I've been teaching English for over 20 years in London, Japan and France. I also do an award-winning podcast for learners of English called "Luke's English Podcast". In my free time I'm a stand-up comedian who regularly performs shows in English in Paris and sometimes London.
A conversation about travelling and learning languages with Ethan from RealLife English. Ethan is very well-travelled, having lived in at least 6 different countries. He’s also learned a few different languages to a good level as an adult. Let’s talk about his advice for adapting to new cultures and learning languages in adulthood. Vocabulary notes and language test available below.
Arrive with an open mind and be ready to try anything
Don’t just hang out with people from your country
You have to make an effort to integrate into the country
Things might be weird, but you’ll end up having some really memorable experiences
Push yourself to live like a local, even if at first you feel like the lifestyle isn’t as good as it is in your country
Get over yourself! Get out of your comfort zone
Don’t go just to learn English, go somewhere for the whole experience – and if you do that you’ll probably learn English more effectively as a result
Ethan’s advice for learning English on your own
Watch a popular TV show with subtitles – it’s important to choose a show that you like.
Listen to music and taking the time to look up the lyrics.
He just talked to people, even though he was really awkward and shy because he made lots of mistakes.
Motivation is key – he fell in love with Catalan and this gave him the motivation to push through the difficult moments, the awkwardness etc. So build and nurture your motivation to learn a language. Realise how good it is for you to come out of your shell and remember that you can get over your barriers if you really want to.
Find the right people to talk to, find people who are understanding and sympathetic to your situation (someone who’s learning a language too).
Do a language exchange because the other person will be much more likely to tolerate your errors, and will be willing to help you out because you’re going to do the same for them. (you can use italki to find language partners in many countries – http://www.teacherluke.co.uk/talk )
Be voraciously curious – cultivate the desire to do more. If you’re listening to music, check the lyrics and look them up. While watching TV use a notepad or an app like Evernote on your phone to note down vocab and then look it up later.
Practice by speaking to other non-native speakers of the language you’re learning. Other learners of the language are likely to be more sympathetic, they’ll probably have more in common with you, they might have some good advice, you’re going through a similar experience. Having peers with whom you can share your experience is really important.
Some language from the first part of the conversation (Quiz below)
Listen to this episode to get some definitions and descriptions of this language.
Refurbished buildings (made to look new again)
You can see some random smokestacks and things sticking up (tall chimneys)
Three blocksfrom the beach. (distance between his place and the beach)
I tend to go running there (I usually go running there. Not – I am used to going running there)
The weather hasn’t really been beach-appropriate (appropriate for a beach!)
We’re just rolling into fall here (entering) (fall = autumn)
I enjoy running by the beach, especially because the whole area around the beach is very iconic from when they had the Olympics here (impressive because it’s a famous symbol of something)
A modernist humongous whale structure (massive)
Every time I look at it I’m just astounded, it’s beautiful. (amazed)
Language for describing Ethan’s background (background – narrative tenses, past simple, past continuous, maybe some past perfect)
I moved back here (already) two months ago.
I was living here two times before, once for a year and a half and once for 3 months. (normally I’d use ‘I lived’ but perhaps he was thinking of it as a temporary thing in both cases)
Ways he talks about his current situation – present perfect to describe past events with a connection to now.
I’ve come back to stay, probably indefinitely, hopefully for a couple of years. (this is the only example actually)
Describing your background and your current situation
Describing your background
You need to use narrative tenses to describe your background story, and you need to learn how to do this in English and to be able to repeat it with some confidence. It might be worth thinking of how you can make your background story quite interesting or entertaining, or at least say how you felt about it. It just helps in social situations.
Remember: Past simple – the main events of the story – the main sequence Past continuous – the situation at the time, or longer events which are interrupted by shorter actions Past perfect – background events to the main events of the story
E.g. I went to university in Liverpool and studied Media & Cultural Studies. It was a really interesting degree, but it wasn’t very useful. I stayed in Liverpool for a while and played music in a band but we didn’t make it and I left and moved back in with my parents which was a bit of a nightmare. I didn’t really know what to do with myself for a while, but I decided I wanted to travel and go somewhere quite different, and I‘d always been curious about teaching, so I trained to be an English teacher and I got my first job in Japan. I stayed there for a couple of years, had a great time but decided that I wanted to come back because of family reasons. I taught English in London for 8 years, did my DELTA, got a job in a good school in London and then I met a French girl and I moved to France so we could be together. I’m very romantic. (actually that was almost exclusively past simple, wasn’t it?)Describing your current situation
Then you also need to talk about your current situation. We do this with present simple (permanent situations) and present continuous (temporary situations) and present perfect to talk about past actions with a connection to now.
E.g. I live in Paris these days. I’ve been here for about 5 years. I’ve worked for a few different schools, teaching English. These days I teach at The British Council. I’ve been there for about 3 years now. I’m also developing some online courses which I hope to release on my website before too long!
I’m from Colorado in the USA. Luke: Oh cool. (I said cool – because you should say cool when someone tells you where they’re from, or at least you should show some interest or curiosity, and be positive about it.)
It’s below Canada and above Mexico, between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. (my non-specific description of where Colorado is – basically, it’s somewhere in the USA, haha etc)
It’s (to the) north east of Arizona, (to the) east of Utah, above New Mexico.
What’s the difference between ‘east of London’, ‘to the east of London’ and ‘in the east of London‘?
The four corners – it’s just a couple of hours away from the town I grew up in. (how would you put that in your language? “It takes two hours to get there”, “It’s a couple of hours from here”
It’s a tourist trap now. You go and put your hand in the middle and you’re in four states at once. (a place that attracts tourists and is probably best avoided)
I was born in my house. Durango, Colorado. That’s the town I lived in.
When I was 17 I moved to Germany for 6 months.
It’s interesting to see that, when you’ve lived in a place for 20 years, how it evolves. (how it changes gradually over time)
Colorado is wonderful, it’s spectacular. (magnificent, amazing, breathtaking)
We’re so active, we’re always outdoors. There are spectacular hikes you can do.
There are 4,000 or 5,000 metre peaks. (summits, mountain tops)
It’s very different to Europe because you get that kind of old-west feeling. (from the period of western expansion) (wild west – cowboys and lawlessness)
My only criticism is that I lived there for 20 years, which is more than enough. (nice way to start a sentence with something negative in it)…. (more than enough = too much)
I’ve never seen a grizzly, and they are dangerous. (grizzly bear)
Mountain Lions – if you were by yourself and you encountered one, it might not be a great end for you. You might get eaten alive by a huge cat. (You don’t meet a wild animal, you encounter one.)
We have deer and elk and in the north we also have moose, and a lot of, we’d say, critters, like small animals. (deer = animals that look like they have trees growing out of their heads – you know what I mean. Like Santa Claus’ reindeer. Elk = big deer. Moose = really big elk. Critters – little animals like rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, rats, raccoons, skunks)
In the US you drive from city to city and you see endlessexpanses of mountains and plains. (wide open spaces)
That’s a fun question so I’d have to think. (a nice way to buy time for yourself when someone asks you a question, like saying “that’s a good question, let me think”)
When I was in high school I did a 6 month exchange in Germany and during that time I also got to live in Poland for 2 weeks. (difference between for and during?)
I lived in Spain in Majorca for a year during college, which is when I fell in love with this place.
Some time expressions to help you tell a story:
After that, after school, I moved to Brazil.
I joined RealLife English because they had started a few months before I moved there.
That’s when I moved to Barcelona. Then I moved to Chile for 6 months. Now finally I‘ve moved back here.
After that you can imagine I’m a bit tired of jumping around so much and living out of a back pack. Now I’m here to stay for a while.
This is a double episode with two audio episodes on one page, and it’s going to be really useful for you because it’s all about difficult pronunciation in English. Listen to Paul Taylor and me discussing the tricky relationship between spelling and pronunciation. There are lots of jokes, impressions, funny accents and useful comments about this important area of the English language. Use this episode to avoid some very common mistakes in English pronunciation, and try not to laugh on the bus while you’re listening! Check this episode page for word lists, transcriptions and my video of 40+ difficult words to pronounce in English.
Luke’s British Council Teacher Talk – “What is this, British Humour?”
I’m doing another talk on the topic of humour at the British Council in Paris on 19 October. It is also being live-streamed on Facebook. Details below.
Difficult Words to Pronounce in English: Notes, Word Lists and That Useful Video (below)
Focus /fəʊkəs/
Fuck us /fʌkʌs/
Sting /stɪŋ/
Boy George /bɔɪ ʤɔːʤ/
Spandau Ballet /spændɑː bæleɪ/
What problems do French people have with pronunciation in English?
/h/ sounds
/th/ sounds
Part 1 ends here… Part 2 continues below!
/r/ sounds
Some vowel sounds, particularly certain ‘long’ and ‘short’ sounds, such as…
“bitch” /i/ and “beach” /i:/
“shit” /i/ and “sheet” /i:/
voiced and unvoiced sounds
Paul’s “how to beatbox” with boots and cats
The words & phrases from the TOPITO article – “The Most Difficult Words to Pronounce in English – the hell of /th/ sounds“
1. I have a sore throat
2. Squirrel
3. Throughout
4. Bewildered
5. Hierarchy
6. Anaesthetize
7. Threshold
8. Worthlessly
9. Worcestershire
10. William Wordsworth
The TOPITO article (it’s in French by the way) http://www.topito.com/top-trucs-durs-dire-anglais
An academic “focus” on French people speaking English, from Frankfurt University
Phonology There are some differences in the sound systems of the two languages that can cause French learners problems of comprehension and speech production. Spelling errors may result from the frequent lack of correspondence between the pronunciation of English words and their spelling.
A typical pronunciation problem is the inability to correctly articulate the vowel sounds in minimal pairs such as ship / sheep, live / leave, full / fool. Because the tip of the tongue is not used in speaking French, learners often have problems with words containing the letters th (/θ/ /ð/), such as then, think and clothes.
Another common feature of English spoken by French learners is the omission of the /h/ sound at the beginning of words. This sound does not exist in French and leads to problems such as ‘Ave you ‘eard about ‘arry?, or overcompensation by pronouncing the /h/ in words like hour, honour. French learners typically have problems with the unpredictable stress patterns of English words, particularly of cognates. (Word stress in French is regular.) Learners may also be unwilling to engage in the prevalent vowel reduction of unstressed syllables in English. Consider, for example, the way that English native speakers swallow the first syllable of the word tomorrow (t’morrow). These problems result in the stereotypical staccato French accent of beginning learners.
From Frankfurt International School Website http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/french.htm
TH sounds
/th/ can be voiced [ð] or unvoiced [θ]
A quick guide to producing TH sounds:
Stick tongue out slightly
Let air pass under/through teeth and over the tongue
You don’t need your lips!
It’s not /f/ /s/ /d/ /v/ or /z/
It’s [ð] (voiced) or [θ] (unvoiced)
Watch my video (below) for more help with /th/ sounds.
More words which learners often find difficult to pronounce
Architecture /ˈɑː.kɪ.tek.tʃər/
architectural /ˌɑː.kɪˈtek.tʃər.əl/
Drawer /drɔː/
Colonel /ˈkəːn(ə)l/
Comfortable /ˈkʌmftəbəl/
Pronunciation /prənʌnsɪˈeɪʃən/
Recipe /ˈresɪpi:/
Scissors /ˈsɪzəz/
Strengths /streŋkθs/
Clothes /kləʊðz/
Eighth /eɪtθs/
Queue /kjuː/
Fruit /fruːt/
Sixteenth /sɪkˈstiːnθ/
Eighteenth /eɪˈtiːnθ/
“Ghoti” is pronounced “fish” (is it?)
This is an old attempt to prove that English spelling makes no sense. Note: David Crystal doesn’t agree.
David Crystal disagrees with this “ghoti” (See below)
Some Words with Silent Letters
bomb
climb
comb
crumb
debt
doubt
government (ok, so the ‘n’ isn’t really silent, but this word has 3 syllables, not 4)
More here: https://mywords.cle.ust.hk/sir/silent_words.php
Also
Business /ˈbɪznɪs/ or /ˈbɪznəs/
Busy /ˈbɪzi:/
Derby (place and a horse race) /ˈdɑːbi:/
L/R (Often difficult for Japanese speakers, or people from East Asia in general)
Roller coaster
Rarely
Red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry
My name
Luke (correct) /lu:k/
not:
Look
Luck
Mr Luck (the most common wrong version, especially in writing)
Teacher luck pot cat? (teacher luke podcast)
Ruke
Ruku
Rook
Duck??
