What's the deal with indigo?

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w. Chuck Bryan over there, there's Jerry over there again. Gosh, it feels good to have you back. Chairs Cherysa's thanks and this is stuff you should know. The smell of mi So is back. I love the smell of me so in the morning.

I've been doing a lot of mis lunches mm hmm, actually just eating balls of mis no. I found a I found a soup that's pretty good, like well, a ramen and a miso that are a little because I was thinking like man, I used to love those little ramin's in college. It's like, I wonder if there's an elevated version of that, and there is, Uh, I'll plug it. Mike's mighty good ramen. It's a cup of soup, but it's just a little bit better. It's made from better ingredients.

In Instead of twenty cents, it's like two dollars. Oh yeah, it's still pretty affordable. But yeah, it's just super fast and get some you know, low calories in your body to stave off some food cravings. Stave off that cheeseburger craving, you know what I mean, Yes, which can be substantial. And you know what I'm also back on and this is all just because of calorie crap. But beef turkey is a nice little protein snack, not a ton of calories,

and squashes cravings. That one kid, um sorry, that one guy, but he started it as a kid our listener who makes beef jerky really top quality stuff. It was good, but you know, I had my MOLDI beef jerky incident years ago in l A. Oh that's right. This is the first time I've had beef jerkey in fourteen years. Because of that incident. Well you're back on the train, though, I'm glad. Well, not like a ton, but a couple of times a week I'll snack on some beef jurney.

That is. That's a lot. That's a lot of jerky. Yes, a couple of times a week is a lot. I mean that's like right in my wheelhouse. But it's a lot. And the whole bag of beef jerky once, okay, two ounces? Yeah, do you weigh it out first? I do? Do you really? Yeah? I was on the food weighing thing for a little while and like you can get into it's kind of like a game. I mean just that's the only way

to track accurately. Um. Yeah, good for you, man. Thanks, you're feeling good whatever, You're like, I've lost my world of blue now it's weighing beef jerkin. It's fine. Alright, Well, everybody, obviously we're talking about Indigo to Die in the History of It, which to me, did you know any of this before we started? No, So this is kind of you're like, oh, this sounds interesting, let's do one on

Indigo and dug In and struck Gold. You know, I was I was perusing the old house stuff works dot com website um, which you know, I know we have almost cleaned that website dry over the years, but this one popped up and I thought interesting because this is one of those that is like, oh, indigo, Yeah, that's a color, but it's also a pigment and it has an interesting history and also slavery and race gets involved, so no idea. Yeah, it has a lot of tendrils

that I found interesting. Yes, Supposedly, wherever indigo went, especially after the age of the exploration and colonization, so too went um slavery because it was it's a really intensive process and crop um to produce indigo to die very popular crop. Yeah, and it was also a worth a lot of money, which was like, oh, well, we'll just um kidnap people and make them work for free and and that's how we'll produce indigo. And that's how it

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

And I just found this ultimately super fascinating. Yeah. I mean this beginning though, I thought was even more fascinating because I never really thought about the fact that if you look at any color up to a certain point about the mid nineteenth century. Yeah, mid nineteenth century, was any color you would see on a fabric or a textile was there because a lot of plants and insects We're squashed like it was an insect and plant blood

bath for eons in the world. Because if you wanted something to be colored at all, then you had to find a bug or a plant that you could grind up into a powder basically or some other means, yeah, or an animal, uh, like sea snails and animals, And if you wanted purple for a very very long time, you had to um, you had to get the mucous gland out of a sea snail and and desiccated. And I'm guessing that didn't end well for the sea snail. No, And I imagine that's a super labor intensive thing to do.

But who, Like I guess I could see like accidentally smashing a sea snail and be like, oh, that's a very pretty purple. I wonder if I can use it to do stuff with the stuff that gets me those when you get into like indigo itself. Yeah, because it's the fact that you can get blue out of indigo is not intuitive. No, because you look at the plant, it's not blue. You squeeze the plant, not blue, eat the plant, poop it out, not blue. There's nothing blue

about it. You have to you have to put it through this chemical reaction that's multi step to to get it to be blue. And I'm likely at a loss how what what series of accidents had to happen so that like somebody came up with indigo to die because apparently it's one of the least least natural natural dyes in the world. Yeah. And and also and for that reason, one of the most sought after through antiquity, because you know, if they wanted to make red stuff, it's pretty easy.

