Stuff You Should Know - What's the deal with indigo?

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

Indigo is a color with a rich past. Learn all about it today.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, everyone in Podcast Land. If you have ever wanted to see us on stage telling jokes and slinging facts, and you live out West, you can come see us in Portland, Oregon, or Vancouver, Canada.

Yep, we'll be at the Chan Center in Vancouver on Sunday, March 29th, and then we'll be at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland on March 30th, and if you want tickets and info, then the best thing you can do right now is to go to S-Y-S-K-Live.com. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.

["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. There's Jerry over there again. Gosh, feels good to have you back. Cheers. Jerry says thanks.

And this is Step You Should Know. The smell of miso is back. I love the smell of miso in the morning. I've been doing a lot of miso lunches, actually. Just eating balls of miso? No, I found a soup that's pretty good. Miso soup? Well, a ramen and a miso that are a little,

because I was thinking like, man, I used to love those little 20 cent ramen's in college. It's like, I wonder if there's an elevated version of that. And there is. I'll plug it. Mike's Mighty Good Ramen. Okay.

It's a cup of soup, but it's just a little bit better. It's made from better ingredients. And instead of 20 cents, it's like $2. Oh, yeah? It's still pretty affordable. But it is good though? Yeah. It's worth the extra money?

It's just super fast and gets some low calories in your body to stave off some food cravings, stave off that cheeseburger craving, you know what I mean? Yes, which can be substantial. And you know what, I'm also back on, and this is all just because of calorie crap, but beef jerky is a nice little protein snack.

I like beef jerky. Not a ton of calories and aswajah's cravings. That one kid, sorry, that one guy, but he started it as a kid, our listener who makes beef jerky. I hate that stuff. He makes some really top quality stuff. It was good.

But you know, I had my moldy beef jerky incident years ago in LA. Oh, that's right. This is the first time I've had beef jerky in 14 years because of that incident. Well, you're back on the train though, huh? I'm glad. Well, not like a ton, but a couple of times a week

I'll snack on some beef jerky. That is, that's a lot. That's a lot of beef jerky. Yes, couple of times a week is a lot. I mean, that's like right at my wheelhouse, but it's a lot. And yeah, I don't know, a whole bag of beef jerky once or twice a week. Oh, okay.

I eat like two ounces. I got you. Yeah. Do you weigh it out first? I do. Do you really? Yeah. I've been on the food weighing thing for a little while

and like you can get into it. It's kind of like a game. Yeah. I mean, that's the only way to track accurately. Yeah. Good for you, man. Thanks. You feeling good?

Whatever. You're like, I've lost my will to lose. Now it's fine. I'm weighing beef jerky now. It's fine. All right. Well, everybody, obviously we're talking about indigo, the die in the history of it,

which to me, did you know any of this before we started? No. So this is kind of, you're like, oh, that sounds interesting. Let's do one on indigo and dug in and struck gold. You know, I was perusing the old housestuffworks.com website, right? Which, you know, I know we have almost cleaned

that website dry over the years, but this one popped up and I thought interesting because this is one of those that is like, oh, indigo. Yeah, that's a color, but it's also a pigment and it has an interesting history and also slavery and race gets involved. So no idea. Yeah.

It has a lot of tendrils that I found interesting. Yes. Supposedly wherever indigo went, especially after the age of exploration and colonization, so too went slavery. Yeah. Because it's a really intensive process and crop to produce indigo, the die.

Very popular crop. Yeah. And it was also worth a lot of money, which was like, oh, we'll just kidnap people and make them work for free. And that's how we'll produce indigo. And that's how it went for hundreds of years, apparently. Yeah.

And we'll get to this, but there are some people that say the state of Georgia legalized slavery specifically so they could kind of keep pace with indigo as a crop. Yeah. And those people who say that are historians. That's right. So, okay, I knew zero about indigo, aside from the fact that they used it to dye jeans

and that was blue, basically. And I just found this ultimately super fascinating. Yeah. I mean, this beginning, though, I thought was even more fascinating because I never really thought about the fact that if you look at any color up to a certain point. About the mid-19th century.

