From the Vault: Tea, Part 3

In this classic series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the history, mythology, culture and nature of tea. So start a kettle and prepare to listen with your favorite cup… (originally published 02/09/2023)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
it is Saturday. Time to head into the vault for
an older episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This
one originally published February ninth, twenty twenty three, and it's
part three of our series on tea. Pour yourself a cup.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Times for drinking tea in idle moments, when bored with poetry,
thoughts confused, beating time to songs, when music stops, living
in seclusion, enjoying scholarly pastimes, conversing late at night, studying
on a sunny day in the bridal chamber, detaining favored guests,

(00:48):
playing host to scholars or pretty girls, visiting friends returned
from far away in perfect weather, when skies are overcast,
watching boats glide passed on the canal, midst trees and bamboos,
when flowers bud and birds chat on hot days by

(01:10):
a lotus pond, burning incense in the courtyard after tipsy
guests have left, when the youngsters have gone out on
visits to secluded temples, when viewing springs and scenic rocks.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind Production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. This
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that opening
up the episode. There, that's the one last key poem.
This one is also collected in a History of Tea,
The Life and Times of the World's Favorite Beverage by
Larc Martin, which is one of my sources for these episodes.
This is a poem by Sue C. Shue, which I

(02:00):
like it. You know, I guess it's kind of a
simple format here, but yeah, it's basically saying, you can
drink tea anytime. Anytime is a great time to drink tea.
But here are some specific examples.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
I guess, pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah. So this is our third and I think this
will be our final for now episode on tea. I
don't know. It's certainly a topic we could always come
back to. It's a topic we could keep doing. But
then if we delivered to do that, we would be
a tea podcast. And we're not exclusively a tea podcast,
but there are a lot of great looking exclusively tea

(02:35):
related podcasts out there, so certainly feel free to continue
your tea journey with other shows, and if there's a
particular topic related to tea that seems like something we
should cover, well, we can always come back and do that.
But if you didn't listen to the first two episodes
on Tea, I highly recommend you go back and listen
to those. We talked about, Oh, the botany of Tea.

(02:57):
We talked about a lot of the history of tea
and conclude the basic Chinese and Japanese history of tea
in this episode, with a few other bits and pieces
in there. We also talked about tea mythology in the
first episode. Now before we move on and also get
into some of these interesting tangents, I wanted to clarify
what we said in the last section about the phases

(03:20):
of tea because I think this can get confusing. So
you have kind of like the primitive tea level, where
it would be tea leaves dropped into boiling water, creating
a bitter brew. Then you have this phase one of tea.
This is where you have leaves dried and pressed into bricks,
and then when you go to make it, you cut
some of that brick off, you put it in water,
and it ends up being kind of coarse and acidic.

(03:42):
But this was kind of like the first phase, the
first era of tea. Then comes Phase two, where the
leaves are steam dried and ground into a fine powder
whipped into hot water. This is the Mancha style of tea.
It's fresher, it has a fresher, grassier flavor. And then
eventually you get to phase three, have steamed, cut, dried, oxidized,

(04:02):
and sordid and steeped tea that creates basically most of
the modern flavors of tea that we think of today. Now,
there are plenty of examples that kind of blur the line.
You can still certainly get brick or cake, et cetera.
Teas that are oxidized. Mancha tees are still used as well.
So it's don't look at this as just like a

(04:26):
strict evolution of form with past forms completely falling away.
But I think it is a good structure to think
of when we think about the evolution of tea. And
as far as phase three goes, we will be getting
into that later in this episode.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
Now, Rob, before we do that, you actually inspired me
to go on a couple of tangents about teapots in
this episode because while I am not much of a
tea drinker, for many years I did have an intimate
relationship with a tea kettle that lived on my stovetop,
and most of that relationship was one of strife and agony.

(05:00):
I really disliked this tea kettle for a number of reasons,
and one of them is as follows, Rob, I'm sure
you've had this experience a million times, whether it's from
a poorly designed or vintage teapot, or I guess from
any vessel containing liquid. You fill it up and you

(05:21):
go to pour it out into a cup or a bowl,
but instead of pouring in a steady arc where you
aimed it, the liquid coming out of the spout clings
to the underside of the teapot spout and then runs
down the side of the pot and dribbles all over
the table, or the floor or your pants.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
I have certainly encountered this before. Fortunately, our current teapot
doesn't do this, or at least doesn't do this so much.
But I have certainly encountered this before.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
The one that I'm thinking of had a very kind
of wide, round, almost pipe like spout, and yeah, it
did this all the time. So this is a phenomenon
that is well known in physics. It actually has a name.
It's called the teapot effect. Though it doesn't just happen
in teapots. It occurs when pouring from all kinds of containers.

(06:12):
I think it is probably one of the most common
sources of spills and stains around the kitchen, when you know,
when you're trying to pour out of one container and
it just doesn't pour the way you intended, It doesn't
arc like you meant it to. Instead, it runs down
the side.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
Mm. Yeah, And I think I've certainly encountered this even
more with other pouring vessels, and often it will be
something you know, bright and colorful or sticky that I
really don't want to get everywhere.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
I think I was trying to think about situations where
I encounter it the most, and before understanding all of
the underlying physics, the things that occurred to me were
that it happens when you're trying to pour a liquid slowly,
especially out of a container without a a designated pouring lip.

