Daniel sent us this one — he's been peering into the world of flag trivia and discovered something most people never think about. Every country has flags you've never seen. Israel has a presidential standard. The United States has an official flag for the office of the Vice President, even though you almost never see it flown. And the UK, being the UK, has an entire extended family of royal flags — one for the king, one for the queen, one for the Prince of Wales, and so on. The core question is: who designs all these things, why does anyone bother, and if nobody even knows your flag exists, what's the point? Also, should this podcast have its own flag? So where do we even start?
The Vice President's flag. That's the entry point. Because it's the perfect example of something that is legally defined, physically manufactured, sitting in a warehouse right now — and almost no American has ever seen it. Title four of the US Code, section three, defines the flag of the Vice President. White field, the VP seal in the center — an eagle with one wing raised, surrounded by a circle of thirteen stars. Last redesigned in nineteen forty-eight under Truman. It's still in production today.
Nineteen forty-eight. That's the same year the modern VP seal was created. So the flag is basically a banner of the seal.
And here's what gets me: as of this year, approximately two hundred copies exist in federal inventory. Two hundred physical flags, manufactured to government specification, stored at the Government Printing Office's flag depot in Washington DC. Each one costs about eight hundred dollars to produce — silk, hand-embroidered details. And yet, in the last fifty years, the VP flag has been flown publicly exactly four times.
In half a century. That's a worse attendance record than a community theater production of Our Town.
Nixon's funeral in nineteen ninety-four. A handful of Cheney's ceremonial events. Some Biden VP-era appearances. That's basically it. So you've got this beautiful, expensive, legally mandated object that exists almost entirely in storage. And the question is: is that absurd, or is there something deeper going on?
Before we get to the existential crisis of the VP flag, let's define what we're actually talking about. Because Daniel's prompt uses the phrase "secondary flags," and I think we need a working taxonomy here.
A secondary flag is any flag officially designated for a specific office, person, or occasion that is not the national flag. So not the Stars and Stripes, not the Union Jack, not the Israeli flag with the Star of David. These are the other ones. And they fall into roughly three buckets. First, personal standards — flags for monarchs, presidents, governors general. Second, institutional flags — for government departments, military branches, agencies. Third, ceremonial flags — for state funerals, royal weddings, specific one-off events.
The core paradox, which I think is what makes this genuinely interesting, is that these flags are legally defined, physically manufactured, and stored in government inventories — yet most citizens will live their entire lives without seeing a single one.
Every country has them. Some have a handful, some have dozens. The UK has at least twenty-seven official secondary flags. Germany has three. We'll get to why that difference exists, because it's not arbitrary.
First, let's talk about who actually designs these things. Because I think most people would assume it's some government graphic design department. Maybe a mid-level bureaucrat with a copy of Adobe Illustrator and too much time on their hands.
That's where it gets wonderfully weird. In the United States, secondary flags are designed by the Army. Specifically, the Institute of Heraldry at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. It's a military unit whose entire job is designing flags, seals, medals, and other heraldic items for the federal government.
The US Army has a heraldry department. Of course it does.
They've been doing this since nineteen sixty. Before that, heraldic responsibilities were scattered across different military branches. The Institute of Heraldry — they go by TIOH — absorbed all of that. Today they have an annual budget of roughly twelve million dollars. They employ about twenty-two civilian heraldic specialists. They maintain a physical repository of every approved design, including flags that have never been publicly flown.
There is literally a vault somewhere in Virginia containing the master designs for flags nobody sees. That's the most government thing I've ever heard.
It's not just designs. TIOH maintains a heraldic quality control system. When a flag is manufactured, it has to match the official specification exactly — the precise shade of each color, the proportions, the placement of every element. They issue manufacturing drawings, they approve prototypes, they inspect finished products. For a flag that gets flown four times in fifty years.
It's like maintaining a Formula One car that sits in a garage and gets driven to the mailbox once a decade. But wait — how does that quality control actually work in practice? Do they unroll each flag and measure it with a ruler? Is there a guy with a Pantone book checking the exact shade of the VP seal?
I looked into this specifically because I had the same question. The answer is yes — there is literally a quality assurance protocol. Each manufactured flag arrives at TIOH in a sealed package. A heraldic specialist — and this is someone whose job title is literally "heraldic specialist," which I still can't get over — unrolls it on a light table. They check the thread count of the embroidery, the color values under standardized lighting, the dimensional accuracy of every element. If the eagle's wing is off by three millimeters, the flag is rejected.
