Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Color Gray

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedian/podcaster Adam Tod Brown (Unpopular Opinion) and comedian/podcaster Jeff May (Sideshow’s Side Show) for a look at why the color gray is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Gray. Known for being a color. Famous for being a color. And maybe boring. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why gray is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Two amazing guests join me this week. Adam Todd Brown is the creator, host, proprietor, and all-knowing, all-seeing leader of the Unpopular Opinion Podcast Network. Unpops is one of my favorite things in podcasting, just full stop. And then Jeff May is so funny as well.

He's a frequent guest and sometimes host on that network. The two of them co-host a great podcast called You Don't Even Like Sports. And they did my favorite podcast ever made about baseball great Jose Canseco. Jeff's also co-host of Tom and Jeff Watch Batman on the Gamefully Unemployed Network. He's the host of Sideshow's Sideshow podcast from Sideshow Collectibles. And they're both excellent comedians, you know, whenever that is safe to do, a little bit online here and there. And I love these guys.

I'm so glad they are on the show today. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and have used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples. Acknowledge Adam recorded this on the traditional land of the Keech and Chumash peoples. And acknowledge Jeff recorded this on the traditional land of the Keech, Chumash, and Fernandinho-Tataviom peoples. That feels worth doing on each episode.

And today's episode is about the color gray, a seemingly boring shade that'll bring us from prehistory to the UK to China to outer space. So, please sit back, or lean back, and look skyward, because we all for some reason share a very specific idea of who is coming to beam us up. And either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Adam Todd Brown and Jeff May. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Adam Todd Brown and Jeff May.

This is the best. This is all my Unpops buddies. This is so nice. It's the best. We are the best, yeah. We're the first and second best, minimum. Yeah. For sure. Guaranteed. Yeah. I shouldn't say all. I like many other people on the best. We are the best, yeah. We're the first and second best, minimum. Yeah. For sure.

Guaranteed. Yeah. I shouldn't say all. I like many other people on the network. But I think you can do this. Disagree. Hard disagree. Yeah.

Like no other people. I don't even like Jeff on the network. Oh, I like me. Yeah, that's fine. But I don't. I don't. I don't like me. But we're talking today about the color gray.

And with every episode, every topic, I ask the guests, what's your relationship to this topic coming in? How do you feel about the color gray? Adam, you go ahead first. I'm a fan, mostly when it comes to clothing. Because you can wear gray with anything, and it's perfect. Beyond that, I'm kind of a fan of an overcast morning but i don't like when it carries on throughout the day like an overcast

morning is fine uh beyond that i don't know if i have that many thoughts on the color gray the gray album was fun danger mouse j, Jay-Z, Beatles mashup. I would say, yeah, I agree. I have a lot of gray T-shirts. I think it's a good base. I'm wearing a gray tank top right now. It says Taco Bell on it. Isn't that exciting?

It's branded. It's from a place that gets you sick when you eat there. No, I do. I like gray. I will go with what Adam said. He likes a gray morning. I like a gray day. We live in sunny California. So the gray, that's that's the that's a sidestep. And I enjoy it. Yeah. I will say, you know, I have an interesting sort of I don't know if it's interesting, but when I was in college, we would have these kind of Mennonite style. I think they were like this weird sect of a vibe of religion where they would come and they would preach at us on the way into the cafeteria at dinner.

But they would just yell at us about going to hell. And they were called the Grays because they refused to wear color. All they would wear was gray. Oh, wow. What part of the world was your college in? Farmington, Maine. So it was at the University of Maine at Farmington, in Farmington, Maine. And so they would come there and they would stand up and they would basically proselytize

about how we were all going to go to hell if we didn't repent and blah, blah, blah. And the wages of sin is death and blah, blah, blah. if we didn't repent and blah, blah, blah. And the wages of sin is death and blah, blah, blah. And then we found out later that this religious sect had these like surges and then fizzles. Like it would be like really strong and then it would fall apart because without a doubt,

the patriarch of the entire religion would get caught like sleeping with someone's wife and it would dissolve the entire religion. And then like a couple of years later they would come back. And that to me was just this delicious form of irony that they were, they were preaching to us about going to hell while he was committing one of the, one of the, the 10 big ones, you know? And, and worrying about an 11th one. That's not a big deal at all.

