The Weird History of Forks and More
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Hello, my friends, Takuya here, and welcome back to the History of Everything podcast. Hello, my friends. If you hear anything that is going on here in the background, I apologize. There are several things. Any little coughs that you hear are actually, this time, not coming from me. They're coming from my six-year-old daughter, who is currently sick upstairs. And then on top of that, my wife, who is in the back. The reason that she is not actually here for this episode is that she herself has a persistent cough that has not gone away. And if

and it is something that unfortunately we cannot do here for recording so even though i wrote this entire thing specifically in order to be able to talk about the different eating utensils and whatnot with her i mean it's basically going to be me telling you all the story of something that i find absolutely fascinating which i know from the very beginning it's going to sound like an odd way to begin an episode but essentially there are many basic everyday objects that are super important

But unfortunately, the reality is that the majority of people don't really care about the origin of them. Like I say, do not care. But the most common answer, I guess you could say, is that people simply do not think of where a lot of things come from as something, you know, you stick in your mouth maybe hundreds of times over the course of a month or two.

Whatever. Eating utensils are one of those things. You don't really consider why they are there. I mean, not why they are there, but how they came to be. Like oxygen, it's not really something that you notice until it's actually missing.

Though an awkward moment at dinner is definitely something that is probably better than not being able to breathe when you know you're missing your fork. Either way, I thought about this when I was looking at different patron suggestions of different topics that we could cover when I saw a comment by one of my patrons, and I realized this is not a patron-exclusive episode, but I am working on a series of those, from Chris Hopps Crammons that specifically asked about eating utensils.

And I realized that in comparison to many different topics covered here on, you know, disaster and war and OK, a lot of miserable things in general. Like you look at the list of everything I've covered in the last year or so. And generally speaking, we've covered a lot of rather depressing topics.

This, however, was a pretty unique thing that I really did not know the answer to. Like, yes, I knew the story of how people used to look down on folks in Europe as an affront to God, which no, I'm not kidding about, but not necessarily the details of how or why things changed over time.

So yeah, forks, spoons, chopsticks. Where did they come from? Who invented them? What weird rules or regulations existed that created 50 different variants for them to use in high society like you see in a lot of different period dramas? Well, did that end my friends? That brings us to today's episode and our search for such answers. What we're going to be doing is talking about the time from prehistory and from what we've been able to find during the Stone Age. Eating utensils would consist of different ingredients.

Simple, sharp stones. Things that were meant to cut meat and fruit and other stuff like that. Things that were meant to strip fibers off of plants. There were simple designs of spoons that were made from hollowed out pieces of wood or seashells that were then connected eventually to wooden sticks and you'd use that to scoop and scrape against things. Animal horns and ladders and other things were also used as a means by which you could contain and then consume liquids.

In fact, what's interesting about this is that the ancient word that we have for spoon suggests which material were actually used in different areas. What is so interesting is that the Greek and Latin words are derived from the copia, meaning a spiral shell. Well, if you look at the Anglo-Saxon word spoon, like a spoon, that means a chip of wood. And if you think about like an older woman utilizing a massive wooden spoon, there you go.

If you go a bit past the points of the very ancient Stone Age in Neolithic times, or sometimes the New Stone Era, this brought about the rise of technology that improved the tools that were needed for production, for preparation, and more, for eating food.

You had pottery, which enabled food to be stored and prepared more easily. And from that, you had stylized pieces of stone that would be formed into different shapes. You have the simple knives that we know of here today, which would have kind of handholds that would either be covered in wood or animal skin as an actual knife and not just a sharp rock.

And so it was then that for thousands of years, humans would appear to have some tools, though they would be limited to a rough spoon, knives, and their fingers. Now, that technology would certainly refine and get better in Europe with developments in metallurgy. But what is so interesting and what we have to start with is in places like China, where you would see the rise of something different, chopsticks.

So now, today, as I'm sure many people are aware, chopsticks are used by billions of people around the world, and they really do have an ancient past. These things are old, and I didn't realize just how incredibly old they were. As an example of this, the ruins of Yin in Henan province in modern-day China. This provides not only the earliest examples of Chinese writing, but also the first chopsticks, or at least the first ones that we've been able to find, because these are bronze sets found in tombs on the site.

Now, of course, metal ones in tombs were some of the only ones to really survive due to natural degradation over time. As I'm sure you could probably guess, one would expect that wood or bamboo or other stuff, which were naturally the early forms of many chopsticks, would very quickly degrade when buried with time. That's going to happen. Those are still the most common materials today.

