Connor Murphy: death of an eccentric looksmaxer

 

Connor Murphy, a controversial Youtuber and fitness guru influencer, died recently, under unfavorable circumstances.  Any circumstances are unfavorable, if the end result is someone no longer being around, but he experienced some sort of manic episode, was pursued by the police, swam into a deep pond beside his own home, and drowned.

He had been at different stages of mania and instability in videos for a number of years; this won't focus much on that.  I've recently watched a video that cites a lot of Tony Huge, his friend, discussing Conor's instability and later mental experiences, only some of which are covered here.

The part that is most interesting to me is his philosophy of conventional perspective.  Some of what he was saying actually works.  That can be overstated or over-interpreted; he was questioning a lot of aspects of ordinary self-perception and placement in society, so of course his starting points of doing the questioning worked.  Then the conclusions and final positions not so much.  Often his points didn't extend that far, to any developed conclusion.

Before getting into that I'll cover a bit on the more controversial aspects of his final communications, including that he might have killed Leo of Leo and Longevity.  I mention that because he kept mentioning it; many videos include reference to him possibly killing Leo.  I'm guessing that he was involved.  Even though he was mentally unstable it's not the kind of thing one would develop and then keep returning to related to drumming up online views, to position yourself as a likely murderer as part of an online character persona.

Another part relates to why he was unstable, the causes, and the forms it took.  I won't fully develop that as a history, or go into most aspects of it, but it's a big part of who he had came to be.  He did a lot of different drugs.

This source I'll work with is a long form, relatively unedited video (or it seemingly is a lot of what he communicated in several video interview sessions, but of course there is no way to evaluate what was edited out).  Before getting into the "did he kill Leo" part another topic works well to place where he was.

Injecting gold

In a recent video Tony Huge, separate from the other already mentioned, his friend that also hosted Leo, where Leo had been killed, claimed that Connor had been injecting himself with a lot of colloidal gold, or gold dust, and that his may well have played a role in his mental issues over the past month or so.  Both Tony and Connor claim that he experienced noteworthy, clearly linked benefits from injecting himself with gold (or in this video he only claims to have consumed it, but that part isn't clear), but there's no way to evaluate that.

Let's start with what he claimed himself in this interview, posted by Your Mate Tom, under the title Connor Murphy’s Final In Depth Interview | In His Own Words:

Well, in the past, I made colloidal gold. You have you ever heard of colloidal gold? Colloidal gold? No, no, no.  Right. So, man, there's just this really intriguing study where they give patients like colloidal gold and their IQ increased by like 30%. Or something's precedent like that. It just hasn't really been studied enough, but I want to do an experiment. I'm a biohacker. I used to ingest I used to make my own colloidal gold and then ingest it and I felt some benefits, but I didn't feel as as much benefits as I thought. And trough the process, I do it through electrolysis. 

I can show you the setup because I almost have the the setup ready again. We're getting the last part of the setup here, but uh it's like a copper, okay, a copper wire and then some sort of gold and send an electrical charge and it it makes this red colloidal gold uh in the water. And I was also afraid of like the potential of copper toxicity if the copper was leeching into the water. Turns out you don't even really need the copper in the water. I don't think you can actually leave the copper out the water... 

The idea in the Tony Huge video was that Conor was converting jewelry directly into gold to be injected, or perhaps consumed, so who knows what alloys were present in that gold.  It didn't sound like Conor was having it tested, from that, so it could include lead, or any number of other metals, or contaminants.  He may not have been tracking an intake dosage closely, which is all the more problematic, if you don't know what you are consuming.  

Here is Google's AI input on that:

Eating gold is a long-standing culinary tradition used primarily to garnish high-end desserts, cocktails, and sushi. While it is non-toxic, there are a few important details to know about consuming it:

Purity is Key: You should only ever ingest high-carat gold (23-24k). Less pure forms of gold are mixed with other metals, like copper or nickel, which can be toxic or cause adverse reactions.

