Brush up against the buffet, you hushed Duncan's welcome to The Blind by 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're not a story. Thank you for the lovely feedback for last week's podcast with my fantastic guest, Emma Dabiri, in which we spoke about race and history and anticapitalism and race is 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 as I've been resting it and I got myself no fucking running shoes, and I didn't think my all running shoes were initiated 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, we're creating unnecessary stress on my face. 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 if you're a seasoned runner, you know this, but if you're not 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 want your fucking knees. Don't want that. Your shins don't want it.

Neither do your ankles, especially running on concrete if you live in a city. So I got myself no fucking runners, because at my old ones were worn out without me knowing about it and they were making shade of my fucking ankles, and it was actually the runners that were stopping my ankle from haling, 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 face and some feet aren't actually suited for running mine.

Aren't I have what's known as an entrepreneur to guess, which means that when I when my feet impact the ground, my ankle twists just a tiny bit. And if you do that for like 10 kilometers, I'm basically asking for an injury. So I have to wear shoes for someone who has an over pronated gaze, which means that they contain quite a lot of support. It's like a sports bra for my face. 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 the video recorder of 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 then recommend the correct type of support that you need.

For your specific date, and then you'll avoid injury when running. And it is all good news to me, because I was only running twice a week and I was running as my fucking head medicine, let's. Doing my little 10k, which sounds like a lot, but it's not because I've been running for like five or six years or 10K really isn't. I'm just I'm used to it. So it's not difficult. It's a leisurely, enjoyable run.

But that's my head medicine that's 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 tech podcast. And it was kind of inspired by the conversation I had with Amanda Berry last week, it was so interesting. I went off doing a bunch of reading afterwards, doing a bunch of reading into into different into different things that came up in the conversation.

And how I prepare this podcast each week, especially a high heartache 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 you can trace if a piece of information is truthful or reliable or not, academic articles are my favorite are like really old newspaper entries and shit like that. I sift through all this stuff, searching for the heartache, 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 about heartache, I like going down rabbit holes of articles and then.

Finding little narratives. That I haven't seen connected before, and then imagine what a heartache, which heartache 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 it's 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. All right, Sergeant, unshared is valuable, cannot statis are 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? 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 very expensive and exclusive because there's not a lot of it.

But like. 12000 years ago and 12000 years ago wasn't that long ago, like modern humans, there was people in Ireland put it that way 12000 years ago. It was like I think it was the end of the ice age. These commies hit the art 12000 years ago somewhere in Asia, and it was called the Younger Dryas Impact. And it's claimed that when this comet hit the art. It contained a shitload of platinum onis, 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 arts megafauna. And the megafauna on art 12000 years ago are 11000 years ago. What big animals like mammoths, woolly mammoths were these big, huge, giant elephants covered in fire 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 12000 years ago and it killed huge animals, but it didn't kill us.

But think of it this way. If back then, 12000 years ago, humans had a limited amount of platinum, so humans were trading in platinum because there wasn't a lot of it sort out a high amount of value.

But when this Falcon Comet Hayse 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 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 there 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 to 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 him and mine them as like I bet you he doesn't because what's that going to do?

Want to 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 what coming to the end of oil so we can either scrap over the last bit of oil that's left. Ah, we can move forward into what's called the fourth industrial revolution and look instead towards renewable technologies. This is also to why places like Dubai like have the tallest buildings in the world, are 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.

Let's we need to find a new natural resource. And our natural resource now is tourism for very rich people so that Dubai is no 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. So my my guess for the next century.

That the natural resources that are going to 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 coltan is used for this and then for batteries, rechargeable batteries. Lithium is the mineral used for that. And 70 percent 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 that 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 always, Amara, I'm seeing this already and I'm very interested in the legal cannabis industry over in America.

And I follow the legal cannabis industry very closely, mainly like 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 a cannabis, but how food will be produced in the future. Like they're embracing technologies like hydroponics, which is where food ah, sorry, cannabis are.

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 shade 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 that in a future of our 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, there are 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 would 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 scares 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 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 Color Purple, which are 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 with, 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 colonisation. 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 Dabiri last week.

We spoke about how in the six hundreds. A lot of Irish people were forcibly sent to the Caribbean and Barbados as indentured servants, effectively people who were forced to work forced labor, 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 16 hundreds 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 hundreds, 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 six hundreds. So. America 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 colonies are set up colonies. It was tough to survive there, so what economists needed was. Labor, essentially, they needed free labor in order for the colonies to work for them and in the sixteen hundreds.