But in time, you would have bone, ivory, bronze, silver, gold, brass, agate, jade, coral, pretty much any other kind of exotic material that you could think of that would show that you are wealthy or powerful. You would want to get that for your specific pair of chopsticks. Now, here's the other interesting thing.

Ancient sets of chopsticks were not just, you know, two sticks. They were also found typically in conjunction with a knife and a pouch. And chopsticks were frequently bound together at the handle by the end of a chain. It was something that you specifically wanted to keep on you.

What is so interesting about that, though, is that these initial chopsticks are not like what we think of here today. You know, you go ahead and get your Chinese food or whatever from the local Panda Express if you're here in the United States or whatever other place you want. And from there, you would use those chopsticks to eat your food. However, that's not really how chopsticks appeared to have been used in the beginning.

In the beginning, chopsticks appeared to have been more of a tool, like what you would have for preparation of food. Sticks that were meant to reach into boiling pots of either water or oil in order to stir around the food or pick it up while it is that you were cooking. In the same way that people would use forks in the early days, not for cooking or not for like eating food, but specifically for cooking.

stabbing something to maneuver from one plate to the next or from one pot to the next or to get a hold of something, not to actually bring to your mouth. It wasn't really until around 400 AD that people began to commonly eat with chopsticks as utensils like what we do here today. Why though?

Well, it appears that the first instance of chopsticks as eating tools came around during the Han Dynasty, which was a golden age for Chinese culture and social custom developments. When China was experiencing a population boom during this time, that is something that appears to have drained resources across the entire continent, which means a lot of people needing a lot more food and cooking fuel in order to prepare said food. So, cost-cutting measures were sought.

That means that one of the things that was done is that smaller portions were eaten. That was a harsh necessity and a reality of the day. And these tinier servings of food would be ideal for precise, deliberate grasps of the chopstick. Especially since if you're using knives, that wasn't really useful here. You can't really stab the meat very easily when it's a small little piece or even if it's not meat, if it's something else, little bite-sized servings already don't need that.

And so a great factor of this, as I'm sure people who cook are aware of, is that food cooks faster when you cut it up into smaller pieces. Hence the whole fuel saving deal that is part of this argument. Of course, when I say that, it is not the only answer. Of course, others argue that chopsticks were used to avoid embarrassing stains on either your hands or the long robes that people typically wore as they ate.

Another story is that chopsticks were chosen because they were less likely to damage the delicate pottery that oftentimes the wealthy elite of Chinese society would utilize. Whatever the reason, chopsticks became all the rage and commonplace. As food became bite-sized, knives were more or less obsolete. Their decline, as well as the chopsticks' ascent, would also at the same time come courtesy of Confucius, the ancient Chinese philosopher.

What is so interesting about this is that as a vegetarian, he believed that sharp utensils at the dinner table would remind eaters of the slaughterhouse. That knives, sharp points, and edges evoked violence and warfare. It was unrefined. It would kill happiness. It would destroy the mood that should reign during meals. In fact, Confucius is quoted as saying, Ahem.

The honorable and upright man keeps well away from both the slaughterhouse and kitchen, and he allows no knives on the table. End quote. Really, by around 500 AD, chopsticks were not only widely used in China, but it also become a staple in households across Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. And really, if you were anyone that was going to be in polite company,

Naturally, you were going to use chopsticks. After all, you didn't want to perhaps have the impression of threatening the person that you were eating at their property with. Oh, yes. And funny detail, by the way, during the dynasty, notable people would often use silver chopsticks to eat. Like if you were wealthy and you think, OK, you're going to want gold, right? Well, sure. But the best chopsticks that you typically wanted to eat with were silver because

Because they had this idea, this misconception that silver chopsticks would immediately turn black if they touched poison. Yeah, religious and health beliefs about metals had seriously unfortunate consequences for some powerful Chinese individuals. As we've actually already mentioned before in previous stories that I've told, like in the case of mercury.

