Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Color Red

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the color red is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

The color red, known for being a color, famous for being this podcast logo color. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why the color red is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there folks, and hey there, Ciphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. I'm a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting that people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden.

Katie! We have a topic and also people pick the collective nickname for themselves. It is Cipelopods. It's so good. I'm so proud of you guys. It's perfect. It's great. It's so good.

It's got a double thing, which is, one, it's a great pun, and cephalpods are great. And two, it's going to freak out Alex just a little bit every time he has to think about it. It's true. They're not quite jellyfish level, but some cephalopods, especially giant squids, mess me up a little bit. So octopuses I'm the most good with, squids the least. This is good for Alex's growth. It really is. We're going to get them out there.

We're going to get them, like, by the time we're done, Alex will be a deep sea explorer down there in the Mariana Trench, looking at all the stuff. Yeah, if you're ever watching my social media videos and my hat is one of those red stocking haps, Jacques Cousteau War, that's it. Yeah. That's happened. We've done it. Yeah. Wonderful choice, folks. We'll, we'll, like, post an email later about what that could mean with some merch maybe. Ooh, preview. In the meantime, we have a wonderful topic this week. Katie, what's your relationship to or opinion of the color red? I like it. It's a good, solid color.

I don't, I have, for some reason, because of my complexion, I don't wear a lot of red. I'm a little bit pale. I have, it's not quite red hair, but it's red hair adjacent. and my grandma had this notion, she was a redhead, and she had this notion that as a redhead you should not wear red because that's too much red. I think I kind of internalized that, even though my hair's not red red-adjacent.

So I don't wear a lot of it, but I do like it as a color. It's a very, very stark color. It's never been like sort of in my favorite colors category, but when it is applied in a, like, you know, looking at like a red fire truck. Nothing like that, man. It's so good. I have a little bit the same opinion because I, just my scan, I don't know if red goes great with it.

And red is one of my favorite colors, especially in like a sportsy context or a zippy context or an exciting context or a podcast context. Yeah. I love it. It's our logo. Yeah. It's like truly one of my favorite colors. And then one of the research days for me on this topic, I was wearing my Manchester United shirt. And I was like, oh, I'm kind of dressed like the thing I'm reading about.

Great. So I love it. Yeah, red's awesome. Yeah. I was my first car. It was red. You know, it's great. Because there are a lot of, there are different shades of red.

And I do like, I really do like sort of a nice, dark, rich shade of red. It makes me happy to look at. And I like really rusty red as well. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, it's just like it's a very, it's a very versatile color. I think bright red, like when there's too much bright red in a situation, it feels aggressive to me and I get scared.

I'm like a bull. I'm like, oh no, bright red. This is antagonizing. I'm going to headbut you. We got to touch that later, but I'm sure you know, people may not know bulls cannot see red. They only see the motion of the cape. So it's sort of a myth. It's great.

Yeah. And it's actually, there's, I'm sure we'll talk about it more. But yeah, there's actually some evidence that it may be like, you know, for them, it's like just a dark color and it's the motion. So like for them, it's like, oh, this looks, it's just an antagonizing dark color. It's not that it's red. It's like Darth Vader's cape. It's like, oh, spooky. Yeah.

Puppy. Yeah. And I really like the exact red of the podcast logo and that's why I picked it. It's a nice. That's a good one. My first ever car was a tiny Honda fit that is not powerful. And I got it in a sporty red because I wanted it to be fun. Wow. Manchester United, Chicago Bulls.

Like I love a just bull red. Like a let's go. Fire engines. That let's go. Yeah. I remember I once wore red to when I was getting my car. I didn't pick my car in red. I was like the color was stingray of my cyanon.

And it's like, oh, you have a stingray. Stingray was a color. It's like, guys, that's not really a color. That's an animal. Anyways, I wore a red shirt, though, because I had read a study that, like, when you're, like, when you're negotiating, red is a very powerful color. So I found, like, because I had some red shirts. So I wore a red shirt. And the gosh durn car dealer still wouldn't stop just talking to my dad, despite my dad only being there to coson.

and like my dad had nothing like my dad was like I'm talk to her I'm not the one buying the car like so it's just like yeah I was like I wore red and everything it didn't work that's so wonderful that you did the red psychology uh obviously the car dealer was sexist but let's make it happier and decide he was afraid of you because your power right right I scared him so much yeah he was like like cowering behind my father being like save me from this 21-year-old. And also, this is our ninth episode of SIF about a color. I'll just try to link them all in the show links or something.

Me and Katie have done purple. We've also done indigo, which is both a plant and a color. And then I did one with Atlanta Johnston and Caitlin Gill about magenta. And then there are episodes with Adam Todd Brown and Jeff May about gray, blue, beige, green, and orange. So a ton of colors so far And let us know if you want to hear another one Listeners pick most of the topics We've knocked out some of the rogy boves

Yeah, yeah Yellow's still out there Actually just yellow's out there How about that? That's amazing Hey Maybe that's next Well, soon, soon! Yeah

It's off to the syphilopods Let us know If you're a cuttlefish, switch to whatever color you want Indicate it Yeah and on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week that is in a segment called we count numbers numbers numbers and stats together yeah we did it and also it's the first time in a long time that I watched the actual Taylor Swift music video for this kitty really helped with playing this together it's a wild music video like I forgot It's very chaotic.

There's a lot of musicians in animal costumes. You wouldn't expect it. Yeah. Yeah. Like, there's a vague, the shining vibe to it that I'd forgotten about. It's that shape of dog costume or bear costume, yeah. Yeah. But putting that horror out of my mind, this name was submitted by Kennedy Lee.

Thank you, Kennedy. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a miscellian wacky and bat as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. speaking of animals the first number this week is at least 31,000 years old at least 31,000 years ago that's when humans drew a red line drawing of bears on the walls of a cave it's the oldest extant human art that you know somebody might on older art but it's the oldest art we have from humans I'm looking at it and it looks good it looks like it's it looks really good it's really good it's not I mean, if I'm not mistaken, they've almost got kind of like a 3D effect going on here because it kind of looks like they maybe drew a little like two ear nubbins. Yeah.

The shape of the bear is very accurate. It's not what you would expect for cave drawings where sometimes it's like more abstract, you know, very simple right before we had kind of come up with more concepts and art perspective, etc. But the face shape really well, the forehead, the nose, the lip, detail, the chin, and it also has a little hump on its back, as bears typically have. It's really impressive. It's like I'm surprised at this.