(07:02):
So like if you're trying to pour liquid, say out
of a saucepan or out of a drinking glass, that's
dribble city.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah and yeah, especially this will occur, at least in
my experience, where you have to say, like you're gonna
pour orange juice out of an orange juice container, and
the orange juice container has just been opened, it's super
filled up, you know, so you have this impulse to
want to pour slowly in order to control the juice
which is already almost overflowing. But if you do so, yeah,

(07:31):
you're going to get that dribble more often than not.
You've got to commit and really just slash it in there.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
But why does the dribbling happen? Well, it turns out
the answer is not simple at all, and there have
been fluid dynamics and raiology papers. Reology is the study
of how matter flows, so the flow of fluids or
plastic plastic solids. Reology and fluid dynamics papers on this
tricky subject, going back at least as far as the

(07:58):
nineteen fifties, there was an investigation of the teapot effect
that in fact even won an Ignobel Prize in nineteen
ninety nine. That you can see how that fits with
their kind of like a quaint, quirky sense of humor,
like oh, teapots, but it looks like A fairly definitive
paper on this question came out in twenty twenty one

(08:19):
and it was by Bernhard Schikel, Robert I. Bowles, and
Giorgio's Passias called developed liquid film passing, a smooth and
wedge shaped trailing edge, small scale analysis and the teapot
effect at large Reynolds numbers. This was published in the

(08:39):
Journal of Fluid Mechanics again twenty twenty one. By the way,
if you scroll through this paper and check out the
diagrams and equations, it's almost hilarious, like you would be
shocked how complicated this looks. I'm not even going to
pretend that I could make sense of it. Like I
was trying to look and hack through this paper, I'm like, oh,
this is hopeless. So instead I found a good article

(09:00):
summarizing the results that includes an interview with one of
the lead authors. The article is by Jennifer Woolett for
Ours Technica and this paper so it was a collaboration
between researchers at the Vienna University of Technology and University
College London, and they say that their paper here is
a complete theoretical description of the teapot effect, which has

(09:23):
eluded these researchers for decades. Finally they've got all the
forces modeled here correctly, so they can fully predict what
happens with a t spout of various designs pouring in
different ways. And they say the teapot effect has to
include inertial, viscous, and capillary forces. So it turns out

(09:44):
one of the major factors influencing whether the liquid dribbles
or not is as you and I both intuited from
our experience flow rate. To people who have less experience
in the kitchen, I think this might sound counterintuitive because,
as you know, you were saying, rob, a lot of
times when you're trying to be careful and not spill something,

(10:05):
your instinct is to pour slowly because pouring slowly seems
like it's the careful option, right. Yeah, But as matches
our experience at a higher flow rate, when liquid is
coming out of the teapot or container faster, this actually
makes the pouring action less likely to end up dribbling.
That is how you are more likely to get the

(10:26):
arc you're intending. It's actually once you start trying to
pour slowly, the dribbling becomes more likely. So you know,
you can imagine all kinds of scenarios here, like if
you're trying to pour something out slowly, to carefully measure
a volume of liquid into another container like a measuring cup,
or maybe you were trying to pour something in a

(10:46):
slow stream to risk and emulsify it. You've seen people
doing that. They dribble all the time.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Oh yeah, and then I'm thinking, especially like making cocktails
and measuring out the various components. This is why the
sides of your bottles are sticky.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, so fast steady pouring dribbles less. The design of
the lip of the teapot or pouring container also matters.
There were some French physicists who wrote a paper on
this in twenty ten, and they suggested that you could
fight the teapot effect by making the lip of the
spout as thin and as sharp ended as possible, so

(11:23):
like round lips are more likely to dribble. And apparently
it would also help to coat the end of the
spout in water repellent material so that the liquid or
water based liquid doesn't want to cling to the underside
of the lip. And this seems to be because the
dribbling is partially the result of what the researchers call
a hydrocapillary effect. Basically, whenever you start to pour water

(11:46):
based liquid out of a container, drops will form on
the underside of the lip of the edge you're pouring
from the like the spout of a teapot, So you
know the water's coming out of the spout, but then
on the under side of that spout there's going to
be some droplet formation, and the rate at which you
pour determines how big those drops on the underside of

(12:08):
the lip get. A high flow rate keeps them small,
but a slow pouring allows the drops on the underside
to become larger. And once those drops reach a certain
critical size, once they get big enough, they actually start
to grab hold of the water or tea or whatever
that's coming out of the spout and redirect its flow
down the side of the container instead of the arc

(12:30):
that you're aiming for. Now, there was a thing that
I was thinking about. This is another design feature that
I didn't see mentioned in this summary or in any
of the papers I was looking at, but it's one
that I've seen in some kettle designs, and it's a
teapot spout, they can have an upward arcing curve right
before the opening of the spout. For example, you see

(12:52):
this on some gooseneck kettles. Rob, I've got an example
for you to look at here if you scroll down,
if you try to picture it, it's kind of a
curving swan neck shape. I don't know why I said, Swannik.
They're literally called goose necks. The curving shape where if
you imagine it in pouring position and you're trying to
think how the liquid would have to travel to run

(13:14):
down the bottom of the spout, it would literally have
to go sort of uphill first before it would be
able to run down the spout. And I think this
also helps it not do that. One last thing that
I thought was pretty interesting, So they had to model
all these forces that determine whether or not liquid dribbles
when it's coming out. Again. Those forces included an inertial, viscous,

(13:36):
and capillary forces, but there was actually a very little
role for gravity. Gravity does not play a major role
in causing the teapot effect, meaning that teapots will still
dribble on the Moon or in other low gravity environments.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
That reminds me. I was looking around for this episode.
I briefly looked into drinking tea in orbit, and I
did find anything that I was really compelled to include here.
But I did see some footage of an astronaut having
their tea with chopsticks, like eating the little floating globs
of tea. Oh I see out of the atmosphere with

(14:15):
their chopsticks.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, just grabbing like so, I guess with the surface tension,
it's like a little blob of tea floating and then
you like put the chopsticks in it and it sticks
to them. Yeah, yeah, Okay, So that's the physical teapot tangent.

