Latest / Specialty Matcha Podcast / Interview with Maren Fichter, Tea Educator and Writer

Transcript

Interview with Maren Fichter, Tea Educator and Writer · Specialty Matcha Podcast

• 0:07
  Welcome to Specialty Much Podcast.
• 0:08
  My name is Ryan. This is Michael Ho Zongjun who
• 0:10
  also goes by Sam. Hello.
• 0:11
  Hello and the Co founders of Sanco much Products.
• 0:14
  Yeah. We launched this podcast to
• 0:15
  discuss our learning journey and macho, share startup stories and
• 0:18
  interview experts. And today's episode, we have
• 0:21
  Martin Fischer joining us for our discussion.
• 0:24
  Welcome, Eric. Welcome.
• 0:26
  Hello, thank you so much for having me on the podcast.
• 0:29
  Happy to finally have you on. I feel like we've been an e-mail
• 0:32
  correspondence for such a long time.
• 0:33
  And we bumped into each other in Japan, which is crazy.
• 0:38
  Oh yeah. Car park in Tokonome.
• 0:42
  Yeah, in a parking lot in Tokonome.
• 0:45
  Very, kind of very crazy. Serendipitous.
• 0:49
  Yeah, very serendipitous. Well, welcome to the podcast.
• 0:51
  We'd love if you could share a little bit more about you and
• 0:55
  your your background and your your tea story.
• 0:57
  Yeah. So yes, once again, thank you
• 0:59
  for having me on. My name is Marin.
• 1:01
  I'm from Germany originally, have lived in the UK and the US
• 1:04
  as well. Been around a little bit and
• 1:06
  been kind of in and out of tea for a while.
• 1:10
  Kind of surprisingly, something I grew up with.
• 1:12
  I grew up with Chinese tea because my dad used to work in
• 1:15
  China. So kind of like I, it's been
• 1:17
  part of my life in a way that is fairly rare for folks outside of
• 1:21
  Asia. And so I feel like it's just
• 1:23
  been kind of something that was always with me.
• 1:25
  But I have been working in tea actually for a while now as
• 1:28
  well. So at the moment, I'm kind of at
• 1:29
  the intersection of tea tourism, education, production,
• 1:33
  agriculture, quite a lot of things coming together, but I've
• 1:36
  also got a background in a lot of other things academically.
• 1:40
  I studied linguistics. I've also had a previous career
• 1:43
  in Ed tech and UX design. I've also been in food heritage
• 1:47
  tourism in the UK, teaching much for the UK Tea Academy, have had
• 1:51
  my own tea business. I've worked for other tea
• 1:54
  businesses kind of doing content websites and things, so a fair
• 1:57
  amount of different stuff. Currently I'm in Wazuka near
• 2:01
  Kyoto in Japan. I'm an assistant manager at
• 2:04
  Obubu Tea Farms. So you have talked about Obubu
• 2:06
  before on this podcast as well, so your listeners might know a
• 2:08
  bit about this here, but I'm working in kind of tourism, some
• 2:11
  tea farming. And then specifically I work on
• 2:14
  Obu's educational programming and I do kind of the long form
• 2:17
  communications like the website, newsletter, blog, that kind of
• 2:20
  thing. So Whirlwinds Tour.
• 2:22
  Wow. Crazy schedule.
• 2:24
  Do you have like 36 hours a day or something?
• 2:27
  Gods, you know I need a time Turner.
• 2:28
  Yeah. We all do.
• 2:31
  That's crazy because like you've really been like up and down the
• 2:35
  I don't want to. It's not necessarily the tea
• 2:37
  supply chain, but like all the way from a plant in the ground,
• 2:41
  in the dirt, all the way through, like consumer
• 2:43
  perception and branding. Yeah.
• 2:45
  I mean, I think of it as like the life cycle of tea.
• 2:47
  I feel like I've been with tea throughout its full life cycle
• 2:51
  at various stages of of the past few years.
• 2:54
  And it gives me a very different perspective, I think than than a
• 2:58
  lot of folks who like specialize in certain areas.
• 3:00
  Yeah, totally. I'm really curious.
• 3:02
  I I know that you were in Wazooka before the matcha boom
• 3:07
  and you're there now. Like what's changed on the
• 3:10
  ground with, you know, the people that come to visit with
• 3:14
  the questions they ask, what what their own motivations are
• 3:18
  like? I'm so curious.
• 3:19
  You get to interact and bump up with so many people who want to
• 3:24
  learn more about tea. Yes, yeah.
• 3:26
  So wow, that's, that's an interesting question is when I
• 3:29
  think a lot about actually, because so much has changed and
• 3:32
  there's kind of two sides of this, I think for me.
• 3:34
  And one side is kind of the on the ground production, like on
• 3:37
  the ground, on the physical ground in terms of what is being
• 3:40
  cultivated, they did and harvested and processed And kind
• 3:43
  of how the the demand has changed.
• 3:45
  What farmers are making and what farmers feel like they need to
• 3:48
  make versus what farmers want to make because it's what they have
• 3:51
  experience and expertise in or like love for in terms of like
• 3:56
  the craft that they specialize in and have practiced for a long
• 3:59
  time. And then the other side of it is
• 4:02
  like the the kinds of things that, yeah, like that that that
• 4:05
  tourists want and that tourism demands now.
• 4:08
  And there's like, no, not an easy intersection between the
• 4:10
  two a lot of the time. So on the one hand, in terms of
• 4:13
  like agriculture, tea processing, all of these things,
• 4:16
  you know, we are seeing a little bit more of a shift towards
• 4:19
  tension production, more shaded teas, but like shading
• 4:22
  specifically for tension production.
• 4:24
  But you know, people who are traditionally producing sencha,
• 4:27
  like, I mean, oh, Boo Boo traditionally produces more
• 4:29
  sencha than 10. And our lead farmer, Akisan, it
• 4:32
  is his craft. It is what he loves and it is
• 4:35
  what he wants to make. And so the pressure to produce
• 4:38
  more tension is kind of at odds with with this.
• 4:40
  And this is something that is the case for a lot of farmers.
• 4:43
  But then on the other hand, you know, the money where where the
• 4:45
  money is, you also have to kind of pay attention to that.
• 4:47
  But in terms of like tourism infrastructure as well.
• 4:50
  And really cool development we've had at Obubu is in the
• 4:53
  last year, Obubu has been able to open its own much grinding
• 4:56
  facilities. So we have a few grinding stones
• 4:57
  of our own now. And with this, we're able to
• 5:00
  offer for tours specifically focused around matcha.
• 5:03
  So Abubu is kind of famous for, you know, the, the internship
• 5:06
  program where like folks from all around the world can come
• 5:08
  and experience tea farming for a few months.
• 5:10
  But also, you know, the, the big tourism aspect of like being
• 5:13
  able to welcome international visitors for a tour of the tea
• 5:17
  fields, a guided tasting. You know, it's a very incredible
• 5:20
  educational experience where you get to be on hands or like, I
• 5:23
  don't know, on the field in a sense, in a way that is like
• 5:26
  quite rare for a tourism experience.
• 5:29
  And now there's a much a focused version of it.
• 5:31
  And so it's like we get so, so many interested people for this
• 5:36
  tour. But most of the people that
• 5:38
  we're getting or that I'm seeing, at least when I, when I
• 5:40
  run these tours is a lot of people who are wanting to learn
• 5:44
  about Macha specifically so they can launch their own brand.
• 5:47
  And so they're not coming to the tour as like tourists.
• 5:50
  They're not coming in the sense of this is an exciting, you
• 5:52
  know, thing for me to experience while I'm in Japan.
• 5:54
  It's more a business thinking orientation for them.
• 5:59
  And it's like almost like quasi A sourcing trip.
• 6:02
  Yeah, they're sourcing yet? They haven't gone to the the
• 6:07
  harsh realization of the realities of trying to source on
• 6:10
  your own. Yeah, yeah.
• 6:12
  And so we frequently kind of have this experience of like
• 6:14
  I'm, I'm taking somebody through this tour and that harsh
• 6:17
  realization is setting in throughout.
• 6:19
  And you kind of people, people go different ways.
• 6:22
  You know, some people get really daunted and like scared by the
• 6:25
  complexities of the industry and of the product itself, not just
• 6:29
  the, the money involved, but like every, anything else, the
• 6:31
  amount of like education and knowledge that they all
• 6:33
  inevitably realize that they're going to need if they're to do
• 6:35
  this properly. But then other people kind of
• 6:37
  turn that into like that, that really excites them.
• 6:40
  And it kind of becomes this kind of navigating that divide and
• 6:44
  kind of guiding people towards also wanting to ask the right
• 6:49
  questions and, and wanting to, to develop that excitement as
• 6:53
  opposed to falling into this despair of, Oh my God, I'm not.
• 6:56
  I now I know how much I don't know.
• 6:58
  Yeah, I feel like that, you know, like you can never, almost
• 7:02
  never try to really set up the expectation fully because you
• 7:07
  would just end up pushing people away.
• 7:10
  I think this is a wonderful strategy.
• 7:13
  Yeah, it's like, it's very much. Sometimes it feels like guiding
• 7:15
  someone by the hand around the edge of a chasm and being like,
• 7:18
  it's OK, like there are. Flowers on the other side,
• 7:21
  indeed. Something you wrote about
• 7:23
  recently that I've been thinking a lot about that was on your
• 7:26
  thumb stack was this concept of a single origin and being
• 7:31
  overfitted into the matcha industry, which is kind of
• 7:34
  unusual because you have places like Obubu who have essentially
• 7:38
  vertically integrated or nearly vertically.
• 7:41
  Maybe some of the equipment for, you know, tension processing has
• 7:45
  to be shared. But you know, you can know your
• 7:47
  own, you grow your own and you're able to have a
• 7:50
  relationship with the plant and with the customer, which is a
• 7:53
  typical. And then you have all the famous
• 7:55
  rock star people and like Uji like the fur Akawas or Suji San
• 8:00
  or Haiti San, who you know, also are farmers that have tea
• 8:04
  businesses. But like it's just not the
• 8:06
  reality for most matcha people are sourcing because it's the
• 8:10
  specialization is so fragmented and people are overlaying this
• 8:14
  single origin concept into a product that it usually doesn't
• 8:18
  describe, but it's sometime describes.
• 8:21
  And I first find this tension fascinating because it's almost
• 8:24
  like 2 narratives competing. There are matcha farmers who
• 8:29
  also have businesses, but most of it is really fragmented.
