The Blindboy Podcast - Lobster Purple

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

The connection between Lobsters becoming fancy food and purple becoming the colour of Royalty in Ancient Greece. Hot Take Art/History episode about how society manufactures exclusivity Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brush up against the buffet, you hushed Duncans. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If you're a brand new listener, I suggest listening to some earlier episodes. And if you're a seasoned listener, what's the crack? You know the story. Thank you for the lovely feedback for last week's podcast with my fantastic guest. Emma Dabbery. In which we spoke about. Race and history and anti-capitalism. And race as a social construct.

It was very enjoyable. And you seem to have enjoyed it too. I've been returning to running. I've been able to run a bit more. I've had a bollocks of an Achilles heel problem. For over a month. But. I've been working on some exercise for it I've been resting it and I got myself new fucking running shoes and I didn't think my old running shoes were in shit because they were quite new but I didn't factor in the fact that I've been running more because of the pandemic. I haven't been able to go to the gym.

So my running shoes wore down. And without me knowing it were creating unnecessary stress on my feet. Why am I talking about this? You might be thinking. You know, is there a set of legs down in Limerick that don't belong to you? That have any impact whatsoever on your life? No, there isn't. You don't have to be concerned with somebody else's legs.

You have enough on your plate. I'm speaking about this as a public service announcement. Because if you're a seasoned runner, you'll know this. But if you're new to running, you have to you're new to running you have to take footwear seriously you have to take footwear seriously your legs don't want to be running all the time they really don't your fucking knees don't want it your shins don't want it neither do your ankles especially running on concrete if you live in a city so i got myself new fucking runners because my old ones were worn out

without me knowing about it and they were making shit of my fucking ankles and it was actually the runners that were stopping my ankle from healing which is good to know because I thought my ankle was fucked find out what type of gait you have we all have different shaped feet

and some feet aren't actually suited for running mine aren't I suited for running. Mine aren't. I have what's known as an overpronated gait. Which means that when my feet impact the ground, my ankle twists just a tiny bit. And if you do that for like 10 kilometres, I'm basically asking for an injury. So I have to wear shoes for someone who has an over pronated gait which means that they contain quite a lot of support it's like a sports bra for my feet

but yeah find out what type of gait you have I don't think you can do it now in the pandemic but a lot of sports stores where you buy fucking runners they'll ask you to hop up onto a treadmill and they video record yourself running on the treadmill and they tell you what type of pronation or gait you have and then they recommend the right pair of shoes.

So go into a shop, ask a stranger to videotape your feet and then they'll recommend the correct type of support that you need for your specific gait and then you'll avoid injury when running. And this is all good news to me because I was only running twice a week and I running is my fucking head medicine lads

doing my little 10k which sounds like a lot but it's not because I've been running for like 5 or 6 years so 10k really isn't I'm used to it so it's not difficult

it's a leisurely, enjoyable run, but that's my head medicine, that releases endorphins into my brain, which allow me to get on with my day, so I'm feeling a lot better than I was in previous weeks. So this week's podcast is a hot take podcast, it was kind of inspired by the conversation I had with Emma Dabbery last week, it was so interesting I went off doing a bunch of reading afterwards, doing a bunch of reading into different things that came up in the conversation and how I prepare this podcast each week, especially a hot take podcast, generally what I do is I spend a few days just sifting through academic articles mainly.

Because with academic articles, they all have citations. So you can trace if a piece of information is truthful or reliable or not. if a piece of information is truthful or reliable or not. Academic articles are, my favourite are, like really old newspaper entries and shit like that. I'll sift through all this stuff, searching for the hot take, hoping that one little piece of information kind of jumps out and then sparks a rabbit hole

that I chase down in order to find a really interesting connections that's what I'm interested with a hot take I like going down rabbit holes of articles and then finding little narratives

that I haven't seen connected before and then emerging with a hot take which a hot take for me is a story a really interesting story something that excites me and something that makes me feel passionate about what I'm speaking about so I did that this week. This week's podcast is... It's about value, I suppose. I want to ask questions as to how do we ascribe value in a society to certain things that appear to be kind of arbitrary. What I mean is...

Alright, certain shit is valuable or connotes status or is expensive to purchase because it's scarce. Scarcity creates value. If there's a limited amount of something, then it's valuable. Gold for instance. Why is gold expensive? Why is gold exclusive? Well because there's only a certain amount of gold and because there's a certain amount of gold

we can put confidence in its value and that makes it exclusive but I was thinking as well like what's also expensive is something like platinum platinum is a precious metal that looks like silver and it's also expensive is something like platinum platinum is a precious metal that looks like silver and it's very expensive and exclusive because there's not a lot of it but like 12 000 years ago and 12 000 years ago isn't that long ago like modern humans there was people in ireland put it that way 12 000 years ago was like I think it was the end of the Ice Age

this comet hit the Earth 12,000 years ago somewhere in Asia and it was called the Younger Dryas Impact and it's claimed that when this comet hit the Earth it contained a shitload of platinum on it so when this comet hit the Earth, it contained a shitload of platinum on it. So when the comet hit the Earth, it deposited loads of platinum everywhere.