Mr Luke (still not correct – it’s just “Luke” or “Mr Thompson”, although Moz called me Mr Luke as a sort of joke)
Thompson /tɒmpsən/
Often pronounced “Tom-sun” in France
and pronounced “Tom-pu-son” in Japan
Some rude or funny tongue twisters read by Paul and me
She sells sea shells on the sea shore. (not rude)
Red lorry yellow lorry red lorry yellow lorry… (not rude)
I am not the pheasant plucker,
I’m the pheasant plucker’s mate.
I am only plucking pheasants
Because the pheasant plucker’s late.
(don’t say “fucker“)
I slit the sheet, the sheet I slit;
and on the slitted sheet I sit.
(don’t say “shit“)
One smart fellow; he felt smart.
Two smart fellows; they felt smart.
Three smart fellows; they all felt smart.
(don’t say “fart”)
I’m not the fig plucker,
Nor the fig pluckers’ son,
But I’ll pluck figs
Till the fig plucker comes.
(don’t say “pig fucker“)
Fire truck tyres
(repeat it – don’t say “I fuck tyres”)
Mrs Puggy Wuggy has a square cut punt.
Not a punt cut square,
Just a square cut punt.
It’s round in the stern and blunt in the front.
Mrs Puggy Wuggy has a square cut punt.
Six stick shifts stuck shut.
Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers.
(don’t say “cunt” – really, don’t say that word, it is extremely rude)
She sells seashells by the seashore.
The shells she sells are surely seashells.
So if she sells shells on the seashore,
I’m sure she sells seashore shells.
(not rude)
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
If a woodchuck could chuck wood?
He would chuck, he would, as much as he could,
And chuck as much as a woodchuck would
If a woodchuck could chuck wood.
(not rude)
Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers (not rude)
Betty Botta bought some butter; “But,” said she, “this butter’s bitter! If I put it in my batter It will make my batter bitter. But a bit o’ better butter Will make my batter better.” Then she bought a bit o’ butter Better than the bitter butter, Made her bitter batter better. So it was better Betty Botta
Bought a bit o’ better butter. (not rude)
http://www.fun-with-words.com/tong_rude.html
Pronunciation practice – repeat after me!
There’s no quiz for this episode – instead I thought I’d make a video so you can practise your pronunciation by repeating after me. Word list with definitions below.
Word List + examples [The definitions are in brackets]
Sore throat – I’ve got a sorethroat today [a painful throat, because you have a cold]
Squirrel – I saw three squirrels in the park [cute little animals with bushy tails that live in the park]
Throughout – Squirrels live in this park throughout the year [all the way through]
Bewildered – I was bewildered by all the options [confused]
Hierarchy – There’s a flat hierarchy in our company [a system of levels]
Anaesthetist/Anaesthetise – It’s the job of the anaesthetist to anaesthetise the patients with an anaesthetic [to give someone an anaesthetic – something which stops you feeling pain]
Threshold – If you earn more than £70,000 you enter the next tax threshold [a level or point where something ends and something else begins]
Worthlessly – I was worthlessly trying to impress her by showing off [in a worthless way – with no worth or no point]
Pass the Worcestershire sauce, would you? [a kind of brown sauce for giving flavour to food]
William Wordsworth was a wonderful writer
live / leave – You have to live a little before you leave this world
ship / sheep – we put all the sheep onto the ship, so the ship was full of sheep
full / fool – The room is full you fool!
Architecture –I love the architecture
Architectural – The architectural style is fascinating
Drawer – The knives and forks are in the top drawer on the left [for example, where you keep the knives and forks in the kitchen]
Colonel – Colonel Sanders founded Kentucky Fried Chicken [a senior officer in the army]
Kernel – Pine kernels can be a delicious addition to a salad [a nut]
Comfortable – Are you comfortable? Would you like a pillow?
Pronunciation is important. You have to pronounce words properly.
Recipe – Can you give me that delicious cake recipe? / This is a recipe for disaster! [the instructions for how to make certain food]
Scissors – Do you know where the scissors are? [a tool for cutting paper or fabric]
Strengths – What are your strengths and weaknesses? [strong points]
Clothes – I bought some new clothes today.
Months – She’s 18 months old now.
Eighth – Henry the Eighth was a Tudor king of England
Queue – Sorry, are you in the queue? Are you skipping the queue? Sorry, the end of the queue is back there. Yes, we’re all queueing up, we’re not just standing here. Unbelievable. [a line of people waiting for something]
Fruit – Do you have any fresh fruit?
Sixteenth – It’s the sixteenth of October
Eighteenth – It’s the eighteenth of November
Thirteenth – it’s Friday the thirteenth
Thirtieth – it’s the thirtieth of December
Bomb – There was a bomb scare in the station. People were talking about a bombing. I remember when the IRA bombed Oxford Street. [an explosive device]
Climb – Do you want to go climbing with me next weekend? I’m going to climb that mountain on Saturday. You climbed it last year didn’t you? [to go up something steep like a ladder, a hill or a mountain]
Comb – I’m just combing my hair with a comb. [something that you use to make your hair straight]
Crumb – Why are there lots of bread crumbs on the table? Have you been cutting bread here? There are lots of crumbs everywhere. Can you clean them up please? [little bits of bread or other food]
Debt – (Many students leave university with) thousands of pounds of debt. [money which you have to pay back to someone after you borrow it]
Doubt – There’s no doubt about it. It’s a brilliant film. [something you’re unsure about]
Government (ok, so the ‘n’ isn’t really silent, but this word has 3 syllables, not 4) The government is yet to make a statement.
My name is Luke (not Mr Luck) Thompson
This is a podcast – not a postcard, or potcard, or pot cast or pot cat. It’s podcast.
See Paul’s One Man Show #Franglais – http://paultaylorcomedy.com/
By the way, if you’re in France, you really should see Paul’s one man show called #Franglais because it is back in theatres for another run. A lot of the comedy in his show is based around pronunciation differences, including the way people say his name, the way French people say funny things without realising it and more. Check out paultaylorcomedy.com for more information.
Here’s David Crystal’s response to “GHOTI” = FISH
Remember that thing that goes around the internet about how “Fish” should be spelled GHOTI?
Basically David Crystal believes that English spelling is not actually senseless, chaotic or mad. It is complex but it’s not completely random. In fact it is the end result of a fascinating process of development that can tell us a lot about the rich history of the English language.
From a Guardian review of his book “Spell It Out”
‘Crystal shows a brisk impatience with the tradition that likes to pretend that English spelling is senseless. The famous suggestion that you could spell “fish” “ghoti” (gh as in “rough”, o as in “women” and ti as in “motion”) is a witticism often ascribed to George Bernard Shaw but, Crystal says witheringly, has been doing the rounds since the middle of the 19th century. It is, he argues “complete naughtiness. The spelling ti is NEVER used with this sound at the end of a word in English, and the spelling gh is NEVER used with this sound at the beginning of a word.” It doesn’t do, then, to simply throw your hands up and say: “Isn’t our language mad?” The real story is much more interesting than that.’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/14/spell-it-out-david-crystal-review
You can read more about the interesting story of English spelling and what it can teach us about the history of the English language by reading David Crystal’s book “Spell It Out”, which I expect is available from any half-decent book shop.
A conversation with Paul Taylor involving several cups of tea, recipes for French crepes, our terrible rap skills, a funny old comedy song about English workmen drinking tea, some improvised comedy role plays and a very angry Paul ranting about bad customer service in France! Your challenge is to listen to this episode in public without laughing out loud, especially in the second half of the episode. Good luck, may the force be with you. Vocabulary list, song lyrics, definitions and a quiz available below.
I’m going to keep this intro as brief as possible so we can get straight into it!
This one is a conversation with friend of the podcast, Paul Taylor. It was lots of fun to record, I hope it’s also lots of fun to listen to.
There are links, videos, word lists and song lyrics with vocabulary and definitions on the episode page on the website that can help you to understand and learn more English from our conversation.
There is some swearing in this episode – some rude words and things. Just to let you know in advance.
Try not to laugh on the bus while listening to this. That might be embarrassing. That is a challenge from me to you. Try not to giggle – because everyone will look at you and will feel either jealous or confused at your public display of the joy which will be bursting forth from your heart as you listen to Paul’s infectious laughter. No giggling or cracking up in public please. Get a grip on yourself for goodness sake.
Where’s Amber? All will be revealed.
Keep listening until the end of the episode for more additional extra bonus fun.
Alrighty then, that’s all for the intro, let’s go!
Vocabulary List
A crepe = a thin french pancake made from flour, milk and egg – all whisked together and then cooked in a pan
To whisk = to mix ingredients quickly with a fork or a whisk
To kneaddough to make bread
To knead = to work/press/mix/fold dough with your hands when making bread
Dough = flour, water, yeast combined to make a soft paste, used for making bread
Cats go to the litter box, shit and then lick their paws
The litter box = the tray or box in your house that cats use as a toilet. It’s full of small stones, sand or something similar.
Paws = the hands and feet of a cat (or similar animals)
The Luke’s English Podcast Challenge – if you don’t know what a crepe is, leave a comment! You *might* get a picture of Paul as a prize.
Talking bollocks* = talking nonsense ( *bollocks is a rude word meaning testicles, or bullshit)
‘owzit gaan? = How’s it going?
It’s the first day back at school in France so everyone’s going mental
Going mental = going crazy, getting stressed
Anti-nuclear pens? = I suppose these are pens which somehow resist the effects of a nuclear attack. They don’t exist, I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geEVwslL-YY
Losing your friends when they have kids – How having kids is like the zombie apocalypse (according to Paul)
“To put the kibosh on something” = phrase
If someone or something puts the kibosh on your plans or activities, they cause them to fail or prevent them from continuing.
[mainly US , informal]
E.g. “Rattray, however, personally showed up at the meeting to try and put the kibosh on their plans.” “…software that puts the kibosh on pop-up ads if a user doesn’t want them.”
I’ll be tutoring my child in the ways of righteousness
A voice-over = some recorded speech used in advertising, TV, radio etc.
“Right said Fred” by Bernard Cribbins
A 1960s comedy record featuring some cockney workmen moving a heavy object and drinking lots of tea.
Lyrics [vocab explained in brackets] “Right,” said Fred, “Both of us together One each end and steady as we go.” [be careful, do it steadily] Tried to shift it, couldn’t even lift it [move it] We was getting nowhere [yes, it’s grammatically incorrect] And so we had a cuppa tea and [ a cup of tea]
“Right,” said Fred, “Give a shout for Charlie.” Up comes Charlie from the floor below. After straining, heaving and complaining [making lots of physical effort] [complaining] We was getting nowhere [also grammatically incorrect] And so we had a cuppa tea.
And Charlie had a think, and he thought we ought to take off all the handles And the things what held the candles. But it did no good, well I never thought it would
“All right,” said Fred, “Have to take the feet off To get them feet off wouldn’t take a mo(ment).” [those] Took its feet off, even took the seat off Should have got us somewhere but no! So Fred said, “Let’s have another cuppa tea.” And we said, “right-o.”
“Right,” said Fred, “Have to take the door off Need more space to shift the so-and-so.” [the thing] Had bad twinges taking off the hinges [sharp pains] [metal parts that attach the door to the wall] And it got us nowhere And so we had a cuppa tea and
“Right,” said Fred, “Have to take the wall down, That there wall is gonna have to go.” Took the wall down, even with it all down We was getting nowhere And so we had a cuppa tea.
And Charlie had a think, and he said, “Look, Fred, I got a sort of feelin’ If we remove the ceiling With a rope or two we could drop the blighter through.” [an annoying person or thing]
“All right,” said Fred, climbing up a ladder With his crowbar gave a mighty blow. [a heavy metal tool] Was he in trouble, half a ton of rubble landed on the top of his dome. [broken pieces of rock] [head] So Charlie and me had another cuppa tea And then we went home.
(I said to Charlie, “We’ll just have to leave it Standing on the landing, that’s all [the hallway on an upper floor] You see the trouble with Fred is, he’s too hasty [in a hurry, rushing ;) ] You’ll never get nowhere if you’re too hasty.”)
Getting queue jumped and dealing with unhelpful staff = when people skip ahead of you in a queue [a line of people waiting]
Luke struggles to understand how to deal with waiters and shop assistants who say “c’est pas possible” (French = it’s not possible)
Listen to Alexander Van Walsum talk to Luke about how to deal with “c’est pas possible” in this episode from the archive
That’s nearly the end of the episode, I hope you enjoyed it and you managed not to laugh out loud on the bus.