Yeah. The mid-19th century was any color you would see on a fabric or a textile was there because a lot of plants and insects were squashed. Yeah. Like it was an insect and plant bloodbath for eons in the world because if you wanted something to be colored at all, then you had to find a bug or a plant

that you could grind up into a powder, basically. Or some other means. Yeah. Or an animal. Sure. Like a sea snail's an animal. Oh, yeah. And if you wanted purple for a very, very long time,

you had to get the mucus gland out of a sea snail and desiccate it. And I'm guessing that didn't end well for the sea snail. No, and I imagine that's a super labor-intensive thing to do. But who, I guess I could see accidentally smashing a sea snail and being like, oh, that's a very pretty purple. I wonder if I can use it to do stuff with. The stuff that gets me though is when you get

into like indigo itself. Yeah, because it's the fact that you can get blue out of indigo is not intuitive. No, because you look at the plant, it's not blue. Nope. You squeeze the plant, not blue. Nope. Eat the plant, poop it out, not blue.

Blue poop. There's nothing blue about it. You have to put it through this chemical reaction that's multi-step to get it to be blue. And I'm like totally at a loss. Yeah. So what series of accidents had to happen so that somebody came up with indigo the dye?

That's right. Because apparently it's one of the least natural dyes in the world. Yeah, and for that reason, one of the most sought after through antiquity, because if they wanted to make red stuff, it's pretty easy. There's a lot of things you can get red out of in nature, or green, obviously.

But blue, the old thing about there being no blue foods. What old thing? Well, the old adage, there are no blue foods. Have you ever had arctic blue gum? Well, I did look into this, because this does make a little sense of why blue as a pigment would be more sought after. And I think it ties into the fact

that it's just not naturally occurring really. Yeah. I had never thought about that, but yeah, now I'm just gonna spend the rest of the episode racking my brain for a blue food. Well, blue corn, blue potatoes, blue berries are the things that most people would say. Well, what about that?

I never would have thought of those. But those are technically purple that on the Food Network a few years ago and other people have done this. They used a spectrophotometer to look at the true colors of foods, and even those foods are actually purple. They brought Cindy Loper in to be like, yep, it's purple. I don't get it.

She had a song, True Colors. Oh, okay. It's such a good song. I was thinking True Blue, I was like, that's Madonna. Did you just add an R onto the end of Madonna? Yeah, but that's a reservoir dogs reference. Oh, okay. Thank you for explaining it.

I didn't have to see multiple emails two weeks from now with people being like, great reservoir dogs reference, Chuck. So the blue food thing, supposedly people think that blue light is one of the high energy wavelengths on the light spectrum, on the visible light spectrum. And that the guess is to grow more efficiently, plants absorb that light and use that energy.

Well, yeah, because the blue end is higher energy. Yes. I'm pretty sure. Yes. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and that was what we were talking about in the about the blue blood. Yes, but that's the opposite of that.

It absorbs more red, so it reflects more blue. Oh, interesting. So if it was blue, it would absorb less blue light. I don't know. I know, it's kind of like a mind, sure. A brain teaser? Right, there you go. But at any rate, there are very supposedly no true blue foods.

And that's probably ties into the fact there are not a lot of plants that were true blue. And as if you wanted something blue back then, you had to get it from woad, which is a, if you look at those, it's got yellow flowers, again, not blue. If there was ever a medieval English word, it's woad. I love it for that.

It sounds like a little short, hairy, stubby man with big feet who wears like a tunic. That's a woad. Or the more, or the prettier named Indigoferra, which is a family of plants in India and South America. Yeah. Both of those, that has like a pinkish flower, but both of those is where you used to get Indigo.

Yeah, and what's weird about this also, is not only like, neither of these plants look like they would produce blue dye, not at all. But neither one of them are actually particularly good at dyeing fabric. They both resist binding to fabric or dissolving in water. Hence the reason why you don't just like squeeze woad

or an Indigoferra plant and get blue dye, you have to run it through this process that starts with fermentation even. Yeah, and squeezing your woad sounds. It does. Sounds like something else. Yeah. So we don't know for sure.

We think they've been making Indigo from woad longer than from the Indigoferra plant. I think now we can't say the word woad anymore for the rest of the episode. I think you're right. But it's, you know, we can't really tell sometimes whether it was woad or the Indigoferra. They do think because Egypt and Mesopotamia are close to Turkey

and they had a lot of blue. And in Turkey, they had more woad than Indigoferra. So they think that was probably the first one. Yeah. So the upshot of all that is that they can trace blue dye back to the third millennium BCE, 5,000 years ago or up to 5,000 years ago. But they can't say whether it came

from woad or Indigoferra, right? Right, but they did find Indigoferra in the Bronze Age and the Indus Valley civilization. And this was fascinating to me just because the Harupon, I guess that's how I'm gonna approach it. It's one of the same, the Indus Valley civilization and that what you just said, they're the same thing, right? Yes, they are.