(14:37):
What about the philosophical teapot tangent. Well, I thought it
would be interesting to very briefly talk about Russell's teapot,
one of the most famous teapots in the world. It's
not a physical artifact. It is a thought experiment used
by Bertrand Russell to explain a certain form of skeptical reasoning,
specifically in his case, to support his lack of bully

(15:00):
in God, though I think it could be applied to
other scenarios. Now, I want to front load a caveat
and say that some theistic philosophers think they have good
arguments for why Russell's teapot analogy does not or should
not apply to beliefs about God. But even if you
are inclined to agree with those critics, I think the
teapot is useful to think about for a more general

(15:22):
analogy for different types of beliefs that we hold in
claims that we make. So very brief biographical background. Bertrand
Russell lived from eighteen seventy two to nineteen seventy He
was a famous British philosopher and public intellectual who was
incredibly influential in a number of different fields. So he
was pre eminent in his academic fields of logic and

(15:44):
analytic philosophy, but he was also a big cultural figure
in Britain and an advocate for political causes such as
anti imperialism, socialism and nuclear disarmament. But Russell was also
infamous for being non religious. In nineteen fifty two, he
was asked to write an essay for a London magazine

(16:06):
called Illustrated, which came to be called is There a God?
And I think the essay was actually scrapped and not
published in the originally intended venue, but Russell expanded upon
it later and released it. And in the essay Russell
uses the analogy of a teapot floating in space to
explain his doubts about the existence of God. So I'm

(16:27):
going to read from his essay here, and then we
can we can analyze a little bit. So Russell says,
many Orthodox people speak as though it were the business
of skeptics to disprove received dogmas, rather than of dogmatists
to prove them. This is, of course a mistake. If
I were to suggest that between Earth and Mars there

(16:48):
is a China teapot revolving around the Sun in an
elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion,
provided I were careful to add that the teapot is
too small to be real even by our most powerful telescopes.
But if I were to go on to say that,
since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption

(17:10):
on the part of human reason to doubt it, I
should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however,
the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient
books taught as sacred truth, every Sunday and instilled into
the minds of children at school. Hesitation to believe in
its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle
the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an

(17:32):
enlightened age, or of the inquisitor at an earlier time. Now,
to take a moment to be fair to Russell's critics,
I think they make some I'm not sure what I
think about this, some potentially good points about the belief
in the teapot not actually being analogous to belief in
an omnipotent creator God, because they say, for example, the

(17:54):
teapot is an object in the world that could only
plausibly have come to orbit the Sun if humans had
put it there, which we would probably know about if
it had happened. Meanwhile, God would not be an object
in the world, but like the creator of the world,
or somehow standing outside the world. And therefore, according to
these theistic philosophers, the existence of God is like a

(18:16):
proposition that is just not analogous to the existence of
any physical object or entity that you could search for
in physical space. So I think a good way of
phrasing this objection is that they're saying, well, belief in
God is not a claim about something that exists in
the universe, but rather a claim about the way the
universe is. I'm not going to try to adjudicate that

(18:39):
particular dispute about whether Russell is right that this is
a good analogy for religious beliefs in God or whether
the critics are right that it is not. But either way,
I think it is a useful thought experiment in a
more general sense because it reminds us not to be
taken in easily by unfalsifiable claims. And there's another thought
experiment right along these lines that we've talked about on

(19:01):
the show before. You might if you listened for a while,
you might remember it, the thought experiment by Carl Sagan,
The invisible Dragon in his garage. So Carl Sagan says, hey,
I've got a dragon that lives in my garage. And
if you doubt this, you might say, well, okay, take
me to your garage. I want to see it. And
then Sagan says, no, no, no, no, no, you got
it all wrong. It's an invisible dragon, so you shouldn't

(19:24):
expect to be able to see it. I mean, you
can look but you're not going to see it. It
is there, though, and then you could say, well, okay,
then let's walk around in your garage, you know, with
our hands outstretched and feel around for it until we
finally come upon this dragon's invisible scaly back, and once
again Sagan can say, no, no, hold on. It is
also an incorporeal dragon. It is made of spirit matter,

(19:48):
not solid matter, so you shouldn't expect to be able
to touch it, you know, that wouldn't disprove it that
you can't feel it, And then you could go through
more stages. I think he says that it's you might suggest, well,
what if we use like an infrared heat detector, and
then he could say, no, no, it's a dragon that does
not produce any heat, and so on and so on.
You can go moving the goalposts of detection always backwards,

(20:11):
so that there's no way to really check and see
if the dragon is really there. I think the main
point of both of these analogies, Russell's teapot and Carl
Sagan's invisible Dragon, is that people can always try to
get you to believe things by shifting the obligation of
evidence onto you for doubting the existence, rather than assuming

(20:32):
that obligation themselves for claiming the existence. So it's the
attitude of if I say X is true and you
can't disprove it, you must accept it. And this is
made doubly dangerous by like the rebuke of all potential
investigatory tests. So in the case of Carl Sagan's dragon,
that's like, oh no, no, no, it's invisible and you can't

(20:52):
touch it and it wouldn't show up on infrared. But
in the case of Russell's teapot analogy, it's that, well,
the teapot is too small with any of our telescopes,
but I tell you it is there. And the point
of both of these analogies is essentially I say X,
if you can't disprove it, you must accept it. Is
not a legitimate way to reason because that type of

(21:13):
argument could be it could be used to force you
to believe in a teapot orbiting the sun or an
invisible dragon in the garage. Reasonable claims are based on evidence,
and most importantly, they are falsifiable. They entail certain physical predictions,
like you should be able to see what I'm talking
about if you look here, or you should be able

(21:33):
to detect you know, the heat signature of the dragon
if you look here, and if those predictions turn it false,
the belief is probably false.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah, And so to your point like that, one of
the big applications here, of course, is with like conspiracy
thinking today, where there are plenty of examples of this
where it'll be some you know, ultimately kind of ridiculous
or outrageous or perhaps supernatural claim and then it's presented
as if it is on us disprove this, when really

(22:02):
that's not the way it goes. And I think you
see a more or I tend to see a more
rational approach to this with some of the impossible or
currently impossible to prove hypotheses so that we've discussed on
the show before, like say the bicameral mind hypothesis or
the stone ape hypothesis, like these are both I think
examples of very thought provoking ideas that cannot be proved