There's a lot of things you can you know, get red out of it in nature or green obviously, but blue. You know the old thing about there being no blue foods. What old thing? Well, the old adage there are no blue foods. Have you ever had arctic blue gum? Well? I did look into this because this doesn't make a little sense of why blue as a pigment would be more sought after, and I think it ties into the fact that it's just not naturally occurring. Really, Um, I

had never thought about that, but that. Yeah, now I'm just gonna spend the rest of the episode racking my brain for a blue food. Well, blue corn, blue potatoes, blue blueberries are the things that most people would say, well, what about that. I never would have thought of those, But those are technically purple. Um that on the Food Network a few years ago, and other people have done this.

They used to spectro uh photometer photometer two look at the true colors of foods, and even those foods are actually purple. They brought Sydney Opera and be like, yeah, it's purple. I don't get it. She had that song true Colors. Okay, I was thinking true blue. I was like, that's my daughter. Did you just add an r Onto the end of Madonna? Yeah, but that's a reservoir dogs reference. Um, thank you for explaining it. I didn't have to see like multiple emails two weeks from now with people being

like great reservoir dogs reference Chuck. So the blue food thing, supposedly people think that blue light is one of the high energy wavelengths on the on the light spectrum, on the visible light spectrum, and that the guesses is to grow more efficiently plants absorbed that light and use that energy. Well, yeah, because the blue end is is higher energy. Yes, I'm pretty sure. Yes, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and that was what we were talking about in the about

the blue blood. Yes, but that's the opposite of that. It absorbs more red, so it reflects more blue. Interesting, so if it was blue, it would it would absorb less blue light. I don't know, I know, it's kind of like a mind sure, a brain teaser, right there you go. But at any rate, there are very supposedly no true blue foods, and that's probably ties into the fact there are not a lot of plants that were

true blue. And as if you wanted something blue back then, uh, you had to get it from woade, which is a If you look at those, it's got yellow flowers again, not blue. If there was ever a medieval English word, I love it for that. It sounds like a little uh a little short, hairy stubby, that little woe man with big feet who wears like a tunic, that's a woad or the more um are the prettier named Indigo fera, which is a family of plants in India and South America,

both of those that has like a pinkish flower. But both of those is where you used get indigo. Yeah, And what's weird about this also is not only like to neither of these plants look like they would produce blue dye, but neither one of them are actually particularly good at dyeing fabric. They both resist binding to fabric or um dissolving in water. Hence the reason why you don't just like squeeze wode or an intego ferra plant um and get blue dye. You have to run it

through this process that starts with fermentation. Even yeah, and squeezing, squeezing your wode sounds it sounds like something else. Yeah, So we don't know for sure. We think they've been making indigo from wode longer than from the Indigo ferra plant. I think now we we can't say the word woude anymore for the rest of the episode. I think you're right, but it's you know, we can't really tell sometimes whether

it was woade or the indigo ferra. That they do think because Egypt and Mesopotamia are close to Turkey and they had a lot of blue uh and in Turkey they had more woad than indigo ferra, So they think

that was probably the first one. Yeah. So the upshot of all that is that they can trace blue die back to the third millennium b c. Five thousand years ago or up to five thousand years ago, but they can't say whether it came from wood or indigo ferre right, right, But they did find indigo ferra in the Bronze Age in the Indus Valley civilization. And this was fascinating to

me just because the um the horror Pon. I guess it's one of the same, the Indus Valley civilization and the that that what you just said, Yes, they're they're the same thing, right, Yes, they're the Harpon civilization that was one of maybe the largest ever ancient civilization. And I'm just fascinating anytime we talk about these civilizations back then, add like as many as five million people, It's just blows my mind. They also had indoor plumbing, underground sewage

like they had it going on. They apparently had a better standard of living um than contemporary Egyptians at the same time. And everybody thinks that the Egyptians having it going on too. Yeah please, yeah, I guess not compared to the Indus Valley civilization. So um, there is lots of examples of this stuff. Um. Yeah, Indigo fera or wode they kind of competed for a very long time, and Europe kind of went the Woade way because wade grows in um in Europe much more easily related to

the cabbage family. They took the load less traveled. That was good, um, and then that was really good. And then indigo fera grows better in like Pakistan, India that that area the Indus Valley um, and so that that was kind of like the split in blue dye. The thing is, there seems to have always been this understanding that indigo fair is just vastly superior to woade indigo um.