Don’t forget, you can see a list of vocabulary and expressions from this episode all on the website, including the lyrics to that song that you heard. There’s also a YouTube video of the song if you want to hear it again and make sure you’ve understood all of it. So check that out.
By the way, the mobile version of my site has now been improved thanks to a helpful listener called Sergei who gave me some CSS coding advice. So if you check the site on your phone now it should look much better than it did before, which will make it easier for you to check vocab lists, transcriptions and other content from your mobile device. Try it now – teacherluke.co.uk. You will find the link for this episode and all the others in the episode archive – just click on the menu button and then EPISODE ARCHIVE.
Don’t forget to join the mailing list on the website so you can get a link to each new episode page in your inbox when it’s published.
As I said, it’s nearly the end of the episode – but it’s not actually the end yet. There’s more. In fact, I’ve decided to give you a bonus bit at the end here, because I’m nice.
So, what’s the bonus bit?
The Bonus Bit – “The Expat Sketch Show”
On the day that Paul and I recorded this episode (and in fact the next one too) we also recorded ourselves improvising a short comedy sketch. I’m now going to play you that sketch.
The idea of the sketch is that I work in an office in Paris and my job is to interview ex-pats (foreign people who have moved to Paris) – I interview ex-pats for a position on a kind of scholarship programme where we subsidise their living expenses and help them integrate into the Parisian community and in return they contribute something to community in terms of work, taking part in cultural events or making any contribution that will benefit the cultural mix of Paris.
Paul plays 3 different ex-pats who have come into my office for an interview, and let’s just say that they’re not exactly the ideal candidates.
The whole thing was completely improvised, it’s full of rude language and it’s all just a bit of a laugh so here is the Ex-pat Sketch show with Paul. Have fun!
Thanks for listening to the episode everyone.
Have a good day, night, morning, afternoon or evening!
I want to share something really interesting that happened to me recently. I got into a debate with some ‘flat earthers’ – guys who believe that the earth is flat. It was pretty intense, and you can listen to it all here on this page.
What you’re listening to (and reading) now isn’t an episode of Luke’s English Podcast, it’s some website-only content – a post on my website with two bits of audio: Audio 1 (my introduction and comments) and Audio 2 (an episode of someone else’s podcast). I’m going to explain everything here and the script of what I am saying is provided on this page, just below the two audio players that you can see.
Audio 1 – An introduction and My comments
Audio 2 – My appearance on The Flat Earth Podcast – my part begins at 19mins
Transcript for Audio 1 starts here:
Hello, you’re listening to some website-only content on teacherluke.co.uk
I want to share something really interesting that happened to me recently. I got into a debate with some ‘flat earthers’ – guys who believe that the earth is flat. It was pretty intense, and you can listen to it all here on this page.
What you’re listening to now isn’t an episode of Luke’s English Podcast, it’s some website-only content – a post on my website with two bits of audio – Audio 1 (what you’re listening to right now) and Audio 2 (an episode of someone else’s podcast). I’m going to explain everything in this recording and the script of what I am saying is provided on the page, just below the two audio players that you can see.
What happened?
Do you remember when I recently talked about flat earth conspiracy theories on my podcast? It was in episode 476. I talked about how some people think the earth is flat and rambled on about it for a while, considering some of the suggestions and theories, like the idea that the world is a flat disc or plane, that we don’t orbit the sun, that the moon isn’t what we think it is, that satellites aren’t real, that the international space station is fake and even that our idea of gravity is either completely wrong or is a deception and that the governments of the world are all lying to us about the earth being a globe. I said that although I hadn’t looked into it fully, I thought it was impossible and ludicrous, ridiculous. I believe the earth is round.
After uploading that episode I was contacted a few days later by one of the hosts of The Flat Earth Podcast – a podcast produced by two guys in USA, Jay and Dave, who are convinced that the earth is flat, and not a globe. They told me that I was wrong about what I’d said in my episode, that the earth is not a globe and that they wanted to talk to me about the whole subject.
In fact, this is what Dave wrote in the comment section of episode 476.
Hi Luke. You said it yourself, you really haven’t looked into it that much. We would like to invite you on an episode of THE FLAT EARTH PODCAST to discuss your thoughts on the subject. We are not dogmatic flat earthers or the type that go into a Starbucks and disrupt people. We have answers to all the misconceptions that you have stated on your show. Please reach out to us…
I thought, “why not let them try to convince me that the earth is actually flat? I thought it could be interesting to have that conversation and perhaps have a friendly debate about the subject.”
I got back in touch with Dave and said, “OK, I’d be happy to talk to you, let’s do it.”
They were serious about it.
Then we fixed a date and a time that would work for all of us – Me, Dave and his co-host Jay, in different timezones. Them in different parts of the US and me at home in Paris.
I was curious and interested but also a bit nervous about it, because I thought that their audience might be angry with me because of the comments I’d made about flat earth on LEP. I had at one point said I thought it was “a load of bollocks”. Yes, I did use the word “bollocks” but I might have got away with that because “bollocks” is not a word they’re that familiar with in the USA, except that it’s on the front cover of an album by The Sex Pistols, which works in my favour if anything.
But, I was a bit nervous nonetheless, but also quite excited at the prospect of actually debating with people who thought or think that the earth is flat. (Think – because they still think it! I didn’t convince them of course! Spoiler alert!)
In any case, I really wanted to have a respectful and grown-up conversation about it with Jay and Dave. That’s why I agreed to talk to them.
Then, a few weeks ago we called each other on Skype and had a conversation about whether or not the earth is flat or round.
You can listen to what happened in that conversation by using the embedded player at the top of this page.
Let me continue talking about this story.
What were my expectations ahead of the interview?
As I said, I was concerned their audience would be angry with me or at least unfriendly and a bit aggressive.
Although they seemed very friendly in the emails I thought they might give me a ‘slapdown’ – which means an aggressive response designed to put me in my place.
I wondered if I would be able to have a proper debate with them because it’s hard to talk to people about this kind of thing, especially when they’re convinced of their position. You need lots of specific data and scientific knowledge and also you have to be quite careful about the things they say. A lot of their ideas need to be fact-checked or at least considered very carefully to make sure the evidence they talk about is valid or reliable, to make sure the quotes they use are not taken out of context, and that the logic they’re using is clear and solid. So, I was wondering if I’d be able to keep up with their ideas or if I’d simply be unable to debate with them at all.
Having said that, I was also thinking about how I could find holes in the things they would say, because, you know I think they’re wrong about the earth being flat. So I did quite a lot of thinking about their arguments and the things they would say. I listened to a few episodes of their podcast, watched a video called the 21 Questions and really considered the points they were making, because I am open to the idea that the world is flat.
Imagine, for example, if all the things they said were genuinely true and that this small group of guys had really stumbled across a global conspiracy, and that their internet research and testing had uncovered evidence that was irrefutable. We shouldn’t be closed to the idea that they’re right about this. My position was – ok guys I’m not going to tell you that you’re crazy. I’ll believe it if you really convince me and I find your points utterly watertight. I’m open to it, let’s go.
Imagine if they are right though. Would they be under threat? If there’s a conspiracy to keep this thing under wraps, are they in danger? We know that when big secrets have to be kept that people get killed. People disappear, they get murdered to cover up big secrets, like government corruption or organised crime.
If these guys are right, they could be in mortal danger. If they’re right. But I suppose that they believe that there’s a plan in place to deal with this, that there is disinformation spread around that makes most people just think these guys are ridiculous, and that’s what prevents this idea from really posing a threat to whoever is keeping this secret.
I wonder if my open-minded approach to their ideas could somehow put them in danger. Imagine, if nobody thought their ideas were ridiculous and this whole concept started gathering genuine momentum, that the powers that be might want to take action and silence them.
I’m being hypothetical here, but when you take these ideas seriously, you end up considering all sorts of possibilities. Jay and Dave don’t seem to be paranoid guys to me. The impression I got was that they’re really inquisitive and enthusiastic about this subject. Hopefully they have no real reason to fear for their safety. I think they don’t, because I don’t believe that there is a cover-up going on. I think they don’t pose a threat really. That now sounds bad, saying that they’re harmless. I don’t mean that, but… I don’t know, it’s complicated.
You can see why this is quite fascinating when you think about it – it’s all about people’s belief systems and also about how to argue your point and how to prove something as true.
It’s essentially a philosophical debate, and I love philosophical debates – I mean, I got a D at A level in philosophy at college! Not a good grade, but I did study philosophy for two years between the age of 16 and 18! I like philosophical debate and I’m really happy that these guys are essentially engaging in quite a profound debate about the nature of existence, and questioning the world around them. I’m happy about that. I think it’s good to be curious and independently minded, but I do think that there are issues with their reasoning and with the evidence they propose, and the way they apply the mathematical theories that have been used to understand the way the earth works. I’m impressed by their rigorous approach and their devotion to the truth, but I am not convinced by the argument – yet! I say yet because we’ve got to keep an open mind, right?
I was thinking lots of these things, but mainly, I was concerned that I was being set up for a smackdown!
What was the conversation like?
It was actually really enjoyable. Dave and Jay were hospitable to me. They gave me quite a flattering introduction, joking that they would sound like stupid Americans compared to my British accent and that it would be difficult to debate with someone who sounded so intelligent and articulate. I assured them that it’s all just a trick – that I’m actually not very intelligent at all and I only sound clever because of my accent. We laughed.
They were very reasonable with me, in the way they treated me I mean. They told their audience that they’d probably hate me but to give me a chance, and that at one point all of them had been sceptical like me. They’d all at one point thought that the theory was ridiculous too.
They were nice, but of course they were! These guys aren’t crazy or anything and they’re not mean-spirited. They’re basically just normal guys who have good intentions. As far as they’re concerned they’re working for truth and justice – both quite respectable things, right? It’s not fair or helpful to brand them as weirdos or nutters or things like that. Saying that is both unhelpful and rude.
We should focus on the things they’re saying not the people they are. They really think we’re being lied to on a grand scale and they want to prove it. I don’t think they are proving it, in my opinion, but they genuinely believe it and I don’t think they’re motivated by hatred or malice or anything. So I was very happy that we all could take part in the conversation in a respectful manner and after all that is a basic foundation for this kind of thing. In an argument or a debate or disagreement – the moment that you lose your temper or start throwing around insulting comments or insinuations, you have lost the debate in my opinion.
I had no plans to do that, and I was really pleased that they didn’t either. I think they might have been annoyed at my position and the things I’d said but they didn’t make a big deal about it, and in fact were totally cool all the time and I had a good time on their podcast. Also, I should say that the podcast is well made. Good sound quality, well-edited, well presented. On that level we had a lot in common and just as podcasters I think we shared some mutual respect. I also think they’re probably around my age, and it’s always cool to make contact with people of your age who live in a completely different country to you.
So they treated me well and that was nice, but again – I was a bit nervous about how the conversation would go. I was worried that I would not be able to argue with them effectively, or deal with certain details in their arguments.
They did bring in another guy called Jerun who, as they put it themselves, is deep inside the rabbit hole. He’s gone really deep into flat earth theories and has been making loads of videos about the subject, and as they put it – he has answers to everything. So, I felt a bit like “Uh oh, they’re bringing in this guy Jerun too so it’s 3 against 1!” I felt a bit outnumbered.
What were the objectives of the conversation for you and them?
I decided that I’d just let them try to convince me. My thinking was this.
I believe the earth is round – but I’m not blindly married to the idea. Obviously, I grew up within this paradigm but I am definitely capable of questioning it. The reason I believe it is because I think the evidence for it is better than the evidence for flat earth – and I don’t hide from the arguments of flat earthers. In fact I’ve been actively seeking them out, looking for ones that I think are really solid and watertight.
I am ready to be convinced that it’s flat. However, I’m not just going to accept arguments without giving them full scrutiny. We need to be careful of confirmation bias – on both sides. This means interpreting evidence in a way that confirms what you want to believe and may involve jumping to conclusions. If they’re arguments are more watertight than the arguments for round earth, I’ll be convinced.
That’s what I was thinking, and I think it was their objective to try to convert me to flat earth because they wanted to get me on their team.
What was the outcome? How did it go?
You’ll have to listen to it and decide for yourself! You’ll see the episode embedded at the top of the page where you found the audio that you’re listening to now.
Have I had any reactions from people?
When the podcast episode came out I was a bit worried that I’d get some hatred from the flat earth community. I prepared myself for some possibly hateful responses in my inbox or in the comment section of the website. But I’m glad to say that I’ve had none, and I really am glad to say that – just because I can’t stand seeing that sort of thing. There’s plenty of blind hatred on the internet these days, particularly in the comment section of YouTube videos and so on. So, it’s quite refreshing not to have had any of that sort of thing. Touch wood. (What is this mysterious power that wood can have?)