(22:28):
or disproved, at least not currently. And I also don't
see the major advocates of these hypotheses demanding that scientists
disprove them like they seem to they understand how Russell's
teapot or the invisible dragon works here and they know
that it's on them to make the argument and provide
the proof if there is such a thing.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
Yes, I mean, I think it's fair to play around
in speculative territory, but to always be hyper conscious to
signal and remind yourself and remind others that that's what
you're doing. We're playing around in speculative territory, rather than
getting too attached to like a fun and interesting idea
that maybe doesn't have a lot of strong evidence for

(23:09):
it and insisting that people should believe it.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, and with time, who knows, with time and research,
perhaps new evidence will come around to support a given
hypothesis or idea. But then the reverse may very well
happen as well, or it could be just something again
that's completely in the realm of no evidence, where there's
never going to be any additional evidence to back this
up one way.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Or the other. But I think one of the points
that Russell and Sagan are making here, and I totally
agree with this, is that if you have a good theory,
the theory should include within itself ways of checking to
know if the theory were wrong. So a theory should
entail predictions about the world and all our good scientific

(23:55):
theories do, and then you could go and check if
those theories, if those predictions turn out true, and if
it's a good theory, those predictions will turn out true,
and if there's something wrong with the theory, those predictions
will not turn out true. And if it's a really
bad theory, it in fact will not make predictions at all.
It will just be sort of in this unfalsifiable space
where it's like, well, there's no way to check if

(24:16):
it's true.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
I've also found if you were addressing doubters or your
enemies within the first couple of paragraphs of laying out
a given hypothesis, then that's a real red flag.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
Oh my god. Yes, that's one of the best.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
And I've encountered that at least a couple of times.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah. One last point I want to emphasize, though this
is also from that Bertrand Russell quote. He goes on
to argue that the fact that some beliefs are already
held by many people gives those beliefs a superficial appearance
of rationality, even if there is no more evidence underlying

(24:55):
them than there is for an obviously absurd belief that
you can make up on the spot, such as a
teapot randomly floating in space. And I think this is
a really good point that people should always keep in mind,
because even if you are, for the most part a
skeptical person, you will probably have biases along these lines.
And I'll explain it in a second. But according to Russell,

(25:16):
it's like, we only notice that the teapot claim is
absurd because it is novel, because he just made it
up on the spot. If people went around appearing to
sincerely believe in the teapot, I think it truly would
start to seem less absurd, and it might start to
get you know, equal time in the panel discussion on
the news. Like like one example, why does it seem

(25:40):
I would say, even to me, I have no beliefs
in the healing powers of crystals, but why does it
just feel more plausible to me that crystals have literal
healing properties then that driftwood has healing properties. They're both
beautiful natural objects. If you want to fill your house
up with them or put them by your bedside and

(26:01):
all that, I think that's wonderful, But I don't think
they like literally emit vibrations that drive away sickness or something.
And I'd have to argue that the crystal proposition feels
more plausible somehow, even though I don't believe it. And
the reason is that this belief is familiar, and the
driftwood belief is not. People have been saying this about crystals,

(26:24):
people seem to believe it, so you just kind of
there's this feeling in your gut. Then it was like, well,
there must be something to it then, But the fact
that people say something does not necessarily give it any credence,
even though it does have this power of giving it
the superficial appearance of rationality. And you know what, I
would say, exactly the same thing is true of a
lot of conspiracy beliefs, like you were talking about a

(26:45):
minute ago, that like, once somebody has said something and
appears to sincerely believe it, suddenly you kind of have
this feeling in your gut like, oh, well, maybe there's
something to that then, Whereas if somebody had said the
same thing thing in the context of a thought experiment,
where they're obviously just making up an absurd belief on

(27:06):
purpose on the spot, it wouldn't have that feeling.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
Here.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
The drift wood is a great example because I could
imagine it being supported and brought up enough if someone
were to champion the healing powers of driftwood, if there
were stores that sold healing driftwood, then like that idea
would just be out there enough for you to sort
of buy into it.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
Likewise, even the teapot, you know, outside of its its
traditional place here as a symbol of how we should
think about outrageous claims. You could imagine the scenario where
someone's making an argument like, yeah, we think there's a
teapot out there, Like there's a face on Mars, and
there is a teapot out there floating in space, and

(27:50):
we need to figure out why it's there. We have
a few theories, you know, So like if you it
kind of comes down to the whole situation of the
old reality of you say lie enough times, then people
will begin to believe it on some level, like you've
just created the internal reality of the thing enough to
where people can't quite get it out of their mind.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
I mean, a favorite trick of the political demagogue. It's
kind of scary, how much if you just say something
and now this is an idea that has to be
discussed and taken seriously, even if there's literally no evidence
for it at all.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
Yeah, if there were a teapot, though, just for the
sake of argument, do you think it would be like
an ornate historical teapot? Do you think it'd be like
a simple like earthenware teapot, or would it be like
a space age teapot from another.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
Why are you even asked? Obviously it would be a
novelty Garfield head teapot.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
Oh, well that's good.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yes, you know what does have healing properties? Is Garfield merchandise?
Oh does it?

Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yes? Well, to some people it may have slight healing properties. Really,
there's a whole comparison there you could probably make to tea.
You know, we again are not going to get into
the healing powers of tea too much, but outside of
any actual properties involved in the tea itself, outside of
what is actually happening in your body when you drink tea.

(29:14):
But by this point, like tea has so many ritualistic associations,
cultural associations, and personal associations that there is a comfort
tea kind of going back to that poem, there there
are all these circumstances where it is the right time,
it is the appropriate time, it is the comforting time
to have a cup of tea, and therefore, yeah, I

(29:34):
mean to at least some extent, like any cup of
tea is going to do you good if you were
a tea person.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
Well, this gets back to, yeah, what we were talking
about in the previous episode about the the studies on
the health effects of tea. I mean, it looks again
there are a lot of persistent methodological problems with studies
like this, but it looks on the whole like tea
may very well have some positive health benefits, but it's
just really it's hard to study stuff like this because

(30:02):
it's not like a new drug that nobody was taking anyway.
It's something that is deeply enmeshed in culture and in
people's lives and in all this so it's a lot
harder to isolate the chemical mechanical properties of the molecules
that enter your body when you drink tea, and like
do these really fight disease? Or when you're studying correlations

(30:23):
between tea use and other health outcomes, is that a
secondary effect of some other correlation? Just because it's so
much a part of human life. It's so much harder
to study.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
This reminds me of a point I may come back
to when we talk about the introduction of tea into Japan.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
Oh well, on that note, let's get back into your
notes on the history of tea in China and Japan.
Now where do we leave off with the history and
development of tea?