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 Redemption's. So Ireland in the six hundreds wasn't a lot of crack. Ireland was being brutally colonized by the English and it was just before the penal laws were about to set in. So quite a lot of Irish wants to get the fuck out of Ireland.

So the redemption's 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 60s to 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. OK, how can I get to America and the English 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 10 years.

So all of a sudden, the colonies of mass in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, starts feeling what 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 bottom of the society within the colony. Now, the colony, you have to remember, would have been like like a wild 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 raised 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 sixteen hundreds were so abundant that they were washing up on the shore in piles that were two foot high. And the lobster's 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, their giant insects, just see insects and they aren't considered food, are 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 Stone 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 fuckin rebellion. Right. And it forced the English to agree that indentured servants could only be fed lobster at no more than three times a week. Now, the thing is, with lobster, I. I don't eat shellfish, but people who eat lobster say that it's absolutely delicious.

All right. Most people say it's absolutely fantastic. So there are theories that the raise and one of the not only was lobster considered a really poor shameful for food in the hundreds in Massachusetts, it was considered disgusting. And they say that's probably because they were eaten dead lobsters. So they were picking these lobsters off 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 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 six hundreds that was an English colony, right, the country of the United States didn't exist 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 hundreds say. Railways started to be invented to connect the various parts of the United States, and the thing is, what 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 Americans are now able to travel around the United States via railways in the eighteen hundreds. And the thing what railways are 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, OK, 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 Potter, is actually really, really delicious.

So let's start serving surf and turf. On trains to reach people, here's half a bit of steak and here's this lobster with butter. And when you put the steak beside the lobster, the lobster starts to throw 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. No beef at the time. Yes, that was exclusive beef in the eighteen hundreds like. Raisin 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 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 it's perceived value and the level of cruelty that goes into its preparation and.

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 here, 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 his entire life in a state of torture.

Basically, what they do is they get geese. And they they force feed the goats grain until the cows get 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 fast. And then the liver is extracted and served up as this really fast. 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 consumers pleasure to occur.

Veal is another example. Veal is calves that aren't allowed to see any light at any point in 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 that 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 our talent and our talent is now actually illegal. Like, I don't think you can legally even get art at a restaurant because it's been made illegal for being so cruel and fucked up.

So what our talent is, again, it's French, so and it's all about ritual and cruelty.

And only the richest of the rich at the finest restaurants can eat ortolan. The art is this really tiny bird, it's a songbird from Africa and it flies all around Europe and basically what the French did with the heartland is they catch and heartland, tiny, tiny bird, and they keep it in a dark cage. And the psychological torture of keeping the bird in a cage, the kind of abuse of that causes the little bird to gorge itself on figs and grain it basically over.

It's so upset at its conditions that it just eats and eat and eats. So then they get the aadland and they drown it alive in Brandee and then it's plucked and fried and went on to land, is served in a restaurant to whoever can fucking afford it. Now, if you've seen the HBO series Succession, which is fantastic, have you seen that series? This visual that I'm about to describe might make sense to you. And this is a long tradition.

This is this is the mad thing about ortolan, right? It's this tiny crispy bird smardon about the size of a plum. The person eating it at a restaurant has to place up like a napkin over their head, like a known as an art lansvale. So the person sits down with their little art on a place, places this weird. White fuckin 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 so 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 ARTlE. And 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 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 lobster. And I just think it's so fucking absurd and it makes me think like in the eighteen hundreds. 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 laugh to think that these rich people were paying for lobster. And it reminds me of a buddy of mine from Limerick.

He's 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 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 Karkh. It's where you get fancy food and there was an olive stand. And these olives in the limerick market are quite expensive. You know, a part of them might be a fiver. And my friend's Spanish wife just started raw and laughing at the fiver for the pocket 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, our own foods. I'm going to have an ocarina pause now.

But what I want to speak about after the ocarina pours 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 talk a place by force a thousand years ago and ever since have created evermore elaborate rituals to create status and a huge thing around the creation of monarchy in Western Europe, in France, Spain, Britain, Portugal, I something that's associated with royalty is the Color Purple. So I want to speak about where the Color Purple came from, how the Color Purple came to be associated with royalty, and why it has very humble origins in shellfish.

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That was the ocarina pause, you just heard an advert. This podcast is sponsored by you, the Listener, via the Patreon page, Patriot dot com Forward Slash the Blind by podcast. This podcast is my full time job. I adore doing it. It's a huge amount of work. I spend most of my time making this podcast, preparing it, and it's my sole source of income. It's my job. This podcast is how I earn a living, and I'm able to do that because of the patrons of this podcast.