Biological Inertness: Because pure gold does not oxidize, corrode, or react with stomach acids, it poses zero health risks in moderation.

Potential Hazards: You should never attempt to eat raw jewelry or loose gold flakes not specifically designated for consumption, as they can contain impurities or cause gastrointestinal issues.

But he was talking about colloidal gold, probably even related to injecting it.  Their take on that:

While colloidal gold is sometimes promoted for alleged wellness, cognitive, and anti-inflammatory benefits, there is limited scientific evidence to support these claims. The safety of these nanomaterials largely depends on the particle size and surface chemistry.

When ingested, colloidal gold is slowly absorbed by the intestines and tends to accumulate in the kidneys and other organs. Research indicates that, depending on the dosage, gold nanoparticles can induce long-term changes in cellular gene expression and morphology. Furthermore, they have not undergone standardized safety evaluations for daily dietary intake by major regulatory authorities...

So who knows.  Let's jump ahead to his involvement with Leo's death, and get back to the main theme, philosophical perspective.

Death of Leo (of Leo and Longevity)

8:258 minutes, 25 seconds  ...that's not fair because he [Leo] was a a much deeper character. [than just covering the penis enlargement topic].  

[interviewer] Did you kill him?

[Connor] Uh potentially. I guess that's what people will will try and decide when the when the movie gets dropped. I mean, yeah, you'll see. I I I don't know.

Maybe I was jealous of Leo. Maybe he had a bigger [ __ ] than me. Like, maybe I wanted to be the the foremost expert in penis enlargement. Maybe I was jealous of his relationship with with Tony.  Maybe I wanted to be Tony's best friend.  Maybe I wanted Leo's room. Maybe I wanted to live in the house. I mean, yeah, you could potentially I have some some motives for doing so, but there's no hard evidence. You'll never find my like DNA on the spot or anything like that...

In a somewhat recent video, that is very interesting, Connor makes up a crazy and extreme looksmaxing character, A Day in the Looksmaxxing Life of Mandibleus Zygomidus.  In that he claims that the only time that he "fatally mogged" someone, or killed them, he nearly had his nose broken.  In another recent video, when asked about Leo, he said that for whatever he did to him, which he can't described, he used a gold club, implying that this was the weapon used to kill him.  In several other videos he or his girlfriend indirectly referenced Connor killing Leo.  

It's all so strange.  Only a very unbalanced individual would kill someone and then keep mentioning it, or for that matter not kill someone and then keep implying it.

Let's move on to a more primary context, looksmaxing, before getting into the interesting perspective insights.

What is Looksmaxxing?

[13:50 minutes, 50 seconds]   Well, it's really simple. I mean, it's just well, it's the name is self-explanatory. It's maxing out your looks. Although, see, it should be called looks optimizing. What does maxing out your looks mean? I mean, that kind of has the connotation like people are trying to have an extreme look, which maybe is the case. Maybe sometimes people overdo it, but you're essentially trying to optimize your looks simply because they recognize that looks provide you an advantage in life. And it's something that people have known throughout all of time. I mean, people have been trying to improve their looks like since the beginning of humanity, right? 

But all of a sudden, yeah, it just I guess people are being explicit about it. And it's funny because it's really pissing people off because of course, like if people aren't trying to optimize their looks, then it makes sense for them to criticize people who are because if other people improve their looks, then they're at a disadvantage by comparison... 

It's an interesting point, that everyone who is critical of looksmaxing is really trying to stop others from optimizing their looks, because it makes them look worse by comparison.  So people could, or should, be critical of others getting plastic surgery, and so on.  

He claims that he has had several cosmetic surgery procedures--which is surely accurate--including a hair transplant, transplantation to his eyebrows, and work around his eyes.  It would seem a real stretch for me to feel threatened by some Youtuber looking more attractive than nature had dictated, but then he probably is describing extreme perspectives, including by others involved with commentary, and not just a conventional take.

This is social media based commentary, right?  I might address more conventional changes like chewing gum to expand jaw muscles, whether I see that as positive, or absurd, or whatever else.