Like you can wear colors, it's fine, but he's doing this other thing at the side. Great. You know, it was like That's not a big deal at all. Like you can wear colors. It's fine. But he's doing this other thing on the side. Great. You know, it was like, that was a big year for yellow, you know, like the,

like 2001, 2000, 2001. That was a big year for, for a lot of yellow. And they really missed out by covering themselves in gray and bonnets. I didn't think of it when you first asked, but Jeff mentioning the grays,

I do have some connection to the color gray there in that I run a conspiracy theory podcast and the grays are a race of aliens that are currently living on Earth. We struck a deal with them in the 70s. It's all pretty basic stuff. I'm sure the government's going to tell us about it soon. Different grays, though, not the ones who wanted to send jeff to hell which i do support you don't know but you don't know that that's true they could have been the same grays hiding right in plain sight adam imagine if aliens came down here and just became super christian like if aliens came here and they're like maybe this is the way yeah maybe maybe this christ is uh is what it's all about and then they're really frustrating to us because because they're like

let me talk to you about christ and we're like i want to talk about you you're a space alien and they're like no no forget me there was a guy 2 000 years ago like oh fine like i want to know about your planet yeah we didn't do the travel thing yet we would like to know more about that and so today we're going to get in ways that the color gray is secretly incredibly fascinating. And to start that off, we're going to get into a segment of fascinating numbers and statistics really quick in a segment called stats, stats, stats, stats, stats, stats, stats. And that name was submitted by Eric Henriksen. We're going to, if you're new to the show,

we're going to have a new name for this segment every week submitted by listeners like you. I want them to be silly and wacky and not very good. So send your bad names for this to at SIFpod on Twitter or to SIFpod at gmail.com. Jeff, go ahead. Is that to the tune of shots? Yes, it is.

Yeah, I think I underdid it. Okay, all right. I might have underdid it, right? That wasn't good enough. Well, yeah what you need to have like the you gotta where's your and where's your dj where's your little john voice you gotta do that little john voice everybody but yeah these are some quick uh stats and numbers involving the color gray and the first number we have is the number two, because that is the number of officially correct ways to spell the word. G-R-A-Y is the American one. And G-R-E-Y is if you speak English in almost any other country. We're just rebels here. Damn right. Another number we have

here is the number 12. That is the number of different shades of what is called space gray that the Apple company has put on their products, according to 9to5mac.com. And they also, them and Reddit, both have really fun rundowns of how Apple has used 12 different versions of something called Space Gray, and none of them are the same. Like, if you buy an Apple product and it's called Space Gray, it's not the same color as most other Space Gray Apple products.

That's stupid. And not to be that guy but isn't space black yeah that makes sense uh okay that's a very good point this is why i have a droid i'm not going to get bought into this thing where apple tells you that's the thing about apple is that apple is a very emperor's new clothes situation yeah where they tell you a thing so people just are like okay this and that's a that is a trick they're telling you everything is space gray because they want you to look at it and they want you to say this is space this is space gray but it's a lie just like saying we have the superior os and you're like they have the superior os and they don't it's a cult it's

a total cult absolutely it's a cult and that space gray thing is a they are the grays whoa we did it but that space gray thing is a perfect example of a uh cult indoctrination process where you uh tell somebody a lie to the point where they have to uh believe that it is the truth and then they give you lots and lots of money. Ideally. That's how cults work. That Emperor's New Clothes thing is also just, this is a fun story about the origins of Apple making things colors, because it's like just a mind game amongst themselves.

There's a great book called The Secret Lives of Colors by Cassius St. Clair, who's an arts and entertainment writer for a lot of publications. But she has a story about how in the early 2000s, you know how those first earbuds from Apple looked white? And a lot of their stuff was white, and that was kind of what the aesthetic felt like.

That was technically either the color moon gray or the color seashell gray, if you looked at the Apple products catalog or the schematics for it. And it's because Johnny Ive wanted stuff to be white, but Steve Jobs wanted it to be gray. And so the compromise is Johnny Ive made it basically white. And then Steve Jobs just called it whatever shade of gray he wanted to. That's how that worked. I don't like Steve Jobs.

I was just going to say the same thing. He's a real jerk. And a couple more numbers and stats here. One of them is 14,000 BC. And 14,000 BC is the approximate date for the cave paintings at Altamira in Spain, which are some of the oldest human visual art we know of. And Cassius Sinclair's book makes a point that since it was drawn with charcoal, that's like some of the first

use of gray ever. And gray was one of the first colors anyone drew anything in ever, which I know it's kind of a fun way to think of the color, right? Usually you think of something else being the fun thing they do. Yeah, that's great. If you're telling me that that's the thing, then I'm going to go with you, Alex. I've never disagreed with you a lot. So I said, I said, it's great, and people, I think, just glossed over that wordplay there. I don't understand. What do you mean?

We'll tell Jeff later what it means. We'll catch you up on the show. Put a sound clip of me understanding that in post. There's also 158, which is the number of years ago the first color photo was taken. That was 1861 by James Clerk Maxwell.