But what this comet also did is it caused the extinction of Earth's megafauna. And the megafauna on Earth 12,000 years ago or 11,000 years ago were big animals. Like mammoths. Woolly mammoths were these big, huge, giant elephants covered in fur. And humans used to hunt them. And then woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers

and all these huge, huge animals just went extinct. And there's a hypothesis that what caused their extinction was this comet that hit the earth 12 000 years ago and it killed huge animals but it didn't kill us but think of it this way if back then 12 000 years ago humans had a limited amount of platinum so humans were trading in platinum because there wasn't a lot of it so it had a high amount of value well when this fucking comet hit that had a lot of platinum on it if you were a human who traded in platinum you were fucked because now there's loads of platinum so the platinum that you have goes down in value. But if you were a human who traded in the tusks of mammoths,

then you all of a sudden became rich, because the same comet that delivered the platinum killed all the mammoths, and now there's only a certain amount of mammoth tusks. So in that case scarcity creates value now I don't know if humans were trading in platinum or fucking mammoth tusks maybe they were I don't know but I'm just saying

if they were that's an example right there of how platinum goes down in value but mammoth tusks go up and if a comet hit tomorrow and the comet was made of gold

then we'd be fucked it would probably cause huge economic collapse because you know certain amounts of world currencies a small amount of that is dependent upon gold if anyone had their money in gold now there'd be loads of gold,

and it doesn't have value anymore. Like I saw an article a couple of weeks ago claiming that Elon Musk wants to find comets with gold on them and mine them. And it's like, I bet you he doesn't. Because what's that going to do? Only devalue fucking gold. And also, we'd say over the next century

what we're going to start seeing is resources that were scarce in the 20th century are going to stop losing importance and value. So the most important scarce resource of the 20th century is fossil fuels, oil and shit like that. And this is reflected in conflict. A huge amount of the conflict from the 1950s onwards has been centered around the middle east where a huge amount of oil is contained but now world governments are pretty much deciding we're coming to the end of oil so we can either scrap over the last bit of oil that's left,

or we can move forward into what's called the fourth industrial revolution and look instead towards renewable technologies. This is also too why places like Dubai have the tallest buildings in the world or have the most extravagant resorts. It's like, why does Dubai want this? Because Dubai has said shit we're running out of this oil stuff lads we need to find

a new natural resource and our natural resource now is tourism for very rich people so that's Dubai's new natural resource and by having the tallest buildings and the biggest golf courses and not giving a fuck about coronavirus and letting anyone go over there,

they're creating scarcity around exclusive tourism, which then gives it value. But renewable technologies like solar and battery power, they also require natural resources. natural resources so my my guess for the next century that the natural resources that are gonna increase in value because of scarcity will be lithium and coltan coltan is used in a lot of screens you find a lot of it in africa like your iphone screen your laptop a lot of coal tan is used for this and then for batteries rechargeable batteries lithium is the mineral used for that and 70% of the world's lithium is in South America so I would say over the next 30-40 years we're going to start seeing the the great powers of the world needing to export quote-unquote democracy forcibly to areas in south america because it's actually just about lithium also

water which is a mad one because there's water everywhere the whole earth is covered in water but fresh water is going to become a scarce commodity as a consequence of climate change. And I'm seeing this already. I'm very interested in the legal cannabis industry over in America. And I follow the legal cannabis industry very closely. I'm interested in legalizing cannabis. Obviously, I want legal cannabis in Ireland. But I'm just fascinated with the industry of legal cannabis in America

because it's a young emerging industry. And when I look at the huge cannabis farms, they just, they tend to be very forward thinking, not just in the growing of cannabis, but how food will be produced in the future. Like they're embracing technologies like hydroponics which is where food or sorry cannabis or any crop is grown not in soil but sometimes vertically using a nutrient solution also they're using technologies like aquaculture where plants are grown in this controlled ecosystem where the

roots are fed from the shit of fish like you have your cannabis plants grown in this room and then in another room you have a huge big pond full of fish and the cannabis plants and the fish work together in this beneficial relationship and what makes it so exciting is cannabis is being grown in warehouses and it's shown us that in a future where land is going to become scarce we can grow food crops in warehouses essentially and that it can be done sustainably and affordably but one thing when I look at videos on YouTube about the emerging cannabis industry, especially the large farms in America, every time they chat to a cannabis farmer, the one thing they speak about is growing their cannabis on land that has a water source a fresh water source because in the cannabis industry they're all basically aware that water is going to become a scarce commodity so growing it on land

that has access to fresh water means that they will save money so scarcity changes and that scarcity influences value but what i want to do with this podcast is I'm not talking about value around things that are blatantly scarce, like gold. What I want to talk about this week is how we've ascribed value to things that aren't necessarily scarce. It's just society decided that these things were expensive and