Speaker 1 (30:47):
In the last episode, I believe we'd pretty much reached
the Yen dynasty. So this was a period when the
Mongols ruled China from the early twelve hundreds through thirteen
sixty eight. And as we I believe, as we noted
in the last episode, when you when you have a
period of outsider rule in China, historically you tend to

(31:08):
see a decline in tea popularity. And I know we
talked about this a little bit and you kind of asked, well,
you know, why is that exactly? And I thought, well,
this would be a good, good example here. I wanted
to go a little deeper into it. So I looked
at a few different sources on this particular scenario, because
on one level, it's not to say that the Mongols
didn't like tea. They had already been exposed to Chinese

(31:30):
tea trade earlier and apparently took to it. They valued
it as a digestive aid, among other things. Some of
the sources I was looking at pointed out that there
were particularities of like the traditional Mongol diet where it
was nice to have a big caffeine punch to sort
of move things along, you know. And also we have
to remember, like there's there's definitely cultural transference. I mean,

(31:52):
this is one of the sort of the famous aspects
of Mongol rule in China is that these new rulers
take on a lot of Chinese cultural things, and so
the transference is going to go both ways. But I've
seen this mention of a decline in tea popularity during
this period noted in multiple sources. Now there is an

(32:15):
added wrinkle that I've seen discussed regarding the Marco Polo account,
and I don't want to get into all the ins
and outs of that and arguments about how historically accurate
we should consider the Marco Polo account. That account barely
mentions tea despite his visits supposedly taking place during this time.
But we know through other sources that there were plenty

(32:37):
of tea houses still operating during this time period. And
I think I've seen it argued as well that, Okay,
if we're to take the Marco Polo account at face value,
he was ultimately more interested in things that were Mongolian,
and he saw tea as this non mongol thing and
therefore didn't pay as much attention to it.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
So you could say maybe he especially because he was
interested in trade, he's interested in dealing with the cultural
artifacts of say, the dominant culture at the time, the
politically dominant culture.

Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yeah, and I think it would also line up with
some of the things I've read about how the Mongols
they didn't like outlock tea or anything, but he became
just another beverage during this period, so they valued it,
but they didn't elevate it like we see in previous
and subsequent dynasties in China. And I was reading about

(33:31):
some of this All the Ta in China from nineteen
ninety book by Chow and Kramer. But now another source
I was looking at is by Valerie Sartor. This was
published in the American Journal of Chinese Studies in two
thousand and seven. Is a paper title All the Tea
in China. The Political Impact of tea.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
Well again, they're both that the previous book you talked
about in this paper both called all the Ta in China.

Speaker 1 (33:56):
It's just irresistible. You got to go with it, okay. Anyway.
In this paper, Sartok points out that the Mongol rule
in China, again the Yen dynasty, didn't put as much
emphasis on Chinese tea culture or pay a lot of
attention to traditional tea customs. However, they definitely liked it.
They adopted the salting of their tea and mixing it
with milk, and at the same time, traditional Chinese tea

(34:19):
houses remained popular hangouts for scholars and poets. In two
thousand and fives Tea and Chinese Culture by Ling Wang,
it's pointed out that the Mongol rule during the End
dynasty was not only rule by non Han ethnic minority,

(34:44):
it also filled many of its key positions with ethnic
minorities as well. Wang points out that while the Mongols
during this time really took to tea, they also pushed
things toward a mass produced product for the masses and
pushed away from you know, the more like say, a
exotic animal shaped tea cakes that had been popular in
China prior to their coming to power. So you know, again,

(35:08):
I think it's a more complicated, seeming historical issue than
one might expect. But I wonder if we might think
of it as being kind of a cultural shift away
from the glamour of tea as opposed to like, you know,
an abandonment of tea or a decline of tea. Really
it was still valued culturally among the Chinese as a

(35:28):
beverage and a medicine, but it wasn't maintained as a
socially elite thing with the kind of trickle down effects
of that social elitism that you would see during this
time period.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
I see. So in these these sort of dormant periods
that we were talking about in that push and pull
pattern in the last episode, like in this example, it's
not that tea really went away or that people stopped
drinking tea, but just that it became less significant as
a as a political and social elite signifier. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yeah, And you know, I bet we can compare this
in a limited sense to various trends. You know, you'll have,
say a particular style of cocktail. This would deal with
a much shorter period of time, but like a particular
cocktail comes out, it's exciting, but then it just becomes
another cocktail, and the attention given to it, you know,
it definitely goes down. Your average experience of this cocktail

(36:26):
is maybe a bit mediocre until such time as someone
brings it back and starts pushing the boundaries again and
figuring out, like, what works about this cocktail, what can
I improve upon, what new twists can I do to it?
And in what ways can I go back to the
original version of this cocktail? That sort of thing. So,
but either way, during the Mongo rule, I think we

(36:47):
can generalize and say that tea culture has stagnated a bit.
Nobody seemed to have been advancing tea so much or
pushing the boundaries of tea. But then you have the
establishment of the Ming dynasty in thirteen sixty eight, and
it's in this dynasty we see yet another revival of
t And it's not to say that it's as simple
as the Ming dynasty simply announcing hey, Ta's back on

(37:08):
the menu, because again, it was never off the menu.
And in fact, according to weighing in Tea and Chinese culture,
the tea loving scholarly class, they were somewhat cracked down
on during this Initially during this period, as were various
other perceived threats as the Ming solidified their rule. Though
interestingly enough, one of the founding hong Wu Emperor's sons