The flag manufacturer has to do it again. For a flag that will then go into a box for possibly decades.
Here's the part that really got me. The rejection rate is about twelve percent. So more than one in ten VP flags fails quality control and has to be remade. There's an entire supply chain of rejection and rework for an object that almost never sees daylight.
That's either the most inspiring commitment to craft I've ever heard, or the most damning indictment of government inefficiency. I can't decide which.
I think it's both simultaneously. And that tension runs through this entire topic.
How does a flag actually get made in the first place? What's the process from "we need a flag" to "there is now a flag"?
It typically starts with a request from the office that needs the flag. So if a new cabinet department is created, someone sends a formal request to TIOH. The heraldic specialists research the office's history and function, develop design concepts, and present options. Once a design is approved, it gets a formal blazon — that's the heraldic description in precise technical language. Then it goes into the official register, and manufacturing specifications are created.
So they're writing medieval-sounding descriptions for modern government flags.
And that's actually the bridge to the UK system, because the British approach makes TIOH look like a scrappy startup. In the United Kingdom, royal flags and standards are designed by the College of Arms. This is an institution founded in fourteen eighty-four by King Richard the Third.
Fourteen eighty-four. So they've been at this for five hundred and forty years.
They still operate essentially as a medieval guild. The College is governed by the Kings of Arms — there are three of them: Garter, Clarenceux, and Norroy and Ulster. They're appointed by the monarch. They wear elaborate tabards. They have a building on Queen Victoria Street in London. And they are the sole authority for granting and designing coats of arms and heraldic banners in much of the Commonwealth.
When a new royal needs a flag, they don't call a design agency. They petition a five-hundred-year-old guild.
The process is fascinating. Let's say a new Prince of Wales is created. The monarch issues a royal warrant authorizing a new standard. The Kings of Arms draft a blazon — the formal heraldic description — based on the prince's coat of arms. That blazon goes through review and approval. Then a licensed flag maker produces the physical standard. The entire process typically takes six to twelve months.
What does a blazon actually sound like? I'm imagining something impenetrable.
Oh, it's gloriously impenetrable. A real blazon for a coat of arms might read something like: "Quarterly, first and fourth Azure three fleurs-de-lis Or, second Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or, third Gules a harp Or stringed Argent." That's not even a full royal standard — that's just a moderately complex coat of arms. The Royal Standard itself is even more involved because it incorporates the arms of England, Scotland, and Ireland in specific quarters.
You need specialized training just to read the description of the flag, let alone design one. Is there a degree in this?
Not exactly a degree, but the College of Arms has apprenticeships. You train under an existing herald for years before you're qualified to draft blazons independently. And that's part of why the system has survived — it's a closed knowledge loop. The skills can't be automated or outsourced because they're so esoteric.
Who actually manufactures these things?
There are only a handful of companies authorized to produce royal standards. The most prominent is Flagmakers, based in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. They've been making flags since eighteen thirty-seven. A single Royal Standard — the King's personal flag — costs roughly twelve hundred pounds. It's hand-sewn silk with embroidered details. And multiple copies exist, because the standard is flown at any building where the monarch is physically present.
Which brings up an interesting point about the Royal Standard specifically. Most people have actually seen it — it flies above Buckingham Palace when the King is in residence. So that one is visible. But the standards for other royals are far more obscure.
The Prince of Wales has his own standard, which is the Royal Standard differenced with a white label of three points. The Duke of Cambridge has his own. The Princess Royal has hers. Each is a heraldic banner of their personal coat of arms. And they're flown only in very specific circumstances — when that royal is representing the Crown at an official event, or when they're in residence at a royal palace.
These flags exist, they're legally defined, they're physically manufactured, and they're almost never seen by the public. Which brings us to Israel, because Daniel mentioned the presidential standard, and this one has a particularly interesting origin story.
Israel's presidential standard was adopted in nineteen forty-nine, just a year after the state was founded. It was designed by Otte Wallish — same graphic artist who designed Israel's national flag variant, its first currency, and its first postage stamps. The man was basically the visual identity department of the entire newborn state.
Covering the covers.