• 8:33
  And like, I feel like these narratives are, I don't want to
• 8:36
  say at odds, but you can feel some tension in the industry.
• 8:40
  Yeah, for sure. It's I think as well like these,
• 8:43
  these narratives and these terms often exist in isolation in a
• 8:48
  sense, like they're plucked out of context, like single origin
• 8:50
  makes sense in some markets and in some contexts.
• 8:53
  But here it is. It's it's a term that's been
• 8:56
  taken out of those other contexts because it feels like
• 8:59
  probably there are enough similarities that it would apply
• 9:01
  in this situation without folks realizing that that's not the
• 9:04
  case. And so it's taken out of its
• 9:06
  context and the context is put into, it doesn't fit in.
• 9:08
  So it's kind of like existing in isolation and it doesn't have
• 9:12
  anything to like hang on to. And I think like this is where I
• 9:15
  always start thinking about like, I think in terms of webs,
• 9:18
  like everything in my brain works as webs and there's
• 9:21
  nothing, there's no web for that to hang on to here with
• 9:25
  Montreal. And it's the same problem as
• 9:28
  actually, you know, there there was a previous episode you guys
• 9:31
  did I think Zhongjian, you said something that like really kind
• 9:33
  of stayed in my mind. I can't remember if I'm going to
• 9:36
  get the words right. But you said something about
• 9:38
  debunking one term won't mean it goes away.
• 9:41
  People will just invent another term for the same thing.
• 9:44
  That really sucks with me. But it's because it's like
• 9:47
  people are looking to put words to things that they're
• 9:49
  observing, but and you take one word away, something else is
• 9:52
  going to come to fill its place. But it's like there's more
• 9:55
  places to fill. We need to like take these words
• 9:57
  and hang them on to other related words so that there's
• 10:00
  like a greater, if we don't have a fitting context, we need to
• 10:04
  build out a context that makes sense.
• 10:06
  And single origin, I think is one of those things in matcha
• 10:09
  that like needs to like build its build out its web or like we
• 10:13
  need to build out its web a little bit for consumers to be
• 10:16
  able to make sense of it. And like, you guys are doing
• 10:19
  quite a lot of that in terms of like providing the context for
• 10:22
  what even terms like uji matcha could mean.
• 10:25
  And kind of like, yeah, like divorcing the concept of single
• 10:28
  origin from its definition that it would have in like the wine
• 10:31
  world, for example, or the coffee world.
• 10:33
  Right. Yeah, I feel like that, you
• 10:35
  know, like people trying to import or adopt this term in the
• 10:40
  matcha, but but having the mindset of, you know, wine or
• 10:44
  coffee because like for example, in wine, you know, grape grows
• 10:47
  in one region, it gets picked in one region, gets processed, you
• 10:50
  know, by the same people in one region and it's single origin
• 10:53
  wine, right? Like everything happens actually
• 10:56
  in a single location, whereas matcha it's not necessarily the
• 10:59
  case. Maybe for a few rare examples
• 11:02
  that we see that people are very vertically integrated, but for a
• 11:06
  lot of other matcha, you know, it doesn't.
• 11:08
  A lot of the processes and cultivation doesn't all happen
• 11:11
  in one location. Yeah, you know, kind of violates
• 11:15
  the very idea of single. And it's, it's hard when more
• 11:18
  when the, the very visible companies or like organizations
• 11:22
  like something like a Google that does have more
• 11:24
  international visibility is the rarer case in terms of like, you
• 11:28
  know, as I said, most of all is single origin in the sense that
• 11:30
  we do have this vertical integration here.
• 11:32
  But like this is, this is the outlier in Japan, this is the
• 11:35
  outlier in Matcha. And like, when that is the one
• 11:38
  that's more internationally visible, that's also a challenge
• 11:41
  for kind of telling that story very accurately.
• 11:43
  Yeah. Yeah, I feel like just very
• 11:46
  conveniently kind of use this term and hide the fact that
• 11:51
  they're not actually single origin.
• 11:53
  I feel like that's something that we, for lack of better
• 11:56
  words, we find it to have some dishonesty something messages
• 12:00
  but. Or they don't know.
• 12:02
  I honestly I think most matcha brand owners have no idea in
• 12:06
  fact that Uji matcha isn't from Uji.
• 12:09
  People in Japan have no idea, like you have to deepen the
• 12:13
  industry before anyone knows the truth behind provenance and the
• 12:17
  way T gets labeled. Like I think it's ignorance, not
• 12:21
  I think there's also a lot of shady players that are like
• 12:23
  genuinely mislabeling or they have an ideological difference.
• 12:27
  There's a lot of farmers in Wazooka, but I say we're we make
• 12:30
  Gu GT and then there's bazooka farmers that were like, no, this
• 12:34
  is bazooka. It's a different place.
• 12:36
  I'm curious, what is your impression of that on the
• 12:38
  ground? Do you feel this is Wazuka
• 12:40
  matcha Uji matcha tension when you look at the landscape of tea
• 12:45
  producers? There, to be honest, I'm not
• 12:47
  sure. I sometimes feel like I'm a
• 12:49
  little bit too enclosed in the Obubu bubble.
• 12:51
  My language skills in Japanese are also not well developed
• 12:53
  enough to like, be having these levels of nuanced conversation
• 12:56
  with other farmers, unfortunately.
• 12:58
  That's one thing where like, absolutely.
• 13:01
  Yeah. I feel like actually, how would
• 13:03
  be a great person to talk to you about that?
• 13:04
  He might have some definite would have some more kind of
• 13:08
  nuanced thoughts than me just because, yeah, like I, I don't
• 13:11
  have the, the language skills to kind of access that and the,
• 13:14
  the, the levels of relationship yet.
• 13:16
  Maybe who knows down the line. But like I, I think there is
• 13:19
  more there. I have seen more sort of there
• 13:22
  have been more like guest houses and like tea experience types of
• 13:25
  things cropping up in Wazuka since I was last here three
• 13:28
  years ago as well. And those all kind of position
• 13:31
  themselves as Wazuka, not as Uchi.
• 13:33
  And so at least in terms of like the international facing or like
• 13:36
  more tourism facing types of things, Wazuka is kind of seeing
• 13:40
  its, its draw as Wazuka as separate from Uji.
• 13:43
  So that is definitely happening. I mean, it's not like in a big
• 13:46
  way because that's just not possible because this is a very
• 13:49
  small town. But for that it is kind of.
• 13:52
  I think there is there is a seeing more here locally of like
• 13:57
  this being a locale that is important for itself as opposed
• 14:02
  to being part of a greater thing.
• 14:04
  That's that's really encouraging to hear.
• 14:06
  In terms of tensha making philosophy, I guess have you
• 14:09
  ever heard from Akizan? Like what?
• 14:11
  What is his philosophy of making tensha or his philosophy of like
• 14:16
  a good matcha? This is I guess pretty new to
• 14:19
  him, right? Because in the past he has been
• 14:21
  making predominantly sencha so. I mean, I'm curious that one,
• 14:25
  it's hard as well because Akizan is somebody who Sencha is his
• 14:29
  art, Sencha is his love, he loves to make sencha.
• 14:32
  And at Obubu, we're a little bit old style, like traditional
• 14:35
  style in terms terms of like our factory is still heavily manual.
• 14:40
  So like we don't kind of automate everything.
• 14:43
  We have machines, but Aki San is still kind of guiding the
• 14:46
  process start to finish. And with tension, he has to give
• 14:49
  that control over to a different factory.
• 14:51
  And so I don't think he views Tensha as his in the same way
• 14:55
  that he views Sencha as his, especially because Sencha has
• 14:58
  been kind of the craft he's specialized in for so long.
• 15:01
  Again, we see this theme of specialization, right?
• 15:03
  And so I think Macha is something where he has to let go
• 15:06
  of and then let go of a little bit more so that he doesn't then
• 15:11
  I mean, I don't want to speak for Aki Sam.
• 15:13
  I I actually like haven't asked him this question.
• 15:15
  This would be an interesting one to ask because he just loves
• 15:17
  talking about Sencha so much more.
• 15:19
  You know, like conversation naturally flows in that
• 15:21
  direction. Very interesting.
• 15:23
  What do you what do you think about the tension of like
• 15:26
  producers practicing their heritage, making what they want
• 15:29
  and then like this is 1 philosophy.
• 15:31
  It's like living culture moving forward and being preserved in
• 15:34
  tension with like we should create what consumers want.
• 15:39
  As you have like lived this full spectrum, like from like
• 15:42
  interacting with a bunch of brand owners who want to sell
• 15:45
  the tea with much of consumers who want to drink and learn
• 15:47
  about the tea. Who is the industry in service
• 15:51
  of like the culture and the producers or of the consumers?
• 15:55
  Like how do you take aside that question?
• 15:58
  Sorry, but you're just so well, it's such a good question.
• 16:01
  I'm so curious about your perspective.
• 16:03
  And well, this is not going to be a clean answer in any way,
• 16:06
  because that is a question you have to kind of pick at.
• 16:08
  There isn't there? There isn't going to be an
• 16:10
  answer. Yeah, man, I mean, in, in a lot
• 16:12
  of ways, it's like the industry is in service to whoever speaks
• 16:15
  the loudest and whoever has the most money.
• 16:18
  I think at the end of the day, that's kind of where my thought
• 16:22
  process would go. Because at the end of the day,
• 16:24
  as much as people want to make what they want to make and
• 16:28
  specialize in the craft that they specialize in, they still
• 16:30
  have to be able to afford to live.
• 16:33
  And if the money is not there, they can't do that.
• 16:35
  And this is something that like, I mean, personally, I've had
• 16:39
  experience and just because, you know, like trying to work in tea
• 16:42
  in countries where tea isn't a big thing, specialty tea isn't a
• 16:45
  big thing, you know, in the UK, it's hard to make a living in
• 16:47
  tea. So I kind of, I, I, I also think
• 16:49
  of it in terms of that of like, at the end of the day, we are
• 16:51
  people trying to make a living. If there is no money in your
• 16:54
  industry, you're going to have to go where the money is and
• 16:57
  that the money currently is with matcha.
• 16:59
  And kind of a difference now with that situation than in the
• 17:03
  kind of the previous matcha spikes that we've seen, you
• 17:06
  know, with, with the Starbucks Frappuccino and the ice cream
• 17:09
  from Haagen Dazs and all of that in like past decades, right?