Exactly. I was too. It's better than I could draw, and I'm 31,000 years more advanced. It's much better than Alex could draw. I mean, you could draw better, yeah. And yeah, this is amazing in so many ways, especially for our. topic, people 31,000 years ago could figure out how to take dirt and clay, which specifically contained iron oxides. Iron oxides are reddish color. And then you can just kind of mush that

into a red pigments and draw art in the color red 31,000 years ago. I only managed to draw like a wicked, a wicked bear, very cool looking bear. But also this pigment is really long lasting because we still have, I guess one thing is that like caves aren't as exposed to the elements. So you have some preservation, but it looks really good. Exactly. It really does end. It's in modern France. It's in a place called Chauvet. And it's also been a clue about our understanding of prehistoric animals because this was a species that we call cave bears. They went extinct about 25,000 years ago. About 50% bigger than grizzlies, males weighed up to 1,000 500 pounds.

Bigger than most bears, but like a very big polar bear could be bigger. Okay, yeah. So like about the size of the largest polar bears that exist. Yeah, and then bigger than anything that lives now in like central Europe. God, that's so scary though. You go in a cave and a bear, like, because if you've seen, polar bears are scary, they are so frightening. And the only reason I don't have like a phobia of them is that I'm not.

going to encounter them because I don't frequent the tundra. So I'm not worrying about it. But if it was just like you're you're puttering around and you look in a cave and this giant creature who loves eating you is there, that is so scary. Yeah. And there's been a lot of inaccurate theories about these bears because for one thing, we thought they mainly ate meat, but we've come to believe that they were mainly plant eaters. Whoa. And part of why they died out is that the Ice Age killed too many plants that they ate. The other thing we think is that humans were respectfully afraid of them and also not that good at hunting them just because they're so big and powerful.

Yeah. We think they mostly went extinct because of the Ice Age killing plants and humans occupying too many caves. Like the bears needed the caves for hibernation and then humans filled in too many of them. It's a fatal Goldilocks story. The Goldilocks story is actually a cautionary tale for bears. don't let the cute little girl into your home where you'll go extinct. Exactly.

She'll have 100 babies overpopulate, you know. I know the humans look cute, but you let them go, and now you have, like, way too many humans. You've got a human infestation. Yeah, yeah. I'm still looking at this artwork. It's really interesting because it kind of looks like I can't tell whether these are intentional to sort of, like, have there be more bears. But it looks like there's a few drafts. like a few different drawings of bear heads that maybe were first drafts or unfinished.

Yeah, it's a crowd. Because they're not as good as the main one. Like the main one looks the best in terms of like the shape of the head looks the most bear-like to me. So I'm wondering if it's like they kind of started on the other two. And then they're like, yeah, these are okay. But then like once they really got a good bear shape going, they completed that bear, which it looks kind of like a sketchbook. It's really cool to see that. And yeah, it's some of the first visual art and culture in human history is red drawings of animals.

Like there's this Bears example, and then another number here is about 16,000 years ago. About 16,000 years is the age of cave art of bison that we've found in modern Spain at a place called Altamira. They use dark material for the outline and then a bunch of rich red material for filling it all in and shading it. other caves have lion species and hyena species that were in Europe, you know, there could be older art that we find someday, but people just kept making red drawings of cool animals was the beginning of human art and culture. This bison drawing would make an awesome tattoo. Yeah.

The separate hooves, the eye detail of the face. It looks incredible. It's really neat, yeah. Like some cave art is like better than, say, like, pre-Renaissance. art like in Europe you look at some of the religious art sort of in the you know in the medieval era right like and it's like so flat and inanimate and even though these are relatively flat they're still the proportions seem a lot better than I don't know a lot of like art that came afterwards which is interesting and especially medieval art the drawings of humans or buildings or something is pretty good

and then the drawing of an animal is the weirdest thing you've ever seen. Like, their version of a lion is like some kind of salamander thing. It's weird. And babies are just like small, miniaturized humans. Oh, yes. I still love that weird art. But it is interesting because, yeah, looking at, I mean, looking at this bear, this bear is a lot better.

It's quite good. Which I think is, I mean, it's not too surprising, right? Because art's going to shift with sort of the culture. And also, this could just have been an exceptionally talented. individual who drew this. Yeah, and whoever was talented at art used red. Yeah. This episode has a mega takeaway coming with a bunch of numbers in it, but the last number

before that is about 9,000 years ago. So 7,000 years after the bison art, 9,000 years ago, that's the founding date of arguably the first agricultural community in human history. It's in modern Turkey, it's at a location called Chathalhuyuk. and Chattelhuyuk is something that's come up if folks heard or attended the past SIF episode about weasels. We talked about Chattel Huyuk there in London. Weasels. We did.

Because weasel bones and the bones of other animals were one of the key decorative things people did in this first permanent agricultural community. They decorate walls and so on with bones. Their other decorative approach was red, like red iron oxide pigments. Who doesn't want an open concept? Hutt with weasel bones and red markings. Like, these bones feel a little grisly. Okay, I'll use the exact color of vertebrate blood to like make it less spooky. Fine.

I mean, why did we use so much red pigment? Because is it because that was like a really strong pigment that right out the gate we could pretty easily procure strong red pigments versus like it's not like purple. is an easy pigment to make, or blue even, whereas red has a lot of naturally occurring pigments that are available and really strong. Yeah, that's why. Cool. Yeah, we could make red easily and strongly from stuff around us.

I don't need to learn anymore. I just guessed it. Yeah, and really the first way we think globally and parallel invented everywhere was the element iron, its oxides. are literally rust or make other reddish colors. And so you could just grab that from the ground and smear it or be slightly more artful. But either way, you could just make stuff red without other technology and gear and ideas. And red is like, it's one of the major, like we have three major wavelengths of light that can hit our eyes.

And it's red, blue, and green. Yeah. Then basically all the color we see is sort of some variation of these ways. wavelengths interacting with each other to give us the full range of color. But yeah, red is a very easier on our eyes. Like blue light can actually cause a little more eye strain than red. So it is interesting because it's like one of the major wavelengths of light that we can see easily see.