And so even in Europe, like you would find woade like the Greeks, the Romans, and then up to medieval Europeans, if they could get their hands on indigo ferra, indigo that um. They would pay through the nose for that stuff. Um and rightly. So, I mean like it was really expensive because it's hard to produce, as we'll see um. But also at the time you had to travel over land carrying the stuff, and so each trader that went along these trade rush just added more and more money

on too. So by the time it reached a western Europe, you were paying a lot for this blue dive. One million dollars. They would be like that that number doesn't even exist yet. So the Greeks they called and this is going down a bit of a a word origin rabbit hole. But the Greeks called the blue pigment indecon with a K because it was from India and they wanted it to sound sinister because things were the K

that became indigo in English. And then there's the word for die in ancient lands uh in i l i neely that was Sanskrit meaning dark blue, and then that became a n i l in Spanish, and eventually that became indigo in Central and South America. And apparently, yeah, blue in Arabic is al neil right, in English, uh annualine is derived from that, and that is synthetic die class. So it's all tied together. We got to climb right out of this hole. Yes, that was a big one. So, um,

where are we in the ancient world? Well, I think we're in Marco Polo? Okay, good so and twelve the late twelve hundreds, the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo made his way to China and was like, hey, get this.

We had to say something. This is me talking, not Marco Polo, but um, they had, like the Romans, the Greeks, the Europeans had no idea that indigo came from a plant, because by the time I got to them, it was like these little hard um bits of die and you would mix with water at about solution and there you had your die. All of a sudden, um, But they thought it was a mineral. Marco Polo went to China, saw some of this stuff firsthand. I was like, hey,

this comes from a plant. Did you guys know that? And by the way, I got a bunch of my boat if you want to buy something, And all of a sudden there was trade now with with China. Yeah, and that went. It was still pretty expensive because there was no direct sea route to China. Until Vasco da Gama came along and said watch this, Yeah, I'll sail to China in like two seconds. Everyone was very impressed. And this kind of cut out the middleman in all

those hands. Like you were saying, raising the prices along the way, you cut out a lot of those and you've got more supply. And even back then that those economics meant cheaper prices would follow, right, isn't Fosco da Gama George Costanza's favorite explorer? I can't remember. I was just wondering that. I want to say it is, but I thought it was Cortez. Now no, no, no, everybody hates Cortez. Who was Jerry's I don't remember which one. I think one of them was impressed about going around

the Horn of Africa majelling. Maybe I'll have to look that all. What's the door Steinfeld research on that for you? So the cost of Indigo dropped a lot because of the da Gama but but not like rock bottom luxury, like the point zero one percent could afforded to you know, could afford kind of something like that. Yeah, But what that meant was is Woade was in big double because Indigo from the Indigo ferra was the blue gold, said, what is me? All right, let's take a break and

we'll talk about the synthesization synthetization. Good God, am I dreaming right now? I think? So? Good night? Okay. So you said that they call it blue gold, right, or they did back in the age of Vasco da Gama. That's right because it was worth a lot of money. It lasted along and had a good shelf life, and it wasn't you know, huge. It was pretty compact as

far as storing and traveling, super compact. So um, if you'll indulge me, like I found a little bit about how that stuff that they used to to travel with was made. Yeah, and it's still if it's going to be made naturally, which it really isn't. This is how they would still do it, right. Someone figured this out thousands of years ago and still today from what we understand,