Sadly, this poison detection power, that was not the case. Though, interestingly enough, silver can actually change color if it comes into contact with foods that release hydrogen sulfide. This being things like garlic, onions, rotting eggs, this sort of thing. And there are several more myths or old wives tales that surround chopsticks like

Oh, if you hold them too close to the tip, you have to wait a long time before finding a marriage partner. Or if you use an uneven pair, this will give you bad luck. It will cause you to miss appointments, to get hurt, to do all sorts of things. It's just in general bad luck. Either way, the design and function of chopsticks...

has barely altered from their first appearances to the versions that we see now here today. Instead, you will see like so many different variants of chopsticks, but this is typically dependent upon the cultures that had adopted them. You see, as chopsticks spread in popularity throughout Asia, different cultures would start to adopt the tool to fit their own kind of style.

In China, the sticks would commonly be a little bit longer than what you'd see elsewhere, but also thicker. They would come with blunt, rounded edges. Whereas in Japan, the sticks would be a bit shorter, but they would be tapered to a point. They have a little pointy end on the bit. Korean chopsticks would be kind of in between, but instead of some of the more common ones of bamboo or wood, you would instead have metal ones that they would utilize.

Of course, more variants were going to exist in places like Vietnam, Thailand, and others. But honestly, if I went on about all that, we would just be turning this into a food blog episode. Like the kind of thing that you'd see at the beginning of when you're trying to find a recipe and instead there's just one person rambling on for page upon page upon page of just backstory. I know my reputation, but that's not what it is that we are doing. That is too deep of a dive to get into.

So for this, we need to go back west and in time when talking about spoons and metal and others. So the Bronze Age is something that brought great advancements in production of weapons and objects made of different types of metal. Specifically, you have copper and tin and from those two, bronze.

Eating utensils would benefit from this, and knives and spoons would receive a lot of upgrades from, you know, the basic shells or wood or other things that they would have to more durable materials.

Rarity of metals, though, in that early age is something that prevented the use of metal spoons commonly. This was something that was typically only available to the richest people of society. Like, you would have different varying royal courts of kings that would actually utilize metal utensils, whereas others could not necessarily. But as the age of iron and steel came into the Western world, knives became more commonplace among, well, men.

Every class of people, whether you were a high medieval noble to a poor worker or a farmer, even though the technology for creating usable cutlery was available, eating knives in the middle ages of Europe really were not like what we see today. Instead, these knives were knives. They were daggers. These had a fighting edge. And this is fascinating because when you are hosting a party and people are drinking and

You typically don't necessarily want every person to have a weapon, but because hosts of banquets and whatnot back in the day were not expected or obliged to provide their guests with any kind of eating utensil, guests would instead carry their own knives. They were used for both eating and fighting and pretty much anything else. Oh, you need this rope cut? Oh, well, you have a knife.

Oh, you need to have a little figurine for the game that you're about to play carved out because you lost one. Oh, don't worry. Here's a random piece of wood. And guess what? You have your knife. Your knife was applicable in almost all situations from food to fun to fighting. And it easily became the most common thing that a person could have.

So that you could just have an idea of what it is that I'm talking about. Think of the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic version of this called the Sax knife, which was oftentimes over a foot long, which let me clarify here that made this less of a knife and more of a sidearm. It's like the equivalent of for anyone who's seen Crocodile Dundee. And there's the bugging scene and the robber pulls out a knife and Dundee says,

Well, that's not a knife. This is a knife before pulling out his big bowie. Imagine something that is like two to three times that length, which all of this is from what I'm describing. As you can imagine, in a time of increased violence, each and every single person having a very sharp knife on hand while drinking alcohol all hours of the day. Well, that can lead to a pretty messy, bad situation. But wait, you may wonder. We have steak knives now that are certainly sharp,

Cutlery knives, though, they're not like they're not at all. Have you ever tried to just test your thumb on the edge of one of those? They are round and they are rather dull. Why? The whole reason that a lot of this stuff switches over is that in European courts, things begin to change. And from what we can tell, you can probably thank the French for this innovation.

Some attribute the innovation of the rounded blade to Louis XIII's minister, Cardinal Richelieu, who lived from 1585 to 1642. He was a very refined man and specifically wanted to stop what he saw as barbaric behavior at the dinner table.

Like this man, who frequently had many different aristocratic guests, was horribly offended when they would do things like take their knives, like their long sidearm dagger knives, and would clean their teeth with the point. That is something that he was absolutely disgusted with, as well as, you know, when they would get drunk and start fighting and stabbing each other, saying, and I quote, too many men who were pillars of royal power have been killed in noble quarrels.