But I did get a couple of nice responses.
From what I assume is a flat earther who just appreciated the fact that I was polite.
Hi Luke! I just listened to your interview on the Flat Earth Podcast and wanted to say “thank you” for being so open-minded and you were so polite. My first impression of you is that you are a very ‘reasonable’ person. I hope you continue to look into what the guys were saying and make up your own mind. Much Respect,
And from someone who apparently listens both to my podcast and to the flat earth podcast (as a sceptic) as well, which I found to be quite a coincidence – but maybe not considering how this is the sort of thing I’m interested in.
Dear Luke,
I sometimes listen to your podcasts, and I recently also came across to the flat-earth podcast, with your contribution.
I’d like to congratulate you for your calm and polite chat with the flat-earthers. I am an amateur astronomist, and of course a “glober” as they say. In the past few weeks I started listening to the flat-earth podcast, with a high interest in how a false idea can spread among people, in spite of evidence. Flat earth stuff is the more obvious example, but I realized that a lot of other false ideas happen to be more and more widely accepted.
Anyway it was a pleasure to listen to you politely standing in front of them. Sometimes you lacked the precise answers, and I tried to whisper some to you, but you did a really fair job ! Best regards.
Did they convince you that the earth is flat?
Nope, I’m still not convinced but I admit that I didn’t conclusively “win” the debate by any means. There were plenty of things I couldn’t really answer. For example, there were certain quotes I couldn’t check, certain mathematical equations I couldn’t really follow and certain claims that I couldn’t be sure of. I didn’t have all the answers to the questions they asked me. But I think I can say that I really considered the things they had to say and I continue to be curious about the subject in general. I’m not just ignoring it all or name-calling or labelling these guys as crazy. Like before, I am still ready to believe it and only a truly stubborn and closed-minded person would refuse to even consider the other arguments.
I was also happy to spend time with Jay, Dave and Jerun and I think I actually got on with them pretty well. I was relieved about that. By the end of the conversation I would have enjoyed going for a beer with them if we’d had a chance.
But having said that, at the moment I still think that they’re wrong about the earth being flat. Guys if you’re listening to this or reading it – you still haven’t got me yet – but I guess there’s still time! I think Dave told me it took 6 months for him to turn from being a round earther to a flat earther. So who knows where I will be in 6 months time. I guess you’ll have to watch this space.
They did say that if I became a flat earther that I would lose a large portion of my audience. So, does this mean that if I continue to be a round earther it’s only because I want to keep my audience? Could it not also be true that I will just think the earth is round? I mean, if I wanted to get a bigger audience I could say all sorts of things to appeal to people’s desires. I could be making all sorts of big promises about English or about how you can make money by following my steps, or I could be attracting the attention of certain religious groups by talking about religious ideas. I don’t do those things, even though doing them would increase the size of my audience. So, increasing my audience is not the only thing that motivates me. So, if I don’t come out as a flat earther, it might just be that I am still not convinced by the arguments. But, as I said, who knows where I will be in 6 months.
By the way, I’m aware that by talking about this and presenting this on my website to my audience that some of you might get converted to flat earthism. That’s up to you. Just remember – if you consider yourself to be open-minded, you’ll be open-minded about both sides. Being open-minded is not just the preserve of one side of this argument.
I’m going to ramble on about this a bit more because it made me think about things, like how difficult it is to argue using logic and to be sure about the nature of reality itself, just that kind of thing…
Debating flat earth with the guys from the podcast made me think about philosophical arguments, logic and how we talk about and argue about the truth itself. It’s a really complex business and it’s actually very difficult to do properly without falling into certain “thinking holes” or fallacies of logic.
There are various “thinking holes” or logical fallacies that are very easy to fall into when talking about this subject, or any philosophical subject for that matter. These are problems with logic or just problems with thinking. Anyone can fall into these traps – not just flat earthers, anyone.
But here are some of those issues that I have noticed when looking at not just flat earth theories, but also “bad science” or pseudoscience, and I admit that some of these points could also be applied to my position, which just shows how tricky it is, from an armchair position, to prove beyond doubt that something is really true.
Confirmation bias – Interpreting evidence in a way that confirms your world view. Interpreting evidence in a way that confirms the conclusions you expect or want. For example, looking at a mass shooting incident – a mass shooting can confirm several points of view. People who don’t like guns might say – mass shootings prove that we need to control guns or ban guns. But someone who loves guns might look at a mass shooting and conclude that we need more guns because good people need to be able to defend themselves against dangerous people. The same event can confirm several wildly different points of view. The people who love guns take it as confirmation that we need more, the people who hate guns take it as confirmation that we need fewer. By the way, I’m not getting into the gun control debate here, that’s not what this is about. That’s just an example. Confirmation bias is really common and I think affects many parts of our lives, and is something we must watch out for as much as possible, e.g. by constantly challenging our own ideas. We often interpret events in the way that suits our worldview. E.g. you can look at footage of the moon landing and be completely convinced that it’s proof that it actually happened, or proof that it didn’t happen, depending on how you feel about the thing in the first place. Everyone is vulnerable to confirmation bias, but especially groups like the flat earth community. One of the reasons I like Jay and Dave is that I think they’re aware of this and to an extent that’s why they brought me onto the podcast, so they’re not just in an echo chamber where everyone is constantly confirming each other’s views without challenging them. Maybe they invited me on because it’s healthy to have some debate. Respect to that. But I’d also like to suggest that they invite properly qualified scientists on their podcast for debates too – not just an English teacher comedian like me who has dabbled in scepticism. Maybe they need to speak to someone who works for a satellite company or a lecturer in astrophysics because that could lead to a genuinely open conversation. Even though they invited me on for a chat and I’m a glober as they put it I think that mostly they’re interested in challenging the round earth theory, and tend to have a very ‘open minded’ attitude to flat earth. ‘I am open minded’ can mean – ‘I am willing to believe this’. Obviously you need to be open to the idea that it’s true, but we have to be careful that ‘open minded’ doesn’t become a state of active confirmation of what we want to be true, for whatever reason. Being ‘open minded’ can be like opening the door to confirmation bias. Flat earthers might say that they’re challenging the round earth model, so they are being good scientists, but what they also do is jump to the conclusion that because the round earth model doesn’t stand up in their eyes, the flat earth model must be true by extension, but this is a whole other idea. Lack of proof for one thing is not proof of something else. E.g. If I’m trying to work out what my mum is going to cook for dinner and I can’t prove that my Mum is going to make chicken, it doesn’t logically mean it’ll definitely be fish. We just can’t be sure it’s chicken.
Unreliable evidence, false premises, unreliable sources or being unable to account for where evidence has come from. Some of the evidence which flat earthers propose is (I think) quite shaky and forms the basis of lots of other assumptions. If the foundation of your idea is shaky at the start, the logical steps from that point are likely to go in the wrong direction, ending up in a false conclusion. E.g. constructing a house on uneven ground. It might look straight at the beginning, but by the time the whole house is built, it could end up really wonky and even unsafe to live in. The roof might fall off or something. The foundation has to be absolutely solid.
The grey area between evidence and speculation First of all, talking about evidence – some of it shaky in the first place, and then moving seamlessly into speculation about things and those speculations becoming ‘theories’ which are considered to be as valid as other ‘theories’ such as gravity. E.g. Deciding that the earth must be flat because you don’t see how the round earth model can work, and then assuming that Antarctica is the limit of our world, and then speculating about what is beyond Antarctica. E.g. “It must be…”
Relying on first hand evidence – eg. human experience or what you see with your own eyes), or considering first-hand evidence to be the best, when actually it’s perhaps the worst kind of evidence. First hand experience as evidence is often the least reliable – e.g. the earth doesn’t look round to me. Why are the bottoms of clouds flat? The earth must be flat too. Why can’t we see the curvature on the horizon? Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there. Often we just don’t know what we’re looking at.
Jumping to conclusions – e.g. Some NASA photos of the earth are fake, therefore they’re all fake. Some scientists are motivated mainly by money or status, therefore they all are. Governments lie to their people and there is corruption, therefore they are lying about this.)
Cherry picking of evidence – Making the evidence fit the theory. e.g. picking out certain statements by scientists that seem to support the theory (e.g. moments when NASA astronauts say something that seems like a moment of truth – e.g. that they faked some pictures of the earth) So when the accounts seem to suit the flat earth theory NASA are leaking the truth, but when it doesn’t suit the theory NASA can’t be trusted.
For example, one of the arguments is – the NASA pictures of earth are fake. The reasoning is, that one NASA photographer admitted to using Photoshop to create a composite image of the earth from space, therefore this is proof that all NASA’s photos are fake. It’s true that some NASA pictures are made up – I mean, they are compositions made from a number of pictures, arranged together in Photoshop – because it’s hard to get a good-looking picture of the earth – it’s very big and you need to be quite far away from it to get a decent picture, so it’s necessary to take a bunch of photos, stitch them together and add layers of colour etc. So some NASA pics might be photoshopped, but this doesn’t mean that the earth is not round. It just means that some photos have been ‘edited’. This is cherry picking the evidence, or jumping to conclusions. E.g. some photos are fake therefore they’re all fake therefore the earth can’t be round.
Bad-faith representations of evidence. I don’t want to say ‘dishonest presentation of evidence’ because it might not be intentional to misrepresent something, it might just be confirmation bias that leads people to do this. E.g. presenting something as evidence of flat earth that isn’t really. E.g. mis-quoting someone, or quoting someone out of context and then using that as proof that they said the earth was flat, or presenting an old map that was created to help calculate time differences around the world and which appears to present a flat earth model, but it wasn’t designed originally as a flat earth map, it’s just a 2D representation, and presenting that as evidence of flat earth is to distort the original purpose of that map.
“If it’s old it’s true” – e.g. suggesting that ancient civilisations, medieval engravings, old buddhist texts or old maps seemed to show the earth was flat. Just because it’s old, doesn’t make it true. Quite the opposite probably.
Lack of evidence for one thing works as proof for something else. E.g. We can’t prove the earth is round, therefore it’s flat. E.g. I can’t prove that there is no afterlife, but it doesn’t mean that there is an afterlife, it just means that I can’t prove it. Lack of proof for one thing doesn’t give proof to something else.
Other fallacies of that nature: e.g. Einstein said that it was impossible to prove in a mechanical way that the earth is round, and that only theoretical or mathematical models could do it (which I think should be verified anyway). Therefore, the earth isn’t round. Or because only mathematical theories can be used to explain earth’s shape, all abstract theories become valid too, including the speculations that we’re making up.
Treating speculations as theories, or mixing up the words hypothesis and theory.A hypothesis is either a suggested explanation for an observable phenomenon, or a reasoned prediction of a possible causal correlation among multiple phenomena. But, a theory is a tested, well-substantiated, unifying explanation for a set of verified, proven factors. So, speculations about the shape of the earth are not theories until they have been really stringently tested again and again.
Not understanding the maths. – It’s quite possible that flat earthers don’t have the expert level of mathematical knowledge to understand the subject, and neither do I by the way – so I’m subject to this too. Now, either the mathematical theories are just wrong and the earth can’t be round, or these guys just don’t really understand the maths. Which one is more likely?
Trust and the belief in deception. A lot of this comes down to whether you trust ideas which you haven’t seen yourself, and when you believe there is a deception or a conspiracy going on. When you decide that there’s deception going on, it’s easy to just discount certain evidence as fake or part of the deception. E.g. “I think the earth is flat. Come on, prove that it isn’t. How about pictures of the earth? They’re fake. Satellites? Fake. International space station? Fake. But my brother went into space and saw it for himself. He’s been brainwashed, or he’s part of the conspiracy.” Perhaps these things are fake, or maybe it’s just a way to block out the evidence that disproves your theory. In the end, the conspiracy or the idea of a deception becomes a sort of tool (or maybe a trap) that erases the evidence that disproves your theory. The conspiracy is almost impossible to disprove because it relies on the assumption that information is being kept from us. We can only speculate on who is part of this conspiracy, and these speculations are presented as evidence, but where the hell is the information coming from?
As I said, some of those points could be applied to my position too, or any position including scientific ones. These are issues that anyone faces when attempting to argue a complex position. Conventional scientists are subject to things like confirmation bias and other issues too, but that doesn’t mean that all conventional or mainstream science has to be rejected completely.
A Question of Trust
I think it comes down to a question of trust. Do you trust what you’re told? And who do you trust? NASA scientists or Dave and Jay? Your own senses? Or the complex things that we’re told by various scientists and teachers.