And I just like conceptually the idea that every photo before we had color photos was just a bunch of gray put together. Like that was the only color all photos were in all of the time. I'm just going to put this out there. It seems pretty that there was a color photo in 1861. And yet we were riding out black and white photos for the next 80 years after that. I'll tell you a crazy black and white photo story. I've mentioned this on on pops before, but my grandfather was a sheriff's deputy in Peoria County. And when he when he in Illinoisoria County. And when he, when he, in Illinois.

Yeah. When he retired someone in the crime lab, like owed him a favor. And the way he asked for this favor to be repaid was he wanted to take home a stack of crime scene photos. And he did. And for years and years and years, when I was a kid,

there was just this stack of crime scene photos, like on the coffee table that I would show to friends to traumatize them. And they were like suicides and car crashes, which aren't crimes, but like it was really grisly stuff. And they were all black and white, which made it so much more horrifying what a weird what a weird way to get favors repaid is to get black and white photos of of dead people you think yeah he was like no money for me i want i want snuff photos and then to take those photos to the grandkids and go ah look what your granddad brought home.

Look what grandpa comes to. It's not like. Pretty cool, right? It's not like we had to sneak to look at them. They were just out all the time for years. Can we look at a dead body? Now we have dead bodies at home. And also with that color photo, that's a good point jeff about like why did we

keep writing out black and white photos forever uh this first color photo by james clark maxwell apparently according to national geographic what he did is photograph something three times once through a red filter once through a blue filter once through a yellow filter, once through a blue filter, once through a yellow filter, and then did a bunch of painstaking recombining of those to create a color image. And so it was a huge, just taxing thing to do. And that's why we kept taking a lot of black and white photos, I think. That seems... This was very experimental and hard. That's just cheating.

Kind of, yeah. That's all that is. He's like, this is the first color photo. It's like, you mean it's the first combination of three photos? Literal Photoshop. Right. Welcome to my Photoshop. Tipping a top hat.

This is me just being like, it's another Emperor's New Clothes situation here. I think he just learned that phrase. And then one more number here, and that takes us into one of our big takeaways for the show. The number is 50-50-50, and it leads us into takeaway number one. Gray hair is the most misunderstood hair color. I think a lot of people are wrong about where gray hair comes from and how it works and just the whole thing, even though it has big social ramifications. and how it works and just the whole thing, even though it has like big social ramifications. The 50-50-50 number comes from what is apparently the rule of thumb among dermatologists. You know,

dermatologists have all kinds of rules of thumb, right? And according to Scientific American, 50% of the population usually has about 50% gray hair by age 50, if you're talking about Caucasian people. So that's 50-50-50. Like about half of white people have half gray hair by age 50, and dermatologists just tell each other this matching number all the time. Yeah, if I grow my facial hair out, it's very gray. You got that salt and pebble. Yeah, but the hair on my head, what's left of it, it's not.

I have nothing in the top of my head as far as gray hair, but every time I go to trim my beard, there's just one new guy. Ah, yeah. Like I got some kind of curse where it's like, every time you shave it, there's going to be a new one until it's full of them. And it's very common for people to get it like some places at some times, and it can be as early as your 20s, and that's very common for people to get it like some places at some times, and it can be as early as your 20s, and that's totally normal, and it's because the thing that happens is the average

human head has 100,000 to 150,000 follicles, which is the thing under the skin that then generates the hair, and if you get gray or white hair, it's because the follicles stop producing melanin. It also turns out that hair that according to Harvard Health, Dr. Robert H. Schmerling, once we grow a hair, that hair doesn't actually change colors. It's just that we shed it and then the next hair from the follicle is the gray one if the follicle has stopped doing melanin. So your hairs don't actually ever change colors. You just replace them with something new that your head is doing now or your body is doing yeah i'm i'm fascinated by that thing where a person will go through some traumatic

event and just have a patch of gray hair the rest of their life i knew a guy my ex-girlfriend's brother was uh he was involved in like a police chase or something and next day had a patch of gray hair and he's always had it. Oh man, I've only, because I've only heard of like the urban legend version of that or the historical legend where it's Marie Antoinette. Like there's a historical urban legend where Marie Antoinette is going to be executed the next day. So overnight her hair turns white because of just the total stress of him about to die.

As far as the like stress gray hair thing, apparently this is also a Harvard Health thing. They say that stress cannot directly cause gray hair, but it can be a factor for a lot of conditions, especially a common one called telogen effluvium, where your hair sheds a lot faster. And so with that condition, your hair sheds three times faster than normal.