The Harupon civilization though was one of maybe the largest ever ancient civilization. And I'm just fascinated anytime we talk about these civilizations back then that had like as many as 5 million people. It just blows my mind. They also had indoor plumbing, underground sewage. Like they had it going on.

They apparently had a better standard of living than contemporary Egyptians at the same time. And everybody thinks as the Egyptians having it going on too. Yeah. Please. Yeah, I guess not compared to the Indus Valley civilization. That's right.

So there is lots of examples of this stuff. The Indigo Farah? Yeah, Indigo Farah or Wode. They kind of competed for a very long time and Europe kind of went the Wode way because Wode grows in Europe much more easily. It's related to the cabbage family. They took the Wode less traveled.

No, that was good. And then that was really good. That was terrible. And then Indigo Farah grows better in like Pakistan, India, that area, the Indus Valley. And so that was kind of like the split in blue dye. The thing is there seems to have always been this understanding that Indigo Farah

is just vastly superior to Wode, Indigo. And so even in Europe, like you would find Wode, like the Greeks, the Romans, and then up to medieval Europeans, if they could get their hands on Indigo Farah, Indigo, that they would pay through the nose for that stuff. And rightly so, I mean, like it was really expensive because it's hard to produce, as we'll see.

But also at the time, you had to travel over land carrying this stuff. And so each trader that went along this trade routes just added more and more money on it. So by the time it reached, say, Western Europe, you were paying a lot for this blue dye. One million dollars. They would be like, that number doesn't even exist yet.

So the Greeks, they called, and this is going down a bit of a word, origin, rabbit hole, but the Greeks called the blue pigment Indicon with a K because it was from India. And they wanted it to sound sinister. Right, because things with a K. That became Indigo in English.

And then there's the word for dye in ancient lands, N-I-L-I, Neely. And that was Sanskrit, meaning dark blue. Right. And then that became A-N-I-L in Spanish. And eventually that became Indigo in Central and South America. And apparently, yeah, blue in Arabic is Al-Neel.

Right, and English, Aniline is derived from that, and that is synthetic dye class. So it's all tied together. We gotta climb right out of this hole. Yes. That was a big one. So where are we in the ancient world? Well, I think we're at Marco Polo.

Okay, good. So in 12, the late 1200s, the late 13th century, Marco Polo made his way to China and was like, hey, get this, we forgot to say something. This is me talking, not Marco Polo. But they had like the Romans, the Greeks, the Europeans, had no idea that Indigo came from a plant. That's right.

Because by the time it got to them, it was like these little hard bits of dye that you would mix with water at about a 20% solution. And there you had your dye all of a sudden. But they thought it was a mineral. Marco Polo went to China, saw some of this stuff firsthand, was like, hey, this comes from a plant. Did you guys know that?

And by the way, I got a bunch of it in my boat if you wanna buy some. That's right. And all of a sudden there was trade now with China. Yeah, and that went, it was still pretty expensive because there was no direct sea route to China until Vasco de Gama came along and said, watch this. I'll sail to China in like two seconds.

Everyone was very impressed. And this kind of cut out the middleman and all those hands like you were saying, raising the prices along the way, you cut out a lot of those and you've got more supply. And even back then those economics meant cheaper prices would follow. Right.

Isn't Vasco de Gama, George Costanz's favorite explorer? I can't remember. I was just wondering that. I wanna say it is, but I thought it was Cortez, no? No, no, no, everybody hates Cortez. Who was Jerry's? I don't remember. Which one, I think one of them was impressed

about going around the Horn of Africa. Magellan? Maybe, we'll have to look that up. Sorry. Well, let's do our Seinfeld research on that. For real. So the cost of Indigo drops a lot because of the de Gama. But not like rock bottom.

Oh no, it was still luxury. Like the 0.01% could afford it to the 20% could afford it. Kind of something like that. Yeah, but what that meant was, is Wode was in big trouble because Indigo from the Indigo Farah was the blue gold. Said, Wode is me. All right, let's take a break.

Okay. And we'll talk about the synthesization. Synthetization, good God. Am I dreaming right now? I think so. Good night. On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor

stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. Oh, my husband, Michael.

Hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so you said that they call it blue gold, right? Or they did back in the age of Vasco de Gama.