I'm going to speak about two different things and they're both connected via shellfish the first thing I want to speak about is lobsters and then what I'm going to speak about is the colour purple which are both connected by shellfish

lobsters is a blatant one because that is shellfish but when you think of lobsters like lobsters are really really expensive posh food like lobsters genuinely quite expensive and not only

is it expensive we associate it with fancy restaurants lobster to be eaten with champagne we'll say lobster is an exclusive food if you're ordering lobster be prepared to pay a lot of money so how did this happen how did lobster become a fancy expensive food because the thing is it wasn't always that way and what's interesting about this story is the Irish are very heavily involved in this I'm always speaking about the Irish cultural footprint because we've had to travel the world to get away from the conditions

at home that were created by colonization the irish footprint there's irish people in every fucking story that i look for there's always irish people involved and i ended up down this particular rabbit hole when i was i was researching irish indentured servants in america based off the conversation that i was having with Emma Dabbery last week. We spoke about how in the 1600s a lot of Irish people were forcibly sent to the Caribbean and Barbados as indentured servants. Effectively people who were forced to work, forced labour, but they were indentured which meant that they were forced to work under slave-like conditions for a certain amount of time and then once that time

was up they were free and that happened to quite a lot of Irish people in the 1600s in Barbados and what I wanted to find out more about is did the English just send the Irish indentured servants just to Barbados did they send them anywhere else well it turns out in the 1600s quite a lot of Irish indentured servants went to North America what became North America specifically in the English colony of Massachusetts in North America in the 1600s so America um was quote-unquote discovered I don't like to use that word it wasn't discovered America was colonized and stolen from the indigenous Native American people and this was done by the British, Spanish, the Portuguese and the French of course the quote unquote great nations of Europe so North America, Massachusetts which is now like Boston

the British set up colonies there and this was obviously this was a dangerous business all right Massachusetts is it is it a very long distance from England so it took a long time on a ship to get there and when the colonizers set up colonies it was tough to survive there so what the colonists needed was labor essentially they needed free labor in order for the colonies to work for them and in the 1600s a lot of this labor was Irish indentured servants but the Irish that were sent to Massachusetts, they weren't forcibly sent like they did in Barbados. A lot of the Irish indentured servants that ended up in Massachusetts did so voluntarily.

They were known as redemptioners. So Ireland in the 1600s wasn't a lot of crack. Ireland was being brutally colonised by the English. It was just before the penal laws were about to set in so quite a lot of Irish wanted to get the fuck out of Ireland so the Redemptioners became a group of Irish very very poor Irish Catholics who wanted to travel to the colonies in North America

but they didn't have any money obviously and the colonists that were going to America in the 1600s to the the English colonists they were protestant puritans they were protestants and they had money they had the money to travel there so these Irish people were like okay how can I get to America? And the English were like, you can do it if you become an indentured servant. So we will pay for your passage to America, but you must work off that money for a period of between seven to ten years. So all of a sudden, the colonies in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, colonies of mass in massachusetts the massachusetts bay colony starts filling with irish indentured servants who do all the labor and are spending about 10 years in not slavery but slave-like

conditions in order to work off their journey now as you can imagine they were absolutely hated they were at the the bottom of the society within the colony. Now the colony you have to remember would have been like a walled commune and everything outside of that would have been indigenous Americans. So within the colony the Irish indentured servants were treated quite terribly and they were also Catholics which means they were hated by the protestant puritans and the ulster scots but as i'm reading about this what keeps propping up is lobsters right because the thing is the english people who owned the irish indentured

servants had to feed them and they didn't want to feed them vegetables or lamb or pigs or whatever it was they were raising to feed themselves they wanted to give them the cheapest possible available food and that food in Massachusetts was lobsters. Lobsters had been used by the Native Americans as fertilizer. Lobsters in Massachusetts in the 1600s were so abundant that they were washing up on the shore in piles that were two foot high and the lobsters back then were massive. They were the size of small dogs and the English colonists hated lobsters. They didn't consider lobster to be food. Even the name lobster comes from an Anglo-Saxon word that means spider. The English colonists considered lobsters to be

giant insects from the sea, which they are. They're giant insects, just sea insects. And they weren't considered food or edible. And the only time that the English colonists would eat lobsters is when they had to because life on the colonies was it was difficult it was really difficult but lobster soon became the food that was given to Irish indentured servants in Massachusetts so it became a food associated only with the poorest of the poor and it was a shameful and embarrassing food culturally at that time because there was loads of it and it was washing up on the beaches

there's a quote from the from the colony at the time that says that lobster shells about a house are looked upon as signs of poverty and degradation the irish were being fed so much lobster in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that it caused a fucking rebellion. Right? And it forced the English to agree that indentured servants could only be fed lobster no more than three times a week. Now the thing is with lobster, I don't eat shellfish. But people who eat lobster say that it's absolutely delicious. Alright? Most people say it's absolutely fantastic.