And so concerned about the lives of notables and aristocrats and others and general offense in his not court, but like at his gatherings, the cardinal would prohibit duels, which he described as night fighting contests. And these conflicts sometimes happened during banquets, which is why the arrival of round bladed knives is attributed to him.

The cardinal would also impose upon the king's cutlers the manufacture of knives with rounded blades. Now, of course, when talking about this, history doesn't really know exactly when this happened or truly if it did. Again, when I say this, a lot of these things are beliefs and up in the air. Some people think that it's the edict of May 13th, 1610, while others think that, oh, this doesn't happen until May 13th, 1637. It varies.

1610, ironically enough, when I point this out, this is also the year of King Henry IV's regicide assassination by Reveillac on May 14th, where he was killed by being stabbed, which was certainly not done with a round-bladed knife, I can tell you that much. This, as you can imagine, is something that would be very, it would have a very negative connotation. People would not want there to be knives that could stab their monarch present, unless you're the person that wanted to do the stabbing.

Kings, of course, naturally did not want this. So later in 1669, King Louis XIV of France would ban all pointed knives in his Flemish provinces, insisting on blunt tips in the hopes that this is something that would reduce knife crime.

And so as time went on, other courts would begin to gradually emulate the French court, which for anyone who has seen anything when it comes to history, yeah, that was a typically common thing. People would emulate the French court in fashion, in the attitude, in pretty much anything because the French court was typically seen as like the peak of culture. So when this came to food, yeah, that was a fairly common thing. But now, of course, this brings us to the final common tool that we haven't really mentioned yet, the fork.

And when I say that, this might come as a surprise, but the oldest historical records for people using forks actually does not come from Europe or the area around it. In fact, it comes from China. Archaeologists have found the first forks that at least we have record of. They were made from bones at excavation sites in Gansu, which is a north central province of China. These two pronged forks were used during the Bronze Age from around 2400 to 1900 BC and for several hundred years after.

However, of course, that being said, we can't be certain whether the instruments were used for cooking or serving food or eating the food, since really there's barely any documentation, if any, about them in the first place. We also know that forks were used in Rome and Greece and Egypt and other ancient areas where it wasn't necessarily used at the table, like for eating food, but as cooking tools, things for carving or lifting meat.

Like if you had a piece that you needed to stab to lift onto another plate so that you do that to give to someone else or something like I just need something to be able to hold down this piece of meat while it is that I am cutting it with my trusty knife, which was actually the more common tool. So then it brings up the very interesting question of who invented the fork as cutlery to be used at the dining table. Well, we don't know.

I'm sorry, it sounds so dumb, but unfortunately, that is the reality of a lot of these beautiful things in history. We don't know. We can't be sure. There are manuscripts that talk about things where forks were utilized, like interesting stories. Like one such manuscript from 1004 A.D. tells the story of Maria Agrippolina, who was a Greek niece of the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, who used a golden instrument with two prongs to eat her meals.

And during this time, the norm was to cut food using a knife and then eat it with your fingers. So the fact is Greek princess was using a fork or something like it for the more conservative members of society, since I believe it was that she was marrying into the Doge's family, like the leaders of Venice. This was seen as horribly arrogant and vain. It was looked down upon by the church.

In fact, it's even speculated that the fork's resemblance to the devil's pitchfork is something that caused God-fearing people to view it as evil. Like it was something that was sinful.

It's not to say that forks didn't exist, as I said. The first appearance of dining forks in cookbooks would be around the 13th century. A cookbook presented by Robert of Anjou, king of Naples, would instruct diners to pick up slippery lasagna sheets using a pronged instrument. By the 15th century, dining forks were frequently mentioned in Italian cookbooks, indicating that, okay, these things are actually kind of common now.

And Italian forks, as they became known, these were popular in a number of courts, or at least they became as simple tools, especially when Catherine de' Medici, the Italian wife of Henry II, brought a dozen of them, these intricate silver forks with her when she got married and became a tool that was utilized at court. Subsequently, the fork spread to the rest of Europe and from there to countries that were colonized by Europe.

Which that is a fascinating thing right there, because every single thing that we've talked about here is in Europe. But at the time that we're talking about this in the 15th and subsequently the 16th and 17th century, you have to think that this is something that is spreading in court. But the colonies that are being created, those are being, well, lived in by everyday average people. Typically, in many cases, like for the American colonies from the English colonies,

They were not the well-to-do of society that would have many tools for cutlery, and so early Americans were close to almost medieval in their dining habits. Even though people were sharing communal meals with their families and friends from the beginning of civilization, early meals in colonial America were more of a matter of survival and getting just a simple food that could feed and fill you.