That's right, because it was worth a lot of money. It lasted a long, it had a good shelf life. And it wasn't huge. It was pretty compact as far as storing and traveling. Super compact. So if you'll indulge me, like I found a little bit about how that stuff that they used to travel with was made. Yeah, and it's still, if it's going to be made naturally,

which it really isn't, this is how they would still do it, right? Someone figured this out thousands of years ago and still today from what we understand, the process is virtually the same. Amazing. So the whole thing starts with a bunch of Indigo Farah plant. That's right.

And you throw it into a pot and you start to ferment it. Step one, somebody figured out how to ferment or that you need to ferment Indigo. I bet someone drank it at some point. Yes. And they're like, check out my teeth. Have you ever seen teeth like these? So here's the thing.

The reason why you can't just squeeze an Indigo Farah plant and get Indigo out is because there's no Indigo in the plant. It doesn't exist naturally. But there's a precursor to it called Indicand. And that is what you ferment out of the leaves with an enzyme, which kind of breaks it down. And all of a sudden you have something called Indoxal and Glucose.

That's right. So you're splitting it. Indoxal is what you're actually after. And then after that, you drain the liquid and into a second tank. You add the Indoxal with air, you stir it basically. And all of a sudden it oxidizes into Indigotten. And then the Indigotten is actually what apparently

is Indigo, because there's no other steps after that except to let it air dry. Yeah, it like settles at the bottom and then they can get rid of the matter on top. Yeah, they filter it out. And you're left with kind of a sludgy paste, I think, right? Yeah, and then if you dry that paste in the sun, which I think is the traditional customary way,

supposedly that converts it into basically like blocky, solid Indigo dye. Okay, so it's not a powder? It says cakes and then the fact that the... But I've seen it as a powder, so I know what you're talking about. But I think the fact that the Romans and Greeks thought it was a mineral.

Because it was hard. It must be hard. But surely, I mean, it's gotta break down somehow. But what's weird about all this is if you take that Indigo dye and you say like soak some denim in it, it's not just going to come out blue. Right.

Certainly not after one. If you're using natural Indigo dye, you have to... I've seen up to 40 times you have to wash it in this Indigo to get it to start to bind. Because one of the things about Indigo is it doesn't like to bind with fibers. And then even when it does, it's very superficial.

So like if you took your jeans right now, cut it open, you looked at the cross section, you'd see it's white inside. It's just the superficial top of the fiber of your jeans that have been dyed blue. Inside the Indigo hasn't actually penetrated. And I would be wearing some sweet Daisy Dukes. You would with like the pocket sticking out of the bottom?

No, I never went that short. No, I would do a cut off gene phase, but never the Jorts. It was always had the frayed bottoms kind of country style. Nothing hemmed. Oh yeah, yeah. Never owned a pair of those. No, no, no.

I know what you're talking about. Yeah, Jorts didn't either. Actually, it's not true. But mine was at a time where... They were acceptable? Yes. Okay, yeah. I buy that.

It's not like I was like, ooh, I'm not gonna wear those because they didn't even call them Jorts back then. I think I just didn't have them. What you're describing is not what I have. Mine were baggier, but they had like a hem like the bottom of jeans did, but they weren't at all... The Tebow Jorts?

Yes. Yes. I didn't look anything like... Baggier, I need to see what that looks like. Just imagine like 90s jean shorts. Okay. There you go, you got it. Sort of.

We'll just leave it there. All right. Well, no, let's just move on. Okay. So... Chuck just put his glasses on everybody. That's right, because I'm reading. My eyes have gotten so bad.

Mine have too, Chuck. I can't read anything now unless I have them. I have to go like this. And it makes it really hard to underline and highlight when you hold like the page. Josh is holding a page very far from his face. And then close. And then far.

And then far. It's really sad. So, I guess we should get into the dark side of, and I think this was one of the parts from the House of Works article. They said some of that, I had some NPR in there. Oh, nice. And I think a fashion website even chimed in.

That is a heck of a fricacy. So, when Europeans colonized North America. Colonialized. They started, obviously, they needed to grow crops and sell them for money. That was a big deal. It was farming. So, they were like, what should we grow?

Like we've never been here before. Yeah, like you don't think about that, but that's exactly kind of what they went through. And they tried a bunch of different stuff. And they did grow a bunch of different stuff. But Indigo was something that they tried to grow a lot of early on. They grew it.

And failed. Yeah, and Jamestown, New Amsterdam. I think in Louisiana, the French did an okay job of it. But it was a woman named Eliza Lucas in the 1730s. And more appropriately, Eliza Lucas's slaves that figured this out. Yeah, so she gets the credit. She was a pretty interesting person herself though.