So there are theories that the reason... Not only was lobster considered a really poor, shameful food in the 1600s in Massachusetts. It was considered disgusting. And they say that's probably because they were eating dead lobsters so they were picking these lobsters up off the beach and then cooking them at some point someone figured out

if you catch the lobster live and then cook it fresh then it becomes tasty but that wasn't the case back then so how does this food of which there was fucking loads in massachusetts which was this embarrassing food that was only fed to indentured servants which was a signifier of poverty how does that go go from that to becoming one of the most expensive things that you can buy in a restaurant that we now consider to be incredibly posh food

well it's a uniquely kind of american capitalist advertising type thing so what happens is the massachusetts bay colony of the 1600s that was an english colony right the country of the united states didn't exist uh when the united states became a country through the revolutionary war with england and the united states became a country and started to expand over the entire expanse of what you call the us and different cities and towns started to set up. We're talking the 1800s, we'll say. Railways started to be invented to connect the various parts of the United States. And the thing is with railways, if you can afford to get on a train across the United States,

you probably have a few quid in your pocket. So the emerging middle class and the pre-existing upper class of Americansicans are now able to travel around the united states via railways in the 1800s and the thing with railways or trains at the time it was kind of posh and you had the posh dining cart which was a fine dining experience for rich people and the lads who were running the train companies were trying to figure out a way that they could save money how can i feed these rich people charge them loads of money and not spend a lot of money while doing it and they figured out the answer was lobster because lobster was this shameful abundant poverty food in Massachusetts, but not in the Midwest, not in California.

So what happened is railway companies started to create like surf and turf. So what was considered exclusive and expensive was steak. So they were like, okay, we've got steak and then we have this lobster stuff which when you prepare it fresh when you cook it fresh and serve it with butter is actually really really delicious so let's start serving sarf and tarf on trains to rich people here's half a bit of steak and here's this stuff called lobster with butter and when you put the steak beside the lobster the lobster starts to through kind of weird osmosis achieve the same cultural value that steak has and lobster is really tasty as well so the railroads of the united states via fancy dining carts basically manufactured lobster as this incredibly

posh food that you eat with steak and butter and you serve it to people who are traveling everywhere getting off trains and talking about it and then lobster as an expensive posh fancy thing was born and the other thing they did too is like lobster still wasn't scarce there was loads of lobster it wasn't expensive to procure for the people running the trains now beef at the time yes that was exclusive beef in the 1800s like raising a beef cow requires a lot of resources it requires time it requires land it requires water it requires a huge amount of grain and food so beef at the time was scarce and therefore there was a reason for it being expensive beef now i've mentioned it before beef

now is completely unsustainable we've created an unsustainable system whereby beef should be expensive and it's not but we're over exploiting that resource through massive farms and destroying the planet because of beef but beef used to be exclusive like gold for a reason. It was hard to get and difficult to make. Lobster wasn't. It was simply placed alongside steak but what they also had to do with lobster is there's this strange thing with food and its perceived value and the level of cruelty that goes into its preparation um it's an odd thing so if you think of foods that are considered posh foie gras foie gras is just to let you know for the next four minutes i'm going to speak about food preparation methods that are quite cruel to animals if you'd rather not hear you can skip ahead about four minutes so foie gras

is a very expensive exclusive posh french food It's a bit like pâté. And what it is, is the over-fattened liver of a goose that has spent its entire life in a state of torture. Basically what they do is they get geese and they force-feed the goose grain until the goose gets so fat that it can't move. It has to be kind of clamped down. And this over-feeding causes the goose gets so fat that it can't move. It has to be kind of clamped down. And this overfeeding causes the goose's liver to become incredibly fat. And then the liver is extracted and served up as this really fat delicacy.

That's what foie gras is. And part of its exclusivity is that the person eating it understands and knows that the animal has been through a ritual of suffering in order for the consumer's pleasure to occur veal is another example veal is calves that aren't allowed to see any light at any point of their lives they're kept in the dark and then all the blood is drained from their body young calves veal for the same reason the ritualistic suffering of the animal enhances the pleasure and exclusivity of the food the the poshest food that i can possibly think of the poshest most exclusive food which most people are probably only hearing about now that I mention it, is known as Artelan.

And Artelan is now actually illegal. I don't think you can legally even get Artelan at a restaurant because it's been made illegal for being so cruel and fucked up. So what Artelan is, again, it's French. And it's all about ritual and cruelty and only the richest of the rich at the finest restaurants can eat artelan the artelan is this really tiny bird it's a song bird from africa and it flies all around europe and basically what the French did with the artelan is they catch an artelan tiny tiny bird and they keep it in a dark cage and the psychological torture of keeping the bird

in a dark cage the kind of abuse of that causes the little bird to gorge itself on figs and grain it basically overeats it's so upset at its conditions that it just eats and eats and eats so then they get the artelan and they drown it alive in brandy and then it's plucked and fried and when artelan is served in a restaurant to whoever can fucking afford it, now if you've seen the HBO series Succession, which is fantastic if you've seen that series, this visual that I'm about to describe

might make sense to you, and this is a long tradition this is the mad thing about artelan, right it's this tiny crispy bird smaller about the size of a plum This is the mad thing about artelan, right? It's this tiny, crispy bird. Smaller, about the size of a plum. The person eating it at a restaurant has to place a napkin over their head, known as an artelan veil.