The presidential standard features a menorah flanked by olive branches on a blue field, with the words "Israel" in Hebrew below. It's deliberately distinct from the national flag, which has the Star of David. The menorah is the symbol of the Temple, the olive branches represent peace, and the whole design signals continuity with ancient Jewish sovereignty rather than the more modern Zionist symbolism of the national flag.
It's flown at the President's residence in Jerusalem, on the presidential vehicle, and at official events where the President appears. So unlike the VP flag, it actually gets some airtime. But it's still a flag most Israelis couldn't describe from memory.
That's true of almost every secondary flag in every country. The Canadian Governor General's flag — designed in nineteen eighty-one, features a crowned lion holding a maple leaf on a blue field — is flown only at Rideau Hall in Ottawa and during official visits. Most Canadians don't know it exists. Japan's Imperial Standard — a sixteen-petal chrysanthemum on a red field — hasn't been redesigned since nineteen twenty-six, when Emperor Hirohito took the throne. It's flown only at the Imperial Palace and during state visits. And here's the kicker: you cannot legally manufacture it without approval from the Imperial Household Agency.
Japan has intellectual property protection on a flower design that's a century old. That's a level of brand enforcement that would make Disney jealous.
It gets at something important. These flags are not just decorative. They carry legal weight. Flying the wrong flag in the wrong place at a diplomatic event is a protocol violation. It can cause genuine offense. The UN Protocol Office maintains a catalog of one hundred ninety-three national standards precisely so that when a head of state visits, the correct personal flag is flown alongside the host country's flag.
How does that catalog work? Is it a physical binder?
It's both. There's a physical reference book — essentially a flag encyclopedia — and a digital database maintained by the UN Protocol and Liaison Service. When a new head of state takes office, their standard is registered. If the standard changes — which is rare but happens when a new monarch is crowned or a country redesigns its presidential symbolism — the UN updates the catalog and notifies all member states.
There's a global flag registry. An ISBN system for silk rectangles. That's remarkable.
It's important. In nineteen ninety-eight, there was a minor diplomatic incident when the wrong vice presidential standard was flown during a state visit to Indonesia. The protocol team had pulled an outdated version from storage — it had been superseded by a minor design revision in the seventies — and someone on the Indonesian side noticed. It made the Jakarta Post. Not a front-page scandal, but deeply embarrassing for everyone involved.
A flag version control incident. That's the most niche diplomatic embarrassment I've ever heard of.
It illustrates exactly why the quality control system exists. These things matter in contexts where symbolism is the entire language of interaction.
Let's talk about the functional argument. Because I think the natural reaction — and Daniel's prompt gets at this — is to say: this is ridiculous. These are vanity projects. Expensive silk rectangles that exist to stroke egos.
There's some truth to that. The VP flag at eight hundred dollars a unit, times two hundred copies, is a hundred sixty thousand dollars just in manufacturing costs for flags that mostly sit in boxes. Add in the design work, the legal infrastructure, the inventory management. It's not nothing.
You're going to tell me there's a real function here.
Secondary flags serve as visual shorthand in protocol situations. When a head of state arrives at an airport, their personal standard is raised. That single flag communicates: this specific person is present. No nameplate needed. It's a visual language that works across all spoken languages.
It's essentially a presence indicator. Like the green dot next to someone's name in a chat app, but made of silk and flown from a pole.
And in diplomatic contexts, that matters. If you're hosting a summit with a dozen heads of state, each one's standard tells you who's in the room without anyone having to announce it. It's protocol infrastructure. Boring but functional.
There's a continuity argument too, right? These flags are tied to offices, not people.
That's the key. The VP flag doesn't change when the Vice President changes. It's the same flag that was designed in nineteen forty-eight, through Truman, through Nixon, through Biden, through whoever holds the office now. It's a symbol of the institution, not the individual. That creates a kind of inertia — once a flag is designed and approved, it's almost never retired. It just persists.
Which explains why the VP flag is still in production despite being flown four times in fifty years. Nobody has a reason to stop making it, and the protocol manual says it has to exist, so it exists.
And this gets us to the "nobody sees it" problem. What's the point of a flag that nobody sees? The answer, from a protocol perspective, is that the flag exists for theoretical use cases. Joint sessions of Congress. Diplomatic ceremonies where the VP represents the United States. These are rare events, but when they happen, the flag needs to be ready.