the process is virtually the same. So the whole thing starts with a whole bunch of indigo ferra um plant um, and you throw it into a pot and you start to ferment it. Step one. Somebody figured out how to ferment or that you need to ferment indigo. I bet someone drank it at some point, yes, and they're like, chuck out my teeth. Have you ever seen teeth like these? So here's the thing, the reason why you can't just squeeze an indigo ferra plant and get indigo outs because

there's no indigo in the plant. It doesn't exist naturally. But there's a precursor to it called indi can um, and that is what you ferment out of the um leaves with an enzyme which kind of breaks it down, and all of a sudden, um you have something called endoxyl and glucose. That's right, so you're splitting it. This endoxyl is what you're actually after. And then after that you drain the liquid um and into a second tank

you add the endoxyl um with air. You stir it basically, and all of a sudden it oxidizes into intogotten and then the into gotten is actually what um apparently is indigo. Because there's no other steps after that except to let it air dry. It like settles at the bottom and then they can get rid of the uh, the matter

on top. Yeah, they filter it out and you're left with kind of a sludgy paste, I think, right, Yeah, And then if you dry that paste in the sun, which I think is the traditional customary way supposedly, that converts it into basically like blocky, solid indigo die. Okay, so it's not a powder, it says cakes. And then the fact that the but I've seen it as a powder, so I know what you're talking about. But I think the fact that the Romans and Greeks thought it was

a mineral because it must be hard. But surely, I mean, it's got a breakdown somehow. But what's weird about all this is if you take that that indigo die and you say, like, soak some denomen in it, it's not just going to come out blue, certainly, not after one. If you're using natural indigo die, you have to, um I've seen up to forty times. You have to wash it in this indigo to get it to start to bind. Because one of the things about indigo is it doesn't

like to bind with fibers. And then even when it does, it's very superficial. So like if you took your genes right now, cut it open, you looked at the cross section, you'd see white inside. It's just the superficial top of the fiber of your genes that have been die blue inside the indigo hasn't actually kind of traded, and I would be wearing some sweet daisy dukes you would with like the pockets sticking out of the bottom. No, I never went that short. I would cut off Geane phase,

but never the Georgs. It was always had the frayed bottoms, kind of country style, nothing nothing hemmed. Oh yeah, yeah, I never never owned appear No, no, no, I know what you're talking about. George didn't either. Actually it's not true, but mine was at a time where they were acceptable. Yes, okay, yeah, I buy that. I don't. It's not like I was like, oh, I'm not going to wear those because theydn't even call them George back then. I think I just didn't have them.

What you're describing is not what I have. Mine were bag here, but they had like a hem like the bottom of jeans did but they weren't at all the tebow George. Yes, yes, I didn't look anything like that here. I need to see what that looks like. Just imagine like nineties Geene shorts. Okay, there you go, you got it. Sort of we'll just leave it there, all right, Okay, Uh, we don't know. Let's just smoove on. So Chuck just put his glasses on. Everybody. That's right, because I'm reading.

My eyes have gotten so bad. Mine have to Chuck. I can't, like, I can't read anything now unless I have them. I have to go like this, and it makes it really hard to underline and highlight when you hold like Josh's holding a page very far from his face and then close and then it's really sad. So, uh, I guess we should get into the dark side of And I think this was one of the parts from the house Stuff Works article they said some of that. I had some NPR in there, and I think a

fashion website even chimed in. That's a heck of a So when Europeans kind of like colonized North America colonialized, they started obviously they needed to grow crops and sell them for any That was a big deal was farming. So they were like, what should we grow, Like we've never been here before. Yeah, that's like you don't think about that, but that's exactly kind of what they went through.

And they tried a bunch of different stuff, and they did grow a bunch of different stuff, but indigo was something that they tried to grow a lot of early on. They grew yeah, in Jamestown, New Amsterdam, I think in Louisiana. The French did it an okay job of it. But it was a woman named Eliza Lucas in the seventeen thirties and uh, more appropriately Eliza Lucas's slaves that figured this out. Yeah, so she was she gets the credit.