Most foods in the colony-building 17th century consisted of one-pot dishes. You're talking like porridges, puddings, meals that were suited for cooking over an open fire, stews, that sort of thing.

Tableware and dining utensils were not very common. I mean, after all, you couldn't really manufacture a lot of that stuff in the new world. So meals were eaten with shared utensils, bowls, wooden cups, oftentimes called noggins, and were passed from mouth to mouth, like literally mouth to mouth for each person.

Although using communal tableware was something that was necessary, you know, it was also part of the custom is the Puritan ethic really was something that espoused frugality and simplicity. You didn't need all of these excess things. If you've ever seen something with a Netflix Maria Kondo and like, oh, does this bring happiness? Does this bring joy?

That's kind of the way it was with the Puritans. You don't need a fork for each person, or I should say a spoon for each person. That is excessive. Instead, we can all just have one bowl and kind of share it around with each other as we go. It was something that was just the norm.

In fact, in one story, there is a newcomer who comes to a new English town in the beginning of like the 17th century that had individual trenches like these large bowl or trenches for each member of his family. And the town magistrates were disgusted by this because apparently it was too extravagant for each person to have their own plate, basically.

See a typical family, Adolph trenchers, which is a 10 or 12 inch rectangular block of wood, about three inches thick with a kind of bowl shape that is carved into it. After the main course, the trencher was turned over and dessert be served on the clean side.

And if you had a poor rural family, they might eat from a trencher that was actually a table of sorts from a long block of wood with a V-shape, though, that was cut in the center from which stew was poured in and then shared by all. Think of it like an actual trough that you would have animals in. So if you had one large thing that food was poured into and then everyone just scoops out of it.

Some families would not even utilize trenchers and instead would eat spoon meat, which was roasted meat that was served on thick slices of bread. Oftentimes, when we talk about these trenchers, which was a common thing in history, it was quite literally old, stale pieces of bread that you would put your food that you just cooked onto as a kind of plate.

And then hopefully that stale bread, if you're serving some kind of stew or something, would soften enough that you were capable of eating it afterwards. And that's just kind of how it would operate, similar to dipping old bread in stew. Prior to the American Revolution, most Americans would eat with spoons that were made from shell, from wood, gourds, horn, different kinds of material like that.

Just like what you'd have in Europe, sharp knives were also used as weapons and to cut one's meat. This is something that typically people would use a knife, cut something, tear it off with their hands, and then shove it into their mouths. And that's what you did.

Blunt-tipped knives, though, that eventually would come into being. They were initially imported into the colonies and were the precursors to the fork, and oftentimes food would be brought to the mouth from the flat edge of the knife. So before it is that you use the fork, people would kind of cut a bit with this semi-dull knife and then bring that to their mouth, utilizing it.

Until the late 18th century, forks were uncommon. This was more of a curiosity than anything else. And since the new blunt knives made it difficult to spear food, this is where the two-pronged fork would usually come in to hold meat while it was being cut. Still, it was not necessarily as helpful for holding bites of food.

By the middle of the 18th century, though, early Americans started to acquire more wealth. And from this, utensils started to be more mass produced. These were becoming more available and affordable for not necessarily everyday people, but it was becoming more common for somewhat well-to-do people.

In fact, a sign of refinement of wealth was the appearance of individual place settings where it wasn't extravagant for a person to actually have their own bowl or spoon. The simple fork significantly refined table manners as hands were no longer used to reach for food and greasy fingers were not just wiped on the tablecloth.

which yes, tablecloths, that's one of the key reasons that they would be utilized, would be to wipe utensils in your hands on. What is so fascinating though, is that when actually talking about utilizing forks to eat, this wasn't really something that was done. Yes, forks were being used by things like the French court and were done so for centuries, but in general, in the colonies, they refused to use the fork for the longest time. Forks were seen as more effeminate, a kind of useless curiosity.

It wasn't really until the 19th century that the three or four prong forks that were developed in England and Germany became the primary eating utensil in the Americas. And that would mark the real beginning of modern day dining or civilized dining by Americans.