It's like keeping a fire extinguisher in your kitchen. You hope you never need it, but if you do, you really need it to be there.
You need it to be the right one. You can't just grab a generic American flag and say "close enough." Protocol requires the specific, legally defined flag of the office.
Here's what I keep coming back to. Four times in fifty years. That's not a fire extinguisher — that's a fire extinguisher for a kitchen that has literally never had a fire, in a house that's barely occupied, on a street that doesn't exist on most maps. At what point does "theoretical use case" become "we're just keeping this alive out of institutional inertia"?
That's the uncomfortable question, and I don't think there's a clean answer. The protocol argument is real — when you need the flag, you really need it. But the counterargument is that if an object is used four times in half a century, maybe the use cases could be handled differently. You could maintain one or two copies instead of two hundred. You could commission one only when an event is scheduled.
That would mean admitting that the Vice President almost never does anything that requires a flag. Which is itself a statement about the office.
That's the thing nobody wants to say out loud. The flag inventory is a proxy for institutional importance. Reducing the inventory would feel like reducing the office. So the flags stay.
We've established that these flags serve a real function, even if it's a niche one. But now I want to get to the part that I find fascinating: the heraldic arms race. Why do some countries have dozens of secondary flags while others have almost none?
This is where history and national psychology come in. Countries with strong heraldic traditions — the UK, Canada, Sweden, Japan — have the most secondary flags. These are countries where heraldry evolved as a living system of visual identification over centuries. The UK's twenty-seven-plus secondary flags aren't a bureaucratic accident. They're the natural output of a society that has been using heraldic banners to denote rank, office, and family since the Middle Ages.
On the other end?
Countries with republican or revolutionary origins tend to have fewer. France, the United States, Mexico — these are nations that explicitly broke from monarchical traditions. They still maintain secondary flags for top offices, but they're more restrained about it. The US has maybe a dozen officially defined secondary flags for civilian offices. France has even fewer.
The real outlier is Germany.
Germany is the case study. They have exactly three secondary flags: one for the President, one for the Chancellor, and one for the Defense Minister. That's it. And the reason is directly traceable to post-World War Two aversion to national symbolism.
When your last flag-heavy regime was the Third Reich, you tend to be cautious about new flags.
Germany's Basic Law — their constitution — doesn't even specify the national flag's exact shade. The flag law of nineteen ninety-six finally standardized it, but there was enormous cultural resistance to anything that looked like flag worship. The swastika contaminated the entire concept of heraldic display for generations. So Germany has the absolute minimum number of secondary flags required to function diplomatically.
Which is itself a kind of statement. Having almost no flags says as much about a country as having dozens.
This is why I find the topic rich. Secondary flags are a lens into how governments think about continuity, representation, and identity. They reveal which offices a country considers important enough to symbolize permanently. The UK has a flag for the Lord Lyon King of Arms — a Scottish heraldic official — because the UK considers that office symbolically significant. Germany has no equivalent because Germany's post-war identity is built on institutions and law, not heraldic tradition.
These flags are basically institutional ego made visible. And I don't mean that as an insult. Every institution has an ego — a sense of its own importance and continuity. These flags are just the ones that got a fabric budget.
Here's something that surprised me: the design process is more accessible than you'd think. In the US, any citizen can submit a flag design to the Institute of Heraldry for consideration. Approval is rare — most submissions don't meet heraldic standards — but the channel exists. The College of Arms in the UK accepts petitions from anyone with a legitimate heraldic claim. You don't have to be a duke. If you can demonstrate a right to bear arms, you can petition for a grant.
There's a weird democratic undercurrent to this whole medieval enterprise. The gates are theoretically open.
And that connects to something Daniel asked at the end of his prompt: should the podcast have its own flag?
I was waiting for this. Because on one level, it's a joke. A podcast flag. Who would see it? Where would it fly?
On another level, it's a useful exercise. Designing a flag forces you to define your identity in visual terms. What symbols represent the show? It's the same challenge that the College of Arms faces when creating a new royal standard — just with lower stakes and no silk budget.
If we were to design a My Weird Prompts flag, what would be on it? A sloth and a donkey, presumably.
That's the obvious answer. But a good flag is simple. A child should be able to draw it from memory. The best flags — Japan, Canada, Switzerland — are essentially logos. Two animals would be too complex.
What's the one symbol that captures what we do?