So the person sits down with their little artelan on a plate, places this weird, white fucking napkin over their heads so no one can see them eating and then they eat this bird whole in private with the napkin over your head in the restaurant and it's because there's there's no hardly any meat on the bones you're basically eating this crunchy bag of bird bones. And the purpose of the veil is that to stop the bones flying everywhere. But also, this is so exclusive and such a delicacy that you need to wear the veil over your head to concentrate every one of your senses only on eating this little bird

and to keep all the smells there. So that's art land that's the poshest food on the fucking planet the most expensive food you can get it's now illegal in France and I'm guessing people still eat it and the only way to eat it is to get a private chef to agree to make it

but what you have there the value and scarcity of it is created around ritual and suffering and lobster is quite similar now when you think of eating lobster at a restaurant we know that there's no hassle getting lobsters there's no shortage of fucking lobsters but when you go to a restaurant, the scarcity is manufactured. The lobster is contained in a tank, alive. And often you pick the lobster that's alive that you want. And then you know that that lobster is boiled alive to suffer for your pleasure. And then it's brought out to your plate.

So the scarcity and suffering is manufactured to then justify the price of the lobster. And I just, it's so fucking absurd. And it makes me think, like, in the 1800s, when lobster was first being served on these American trains to rich people alongside steak, like, if an Irish person, whose parents maybe were indentured servants had heard about it, if they had, if they were in Boston, how they'd laugh to think that these rich people were

paying for lobster, and it reminds me of a buddy of mine from Limerick, he's got a Spanish wife, and they were in the Limerick market. The milk market in Limerick. Which is where if you're in Limerick you can buy fancy foods. So they were there in the Limerick milk market. Which was not posh when I was growing up. When I was growing up the Limerick milk market is where your dad went to buy stolen power tools. But now it's like the English market down in Cork.

It's where you get fancy food. And there was an olive stand and these olives in the Limerick market are quite expensive a punnet of them might be a fiver and my friend's Spanish wife just started roaring laughing at the fiver for the punnet of olives and he's like what are you laughing at and she's like I fucking know the farmer who makes those olives like they're not even good olives back home in spain we wouldn't even eat them and

over here in limerick you're fucking charging five quid upon it and she thought this was hilarious that was a bit of an olive tangent there but it's an example of the the manufacture of value around foods i'm gonna have an ocarina pause now but what i want to speak about after the ocarina pause is another bit of research i did which ties in with the lobster around the manufacture of status and value around something which is strangely enough related to shellfish and when i spoke earlier and i mentioned how america was colonized by quote-unquote the great nations of europe and how these great nations asserted their greatness through monarchy and royalty this manufactured entitlement like monarchy is just bullshit like that's just fucking bullshit monarchy is we took a place for by force a thousand years ago and ever since have

created ever more elaborate rituals to create status and a huge thing around the creation of monarchy in Western Europe, in France, Spain, Britain, Portugal. Something that's associated with royalty is the colour purple. So I want to speak about where the colour purple came from, how the colour purple came to be associated with royalty, and why it has very humble origins in shellfish. So here is the ocarina pause. You're going to hear a little advert for something I don't know what it is. The advert is algorithmically generated depending on what you search

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Twitch.tv forward slash TheBlindBuyPodcast. Patreon.com forward slash TheBlindBuyPodcast. Yart. So before the ocarina pause, when I was speaking about the strange history of lobster, and how lobster went from a food that was considered rubbish that was only fed to Irish indentured servants how it went from that to becoming a real mad posh expensive food one thing I also found on my research which strangely ties in is how the color purple came to be associated as with the color of royalty purple is the color of luxury the color of regality if you think of brands that try and make themselves look fancy like fucking

cabri's milk tray you look at the branding of cabri's milk tray or dairy milk they very consciously use the color purple to make us think that this product is exclusive and fancy how did this happen how did society decide that purple is the color of exclusivity. So you have to remember. What colours and pigments throughout history. Like. Paints weren't just lying around. Dyes weren't just lying around. Well they were. But.

Getting a colour. To stick to something. Via paint. Or to dye a fabric. Took years and years of. Technology and early chemistry. To figure out how to do it so in the ancient world people didn't have a full palette of color like i spoke about this before with the ancient greeks like they analyzed ancient greek poetry in specific Homer's Odyssey, which would be, I think, about 2,000 years old.