He probably used filler injections to cause that appearance, although it could also just be a video filter effect.  From the way his jaw appears in that capture it's probably a filter, or edit; the bone structure of his frontal jaw doesn't look natural, or possible.

In framing that video, and many of his ideas, as an absurd satire of what others propose it all kind of works.  He claims that there is a homosexually oriented aspect to looksmaxing, that it's not always positioned as mainly relating to increasing attractiveness to the opposite sex, for example.  

But all of that isn't a main concern here, it's just interesting that he took it all in those directions.  It doesn't intuitively work, to critique looksmaxing as generally misguided, in relation to setting unclear or conflicting goals, or being absurd in relation to steps taken, or goals that are pursued, and then to also actually take those steps yourself.  

If the end goal is content promotion, and not the actual effects, that makes more sense, but then doing something as risky and unconventional as consuming homemade colloidal gold, derived from jewelry, or injecting that, again conflicts with that goal.  Critiquing a popular theme for views works, but extending it into your own less safe, practical, and reasonable range doesn't.

Extending this to self-image:  Looksmaxxing or Body Dysmorphia

His own interview content introduces this from one perspective:

And what's the line between looks maxing, right? Improving your your aesthetic and body dysmorphia.  Oh, yeah. Well, that's the thing.  There's not a a fine line. It's not black and white, right? It's it's a spectrum. I think there's I mean, there's a healthy level of discontentment in with life in general, right? If you're just complacent, you're never going to improve. A lot of people think that self-improvement and self-love are mutually exclusive. This is how you get like the fat acceptance movement. They think, "Oh, in order to love yourself, you have to be completely content with precisely who you are." But I think this is like a fundamental misconception of what the self even is.

They think the self is like a noun, but in reality, it's more like a verb. We're an everchanging entity, and we're constantly evolving. We're constantly changing. And so you might as well evolve and change in a positive way and fall in love with the process. And so just because you're improving yourself doesn't mean you don't love yourself. In fact, a lot of people, it's it's ironic because if you're overly attached with who you are and your identity, you're less likely to transform. 

So a lot of these people who won't transform, who won't improve their looks, it's actually because they're more attached to their looks. They think like their look is a fundamental part of themselves. And if they change it, somehow they're becoming a new person that is unfamiliar to them and they don't recognize. And so, no, I think there's a very healthy level of of discontentment, but it's it's not mutually exclusive to loving yourself.  You can do both.

This is actually pretty insightful, and grounded.  It's a shame that all of the parts of what he is saying, and his own internal life experience, weren't all as balanced and positive.

Another point highlights how on a superficial and simplified level what he is claiming works, but it doesn't represent a deep, healthy, or developed worldview:

[interviewer]:  How would you rank in terms of importantness to pick up girls or to attract women? Is it money, uh, confidence, aesthetics? 

[Connor]:  It It's really tough to say because it depends on the girls values as well.

Like some girls value money more, some value status more, some value looks more. It depends on what relationship they're looking for. Generally, a short-term relationship, looks are going to matter more. But a longer term relationship, it's going to be more like money and and status. And it's actually not money. It's actually your ability to generate money. like money is just kind of a proxy for your ability to generate money, right?

You know, like you think it's like your your skills itself is more important than it's a signal for your skills because think about it, man. You could be in a scenario where all of a sudden your money disappears like someone like robs you or like there's like the apocalypse, you're stranded on a deserted island or something happens and you lose your wealth. Like a girl wants to feel safe and she wants to think that even if you lose your wealth, you have the ability to generate wealth. So way less people are going to be some people still will but way fewer women are going to be attracted to some rich kid who just inherited a fortune rather than someone who is like a self-made millionaire.

Lots of those online influencer / guru types tend to present information like this, in a superficial and immature way.  Of course charisma and confidence are important in a relationship, and are attractive.  But this essentially reduces all women down to pursuing either physical attractiveness or financial gain.  He would mention there's more to it in other comments, but it comes across that his take really is that those two factors dominate what women seek, and how relationships work out.  