• 17:11
  Like we did have matcha spikes and they didn't kind of stay
• 17:14
  stick around in the same way. Those were without things like
• 17:17
  social media where like there are people that just talk like
• 17:22
  the voices that talk the loudest because they have the most
• 17:24
  reach. And the kind of virality of
• 17:26
  matcha as like the cool, healthy green drink.
• 17:30
  This is, you know, that the that rhetoric, that aesthetic, that
• 17:34
  thing is so much louder and more present and more real for a lot
• 17:38
  of people than anything about what much actually is.
• 17:42
  So what does that mean in terms of who the industry serves when
• 17:47
  there's a kind of very much a fundamental misunderstanding of
• 17:50
  what the product even is amongst a lot of people who want to put
• 17:53
  money into the industry almost. New culture.
• 17:56
  It's almost new culture creation, this new group of
• 17:59
  consumers. Yeah.
• 18:01
  And he's business after all. Yeah, we got a filthy.
• 18:04
  That's our sound realization. 100 episodes and no business, no
• 18:08
  tea. Gorgeous business, no tea.
• 18:11
  We actually did an episode about this.
• 18:13
  It feels a little bit sad in some ways putting it like that
• 18:16
  because it's like, oh, we love to talk about like the health
• 18:19
  benefits, mindfulness, the connection to nature, all of
• 18:22
  these kinds of elements. They are very, very nice to talk
• 18:25
  about and they are not untrue. Like they, those are real.
• 18:28
  Unfortunately, so is money and business.
• 18:32
  But but, but I feel like we should talk about it right, like
• 18:35
  especially, I guess Japan is in, in the much better farmers in
• 18:39
  Japan are in much better position compared to places
• 18:43
  like, you know, Southeast Asia, India, Sri Lanka or even rural
• 18:47
  China, China, like you got to make money, help them make money
• 18:51
  first before we can start talking about preserving culture
• 18:54
  and all that. Otherwise, you know, there there
• 18:56
  will be no one there making so. So I feel like, you know, we
• 19:01
  shouldn't be ashamed of talking about this side of.
• 19:04
  Yeah, yeah. So no, and it's true.
• 19:06
  It's, it's as well, like whenever people talk about the
• 19:08
  word sustainability, I feel like there's always talk about
• 19:11
  sustainability in terms of like the planet and like climate
• 19:14
  change and how this effects tea plants growth and, you know,
• 19:18
  like unpredictable weather patterns making harvest harder.
• 19:21
  This year, we've had incredibly intense typhoon season that has
• 19:25
  like been really tough on, on us this summer.
• 19:28
  But the other side of sustainability is like the
• 19:31
  people side of sustainability. And you know, like there is the
• 19:35
  kind of the struggle of, you know, like most tea farmers here
• 19:38
  are getting too old to do the work and the younger generations
• 19:40
  are not wanting to pick up the work.
• 19:42
  That is an element of sustainability as well, and this
• 19:45
  is where it comes back to money. If there's people willing to pay
• 19:49
  for this product, then there is demand there.
• 19:52
  There is like a reason to do the work and that is sustainability
• 19:56
  for that industry, for that product.
• 19:58
  Yeah, 100% agree. That's the real danger for a lot
• 20:01
  of these Japanese crafts like you.
• 20:03
  You hear about like there being like 1 artisan left of making
• 20:08
  this or that and it's so sad even with the matcha boom.
• 20:13
  And like seeing like a lot of the really like famed and prized
• 20:18
  Goku producers, which in the tensha and like, it's just you
• 20:21
  can feel the soul being sucked out by this like demands.
• 20:26
  And like, like, it's, it's yeah, it's a weird tension.
• 20:30
  But at the same time, like, can you force someone to like, you
• 20:33
  know, you should use a Q sue. Like most people don't want to
• 20:36
  use a Q sue, right? Like can I blame, you know, a 30
• 20:40
  year old office worker in Tokyo that they don't want to go
• 20:44
  through the rigmarole of doing something they don't even know
• 20:46
  how to do well and it probably tastes worse than their
• 20:50
  convenient PET bottle tea. Like if they don't, if they do
• 20:53
  it poorly, like it's. You can't force consumer
• 20:57
  behavior either. Absolutely.
• 20:58
  Yeah, this is the other thing that's so cool about Boo Boo is
• 21:02
  that you guys, like bring so many like young people all
• 21:05
  around the world. So to Japan.
• 21:07
  This like aging country and doing all these and be so open
• 21:11
  minded. I feel like it's really an
• 21:13
  anomaly in Japan to like being, you know, this opened to the
• 21:18
  outside world. I think it's super rare kind of
• 21:20
  experience that in a lot of hard ways.
• 21:24
  Yeah, and I guess it's it's hard as well because contextually
• 21:28
  kind of there's for for a Boo Boo.
• 21:30
  It's made easier by the fact that here people are coming from
• 21:34
  all over the world and they're getting very, very deep access
• 21:37
  into is something that's like quite traditional, quite like
• 21:40
  closed off in a lot of ways. But they are not doing that from
• 21:43
  for the perspective necessarily of like, you know, doing
• 21:46
  business with that away. Like back home, wherever they're
• 21:49
  from, some of them do, you know, some of some people come to a
• 21:52
  Boo Boo and later go away and do their own key things.
• 21:55
  But like while they're here, the purpose of their stay here is to
• 21:58
  contribute and it is to do the work.
• 22:00
  And in that sense, I think there is like an element of, of, of
• 22:04
  like, how do I put this? You yourself become a player,
• 22:09
  like you yourself become part of the workforce.
• 22:12
  I mean, it might just be the result of kind of the attitude
• 22:16
  of Matsuzan, Hirosan Akisan as the founders of Obubu.
• 22:19
  But they try and kind of cultivate a feeling of taking
• 22:23
  folks from outside of Japan and turning them, giving them
• 22:25
  insider access because those people are doing the work that
• 22:30
  you would be doing anyway if you had this inside access.
• 22:33
  They they are giving them insider access by turning them
• 22:37
  into insiders. But the expectation is that they
• 22:40
  will do that work. And this is kind of, this is
• 22:42
  something that where the internship that we have at Ubu
• 22:45
  is a little bit intense, like it's a fairly intense program.
• 22:48
  The expectations are tough at times, especially this time of
• 22:52
  year when we're like farming in this heat.
• 22:54
  But like that is kind of inherent also to like, you know,
• 22:58
  Japanese work culture and principles like you are just
• 23:00
  expected to do the work. And I think that's why it works
• 23:05
  in a sense like it kind of functions based on you leave
• 23:08
  your context fully and come into the Obubu context.
• 23:12
  And the Obubu context is kind of a microcosm of well, many things
• 23:16
  in the Japanese tea industry, but not all things, of course,
• 23:19
  it being such an outlier in some ways.
• 23:21
  But because as well, you know, who has such strong connections
• 23:24
  across various other places in Japan as well.
• 23:26
  In Kyoto, anytime I go somewhere and I mentioned I'm working at
• 23:29
  Obubu, everyone's like of course we know Obubu and you know, you
• 23:33
  get access to things because of that because there is kind of
• 23:36
  this this knowledge as well of like what was doing for Japanese
• 23:40
  tea abroad also. I can't imagine the impact like
• 23:44
  it's a would have like 250 interns from like what like 60
• 23:48
  something countries? I forget the numbers, the
• 23:52
  spending very effects of like what is probably a very life
• 23:56
  changing experience for the people that go intern there.
• 24:00
  Like the secondary effects are like almost immeasurable.
• 24:03
  Probably like the number of tea companies that get started, the
• 24:06
  number of consumers that become aware of Japanese tea having
• 24:09
  tastes like tea from a kusu for the first time or like go
• 24:13
  properly whisked matcha for the first time.
• 24:16
  And then they bring them home like it's even the global
• 24:19
  Japanese Tea Association are. Absolutely, yeah.
• 24:22
  Members are former Google people or current.
• 24:25
  Actually, it's the implications are crazy.
• 24:30
  I'd love to. Like document Oh Boo Boo more
• 24:33
  thoroughly because it's a really interesting story here because
• 24:37
  it's the only place that feels friendly to open up.
• 24:40
  Like it's like I feel like Oh Boo Boo and Oh Boo Boo, people
• 24:43
  are not very dogmatic. Like a lot of some of the other
• 24:46
  much education that's going on I can find a little bit dogmatic
• 24:50
  and I kind of disagree with some of their perspectives.
• 24:52
  Like they're but I feel like, I don't know, it just feels so
• 24:55
  balanced. We should apply for an
• 24:56
  internship, Ryan. This is my application Asian
• 24:58
  NVIDIA. Write us the recommendation
• 25:01
  letter, Baron. You know, I would actually about
• 25:04
  one for next year. Applications are going to open
• 25:06
  pretty soon. Yeah, I mean, it does it does
• 25:10
  come from from this kind of thing, from this confluence of
• 25:13
  like all these different people though.
• 25:14
  Like, that's how that's how that balance is achieved is because
• 25:17
  there are so many different perspectives coming together and
• 25:20
  so many different experiences coming together.
• 25:22
  And, you know, like, oh, Boo feels very different now than it
• 25:25
  did three years ago. But also there are a lot of
• 25:27
  underlying things that feel very much the same that are kind of
• 25:30
  steady here. And I one of those is like,
• 25:33
  yeah, that sense of openness and like and also awareness of how
• 25:38
  unique a space that OBU really is.
• 25:42
  Yeah, it's so unique, it's so cool.
• 25:45
  And the Matcha Tor is so cool. Everyone who asked me for Japan
• 25:48
  a Japan recommendations for tea Who wants to see the farm like
• 25:52
  this? Like oh Boo Boo is just such an
• 25:54
  easy answer because I don't think they're a tour that exists
• 25:58
  where you can see a room full of actively working ish uses and
• 26:03
  also the plants on the ground. I don't think any of the
• 26:05
  tourists are at a place that's that vertically integrated.
• 26:09
  Or if they are, it's like you have to be an industry insider
• 26:12
  and huge factory, but maybe they just have ball mills or
• 26:16
  something. It's really cool.
• 26:19
  Yeah. What I'm curious, what are some
• 26:22
  of, like, the knowledge gaps that you've seen of people who
• 26:26
  take the matcha tour and what are their motivations?
• 26:29
  Like, are they wanting to learn the craft of making matcha and
• 26:32
  maybe like, milling it themselves?
• 26:34
  And we see like this explosion of build your own matcha.
• 26:37
  Are they more interested in doing like local workshops?
• 26:40
  We know it's a pretty common business model in different
• 26:43
  parts of the world. Or, or opening their own cafes.