And it's also like in a very abundant pigment. I mean, there's a whole planet made out of red out there. That's right. Red Earth. Oh, our enemy version of our. Earth. Bizarro Earth. Bizarro Earth. No, yeah, Mars.

And yeah, all that chemistry and biology and more gets us into. Mega takeaway number one. Red led to the invention of the human concept of colors. Whoa. There's a little tricky to understand

and also, to be clear, we've had the same, like, eyes and brains for hundreds of thousands of years. People in these prehistoric times saw the world the same way you do. But red was one of the very first shades of color that we made on purpose conceived of as a color named and that paved the way for us to do it with other colors at all. Yeah, I see what you're saying. So it's like we saw colors. We knew that colors existed because we saw them, but we started with red when we started naming, labeling, and trying to procure colors and dyes and things like that.

Exactly. Yeah, like the active choice to make something a color, we started with red. Red was first. Right. I've heard this thing, and like it's this kind of, I don't know if it's still going around the internet, but this idea that unless you have a concept and a word for a color, you can't really see it or you don't recognize it as a color, that's not true. It's a lot more nuanced than that.

You, of course, can see colors, even if you don't have words or concepts for them. The thing that is true is that when you have, say, I mean, you can be trained to see more subtle gradations of colors. Like, you can be trained to see different shades of colors versus lumping all the colors together. You can still, so, like, if a shade is different enough from another color, you will still see that. but like if you see two versions of blue, you might just say these are both blue, whereas obviously if you have the language for it, you're like, well, this is teal and this is blue or whatever. But it's not that people literally can't see the difference in shades or the difference in colors. It is true, though.

Like for really very slight variations in shades, you can learn to detect those better. You can get better at it when they're really, really subtle and it's hard to see. But it's not, I think there was like 10 years ago or something, but I remember it being like, oh, like some cultures, like they literally can't see kind of certain colors because they don't have the words for it. And it's like, that is not even remotely true. Right. They're going around like bulls or dogs or something. Like, I don't see it. Right.

Yeah. Perfect examples. Yeah. Yeah. These various shades of blue. We have specific names for some of them, but we see them either way. And this especially came up on the past. episode about orange. Like, people in Europe especially were just slow to name orange and more

specifically conceptualize it. But they definitely saw it. They just had other names for it. Yeah. Like they called it yellow, red and so on. Right. Which it kind of is. So, you know, makes sense. Yeah. They're not wrong. Yeah. And yeah, and red paved the way for pretty much all of it. There's also two key sources for this and the whole episode. One of them is a book called Red the History of a Color. That is by Michelle Pastero, Professor Emeritus at the Practical School of Advanced Studies of the Sorbonne.

And the other is The Secret Lives of Color that's by Cultural Historian and Design Journalist Cassia St. Clair. And I like Michelle Pastero's quote about red. He says, quote, red is the archetypal color, the first color humans mastered, fabricated, reproduced and broke down into different shades,

first in painting, later in dying. That's so interesting, yeah. And he's also written books about colors besides red. He's not just some kind of red obsessive. Some redhead. We used his blue book for the Indigo episode. Like red was the beginning of us. Making colors, there were some super early uses of Indigo, too, that we'll talk about.

But red was the beginning. Well, I too have read a lot of books on colors, Alex, and the books that I have read have a lot of pictures in them. So who's to say who is more learned? For example, the red fish comes before the blue fish. You know, you count a fish and then a second fish, and then you see the beginning of color. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I had this great, I had this great little golden book where it was these cats mixing colors. It was so cute.

And they were little painters, but they would get real messy because they're kittens. And they'd be mixing all these colors. But, you know, they started with the sort of like red, blue, green, you know, the primary colors. and then they'd kind of like get into the more messy colors. Yeah. I love every color topic because it's so sift. It's been with us since infancy, basically. We were just taught colors immediately as soon as possible.

You know, light works the way it works, and then our eyes interpret it and our minds interpret it. Red is the longest part of the visible spectrum, the longest wavelength. Also, the human eye uses cones and rods to see cones give us our color vision. As Katie said, the cones see red. or green or blue. Also, about 60% of all the cones are the red kind. We just have more cones for it. Yeah. Like we mentioned, bulls don't see it. They only have cones for green and blue. They just like the motion of the cape. And also, if you look at a bullfighter, the capes are usually more colors than just red. So it's all made up. I've also heard that red kind of comes across as more

black to them, just like a dark color. So like, which would be very clear and visible to them. Better for motion. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Then there's another odd biological thing with our association with red, which is blood. Yes. Our blood, much like that soil that got turned into pigment, it has a lot of iron in it. Our blood has hemoglobin. And so between it being very red and being a big deal, right?

Like if you start bleeding or if you hunt something or if you're at war with another human, those are all visceral situations. And so every culture ever has been interested in blood and its color. Both something very positive, right, when it's inside you because you need it. And it could be kind of negative if it gets outside of you because that's a problem. Right, right. And then that led into like animal sacrifices as a whole ritual in many situations. Right. When we hunt animals, almost all vertebrate animals have red blood like us.

And so there's just been so many situations where we take an interest in blood. But it's interesting because you can't really use blood as a dye for red because it oxidizes and it dries brown. So you're not going to actually get blood red if you use blood because then it'll eventually kind of have that brownish color that's not pretty. And that really, really fits the thing that Michelle Pastor O gets into, which is that at least like fresh blood is the red color. But like you say, then it turns not so red. Yeah. And then our other big source of an obsession with red is another thing that is not red all the time. We're not even primarily red, which is fire.

Yeah. Like fire, we've developed a cultural thing where fire equals red. And in most situations, it's more of an orange or a yellow or a super hot blue. There's been a thing across a few different cultures where people came to decide that fire, you know, it gives us warmth and light and it also dances and moves. moves in cool ways. And then that's led some cultures to say, hey, fire must be living. Mm-hmm. Makes sense.

Right? Like, whatever makes life living, there must be some kind of commonality between fire and biological life because it's all moving and doing stuff and warm. It's not stupid. I think it's a good idea because fire moves, it consumes, right? Like, if you don't have sort of an understanding of cellular biology, which you wouldn't at this point in human history. Yeah, you don't know stuff.