It could be off. But anyway, someone noticed. It was actually William Gladstone, who ended up being a Prime Minister of England. They noticed that in ancient Greek poetry and in Homer's Odyssey, no one ever mentions the colour blue. When he talks about the sea, he says it's like the color of dark wine and people looked into it more and more and they're like fuck it no one said no no they didn't have a word for blue in ancient greece what the fuck is that about and there's this theory that

the thing in in ancient greece in that area at the time the only things that were blue were the sky and the sea so because of that people didn't have a word for blue and some argue that people because the the fucking sky and the sea were the only things that were blue and a word didn't exist for it people didn't see the color blue back in the times of ancient greece because why would you why would you why would you need a color for something when you don't have a variety of things that are this cover color and i know that's very difficult for us to think of today to imagine a world where there's a poverty of color but that was the case they didn't the greeks didn't have a word for blue because they didn't need it the only thing that was blue was the sky or the sea they didn't need a word for the color the egyptians did have a word for blue because

they'd figured out how to make blue dye and i know that sounds bizarre but in 2006 uh scientists were like fucking hell we gotta test this out is it is it possible that because the ancient greeks didn't have blue in their world and they didn't have a word for it that maybe they didn't actually even see blue so in 2006 goldsmiths university did this study where they found a tribe from namibia called the himba tribe and the himba tribe don't have a word for blue in their language so they got members of this tribe and showed them screens with different dots of green and different dots of blue and people in the tribe couldn't see the dots that were fucking blue because they didn't have a word for it all right so it's i did a podcast on this before one of my

earliest podcasts that's why i'm not going into great detail with it but it's mind-blowing but the ancient greeks did figure out how to manufacture a dye for the color purple right i think it was even before the ancient g, the Phoenicians, which were like the earliest Greek civilization, 2500 years BC, before Christ, so that's almost 4000 years ago, if not more. I'm shit at maths. Some even think that the name Phoenicia for the Phoenician civilization means purple land because the Phoenicians had figured out how to make this purple dye

and to dye their clothes and to paint things the colour purple which if you came from a civilization that didn't know how to do this you're like holy fuck they have this colour there in Phoenicia you gotta see it so they named the Phoenicians after this colour so we now know this specific colour purple itenicia, you gotta see it. So they named the Phoenicians after this colour.

So we now know this specific colour purple, it's called Tyrian purple. And it's one of the most important colours in all of human history. And Tyrian purple, which the ancient Greeks used, is the reason that purple is strongly associated with royalty all throughout Western history. is strongly associated with royalty all throughout western history and this color purple comes from a type of crustacean a sea snail that's a cousin of the lobster called the murex snail which we used to wash up on the beaches of ancient greece and it specifically comes from the arsehole of this very spiny murex snail and this color purple tyrian purple which the greeks discovered was so important that its discovery even made its way into greek mythology the the story in greek mythology of how the greeks or the phoenicians discovered tyrian purple from this snail the story goes that like em there's a Greek God called Heracles right in he's Hercules in in Roman mythology because

Roman the Romans took some of their gods from the Greeks so the Greeks called them Heracles and then the Romans called them Hercules so here's the story in Greek mythology Heracles who's this heroic god, he's one of the sons of Zeus. Heracles is walking along the beach in Greece and he has his dog with him. And Heracles is on his way to ride a nymph. A nymph in Greek mythology, nymphs were like, they were were beautiful female they weren't goddesses they were like fairies they were very very physically attractive um creatures of nature that that took the form of beautiful women it's where you get the phrase nymphomaniac from the nymphs in greek mythology

were woman fairies who were just mad for riding all the time so heracles anyway is like walking along the beach going i'm gonna fuck a nymph brilliant and he's thrilled with himself walking along the beach ready to have sex with a nymph that he's going to meet up in the woods and he's got his dog with him and while they're going along the beach and Heracles has got the horn for the nymph his dog stops on the beach and starts devouring the arsehole of a one of these murex snails that's on the beach so the dog is there messing around with the snail and then Heracles goes over and says what the fuck are you doing I'm supposed to be getting my ride off a nymph up in the mountains and you're down here eating a snail's arse what are you at i'm supposed to be getting my ride off a nymph up in the mountains and you're down here eating a snail's arse what are you at and he starts giving out to the dog so the dog

anyway runs away with heracles he's after getting scolded for wasting time eating the snail's arse so by the time heracles and his dog arrive up at where the nymph is. Heracles is there to the nymph going, right, I'm here, brilliant, can we have sex? And the nymph then looks at the dog's mouth and she's like, what the fuck's up with your dog's mouth? And then Heracles is like, I don't know, he was eating a fucking snail's arse down by the beach. And the nymph notices that all along the dog's

mouth is this wonderful color that she's never seen before and this color is purple and she says to Heracles I'm not having sex with you until you come back to me with a dress or a garment that's the exact same as the color that's all around your dog's mouth. So Heracles is like fuck what am I going to do? I want to have sex with this nymph. So Heracles goes back down to the beach. And figures out that there's some extraction from this sea snail's arse. That creates the colour that's around his dog's mouth.