She was 16. And her father, boy, I'll bet my voice just transitioned really weirdly. And her father owned like at least three plantations around Charleston. Yes, South Carolina. Yeah, again, a British colony at the time. And he said, hey Eliza, you're interested in botany.

Why don't you go take over these three plantations and see what'll grow there. And he sent her some seeds and she started growing stuff. And she found that Indigo grew really, really well in the lowlands of South Carolina. Yeah, she grew ginger, cotton, hemp, alfalfa, and the aforementioned Indigo. Eventually for her effort, she was inducted

as the first woman into the South Carolina business hall of fame. Again, she's 16 years old at the time. Sure. She got married to a man named Charles Pinkney. You know, because she was an old maid of 16 and not married yet. Just getting up there in years.

And they, because, and you know, of course she'll get, I think a lot of the credit now is being shared. But for many years, she was like Eliza Lucas, the woman who figured out how to grow Indigo. Right. Whereas the true story is Eliza Lucas had slaves on her plantation from Africa that knew how to grow Indigo.

She's like, how do you do this? And they helped her out. They, to their credit, they did share this, the plants, the seeds, the knowledge, to all kinds of other farmers. And they are kind of looked at as being responsible for the Indigo boom in the South. Right.

So then you could extrapolate pretty easily that they were also responsible for the introduction of slavery into the Southern colonies. Because the Indigo started growing so well and this Indigo boom happened. And remember, this is still like a luxury item. And in high demand, everybody wanted everything blue.

Blue, blue, blue. Give me some blue clothes right now. That was kind of the age in the middle of the 18th century. And because this crop started growing so well in the South and because it was so lucrative, they think that Georgia said, oh, you know, Charleston's doing really well with this Indigo, we could be doing well too.

If only we would overturn our ban on slavery. Had no idea that Georgia initially had a ban on slavery, did you? I did not. And said, we're going to start allowing slaves to be held in Georgia, in the Georgia colony, so that we can grow Indigo. And that's exactly what happened.

Yeah, and 1751 is when the ban in Georgia ended. And the Revolutionary War, Revolutiony, I keep saying that, Revolutionary. Because it was truly Revolutionary. Sure. The Revolutionary War came along. By that point, there were 18,000 slaves in Georgia. And the war, though, kind of put a dent in the Indigo market.

Yeah, I guess so the biggest consumer base of Indigo for the colonies was Britain. And Britain said, oh, you don't want to be our colonies anymore, you want to be independent? Go find some other customers. And Britain said, we're going to go take over India and get our Indigo there. Right, except they said it all British-y.

Right. That's pretty good. I don't know if that's... Pretty good, Governor. Heck red at all. And this tie to slavery in Indigo was basically around until the early 20th century when synthetic Indigo came along. Yeah, so if Eliza Lucas Pikney kicked off the slavery boom

in the southern colonies, you can make a really good case that Alfred von Beyer, the German chemist, freed a lot of slaves when he found a synthetic alternative to Indigo. Yeah, and he followed a boy, truly a boy, a teenage chemist named William Perkins. What's up with all these teenagers doing stuff? Well, they died when they were 27. I guess that's true.

We both know that's not true, don't bother emailing everybody. 27, the 27 Club. Great new show on our network from Jake Brennan. Yeah, from Disgrace Lands. Jake Brennan, catch it, Sunday's on iHeart. It is a good show though. Yeah. It's about the 27 Club, the musicians who die at the age

of 27. Yeah, I feel like I think that's on our list of to-do episodes, although now it's done. Yeah. Why are we going to rip Jake off? I don't know. He'll come after us. I know.

So British chemist, teenage wonderkind, William Perkins, he was the first, he was a creator of the first synthetic dye, which came about as a lot of things do in science by accident when they're trying to do something else, in this case, a cure for malaria. Right, which this teenage kid was doing, trying to find a cure for malaria. Pretty cool. And he came up with something called Mavine, which produces a bright purple. And so this was the first synthetic dye. However, up to this moment when William Perkins came along, everything that had ever been

dyed in the history of humanity had been dyed using naturally sourced, labor-intensive, weirdo-processed dyes. And all of a sudden, he's like, hey, this is way easier. It's way more controlled, and because it's controlled, you can put it into mass production pretty easily. Just changed everything. Yeah, and we don't have to harvest billions of insects and grind them up into powder. Or pour sea snails.