It's like, well, look, organisms move around, they reproduce, and they eat. Fire moves around, it reproduces, and it eats. So, of course, it's going to seem like a living thing. I don't think that's, I don't, I think that's like a very smart mistake that people made. I agree. A giant cave bear and a fire both eat a shrub, you know? They just, it's just different, but otherwise the same. Yeah.

Yeah. And they probably would recognize plants as living things, and those can spread. And fire can spread. So unless you would have the understanding of chemistry that came much later, of course it seems like it's alive. That makes perfect sense. And then fire, as people tried to figure it out, they said, oh, fire also must be one of the elements that makes up the universe. Like the ancient Greeks had fire as one of their four elements along with earth and water and winds, because those each seemed to have a life. forced to. In ancient China, it was one of the five elements along with earth, water, wood, and metal. And so between like fire and blood, people got really into things that they then associated with red. And the other big thing besides our eyes and our blood and our fire is just a huge amount of ways to make red pigments and dyes. All over the world, people had a ton of ways, not just that iron oxide and dirt. Yeah, because it's a fairly abundant pigment in nature. Yeah, like flowers and just natural stuff will be red. And then also if we want to

generate red as a paint or a dye, the fancier name for those iron oxides is hematite. And that remained popular across the world for tens of thousands of years. It's not just cave people stuff. It might be most famous as the first red for ancient and Egyptian burial dress. blessings and decorations. And the Egyptian god Osiris is known as the Lord of the Red cloth because of his association with death and burial. I guess you could associate Red with either life or death because it's kind of involved in both things.

Yeah. So universal. Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. And yet another source was a mineral called Sinabar. Sinabar is really mercury sulfide. So not delicious.

Sinabar. Sounds good, Alex. I'm going to put it in my mouth. That led to a shade of red that people named vermilion. If you just grind up the rock, you get a beautiful, very strong vermilion pigment. Cascia St. Clair says that the amazing murals in Roman villas at Pompeii are mostly vermilion. I've seen those. They're so impressive. Yeah, yeah, I've been to Pompeii.

It's really, really impressive. I was like a little bit nervous to go because I felt like it would mostly be sad to see the bodies. But that's actually a very small part of it. You can also choose to skip that entirely. Most of it is just incredible artwork. Like it's so vivid and the pigments they used are so strong, really nice shade of red for a lot of the sort of fresco artwork. Yeah, cool. Yeah, I'm so glad you've seen it. It just seems amazing. And yeah, the pictures of it, it's like red, red. And they could just grind up a rock. It wasn't heard. Yeah, I think like the strongest pigments that I would see would be red and black. Like those were really strong and really bright. Those held up really, really well. Other pigments, I think, faded a little more or maybe it started out being a little bit duller. But they were still impressive. Like there was like some greens and yellows and stuff that that were surprisingly good. I'm glad you bring up like black because across art and also languages, apparently, as we've studied, art people made and also when words came into languages, there's a general trend where red is first except for words or pigments for black and white.

But with both black and white, we also think that conceptually those were more tied to just like darkness and light rather than like a color concept. Like, of course, people could take, like, coals or charcoal or something and just make a black line. So you could do that maybe before red. They also might not have quite thought of that as color in the way we do. They're just like, I made a line. Great. Do people think of white and black as color necessarily these days, right? Because, like, when we had, we had, like, black and white television and then color TV, right?

So I think that in a way, we still have something of that concept of, like, black and white aren't. really colors they are not included in the rainbow so yeah you know the example i think of as chindler's list like when it's black and white and then occasionally something's red like that's like the red is different like oh and yeah also we'll link about it there's like a linguistic study from the 1960s that claimed that every language in the whole world made red its first color word apparently that's been kind of debated since, but there could be some truth to it. It's probably pretty early, maybe not the first, but yeah. Back to like ways of making it, there's many minerals for it.

Also many plants. Three different examples are a plant called matter that's grown from India to the Mediterranean. It has pinkish colored roots that you can dry and crush and pound into a dark red dye. That's awesome, yeah. Another example is the Hanna plants. you can dry out and powder the leaves and then make body art and other red lines. Yet another plant source, it's called Carthamin, is a thistle-like plant where the petals can be made into a dye.

And then later in the episode, we'll talk about two different insects that are excellent red dye sources. One is in the Mediterranean, the others in the Americas. And then also if people have heard the episode about purple, we talked about the two major sources of that being a shellfish called Murak. that made the Tyrion purple, and then also a much lighter purple that came from lichens called Orkill, also pronounced Arkil or Orsanol. Both of those, you combine it with human urine to make a purple dye. And people have always been able to also make a different shade of that that's more like

red. It just wasn't as much of a go-to because there's less expensive reds. Like we don't have to pee to get red, which is nice. It's a bonus. And yeah, and then as far as like the other. exciting example of Red's dominance, we have the Bible. Both Testaments, especially the Old Testament. Red is the main word for a color in the writing of the Bible. Michelle Pesteros says that people have analyzed the color words across the whole text. And most of the time, if they're describing the appearance of something, they either describe

the pattern of it, like livestock being striped and spotted. And they also lean on words like ivory and gold, where it's an item that has an obvious color. But when there's a specific color word, about three quarters of the color words in the Bible are shades of red. I feel like bibles are all so often colored red, like either black or red. Yeah, that happens a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. Look, I have my own personal Bible here. It might be hard to, maybe backwards. And it is red. You came up with that bit so fast. Katie held up an Audubon Guide to Birds of North America. And it's a red cover. But that was a really funny bit to come up with.

But it's true. It's just this red book. And it's a, I didn't even bring it out for the podcast. So I just keep it on my desk because it's my personal Bible. That incredible prop work, I'm fast thinking. I love it. But yeah. And so like since we could make red so many ways and wanted to make it so many ways,

we proceeded to make it the symbolic color of blood and the symbolic. color of fire, these two vaguely living things. From there, we made it the symbol of all sorts of holidays from Lunar New Year in East Asia to Christian Christmas. And the maybe one exception to Red's dominance is textiles. Because if folks heard the Indigo episode, we covered the oldest ever indigo dyed cloth, which was made 6,200 years ago in Peru. That is older than the most ancient red dyed fabric we have by a few thousand years. Interesting. But all textiles decay rapidly, we don't actually know.