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So thank you. Like the podcast, subscribe to it. Recommend it to a friend, especially if you're living outside of Ireland. That makes a huge fucking difference. Recommend it to a friend. Catch me on Twitter on Thursday nights where I'm making a never ending video game musical and you can come and chat to me to twitch that TV fibroblast playing by podcast Patreon dot com forward slash the Blind by podcast Yade. So before the ocarina pause, when I was speaking about the history of 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 tisane. 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 fuckin.

Cadbury's milk tray, you look at the branding of Cadbury's military 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 colors and pigments throughout history. Like who aren't just lying around days, weren't just lying around when they were both. Getting a collar to stick to something via paint are to die 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 and in specific Homer's Odyssey, which would be, I think about 2000 years old, will 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 color 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 not. 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 the fucking sky and the sea were the only things that were blue and awah 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 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. There 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 figured out how to make blue dye. And I know that sounds bizarre, but in 2006, scientists were like, fucking hell, we got to test this out. Is it possible that because the ancient Greeks didn't have blue in the 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 Fokin blue because they didn't have a word for it. All right. So it's I did a podcast on this before and one of my earliest podcasts.

That's why I'm not going into great detail with it, but it's mind blown. But the ancient Greeks did figure out how to manufacture a day for the Color Purple, right? I think it was even before the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, which were like the earliest Greek civilization, 2500 years B.C. before Christ. So that's almost 4000 years ago, if not more. I'm sure that that's some even think that the the name Phoenicia for the Phoenician civilization means Paape land, because the Phoenicians had figured out how to make this purple dye and to dye their clothes and to paint things the color purple, which if you came from a civilization that didn't know how to do this, you're like, holy fuck, they have this color there in Phoenicia, you got to see it.

So they named the Phoenicians after this color. So we now know the specific Color Purple. It's called Terry in Purple, and it's one of the most important colors in all of human history. And Terry in purple, which the ancient Greeks used, is the reason that purple 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 I 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 Terry and purple, which the Greeks discovered was so important that its discovery even made its way into Greek mythology. The story in Greek mythology of how the Greeks are the Phoenicians discovered Tyrian Papà from this snail. The story goes that like there's a Greek God called Heracles. Right in his heart is 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, Heraclitus, who is this heroic God? He's he's one of the sons. Those Hercules is walking along the beach in Greece and he has his dog with him. And Hercules is on his way to ride a nymph, a nymph in Greek mythology, names for like they were beautiful female. They weren't goddesses. They were like fairies. They were very, very physically attractive.

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, where woman fairies who were just mad for riding all the time. So Heracles anyway, is like walking along the beach, gone. I'm going to fucking 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 heart for the name of his dog, stops on the beach and starts devouring the arsehole of one of these murex snails that's on the beach. So the dog is there messing around with the snail. And then Heraclitus goes over and says, The fuck are you doing? I'm supposed to be getting my right after nymph up in the mountains and you're down here in a snails hours. Why do you ask?

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 snails hours. So by the time Heracles and his dog arrive up at where the name is, Heracles is there to the name of going right, I'm here. Brilliant. Can we have sex? And the name then looks as the dog's mouth. And she's like, what, FoxxHole put your dog's mouth and then Heracles is like, I don't know, he was eating a fucking snails hours 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 her, I'm not having sex with you until you come back to me with their address or a garment. That's the exact same as the color that's all around your dog's mouth. So Heraklion is like, fuck, what am I going to do? I want to have sex with this name. So Heracles goes back down to the beach and figures out that there's some extraction from this season is ours. That creates the confidence around his dog's mouth.

And that's how Terry and Parker was born. And that's the Greek mythology baat story of the Color Purple. Heraklion wanted to have sex with someone. His dog ate his nails hours. And then in the time it took for his dog to leave the beach and go to the 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 people 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 and somewhere around this area, the people figured out. These particular snares, 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 Terry and 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 Terry in purple. This is in part and 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 only people who were allowed wear clothes that were colored with Terry and Purple were very, very rich people. People of very high social political rank are religious. And peasants weren't allowed to wear anything that had this Terry in 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 model themselves on the Greeks. And there was this fellow called Pottawatomie. Now, not I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, not patala me who made the maps a different Pottawatomie. He was a king of Mauritania. Right. But this patala me went to visit Emperor Caligula. Now Claygate was a bit of a prick. He was the fellow that was, he was really violent Folker and used to have all these big armies and stuff. Caligula was a mad bastard.