So you could get a kind of thing where a bunch of stress happens to you causes this condition and then when a bunch of hair comes back uh it's all it's all gray looking and yeah and also like uh timing of gray hair it's basically all genetic uh because because even if you shed your hair faster or slower the the switch in your follicles it's basically just from genes that's kind of how does harvard health know can you have it? Do you think you're better than me? Yeah. How about you find a better source before you go refuting my anecdotal evidence about my ex-girlfriend's brother? What's Breitbart got to say about it? Yeah. F and J O. And then there's also like just some interesting cultural currents going on around gray hair. And one is that the old trend was to dye your grays and erase them.

And now people are kind of picking gray hair. A lot of fashion magazines are talking about the granny hair trend. And also in 2019, the L'Oreal company did a press push where they said silver is the hair color of the year. And silver is just fancy gray. That's just like an Oakland Raiders version. That's money gray. Yeah. It's Mercedes gray.

You know what I'm talking about? There's also, there's one story I love here that comes from the Chinese Communist Party. And, you know, I'm always talking about the Chinese Communist Party. It's what I do. Now we're getting into some reliable sources. Right. Card carrying member, Alex Schmidt. party it's what i do now we're getting into some reliable sources right card card carry card carrying member alex but uh apparently just like socially and and politically among the the top

leaders in that party there's kind of a thing where there's an emphasis on the men keeping up youthful black hair like it's a lot of people dying their hair all the time um the bbc beijing correspondent celia hatton says that the politicians have quote dark suits red ties and identical helmets of jet black hair and that's just like what you do if you're up there in the party that's so hot it's just like shoe polish it's like that like that pitch black they look like a bunch of like greasers yeah like fon like Fonz's everywhere. I'm in with that. Also, the New York Times says that it was pretty noticeable and a big deal in the country when Mao and also Deng Xiaoping both allowed themselves to go gray publicly late in

life after they were retired. Quote, but more recently as the party promoted a collective leadership model to spread power more evenly after the strongman days of Mao, flawless black hair joined the sickle and hammer as part of the communist uniform, end quote. And these are Western sources, but it seems to be a thing where there's huge pressure in this one specific national government to like dye away gray hair or else you're bad at your job it is a very funny sort of thing when you look at foreign to us governments versus what we have going on where it's like this guy's got gray hair he's got gray hair you know that's you know bill clinton had a shocking head of like

salt and pepper to white hair and then they look at that and just the sort of gaslighting to believe that a consistent series of 65-year-old men all have beautiful jet-plagged Lego hair is fascinating to me. It's just like this cultural gaslighting of believing that that's even remotely possible. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of how i feel like we are never going to have a president with a beard again like when when was the last time i don't know man we gotta get like it's been a long long time it's like was it grant yeah yeah the last facial hair was 100 years ago i want trump to do it i want trump to grow a goatee. See how the world reacts. Like a Star Trek villain? Yeah. Yeah, that would be really just a big evil goatee.

Shave his head. Or like lightning bolt sideburns going down the side of his head. Couple earrings. I like it. Linda, and we're joking about like, oh, what if our leaders suddenly look different? But also the other thing with this China story is that that has a little bit happened specifically with gray hair coming around. There was a time in 2013 when a retired premier appeared in public with gray hair, and apparently it blew up Weibo, which is sort of the Twitter-ish site in China.

And that's even though this retired premier was 85 years old they were like oh my god can you believe it we can see him with gray hair freaky um and then the other thing is the current leader chi jingping is someone who is now going around with some gray hair and it is national news like the cnn headline was gray leap forward just fun about hair uh and then the new york times interviewed like a bunch of people in the country and these are some of the man on the street quotes they got he's very humble he's not afraid to be himself another person said it makes him look like he works harder that he's laboring day and night a member of the people's congress was like speculating publicly when asked like why has he gone gray and the member said quote our country is so big he needs to manage all sorts of things and it's very hard

which is like like it's like a sea change that oh somebody who's a leader has gray hair they must be like totally different from anyone we've had before but also what's anyone in china gonna say in a man on the street interview about xi jinping Oh, sure. She's going to be like, well, this is because he works harder than anybody who's ever lived. Please don't bulldoze my family to the ground. I guess the other takeaway might be he's publicly gray because his power is unquestionable. Sure. Yeah. Like that might be the situation.

But, you know, yeah. And good. You know, he must like it. But anyway. I think you were just going to say good for him. I was leaning there and then I realized, no, it's not. Not good for him. I mean, it's great for him, Alex.

Trying to give it a positive. Maybe not good for the world. It's literally the best for him. I am. Power is a nice little segue here because we're going into takeaway number two out of three. There are three total for the episode. Big takeaway number two out of three. There are three total for the episode. Big takeaway number two. Gray clothing is all about power.