We think red was still probably first. But that was because they had a plant that produced a really strong indigo color in that area, right? Yeah, there's still like technique to it, but much like dyeing stuff red, people have dyed fabric indigo because of the availability and the ease of use, yeah. basically what we could find around us and process into dyes we would do that it just so happens in some areas right you're going to have certain plants that produce i mean seems like red is a pretty common one but yeah and in that area they had indigo exactly and so for similar reasons red dye is very very ancient much like red language art cultured symbols and and red is so dominance across all of the human cultures in the world that it led to a weird scientific myth in Europe. As recently as the late 1800s A.D.,

the recent times, there were European scientists who claimed that because red is so dominant across ancient cultures, human eyes must have only evolved to their present situation a few thousand years ago. What? And they claimed, like,

we must have used so much red because we saw differently. and like... Oh, I see. And that's not... It's a pretty good guess given everything we just went over, but it's not how it works. We've had the same eyes since Homo sapiens developed hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yeah, it's just that we had kind of a long run where it seemed like we were developing things like small societies and figuring out tool use in general. And then there was like an explosion at a certain point where it seemed like...

our ability to figure out tool use, like just kind of like shot up because like once you get the first few steps, you're like, okay, now I got it. So like that's probably more, more has to do with the fact that we finally got to a point in our human civilizations where we could go past like, I need to smash this fish with a rock or I'm going to die to like, I wonder if I can make fabrics a pretty red color. Exactly. And one expert, Michelle Pastor, sites, they basically suggest that red was the first tool in terms of art and visual anything. Yeah. Like, it's as fundamental as chisels or something, the color red.

Yeah. I hope it's clear it's like not just an ancient thing. And the last fun part of this mega takeaway is a powerful modern example of how much we like red to represent ourselves. National flags. Yes. It turns out red is the most popular color on national flags in the world. About three quarters of all countries' flags have it. Close second place is white, but blue is only around half.

Yellow and green are below that and everything else is way below that. Yeah, I mean, like the Italian flag has red on it. The British flag, a lot of European flags have red in it. The U.S. flag, it's just everywhere. Yeah, and apparently until the creation of both an independent India and an independent Pakistan, on most people in the world lived under either a flag with red on it or kind of no flag. Yeah. It was really the color of modern flags.

And the other weird flag factoid is that Jamaica is the only country on Earth whose flag is not red or white or blue. Whoa. Wait. Like white is carrying a lot of weight there. But yeah, no red, no white, no blue. Their flag is just black and yellow and green. Okay. Yeah.

I was thinking of Brazil, but no, they have blue, right? Yeah, they have blue and white. It's like green, yellow, and blue and white. Yeah, okay. A lot of that spread is due to various empires. Like, the British Empire pushed red really hard, and also in the mid-1600s, they professionalized their army, and part of the professionalization was red coats. Right.

And then France and Russia both associated red with revolution and the people, and so they spread it too. Yeah. Yeah. On one hand, I can see red being associated with sort of war, right? Because blood, et cetera. But also it makes you very bright and visible. But I guess, I guess like that was from the time before we kind of had any sort of like attempts at camouflage, right? It was always like, we see the approaching army. There's no attempt to hide the approaching army. So it's, it was fine to have as a color. Yeah, and also before World War I battle was especially smoky, and so not only were you not camouflaging, you wanted to kind of know if the other guys were British or not. Right, right. Or whatever other country.

I would, if I was a country, I would go as zebra stripes because of it being hard to determine who's who. And it would still be really distinctive, so you'd be able to identify your own soldiers, but then when the enemy is trying to pick out one of you to shoot, it's like, I don't know where his butt is and where the other one's front is. See, this is why you're the leader of the zebras. You have good ideas. You have good plans.

That's just some new lord to reveal about the show. Katie is leader of the zebras. Right. Yeah, I mean, like, well, we just talked, like, there are the zebras in California. Oh, yeah. I grew up in California among the zebras. Among the wild zebras.

I'm like Tarzan except zebras in California. Zarzan, right? More Zs, yeah. Yeah, it does add some Zs, which is very important to zebras, let me tell you. There's only one Z in zebra, even though the S kind of sounds like a Z at the end, right? It kind of, yeah. True, yeah. I digress, though.

Let's get back to Red. I got us there. And folks, that's such a massive mega takeaway with so many numbers and numbers before it. We are going to come back with three more takeaways about this global dominant color. All right. We're back and we have three further takeaways about red. They're all relatively quick. But starting with takeaway number two.

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he literally crossed a red line. Okay. That just sounds like a Looney Tunes thing. What, the Rubicon? Well, just that, like, you cross the Rubicon and it's a red line. Yeah, it is sort of like when Bugs Bunny saw his Florida off of the United States and you can see a big borderline. Yeah. And you, like, zoom out and you see the state name on the zoom out.

Yeah, this is a very weird combination of metaphors and actual history. And it all involves a very tiny river in northeastern Italy. It's like on the Adriatic side. It's good to lay out the basics of it because not everybody knows this trope or saying or history, Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Yeah. I mean, so Rubicon is not Italian, or I guess it's Latin origins. Yeah, they called it the Rubico, and it's been slightly anglicized. Right.

I think in Italian it's Rubicon. Oh, there you go. Yeah, that makes sense, yeah. And Rubico was the proper form in Latin of the adjective Rubber, which means red. Oh, okay. And this tiny river was very shallow and runs through. reddish soils. And so it's almost like the Red River, basically, as a name. Right, right, right. And then in history, it's become a saying 2,000 years later, Julius Caesar, very famous

Roman emperor and dictator. Before that, he was a general in the Roman Republic and then helped overthrow the republic. And in the year 49 BC, he is a powerful general who's up in Central Europe conquering and killing. And his rival, a guy named Pompey, is concerned. that Caesar will take over instead of Pompey taking over. I mean, Pompey wants to be in charge because he's Pompey. When you have a name like Pompey, you just want to be in charge. Right, you can't be like a junior associate if you're named Pompey. No way.

Right, right. Pompey's not an assistant manager to anyone. Pompey's in charge. So Pompey is back in Rome while Caesar is spending 10 years killing everyone in Gaul and writing a book about it. Pompey convinces the Senate to order Caesar to come back to the city of Rome and also not be in charge of armies anymore. And Caesar is suspicious that they'll charge him with crimes or kill him or something in this power struggle. I mean, he was on to something there. Both of these guys were jockeying big time. Yeah. Nobody's a total hero. Yeah. And Caesar says, I need to march

south back into Italy. And I'm going to cross this small river called the Rubicon. with a legion, which is more or less against the law. Like, you're not supposed to march your army toward Rome because it threatens to end the republic, which it did. Because, like, the modern saying is, like, you're at basically a point of no return and you decide to go across it. And that's what he did.