In all of this interview he never really touches on the theme of an actual romantic relationship, of a short or long term duration, and never uses the term "girlfriend."

Am I wrong to critique that (both parts, that he oversimplifies interactions between people who are dating, and that he leaves out that people are seeking relationships at all)?  Per my experience in more sustained relationships men and women seek out commonality of experience and perspective in temporary or more permanent relationship partners.  Social level ends up mattering, and lots of personal interests, and life direction.  To some extent maybe relationship partners do tend to match on an attractiveness range, or maybe status and wealth trade in to replace that, on the guy's side, but to simplify relationships down to those two factors is a bit absurd.

In knowing of--to a very limited extent--Conor's personal history this makes sense.  He himself claims to have slept with a lot of women outside of any relationship connection related to his physical appearance, in particular his developed muscular fitness.  Maybe he has experienced one or more serious relationships, or maybe he hasn't.  Tony Huge mentioned Connor experiencing a problematic breakup in one video; maybe a main experience with that theme was negative.

Him living in Thailand and dating a Thai seem to support this theme, that he hasn't experienced mature relationships in the past, and isn't really even pursuing that.  There's no mention of his girlfriend, at the time of his death, in that interview.  It's my guess that she was the same woman he was accused of assaulting some time ago, in other online video content and news, but I'm not following his story close enough to be confident in that.

I live in Thailand just now, and over most of the last 19 years, but of course I'm not going to characterize typical relationships between Thai women and foreigners.  People often do online, but it becomes nonsensical, painting such broad themes with the same brush in that way.  I've interacted with essentially no women who were or had been working as prostitutes; that kind of thing ends up getting overstated, by a lot.  I don't go to go-go bars, and people living ordinary lives in Thailand have nothing to do with all of that, in general.

Conclusions

There's a lot more covered in that video interview, and again the main interesting aspect to me is how parts of it are grounded, or at times even insightful.  For example, Conor talks about the balance between being self-confident, which is positive and useful, and lacking any self-doubt, which is potentially a problematic sign of mania, or at least of an unbalanced self-image.  He says that self-doubt can help you examine your own actions and perspective, that it's useful, taken in the right ways, and in the right amounts.

Then he keeps saying things that make sense, that are worth reflecting on, and it couples with or digresses into nonsense, over and over.  He had some issues.  Here's another example from that interview:

Chapter 19: False compassion vs REAL empathy

[45:1345 minutes, 13 seconds] You have compassion for other people's suffering, right? You understand and you relate to and you want to mitigate other people's suffering and it's not selective. So when people have false compassion, it's a signal that they're not actually compassionate.

They're just doing it to score uh social points, right? They're trying to place themselves on some sort of moral pedestal. They're just virtue signaling, right? So anytime you see someone compassionate towards one group but hate on another group, they're not authentically compassionate. They're just doing it to score moral social points.

[interviewer]:  Yeah. Yeah. Like whatever whatever's trending in the mainstream right now.

Exactly. And that's just what Kanye was trying to show. It's like, dude, yeah. What the [ __ ] I love everyone. I love Hitler, right? Like I But no, see, you won't say that. You won't say you love everyone because you have false compassion. Like dude, I mean, man, I have Hitler probably suffered a [ __ ] lie. Who who how do you become someone so violent and so evil? Like you have to have a lot of [ __ ] emotional baggage and like psychological turmoil. Like no, I have compassion for him. Like we should have help. Someone should have helped him before he came so evil, right? 

I mean there are so many things in reality that are outside of our control. We were just born into reality this blank slate and then programmed by our environment. a lot of things. I mean, you can't really say that anything is entirely someone's fault because there are so many different aspects of the universe that are impacting them, right? 

Compassion for Hitler; nothing is anyone's fault; this definitely drifted off a bit.  But the early part seems to work, that someone expressing support and concern for a limited group is positive, but when that couples with hate for another group something negative is being included there, some sort of inconsistency.