• 26:46
  Like what's what's the variety of people that you see who want
• 26:49
  to start their own thing? It's quite a variety, although
• 26:52
  the largest kind of subset I think is folks who want to do
• 26:57
  either cafe type thing or just kind of sell Matcha as a, as a
• 27:00
  retail business. And so a lot of that the
• 27:04
  curiosity and learning that they need to do is literally just
• 27:07
  what is this product? And a lot of them are starting
• 27:10
  from like really the basics of assuming also things about much
• 27:14
  alike. It must come from Japan.
• 27:16
  And then we have to have these very kind of nuanced
• 27:19
  conversations around whether that is true or not and how that
• 27:23
  kind of conversation is changing nowadays.
• 27:25
  And but this also has to be in context of if these people are
• 27:29
  coming to start their own business.
• 27:32
  There is an element of like, whatever I say in this context,
• 27:35
  whatever Obooboo says in, in this context, this is going to
• 27:38
  be someone else's company taking this information and passing it
• 27:40
  on to their consumers. And so there's like all these
• 27:43
  levels of remove happening and all of these levels where things
• 27:47
  can be interpreted differently or phrased differently or
• 27:50
  otherwise just like change, like lost in translation or lost in
• 27:54
  rephrasing. And whenever these questions are
• 27:57
  asked, answering them has to be kind of this, this, I, I think
• 28:00
  of it more in terms of training than education of like the, the
• 28:04
  difference between like training someone to, you know, deliver
• 28:09
  knowledge or do a task or like deliver something to like a
• 28:12
  third party that is not here at the moment versus just giving
• 28:16
  education to somebody who's curious and who's building their
• 28:18
  own knowledge. There is that level of remove in
• 28:21
  these tours most of the time. And most of the time it's for
• 28:24
  folks who don't have a huge amount of context already.
• 28:27
  So we're just sort of starting to build out that web of context
• 28:31
  for them, and that's like, it's an incredibly delicate thing to
• 28:36
  do. Yeah.
• 28:37
  So like, how do you like if someone's like, I only want to
• 28:40
  source ceremonial great matcha or like they say much only has
• 28:43
  to be from Japan like you mentioned, How do you like
• 28:46
  gently steer people towards like, I don't want to say the
• 28:50
  truth, but like a more nuanced understanding of what they're
• 28:53
  actually asking if I feel like when that's done poorly, it's
• 28:57
  incredibly condescending. It's like.
• 28:59
  You're a very. Filthy wine bar and someone's
• 29:01
  talking down at you. But like, how do you, how do you
• 29:04
  approach these conversations That can be difficult or like,
• 29:07
  and you're almost correcting them, but are you really?
• 29:10
  You're giving them a web of context, as you say.
• 29:12
  Yes, yeah. Well, it literally oftentimes I
• 29:15
  will say that I will be like, OK, this is one question you're
• 29:18
  asking and the answer is far more complex than you may think.
• 29:22
  And so I'm going to build out a couple like a couple of other
• 29:25
  talks, topics that impact the answer, and then I'm going to
• 29:27
  put the answer there. And so I kind of like I, I will
• 29:32
  explain to them that their question is very complex and
• 29:35
  then we'll kind of get into some of the complexities around it.
• 29:38
  This is kind of something that comes more from not from my tea
• 29:41
  background, but from I used to work as a tour guide in the UKI
• 29:44
  did food tours. And oftentimes we had like a
• 29:47
  pairing like we would be talking about a food item and it has
• 29:50
  some relevance to the history of the city.
• 29:53
  And that connection is not clear, but like, kind of
• 29:55
  hammering it home feels a little bit like a punch to the face of
• 29:58
  like, OK, why are you telling me all these, like, long historical
• 30:01
  anecdotes about this little bun that I'm eating?
• 30:04
  It's kind of like building out these transitions and turning
• 30:07
  them into stories rather than info dumps.
• 30:12
  Yeah. And I think because that's,
• 30:14
  that's also what sticks with people, like giving them a ton
• 30:17
  of information and technical things and dates and names.
• 30:20
  And these things only stick in people's minds if they have a
• 30:24
  reason for them, if there if there's an emotional connection
• 30:27
  or if there's a story linking them all together.
• 30:29
  And that's that's kind of what I think of with webs.
• 30:32
  It's like the building of this story.
• 30:34
  And so like, I just have to when people ask questions like this,
• 30:38
  you have to make them aware that that's that that's that's where
• 30:42
  this question leads. This question is not a simple
• 30:45
  Q&A. This question is something that
• 30:47
  opens up a whole network. And then, you know, depending on
• 30:51
  the situation, you can get into that more or less deeply.
• 30:55
  You can take that in various directions because as again,
• 30:57
  it's a web, it can go in very many directions.
• 31:00
  Any one of these questions can unlock so many other questions.
• 31:03
  And usually at the time that people are asking these
• 31:06
  questions, there's already been a level of conversation.
• 31:08
  So you already kind of know like what they're interested in,
• 31:11
  what's going to to resonate with them and picking up on those
• 31:13
  things, like what's going to resonate with a particular
• 31:16
  person or a particular group and being able to hone in on that.
• 31:19
  And then kind of tailor the story or focus on the side of
• 31:23
  the web that already they've shown interest in is going to be
• 31:26
  kind of the way to not only answer the question, but like
• 31:30
  help them build context for like what all their other questions
• 31:34
  are going to be after this that even they might not ask that
• 31:36
  day. But like it's like illuminating
• 31:39
  all of the things that you don't know.
• 31:42
  When people go into something and they think that they don't
• 31:44
  know what they don't know, oftentimes my goal is for that
• 31:47
  interaction. They know what they don't know
• 31:50
  afterwards. I haven't answered all the
• 31:51
  questions. They just have a clearer idea of
• 31:53
  the landscape and where to go next.
• 31:56
  I love that approach. It's really the greatest gift
• 31:58
  is, you know, it's cultivating curiosity in a sense like, and I
• 32:03
  love the web analogy. It's, it's, it's really just
• 32:07
  really fitting. And this is the way tea
• 32:09
  education should be. And it's so rare and so rare to
• 32:12
  find this approach. I find so much tea education is
• 32:16
  so poorly executed. It's so luxury and dogmatic and
• 32:21
  condescending sometimes. I mean, really for this as well,
• 32:24
  I have to big time shout out being tea.
• 32:26
  I don't know if you know them. They're based in Chicago in the
• 32:29
  US. They're a tea education
• 32:31
  educator. So they do a lot of tea
• 32:34
  education, but they also run a teacher training program.
• 32:37
  And I completed that a couple of years ago.
• 32:39
  And so that is also kind of been hugely formative in terms of how
• 32:42
  I think about teaching tea and like sharing tea and doing tea
• 32:45
  education. Oh.
• 32:47
  Cool, I had no idea that this this existed being tea.
• 32:50
  Being tea, Yeah, I'll send you. I'll send you the website man.
• 32:53
  Cool. We'll link it in the show notes
• 32:54
  too, yeah. Absolutely.
• 32:56
  Great name too. Yeah, no.
• 32:57
  And I mean like the conversation they're often so, so often is
• 33:00
  about kind of these more felt sense things.
• 33:03
  There's a lot of kind of stuff in the program about like how
• 33:07
  our bodies even process tea, how our minds process flavor, you
• 33:11
  know, like the the the subset you referred to or actually the
• 33:14
  other one, one of the other ones.
• 33:16
  And in terms of like how smell and our sense of taste, like
• 33:20
  the, the program also talks a lot about this stuff and what it
• 33:23
  means in terms of teaching tea, because accessing those things
• 33:27
  is a fairly vulnerable experience.
• 33:29
  And kind of leaving space for that, creating space for that
• 33:32
  can be done very like dogmatically and very like,
• 33:37
  here's a correct answer, here's a wrong answer, or here's the
• 33:39
  experience you're supposed to be having.
• 33:40
  Here's your goal experience. Or it can be done, you know, in
• 33:43
  a more delicate manner where it's like a container for any
• 33:46
  experience. And those are very different in
• 33:49
  terms of also like the impact they can have on how willing you
• 33:54
  are to experiment on your own going forward.
• 33:57
  I feel like that's quite common when you interacting with the
• 34:00
  traditional sensory world scientists and a lot of these
• 34:05
  development works. Ryan and I was in kind of this
• 34:08
  realm for a little bit, I guess not for a little bit pretty long
• 34:11
  time in our past company and it was quite, quite interesting to
• 34:15
  to deal with that. We have lots of problems with
• 34:17
  like flavor wheels, which is something you've written about.
• 34:20
  We have tell you how many like pseudo debates that we've had to
• 34:25
  have with people about. Flavour and I was responsible
• 34:30
  for translating the English flavour bill and a lot of the
• 34:33
  terms into Chinese because. We start with.
• 34:36
  Chinese companies and you know, I guess my first challenge back
• 34:41
  in the days is just to explain to my team members that this
• 34:45
  word in English doesn't exist in Chinese.
• 34:49
  Like like the idea of like so many crisp like like you know,
• 34:54
  like chip can be crisp crispy and also like sparking sparkling
• 34:58
  water can be crisp right like, but that idea doesn't exist in
• 35:02
  Chinese and and somehow we have to kind of do some modification
• 35:06
  on that. I mean which has cascading
• 35:08
  effect on the data set, you know structure and how the AI
• 35:11
  understand the data my. Gosh.
• 35:14
  It's a whole mess. Yeah, well, and I mean, like I
• 35:18
  background in linguistics, so like this kind of language stuff
• 35:20
  is super interesting to me as well.
• 35:23
  And I mean with translation, there's always going to be this
• 35:25
  problem of like all of those nuances you there, there's not a
• 35:29
  one to one translation between those things between languages.
• 35:32
  And especially with flavor wheels, like oftentimes they're
• 35:35
  conflating flavor, like taste, they're conflating aroma,
• 35:37
  they're completing positive and negative associations of those
• 35:41
  things, the appropriateness of of things in context or out of
• 35:44
  context. And like, I can't imagine
• 35:47
  needing to translate on that level.
• 35:50
  Man, that would. It's all imperfect, like it's
• 35:53
  Eugene, the best you can. I think it was.
• 35:56
  A year long. It was a year long project with
• 35:59
  20 other pH DS in the realm and all unhappy about the results.
• 36:03
  That's the. Only way you can go really isn't
• 36:06
  it? You know what they say?
• 36:08
  Some models. All models are wrong.
• 36:10
  Some models are useful. You just got to get close enough
• 36:13
  that there's some utilities. Well, I'm not something at the
• 36:17
  end of the day's utility, isn't it?