And it has been for a long time. Like the fashion of gray clothing for, especially in Europe and America, it's been all about who has power and who doesn't, which is like a fun way to think about gray clothing, perhaps the most theoretically boring clothing. Who's wearing a gray hat on this podcast? Yeah, like a fun way to think about gray clothing, perhaps the most theoretically boring clothing. Who's wearing a gray hat on this podcast?

Yeah, with a tiger on it. That's power. I would say if that was a gray tiger, we'd be done over for you. It would be just too much power. No, I have a couple of gray suits from the teaching days left over. I enjoyed wearing gray. I mean, because gray also provides you that ability to dress up either heavy with the bright colored shirt and then a gray tie or a neutral shirt with a powerful color. Right.

Same. So there is that. It does accessorize very well. Well, and there is a, there's also one, one thing that kind of foreground the fashion stuff is that gray is like really good at being no one's favorite color. Um, there are like, I, it's hard to like survey what people's favorite colors are. There's a few surveys I could find that, uh, like there's a 2015 YouGov survey that asked people in 10 countries what their favorite color is but it only gave people 10 options and none of them were gray like it it's a favorite thing to use as fashion or decor or something but nobody's like that's my favorite color so i'm gonna wear it like that doesn't really happen with the color gray uh and i think it's the that's like saying i was gonna say

it's like saying your favorite meal is the plate yeah yeah yeah like it's just a default thing you do and then you do something else yeah yeah yeah what's everyone's favorite color i it's uh blue or red it's one of those oh dangerous in los angeles riding both sides of that lane mine get off the fence alex pick a side mine's yellow because i read in a book in sixth grade there was this line that said yellow is a madman's favorite color and i've always loved yellow since then that's pretty cool yeah ronald mcdonald is a psychopath uh i like uh i like a heathered blue oh although i will say my favorite t-shirt is a heather gray a thin fabric heather gray is my absolute favorite color of t-shirt but also like if you go way back in the centuries like gray was truly a default color for a lot of people because gray was the color of most

wool if it hadn't been dyed and so in you know medieval times and so on uh gray was the color of the poorest europeans like if you if you can't really afford to dye your clothes you you wear gray and you like are one of those Monty Python peasants. And that's what's going on with you. And then the royalty made a point of wearing colors because they wanted to be different from that. Like purple. Yeah, yeah. It was expensive because it was made of crushed seashells.

Shut up, nerd. What did you teach history for about a year? Come on. Let me just dust off this sweet, sweet degree. I have my degree framed. I don't know why. What am I going to do with it? Am I going to brag?

Worcester State College bachelor's degree? Anybody care about that? I don't have a degree. I mean, I have a degree in street knowledge. Well, I've witnessed the strength of it. Yeah, that's why you advised me to not wear red and blue. That was very helpful. See?

You were about to witness the strength of that street knowledge. So with Gray, I'm glad Jeff, you brought up suits, because there was this huge transition in men's fashion that I think not everybody knows about. There's an amazing podcast called Articles of Interest. It's a fashion-specific show by Avery Truffleman and came out of the 99% Invisible Families podcast. But she has an episode about suits and where suits came from. And one of the key things that brought them about was a phenomenon in fashion called the Great Male Renunciation.

And this was a phenomenon where men started saying, even though I am an incredibly wealthy king and so on, I'm not going to wear a billion colors and furs and ermines and stuff. I'm going to wear like a few muted things that are really nice and like really perfectly tailored and arranged specific ways. And that'll be my entire self-expression as a European male. And this kind of took off in swept fashion. And so then gray became the color of like high status people. And there was that turn in the history of fashion. I used to wear a suit every day when I was a teacher towards the end of the career. I tried out a lot of different things and I really stuck with the suits towards the end. And I loved wearing them. I really did. It definitely does sort of change how people perceive you, especially when teaching in a public school when nobody else was dressing like that and to sort of show up.

And it did really have a difference. You don't automatically think it will, and then you realize it 1,000% does. My favorites were I have a good gray suit, and then I had a good gray suit and then i had a a really i had a charcoal gray suit with like a like a small pinstripey kind of vibe to it right and uh the more i look back at that the more i felt i feel like that was um a cartoon person's suit right that small change you're like oh now i'm a dick tracy character. Like, that's all it takes.

100%. Yeah, yeah. Now I'm going to hold up the malt shopping. Yeah, and that was this transition. Because before that, and especially, you know, up to like the mid-1700s, men would be like, how many pumpkin pants and furs should I put on? Better keep it to seven. You know, like that was how the extremes of men's fashion worked.