I'm not sure how much we can directly learn from what Conor had been expressing.  It's all interesting to consider, if also experiencing some raving nonsense isn't a problem.  He probably would have did well to question a lot of things, a lot of conventional perspective, without so much drug use, and without injecting himself with or consuming a lot of gold and other mixed metals.  

Which makes it a strange cautionary tale.  Some people are doing massive amounts of drugs, to help them gain self-awareness, as discussed in this Reddit "Psychonaut" group, but in general that's a fairly extreme approach, that doesn't map back to what most ordinary people experience.

An entire tangent I've not mentioned here is about Connor supposedly experiencing super-powers (again mentioned in this video about Tony Huge:  Connor Murphy's Friend Exposes Experiment That Killed Him).  That claims that the gold experiments essentially caused his mental problems (the worsening of those), in effect killing him.  Maybe.  Tony talks about potential psychic "superpowers" in there but doesn't get around to mentioning any examples that make any sense, about heightened awareness and such.  

In an odd interview section with Connor, and Tony, he is describing how AI became omniscient, and how a benign cabal of wealthy people controlling everything planned to use Connor to transmit total self-awareness to everyone, turning this reality into a heaven realm, which has been partly enacted related to cellular alterations caused by vaccines.  It's all pretty crazy.  One wild part is that Tony was on board with a lot of that, but couldn't buy into the wealthy group of people who control everything being benign, and looking out for everyone's general interests.  But a lot of the rest could work?

I'm not sure that a lot of this tale of madness is up to the pragmatic level of "cautionary tale."  But to me it's still interesting.

Internet fame and tea awareness development

 

I've been considering writing about what it means to have been the subject of an interview related to being a tea blogger, or something along that line.  It doesn't mean anything in particular, of course, just a touch of exposure, probably partly as thanks for helping a tea vendor and friend with minor editing and online mentions (Sergey Shevelev, the founder of Moychay).

the unconventional grooming look has progressed well since then

I keep discussing a deeper and related theme, about people promoting tea awareness, across different channels and in different forms.  As it has always stood more discussion and group promotion occurs on an even and open basis among many participants, not as led by any one expert, or "cult of personality" center.  There are exceptions.  As much as many people question Don Mei and Mei Leaf's business orientation and ethics to be sure he has done as much as anyone in promoting tea awareness, through Youtube basics theme content creation.  The ethics issues were mainly about fair pricing and getting communicated details right, both kind of grey areas, with a take on the rest here.  The Global Tea Hut mixing of tea and religion themes ends up being criticized, which I addressed here, but as I see it to some extent it's really more about people with both interests sharing and developing those forms together than as a mainstream influence of tea culture.  

Others aspire to fulfill a similar role.  Most often that seems to stem directly from a strong personal interest in advancing tea awareness and culture, to help others, and of course also to business interest.  Sergey of Moychay, that interviewer related to the video I've mentioned, and So Han Fan of a Texas based tea business are good examples of this.  Both create online content to help introduce people to tea basics, and from there extend to exploring interesting aspects of tea culture and background.  It comes up in other places; this Polish vendor seems to have driven their business and tea awareness through Youtube promotion, seemingly with Rafał Przybylok filling the role of a high profile tea promoter.

another interesting tea persona

If we have an isolated few individuals stepping forward to serve as promising tea evangelists, and multiple platforms and channels of tea discussion groups, why is it that tea awareness spreads so slowly, that none of this ever worked as a stronger catalyst?  One can only guess, or identify likely partial causes.  One guess is that it's starting from so far from coffee preference scope that interest level doubling a few times isn't noticeable.  