• 36:18
  Yeah. Oh, exactly.
• 36:20
  Actually, I think people get wrong about sensory.
• 36:22
  Like, what are you trying to measure?
• 36:24
  Are you trying to attribute what someone likes about the product?
• 36:28
  Are you trying to measure that this tea tastes the same as this
• 36:31
  batch versus this batch? Are you trying to determine if
• 36:35
  there's a flaw and identify the like?
• 36:37
  It just so totally depends on the objective.
• 36:40
  I'm super curious. You had a really cool experience
• 36:44
  doing sensory training in Hangzhou in China.
• 36:47
  Just really curious what that experience was like and how you
• 36:50
  map the way Chinese tea people think about sensory going to the
• 36:55
  way Japanese tea people think about sensory and flavor
• 36:59
  language. Yeah, OK.
• 37:01
  Different or similarity? I mean, so just one caveat, I
• 37:05
  had one day of, of training in sensory analysis in Hangzhou.
• 37:09
  So this is one day's worth of experience that I'm that I'm
• 37:12
  speaking with here. So it's not a huge amount, but
• 37:16
  it was, it was very, very cool and very in depth.
• 37:19
  Well, 1 1/2 days for that time. The, I mean, it's very different
• 37:24
  in China or there versus kind of in, in, in Japan because so much
• 37:29
  of Japanese tea evaluation is tea specific, right?
• 37:32
  There is like for sencha, for tensha, like the, the, there are
• 37:36
  differences in how you would evaluate each.
• 37:38
  And that's the same in, in China as well.
• 37:41
  The broadness of kind of like what is almost seen as worth
• 37:46
  evaluating. It was way more in my experience
• 37:49
  in China, like the the, the level of detail in guidelines
• 37:54
  for evaluating green teas, white teas, long black, yellow, poor
• 37:59
  or fermented teas. There, there were like books on
• 38:03
  each in terms of like the vocabulary that we use the the
• 38:07
  different breakdowns of like what categories and how many
• 38:10
  points each have. These kinds of things were
• 38:12
  incredibly detailed and extensive for all different
• 38:15
  types of tea. For aramatized teas, like with
• 38:17
  flowers in as well, that was its own category and each tea type
• 38:22
  has kind of its own method of calculation, like weighting the
• 38:25
  categories differently. And in my experience here, it's
• 38:29
  been much more sort of focused around the two categories of
• 38:33
  sencha and tensha. And to some extent that makes
• 38:35
  sense because Japan produces mostly sencha and you know,
• 38:39
  tensha kind of it's interesting to me that that is what's
• 38:43
  evaluated more so than matcha, where from an industry
• 38:48
  perspective, like it makes sense.
• 38:49
  But then, you know, it's again like what purpose are we doing
• 38:53
  this for? What's the utility of this from
• 38:55
  a consumer perspective? It is a different product at the
• 38:57
  end of the day that you are then actually like consuming.
• 39:00
  So what is the purpose of doing this evaluation?
• 39:04
  Because it's not about the final product in a sense.
• 39:07
  For our audience that haven't had the experience of drinking
• 39:10
  tensha, the flavor transformation from tensha to
• 39:13
  matcha is tremendous. It's.
• 39:16
  Enormous. It's.
• 39:18
  Different two different products yeah it's the the mental
• 39:21
  conversion of like tensha like to the the product must have
• 39:26
  happened in in in their brain like in all these Japanese tea
• 39:30
  evaluator very curious about how they obtain that kind of
• 39:34
  knowledge and. Yeah, well, and that's that's
• 39:37
  one thing that I find really fascinating about like this kind
• 39:39
  of professional tea evaluation just in general is how much of
• 39:43
  this is kind of mental inside evaluators brains.
• 39:46
  Because this is not this is not evaluation in terms of like
• 39:49
  brewing a tea in the way that it's going to taste the best or
• 39:52
  be the best experience of this tea.
• 39:54
  This is brewing a tea to find the faults.
• 39:56
  This is brewing it same tea according to like the same
• 40:00
  guideline or bring different teas to different guidelines.
• 40:03
  You know, you'll brew your senchas with boiling water and
• 40:05
  in order to like make a pleasant cup of sencha, you probably
• 40:09
  wouldn't do that. And so like this kind of tea
• 40:11
  evaluation, this sensory evaluation also, it's not really
• 40:15
  about like evaluating the ideal product that your customer is
• 40:19
  going to encounter is not. About the final product in that
• 40:23
  sense and in the way that the person is going to ever consume
• 40:27
  it. It is about identifying features
• 40:30
  and disentangling what are variances versus what are
• 40:34
  faults, and that's not something anyone would do in their own
• 40:36
  home. That's the way we're.
• 40:39
  Putting it. There's 2 levels of distortion,
• 40:41
  you don't typically use boiling water, at least in the case of
• 40:44
  10 cha, and no one drinks the product is 10 cha.
• 40:48
  Like it's a really weird thing that's like flaw maximization
• 40:52
  approach to brewing and evaluation because it's just not
• 40:57
  the way the consumer experiences the team.
• 41:00
  And then from there, you know, like it can be taken and milled
• 41:02
  in different ways and the result, you know, like there's a
• 41:06
  whole other level where like there could be faults introduced
• 41:09
  still after that stage. Very non ideal actually.
• 41:13
  I have a hard time building this mental map between tensha and
• 41:16
  macho. I've tried.
• 41:18
  I'm so like I've been into sensory for so long.
• 41:20
  I am so seduced by this craft, these Japanese people and do
• 41:26
  moving from boiling water tensha to a delicious bowl of Lucia and
• 41:32
  then. I.
• 41:32
  Think what's the point? But I and I suppose again, like
• 41:36
  utility, right? Why it's probably because I mean
• 41:39
  like just like historically looking at, you know, how
• 41:42
  blending kind of developed as a thing and and like the purpose
• 41:45
  of tasting tensha at this stage is well, OK, like this, the way
• 41:48
  we can craft like the blend, we can make sure uniformity at the
• 41:52
  stage before we have milled it into a powder.
• 41:54
  That's then a little bit more fragile, you know, like there is
• 41:56
  a sense of utility for the creation of product, but like
• 42:01
  that utility is part of the process.
• 42:04
  It like it gets reinterpreted maybe as has an end stage thing
• 42:08
  in a way where it's where it doesn't fully make sense.
• 42:11
  Yeah. And I wonder if some samples
• 42:14
  that don't taste as good as tensha brewed with boiling water
• 42:19
  will make better matcha then. Like if they were to rank in
• 42:23
  terms of sensory quality, if you're using 70° water, Ishusu
• 42:27
  milk, normal usucha preparations, if the matcha
• 42:31
  would change order, and if we're just building for a more
• 42:35
  resilient cup that has less likely to express certain
• 42:39
  things, and if the order would be reshuffled.
• 42:41
  I think it's definitely a part of the consideration because
• 42:44
  because actually similar things happened in in Chinese tea to
• 42:48
  people would taste Maucha like or for example, like Yancha like
• 42:51
  before it gets roasted, they would taste the Unroast tea.
• 42:54
  And frequently they would be pointing at teas that I think
• 42:58
  tastes like really bad and telling me that this will be the
• 43:02
  highest quality afterwards. And for some, like Maucha that I
• 43:06
  think it tastes, you know, quite enjoyable, they said that this
• 43:10
  is no good, it's not going to taste good after roasting.
• 43:13
  So I bet similar things happened in matcha too.
• 43:16
  But I suppose it's, it just goes to show this point of like, what
• 43:18
  tastes good? Like good.
• 43:20
  The, the, the value judgment element is something that we do
• 43:24
  so automatically and so naturally.
• 43:26
  But like there needs to be some sort of separation at work
• 43:30
  mentally while doing this because what we're, we're not
• 43:33
  like looking for good here. We're not looking for something
• 43:36
  that tastes pleasant in the moment.
• 43:37
  And so that's like that's where this is also its own craft.
• 43:40
  It's having the background and the experience and the having
• 43:43
  tasted on 10, just know specifically if I'm tasting this
• 43:47
  thing, that's likely to lead to this other thing once the next
• 43:50
  process has been applied. And like the same thing with
• 43:52
  Yensha, like tasting this flavor or like this kind of bad taste
• 43:57
  now means that once it is roasted and like there's been
• 44:00
  some elements of like my reaction or like sugar is
• 44:02
  caramelizing the leaf, this other effect will have happened.
• 44:05
  And that's the thing we want to look out so like tasting the the
• 44:09
  pre stage of that, but that is like that is a level of
• 44:12
  separation and training that like I mean, I do not have.
• 44:16
  Well the the sad thing is all these people that I have
• 44:19
  encountered on just so like bad at articulating like what
• 44:22
  exactly? They're looking for I just.
• 44:26
  Cannot and they use all these jargons that's.
• 44:29
  The yeah, yeah, yeah. Like social, like, you know, the
• 44:32
  removal of water, like the shray can mean differently in
• 44:36
  different tea categories in China.
• 44:38
  Anyways, it's it's it's own chaos.
• 44:42
  I mean, this was like that. That's something that was where
• 44:44
  I wish our sensory training in China had.
• 44:46
  We'd had more time for like in terms of that jargon because we
• 44:49
  got like these booklets. And it was essentially what
• 44:52
  you're saying about translating the flavor wheel.
• 44:53
  It was like in Chinese. And like my Chinese is so basic.
• 44:57
  So like, you know, I could figure out some characters, I
• 44:59
  could figure out some things, but like the nuances completely
• 45:01
  lost on me. And then the translations, we
• 45:04
  just didn't have enough time to like fully understand these very
• 45:08
  specific reference because they were very, very specific.
• 45:12
  And that's one thing I always get hung up on on things like on
• 45:15
  on tasting notes a lot of the time.
• 45:17
  Like you say something like my classic example is mango, like
• 45:20
  growing up in Europe, right? Like I, my reference for mango
• 45:24
  is unripe mango. It's not fresh, ripe, like
• 45:27
  sweet, juicy, like it's not these things.
• 45:29
  It's a little bit more on the tart side.
• 45:31
  And so like even saying the same word will kind of bring up
• 45:35
  different things depending on what you're reference for that
• 45:39
  word is. And so like that, this whole
• 45:41
  book was like basically a term and then two paragraphs on like
• 45:45
  specificity and in terms of what that term actually refers to.
• 45:49
  Yeah, filtering perception through language is a messy
• 45:53
  process and then interpreting it, it's as you wrote, wrote
• 45:56
  about even fishiness, like what does it mean for AT to be fishy?