If you listen to this episode of the flat earth podcast, let me know what you think. It’s quite long – we talked and talked for ages and we could have gone on much longer, but there’s no end to this debate when we’re essentially discussing the nature of truth and reality. But let me know what you think if you listen to it, and I’ll let you make up your own mind about the shape of the earth.
One thing I’d like to ask from you though – if you consider making a comment on Dave and Jay’s episode, please be respectful and friendly. Dave and Jay were both very polite to me and I think it’s only fair that we return the same courtesy to them, even if you really don’t agree with their position. As I said, one of the things I liked about this experience was that we were friendly and civil with each other and I want to keep it that way.
Also, Dave, Jay and Jeran – if any of you are listening to this, I’m sorry that I haven’t been converted to the flat earth position yet – but who knows I might change my mind if I feel like it’s really what’s going on, and I hope you feel I’ve been fair because I’ve made an effort to be.
At the end of the day (or at any time of the day) whatever the shape of the earth, we still have to go to work every day, still have to pay the bills, we still fall in love, we make friends, we laugh about stupid things and we look after our loved ones, and I think we all have these things in common.
Thanks for listening to this and reading it too, and if you’re a flat earther – Do you fancy a pint? Let’s go to the pub and have a friendly chat about it all. I’ll buy you a drink, how about that? In fact, if you’re not a flat earther you’re welcome too. Let’s all go to the pub and have a drink and some peanuts, and if the night goes well we could end up in karaoke. I’ll sing “Around the World” by Daft Punk (it’s easy) and you can sing Man on the Moon by REM.
The second part of my conversation with my friend Moz, this time covering subjects such as podcasting vs YouTube, bathing naked in a Japanese spa, sharing personal information online (like a story of bathing naked in a Japanese spa), the role of artificial intelligence & social media, murdering mosquitoes and meeting a crack addict on the streets of London. Vocabulary list and quiz available below.
Hi everyone, Here’s the second part of my conversation with my friend Moz that was recorded a few weeks ago.
After talking about murder in the last episode, Moz and I kept talking for about another 45 minutes, just rambling on and going off on a few tangents and you can listen to that conversation in this episode as part of your ongoing mission to improve your English by listening to real conversations that actually happened, between actual people who actually said some actual things and actually recorded them and uploaded them for you to actually listen to.
Things that we actually talked about (in the form of questions)
What goes into making and publishing a podcast?
Who is my audience and where are they (that’s you)?
What’s it like to meet members of my audience?
What’s the difference between doing audio podcasts and making videos for YouTube?
Should native speakers adapt their speech when talking to non-native speakers of English?
Does the word ‘cack’ in English relate to similar words in other languages?
What does ‘cack’ mean? (it means poo, by the way)
How much of our personal information should we be sharing online?
How much of my personal information should I be sharing in episodes of this podcast?
Should you post pictures of your children on social media?
What are the effects of social media and artificial intelligence on our lives? How might this change in the future?
How could you fight against a robot invasion using an umbrella and software updates?
How much do we hate mosquitoes and what happens when you kill them?
and
How can you identify different drug addicts that you might meet on the streets of London, just based on how they smell?
I think they all sound like perfectly good questions for discussion, don’t you? I can even imagine some of them cropping up in the speaking section of a Cambridge English exam. Some of them. Maybe not the one about cack, or the one about drug addicts, but who knows?
Listen on to find out how we talk about all of those points.
If you’re a vocabulary hunter, check the page for this episode on my website because there you’ll find a list of words and phrases that come up in this conversation.
That list is available in order to help you to use this episode to expand your vocabulary and to develop a more natural form of English.
There is a bit of rude language and some slightly graphic content in this conversation. Just to let you know…
But now it’s time for you to hear the rest of my chat with Moz.
And here we go.
Vocabulary List
These days I’m a lot more devoted to it than I used to be
When the inspiration struck me
I try to be a bit more organised and rigorous about it
There are some teachers on YouTube who are getting phenomenal views
There are also various young, hip, fresh-faced YouTubers
I’m sticking with podcasting because it works for me
Technology has moved on so fast that we can do these things ourselves
A digital SLR with a boom mic attached to it (or a shotgun mic)
Those are the ingredients for making a hit youtube channel
Libsyn is my hosting site and I’m about to sign up with iTunes
I had to replace all of the embedded players on my website
A ‘hell of a lot of stuff’ that had to be done
Libsyn have various different filters that they applyto the data
The internet is basically this huge network with all these different sub-stations
My podcast is big in Wisconsin. It is the home of Ed Gein, the murderer
A lot of internet servers are based in that part of America
There’s some sort of internet sub-station or routing station in Virginia
If people are using VPNs or proxy servers that counts as coming from the USA
I’m trying to use an element of scepticism when I’m reading my stats
Lots of people are getting my podcast from bit-torrenting sites
I tell you what, a good way of working out how many listeners you get…
Every now and then someone comes out of the woodwork
I used to have the word ‘whittle (down)’ in my tour
You get a piece of wood but you slowly etch away pieces of wood to make it into something else
People whittle a stick down to a spike or something
You whittle the evidence down until you get the bare bones of the case
It’s helped me work out the kind of phrases that only English people use
Some aspects of our pronunciation or idioms are a barrier to the global community
Communication is a two-way street
I’ve just come away from dog-sitting with my brother [your brother is a dog??]
They were brummie (from Birmingham)
Their brummie was so strong that I couldn’t understand my own language
It was only when she came nearer that I could grasp what she was talking about
Do you curb your language, or do you hone the way that you speak on this podcast?
If they’re not careful they swing too far in the other direction and it becomes unnatural
It’s a balancing act between trying to be understandable and trying to be natural
“Oui, oui” = “yes, yes” in French
Wee wee = unrine (pee pee in French)
Poo poo = excrement
“Caca” = “poo” in French
Cack (another English word for poo)
Input = just the language you hear when listening
Intake = the language you are really focusing on when listening
The more personal they (podcasts) are, the more I get engaged
Stiff upper lip and all that, hopefully the lip will be the only thing that’s stiff
The pianist stops playing
I felt like everyone broke off their conversations
Naked guys lounging around, chatting
The first guy who walks past me is a midget
It did occur to me to check him out and see if it was in proportion
I don’t necessarily want to open up the doors of my house
We don’t really want to post lots of pictures of the baby on Facebook
She has remained true to her word
…
How much of the vocabulary can you remember from the list?
Take the quiz below to find out. Not all the vocabulary is in the quiz, just a selection.
My friend Moz, who runs a murder-themed tour company in London, is back on the podcast to talk about some more creepy stories of crimes from London’s history and his new podcast. Vocabulary list and quiz available below.
Moz (aka Michael Buchanan-Dunne) has appeared on the podcast a number of times before, for example in the Brighton Fringe Festival episodes, the drunk episode, the episode recorded on Moz’s narrowboat and also the episode from last year called “Murder Mile Tours”.
If you haven’t heard those episodes, let me bring you up to speed as it might help you understand some of the things we talk about in this conversation.
I first met Moz and made friends with him about 8 years ago while doing stand-up comedy in London.
He used to work for the BBC, making comedy television programmes, but then a few years ago he decided to set up a tourism company and bought a narrowboat which he now lives on. Narrowboats are boats that can be used on the UK’s canal system. They’re long and narrow and they’re boats, hence the name “narrowboats”.
Moz now lives on his boat which he usually moors at different locations throughout London’s canal network (there are lots of canals running through London).
He also runs a successful tour company in London, called “Murder Mile Tours”.
His most popular tour is called the “Murder Mile Walk” which currently takes place in Soho in central London every week. The walk takes in various sites where murders have actually occurred. Some of those murders were the work of serial killers and they all have gruesome stories connected with them, stories which Moz has painstakingly researched by looking up lots of archived material including court records from courtrooms in London.
Last year I invited him onto the podcast to tell us some of those stories. That proved to be one of the most downloaded episodes of the podcast last year. Since then his tours have gone from strength to strength – not directly a result of being on this podcast of course, although that has helped because quite a lot of LEPsters have been on the murder mile walk with Moz, no, the tour seems to be going really well because it seems really fun, it’s original, the stories are fascinating, and the tour has had loads of 5 star reviews on Trip Advisor.
In fact just recently Murder Mile Tours received a TripAdvisor certificate of excellence, which is a really great achievement. TripAdvisor describe it as one of the 150 best things to do in London and Time Out Magazine described it as one of the top 3 themed tours in the city.
Now Moz has decided to start up his own podcast in which he will regularly share some of the stories he has discovered while doing his research. His podcast, called “The Murder Mile True Crime Podcast” will be available from 1 October (you’ll be able to find it on iTunes – or just check https://www.murdermiletours.com/podcast).
So, I’ve invited Moz to come back onto the podcast to talk about all of this.
Moz and I are friends, so this isn’t just an interview, it’s also a light-hearted informal conversation and a chance for the two of us to catch up on each other’s personal news and just have a bit of fun while we’re doing it, and you are invited to join us.
You should know that this episode contains some graphic content and explicit language
including some fairly detailed descriptions of violence and murder
and some other things that you might find disturbing or disgusting.
I feel I should let you know that in advance, just in case you’re squeamish and you don’t like that sort of thing – but to be honest the content of this episode is no worse than what you would see in the average episode of a TV show like CSI or Game of Thrones.
But still – there are some creepy and gruesome details in this episode, so – you have been warned.
By the way, if you’re interested in some of the items of vocabulary that you can hear in this conversation, you should check out the page for this episode on my website. You’ll see a list of words and phrases there which you learn in order to add real strength and depth to your English.
OK so here is part one of my conversation with Moz, the guy from Murder Mile Tours.
Vocabulary List
“Sacre bleu!” (French – used to express surprise or amazement)
“There’s lovely” (this is what Welsh people apparently say a lot – it means “that’s nice”)
“Zoot alors!” (an old-fashioned French phrase – it’s used to express surprise, shock etc)
More excuses for my lack of improvement in French. [absence of]
I’ve got to pull my socks up, pull my finger out and turn over a new leaf. [all these phrases are ways of saying “improve my attitude and approach”]
I don’t have long to get the French up to scratch. [improve it to an acceptable level]
Rutting [when animals, such as deer, have sex – but also when the male deer fight with each other during the mating season]
“During the ruttingseason the male boars have terrible mating battles”
It’s a scratchyhowl [a howl is the sound an animal makes – usually a dog or wolf at night, e.g. ‘to howl at the moon’. ‘Scratchy’ describes the rough sound of the howl]
Foxes, when they’re mating, make a high-pitched scream which sounds like someone being murdered
I’m not registered for council tax [tax you pay when you live in a house or flat]
I’ve got a P.O. Box [a post office box where you can have post delivered if you don’t have a fixed address]
I’m not condoning mass murder [promoting it, saying I agree with it]
The police had sectioned off the walkway [used plastic tape to prevent people from accessing that part of the walkway]
Someone may commit suicide and the body floats down (the canal) [commit suicide = kill yourself / float = not sink, but stay on the surface of the water]
Grisly details [unpleasant, involving death or violence]
People think that a canal is a good place to dispose of a body [to get rid of a dead person]
The canal has been used for dumping rubbish, but also corpses [dumping = throwing away, getting rid of, disposing / corpses = dead bodies]
They decided to take this guy’s card and start withdrawing money [taking money out of the bank]
The culprits were found guilty of ‘denial of a proper burial’ [culprits = people who committed a crime / ‘denial of a proper burial’ = a criminal charge which is given in a court – it means when someone didn’t bury a dead person properly, or perhaps didn’t dispose of the body in the legal way]
That was the main charge that they could definitely pin on them [a statement by prosecutors in court that someone committed a crime]
Eastenders is a soap opera that’s been on TV for years [a TV drama which is about ordinary people, shown on television on a regular basis]
“My auntie’s brother’s sister left me 10% of this pub in her will!” [a will = a document which explains who should receive someone’s property when they die]
He smoked skunk all the time [a strong and smelly form of marijuana]
He had an argument with her, killed her, chopped up the body [cut the body into pieces] and then wrapped up [put inside a sheet or some clothing] her limbs [arms and legs] and her torso [the body, but without the arms or legs], put them in a suitcase and dumped [threw away, disposed of] them in the canal
He bought loads of bin bags [bags for rubbish] and saws [tools for cutting something up]
Things got out of hand, they had an argument [things got out of control]
He dragged her down to the canal [pulled her along the ground]
The suitcase floated for about two miles [didn’t sink]
Poking out of the top of the suitcase was hair [you could see part of it coming out of the top of the suitcase]
I like having a good poke around [looking and investigating, perhaps by looking into something and moving things around] different streets and digging into [going deep into something] murders
Most murders are just men having fights, but occasionally you come across [find] a really good one
Don’t worry, we’re hung over! [feeling sick because they drank alcohol the night before]
I was a cannibal, [someone who eats human flesh] I’d eaten my girlfriend and her body was slowly working its way through my bowel (yuk!) [moving slowly through the lower part of the digestive system] yuk yuk!