I feel like we need to get back to that. Well, a lot of it came from one guy. There was a guy named Beau Brummel. He lived 1778 to 1840, and he was a rich London guy who was basically famous for wearing clothes. A guy named Beau Brummel was a wealthy guy i don't believe it and uh he also he was the son of the secretary to uh britain's prime minister in the 1770s so also his dad was like part of the government that lost the united states um but he was he then became the first English dandy. Crowds of people would gather outside his house to watch him dress. And unlike the frilly clothes of other men, all he would wear

is a white shirt and a dark jacket and tan pants. And that was it. I'm gonna need I'm gonna need you to hit a rewind real quick. Yes. Do you say that there was like a town full of peeping Toms? Just watching him get dressed or were they just waiting to see what he was wearing or did he just like step outside nude every morning and throw on his clothes big little floppy dandy in front of everybody so we we joke about the nude thing but if i heard this articles of interest podcast right he was like visibly nude or very undressed through his window. And people were looking to see how he was going to put on his just shirt and jacket and pants.

And also his pants were, there was a big pants tightness thing with him. And they were such tight pants he needed an assistant to help him put them on. And it was supposed to look almost naked when you're wearing them. Like you can see the package very effectively and that was his thing. Bo Brummel, bring it. Yeah, I like this guy a lot. He has taught, brought us to school

and we are still learning. Three centuries later and we are here for you, Bo. Yeah, because he, like that outfit of just a plain white shirt and especially like white clothes are a very powerful color of clothes kind of all across history because it's hard to keep white clean. So you have like servants or laundry services or something if you do that. But like white shirt, dark jacket and tan pants is almost a suit.

And it sort of evolved into the suit that we have today. And it also evolved into like a democracy thing. suit that we have today. And it also evolved into like a democracy thing. According to historian Ian Kelly, quote, the dress down issue of Beau Brummel and his friend was sometimes taken as looking in support of or an allusion to American revolutionaries or French revolutionaries, very dressed down, very man of the people sort of look, end quote, which was very rebellious if you're the British Prime Minister's son son uh or a prime minister's secretary's son i should say uh you can see how it became an american thing like between the fashion change taking off and it being seen as democratic uh that's a lot of why we wear suits today in the

or more specifically black coat white shoes black hat cadillac. The boys of time bomb. Is that right? Yeah, that's in the Constitution. Yeah, sure. Yeah. This is a rant. This is a rancid podcast, right? Because it could be. But and so ever since then, like gray has been in modern times and democratic times a powerful color.

times and democratic times a powerful color there's also like a weird counter move uh that a few women have been able to do to that where like so many men in power are wearing gray that someone like margaret thatcher can wear a bunch of bright colors all the time and it stands out and it makes a statement and there's a article from the new statesman in the uk that we'll link that calls thatcher quote a jewel frocked siren in a sea of gray suits, and goes on to say things about her, like, making a statement by having very bright fashion. I don't care for Margaret Thatcher, but apparently that's what she did. I was like, and that statement is, I'm going to take away all of your liberties. That statement is, look at the camera I just put up on your street.

Off of that, we are going to a short break followed by a whole new takeaway i'm jesse thorne i just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and

enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. There's also just a few more quick things about wearing gray clothing, because it's a big thing for uniforms, especially in the 18 and 1900s. And one of those is road teams in baseball. And I don't know this, but in researching,

it turns out that road teams in baseball wear gray because it doesn't show stains as much. And so when you were on the road and you didn't have laundry machines, that just like made practical sense. And that's where that tradition came from. Like they were eating ribs out on the field. Be very careful. Yeah, those days.

Yeah. The old salad days of baseball. And you're eating a big rack of Coney Island ribs when you're on the field. Bring me a hot dog. I'm dying out here in the outfield. God, that would have been so much better. Yeah.

Yeah. Let me tell you. They should do that now. Kind of from that same era, there's also a little known thing of the U.S. Civil War, which is that, like, we think of the Union wearing blue and the Confederates wearing gray, but they didn't really totally figure that out for the first, like, year or two. It really took a while for each side to have a specific color they were wearing,

especially because cadet gray was the official uniform for West Point, the military academy. And so you ended up in a situation where the Confederates didn't make gray the official color until 1863. And in some of the early battles, both sides were wearing both blue and gray and kind of shooting at the wrong troops. Did they put out like a press conference about that?

Was there like a junket? By the way, real quick, dibs on gray. Yeah, how would you? You just have to send one guy to each f***ing town to be like, hey, gray. Gray. Put on gray. Hey, we're the Confederates. You'll notice.