And that's how Tyrion Purple was born. And that's the Greek mythology's mouth and that's how tyrian purple was born and that's the greek mythology barth story of the color purple heracles wanted to have sex with someone his dog had a snail's arse and then in the time it took for his dog to leave the beach and go to the nymph's fucking house his mouth was purple and she wanted a dress made out of that color and that's the story in greek mythology where purple came from but in real life what happened was someone in this area

around what we call Phoenicia I think it might have even been near Lebanon somewhere around this area the people figured out these particular snails these Murex snails have something going on around their arses that creates this

color purple and we can extract this by catching loads of these snails and we can dye fabrics with this incredibly bright unique color and in the ancient world there was nothing like it there was no other dye that could change the color of a fabric as significantly as tyrian purple and in a world where you don't have a color palette where most people are wearing clothes that are just the color of the fibers they're made from all of a sudden the greeks were like we can make these fucking capes out of this color called tyrian purple this is important shit this is the height of technology so what started to happen was the ancient greeks started to tightly control who could and couldn't wear this color purple they had to make it exclusive they had to make

it something that they could trade so the the only people who were allowed to wear clothes that were coloured with Tyrian purple were very, very rich people. People of very high social and political rank or religious. And peasants weren't allowed to wear anything that had this Tyrian purple. And this was taken really seriously. And the Romans adopted it too because like the Romans came after the ancient Greeks but the Romans adopted a hell of a lot of their society and customs from the Greeks they modeled themselves on the Greeks and there was this fellow called

Ptolemy now not I'm probably pronouncing that wrong not Ptolemy who made the maps, a different Ptolemy, he was a king of Mauritania, right? But this Ptolemy went to visit Emperor Caligula. Now Caligula was a bit of a prick, he was the fella that was, he was a really violent fucker and used to have all these big orgies and stuff. Caligula was a mad bastard. But anyway, Ptolemy goes to visit Caligula. And when Ptolemy came to visit Caligula, and when Ptolemy came to visit Caligula, and this is real life now, this is historical, it's not myth, Ptolemy decided to wear his entire clothes with this Tyrian purple, right?

Head to toe, this really dark purple. And Caligula basically was like, well, Ptolemy's after turning up here in all purple. That's him trying to say that he's better than me. And Caligula had him killed. So Ptolemy lost his life because he chose to meet Caligula entirely draped in Tyrian purple. So this is how much of a strong exclusive statement this was. And how this purple was valued as the colour of royalty.

And of course then, Western, we'll say, Western civilisation, the monarchies, the great nations of Europe that form after the collapse of the Roman Empire, they then start to borrow these classical ideas and borrow the importance of the color purple and if you look at the paintings of like you'll see it in some of michelangelo's frescoes when when michelangelo was portraying christ he'd often have christ in in a purple robe to show the importance of christ now there's the other i did another podcast on the color blue so the difference between the exclusivity of blue and the exclusivity of purple is that if you look at historical paintings from the renaissance or whatever holy mary is always painted in blue now the thing with blue blue was actually exclusive the color blue in the middle ages came from a precious stone called

lapis lazuli and this was actually hard to find and it was really expensive so that's why holy mary is blue because if an artist was using blue an artist a painter was showing off look how rich i am look look how wealthy i am i have access to colour blue, so blue is exclusive because it's literally, blue has status because to have blue is literally exclusive, but the exclusivity and status of purple is completely manufactured because purple comes from the arse of a fucking snail that you can get on the beach, it's like lobster, there's plenty of lobster washing up on the beach there's no scarcity going on here society decided that lobster was posh

society also decided that purple was posh that Tyrian purple was posh there was no scarcity there so this is how that deep colour of purple came to be associated with royalty and regality. It goes back to the ancient Greeks, but the origin story is fucking ridiculous. It's a snail's arse.

You know what I mean? It's fucking absurd. And one psychological reason that they say why this colour was so valued is royalty is nothing but extreme violence. Alright? Royalty is one of the most fucked up constructs of society. is royalty is nothing but extreme violence. Alright? Royalty is one of the most fucked up constructs of society. Like I mentioned before the Ocarina pause,

royalty is some very, very violent people decide to take an area by force and commit acts of obscene violence. And in order to take this area, they need to convince everybody there that they're really really special and that their heirs and children and children's children should have that same level of entitlement so they manufacture ritual around it and the reason this deep shade of purple was so appealing to royalty is that it was a signifier of the the violence that was required to take the land by force they wanted a purple that looked like clotted human blood that looked like the deep

deep purple that human blood achieves when someone is slaughtered and that is what the regalia that's where royalty purple for royalty initially and and the greeks and the romans was like this is the blood of my enemies it's not red because when you really fucking slice someone open and that blood congeals it's a deep purple like my cloak and that's why i'm entitled to this land it's fear and power and beauty and if you want to go one step further and get really fucked up with it and look at okay we've established that