I'm reminded of an interesting video example about exponential growth curves, which is worth watching, from back at the beginning of the spread of covid.  It explains why exposure doubling in a patterned way is especially problematic, just not at first.  The example was about what happens if we repeatedly double the amount of water in the Grand Canyon, on a set interval (I think starting from a low level, in the example, from a liter of water or something such, to make the point more dramatically).  Of course flooding would be severe right away, if you start from doubling a current river level, but if you start with periodically doubling a liter of water instead the doubling doesn't seem noticeable at all for awhile.  Then the second half of the canyon fills in the last time-interval unit, whatever that had been set to.  

So what feels like tea building to a critical mass of interest taking awhile may just be how a slow natural progression of increase would normally feel, in earlier stages.  On the opposite side we kind of get used to the "going viral" theme relating to everyone jumping on an interest, trend, or idea in short order.  But that pattern is something else, related to a fashion trend or app interest spreading faster, with tea preference uptake a different kind of thing.  It spreads through people having experiences, one person connecting through contact with another, not like memes do, where a cute image of a dog or The Rock making a funny face can be copied thousands of times in a week, or a limitless number.

To back up a bit, I've been considering lots of subjects in relation to Youtube content promotion, and it's interesting how the pattern of Youtuber popularity tends to happen.  The form of interest progression might connect.  It takes a content producer a long time to struggle to reach 10,000 followers, and from there the move to 100k can be much faster.  A local Thai lifestyle blogger commented a little on this, making a concerted effort to reach 10k viewers over the last half a year, pushing on to exchange following with other Youtubers doing a series of interviews, and they moved on from 10k to 16k followers within a couple of months.

It reminds me of the Matthew principle:

For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.

— Matthew 25:29, RSV.

As I see it this is at the root of the problem people have with the "white privilege," that the real starting points for personal financial success in relation to having a favorable childhood, education, business starting point, and connections really relate to a main cause of someone already being successful prior to their actual business success.  It gets interpreted as the effect from not struggling with minority status, poverty, personal debt, a lack of early childhood support, and so on, but really the keys to success were built up across the first 20 years of everyone's lives, versus there being few limitations blocking them.  Or else they weren't.  Cases where Elon Musk or Donald Trump's parents granted them millions of dollars in start-up funding are something else, but the same pattern applies, that it would take over a lifetime for a normal person to collect together a few million dollars in seed capital.

Only partly related, and tying to another dimension, someone asked in a Quora question what made children stand out as popular, and many answered that wealth or attractiveness would cause that.  That's true, but it's also expectations, at least as I see things and answered that.  By the age of 5 this social role development is largely complete, and by 8 it's all the more solidified, based on what I've experienced from raising two children to or past that age.  I suppose it makes a difference if it really is physical attractiveness, wealth, or expectations related to parents implicitly emphasizing that their children will be social leaders.  It could be seen as their birthright, but only on an implied level; that's what I was getting at.

Really I'm still talking about two different subjects, wealth and class status as an input, and a set of social expectations that has a profound effect on young children.  So does this even connect back to tea themes, to awareness spreading, or to the influence of social leaders in driving that change?  Probably, but I would guess that the patterns aren't simple enough to be easy to follow.  To consider a natural evolution from early start-up to tea industry leader we need to consider an example case.

Yunnan Sourcing as an example

I've used this as an example of a successful tea business in a relatively recent post, and it will work again to support this related point.  I'll cite from external material cited in that post, about Scott Wilson's personal background and perspective, that business founder:

...I came to Yunnan in 1998 and just fell in love with the place, especially the tea and the food. In 2004, I got fed up with being in the states and decided to pursue my dream of living in China and doing something with tea... 

We have a tea room in the Kunming Wholesale tea market. It is a place solely to drink tea. We have a library of more than 600 pu-erhs that are available to try! Our eBay store is our only online presence at the moment. Most business is conducted outside of eBay. In fact, individual customers with small orders can contact me directly and get at least 10% (or more) off the retail price. We will open yunnansourcing.com and yunnansourcing.us before the end of 2009. The latter site will feature products that will ship from the USA instead of China...