Power gray. Which is really s*** because a lot of the battles were fought in the South. Right, right. So, like, they stole that away jersey ability for the unit. Yeah, they did. Well, also, there's one other thing with their uniforms where apparently part of why they settled on gray in the Confederacy was that they didn't have a very good dye industry.

That was mostly in the north, the factories for that. And also the Confederates were trying to do cheap, easy dyes made from vegetables at one point. But then those dyes would tend to turn yellow in the sun. And so you had some units where the guys, unis started to kind of turn yellow in the middle of the war, which is fun. Yeah.

The piss army. There goes the, there goes the scary piss army of the South. Glad I called out yellow as my favorite color earlier in the episode. Yeah. Sorry guys. It's the color of a madman. Confederate madman.

Confederate piss man. They call madman. Confederate piss man. They call me good old Confederate piss man, I tell you what. Yeah, there's still a monument to the Confederate piss battalion here in California. We need to pull that down. But no one wants to touch it, yeah. Yeah, it stinks. Well, and we got one more big takeaway for the

episode, and Adam kind of brought us into it early on, too. Takeaway number three. Greys are the world number one myth about space aliens. And it's not just those specific zeta reticulans. Basically, all of the roots and present day of how we think of space aliens will look in in world culture is a gray guy even though aliens could be anything you know they could be but they are a gray guy um but with the aliens there's like there's a couple key sources of almost all alien myths and

one of them is the betty and barney hill tapes uh they were taking a trip through new hampshire in september 1961 as they were driving in the middle of the night, they saw lights approaching in the sky, and they claimed they saw bipedal humanoid creatures in the window of a large spacecraft and then can't remember the next two hours. And hypnosis sessions drew stories out of them about a teardrop-head, large eyes, tiny body, gray alien. And after repetition, the descriptions started to line up of being the grays. And that's kind of the main concept that then got applied to the Roswell sighting in 1947

and the other key modern UFO stuff. So that's one of the key sources there. The classic episode of Unsolved Mysteries is the Hill tapes. Oh, yeah, I'll bet. Because they recorded them under hypnosis and it was scary yeah because barney hill starts screaming right i remember being bothered by it now when i watch old unsolved mysteries none of the stuff that scared me as a kid is scary now i'm not afraid

of like they're like we saw we saw a cowboy ghost i'm like that's not scary but then there's ones like the stuff that i didn't care about like a man randomly drive drove up and shot me in the face i'd be like oh that's pretty scary i was never afraid of those when i was 10 but now everybody in a car potential murderer yeah i made a kind of a joke earlier about us striking a deal with the grays but that is an actual conspiracy theory that's out there in the world that the grays at some point in the like 70s struck a deal with the u.s government where we basically built them a lab at this base called dulce base and if you follow that conspiracy theory far enough it ends with the military finding out

that they were doing all these crazy human experiments in this lab and so we sent a team of marines in to clear it out and those marines lost and i just want to see that movie why write that movie that would be amazing that could be a great sci-fi original right maybe shutter shutter original right are you h in me right now shutters if shutters listening to this is a paper i hope so shutter come on shutter shutter you gotta You're making Creepshow, which we appreciate. Now continue to make Adam's gray movie. Please. And also, that story definitely sounds like a conspiracy theory because it involves the government funding a science lab.

Like, come on, they don't do that. Not anymore. They don't do that for anybody. Yeah. That'd be funny if, like... This was the 70s. This was the Carter administration. If there was, like, a news article about how, like,

the Trump presidency has cut funding to all gray-based science science labs and that's how we find out about it. Right. The grays prove climate change. Then they're like, oh, no, done. He keeps calling them illegal aliens. And I'm like, this is a little ominous. Yeah, the government does keep trying to tell us about UFOs and aliens. They just came out again this past week and the Pentagon said they have off-world vehicles

that they are in possession of. Vehicles that were made not on this planet. But they are dune buggies. Even if. Wouldn't that be rad? A little alien dune buggy? Yeah. Aliens got here on f***ing dune buggies and jet skis.

There's also one other source of this alien concept where an alien is very gray is H.G. Wells, the 1890s science fiction writer. He wrote an article for a magazine back in the day, and he talked about what he called the man of the year million. And it was an idea where it's like a basically a the greys alien style version of human bodies and he claimed that a million years from now quote the mouth will shrink to a rosebud thing the teeth will disappear the nose will disappear it is not nearly as big now as it was in savage days the ears will go away end quote he's the one saying savage uh and uh that's and i sent you guys an image from an article where it shows it. The drawing kind of looks like a gray, but it's from 1893.