The funny thing is, at this point, fewer middle and upper class folk would regularly eat from a common serving bowl. Pewter plates began replacing wooden trenchers, and many of the more wealthy households just did not use woodenware at all. But for people that were living out in newer settlements more on the frontier, away from transportation centers, they would continue to utilize wooden tools for hundreds of years, 200 or so.

China would first make its appearance in the early 18th century, but that is something that would only be found in wealthier households that wouldn't even typically utilize it. Instead, it would be in the China closet the majority of the time. What really changes things, though, is the industrial revolution, the rise of factories. That is something that with it comes the ability to make many pieces of silverware quickly and uniformly.

Add to this the discovery of vast amounts of silver from the Comstock silver mine beginning in 1859, which made silver much more affordable and available. And the great silver services, the Victorian era and the Gilded Age would pretty much create the obvious outcome.

German silver, ideal for mass production, would commonly be used to create flatware in England in the 19th century. And at that point, pretty much everyone could get some kind of piece of silverware, as it would come to be known. During this period, just as a century earlier, dining and entertaining was an art. And all the fancy little pieces of tools and whatnot that you would need would all be utilized to create a picture of luxury.

Here's the thing you need to understand. Lavish dinner parties were constant for the wealthy society here. Hostesses would do their absolute best to impress with all the material, not just the food, but specifically the tools that you'd be utilizing to consume the food. The size, the service, the quality, everything was important.

In fact, during the 18th and 19th centuries, owning the most up-to-date flatware pattern was extremely important, arguably one of the most important things that you would need for a dinner party. And having sets remodeled in order to fit a new style that became more common, well, that itself was not uncommon.

As it was, humble spoons soon gave way to dessert spoons, play spoons, soup spoons, cream spoons, spoons for ice cream, sorbet, parfait, any kind of tool or food that you can think of, citrus, egg, confection, even more. All of this required its own very specific spoon that people would recognize and it didn't actually do anything special for.

Knives would evolve into steak knives, fish knives, luncheon knives, butter spreaders, knives for fruit. And when I say knives for fruit, I mean very specific fruits. You'd have apple knives, orange knives, cherry, like literally any kind of fruit or thing you could think of. There was a specific knife for forks of all sizes were created for salads, for pastries, for pies, pickles, oysters, lettuce, birds, cocktails, terrapin, puddings, strawberries, anything.

And so when talking about these services, the place pieces or utensils placed in each setting were not limited to the various types of knives, swords, and spoons. There would be a huge amount of specialized pieces that were just general.

Asparagus tongs, potato chip servers, all of these different tools that weren't even knives or forks. They were their own things would be utilized. Escargot tongs, corn holders, scrapers and butterers, spreaders, like squab holders, lobster crackers, nut picks. It is a nigh on impossible list of new tools that one has to keep up with. And the thing is,

If you didn't have the right tool, you were going to get made fun of. So what changed? Well, World War I, rationing, a harsh reality of the world, and a simplification of etiquette. People kind of realized with time that, oh, hey, you know, we don't need 12 types of spoons on the table. And now that material was cheaper and more common, having 12 of something like a spoon or a fork really didn't show off your wealth in high society like it did in previous years.

Anyone and everyone had a spoon. Just because you had a fruit spoon did not mean that it was anything necessarily very special. And as a result, high society dining actually became more simplified. Yes, it still had many strict and elaborate customs, of course, but not nearly as many as you would see in the 1950s as what existed in the 1850s. Cheap stainless steel and plastic in turn would become hallmarks of the everyday person today.

And really, at the end of this, who knows? Maybe all of this will go away soon, and we will just have sporks and knives before that evolves into a point where we squeeze all of our food out of tubes, and then eventually we take it in pill form. And that's the end of that. No more silverware at all. Really, we'll see what the future holds. But that is the end of today's episode.

Everyone, my friends, thank you so much for listening. I appreciate all of you. I will see you all here in the next one. I would advise that if you have any ideas on things you want to know or topics you want covered, make sure to go ahead and check out Patreon. Give us some suggestions. We are always looking forward to more ideas because I have a lot of stuff I'm going to be creating here this week. Until I see you all here again, goodbye, my friends, and I'll see you next time.

As a longtime foreign correspondent, I've worked in lots of places, but nowhere as important to the world as China. I'm Jane Perlez, former Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. On Face Off, the US versus China, we'll explore what's critical to this important global relationship. Trump and Xi Jinping, AI, TikTok, and even Hollywood. New episodes of Face Off are available now, wherever you get your podcasts.