So that content is from prior to the end of 2009, or at least 13 years ago.  I could develop my own interpretation of how Scott's personality and later business decisions inform this kind of narrative, but it's more interesting to me which parts of a business story followed, and which didn't develop.  He did use social media content posts to support those sales, but not to the same extent Don Mei and Sergey Shevelev did.  A Facebook vendor support and discussion group has expanded discussion of his business offerings, but that was started by an independent fan, per my understanding.  How could he and his business become uniquely successful then?

It was the right theme at the right time.  Sales site catalog and vending outlets are common now, for tea and any number of other goods, but they certainly weren't in 2009.  Beyond timing the broad product selection, value, and clear descriptions could only come from someone with that degree of product exposure, from years of working within a Chinese sourcing and vending system (5 years, it looks like in that source).

So it wasn't "cult of personality" driven (although Scott is interesting and nice).  Tea blogs and tea discussion circles were well-developed by 2009, but as I see it that was the beginning of a "golden age" for groups, the time of Tea Chat and Steepster, with Facebook groups soon to follow.  I joined my first FB tea group in 2013, and became a moderator for an International themed version 6 years ago, with that three years mapping out a lot of the ramp-up time of FB tea group.  Many thousands of people have mentioned Yunnan Sourcing as a good place to buy tea over this last decade, based on having positive experiences themselves; the success came from that.

Elyse of Tealet using a meetup channel form to connect and share information

All that makes it sound like women aren't tea subject social media influencers, or that one person sharing their own knowledge and perspective is a conventional form, versus podcasts, discussion groups, meetups, and so on.  Really the opposite of both is more true, that tea expertise isn't a gender-specific theme, and that alternate and broadly varied forms of information sharing are now the norm.  Sergey (again of Moychay) interviewing me is a standard theme in his channel, about showing different locations or events, or meeting with someone else offering their own input.

Connecting it further

It seems like there are next steps to follow that will drive tea popularity, and the industry, or else sales forms and uptake will continue as they have.  Not necessarily mostly from individual inputs, but that always could be a factor, some kind of visionary, high profile business developer doing more, or a popular celebrity adding exposure.

It's strange how the larger corporate inputs have stifled the growth of popularity of tea, instead of supporting it.  I'm not sure that's only a coincidence.  Starbucks bought Teavana, and let it thrive to a good sized mall chain, but the decline of mall popularity in the US seemed tied to shutting the entire business down.  Unilever bought T2, a small outlet chain poised to move an entire level beyond the scale of "mom and pop" cafe or dry tea outlet business, and shifted product focus to higher return blends, swapping out higher quality teas sold previously.  Covid hit that business hard, another casualty of negative external influence.  I don't think both large corporations killed the businesses on purpose, but shifting to a high-return, lower quality product theme probably didn't help either.

Oprah promoting tea might've been a main launching point, but instead she tried to sell her own herbal and tea blended chai product, which wasn't really universally well-received.  See a pattern here?  Oprah, Teavana, and T2 weren't promoting prior accepted tea versions, or the Chinese tea cultural experience, or pushing on to highlight more interesting and higher quality offerings, they were promoting specific lower quality products that they could potentially make a higher return on than those other types of products.  And that failed more than it succeeded in all three cases.

Expansion through small vendor sales has been the norm in the tea industry, with real significant growth limited to a broader wholesale layer ramping up.  This gives rise to the ability for new tea forms to appear and gain exposure faster, and also limits the degree of that exposure.  Hundreds of small businesses either are or are not involved in that successful marketing promotion, each with very limited influence, taken alone.  

It almost seems like an economy of scale limitation issue is holding tea in place in this current form.  Past a certain threshold tea might experience what wine did way back when (in the late 80s?), when a critical mass of interest might enable media channel development, and support a broader producer and distributor network.  I was interested in wine in the 90s, and there was a great local shop that sold all sorts of interesting versions in my small town (a ski town with a few thousand residents), but with no comparable tea shop there, I think even now.  There was an "alternative perspective" oriented health foods shop, so I did venture into tisanes a little, but not plain tea, which just wasn't around, beyond new tea bag offerings (eg. Tazo).