Man. Looks like a f***ing baby. Yeah. That drawing, I'm just like, man, H.G. Wells is overrated. As soon as I see that picture, I'm like, man, this thing looks stupid. It looks like a baby and a seal. Yeah, about right. Yeah. Baby seal. Stupid idiot legs. Yeah. Why would we evolve to not have legs? Do we fly? this thing looks stupid it looks like a baby and a seal yeah about right yeah baby seal stupid idiot legs yeah why would we evolve to not have legs do we fly they're like crisscrossed over

you know what this guy's doing he's doing sprinter stretches he's stretching out his hamstrings oh yeah lunges get those hammies ready this drawing's like let's talk about it for a second because this is like a police sketch artist drawing of somebody. If you described it as being like, well, his head looked like a butternut squash and he was doing pushups. And then that's what that's what the guy did. This person has never the artist here has never seen anything. That's the only way this picture works. I'm so offended that this picture got published.

Wait until we all look like that. Then you'll be super offended. Oh, imagine if we're walking around with one useless leg draped over another leg that clearly isn't for mobility. While we have dumb, stupid heads. This doesn't even take center of gravity into play whatsoever. Who drew this? We should kill them. who drew this we should kill them and the one uh the one other wells description of an alien like this uh it's not a humanoid body

but in war the world's 1897 like you don't see the martians very often but there's one part in chapter four the cylinder opens where they say quote looking i presently saw something stirring within the shadow grayish billowy movements above another, and then two luminous discs like eyes, then something resembling a little gray snake about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the writhing middle and wriggled in the air, blah, blah, blah, it's an octopus monster. But it's like a gray octopus monster with basically a gray alien style head. And in 1897, he's like, hey, here's the first alien invasion story. And it's guys like these. That's what's coming.

And that templated a lot of people's minds. Well, Independence Day famously took that sort of concept and rolled with it. If you remember, they had the tentacles and the little glowing discs in the grayish body. And it didn't look like that jerk off drawing though this artist is not gonna get away yeah i like it that embarrassment of an illustration did he do it on a dare i'm gonna put this and see if they take it who did it who paid what what magazine was it for? Penthouse? Right. It was supposed to be attractive. He really blew it.

Yeah. Yeah. Where's the, where's the, where's the gens? Where's the genitals? That's what those floppy legs are. Two weird body dongs crawling towards us. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Adam Todd Brown and Jeff May for very much helping me still launch this show.

It's very early days. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic, Eugène Schuller. You may not know the name E Jean Choulaire, even though he was the founder of L'Oreal and one of the founders of French fascism. So how about that? That's pretty wild. Visit SIFpod.fun to hear about that and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring the color gray with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Here's one more run through the big takeaways.

Takeaway number one, gray hair is the most misunderstood hair color. Takeaway number two, gray clothing is all about power. And takeaway number three, grays are the world number one myth about space aliens. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow our guests. You gotta check out the Unpopular Opinion Podcast Network. Please support them on Patreon or on Supercast. You have a lot of options there.

It is one of my favorite podcasting things, period. And it'll bring you so much Adam Todd Brown. We'll also bring you some Jeff May. Check out both of them there, and check out Jeff as the co-host of Tom and Jeff Watch Batman on Gamefully Unemployed's podcast network, and as the host of Sideshow's Sideshow from Sideshow Collectibles. Your podcast app is your friend for finding all of that stuff, or use this episode's links at sifpod.fun. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article titled Fighting Gray, Why Do China's Leaders Dye Their Hair by Celia Hatton for BBC News. A great book titled The Secret Lives of Color written by cultural historian Kasia St. Clair. Also an incredible

podcast by Avery Truffleman with the team at 99% Invisible. The show is called Articles of Interest, and it's episode number 10 of that miniseries. It is titled Suits, and we are hugely in that show's debt for that second middle takeaway of this one about gray clothing and what that means power-wise. Find those and more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun.

And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Get more Budos into your life by visiting daptonerecords.com. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. See more of Burt's art on Instagram at Burt Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. And special thanks to everybody listening, because it's it's very exciting taping this chunk of audio this is the first chunk of audio i've taped since the show came out and since it's begun from like being a thing that exists in a vacuum and on a hard drive

and now exists in the world i y'all are so kind and also very fun and also borderline diabolical with the numbers and stats suggestions already. You've blown my expectations away. I'm very excited. Anyway, I'm feeling all kinds of gratitude. And thank you so much for making the launch of this just so special and a real highlight for me and hopefully for you, too. and a real highlight for me and hopefully for you too. And along with that, extra, extra special thanks

go to our patrons because I hope you loved this week's bonus show and I hope you loved the previous ones too and the ones to come. Thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say

we will be back next week with more secretly, incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.