She was a pretty interesting person herself that she was sixteen and her father, boy, but my voice just transitioned really weirdly. And her father um owned uh like at least three plantations in around Charleston, South Carolina. Yeah, again a British colony at the time, and he said, hey, Eliza, you're interested in botany, why don't you go take over

these three plantations and see what will grow there. And he sent her some seeds and she started growing stuff and she found the indigo grew really really well in the lowlands of South Carolina. Yeah, she grew ginger cotton, hemp, alfalfa, and the aforementioned indigo. Eventually, for her efforts, she was inducted into as the first woman into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame. Again she's sixteen years old at the time. Sure she got married to a man named

Charles Pinkney. Um, you know, because she was an old maid of sixteen and not married yet getting up and they because, um, and you know, of course she'll get I think a lot of the credit now is being shared. But for many years she was like Eliza Lucas, the woman who figured out how to grow indigo. Whereas the true story is is Eliza Lucas um had slaves on her plantation from Africa that knew how to grow indigo. She's like, how do you do this? And they helped

her out. Uh they Um. To their credit, they did share this, the plants, the seeds, the knowledge to all kinds of other farmers. And they are kind of looked at as being responsible for the indigo boom in the south, right, So then you could extrapolate pretty easily that they were also responsible for the introduction of slavery into the southern cultures because the indigo started growing so well, and this indigo boom happened. And remember this is still like a

luxury item and in high demand. Everybody wanted everything blue, blue, blue blue, Give me some blue clothes right now? That was kind of the the age in the middle of the eighteenth century. UM. And because this crop started growing so well in the south, and because it was so lucrative, they think that Georgia said, oh, you know, Charleston is doing really well with this indigo. We could be doing well too, if only we would overturn our ban on slavery.

Had no idea that Georgia initially had a ban on slavery, did you. I did not, uh, and said We're going to start allowing slaves uh to be held in Georgia and the Georgia colony so that we can grow indigo. And that's exactly what happened. Yeah. In seventeen fifty one is when the band in Georgia ended and the revolutionary Revolutionary I keep saying that revolutionary because it was truly revolutionary. The Revolutionary War came along. Um. By that point there

were eighteen thousand slaves in Georgia and Uh. The war, though, kind of put a dent in the indigo market. Yeahs um. So the biggest um consumer base of indigo for the colonies was Britain, and Britain said, you don't wanna be our colonies anymore. You want to be independent, go find some other customers. And Britain said, we're gonna go take over India and get our indigo there, right, except they said it British, all British, British eight barby gun. That's

pretty good. I don't know if that's pretty good, governor accurate at all. Uh. And this tie to slavery and indigo was basically around until the early twenty century when um synthetic indigo came along. Yeah. So if Eliza Lucas Pickney kicked off the slavery boom um in the Southern colonies, you can make a really good case that Alfred Vombayer, a German chemist, freed a lot of slaves when he

found a synthetic um alternative to indigo. Yeah, and he followed a boy, truly a boy, a teenage chemist named William Perkins. That's up with all these teenagers don't doing stuff? Well, they died when they were seven. Um, we both know that's not true. Don't bother emailing everybody. Seven Club. Great new show on our network from Yeah from Disgrace Lands, Jake Brennan, Catch it Sundays on my Heart. It is a good show though. Yeah, it's about the twenty seven Club,

the musicians who die at the age of seven. Yeah, I feel like I think that's on our list of to do episodes, although now it's done. So yeah, why are we gonna rip jakeof I don't know, he'll come after us, I know. So. Uh. Brittish chemist, teenage wonder

kid William Perkins, he was the first. Uh. He was the creator of the first synthetic die, which came about as a lot of things doing science by accident when they're trying to do something else, in this case a cure for malaria, right, which is teenage kid was doing trying to find a cure for malaria. Pretty cool, and he came up with something called Marvin, which produces a bright purple and so this was the first synthetic die.