(37:31):
became a key scholar and proponent of TA during this time.
This was an individual by the name of Zu Kwan,
and he wrote a manual on T and much of
the Ming tea ceremony culture to follow would be based
on the ideas presented in this manual T as this
ritualized cleanser of the soul. So on one hand, yes, you

(37:54):
have imperial folks pushing tea again, accepting TA. You can
get kind of like that, that trickle down attraction to
the beverage again. But it's also during this period that
we enter phase three of tea, in which tea is picked, withered, dried, rolled,
and oxidized. The result is dried, loose leaf tea that

(38:15):
can then be steeped for a set number of minutes
to create a smooth and rich beverage. It was easier
to process this way, as Laura C. Martin points out
in the History of Tea, and it better enables the
incorporation of dried fruits and spices as well as flowers.
All these were ingredients the Chinese tea enthusiasts during this
day and tea masters definitely explored, and you see this

(38:37):
a lot in tea today as well. Also during this time,
the Honglow Emperor himself proclaims that only this new method
of loose leaf tea is going to be acceptable as tribute.
So tea tributes made to the Emperor and his household
they have to be this new phase three t The
scholarly class apparently held out a little bit longer, sticking
to their older traditions, traditions again that they had they

(39:00):
had stuck to through foreign rule. But even they eventually realize, hey,
oolong tea is really good and they start drinking oolong
tea instead.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Okay, so they've got the larger process that includes oxidation
like we talked about last time. But am I correct
that Oolong that's a medium level oxidation tea, right, It's
not as oxidized as like black tea, but it's more
than green tea.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, so I didn't read a whole lot on oolong
or oolong tea, but but perhaps there was kind of
like a meeting of halfway there where they're like, oh,
but this one's just a little bit oxidized, you know.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:34):
Now, new types of tea also means okay, we have
we have new methods of brewing it, so we need
new tea paraphernalia. And so it's during this time to
come back to the teapot that historians think that the
true teapot was possibly born. Now, prior to this one
would use open pans and wide mouthed bowls to brew

(39:54):
your tea in. But they discovered now that okay, if
you have a small, covered container, this is going to
bring out more flavor. But at the same time, it's
thought that the invention of the teapot was largely more
of a repurposing of pre existing wine oers and then
adapting the design for tea, so, for instance, the handle
being placed on the side of the teapot as opposed

(40:16):
to on top of the teapot for easier access, though
of course we still have a lot of teapots today
where you have the handle on top that kind of
folds to the side. Also, smaller pots, because while it
might make sense to have a larger pot that you
have filled with wine to distribute at a party or
something if you're making tea in it. You don't want
to make so much tea in the pot that everything
gets over steeped. Because you oversteep your tea, it's going

(40:39):
to take on a bitter and undesirable flavor. I imagine many
of you out there have encountered this before. Perhaps you
get a pot of tea at a restaurant and there
are not enough of you drinking it, or you're drinking
it at such a slow pace that by the end
it's pretty strong and maybe a bit bitter.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Sorry, this got me thinking about, with the invention of
the teapot, if there are any older like of these
tea poems, if any of them mentioned the dreaded dribbling
like is the teapot effect reference that far back? I
wonder when the first person to notice it in writing.

Speaker 1 (41:09):
Was Oh, this is a great question. We have to
come back to this, because I bet there's an answer.
Because these texts that were coming out on tea culture
were so exhaustive about all the dos and don'ts, there
has to be something in there about the I'm surely
forbidden don't of dribbling your tea during a high class
tea service like if it doesn't, like, surely it exists

(41:30):
in Chinese and or Japanese literature.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah, the instruction must be to pour with confidence. Yes.

Speaker 1 (41:39):
Now, there were other advancements here too. For example, light
colored porcelain ceramics became all the rage as they allowed
you to show off the natural color of a particular
tea better. Blue underglazes were also quite popular, and there
was also a special earthenware teapot known as a using
that was quite popular as well. This was I think
it basically means like purple earthenware, but it wasn't necessarily purple,

(42:04):
But it was an earthenware tea pot that was essentially
seasoned by the tea. And they could also be quite beautiful.
But there are some mentions in the old writings about
tea that like, oh, we have a nice tea here,
but you're serving it out of the wrong pot. You
need a properly seasoned pot otherwise it's just not going
to taste it. Now, we mentioned Oolong tea already, but
obviously this is the time during which black tea is discovered.

(42:27):
You know that we could realize that we can have
this this highly oxidized black or red tea as it's
generally referred to in China, and as Mary Lou and
Robert J. Heies discuss in the Story of Tea, a
cultural history and drinking guide that came out in two
thousand and seven. The discovery of black tea oxidation as
a process was originally thought only suitable for barbarians and foreigners.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
Well, it makes me wonder, as I'm sure you know,
many food inventions have an origin like this. Was this
discovered by act accident? Was it like, ooh the tea
the tea leaves got bruised up and smashed and then
left around for a while and they turned dark and
all that is it ruined?

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (43:09):
No, turns out it actually tastes great.