When I see tea related Youtube channels or groups grow to include much higher follower count it makes me wonder if we aren't seeing that slow progressive growth play out, now in that later form, onto doubling from significant numbers then very large ones.  I've just noticed that the Reddit r/tea group membership is unusually large, at 645,000 members, which one can assess better from considering my 2018 writing on that topic:

The main problem with online tea interest groups--beyond activity tending to drop off at some point--seems to be people being on the same page, sharing perspective.  Facebook groups work well for sorting that naturally; if you talk about scope beyond group theme interest you probably won't hear much back, or feedback could be negative.

That's why it's odd that the Reddit subforum works; it isn't sorted, beyond an emphasis on most people being newer to tea.  That's also probably why it has 120k+ members and almost none of them seem to be regulars, beyond the moderators.  There are some but they are exceptions.  Vendors had seemed to be more active in the past but a few scandals about product promotion inconsistencies may have threw off the friendly neighborhood self-promotion vibe...

So r/tea increased five-fold in under 4 years; not bad.  "My" FB tea group, really owned by a friend who runs a Chinese vending outlet and training organization, has levelled off at 25,000 members, still adding new ones, but not at the rate that brought it to that level.  I think the "new to tea" theme is more promising for broad membership.  For promoting advanced tea interest what the Gong Fu Cha group evolved to become works better, than for a general producer and vendor oriented "international" theme, even though both groups are about the same size now in terms of membership count.

One might look closer at group sub-themes and try to sort out the role they are playing through that lens, but that might miss parts of the larger picture.  For any number of reasons a half a million new Reddit followers joined that tea sub in four years, a group that isn't doing much beyond letting people express their own interest, post by post.  The average post has been and will continue to be images of boxes of tea bags sitting in a kitchen cabinet, the kinds I said were all that existed in the early 1990s.  But then maybe it's not an anomaly that finally in the last year that range has expanded, with "better tea quality" related posts only now turning up on a daily basis.

I think it's easy to misplace how Don Mei and Sergey Shevelev building up to over 100,000 Youtube followers changes things.  I watch Youtube content about some strange and random subjects, without much meaning, perspective, or connection to my life habits, but for sure those videos are helping people move on to buying and brewing a broader range of tea.  The channels alone must generate more video views ad revenue than most home tea businesses (unless ads are turned off?), which is partly beside the point, but also worth considering.

Let's back up to a level of assumptions I've not yet addressed here:  why would I want more people to drink tea?  If my own reader numbers double that changes nothing; there is no ad revenue from this blog, and no financial gain through another business function.  Topic bloggers can tend to tie their personal self-image to a subject theme; I think that's a lot of it.  Usually that plays out in a 3 to 4 year blog lifecycle, before it either leads to financial return or not, but in rare cases people might stick with it, for no normal reason.  Maybe there could be a perception that later gain could follow, that a different kind of meaning could evolve.

I like to think that I'm really still just sharing experience, except that I've moved on from basic exploration, what different kinds of oolongs are, to digging deeper into local production issues, or other background, like social media influence.

Given the range of broad speculation here I should end this with my guesses about the future of tea.  Do I think tea interest is "really about to take off," or that gradual and increasing rate uptake will have the tea sales, vending forms, common offerings, and interest groups looking about the same in another decade?  I think there will be a tipping point experience, I just don't know when, or what extra factors will seem to fold in.  Conventional media mirrors common perception in not caring about tea; maybe both will change together.  NPR ran some articles at one point, or moderate sized food interest pages also sometimes do, or a more mainstream newspaper might mention "duck shit" oolong as a novelty; that has been most of it.  

It might take a decade for tea to get where coffee was in the early 90s, for seeing an interest level spike, or maybe only half that long.  It's easy to forget that there were an awful lot of small but developed theme specialty coffee shops around before Starbucks arrived at a format that consolidated the interest trend, and put a lot of those out of business.  The changes in progress are complex in form, and take time.