Secret Lives of Color, written by cultural historian Cassia St. Clair. Also a deep dive from Bon Appetit, it is titled What Even Is Blue Raspberry Anyway? And it's by Michael Y. Park. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun.

And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.