Speaker 1 (43:11):
You know, I think I ran across a story or
to that effect, but then I couldn't rEFInd the story
when I was finalizing my notes here. But yeah, I
feel like there was at least one story about like
some discarded tea ship mints that an army came across,
or something to that effect. But the other interesting thing
about this is that like the resulting tea would simply

(43:34):
keep longer and could therefore be shipped further both by
land and by sea, and so the brick tea that
started reaching Mongolia and to bet that would be black
brick tea. Meanwhile, green tea bricks those more easily suffered
from overheating from freezing, and it often developed mold in

(43:55):
damp environments. So yeah, we get into the situation where
the farther out you're sending your tea, the more where
it makes sense for it to be black tea. And
perhaps early on you're just like, well, yeah, get send
that black stuff out of here. That's going to Mongolia,
that's going to Tibet. But then of course over time
it catches on, people start experimenting with it, and you
get so many splinterid black teas as well. But at

(44:16):
the same time black tea of course becomes the tea
to catch on in the Western world and catch on
by storm. There's a good great deal of Martin's The
History of Tea that of course just deals with this,
like how tea reaches Europe and how it I mean,
because it's so crazy to think about this as well,
like modern Britain and not even modern brit but historically

(44:37):
Britain and tea so inseparable, like it is held up
as this thoroughly British thing, but of course it is
entirely an import one interesting thing. This is something we've
discussed on an older episode of the show. But like
thinking again about black tea being considered this thoroughly British thing,
and yet at the same time, there seems to have

(44:58):
been at least a mild panic Britain in the nineteenth
century about green tea making people hallucinate unlike proper black tea.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
Of course, that's almost like people don't realize they come
from the same plant.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
Yeah, like you're talking about the same botanical origin here,
they're both tea. But yeah, black tea is British, but
green tea is something to mistrust.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
And again there's a dangerous foreign substance that may have
the devil inside it.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Yeah, and there's a Again there's an older episode of
the show about this, but the scenario seem to have
basically involved three factors mistrust of a tea seen as
foreign or unusual, and I think this was also backed
up by a popular ghost story that was written in
the time during this time period about the dangers of
green tea, also possible contaminants of the tea, and also,

(45:50):
there were some sort of bad actors in the tea
market here who thought, well, we need to make this
color more exciting for Western customers, and so they were
throwing in some perhaps less than healthy substances to try
to enhance the coloration of the green tea. Hmmm.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
Oh, this may be a completely spurious connection, but it
also makes me think of the English association between the
color green and like the jealousy of the fairies.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
Oh yeah, you know, I don't recall there if anybody
called out that connection, but I could easily see that
they're being the sort of color theory and color a
version already present and given culture. And then you have
these other that could potentially enhance these other reasons that
we're seen at the time to be suspicions of green tea.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
Yeah, like a green dress invites curses, what would a
green beverage do?

Speaker 1 (46:43):
Yeah. But the other thing worth keeping in mind too
is that there is an actual possible link between caffeine
and hallucination. And this link is not all that shocking
when you consider the relationships between anxiety stimulants and the minds.
Just natural potential for hallucinations various reasons.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah, but would there be more caffeine and the green
tea than the black tea. I thought it was usually
the other way around.

Speaker 1 (47:09):
Yes, But then also a lot of that comes down
to how long you're steeping something, and you know, how
often you're consuming it. I guess, like if you're having
enough green tea during the course of a day. I mean,
the other part of it is that an individual's susceptibility
to caffeine is going to vary from person to person.
But I guess one way to look at it is, Yeah,

(47:32):
if caffeine potentially enhances stress, then this could cause the
body to release more cortisol. And another explanation that I
remember from that episode was that people who use caffeine
a lot, say three or more cups of coffee per day,
are simply more prone to mental health associations that cause hallucination.
So you know, there are various various ways to tease

(47:54):
it apart if there's nothing special about green tea itself,
unless it is, of course, has some sort of horrible
substance added to it potentially to make it more hallucinogenic.
But yeah, it's just kind of interesting in terms of
the britishness or foreign nature of tea as perceived in
England in the nineteenth century. All right, one final area. Again,

(48:23):
We're not going to follow tea all around the world
and cover all the various variations and customs on this show,
but I think it is important to at least touch
on Japanese tea culture and history a bit as well,
because like knowing when and how tea reaches Japan is
also important because Japanese culture has contributed so much to

(48:45):
our global understanding and appreciation of tea. In fact, a
number of the teas that I drink are Chinese teas,
but I did make sure that I was drinking a
Japanese tea when I was working on this section of
the notes.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
Oh, which one is?

Speaker 1 (48:56):
That is a delightful Karagani tea, Which is a great tea.
This one's made, but I think mostly from stems, and
like a lot of green teas, you have to be
you can't just go willy nilly in there and start
steeping it at any temperature and for any amount of time.
It's not one of the kind of slot. I like
a good sloppy tea that I can accidentally forget about
and come back too. And it's no worse for wear.

(49:17):
This is one you have to be precise with. But
if you if you just give it the appropriate amount
of time at the appropriate temperature, it's thoroughly delightful, very
smooth green tea. So tea culture as I was reading
in most of my main source and this was Martin,
but tea culture was originally introduced into Japan via Buddhism
during the reign of Prince Chautauku, who lived five seventy

(49:41):
four through six twenty two. This is a semi legendary figure,
though there's nothing too legendary about the basic premise here,
So this is not a story that involves the machinations
of gods or supernatural deities. Basically, you had scholars traveling
to China during this time studying Buddhism and in the
process also learning to drink and cultivate tea. Now, this

(50:04):
is definitely the Phase one era of tea at this point,
So there's that level of tea technology that they have.
This is the two level of tea technology that they're
bringing back with them.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
Phase one would have been the brick form.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
Yeah, the brick form that did not have as enhanced
flavor profile as most of the teas we think of today, okay,
And it was a luxury item at first, mostly imported,
but it was during the reign of Emperor Shomu, who
lived seven oh one through seven fifty six he helped
popularize it more by serving it to monks, particularly. There's

(50:40):
a story about him serving it to monks during this
day long reading of Buddhist scriptures and they're like, what
is this and he's like, drink it. It's going to
enhance everything you're doing today, trust me, And supposedly they
end up embracing it up until the ninth century, when
Sino Japanese relations strained somewhat. There is a lot of
cultural transference there, with tea customs and practices entering into

(51:02):
Japan from China, much of it tied to Buddhist practices
and the tastes of the Imperial court at that time.
In the ninth century, however, diplomatic ties between the countries
dried up, and tea culture in Japan didn't really progress
for a good three centuries. Its popularity to decrease, and
its use was then limited mostly to monasteries, which is
interesting because all this kind of mirrors what we saw