Remember up to this moment when William Perkins came along, everything that had ever been dyed in the history of humanity had been died using naturally sourced labor, intensive weirdo processed um dies. And all of a sudden he's like, hey, this is way easier. It's way more controlled. And because it's controlled, you can put it into like mass production pretty easily. Just changed everything. Yeah, and we don't have to harvest billions of insects and grind them up into

powder or poor sea snails. Yeah. Um and so again. A few years later, a couple of decades later. Uh, funny enough, Alfred von bayer Um said I'm going to start working on one for indigo. Oh yeah, eightolf in Uh. In eighteen sixty five he declared that that's what he was working on. In seven he figured it out. Yeah, not bad years. Ah, well, what's funny? He got the Nobel Prize actually for chemistry for his work on organic dies, but also he discovered, um, barbiturous, didn't even mention it

in the Nobel Prize barbituous or synthetic dies. We'll give it to them for synthetic dies. Wow. Yeah, chemistry, Well it's still interesting. But back then it was just like, I can make heavy duty drugs, might make synthetic dies, and they'll inject them both and see what happened. Um, when that launched in the natural production of indigo, was it about nineteen thousand tons? I guess annually it doesn't say those look like metric tons. If you ask me,

there's an extra and and a knee. Yeah, Let's say it's annually and this was you mainly coming from India. About fifteen years later, after the invention of the synthetic die, that natural number had gone from nineteen thousand townies to one thousand tonies. It's a pretty precipitous drop. Pretty it hit a It hit the natural indigo market pretty hard, and it had nothing to do with the demand for indigo. It was just the synthetic indigo stepped in and just

took over very very quickly. That's right, um, And so now it's like just a complete niche market to be like this is actually naturally dyed with natural indigo kind of garments. You just don't find those. Instead, almost entirely everything is made with synthetic dyes. Let's take our second break and then we'll come back and talk about how that's just ruining everything too, because there's nothing good about indigo apparently, correct, Charles. You're wearing jeans right now, are you?

Unfortunately I am as well. That's all you wear. How many pair of jeans you got two? I have two as well. One jean jacket show off you throw on like a little jeane vest. You got a Canadian tuxedo going yeah, I I but Emily made fun of me for buying a jean jacket and that's like, I think jean jackets are kind of in your Like Brennan thinks it's cool. I bet he can rock a jean jacket that hair, Yeah, for sure. Uh And I said, now these are in now, and she's like, I don't know,

and I was like, no, they totally are. Like I'm going to make it my business that they're in now. They're in. You just don't don't wear them with gene bottoms. What are you wearing with? Uh? Well, according to the websites I looked up to prove Emily wrong, you wear them with like khakis. You wear it with a corresponding or a pant that doesn't jack doesn't sound right. Yeah, khakis are like you know, I have my like maroon khakis.

You can wear it with that any anything that's not blue jeans, basically, because again, you look like you're edging really close to Canadian tuxedo. Yeah, but you know I've seen people pull it off. Will Ferrell he worked Innadian tuxedo. He's hilarious. He got up there, do you see that jean getting blue jeans? But he offset it. Yeah, I was like, because he did that whole Neil Diamond thing. Remember, no, oh, one of his greatest characters from Sorrence Live is Neil

Diamond and you sorry, I mean Robert Goulay. Do you know? Okay, this Neil Diamond makes his Robert Goulay look like like dog poop. Really, it's yes. I don't think I ever saw there was he did it multiple times, but there was one where he did. A VH one storyteller is Neil Diamond and like Neil Diamonds just off the rails on like on pills and like he's got stitches for

some reason, they come loose and just beautiful. He's like a bigoted racist who's singing about he can't really stand as keyboard player because he's black, and his keyboard players like, what are you talking? Yeah? It is Tim Meadows. So I I I demand that everybody pressed Paul and go watch the Neil Diamond Forever or no vh win storytellers will Ferrell and we'll wait. I will check that out and we're back. Okay, So where the heck are we now?

Is the environmental nightmare that is modern text, not just blue jeans but textile dying period. Uh. There's a documentary called River Blue that I have not seen yet. Sounds lovely, but it details the chemical manufacturing process for denim specifically where like you go to China and there are rivers that are running blue um, which is not good for many reasons. No, some of the reasons are that the die itself makes the river blue, which blocks out sunlight.