Tyrian purple going back to the ancient Greeks is co-opted by the Romans is co-opted by the monarchical nations of Europe to signify royalty and entitlement and power the phrase blue-blooded also has its roots in this tyrian purple and the fact that it looks like blood so in Spain Spain used to be ruled by the Moors by Islam Spain for about 800 years was an Islamic country in the early middle ages right and Spain went through a period called the Reconquista where the monarchy of Spain

reconquested their land they took back the land from the Moors who were people who are North African and these people would have had dark skin so the Spanish came up with this Spanish royalty came up with this phrase Sangra Azul which means blue blood and basically what they're saying is white skin they started to associate their white skin with an entitlement and a sense of purity with royalty so even though they're using the word blue they're referring to purpleness and royalty and what they mean is their skin was so white that they could see the purple veins in their hands so the Spanish manufactured this concept of if your skin is so white that you can see the purple blood running through the veins of your arm then that's royalty in your blood and

you are entitled to this land and differentiated themselves from the darker skinned Moors who had previously been ruling Spain under Islam. So now more than a thousand years, two thousand years later, from when Heracles is on the beach with his dog eating a snail's arse and purpleness becomes associated with royalty and regality, now the Spanish claim that they can see it in their fucking veins. And in particular, like you'll see it in the patron saint of Spain is called Saint James now his full title is Saint James Matamoros which literally means Saint James the slayer of Moors and if you look at images of the Spanish Saint James the patron saint often the images of a pure white skin Saint James on horseback beheading an African a North African moor while Saint James raises his

his sword in the air and you can see his exposed wrist and the blue or purple veins on his wrist. And it's this entitlement and this sense of monarchy and conquest and entitlement to land that then leads to the conquest of America. Because I start this by talking about the quote-unquote great nations of Europe that colonized America. Spain, France, Portugal, Britain and they have their purpleness and their regality and their royalty and their blue bloodedness and using this as

sure of course America is ours I don't give a fuck about who's living there we're entitled to this we're regal, we're royal and the great irony of how you can take it full circle about who's living there, we're entitled to this, we're regal, we're royal, and the great irony, of, how you can take it,

full circle, and it, it goes to fucking lobsters, it goes to, sea crustaceans, the purpleness, the blue blood, it's a fucking, snail's arse,

on a beach, and in ancient Greece man, you know, it's a dog, eating a snail's arse on a beach and then his lips go all purple

the fuck is so posh about that what's so fancy and royal about that you silly cunt and then you've the colonisers in Massachusetts

taking the land from Native Americans filling it up with Irish indentured servants and considering the lobster, the cousin of this purple-arsed snail, considering this to be food for the peasants

and all of a sudden then it becomes the poshest food in the world. It's all manufactured. It's manufactured around ritual. I suppose what I'm trying to get around this is I'm trying to highlight the absurdity of status and value around certain things and status value and entitlement whether it be the lobster served alongside steak or the

color purple somehow signifying royalty which then gets perverted into the into the idea that it runs through the veins of royal people it's all manufactured and it just it's just there to serve entitlement and evil essentially because you always get this this idea some people say if some if when people are defending colonization they say sure fuck it you were colonized but if you aren't colonized you'd have colonized somewhere someone else and sometimes i think not not necessarily not if the culture doesn't have a culture of entitlement and it always takes me back to the voyage of Saint Brendan. Saint Brendan was this semi-mythical but also real Irish monk in, I think, around the 5th century. I'm going to say 5th century. It was after the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain.

And Ireland was having a little bit of a golden age and we hadn't been colonized yet but Saint Brendan was this saint who was also a sailor he was Brendan the navigator now half his story is myth and half his story is real he was definitely a person and he definitely got on a boat and he sailed on a fantastic journey right and there is evidence to suggest that that saint brendan from ireland in the fifth century reached north america or canada long before anyone else did and what always strikes me about the story of saint brendan because because i read it a lot and i got a good translation of it recently One thing that always strikes me about the voyage of Saint Brendan, he got up as far as Iceland, he very possibly got to North America but when he's with his sailors, one thing that Saint Brendan says all the time to the sailors is when we sail and we arrive on a new island, don't ever steal from that island. Don't steal from that island don't steal from that island and don't commit acts of violence

against the people that are there because if you do we won't be safe at sea only by going around the Atlantic and finding these islands and visiting them only when we do it with respect are we watched over by God on our journey but as soon as you steal something from one of these islands or you hurt someone on these islands then the wrath of god and christ will come upon you and our boat will sink and we'll drown and i'm not i'm not using that as like an explicit example of well if the irish had a chance we would have never have colonized. Because you can look at Irish history. Going back a thousand years. And there's evidence of.

The Irish raiding parts of Britain. You know. But I just find it interesting. That Saint Brendan managed to sail. All around the Atlantic. Maybe reached America. And he explicitly stated. Do you know what lads.

It's possible to. Go to a new land. And and not think that it's yours. I just find that interesting. I find it very interesting that he had that concept. He didn't go there and go, brilliant, there's some shit we can take. I better tell the lads back home and we'll all head off there and take everything. He was like, no. Respect the people that are there. Say what's the crack and then head home. Go back to your monastery. Okay.

That was a bit of a slight rambling podcast there near the end because I was trying to decipher what the hot take was. But it was a fun journey. It was an enjoyable journey. All right. I'll be back next week I don't know what about I have a few hot takes bubbling in the meantime mind yourself

rub a dog I can't think of rubbing dogs now when I'm thinking of fucking Heracles dog with his snail arse purple mouth fuck it rub a dog anyway yart snail arse purple mouth. Fuck it, rob a dog anyway. Yart. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league,

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