• 46:00
  And like to Japanese people the perceptions different, but so is
• 46:04
  the preference because I don't think it's an insult.
• 46:06
  But to a native English speaker, fishing is not a compliment
• 46:10
  usually. Yeah.
• 46:11
  But then, you know, you say something like marine or
• 46:13
  something, and even that has a more positive association in
• 46:16
  English. Totally, Yeah, yeah.
• 46:18
  And then those words that have preferences and baggage comes
• 46:22
  along with each of these terms, so.
• 46:24
  Much baggage. Yeah, yeah.
• 46:25
  It's, it's crazy that we can even talk to each other across
• 46:28
  like the different tea communities about what we say,
• 46:31
  about what we taste. The Chinese gets like even like
• 46:34
  within Chinese tea vocabulary, you get like, time intensity
• 46:38
  stuff like returning sweetness wagons.
• 46:41
  Yeah, like all of this more sophisticated, not static notes.
• 46:46
  It's more, I don't know what to call it.
• 46:48
  Poetic. More experiential.
• 46:51
  Oh, and then like tea and things like that.
• 46:53
  Yeah. And then, yeah, that's a whole
• 46:55
  other. Yeah, another bucket of worms.
• 46:59
  Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious too because
• 47:02
  like the across Chinese tea vocabulary, I feel like it's
• 47:05
  much larger because the flavor profile diversity in Chinese tea
• 47:11
  in my opinion, is so much higher than the flavor profile
• 47:14
  diversity that typically exists. And even within a product
• 47:18
  category like Matcha, the flavor profile variation is a bit lower
• 47:24
  than in, let's say, Taiwanese timeout loan, for example, or in
• 47:28
  like other categories or classes of to think about.
• 47:32
  And I wonder how that gets baked into the vocabulary, if they
• 47:35
  just need more granularity and specificity to differentiate
• 47:39
  things in their mind. And I wonder if that like comes
• 47:41
  through because sometimes I feel like I'm tasting a lot of
• 47:43
  different matchas and I'm like, wow, yeah, there's some
• 47:46
  differences. But like, if there's some
• 47:48
  homogeneous miss to the category, and I wonder how the
• 47:53
  the Japanese flavor, how much of the vocabulary maps onto what
• 47:58
  people are actually experiencing if you're not trained to pick
• 48:02
  apart that level of regularity? So like, if you serve a bunch of
• 48:06
  different cultivars of much into people you know at the tour, how
• 48:10
  good are people at articulating the differences and their
• 48:13
  preferences when they're visiting?
• 48:14
  I mean, well, interestingly, they're very good at
• 48:17
  articulating that there are differences and which is the
• 48:20
  preference, what the differences are.
• 48:23
  That is often the challenge. And it's, it's interesting
• 48:26
  watching also like watching interns go through the process
• 48:29
  of, of doing this several times throughout three months,
• 48:32
  starting off kind of where most tour guests are, give or take,
• 48:35
  depending on how much experience they have with much or with
• 48:38
  other tea coming in. And then how much of a
• 48:40
  difference three months of tasting those same cultivars
• 48:43
  over and over and over again and tasting other things at that
• 48:46
  same time. How that vocabulary refines in
• 48:48
  just those three months. It's the kind of the both the
• 48:52
  specificity and the confidence. Because a lot of the time what
• 48:55
  I'm noticing thing is like in on tours, when people have a
• 48:58
  specific sort of difference that they want to point out between
• 49:01
  two cultivars, they'll be very tentative about it.
• 49:04
  They'll be like, I think this one is a little bit sweeter,
• 49:08
  right? You know, they'll ask for
• 49:09
  confirmation and I'll be like, if you think so, then yeah, I, I
• 49:14
  am not in your mouth. Like I, I cannot taste what
• 49:16
  you're tasting like. I process these things
• 49:19
  differently than you do because like, there is the experience
• 49:21
  of, of what the cup is. And yes, we're both drinking the
• 49:24
  same thing, but we, we have different sensory apparatuses,
• 49:27
  we have different brains processing the signals that
• 49:30
  those senses are giving us. And, and so like what you say is
• 49:34
  correct for your sensory system. It's just like kind of it trying
• 49:39
  to get specific vocabulary that that like helps.
• 49:42
  And this is kind of how I talk about flavor wheels as well,
• 49:44
  because we do have one that we supply during the tour.
• 49:47
  And a lot of people look at it as kind of it must be on this
• 49:50
  wheel, otherwise it's not right. Or otherwise like nothing
• 49:53
  outside the wheel exists. But it's, you know, like I set
• 49:56
  it up as a sort of, you know, like this is a vocabulary list
• 49:59
  to start from because it can be really hard to taste something
• 50:02
  and like, just describe it. You would know, starting point.
• 50:06
  Whereas if you see the word spinach and you're like, this is
• 50:09
  absolutely not spinach, you might then your brain might go,
• 50:13
  oh, but like actually charred, you know, like another leafy
• 50:16
  green vegetable. So like the, the kind of
• 50:18
  prompting and priming element can be super helpful, while at
• 50:21
  the same time, I think like be a little bit constricting.
• 50:24
  So it's like, yeah, finding that, that balance, but I don't
• 50:27
  know. Yeah, I, I think it's what I
• 50:29
  observe most is kind of the, the level of, of confidence and
• 50:33
  tentativeness. And then when I feel like I've,
• 50:36
  I've done a good job is when people get more confident with
• 50:39
  whatever they say, even if it's something I completely disagree
• 50:41
  with. But what's also interesting also
• 50:43
  is like, you know, tasting 3 cultivars back-to-back, it can
• 50:47
  be a very different experience with each of them, even if
• 50:49
  they're prepared kind of to the same proportions because we, you
• 50:52
  know, keep that consistent so that really what you are tasting
• 50:54
  is the difference of the cultivars.
• 50:56
  And then, you know, it's very interesting asking people like
• 50:59
  which one of these tastes closest to what you've had
• 51:02
  before or like what 1 is like the most different to you.
• 51:05
  This is always something I like to do, like in my own business
• 51:08
  as well. I always try and like ask a
• 51:10
  specific link it back to Europe that their own experience
• 51:14
  outside of this specific context, like what has been the
• 51:17
  most familiar, what has been the most different?
• 51:19
  And then when you have something so constrained in terms of the
• 51:23
  range of flavor profiles and you ask people to connect that to
• 51:26
  something outside of that that maybe they haven't tasted in the
• 51:29
  last couple of days or in the last couple of weeks, that's
• 51:31
  like a little bit not so immediate anymore.
• 51:34
  And, you know, then it's in the brain and not in like the felt
• 51:37
  body either. The way people start thinking
• 51:40
  about these differences also changes when you prompt them to
• 51:44
  back up that far. Yeah, it's not exactly priming,
• 51:48
  but I guess recontextualizing. Exactly.
• 51:51
  Different bigger web. Yeah, that's always web.
• 51:55
  Analogy actually these contacts, so on the consumer in the
• 51:59
  business side, I know you had a lot of experience working with
• 52:02
  matcha brands. It's particularly in the UK.
• 52:05
  I'm curious like how you know a lot of people who listen to the
• 52:09
  show or either have their own matcha brand or starting a
• 52:12
  matcha brand and like how do you think about like getting a
• 52:14
  collection or portfolio of matchas and then how you're
• 52:18
  communicating that to the consumer.
• 52:20
  And like, I like to think of this as like a push or pull,
• 52:23
  like how much of the industry is trying to push ideas on to
• 52:27
  consumers versus consumers already saying, you know, I want
• 52:30
  yame matcha, I want uji matcha. I want, I want something I want
• 52:34
  ceremonial great matcha, even like this push and pull dynamic
• 52:38
  with regards to, you know, creating a successful match of
• 52:40
  business. Curious about your experiences?
• 52:43
  I think the caveat I'd have to start is that I am not great at
• 52:48
  business. I am interested in education
• 52:51
  primarily. And so I always struggle to
• 52:54
  think of things in terms of strictly business and like what
• 52:57
  would be the business right thing to do.
• 52:59
  And so my answer or my my way of thinking about this question is
• 53:03
  going to come more from that angle of like more the long term
• 53:07
  development aspect and less the how to make a business work now
• 53:11
  aspect. I think there is a difference
• 53:12
  there. Yeah.
• 53:14
  Especially because I mean, we've mentioned many times today and
• 53:18
  like also you guys also constantly talk about how much
• 53:21
  of like much is changing as an industry right now.
• 53:24
  This, This is why this is such a difference for me, I think.
• 53:27
  But like you said, push and pull, I think I think of it more
• 53:30
  in terms of offering things like, rather than brands pushing
• 53:35
  terminology onto consumers, it's offering terminology because
• 53:39
  again, going back to the content of the web, right?
• 53:41
  And like terms that exist and isolation without context,
• 53:45
  ceremonial grade, having no context or having context that
• 53:48
  is not really appropriate for for the situation because it
• 53:51
  refers to, you know, like it's ceremonial.
• 53:53
  We're thinking tea ceremony, we're thinking kimono, we're
• 53:55
  thinking tatami. We are in a Cafe.
• 53:58
  It's an ice drink with milk. Like not the right context, but
• 54:01
  like, what then what web does that hang on to?
• 54:04
  And so rather than like pushing terminology on to consumers, I
• 54:07
  think it's offering various other things to hang that term
• 54:12
  on to. So, so ceremonial grade, OK,
• 54:15
  well maybe instead we talk about shading.
• 54:17
  Maybe instead we talk about different grinding methods and
• 54:20
  the effects that those might have.
• 54:21
  Maybe we talk about, maybe we do talk about region and like
• 54:24
  provenance and like terroir in a sense.
• 54:26
  But we also kind of maybe leave that one to the conversations
• 54:30
  further down the line because it's a bit more complex.
• 54:32
  Maybe we talk about harvest season and we kind of introduce
• 54:35
  those terms, but we don't give only those terms.
• 54:38
  So I think it's like, yeah, like pairing things like ceremonial
• 54:42
  grade with the information of spring harvest, 3-4 weeks shaded
• 54:47
  shading style, like these kinds of information so that the more
• 54:51
  people start seeing those terms paired together, maybe that
• 54:54
  association grows. Maybe then what when they see
• 54:57
  something that says spring harvest, that will associate in
• 55:00
  their minds to oh, something ceremonial grade was also spring
• 55:03
  harvest. Maybe that means spring harvest
• 55:04
  is good. And so like over time, we can
• 55:07
  kind of maybe shift away from using those words that have not
• 55:10
  really much meaning. So with when, when kind of
• 55:14
  talking to brands about like building out portfolios and
• 55:17
  talking about their products, I think that's it's hard to kind
• 55:20
  of provide specific guidance or recommendations.