So plants die everything. Yeah, when they when they disintegrate, they are broken down by bacteria which stuck up all the oxygen, which kills the fish. It's just a horrible chain reaction. Um. Again, remember even with synthetic indigo, but with natural as well. Even with synthetic indigo, that the dye doesn't want to stick to the stuff. So you have to use something called the mordant, which is a bleaching agent that actually that will bind the indigo die

to the garment. Oh, I thought the mordant was because the initial color that it gets is not the blue that you want, so you have to keep bleaching it. That's not my understanding, you know. I think it's the thing that binds that says, hey, indigo, come on over here and let's hang out with this this denim and we'll stain it blue. Well, the wastewater the leftover mordants are terrible or either acidic or their chromium or some other kind of horrible metal that kills fish and poisons

the supply. Yeah, you know they spell it differently, which is why they pronounce it differently. No, I looked it up. How's it spelled exactly as it's pronounced. But we spell it aluminum in the US and in Canada. Apparently the rest of the English king world spells it alumni. Yum, there's that extra syllable spelled out. Oh they say aluminium. Yeah, okay,

I didn't know that. I thought it was just aluminium, right, but they're they're really saying aluminium, but they're just they're British, so that would be an extra I after the end. Aluminum aluminium, Yes, exactly, all right, But in't that fascinating we spell it differently. Yeah, that's weird, But anyway, you don't want that stuff in your water supply. And it comes about in aces from the four billion pairs of

genes that are died every year in the world. Yeah, jeans and geen jackets and gene hats all Canadian tuxedos. That's right, But they are trying to work on this. UM. There's a more environmentally friendly way they're there trying to formulate UM. I did not understand this at all, So I'm just gonna say it's magic through chemistry. I have a feeling you're gonna want to explain it. Well, So

it's here's the thing. Do you remember, Like endoxyl is what you're after when you're when you're extracting and fermenting indigo or indigo ferra plants in indigo. So that indoxyl it's super unstable, so it likes to buy into something. It becomes something else. We can't use that something else.

You need the endoxyle. What they figured out is too they genetically altered an E. Coli, a strain of E. Coli, and it secretes that that precursor to endoxyl, or they can make it secrete it right right, Yeah, they like genetically engineered to do so UM that that precursor to endoxyl. When you put it together UM with some other natural enzyme, it separates that precursor into endoxyl and glucose, and then

all of a sudden you've got endoxyl. And what's neat is they found that with this particular type of endoxyl, when you expose it to air, it automatically turns into indigo. Well, it turns into uh luke luco indigo, which is the white indigo, which apparently is what you actually want to make things blue. That's right, it's really confusing it. You just lost me with that one. That's the deal. But they're they're they're saying, like, we've got this thing. It's like,

this system actually works. We've engineered this bacteria to produce basically the precursor to indigo, and then you scale it. That's always the problem, exactly. It's exactly because big Denim is gonna say, great, show me the numbers. Tommy Hill figure is going to be like, I can't make any money off this, and and so will an tom antoine bugle boy. Well, they won't have anything to do with it unless it's cost efficient. Oh that's good. Uh. And the good thing about this is is it it uh

solves a couple of problems. Um, the chemical synthesis of indigo is just bad. And then you also don't need that mortan bleaching stage either, and all of this stuff is running off into the rivers in China and other places. But if you don't have that, and you just have this nice little bacteria producing it on a massive scale, then the denim producers will say we're on board and the world will be saved. It's just could there be

anything more wrong with the world? I know, because you start to think about like someone like someone who's vegan, it's like really walking the walk and trying to do the right thing, and like, I don't wear leather, no belts, no shoes, all of this stuff. They say, maybe while wearing their jeans or maybe not. Maybe they're like, oh, and I don't. I won't wear denim either. But I think it's all dependent on what you have researched. You could probably research everything on your body and find some

awful practice along the way. Unless you're just sitting on your commune making your clothes and weaving your loom and you're just wearing like Tan Lennon's no colors, no dies. You're like, because you're not gonna smash up a beetle to get green. No, because that's not environmentally friendly either. Beetles got a right to live. Yeah, beatles got a beetle. You got anything else? No, it's just sad. You're right, and I was hoping to end it on the upbeat thing,

but not this one. Yeah. You you follow the chain of almost anything used today, and it's got some terrible thing. I've got. I've got it. But that doesn't mean you should give up. No, no, because anyway, any choice you make that helps something continue to live did not be polluted. It's still helping. Now you're still screwing up this other way you don't mean to, but the other stuff that