Yeah. And so again, a few years later, a couple of decades later, funny enough, Alfred von Bayer said, I'm going to start working on one for Indigo. Adolf. Oh yeah, Adolf. In 1865, he declared that that's what he was working on. In 1897, he figured it out. Yeah, not bad, 30 something years.

That's all. But what's funny, he got the Nobel Prize actually for chemistry for his work on organic dyes, but also he discovered barbiturates. Oh, really? Didn't even mention it in the Nobel Prize. Wow. Barbiturates or synthetic dyes, we'll give it to him for synthetic dyes. Wow.

Yeah, chemistry, well, it's still interesting, but back then, it was just like, I can make heavy-duty drugs, I might make synthetic dyes. Yeah. I'll inject them both and see what happens. When that launched in 1897, the natural production of Indigo was at about 19,000 tons, I guess annually, it doesn't say. Those look like metric tons, if you ask me, there's an extra N and an E. Yeah, let's say it's annually, and this was mainly coming from India.

About 15 years later, after the invention of the synthetic dye, that natural number had gone from 19,000 tonnys to 1,000 tonnys. Right. It's a pretty precipitous drop. It hit the natural Indigo market pretty hard. It had nothing to do with the demand for Indigo, it was just the synthetic Indigo stepped in and just took over very, very quickly. That's right.

Now, it's just a complete niche market to be like, this is actually naturally dyed with natural Indigo kind of garments. You just don't find those. Instead, almost entirely, everything is made with synthetic dyes. Let's take our second break and then we'll come back and talk about how that's just ruining everything too, because there's nothing good about Indigo apparently. Correct. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll be there for you, and so will my husband, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. If so, tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Charles. Yes. You're wearing jeans right now, are you? Unfortunately, I am. I am as well. That's all you wear.

How many pair of jeans you got? Two. I have two as well. Yeah, tell me. One jean jacket. I don't know, show off. You throw on like a little jean vest, you got a Canadian tuxedo going. Yeah, but Emily made fun of me for buying a jean jacket, and that's like, I think jean

jackets are kind of in again. You're like, Chief Brennan thinks it's cool. Oh, I bet he can rock a jean jacket. Sure. That hair? Yeah, for sure. And I said, no, these are in now, and she's like, I don't know, and I was like, no, they totally are.

You're like, I'm going to make it my business that they're in. No, they're in. Don't wear them with jean bottoms. What are you wearing with? Well, according to the websites, I looked up to prove Emily wrong. You wear them with like khakis. You wear it with a corresponding or a pant that doesn't match. Khakis and a jean jacket doesn't sound right.

Yeah, khakis or like, you know, I have my like maroon khakis. You can wear it with that. Okay. Anything that's not blue jeans, basically. Okay. Because again, you look like you're edging really close to a Canadian tuxedo. Yeah, but you know, I've seen people pull it off. Will Ferrell, he wore a Canadian tuxedo at the iHeart Awards.

He's hilarious. He got up there. Do you see that? Jean jacket and blue jeans. Yeah. Forever and blue jeans. But he had a shirt that offset it. Yeah, it was like a silk.

Did you just say forever and blue jeans? Yes. Because he did that whole Neil Diamond thing, remember? No. Oh, one of his greatest characters from Silent Live is Neil Diamond. Really? And you mean Robert Goulet, do you? No.

Okay. So, Neil Diamond makes his Robert Goulet look like dog poop. Really? Yes. Don't think I ever saw the Neil Diamond. He did it multiple times, but there was one where he did a VH1 storyteller, is Neil Diamond. Really?

And like Neil Diamond's just off the rails on like, on pills and like he's got stitches for some reason and they come loose and it's just beautiful. He's like a bigoted racist who's singing about how he can't really stand as keyboard player because he's black. He's a keyboard player is like, where are you talking about? He's right there. Yeah. It's Tim Meadows.

So, I demand that everybody press pause and go watch the Neil Diamond forever, or no, VH1 storytellers. You're right. Will Ferrell and we'll wait. And we'll check that out. And we're back. Okay. So, where the heck are we now is the environmental nightmare that is modern text, not just blue

jeans, but textile dying period. Yeah. So, there's a documentary called River Blue that I have not seen yet. Sounds lovely. But it details the chemical manufacturing process for denim specifically, where like you go to China and there are rivers that are running blue, which is not good for many reasons. No.