• 55:23
  I really struggle to do that. But that's kind of the context
• 55:27
  that I try and do it in is like what consumers are you talking
• 55:31
  to? What language do they already
• 55:33
  know and how can you offer them more specific language?
• 55:38
  You know, Like, if all they know is ceremonial grade, you have to
• 55:41
  use it. Like you have to at least
• 55:43
  acknowledge it as a term because otherwise you're not having the
• 55:46
  same conversation. And if that's the term they're
• 55:48
  looking for, then a way to build trust is to meet them where
• 55:51
  they're at and like acknowledge the language that they're using
• 55:55
  and maybe help them to refine it.
• 55:58
  But again, it's this element of like offering and helping as
• 56:01
  opposed to enforcing because that can come across again,
• 56:05
  patronizing and exclusive. Totally, yeah, I, I, I love the
• 56:10
  approach to I, I think like if you go to the average cafe in
• 56:14
  the US or Europe and you ask them about their matcha program,
• 56:17
  even if they have a sophisticated matcha menu,
• 56:19
  typically I find, and this is not on the knock on the
• 56:23
  baristas, but they don't care. They don't know and they don't
• 56:26
  seem very curious. And I have a theory that like
• 56:30
  these very coffee centric people have very good BS detectors and
• 56:34
  that a lot one of these bunch of brands trying to sell in B to B
• 56:37
  like wrap the product in so much opaqueness and fufu fluffy
• 56:42
  language that they don't have a decent foundation enough and tea
• 56:47
  maybe to be critical enough to like learn more.
• 56:51
  And that the industry, the much industry just a such a bad job
• 56:55
  making much interesting to that group of people who's actually
• 56:59
  having that interaction with the consumer.
• 57:01
  And like, this type of language that you're talking about, I
• 57:04
  think can Pierce through that interest of some random barista
• 57:08
  in Chicago or in San Francisco or here in Paris or in, you
• 57:12
  know, in Berlin. And like the industry's done
• 57:15
  such a poor job making it interesting to the coffee
• 57:18
  community. Yeah, yeah.
• 57:20
  I also think that Japan has done a really poor job educating
• 57:25
  these people coming in, trying, desperately trying to learn
• 57:29
  about this product. Like a lot of the people that
• 57:31
  like go to a Boo Boo, I'm sure would love to like go go to a
• 57:35
  bunch of different farms and really get into the dirt and
• 57:38
  into the cultivars. And it's just so hard to do.
• 57:41
  Like there's nowhere to do it and like, go learn what makes
• 57:46
  that product interesting through those lenses.
• 57:49
  Yeah, and I feel like it was in in Japan, there is kind of this
• 57:52
  element of like, why, why do people want to know this?
• 57:54
  Like no one's ever wanted to know this before.
• 57:56
  Why now? You know, like because with with
• 57:58
  even in China UNT ceremony, like it's not really about the much.
• 58:02
  There has never been kind of this element of curiosity about
• 58:05
  agriculture or like cultivation in the context of tea ceremony.
• 58:09
  So like now that interest is coming from elsewhere.
• 58:12
  There is like a little bit of a, a dubiousness of like like
• 58:15
  what's the ulterior motive here? Like why and and and the the
• 58:19
  kind of just like genuine curiosity of how does this work?
• 58:21
  Why does it work this way? It, it just like is a little bit
• 58:24
  too surprising still maybe for that to be something that's
• 58:27
  easily and easy to engage with for many people in the industry
• 58:32
  or farmers. And like OBU has been able to do
• 58:35
  an amazing job with this because they kind of got into tea with
• 58:38
  the same spirit of curiosity. And so they're able to work with
• 58:41
  it. But that's again, a very rare
• 58:43
  case. And that when as well, that
• 58:46
  curiosity often comes from the parallels of the coffee world
• 58:50
  and the coffee industry, which there are some similarities, but
• 58:52
  there are some differences. And like oftentimes, you know,
• 58:55
  questions are asked that make sense in the coffee world, but
• 58:57
  that just don't make sense in tea.
• 58:59
  You are in matcha and you know, so it's like also about like
• 59:02
  navigating where those mismatches are and figuring out
• 59:05
  like it's, you're not asking the wrong question because you're
• 59:08
  not interested. You're asking the wrong question
• 59:09
  because you have the wrong frame of reference.
• 59:11
  And like, let me help you build that out.
• 59:13
  That is also like, it requires a lot of kind of thinking and
• 59:17
  meeting in the middle and like cultural like transfer that is
• 59:21
  not easy to do all the time. And that with the sort of
• 59:25
  ravenous amount of interest in matcha, they're just like isn't
• 59:28
  infrastructure for yet. And I don't know coffee well
• 59:31
  enough to actually know if that if there is a parallel like if
• 59:35
  there was a time when coffee was kind of in a state like this.
• 59:39
  Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question actually.
• 59:42
  That's a great research topic to see how like other specialty
• 59:45
  industries navigated this. Where?
• 59:48
  There was some misapplied framework totally wrong either
• 59:53
  like let's say origin in terroir, like it's sort of
• 59:57
  right. And sometimes it is single
• 1:00:00
  origin and it's just, it's actually just, it's really
• 1:00:03
  complicated, this web of context, except because the
• 1:00:06
  exceptions are the most visible companies.
• 1:00:09
  Because they're the ones that actually have to sell tea to
• 1:00:11
  consumers who develop a consumer relationship.
• 1:00:13
  And then they're coexisting with all of these people, like all
• 1:00:17
  these huge blend houses or, you know, someone, some little man
• 1:00:20
  somewhere in the supply chain that is aggregating all this
• 1:00:23
  tension that they bought at auction and, and like, being a
• 1:00:26
  facilitator and like, it's that provenance gets lost.
• 1:00:30
  And so, yeah, so hard to navigate.
• 1:00:33
  It's even, yeah, even in Japan. They just don't value it.
• 1:00:36
  It's they don't value provenance.
• 1:00:38
  I think it's a fair statement actually, but they sell them.
• 1:00:42
  Yeah, Yeah. Well, but the, it's like the
• 1:00:44
  understanding of what provenance is as well in terms of like
• 1:00:47
  understanding Uji not as provenance in terms of where the
• 1:00:51
  leaf material comes from, but as like the finishing touch that
• 1:00:54
  makes the product what it is at the end of the day.
• 1:00:56
  And so like it's just a different understanding of what
• 1:00:59
  the provenance is because if it weren't finished in UJI to kind
• 1:01:03
  of like the standards and style and practices here, it wouldn't
• 1:01:06
  be what it is. And.
• 1:01:07
  Then under the same rules, you can have a big company,
• 1:01:09
  companies set up somewhere in Kyoto Prefecture and Negluji
• 1:01:12
  Macha, which is no longer in that spirit.
• 1:01:15
  So it's, yeah, they're just provenance is sort of the same.
• 1:01:19
  They're following the same rules, but.
• 1:01:23
  It's so hard. Yeah, it's so.
• 1:01:25
  Hard. Well, like if we really are
• 1:01:27
  trying to make any sense out of the provenance of the location,
• 1:01:31
  it will just turn into another ceremonial great, right?
• 1:01:35
  Like instead, which care about, you know, as Martin said, you
• 1:01:39
  know, shading, cultivation methods, culture bars, all these
• 1:01:43
  like ground truth that that people touch and and we'll have
• 1:01:47
  the impact on the final taste of the product.
• 1:01:49
  I think that's what people should care.
• 1:01:50
  Yeah. And I mean, I suppose once we
• 1:01:52
  build out that web of like that, that web of reference there,
• 1:01:55
  that opens up further avenues. And then, you know, the
• 1:01:58
  incredible amount of complexities of things like what
• 1:02:01
  is provenance, what is origin will make more sense already
• 1:02:05
  just because some of those frameworks will already be in
• 1:02:07
  place just naturally because of conversations around cultivar.
• 1:02:12
  Like if we normalize kind of those earlier ones first as
• 1:02:15
  easier in a sense that they are kind of less complex, you know,
• 1:02:19
  like that it will make the the more complex things a little bit
• 1:02:22
  more accessible. Totally.
• 1:02:24
  And the more predictive terms, right?
• 1:02:26
  Knowing something? Yes, yeah.
• 1:02:28
  If it's shaded for eight weeks, that's very predictive of higher
• 1:02:33
  more than four weeks. And then you can get into
• 1:02:35
  interesting stories. Why?
• 1:02:36
  Well, you can't do direct covering for eight weeks because
• 1:02:39
  you'll kill the plant because it's it's too moist and humid
• 1:02:41
  and no airflow. So it's on it actually on a ton
• 1:02:44
  of and then like a great opportunity like it's like those
• 1:02:47
  are really great ground truth predictors.
• 1:02:49
  And then as well like the relationship between those and
• 1:02:52
  pricing, you know, like if you shave for that amount, the plant
• 1:02:54
  needs time to recover. You can't have multiple harvests
• 1:02:57
  in a year. Like you're kind of limiting
• 1:02:59
  also productivity in that sense. And then, you know, like that
• 1:03:02
  kind of of knock on effect in terms of what the price of the
• 1:03:05
  end product is. Because, you know, there's still
• 1:03:07
  so many conversations around why the heck is Matcha so expensive?
• 1:03:10
  And then trying to find like the cheapest price, ceremonial
• 1:03:13
  grade. And then you know, as well, like
• 1:03:16
  the, the, the Matcha Cafe that I used to work in, in Bath, the,
• 1:03:19
  the number of conversations we had around, should we raise
• 1:03:22
  prices? Do we need to like when, when
• 1:03:24
  like the supply also the base price of Matcha that we're using
• 1:03:28
  changes? Like how do we reflect that in
• 1:03:30
  the drinks that we offer in the Cafe and how do we communicate
• 1:03:33
  that to customers, especially when every other Matcha brand is
• 1:03:37
  or isn't, you know, like there are, there have been specific
• 1:03:39
  times in the UK where like every Matcha brand has risen its
• 1:03:43
  prices and then other times where no one is changing prices.
• 1:03:46
  And then you know, like how do you behave in those contexts and
• 1:03:48
  how do you explain those things? If there are these vocabulary
• 1:03:52
  kind of and context webs in place, it's going to be a lot
• 1:03:55
  easier to navigate those changes also.