you are doing that is helping is still helping. It still saving a life, it's still promoting some healthier ecosystem somewhere, and it's still worthwhile. I'm a big subscriber to this. You know, you don't have to be all or nothing. Some people are that's great, But every little bit of good you can do is still doing good because I've been taking the task personally over the years from listeners saying,

how can you be an advocate for dogs and eat meat? Oh? Yeah, they love that one, And I'm like, you know, I'm still helping dogs. You know, I just really love two ounces of perfectly proportioned beef jerky was and maybe I should be vegan. But to call me out on saying, you know, you're a hypocrite because you're helping dogs, like, no,

helping dogs is good, period, full stop. Agreed, And they're like, you know, strangling turtles with a plastic bag while they're saying this too, because I guarantee if you drilled in chuck, you could find something too. Yeah. Yeah, but that's not a fruitful road to go down. No it's not chuck, No, it's not agreed. Uh. Well, if you want to know more about being a better person, go back and listen

to our catalog. How about that? Yeah? All of them? Um, And since I said that, it's time for listener mail, what is this? Oh? This is kind of a fun one. It's a correction for you, but it's a lighthearted and fun one. Hey, you guys, A long time listener, huge advocate for all you do. I live in southern Maine and frequently make the long drives to Vermont. In your podcast helps me make that more tolerable. But I got

a bone to pick with Josh. Whenever the state of Maine comes up, you guys always slide in a comment about our state's weird and independent nature. Rightly so. But I've now counted two times at least where Josh is misidentified Maine as the slogan live for or Die uh, the first time in the rank choice voting and then more recently in AI facial recognition. I let it go then, but I have to say something now, Live for you or Die is famously New Hampshire state motto Josh, not Maine.

It's even on their license plate. Main state motto is uh, dear a dear Ago dear a Joe Latin for eye lead. I have no idea d I R I G O. That suits us quite well as our state leads as the first in the nation to use rank choice voting, having the most breweries per capita, and being the state in which the most Stephen King books take place. Again, I love the show. Always chuckle when you call us Maynard's weirdos. I hope you enjoyed your time in Portland

during your live episode last Wall. Now, if you excuse me, I have to go ride my moose to the ocean so I can catch lobsters by my lighthouse. And that is from John Q Neo. Speaking of lighthouses, we both agreed. The Lighthouse was an amazing movie. I know you just randomly texted me, it's just so good that have you seen The Lighthouse. I was moved to Robert Agars, just please keep making movies. He's great, and I was. I wish it hadn't gotten shut out of the Academy Awards.

I thought, why would it have been because it was black and white, because it was weird, It was almost an experimental film. But the fact that either or both of them did not get nominated for Best Actor is just ridiculous, pretty ridiculous because they were both amazing and production design everything. Have you ever seen a more like authentic looking film that's absolutely true Edgar's Robert Pattinson came out and was like, we basically lived like you know,

it was whatever year it was. He was like, it was awful. It's like all the stuff you see is doing is the wheelbarrow scene that just looks miserable because it was. Yeah, everybody, if you don't know we're talking about, just go look up the Lighthouse and it was so good and watch it and just watch it all the way through. Okay, and then after that I really like this, then go watch the Witch, which is Robert Eger's first movie. That's right, his first movie was The Witch, one of

the greatest films ever made. In Pattinson is just one of my favorite actors. He's so great. Have you seen Good Time? Oh? Yeah, man, I couldn't believe how good that was. Amazing. Okay, John wrote that that listener mailan right hold on, I think it was John, Yes, John, Cuneo. John, I can tell you that definitely in the facial recognition episode, I was being I was trolling. I know for a fact that it's New Hampshire's slogan, and if I know Josh, John,

you're going to hear that again. Yeah. I would also guess that when I said it before in whatever other episode I said it any Yeah, I don't remember that. That was probably me trolling too, But if I was mistaken, I apologize live for or die everyone. If you want to get in touch with us, like John did, you can go into Stuff you Should Know dot com, or you can just send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is

a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.