It was one of the darkest jokes I’ve ever pulled off [managed to succeed bit it was difficult]
It didn’t get a laugh it just got a gasp [a shocked sound when people breathe in suddenly
😱] and for me that was enough
It certainly got the evening off to a different start [to get something off to a start = to make something start]
Often the murderers are like slapstick movie idiots [a form of comedy involving funny physical movements, like people falling over or hitting each other]
Can you remember the vocabulary in the list?
Were you listening carefully? Take the quiz to find out.
I was on the RealLife English Podcast and we talked about why I became an English teacher, doing James Bond impressions and also comedy & how to use humour in learning English. You can listen to it here. More details about Real Life English below. Enjoy!
Last week I was featured in an episode of the Real Life English podcast and I just wanted to share it with you here on my website.
RealLife English is an online community with a mission to inspire, empower, and connect the world through English, both online and in-person.
It’s run by three English teachers, Justin (USA), Ethan (USA) and Chad (Australia) and they do a podcast, write blog articles, create YouTube videos and also host an online community for social learning. A lot like LEP, they believe in teaching English to the world in a fun, personal and inspiring way.
Recently I spoke to Ethan on the Real Life English podcast (and also recorded an episode of LEP) and we talked about lots of things, including British & American comedy shows, and how to use humour (and alcohol) in learning English. Listen to it above, or on the Real Life English website. I’m sure they’d appreciate some comments from friendly LEPsters.
I’ll be speaking to Ethan in an episode of LEP soon. You can look forward to that in the next few weeks.
The final part of the holiday diary series. This one is about visiting the Navajo Nation, meeting some Navajo people, seeing more natural wonders at Monument Valley and The Grand Canyon, a couple of film recommendations our experience of the solar eclipse and a few more anecdotes about the rest of our road trip.
So here is the final episode in this series about the things I saw and did on my summer holiday this year. I’ve tried to make this more than just a description of a holiday. It’s also been a chance for me to talk about some topics that I hope are as interesting for you as they were for me when I found out about them.
In the last episode I talked to you about our road trip around the so-called Grand Staircase – a huge area of land where about 2 billion years’ worth of rock are exposed by tectonic activity and erosion, creating canyons and rock formations that are awe-inspiring but also revealing of the earth’s geological history.
In this episode I’d like to bring the series to a close by telling you a few more anecdotes and describing the rest of the trip.
Then, after this episode we’ll be back to normal podcasting with some upcoming episodes featuring conversations with guests.
So, after visiting Zion and Bryce Canyons in Utah in the last episode, we drove South East and across the state border into Arizona and also crossed into the area known as the Navajo Nation Reservation – an area of land that includes parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico.
I already knew a few things about native Americans, or American Indians, or just the Navajo tribe, but I sort of hadn’t realised we would be entering their territory and staying there for a few days.
In fact, I didn’t even really know that the Navajo Nation existed.
I knew a bit about the Navajo. I knew that many Indians were moved from the areas they used to inhabit onto reservations in the 19th century.
I knew that many Indian tribes like the Navajo had been forced, in the late 1800s, by the US army to move onto reservations, which in many cases were basically just prisons on inhospitable land, just because the United States government didn’t really know what else to do with them and which, by today’s standards, would be considered a violation of basic human rights.
I also knew that the Navajo’s population had been decimated by these changes and that this was the same story with many Indian tribes across the country.
But I didn’t realise that the Navajo had been given a whole area of land – much bigger than their original reservation, that they could govern themselves, with their own elected president and other official posts.
It’s worth saying a few things about the Navajo Nation because I learned some stuff I didn’t know before.
They’re a sovereign nation with their own elected President.
The land which includes parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah is about 27,000 square KM – and on that land you can find various sites of great cultural and spiritual significance to the Navajo. There are over 300,000 people living there.
So, for a few days we were living on Navajo land and met quite a lot of Navajo people who work in the hotels, restaurants and as tour guides to some of the natural monuments.
These days the Navajo are modern people of course, and they don’t live exactly like their ancestors did but the brief bits of contact I had with some of them was interesting. It was really cool for me to chat with some people, particularly a tour guide we met at Antelope Canyon and just realise that although our ancestors were worlds apart (mine would have been English families raised as Anglican Christians in towns in the North of England, theirs lived on this land and hunted for deer and fish, lived in earthen houses called Hogans, fought with the US army) – so although our great grandparents lived utterly different lives, we shared some surprising things in common.
A Short history of the Navajo
They used to live in the Arizona area – living on and the land in simple wood and earth structures, hunting for animals, performing their rituals, living by their beliefs in the importance of living in harmony with the supernatural powers of nature, but as settlers from Europe began moving west and populating more and more land, they clashed with the Navajo, making life difficult for the settlers and prospectors moving through, so they were forced by the American government and the US army to move 300 miles to the east into New Mexico, and they had to walk there, in winter. Everyone. Hundreds of them died on the way and generally the population was nearly wiped out by the general upheaval – the consequences of the move, and the way their whole way of life became severely limited and impossible, by the way they were treated and their reduction in population is now often referred to as a genocide.
It wasn’t until much later, that the remaining Navajo were not only allowed to go back to their land, and claim it again, but they were allowed to govern themselves.
Essentially, during that period of western expansion, native people were considered less than human and were treated that way. Many Indians were killed or simply left to die.
They were just not included in the grand narrative of western expansion that built the USA of the modern age, despite being the original American people. Usually the American Indians are just represented as savage bad guys in western movies, although this has changed in the last few decades when their stories have been told more respectfully.
Also I learned that the Navajo played a really important part in World War 2. When the US was at war with Japan after Pearl Harbour, one of the most important things for the US navy was being able to communicate secretly. They created loads of codes, but the Japanese codebreakers were so clever and sophisticated that pretty much any code the Americans came up with got broken, and this was costing the US army a lot of lives. In the end, they employed bilingual Navajo people to create a code based on the Navajo language, and it was incredibly effective. The Japanese couldn’t break the code because of the nature of the Navajo language. Many words in Navajo can have multiple meanings but it depends how they are pronounced, using different tones. Some words can mean 4 totally different things depending on the tone used when saying them. I suppose in that way it’s like Mandarin Chinese or other tonal languages.
The Navajo people employed by the government to translate messages into code, based on their language, are known as the Navajo Code Talkers and they have been recognised as heroes and given numerous awards by the US government.
It’s a fascinating story of how this American Indian tribe suddenly became vital to American interests and greatly helped the country win the war.
We met a few native people while we were there and I wondered what life is like for them and how they feel they fit into life in the US.
They seem like nice people (but who knows) with a sense of humour. I mean, they could be vindictive and bitter, but they don’t seem to be. In fact the people we met seemed to be quite level-headed and humourous. I think the fact that they govern themselves helps to give them a sense of pride and independence.
Being in this part of the world, seeing the different landscapes and people, this made me think of some films – these are often my reference points because I’ve watched a lot of films over the years.
The Outlaw Josey Wales – Chief Dan George (not a Navajo but an interesting scene)
One particular film I thought of is The Outlaw Josey Wales – directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. It’s about a civil war fugitive who is running from the Union army. At the start of the film he’s a peaceful farmer, but soldiers come and burn his house down, and kill his wife and child. He’s so consumed by revenge that he becomes an outlaw – a sort of avenging ghost (the typical Clint Eastwood western character) and on his way he sort of picks up these odd group of companions and it becomes something of an unconventional family. It was filmed in some of the locations that we visited, and there’s an Indian character in the movie played by an Indian actor called Chief Dan George. The actor isn’t Navajo and neither is his character – his character is a Cherokee – but the Cherokee experienced similar displacement to the Navajo, and they were ordered to walk hundreds of miles away from their land into reservations where and it basically destroyed their whole way of life – a way of life that had developed over many many years and was in harmony with the land, the wildlife and the natural environment in general.
There’s one scene in the film when this character played by Chief Dan George mentions the trail of tears and how him and other members of his tribe actually went to Washington to meet with the Secretary of the Interior to negotiate. They were all proud and wore suits and hats like Abraham Lincoln – because they were naive, but they were simply told to “endeavour to persevere” which basically means “just try to survive”. They were basically told “nope, we’re not going to help you, we’re still moving you into reservations, you’ll just have to try to survive”. The Indian chiefs went away thinking they had achieved something because the language sounded so respectful and important and because they’d been impressed by the posh surroundings in Washington. It wasn’t until later that they thought about those words “Endeavour to persevere” and realised that nothing had changed and they were being left in appalling conditions with nothing other than “try to survive” from Washington – on reservations built on land that wouldn’t yield anything for them. Once they’d thought about it, they declared war on the Union.
I like this scene because Dan George delivers the story with dry humour. It’s funny but also a bit tragic. It’s also a chance to hear English spoken by an American Indian.
Context: Chief Dan George’s character emerges from his home because he thinks someone is approaching. In fact it’s Clint Eastwood’s character just moving through the area. Dan George (Lone Watie) emerges from the house, trying to get an edge (an advantage) on the intruder but Clint’s character manages to sneak up on him. Then he talks about how the white man has been sneaking up on him and his tribe for years. Then he talks about the frock coat he’s wearing – the same coat he wore when he went to Washington, and a top hat like Abraham Lincoln used to wear. Then he tells the story of meeting the Secretary of the Interior and being told to endeavour to persevere.
“Indians vow to ‘Endeavor to Persevere'”
It’s a great performance by Chief Dan George and shows dignity, sadness and humour.
It’s hard not to see the irony when you see Americans today on Twitter complaining about immigrants coming and stealing their land and not assimilating to the culture.
Saw horseshoe bend – a huge natural bend in a river.
Lower Antelope Canyon (more pics at the bottom of the page)
(Not looking directly at the sun, by the way)
Video (below) – an example of a Flash flood – the sort of thing that created Antelope Canyon with erosion (this is a scene from 127 Hours, not actually filmed at Antelope Canyon, but just an example of a flash flood)
The tour company is run by the Navajo.
Examples of their dry sense of humour.
We arrived for our 12.20 tour about 30 minutes early because we thought there would be crowds.
We noticed that quite a lot of the tourists were being quite rude with the staff – just being a bit impolite and demanding, which is a pity.
In fact I noticed that the couple in front of us, who weren’t very nice, were demanding to go on the 11.50 tour when theirs was at 12.20 because there wasn’t an air conditioned waiting room (everyone was waiting in the shade in a covered waiting area) but the girl behind the counter told them that there was no space on the 11.50 tour and they just had to wait.
Sure, there wasn’t an air conditioned room, but this particular bit of land is not supposed to have lots of buildings on it and after all this is the desert, what did you expect, etc etc.
It was our turn and we made an effort to be nice.
“Hello! We’ve got a canyon tour booked”
Which tour?
12.20
It’s already gone, sorry.
My wife: What??
The girl just had a straight face.
Then I realised she was joking.
No, I’m just joking, ha ha. You can join the 11.50 one if you want.
I have some time for that attitude. I’ve worked in bars, restaurants, shops, lots of customer service positions. You have to have a sense of humour because people can treat you so badly and they feel that they can be so rude to you.
Meeting Brian Yazzie our tour guide
We were joined by a group of about 10 tourists.
I think that people might be at their worst when in tourist groups. I don’t know why, but groups of tourists can act so rudely, pushing in front of each other, showing no respect to the guide, showing no deference to the incredibly significant monument which they are visiting and also doing stupid and dangerous things – like leaning over cliffs to take selfies or wandering off the path to take photos and stepping on a snake or being stung by a scorpion or something.
Brian dealt with all of this by using some seriously dry humour
Brian’s funny jokes
Can’t remember them? He told us 11 people had been bitten by snakes this week, that a woman fell off a ladder and you can still see the bloodstains if you look carefully, and he also said “travelling thousands of miles to walk through some cracks in the ground, kind of crazy right?”
He knew Penn & Teller and even Derren Brown.
Videos of Brian on YouTube
Some sleight of hand card magic inside Antelope Canyon
Brian tries some tricks on a few French tourists
The chimneys you see in the background of that video are the local power station which provides the whole area (and other states) with electricity. It’s part-owned by the Navajo.