Yeah, that's where it comes from. He allegedly said the Latin words for, the die is cast. Right. At the moment, his army crossed to the Rubicon River because that meant it's time for a civil war against Pompey's forces. Then that happens. Caesar won the war.

Then he's killed and other guys to another civil war and so on. But it's been a figure of speech for 2,000 years since. It's a point of no return and it's dangerous crossing the Rubicon. Yeah, yeah. And so it's very fun that the river is literally a red line on a map. Like it's a red river. Right. And he crossed a red line in a metaphorical way too.

When you did say a red line, I did think it was Bugs Bunny with a paintbrush, drawing a red line, and then Yosemite Sam, who I would assume would be playing Caesar, keeps trying to cross it until he falls off a cliff. Because some of those cartoons, there's a line in the sand bit where he just keeps crossing it. Right. And then like Bugs Bunny leads them to some little fun little trap or something, yeah. Yeah, yeah, like Marcus Julius Bunny is crossing. a line or drawing a thing. Yeah. Yeah. With red also making people excited and panicky and stuff, let's move into takeaway number three.

Scarlet uniforms for Catholic Cardinals caused a satanic panic in the Renaissance. Oh, heck yeah. It turns out Catholic Cardinals have only wore red since the mid-1400s. They wore purple before that. which is hard to imagine. They're so red to me. I'm not religious, and I, I'm actually a little bit, you know, shy about, like, super, super organized religion when it comes to, like, things like rituals and stuff, because

sometimes I think like that could be potentially bad, right? But I love the aesthetic of it, you know, it's very cool. Like, all of the, like, Pope stuff that happens in Rome is really just as, as a vibe and aesthetically, very cool. Sociologically speaking, I'm sometimes concerned about it. But in terms of just like, I mean, it's cool. Seeing someone wear a red cape. Yeah.

Like, man, it's like Superman, except not really, but, you know. Yeah, and this is a thing where the Catholic Church took on Scarlet, which also in this time was considered a specific shade and production process of red. They took it on in a positive way, and then the oncoming Reformation took it as a negative thing about Catholicism in response. Because, like, there was a negative association with Scarlet. Yeah, and a lot of it comes from one line in the book of Revelation. The book of Revelation, if people don't know, it is a final book of the Bible, end of the New Testament, written kind of after a lot of the rest of it, and it's all about the apocalypse. Ah, well, you know, but I thought that sometimes people were into that religiously, right?

Because isn't that supposed to be, that's not necessarily supposed to be a bad thing in the context of religion, because then it's like everyone who's cool gets to go to heaven. Right, like rapture people are like, that's great. I'm on the positive side of the rapture. Sounds good. Right. But there's one line that associates Scarlet with an evil figure. they call this figure

the whore of Babylon Ah, well, that's a little harsh Yeah You can date more than one people in Babylon without these wild accusations And there's a strong misogynist thing here too

But Oh really? That's surprising Yeah I'm shocked Katie's hat flew off Her eyes are bugging out Like that rule

eyebrows flung right off my forehead. And the light about the horror of Babylon says that she does evil sex things with all the kings of the world and so on. Nice. But she's also described as wearing scarlet and or riding a scarlet beast. Oh, she looks so cool. Man, I'm on the horror of Babylon side. She's riding like a multi-headed lion dragon. and she looks so cool.

And like she's wearing an awesome outfit. Her hat looks kind of like some kind of weird cone. I'm into that. I mean, in the subsequent picture, I am seeing her being cast down into hell by angels. Still slaying it, though. She still looks great. And she's smiling.

She seems to be all right with it. Everyone actually in this, like even the lion beast thing looks kind of cool with it. Everyone seems to be having a good time. I think we can just all get along, folks. By the way, folks, I'm a lapsed Catholic. I can talk about any of this stuff. But also, two things to clarify. One is that the Bible's been translated and re-translated many times, so only in some versions to Scarlet come up at all. And the other thing to be clear about is that Cardinals started wearing Scarlet for positive reasons, very not related to Revelation. It was mostly because it was a prized fabric, and Cassius St. Clair is the key source here.

She says that Scarlet, you know, now it's just kind of a shade that you pick in a catalog or whatever. But back in the day, it was a specific red cloth made from, die from the females of a beetle species in the eastern Mediterranean, called the Kermis beetle. and they're extremely tiny insects. It takes about 80 female beetles to make one gram of that scarlet dye. And you grind them and mix and heat it. That's a lot of beetles for a whole robe. Yeah, so they were wiping out thousands and thousands of the beetles to make it. It's sort of like the Merak's shellfish that we talk about in the purple episode,

where just there was a big killing of them. Were they finding that? Because like with insects, you could get away with that as long as they're breeding fast enough because insects are very good at that. It's true. Yeah. Were they just like finding them and crushing them

and making no attempt to breed any of them? Much like the shellfish, those species are still around because they just can breed so fast that we didn't drive them to extinction. Right. Like take that early Catholicism like you thought you could crush these beetles. No, they're going to have sex so much. that they will outlast your robes.

Yeah, and also because you need to kill so many of them, scarlet cloth, really just through economics, there were sumptuary laws in some places, too. But really just through economics, scarlet cloth ends up being for royalty and rich people. Because it's just expensive to do all this painstaking beetle grinding lecture. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you've ever sat down and tried to grind a bunch of beetles, but it takes a lot of elbow grease. you like grind a different beetle to make the grease for your elbows and then you grind the scarlet beetles it's just horrible beetle deaf they keep trying to walk away and then in the 1400s a few things happen all at once there is a decline in the Marex shellfish population that makes Tyrion purple more expensive also Muslim people start to take over places like Constantinople and other areas of the eastern Mediterranean And so European Christians start to say, hey, our cardinals have been wearing Tyrian purple and other fancy colors to indicate their status in the church.

What if we switch just because we may be a different colors to better move here? Got to be unique. Got to be different. You can't have two religions show up at the same event wearing the same colors. That's a no-no. It's a faux pa. And also the Muslims are like, we've been into green this whole time. Like, you can have it, but the Christians are like, I'm weird, though.