I'd argue for a question mark. Or maybe an open book with a question mark rising from it. Something that signals curiosity, inquiry, the pursuit of weird knowledge.
I was going to suggest a leaf. But that's probably too on the nose.
The process matters more than the result. What designing a flag does — and this is the actionable takeaway from this entire conversation — is force you to distill your identity into its simplest visual form. What's the one thing you want people to understand when they see your symbol? For a country, that might be unity or freedom. For a podcast, it might be curiosity. For an individual, it might be something else entirely.
The challenge to listeners is: design your own flag. Not a joke flag, not a meme. Actually sit down and think about what symbols represent you, your family, your work. What would go on your personal standard?
If you want to go deep on this, the design principles are well documented. The North American Vexillological Association — yes, that exists — has a famous pamphlet called "Good Flag, Bad Flag" with five principles: keep it simple, use meaningful symbolism, use two or three basic colors, no lettering or seals, and be distinctive.
There's a vexillological association. Of course there are.
They would have opinions about the VP flag, by the way. It violates the "no lettering or seals" rule. It's essentially a seal on a bedsheet, which is what vexillologists call the most common design failure in American flags.
The VP flag is a seal on a bedsheet. That's the official flag of the second-highest office in the United States.
To be fair, most US state flags are also seals on bedsheets. It's a national design pathology. Something like twenty-three state flags are just the state seal on a blue background. If you lined them up, most people couldn't tell you which was which.
Which is exactly what the "Good Flag, Bad Flag" people warn against. A flag should be recognizable at a distance, in wind, from the back. A seal on a bedsheet fails all of those tests.
Yet, here we are. The VP flag persists, design flaws and all, because changing it would require someone to care enough to initiate the process, and nobody cares enough. That's the secret engine of bureaucracy right there — not malice, not even incompetence, just the gravitational pull of the status quo.
We've covered who designs these flags, why they exist, and what they tell us about national psychology. Let me try to synthesize this into something useful before we wrap up.
Go for it.
First, secondary flags are institutional memory made physical. They persist across administrations because they're tied to offices, not people. That gives them a kind of gravity that a logo or a brand identity doesn't have. Second, the design process is a fascinating collision of ancient and modern — medieval guilds and military bureaucracies, both producing objects for a world that barely notices them. Third, and this is the part I think our listeners can actually use, the exercise of designing a flag forces you to think about identity in a way that few other creative challenges do.
That last point is worth sitting with. In a world of infinite digital representation — emojis, profile pictures, branded content — a physical flag is almost anachronistic. But that's precisely what makes it powerful. A flag says: this thing is real enough, permanent enough, important enough to deserve a textile.
Which brings up the question of whether secondary flags will survive the digital transition. As representation moves online, as heads of state communicate via video call rather than state visits, does the VP flag become even more irrelevant? Or does it persist precisely because it's physical — an anchor in an increasingly virtual world?
I think they'll persist, and for an unexpected reason: space. NASA has already designed flags for lunar and Martian outposts. If humanity establishes permanent settlements on other worlds, every settlement will need its own flag. The secondary flag industry may be about to explode. Think about it — a Martian colony will need a governor's standard, a research director's flag, maybe even a flag for the chief engineer. The heraldic infrastructure we've been discussing is about to go interplanetary.
A flag for the chief engineer of Mars. That's the most wonderfully absurd thing I've heard all episode. And it's probably going to happen.
The Institute of Heraldry is going to need a bigger budget.
On that note, it's time for Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the late sixteen hundreds, a French naturalist in Madagascar reported that octopuses could change color by secreting pigments through their skin — a claim dismissed for centuries until scientists discovered chromatophores in the eighteen hundreds and realized he was essentially correct, though the mechanism was neural rather than glandular.
...right.
We've spent an episode talking about flags nobody sees, and the fun fact was about an octopus color theory that nobody believed for two hundred years. That's either a thematic coincidence or Hilbert is getting more sophisticated.
I'm not going to read into it. To close out: this has been My Weird Prompts, produced by the ever-patient Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want to dive deeper into the hidden infrastructure of national symbols, our episode on ISO country and currency codes pairs nicely with this one — same energy, different bureaucratic rabbit hole.
If you design your own personal standard, send it to us. We might feature the best ones. Find everything at myweirdprompts dot com.
I'm Herman Poppleberry.
I'm Corn. Go make a flag.