As we were walking to the canyon he told us that his Grandmother used to say that you shouldn’t go down there, because it’s “the home of the winds”.
“So this is sacred ground?” I asked him.
“My grandma thought so”.
“Well, I’m sure everyone appreciates the beauty of it.” I said, but I couldn’t help feeling like we shouldn’t be walking there.
But Brian seemed ok with it.
Monument Valley
Monument Valley in the film Fort Apache
Hotel is run by the Navajo.
It has views of the valley and the big rock formations.
It’s also a trading post and a place to eat.
It’s quite neatly built into a piece of high ground at the end of the canyon. It doesn’t stand out too much.
Each room has a view of the valley and there’s a big terrace with full views.
Incredible views. Describe the view.
Again, mad abstract shapes on a clear blue and rust coloured background.
Shadows stretching out across hundreds of metres of land. Amazing huge monoliths with faces in them and old names given by the Navajo.
Sunset.
Movie on the wall with view from our room. We sat, ate our packed dinner and watched the film.
It was called Fort Apache – directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne and Henry Fonda. It features scenes filmed in Monument Valley.
In fact, Monument Valley is famous for being in westerns.
It was amazing to watch the film and then literally turn your head and see the exact same environment just there in front of you.
Also, it was interesting to me that the Navajo chose to screen the film, because usually westerns present rather a bad image of Native Americans as the bad guys.
But this one was different. It was made just after WW2 and the general tone of it is about how foolish leadership and the so-called glory of war usually just leads good young men to die and how the American military misunderstood the complex culture of the native Americans and also underestimated their military strength.
The natives are presented as brave, civilised and great strategists.
All the native American parts (Apache indians) are played to great effect by local Navajo, and the end of the film sees them defeat a garrison of American soldiers.
So it’s pretty clear why the locals like the film. And it’s a really good one. John Ford was a masterful director.
That night, like most nights out in the desert we couldn’t sleep. Not because of jet-lag but I think because we’re quite blown away by all the stimulation. It’s quite hard to take it all in!
So, that night we both lay in our bed trying to sleep, but feeling wide awake, with this incredible and powerful landscape just outside the window.
In the morning we drove down into the valley to see the huge monoliths a bit closer. Again, there were lots of faces and forms seemed to be in the rocks as you look at them. You can imagine how the native Americans must have stared at these rocks and seen all sorts of visions in them.
They are truly inspiring places.
Out of the Navajo Nation and into the national parks again.
The Grand Canyon
We drive there just before sunset and get to see some incredible early sights of the canyon.
It is just the biggest thing I’ve ever seen.
(A small corner of) The Grand Canyon
From you to the horizon, a huge network of different canyons, jutting rocks, cracks diving deep into rivers down below.
Imagine seeing 300 canyons all at the same time, all part of one much larger one which bends around the corner. It’s like that.
Saw the sunset and driving home catch views of elk by the side of the road.
Insomnia
We couldn’t sleep (again).
I felt a million and one thoughts come to me while I was lying there wide awake.
Some thoughts were my fears and my worries. My whole life flashing before my eyes.
You know when you can’t sleep and your mind insists on playing back some memories…
But also thoughts of positivity and joy about the future.
…
It’s weird how sometimes when you can’t sleep your mind just takes off and you have to hold on for the ride. You know when you can’t sleep and your mind races around to different things, and you just can’t stop it? You really want to just sleep and switch off, but you can’t. Normally you have ordinary things to deal with that occupy, like remembering to iron your shirt in the morning and dealing with little work-related problems and things like that.
But being away from it all, your thoughts become untethered.
Basically, it’s called “taking stock” and this is what we often do on holiday isn’t it?
I reflected and tried to work things out somehow, while also just trying to get a good night’s sleep.
For example, I am trying to stop worrying about small things because they’re just small things…
I can get quite caught up on details and I can blow small concerns out of proportion. I can make mountains out of molehills, just like we all do, and that causes anxiety and so on. We all do it, right?
But we can’t afford to do that. We can’t put significance onto every little thing. It’s best to let some things slide and to focus on the big stuff. You’ve got to prioritise.
I was also thinking about the whole universe and remembering random episodes from my life, and thinking about starting a family and what it means, also thinking about this podcast and how I’m doing it.
Like, what is it that my audience really wants from me and from this podcast? How can I continue to provide the sort of content that will really benefit people while allowing me to pursue the things I want in life?
There were a lot of strands running through my head, man. But I think I worked a few things out.
From the Grand Canyon we drove down into the lower ground of the desert, back towards Las Vegas – where we would take our quick flight back to Los Angeles for the final part of the trip.
We spent a night an unremarkable in a town called Kingman, and the next day set off by car to Vegas.
This day was all about the eclipse.
The Solar Eclipse
I guess you all know what a solar eclipse is.
It’s when the moon passes in front of the sun and fully eclipses it – hiding it for a few moments before the sun reappears again.
Have you ever experienced one?
It’s seriously weird and amazing.
Firstly, seeing these celestial bodies crossing past each other is like a ballet of cosmic proportions.
This is another thing that makes you realise how small you really are in the grand scheme of things.
It’s also extraordinary that this happens.
Some ancient cultures thought they were extremely significant events.
It’s easy to see why. Everything goes dark like it’s night time. The birds stop singing. Animals behave strangely. The sun is like a black dot in the sky with a shining halo around it.
Then everything goes back to normal.
If you didn’t know it was coming, and you already worshipped the sun, you’d undoubtedly read massive significance into it.
It also looks amazing. You’re not supposed to look directly at it of course, because then you’re basically staring right at the sun which will blind you if you do it for long enough. The light will scorch your retinas.
You have to use special filtering glasses to see it, and on the news they were repeatedly telling everyone not to look at the sun because it could blind you.
Trump looked directly at it of course, as we know. I’m not sure why he did that.
Anyway, the eclipse was visible in certain spots along the breadth of the country. On the road to Vegas we didn’t get the full eclipse, just a partial one and we were in the middle of driving to the airport to catch a plane so we didn’t stop to check it out.
But in any case we wouldn’t have been able to see anything because there was cloud cover.
We did experience a murky half light at the time of the eclipse and everything went spooky.
On the journey there were large black clouds collecting in the distance and some lighter cloud cover over our heads. We started fairly early so the sun was quite low in the sky and with the clouds the light was quite dim.
But as the eclipse happened overhead everything went a murky, dark yellow colour, cars put their headlights on. There were freaky flash rainstorms with massive raindrops.
For about 10 minutes there was a strange end of the world type feeling as the darkening sky was lit up by flashes of lightning in the distance and we saw forked lightning striking rock formations up on our left at the top of a shallow canyon.
We came into Vegas and just went straight to the airport. No need to stop there again.
Arriving in LA had a much better car rental experience.
Within minutes we were in the garage choosing our car.
“Which one would you like? A Japanese one? An American? Hatchback or saloon?”
My wife said “The red one”.
That’s her criteria. Colour.
It turned out to be a Chevrolet Cruze and it was a great car. About the size of a Ford Focus and extremely smooth and responsive.
Maybe this is just how it felt after driving a Jeep for a week.
Compared to that this one felt like a sports car.
Topanga Canyon
Topanga is an awesome place.
Along the coastal highway and up into the hills overlooking the coast.
In those hills are leafy little canyons with communities of people who’ve set up their homes on the hillsides. Topanga was a really cool scene to be part of in the early 1970s and lots of musicians hung out in that area writing their songs. This included people like Neil Young and Crosby, Stills & Nash.
I’m particularly a fan of Neil Young and I’d read his autobiography, so I knew a lot of the stories of the music he wrote and recorded here, and I always thought it sounded amazing. A peaceful retreat among oak trees with sunlight shining through the canopy with wood cabins and cafes serving pie and coffee.
It’s still a lot like that.
We stayed in an AirBnB which was basically a single room wooden cabin with a shower. THe place was extremely well put together. Very tasteful and it felt new. Everything was made of oak with a fantastic and huge stove for cooking. I cooked some food there and drank local beer from bottles. We enjoyed hanging around on the deck outside and lying on the sun lounger looking up at the sky through the leaves and branches of the trees.
We only had a couple of days in this peaceful part of LA so we didn’t do a lot, where you can get lunch and watch people surfing.
Generally it was a pleasure to stay in Topanga and we did not want to leave our cabin and come back to reality.
At night there were coyotes outside the cabin. They make a really strange noise – a kind of whooping, howling and whistling that sounds both ridiculous and scary.
One evening we came back at night and as we drove down the driveway to the cabin there were coyotes hanging around outside the door of the cabin.
These are wild dogs, a bit smaller than wolves.
My wife freaked out a bit so I had to go out of the car, open the door of the cabin and then get her in quickly.
I must admit it was a bit offputting when I heard the coyotes go crazy when they could smell me standing just a few metres away and I heard them all running around in the darkness just beyond my vision making a hell of a racket. I kept telling myself that they were more scared than me, but I didn’t fully convince myself.
I rushed my wife into the house and locked the door! Thankfully we both didn’t get eaten alive by wild dogs because, well, that would have been a pity.
That was a bit scary but we had a good laugh about it!
All in all, this holiday was amazing.
Throughout our trip people were polite, friendly, helpful and often interesting and funny.
We saw some really cool stuff, had a chance to enjoy each other’s company as a couple before the arrival of our child.
The trip also took me by surprise a bit. I didn’t expect to be so moved by the things we saw, particularly out in the desert, at those canyons and in the Navajo Nation.
It was a bit emotional too, watching my wife’s belly get bigger, reflecting on things, not sleeping.
It all felt very real at the time and it was a welcome bit of clarity even if it all happened too quickly.
Now I’m back in Paris amongst all my stuff and all the things that keep me tethered on earth and it’s hard to somehow recreate on a podcast how it really felt to be face to face with the hand of nature creating its mysterious art over billions of years.
I’m not sure it’s possible to, in words, recreate the experience of discovering such beauty, wonder and mystery all through the eyes of people who haven’t slept.
In any case, I hope I’ve managed to communicate to you some of how it felt and that you’ve picked up some more English in the process.
You might have been to the same places as me? What were your thoughts?
Thank you for listening to my Holiday Diary series.
In this episode I’m going to continue telling you stories of my recent holiday and there will be descriptions of impressive rocky landscapes, a sort of geology lesson and a brief history of planet earth. Expect plenty of solid descriptive chunks of vocabulary as this holiday diary continues.
In this episode I’m going to continue telling you stories of my recent holiday and there will be descriptions of impressive rocky landscapes, a sort of geology lesson and a brief history of planet earth. Expect plenty of solid descriptive chunks of vocabulary as this holiday diary continues. I think there will be just one more episode to come in this series, and then it will be back to the usual sorts of episodes I do, including a few conversations with some friends of mine as guests.
The first part of the trip was urban. Now it’s all about earth, wind and fire – not the band, but the elements, earth, wind, fire, rocks, stone, water, ice, wood and time.
We drove from Las Vegas on a road trip tour, a loop, in our Jeep, over about 9 or 10 days stopping at various places to stay a night or two and taking in some of the most impressive spectacles of natural beauty I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know about your country – I’m sure that you have some seriously big and impressive locations too. Places that are famous and that take your breath away when you see them. Places and things that I would love to see with my own eyes one day.
In the UK our countryside is absolutely beautiful, but it is generally on a fairly small scale compared to other places – we have rolling hills and stone bridges over babbling rivers – it all seems quite self-contained or cute or something – a bit like The Shire or Hobbiton in Lord of the Rings. Not all of it – we have impressive spots with mountains and lakes and stuff but it doesn’t quite smash your senses like the things we saw in Arizona and Utah.
Every day or two we would be greeted by ever more stunning views as we toured around the border between Utah and Arizona, from Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park to Lake Powell, Horseshoe Bend, Antelope Canyon in the Navajo Nation Territories and finally the Grand Canyon before heading back to Los Angeles via Las Vegas.
America’s National Parks
Think what you like about the USA, I mean, there are plenty of things that aren’t appealing, like.. Pop Tarts – they’re disgusting aren’t they? Say what you like about the country, you can’t deny that it has some truly breathtaking spots of natural beauty.
Thankfully, most of these places were protected by the National Parks project, which was initially set up at the end of the 19th century and then was fully put into force in the early 20th century by the president at the time, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt.
The whole area that we were driving around and visiting basically features canyons and cliffs that form what is known as The Grand Staircase. Imagine a big staircase made out of rock, but it’s all spread out over hundreds of miles. In different locations you can see different layers of rock that are exposed because the rock layers have been uplifted, tilted, and eroded. It’s a series of colourful cliffs stretching between Bryce Canyon (in the north of that area) and the Grand Canyon (in the south, basically). Zion is sort of between the two.