But anyway the Ptolemy goes to visit Caligula and when Potawatomi 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 pauperized head to toe, this really dark purple and Caligula. Basically was like, well, Ptolemy's, after turning up here and all parts. That's him trying to say that he's better than me and Caligula had him killed. So Pottawatomie lost his life because he chose to meet Caligula entirely draped in Tarion purple.

So this is how much of a strong exclusive statement this was and how this purple was valued as the color of royalty. And, of course, then Western would say. Western civilization, that the monarchies, the great nations of Europe, that farm 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 see it in some of Michelangelo's frescoes, when Michelangelo was portraying Christ, he'd often have Christ in a purple robe to show the importance of Christ.

Now there's the other added 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 of 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 the color blue. So blue was exclusive because it's literally a 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 art of a fucking snail that you can get on the beach. It's 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 park was posh, that Terry and Parker was posh. There was no scarcity there. So this is how. That deep color 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 ours, you know what I mean? It's fucking absurd. And one psychological reason that they say why this this color was so valued is royalty is nothing but extreme violence.

All right. Royalty is one of the most fucked up constructs of society. Like I mentioned before, the Macarena was 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 of that looked like clouted human blood that looked like the deep deep purple that human blood achieves when someone is slaughtered. And that is what the regathered that's where royalty purple for royalty initially and the Greeks and the Romans was like, this is the blood of my enemies.

It's not red, because when you're 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 us, OK, we've established that Tyrian people going back to the ancient Greeks is co-opted by the Romans, is co-opted by the monarchial 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 race. And Spain went through a period called the Reconquista, where the monarchy of Spain reconquest their land. They took back the land from the moors who are 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 sangrias all, 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 powerfulness 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're entitled to this land and differentiated themselves from the darker skinned Moors who had previously been ruling Spain under Islam. Now, more than a thousand years, 2000 years later, from when Heracles is on the beach with his dog, eat ensnares hours and powerfulness becomes associated with royalty and regality.

Now, the Spanish claim that they can see it in their fuckin veins and in particular, like you see it in the patron saint of Spain is called St. James. That was full title is St. James Matamoras, which literally means St. James the slayer of Moors. And if you look at images of the Spanish St. James, the patron saint, often the images of a pure white skin, St. James on horseback, beheading an African and North African more white St.

James raises his is sword in the air and you can see his exposed wrist and the blue or purple veins on his wrist. And this 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, the colonized America, Spain, France, Portugal, Britain, and they have their properness and their regality and their royalty and their blue bloodedness and using this as. Of course, America is ours. I don't give a fuck about who's living there, we are entitled to this. We're Regla, we're right. And the great irony of how you can take it full circle and it goes to fucking lobsters.

It goes to sea crustaceans. The the blue blood, it's a fucking Snell's Arason, a beach, and in ancient Greisman, you know, it's a dog eat in a snazziest 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 the colonizers in Massachusetts taking the land from Native Americans. Filling up what Irish indentured servants? And considering the, you know, the lobster, the cousin of this popular snail, consider 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 that is value on entitlement. Whether it be the lobster served alongside steak or the Color Purple somehow signifying royalty, which then gets perverted 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 idea.

Some people say if some if people are defending colonization, they say, sure, forget you were colonized, but if you aren't colonized, you 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 St. Brendan St. Brendan was this. Semi medical, but also real Irish monk in, I think around the 5th century. I'm going to say fifth century. It was 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 St. 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 St. Brendan from Ireland in the 5th century reached North America or Canada long before anyone else did. And what always strikes me about the story of St.

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 St. 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 St. 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 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, are you hurt someone on these islands? Then the wrath of God and Christ will come upon you and our boat will sink and we drown. And I'm not I'm not used 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 St. Brendan managed to sail on around the Atlantic, maybe reached America. And he explicitly stated. You know what, lads, it's possible to go to a new land 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 brillant. There's some shit we can take a better tell the lads back home and we'll our 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. OK, that was a bit of a slight rambling podcast there near the end because I was trying to trying to decipher what the heartache 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 what about I have a few heartaches bubbling in the meantime, mind yourself, rubber dog.

I can't think of Robin dogs now when I'm thinking of fuckin Heracles dog with his snorlax purple mouth. Fuck it, Rob, a dog anyway, yacked. I'm from Australia, the land down, and I am from Brazil. Hi, guys, I'm from South Africa.

Tell me something. What would you say if you knew the world was listening? My boss and his wife are terrible people. I mean, I love my men and all. Don't get me wrong.

But it is what let's get back in the loop on what's the word? The international show of word of mouth. You could find us by keying in what's the word at ACORN Studio?