I'm discriminating. It's very hard to imagine, to me, a lapsed Catholic. Like, before 1464, Cardinals mostly wore purple. There are members of the Catholic Church who currently wear purple. Like, who are they? Bishops, yeah. It's mainly the bishop. Okay, bishops.

And also, like, vestments for Advent and stuff. Yeah, there's still a lot of purple going on. But in the year 1464 specifically, Pope Paul II, and decreed that cardinals should wear scarlet and like specifically scarlet. And the big positive association was the blood and martyrdom of Jesus and saints. Like throughout all this time, red like scarlet was positive in Catholicism because of blood and sacrifice. Right. So it wasn't weird.

And so the cardinals make this switch. There's also just a fun fact here that it's a couple decades before Europeans start invading the Americas. So this change in the Catholic Church paved the way for red songbirds in North America to get called Cardinals. Oh, oh, okay. Like if those guys weren't wearing red, we probably wouldn't have called the birds that. I see. We would have called the birds something else like red. Red.

Reds. They are. Red red reds. The St. Louis Cardinals, one of their nicknames is the redbirds. Like, we would have just called them the redbirds, I think. Red bird. It's a red bird. I mean, when you look at bird names, you can usually guess if there's like a weird bird.

You're like, what? I mean, it's a yellow bird with a tuft on it. You Google it. It's like tuft and yellow bird. Or the name of one guy. That's the other way. Yeah. But yeah, and so the Catholic Church does this 1464 ever since then Cardinals have worn Scarlet.

And then people were really getting a reformation going. Like, this was only about 50 years before Martin Luther nailed theses to a church door. There were earlier people like Jan Hus agitating against them. The church was already accused of oppressiveness and financial crimes and other things. And this scarlet fabric in a very normal sense became a symbol of the church not spending money on the poor and good works. Right. Because they're like investing too much in beetle crushing to help the poor. Yeah, like along with gold fixtures.

and stuff. People were like, this is not Christian was the claim. And then that also got looped into a conspiracy theory about the Cardinals are wearing scarlet because they're in league with the whore of Babylon from the one line of revelation. And that became a satanic panic sort of thing. Right. Yeah. I mean, conspiracy, like if people think QAnon is new, it's, we've had, we've had conspiracy theories for a long time. Because I think this idea was implanted in us. by aliens to come up with conspiracies to make us as a as humanity to like so disconsent in humanity so when the aliens come to take over we're fighting among each other like trying to like because we have all sorts of conspiracies about each other we're not seeing

the real one which is aliens right and yeah so that exactly it's all the rest of history and cassia st clair points out that this like garlet as Satan thing, is still very much with us. In the 1900s, there was an occultist in the UK named Alistair Crowley. Oh, yeah, that guy. He created a character called The Scarlet Woman, pretty directly based on this take on the horror of Babylon. It was like a thing to worship in occult ways.

And Cascia St. Clair also points out that Mary Queen of Scots is a historical figure who embodied Scarlet in both the ways. about a hundred years after this cardinal change, Mary Queen of Scots is executed. She's Catholic, and Elizabeth I first is the Protestant English monarch who takes her out and eliminates that opponent. Is there anything, like, because the Scarlet Letter is a little bit around that time. Yeah. So it's like a little after that, right?

So it's like, is that anything, Alex? It is related to it. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is based on this take on Scarlet. about, like, evil and evil women, yeah. Right, because it's like a red A, which stands for adulteress, and his thesis was like, isn't it cool how we do this? Yeah, it's from, like, Revelation and also Protestants demonizing Catholics, yeah. Right. Huh, okay.

Mary Queen of Scots, on the day they chop her head off, she shows up to the event wearing, like, a big, dark cloak. but then she does a dramatic reveal where she throws the cloak off to reveal a completely scarlet outfit. That's amazing. See, we've had Rupol's drag race also around forever. Yes. That is, that's, I'm sorry, I probably don't really know the right terminology, but I believe one might say that's very snatch. Fierce, Riz, sure, any of it, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

She's working the runway up to the chopping chopping block. Up to getting your head cut up. And the main reason we know that story is everyone talked about it because it was useful to both Catholics and the opponents of Catholics. This was a perfect representation of her martyrdom for the cause of Catholicism. And her opponents said there's a perfect representation of her being in league with the whore of Babylon and all the bad Catholic stuff. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you know. So that's why the story is. is still readable and with us of a lady taking off a Coke one time. Right. Because Scarlett became this thing. It became like Catholics saying we're saintly and martyrlike and anti-Catholics saying they're like a demon from Revelation. Right, right.

And also women are bad. And we're still inside of Christianity too. Like we have not even gone outside of Christianity. It's all inside. Cool. Again, meanwhile, the Muslims are just. in the Eastern Mediterranean liking green and not really bothering anyone.

Yeah, green's cool. Like, the prophet likes green, we just really like green. It's, you can have red still. And yeah, off of that, we have one quick last takeaway, because takeaway number four, lots of the red coloring in your food comes from a former Spanish monopoly on an insect. So this is really interesting.

I have a personal take on this on Red Food Dye. But continue, Alex. Because the dye is called Kachanil. And on the label, it's E120, E120. Yeah. Is that one okay for you? Do you feel okay about it? Well, so like, so I have, not to brag, but I'm a super taster.

So I have more taste buds, a higher density of taste. buds. So I can actually... Katie is a supertaster, a.k.a. Food Morpheus. She has a food morphius, and she sees food differently. Yeah, it's not as cool as it sounds.

It just means there's a lot of stuff that tastes like crap to me. Don't listen to her. It's really cool. She's on a big coat and sunglasses. But like, so one of the things is like I had noticed that certain food, like I'd be eating a dessert and it's like, this tastes terrible. It's like really bitter. It's weird.

So like red velvet cake, certain like iced maybe like an iced sugar cookie that had pink or red frosting on it and it would have like this very like weird bitter taste I was like this is terrible and someone else would be eating it's like no

this is really good I don't know what you're talking about and I found out that it might be this one I'm not exactly sure which red dye it is but for certain people some people can taste this bitterness to the red dye and whereas like whereas other people can't

that's very interesting because, yeah, that is apparently one of the two reasons people oppose the use of this dye today because lots of food uses it. And apparently not even just foods, apparently everything from M&Ms to strawberry yogurt to lipstick and cosmetics. It uses a dye that is still made from tiny insects that live on the undersides of prickly pear cactuses and only eat prickly pear cactus. The scientific name's Dactylopius cacus. Mm-hmm. Nice. But some people can taste it different and don't like it.