Some of the reasons are that the dye itself makes the river blue, which blocks out sunlight. Sure. So, plants die. Kills everything. And when they disintegrate, they are broken down by bacteria, which suck up all the oxygen, which kills the fish. It's just a horrible chain reaction. Again, remember, even with synthetic indigo, but with natural as well, but even with synthetic

indigo, the dye doesn't want to stick to the stuff. So, you have to use something called the mordant, which is a bleaching agent that actually, that will bind the indigo dye to the garment. Oh, I thought the mordant was because the initial color that it gets is not the blue that you want. So, you have to keep bleaching it. That's not my understanding. Oh, okay.

No, I think it's the thing that binds, that says, hey, indigo, come on over here and let's hang out with this denim. Oh, okay. And we'll stain it blue. Well, the wastewater, the leftover mordants are terrible, they're either acidic or they're chromium or some other kind of horrible metal that kills fish and poisons the water supply. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, they spell it differently, which is why they pronounce it differently. Oh, really? Did someone turn that in? No, I looked it up. How's it spelled? Exactly as it's pronounced. But we spell it aluminum in the U.S. and in Canada. Apparently, the rest of the English-speaking world spells it aluminium.

There's that extra syllable spelled out. Oh, they say aluminium? Yeah. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. I thought it was just aluminium. Right, but they're really saying aluminium, but they're British, so they're saying aluminium. Okay, so that would be an extra I after the N.

Aluminum, aluminium. Yes, exactly. Oh, all right. But isn't that fascinating? We spell it differently. Yeah, that's weird. I agree. But anyway, you don't want that stuff in your water supply and it comes about in aces from

the four billion pairs of jeans that are dyed every year in the world. Yeah, jeans and jean jackets and jean hats. All Canadian tuxedos. That's right. But they are trying to work on this. There's a more environmentally friendly way they're trying to formulate. I did not understand this at all, so I'm just going to say it's magic through chemistry. Okay.

I have the feeling you're going to want to explain it. Well, so... Which is fine. Do you remember like endoxyl is what you're after when you're extracting and fermenting indigo? That's right. Or indigo ferro plants, indigo. So that endoxyl, it's super unstable, so it likes to bind to something and it becomes

something else. You can't use that something else. You need the endoxyl. What they figured out is they genetically altered an E. coli, a strain of E. coli, and it secretes that precursor to endoxyl. Or they could make it secret, right? Yeah. Right.

Yeah. They like genetically engineered it too. Yeah. So that precursor to endoxyl, when you put it together with some other natural enzyme, it separates that precursor into endoxyl and glucose, and then all of a sudden, you've got endoxyl. And what's neat is they found that with this particular type of endoxyl, when you expose it to air, it automatically turns into indigo.

Well, it turns into... Luke, luco-indigo, which is the white indigo. Which apparently is what you actually want to make things blue. That's right. It's really confusing. Yeah. You just lost me with that one. Well, that's the deal.

But they're saying, like, we've got this thing. It's like this system actually works. We've engineered this bacteria to produce basically the precursor to indigo in this process. But can you scale it? That's always the problem. Exactly. It's exactly right. Because big denim is going to say, great, show me the numbers.

Tommy Hilfiger is going to be like, I can't make any money off this. And so will Antoine Bugle Boy. Well, they won't have anything to do with it unless it's cost efficient. Oh, that's good. And the good thing about this is it solves a couple of problems. The chemical synthesis of indigo is just bad. And then you also don't need that mordant bleaching stage either. And all of this stuff is running off into the rivers in China and other places.

But if you don't have that and you just have this nice little bacteria producing it on a massive scale, then the denim producers will say, we're on board and the world will be saved. It's just, could there be anything more wrong with the world? I know. Because you start to think about someone who's vegan. It's like really walking the walk and trying to do the right thing and like, I don't wear leather, no belts, no shoes, all of this stuff.

They say maybe while wearing their jeans or maybe not. Maybe they're like, oh, and I don't, I won't wear a denim either. But I think it's all dependent on what you have researched. You could probably research everything on your body and find some awful practice along the way unless you're just sitting on your commune and making your clothes and weaving your loom and you're just wearing like tan linens. Sure. No colors, no dyes.

Right. You're like- Because you're not going to smash up a beetle to get green. No. Because that's not environmentally friendly either. Beetles got a right to live. Yeah. Beetles got a beetle.

You got anything else? No. It's just sad. You're right. I know. I was hoping to end it on the upbeat thing, but not this one. Yeah. You follow the chain of almost anything used today and it's got some terrible thing.