• 1:03:58
  Oh yeah, and justify them if they already have that context.
• 1:04:02
  Yeah, as London almost explains itself when you're just like,
• 1:04:07
  yeah, makes a lot of sense actually.
• 1:04:09
  I also like to briefly Fact Check myself.
• 1:04:11
  I was trying to do some quick mental math.
• 1:04:13
  I don't think anything is shaded for eight weeks.
• 1:04:15
  I'll revise my answer to 6 I have heard.
• 1:04:19
  Of I have heard of seven actually.
• 1:04:21
  Yeah, 7:00 to 8:00. It's called a white leaf tea
• 1:04:25
  hakyocha. Like the leaf turned white by
• 1:04:28
  the end of the shade. Someone someone did that.
• 1:04:31
  Yeah, like, yeah, more as an experimental God, will the plant
• 1:04:35
  survive kind of situation. You heard of seven weeks within
• 1:04:38
  like just normal normal matcha non experimental.
• 1:04:41
  I don't think it was, no. I think it was experimental
• 1:04:43
  yokuro. Maybe my brain is telling me
• 1:04:46
  that it was how talking about about this.
• 1:04:47
  So again, one to one to follow up, OK.
• 1:04:51
  Seven weeks. It's crazy.
• 1:04:53
  Yeah. Yeah, it's too long.
• 1:04:56
  Too long. Especially once without
• 1:05:00
  taproots. So, yeah, I guess is one last
• 1:05:05
  question. Something that you're living and
• 1:05:07
  breathing day in, day out in Wazooka is just interacting with
• 1:05:11
  a bunch of people who are traveling.
• 1:05:13
  And, you know, we hear about people like, I don't know, the
• 1:05:16
  Anthony Bourdain's of the world that like, you know, travel
• 1:05:19
  really opens your mind and to seeing a new culture and to
• 1:05:23
  learning new experiences. And I guess you perceive the
• 1:05:26
  world slightly differently. So it's like in when you're
• 1:05:29
  visiting with all the people who are there for tourism.
• 1:05:32
  Have you noticed like come in with a different perspective and
• 1:05:36
  they would at a cafe in the UK or a different level of openness
• 1:05:41
  is, you know, something that you've recently written a lot
• 1:05:43
  about when you're sub stack. So curious to hear like a bit
• 1:05:46
  more of your experience on that side.
• 1:05:49
  Yeah. For sure.
• 1:05:50
  I mean, I think holidays are, I mean, holidays are a time away
• 1:05:55
  from real life, right? And a lot of people go on
• 1:05:57
  holiday to a place they've never been before or maybe a place
• 1:06:00
  they've been already, but like want to experience again.
• 1:06:03
  And there is an element of like of, of choice to put yourself in
• 1:06:08
  a different context and a new situation in which you have to
• 1:06:11
  leave your old frames of reference behind.
• 1:06:13
  And then it's easier to develop new ones and to encounter
• 1:06:17
  something else in context of, of that thing as opposed to in
• 1:06:21
  context of your life. And so I think I, I mean,
• 1:06:25
  obviously that's not the case for everyone going on holiday
• 1:06:27
  always like that. You know, plenty of people just
• 1:06:29
  go, you know, to the beach to lie there and not think about
• 1:06:32
  anything and you know, don't want to encounter something new.
• 1:06:35
  But a lot of people do want to encounter something new.
• 1:06:38
  They're kind of looking for it, even if it's not like overtly
• 1:06:41
  what they're going on holiday for.
• 1:06:43
  There's kind of the the subconscious shift of like, I'm
• 1:06:46
  outside of my usual life. I'm not at my regular job.
• 1:06:49
  I'm not seeing the people I see every day.
• 1:06:50
  I'm not walking down the same streets as every day.
• 1:06:53
  Because when you do, when you are in those regular rhythms,
• 1:06:55
  your brain very easily kind of falls into the same cycles and
• 1:06:59
  thinks the same thoughts and keeping yourself out of like
• 1:07:02
  always having the same cycles. A great way to do that is to put
• 1:07:05
  yourself in a different context where you can't autopilot.
• 1:07:08
  And then having people on the tours here who are actively
• 1:07:12
  choosing not to be on autopilot, they're oftentimes more open to
• 1:07:17
  learning something new, experiencing something new.
• 1:07:19
  You know, if we get so many people who are like dragged by a
• 1:07:22
  family member, like one person is interested in T, the other
• 1:07:25
  one is like, I guess. And by the end of the day,
• 1:07:27
  they're like, Oh my gosh, this has changed everything.
• 1:07:31
  And the person who brought them here will be like I told you,
• 1:07:34
  but like, very much like, that is more likely to happen here, I
• 1:07:38
  think partially because obviously it's a beautiful
• 1:07:41
  environment. The tea fields are gorgeous.
• 1:07:43
  It's going to be an amazing day in that sense.
• 1:07:45
  But also you are outside of your usual context and think, so
• 1:07:49
  things are going to hit differently.
• 1:07:50
  Things are going to, like go into your brain in a different
• 1:07:53
  way and sometimes in a more unfiltered way because you're
• 1:07:57
  not kind of trying to subconsciously fit them into
• 1:08:00
  your usual frameworks. And like, I see that here every
• 1:08:03
  day, but I also had it a little bit in my, when, when I was in
• 1:08:07
  Bath and I was a tour guide there, we had a lot of tourists
• 1:08:10
  from other parts of the world, but also a lot of British
• 1:08:14
  tourists coming to Bath because Bath is like, you know, also
• 1:08:17
  famous in the UK. And even that, like that's
• 1:08:19
  tourism way closer to home. Those are folks who like that
• 1:08:22
  this, this is not a very different place for them at all.
• 1:08:25
  But even that level of remove and openness of, of like, oh,
• 1:08:30
  I'm just, I'm in a different city.
• 1:08:31
  And particularly because the tours I was doing there were
• 1:08:33
  food, specifically it was about food and heritage and kind of
• 1:08:37
  the history of of lace from a culinary perspective that is a
• 1:08:41
  bit of a different frame of reference from usual.
• 1:08:43
  And so like even even there, it was super interesting to see
• 1:08:48
  also how open people are to trying things they wouldn't
• 1:08:51
  usually try. And one thing I absolutely loved
• 1:08:54
  about doing those tours was I also worked at the Matcha Cafe
• 1:08:58
  at the time in Bath, and I would take people to the Matcha Cafe
• 1:09:02
  on the tours. So I would encounter the
• 1:09:04
  customers, they're just like coming to the cafe as customers.
• 1:09:07
  And I would also encounter like I would also be taking poor
• 1:09:11
  tourists through to the cafe. And the difference in how they
• 1:09:14
  engaged with Matcha in that context, like those kind of
• 1:09:18
  customer groups. This is super interesting to me.
• 1:09:21
  And the kind of the especially some of the folks who like you
• 1:09:25
  would never expect to kind of be the clientele of Matcha, how
• 1:09:28
  they kind of process both what the product was in terms of how
• 1:09:31
  I explained it and how they would or something, how they
• 1:09:35
  would kind of come to understand what a menu in the cafe like
• 1:09:38
  this is, how to navigate what the product is.
• 1:09:41
  Because. And then oftentimes, you know,
• 1:09:42
  you make parallels in terms of like coffee drinks.
• 1:09:45
  And then people suddenly realize they don't actually know what an
• 1:09:48
  Americano is or what a technically a latte is.
• 1:09:51
  Like it's the ice coffee with milk, right?
• 1:09:53
  But a lot of other drinks are also coffee with milk.
• 1:09:55
  So like, what's the difference between all of them?
• 1:09:57
  And then, you know, kind of jumping from there to all these
• 1:10:00
  levels of like, well, there are so many again, building out the
• 1:10:04
  webs of reference kind of the the, the more complex
• 1:10:06
  conversations around what else is all going on with these, with
• 1:10:10
  these products. A.
• 1:10:12
  Magical powder. So many people like literally, I
• 1:10:14
  would ask them, do you know anything about matcha?
• 1:10:16
  And I got answers like that sometimes like magical powder,
• 1:10:19
  like elixir of life one, one person said.
• 1:10:21
  And it's like, wow, you've been on some interesting sides of
• 1:10:24
  TikTok. And like the, the, IT was just
• 1:10:27
  like the, the kind of the openness and the curiosity and
• 1:10:31
  like the, the depending on, again, depending on the group
• 1:10:34
  and depending on the vibe, like you could, you could take it in
• 1:10:36
  different directions. But I found the openness of
• 1:10:39
  people in that context to be really encouraging.
• 1:10:42
  Also because there is like a self selecting group of people
• 1:10:45
  who will, you know, pay the money And like it takes the time
• 1:10:49
  to come out to rural Japan, to come out to Wazuka to do a tour
• 1:10:52
  like this or to like spend the money to do a tour like that in
• 1:10:56
  Bath. But like, those are the people
• 1:10:59
  who want to experience something new and are willing to put
• 1:11:03
  themselves into a different context where they might
• 1:11:05
  encounter something that they have no form of reference for
• 1:11:09
  and and kind of try and understand it on its own terms.
• 1:11:12
  Very almost vulnerable context. Absolutely, yeah.
• 1:11:15
  Vulnerable to your own ignorance and, you know, trying to build
• 1:11:19
  off that context. Web, yeah, amazing what travel
• 1:11:22
  can do in terms of more people should travel to origin I think.
• 1:11:26
  Yeah, yeah. Well, awesome.
• 1:11:28
  This was this was really awesome and thank you so much for your
• 1:11:32
  time. And we really recommend all the
• 1:11:33
  listeners to check out your sub stack and you're writing.
• 1:11:36
  You've really like Nuanced perspectives and I've really
• 1:11:39
  enjoyed reading your work recently.
• 1:11:41
  Thank you so much for this shout out.
• 1:11:42
  Thanks for having me on as well. This has been an awesome time.
• 1:11:45
  It's our pleasure. So happy we finally got to
• 1:11:48
  record something. Hopefully seeing you in Japan,
• 1:11:52
  hopefully soon. My God, please.
• 1:11:53
  Yeah. Thanks in.
• 1:11:54
  Hokonami again. Maybe the same parking lot?
• 1:11:58
  The same parking. Lot magical moments.
• 1:12:00
  Anyways, if you enjoyed listening to this, please
• 1:12:02
  consider sharing with a friend and we'll see you on the next
• 1:12:05
  one. Take care, see you in the
• 1:12:06
  future. You bye.