And then some people are vegan and just oppose eating insects as part of that. Right, right. It's fair enough on both accounts. It is, it's just very, it was so strange. I felt so gaslit when I didn't realize it was because of the red dye where I like would taste just this. It's a really off-putting taste. And people would be like, why don't you like red velvet cake? It's amazing.

For me, it was horrible. you can see the lines of code but it's red it's not green you know yeah yeah exactly food morphies and this has been a major source of dye for thousands of years but these bugs they are originally from central america and south america they're now kind of harvested a few other places but empires like the triple alliance demanded sacks of the bugs in tribute from vassals and it's been used as dye and body paints and all sorts of things for more than two thousand years across the Americas. And it's edible, apparently.

Yeah, and it's edible. It's safe to eat. And then unfortunately, for the humans in the Americas, Spain invades most of the places where these bugs live. And Spain proceeds to create a cochineal monopoly across most of the worlds. And apparently it was as lucrative as anything except gold or silver in the Spanish Americas. The most amazing stat from Kasia St. Clair is that in.

Just one year, the year 1587, doesn't really matter what year. In just one year, Spain shipped 144,000 pounds of these bugs from Peru to Europe. Whoa. And specifically only to Spanish ports to then sell it as a monopoly. And also, they're very tiny bugs. So 144,000 pounds in weight is more than 10 billion of the bugs with a bee. Man, those bugs got to be getting busy to make up for all that. loss of bug.

And like the Kermis beetles, they do. Yeah, they're still with us. And they also make a very beautiful red dye. Along with Scarlet, like, people had other ways to make dye, but these were stronger, brighter, more color fast. And even more than the scarlet, this cauccaneal became very popular. It was so popular worldwide that in the 1700s, the emperor of China demanded that his officials acquire more cauccineal.

And he also didn't call it that name. He called it the Mandarin words meaning four in red. Hmm. Because this bug dye was so popular worldwide. Everybody wanted it. I'm looking at these bugs. And they're not the most, like, nice looking bug, I got to say. They're not the type of bug I'd be sort of like real psyched to have in my food.

They're kind of larval. Because I think they might be a larval form of a, of a, of a, an actual flying insect. Yeah. So they don't look, so they're not, they're not looking great, I would say. They're not looking appealing. And they also don't really look red. Like apparently when you squish them, that's really all it takes to get an amazing dye.

There's other steps, but it's been very easy to turn them into beautiful dye, even though they're very unassuming and an extremely specific form of life. Like they only eat prickly pear cactus and live on it. It's become a still popular global food dye. it's still inefficience and also natural way to make a red dye. And so all of us have probably eaten it. Some of it's in Cherry Coke, so I've definitely had it. Yeah, so I did a little bit of Googling on the red dye bitter, like which type of red dye.

So it's not necessarily just the bug red dye that has a bitter flavor. It can also be artificial red. So like red dye number 40 can be bitter flavor to it as well. so it's not it's not it's not the bug's fault i'm glad you know what you're putting in those red and blue pills food morphius huh hey it kind of comes together uh i don't know though like if you if you offered neo pills and you're like one of these pills is blue one of these pills it's a man of bugs he's just really trying to tilt him to join the the force or not i guess But the red pill, yeah, no, the red pill is the wake-up pill.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I did it wrong because I was associating red pills with horrible politics. But you're right. The blue pill is the side of the robots. Because, like, because bad losers appropriated the red pill from trans movie makers who did the Matrix, which is, you know, always a bummer. Yeah, that's a takeaway. for you weirdos out there.

Learn something. Stop being weird. Yeah. Swallow a bug and stop being weird. Yeah. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega takeaway number one,

the color red paved the way for the invention of the human concept of colors. We always saw colors but using colors making things colors that came from red. Takeaway number two, when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he literally crossed a red line in the form of a red river. Takeaway number three, scarlet uniforms for Catholic cardinals. caused a satanic panic in the renaissance. Takeaway number four, lots of the red coloring in your food is cochineal, which comes from a former Spanish monopoly on an insect.

And then tons of stats and numbers, especially throughout that first mega takeaway, about everything from the first art of cave bears and bison's and more ever made by people, to the national flags waving over most of the world's population. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is why sports cars are read. There is a very specific reason and car. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 21 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows

and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. It's just for those members who pick the wonderful name, Ciphalopods. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things,

check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include two crucial books One of them is Red, the History of a Color, that is written by Michelle Pastero, who's Professor Emeritus at the Practical School of Advanced Studies of the Sorbonne. The other book is The Secret Lives of Color, that is by cultural historian and design journalist Cassia St. Clair. That second book in particular, if you've liked any of our color episodes, check that out.

It's astounding. It's about more things than we talked about. We also leaned on digital resources about, especially the bugs that are turned into scarlet and the separate ones turned into Kachanil. There's an amazing documentary from Business Insider on YouTube about the current harvesting of that in Peru. Also a piece for Theconversation.com by Paniza Almark, Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at Edith Cowan University.

And then leaned on further digital resources, especially from the French Government's Ministry of Culture, and from Smithsonian Magazine about prehistoric red animal art. That page also features resources such as native-land.com. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie Lanoppe people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this

episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 111. That's about the topic of Lorum Ipsum. Fun fact there, that chunk of Lorum Ipsum text comes from an extremely specific treatise by Cicero. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Boudos band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. And extra special thanks to Burton today, because I love that logo. He's a wonderful artist in New Orleans. When we put

our heads together on it, here's an extra piece of lore, if you listen this far. When we put our heads together on the logo. I mentioned comps such as the Coca-Cola logo and the craft food logo, because I love those kinds of reds, and it led to his beautiful work on a logo we've had for every episode. Really love it. Also want to say special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. The Beacon Music Factory is a wonderful practice space and also place to take music lessons in my town of Beacon, New York, and they have a red logo. Red all the way down. Extra extra special thanks, go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners, our newly

christened syphilopods. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun A worker-owned network Of artists' own shows Supported directly By you