Oh, I've got it. I've got it. But that doesn't mean you should give up. No. No. Because any way, any choice you make that helps something continue to live or do not be polluted, it's still helping. No, I agree.

Yeah, you're still screwing up this other way. You don't mean to, but the other stuff that you are doing that is helping is still helping. It's still saving a life. It's still promoting some healthier ecosystem somewhere and it's still worthwhile. I'm a big subscriber to the, you know, you don't have to be all or nothing. Some people are. That's great. But every little bit of good you can do is still doing good because I've been taking

the task personally over the years from listeners saying, how can you be an advocate for dogs and eat meat? Oh yeah. They love that one. And I'm like, you know, I'm still helping dogs. Yeah. You know. I just really love two ounces of perfectly proportioned beef jerky ones.

Or maybe I should be vegan, but to call me out on saying, you know, you're a hypocrite because you're helping dogs. Right. Like, no, helping dogs is good. Period. Full stop. Agreed. And they're like, you know, strangling turtles with a plastic bag while they're saying this

too. I know, right? Because I guarantee you, if you drilled in Chuck, you could find something too. Yeah, yeah, but that's not a fruitful road to go down. No, it's not Chuck. No, it's not agreed. Well, if you want to know more about being a better person, go back and listen to our catalog.

How about that? Yeah, all of them. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. What is this? Oh, this is kind of a fun one. It's a correction for you, but it's a lighthearted and fun one. Hey guys, long time listener, huge advocate for all you do. I live in southern Maine and frequently make the long drives to Vermont and your podcast

helps me make that more tolerable. But I've got a bone to pick with Josh. I know where this one's going. Whenever the state of Maine comes up, you guys always slide in a comment about our state's weird and independent nature, rightly so. But I've now counted two times, at least where Josh's misidentified Maine is the slogan, live, free, or die. The first time in the ranked choice voting, and then more recently in AI facial recognition,

I let it go then, but I have to say something now. Live, free, or die is famously New Hampshire's state motto, Josh, not Maine, it's even on their license plate. One state motto is Derego, Derejo, Latin for I lead, I have no idea, D-I-R-I-G-O. That suits us quite well as our state leads as the first in the nation to use ranked choice voting, having the most breweries per capita and being the state in which the most Stephen King books take place. Again, I love the show, always chuckle when you call us Mainers weirdos.

I hope you enjoyed your time in Portland during your live episode last fall. Sure. Excuse me, I have to go ride my moose to the ocean so I can catch lobsters by my lighthouse. That is from John Cuneo. Speaking of lighthouses, we both agree the lighthouse was an amazing movie. I know, you just randomly texted me. It's just so good. I said, have you seen the lighthouse?

I was moved to. Robert Eggers, just please keep making movies forever. He's great, and I was, I wish it hadn't gotten shut out of the Academy Awards, I thought. Why would it have been, because it was black and white? Because it was weird, it was almost an experimental film, but the fact that either or both of them did not get nominated for Best Actor is just ridiculous. It is pretty ridiculous. Because they were both amazing.

Yep. And production design. Yeah, everything. Have you ever seen a more authentic looking film? No. No, that's absolutely true. I mean, Robert Pattinson came out and was like, we basically lived like, it was whatever year it was.

I buy it. He was like, it was awful. Yeah. And all you see is doing is the wheelbarrow scene. Oh, yeah. That just looks miserable, because it was. Yeah, everybody, if you don't know what we're talking about, just go look up the lighthouse. Man, it was so good.

And watch it. I love it. And just watch it all the way through, okay? Yeah. And then after that, if you're like, I really like this, then go watch The Witch, which is Robert Eggers' first movie. That's right. His first movie was The Witch, one of the greatest films ever made.

And Pattinson is just one of my favorite actors. He's so great. Have you seen Good Time? Oh, yeah, man. I couldn't believe how good that was. Amazing. Okay. John wrote that listener mailing, right?

Hold on. I think it was John. Yes, John Cuneo. John, I can tell you that definitely in the facial recognition episode, I was trolling. I know for a fact that it's New Hampshire's slogan. And if I know Josh, John, you're going to hear that again. Yeah, I would also guess that when I said it before, in whatever other episode I said it in, that was probably me trolling, too.

But if I was mistaken, I apologize. Yes, live for your die, everyone. If you want to get in touch with us like John did, you can go on to stuffyshineau.com, or you can just send us an email to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.