(51:25):
during Mongol rule in China. But then during the twelfth century,
relations between Japan and China improved, and it's during this
period that the Monk Asi introduced both the Rinzai Zen
Buddhism practice as well as whipped tea to Japan. So
this is phase two once more with Asi. Here he's

(51:46):
advocating tea as a key tool for Zen Buddhist practitioners
as well as a quote divine remedy and supreme gift
of heaven. Martin writes that Asi proclaimed t as the
cure for or loss of appetite. Illness is caused by
poor drinking, water, paralysis, boils, and what we would come

(52:06):
to know of as a thimine deficiency. He saw tea
drinking as something that benefited each organ in a different way,
as well as the spiritual aspects of a person as well,
just so everywhere it could go to leak into all
your organs and into your spiritual structures, and it's just
going to cleanse everything out and make everything better.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
Tea is great, But I love these different moments in
history where like somebody discovers tea and then they're like
it does everything. You know, they really get on the
tea terrain.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
Yeah, I do like that. Again, it comes back to
something we talked about in the last episode about tea
being healthier than just normal drinking water that hasn't been
brought up to the boiling point.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
So, initially tea was really popular monasteries and among the
ruling class, but then it spread to pretty much everyone.
It also became highly ritualized during this time, the time
of the samurai. For example, it became part of the
Bushido code. So if you were a memo or of
the elite warrior class in Japan, were yeah, you're expected
to be able to kill people with your sword, but

(53:06):
you were expected to apply yourself to say poetry and
tea customs when you were not fighting or training to fight.
By the mid fourteenth century, tea houses were a popular
secular hangout as well, and it seems to have taken
on a not only a secular air, but kind of
a boisterous quality as well. They're apparently a number of
tales of tea drinking exploits. Some of these exploits were

(53:29):
tied to just drinking a whole lot of tea. There
are accounts of like fifty cups, one hundred cups, though
I don't think this is necessarily for an individual, but
maybe more for like a group or a table.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Okay, because I mean warning like you can't actually get
too much caffeine. Be careful there.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't do not try and drink fifty
or one hundred cups. But I think this would be
like a party, like a large group and they're just
drinking a lot of tea and they're keeping track of
how many they were going through. It could be wrong,
but I think that's the case. There were also more
refine find tea drinking exploits tied to contests that would
take place to see if you could identify a tea
by the taste or say taste of tea and determine

(54:10):
what region it's from. That sort of thing, And the
tea service during this time was also formalized as a
part of politics. So really it's like at every level
of the socioeconomic structure, tea ends up finding a place.
Tea culture would come to impact various levels of design
as well, from the physical instruments of tea brewing of
course in Japan, but also this would end up being

(54:32):
tied into the architecture of tea huts that were specially
designed to blend into the natural environment and be part
of this sort of like nature based understanding of tea
and tea drinking.

Speaker 2 (54:44):
Speaking of pouring with confidence to avoid the teapot effect
that I mentioned earlier, I've watched some video of Japanese
tea masters from today at work, and man, I really
notice a pouring with confidence kind of ethic to them.
Like it's interesting to watch their actions because in the

(55:05):
ones I've seen, they are of course very precise with
their movements, so it's not it's the opposite of sloppy,
but it is also very like forceful and deliberate, confident pouring.
It is not delicate, little anything that would result in dribbling.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
Yeah, Like I say, I know that some of these
tea masters in their works have to have to tackle
the avoidance of dribbling, and how you avoid dribbling in
these various tea ceremonies. You know, I don't know about you, Joe,
but another this is something that comes up for me
and I know was just surely avoided by experts in
the field. But in the resteeping of tea bags, one

(55:42):
error that we have to keep looking out for in
my house is you have an already wet tea bag
and you're going to do your second or third steep,
you put it in there, you have some new hot
water added. If the tea bag is kind of partially
hanging over the edge of the of the tea cup
or the mug, then you'll have this kind of wicking
effect where the water comes up through the tea bag

(56:04):
and then gets all over the countertop. If you ever
had this.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Occurain, Yeah, I didn't know what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 (56:09):
Yeah, yeah, So another great way to make a big
mess with tea.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
Different kind of capillary action, I would guess.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Capillary action sounds like a better explanation,
but yeah, it do make a mess.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Well, I've enjoyed this tea journey, Rob, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
Like I say, this was not an attempt to provide
an exhaustive and all inclusive understanding of tea, but hopefully
sort of drive home like the basic evolution of tea
and where a lot of the most important movements in
tea were taking place. Because again, we have such a
rich tea global culture out there to appreciate. Now, we

(56:47):
didn't even get into all the various salted and buttered
tea traditions. And again, we're already at this point. I
don't think we've gotten to share any of these in
listener mail yet, but we're already hearing from some folks
about some of their favorite ways to prepare tea, things
that are either personally or culturally important to them. So
we would love to hear from everyone out there. If
there's a particular tea you love, let us know. For

(57:11):
my own part, and I'm doing this recording especially, I
have a bit of a sore throat and a cold
a cough going on, and I depended heavily on a
puer tea called Evil Snake King. And normally I just
take it straight, but for this I added a lot
of honey to it. So normally I don't put anything
into the teas that I drink, but man, if my

(57:32):
throat is a little bit sore, I can add some honey,
maybe even some lemon to that and it'll really get
me through.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
Well, may the Evil Snake King breathe all his curses
into whatever microbe is infecting your throat or virus A
blast them on out of there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:49):
Plus, I just bought this piece of driftwood just arrived.
It's supposed to have healing properties. Yeah, I have to
swallow it and strap it to my neck. It would
be good. Great, all right, So yeah, write in. We'd
love to hear from everyone out there about tea and
tea culture in your life. If you have perhaps you

(58:09):
have some answers to our questions about tea dribbling advice
from the tea masters of old. In the meantime, check
out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Our
core episodes come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the
Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed On Mondays. We
do those listener mail episodes. On Wednesdays we do a
short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a

(58:31):
strange film.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.

Speaker 3 (58:53):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.