The bottom layer of rock at Bryce Canyon is the top layer at Zion, and the bottom layer at Zion is the top layer at the Grand Canyon. So, in terms of the staircase, Bryce is at the top, then Zion in the middle of the staircase and the Grand Canyon at the bottom.
If you were a massive giant, you could start at the riverbed at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and go up the stair case (some of the stairs are huge plateaus of course and moving across them you can visit places like Lake Powell or Monument Valley, where there are eroded tables, platforms and columns that stick up all around you) and walk up the cliffs, the stairs, and pass through Zion and keep going until you get up to Bryce Canyon at the top. On your walk you would ascend through about 40 identified layers of rock, and about 2000 million years of history. The oldest sedimentary rock at the bottom of the staircase is 2 billion years old. The rock at the top is about 40-30 million years old.
So, driving around the area we were going up and then back down this staircase, travelling through hundreds and hundreds and million of years worth of time as well as hundreds of miles of distance.
This is one of the only places in the world where this much of the earth’s history is exposed to us, and because of that – because so much old rock is exposed in this area, it is one of the most studied geological areas in the world.
These 40 layers of rock are full of evidence that show us what happened in this area in the past, and that allow us to understand a lot about what happened in history – way before humans even existed. The story is told in the rock, including fossils of many dinosaurs.
As well as that, it’s just amazing to look at. The layers of rock have different colours. Some are rust coloured, some yellow, some pink, some white, some grey, some a deep blood red. The different colours are caused by different chemical reactions in the rock – things like the presence of iron which oxidises and changes colour – a bit like the way an old bicycle will go rusty as the metal reacts with the water.
So our entry point into this grand staircase was Zion National Park. We spent a day and a half there and did a fairly easy hike up the side of the canyon to a viewpoint. We were very careful and cautious of course, this time.
Then we drove in a northerly direction to BRYCE CANYON.
Bryce Canyon
Bryce Canyon is the highest point in the grand staircase. We drove up towards an elevated point on one side of the canyon. The usual thing to do there is to drive to the end of this point and then drive back, stopping at certain viewing points on the way.
So at Rainbow point we stopped the car and walked to the edge, where there are barriers and information points and so on.
Imagine standing on the edge of some cliffs and in front of you there’s a huge canyon – a massive area where the ground goes down quite sharply and there are thousands of bits of rock that stick up on top of huge blocks of rock of different colours and they look a bit like huge statues and there are river beds in there at the bottom and trees growing up from the bottom, and big bits of rock that stretch out into the canyon, and way way over on the other side (almost on the horizon) is the other side of the canyon. So you’re standing on the edge of a plateau, it all goes down, and then the plateau continues again way over on the other side. You can see the layers of rock – all different colours.
Now, this is all caused by erosion and the rocks that stick up in the canyon are all really weird shapes. It’s really stunning and weird too. It’s like an alien landscape. I’ll give you some more details in a moment.
At rainbow point we saw a guide explaining all of it and how it fits into the grand staircase.
He was doing a great job of telling the massive story of the place and enthusiastically putting himself into it.
This helped us understand a lot of the geology of the whole area.
I’ve already told you some stuff about the grand staircase, and it’s pretty difficult to explain but I’d like to try and give you some more details of the story of how all of this happened. This is what I understood from the ranger – this guy employed by the park, wearing a green outfit and a wide brimmed hat.
So this is ancient history and geology.
By geology I mean the study of the Earth’s structure, surface, and origins.
So, we’ve had space, we’ve had belief systems, and now the history of the earth itself. I told you I had a lot of stuff to get off my chest in this series of podcasts!
I’m talking about the history of the earth.
A Short History of the Earth (according to the Big Bang Theory)
How about we start right at the start? The Big Bang theory – not the TV show, but the account of how the universe began, which is based on a lot of study and a lot of analysis of evidence and understandings of the way the universe works – the collaborative work of many people over many years, people analysing the evidence, creating hypotheses, testing them, coming up with theories that get adapted and improved and disproved and further changed. The big bang theory is the best we have at the moment.
So, at one point the universe was all compressed into a space about the size of a pin head. All matter that exists now in the universe, all of it was at one point contained in a tiny little spot, a singularity. An extremely high density and high temperature singularity.
Physicists are undecided whether this means the universe began from a singularity, or that current knowledge is insufficient to describe the universe at that time… Detailed measurements of the expansion rate of the universe place the Big Bang at around 13.8 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe. After the initial expansion, the universe cooled sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles, and later simple atoms. Giant clouds of these primordial elements later coalesced through gravity in halos of dark matter, eventually forming the stars and galaxies visible today.(Wikipedia)
This is just what we know today. There’s still a lot we don’t know – like exactly what ‘dark matter’ is. But that’s the point of science – we don’t have to be able to explain it all at once, we’re working it out bit by bit.
So after all that matter came together through gravity and the stars were created (over an incredibly long period of time by the way, and it’s still going on now) earth also formed from matter that was basically left over from when the sun was created – we’re talking about cloud and dust particles containing all the elements that make up the building blocks of everything on earth.
This stuff coalesced into this ball due to the force of gravity. In the early days the earth was very hot and was basically molten lava, and was hit by lots of other lumps of rock that were still flying around the galaxy. A lot of this rock, left over from the sun’s creation still exists in space and is orbiting our sun too. Most of it is in the asteroid belt which is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. There are also loads of asteroids which are not in this belt, just flying around our solar system on different orbits around the sun. We’re pretty sure that one or two of them hit the earth in the past and probably wiped out the dinosaurs – because if a huge asteroid hits the earth it creates an explosion which is like loads of nuclear bombs all going off at the same time, and that tends to make life on earth a little bit tricky, like for example when the sun gets blocked out by dust or when the atmosphere is filled with poisonous gas from the explosion.
One might hit us one day too, which would be pretty bad news as I’m sure you can imagine, but if we’re clever we’d be able to prevent it by sending Bruce Willis up there to blow it up before it hits us.
After earth cooled down, the molten rock on the surface cooled down to become the earth’s crust. THat’s a bit like if you leave some soup out for ages and the top becomes a thick layer and if you leave it out for ages (like you go away travelling for a few months and don’t do the washing up before you leave) eventually it’ll dry out and form a hard crust.
So the surface of the earth was this crust, made up of a number of different plates. It’s not all one single crust, because underneath it’s all still molten rock – you know, because as you go deeper underground eventually it get really hot and ooh magma! Lava is the stuff that spews out of the top of volcanoes. It’s amazing but it’s not very friendly.
So the earth’s crust is made up of a number of plates that sit on top of this magma. On top of these plates you have land with different features. Some of it is covered in grass, some of it is covered in water, some of it is just rock, etc etc.
Different types of rock
Igneous rock – this is the stuff that is formed when magma cools down. Sometimes it cools down when it’s in the ground and sometimes it cools down on the surface after being spewed out of volcanoes as lava.
Metamorphic rock – this is the stuff that is formed when magma cools under the ground but in certain conditions, like when there’s massive amounts of pressure or heat and the rock gets compressed and it changes quite drastically – for example it becomes crystal or the rock has layers of crystal in it. It’s often extremely hard rock and it can be shiny, or striped with layers of crystal in it. E.g. diamond is metamorphic rock because it has changed from pure carbon (or coal – a sedimentary rock) into diamond.
Sedimentary rock – this is the stuff that usually forms on or very near the surface. It’s made of particles of sand, shells, pebbles (little stones) and other fragments of material. Imagine you have a fish bowl with some fish in it and you go away travelling for 3 months and you forget about it. Eventually the water in that fish bowl will get dirty.
First there are the little stones at the bottom, then there might be dust from the room that lands in the water and of course there’s the fish poo and the green algae that might build up inside there and the water gets cloudy and dirty and eventually the fish will probably die (I know it’s a sad story) and over time all that stuff in the water will settle on the bottom of the tank – that’s sediment. Imagine that over millions of years. Now imagine it’s the ocean which is washing over the surface of rocks and eroding them, creating more sand, and also think of all the sediment – sand and little stones that get washed into the ocean from rivers. All that stuff is sediment and it finds its way to the bottom of the ocean and gets compressed.
Oceans or lakes don’t last forever and they sometimes dry out, exposing all the compressed sedimentary rock. That might get blown by winds into big sand dunes, which then eventually compress, or at least the sand that was once at the bottom of the ocean or lake dries out and over time it compresses more until it becomes rock.
This is not just useful for describing types of rock. The word ‘sediment’ is used in other situations too, like we get sediment at the bottom of a bottle of wine sometimes, or in fruit juices – any stuff that has settled at the bottom of liquid.
Also ‘metamorphic’ is in the same word family as ‘metamorphosis’ – the process of when something changes into something else.
e.g.
the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly She had undergone an amazing metamorphosis from awkward schoolgirl to beautiful woman.
(Oxford dictionary)
Igneous – not useful outside this subject. It’s just for rocks, except that it’s formed from the latin ‘ignus’ which means ‘fire’ and from ‘ignus’ you also get the English word ‘ignite’ and that’s a good word. It means ‘start to burn’ or ‘make something start to burn’.
E.g. “Gas ignites very easily”, or “the hot weather made it much more likely that the forest would ignite.”
It can also be used as a metaphor, especially with words like “controversy” or “debate”.
“Donald Trump’s words ignited controversy for the 2nd time this week…”
So that’s igneous rock, metamorphic rock and sedimentary.
Terrible Jokes
I’ve got a (terrible) pun for you.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are on a geology field trip, walking near a lake. Watson spots something interesting and says “Holmes, what kind of rock is this?”
Holmes says “Sedimentary, my dear Watson”.
Rubbish isn’t it. Obviously, it’s because Holmes is famous for saying “Elementary my dear Watson”. It’s a pretty easy joke to adapt.
Holmes and Watson are wondering through a weird alien land where everything is made of chocolate. Watson says “what’s this massive tree with red and yellow sweets on it?”
“M&M tree, my dear Watson.”
I challenge you to come up with a pun for igneous and metamorphic rock…
Anyway…
How do you know what kind of rock is which?
If it’s got little bubbles in it? Igneous
Got some little crystals in it, or some little bits seem shiny? Igneous (e.g. granite – that hard grey rock which is used to build really good quality things – like a really solid good quality wall outside a bank, or an impressive modern monument in the centre of town)
Got some lines or bands in it (not musical bands, unless it’s Dinosaur Jnr, lol) It’s igneous
Has it got fossils in it? Dead animals that got compressed, preserved and petrified? Sedimentary
Sand or pebbles in it? It’s sedimentary
Breaks apart fairly easily? It’s sedimentary
Looks like it was formed in layers? It’s sedimentary
Glassy surface and sharp edges, like flint? ? It’s metamorphic
A big beautiful crystal? It’s metamorphic
Diamonds? It’s mine. It’s fine, just give it to me.
Continuing the story…
The atmosphere in earth is made from gasses that were released from the bubbling cauldron of magma under the surface and which were ejected into the air through volcanoes. All that gas created our atmosphere and we’re lucky in that this combination of gasses is just right for sustaining life.
So all the land and sea and all that stuff is on the surface of these tectonic plates. All the land masses on the top which are exposed above the water layer – these are the continents, countries, islands etc. Now, the tectonic plates under the ground move around all the time – very slowly from our perspective, but they do move over time.
Let’s say that at one point the countries we all live on were in different positions, because the tectonic plates that underpin everything on earth were in different places.
The land on top of those plates is made up of the outpourings of volcanoes and also layers of sedimentary rock which is the result of erosion of different kinds. Rock that is spewed out of volcanoes gets eroded over time and the sediments are carried into the ocean or lakes from glaciers at the top of mountains down through rivers and out into the sea.
The sediments then become sand at the bottom of oceans and lakes.
There was a big ocean over these parts of the USA many many millions of years ago. That ocean dried up in the sun and revealed the sediments at the bottom.
The part of the USA where Bryce Canyon is located now has occupied different points of latitude over the years. Basically, that area in Arizona used to be further south. At one point it was equatorial (on the equator), and as the tectonic plates shifted the continent moved and it went north and became sub-equatorial, which is that part just above or below the equator (above in this case) that tends to be super hot and dry – deserts like the Sahara are sub-equatorial.
As this ocean dried up and the sandy sediment was exposed to the sun in sub-equatorial conditions like that it became a huge desert covered with sand dunes being blown around by the wind.
Those dunes built up and up and over millions of years the pressure of their own weight solidified them into sandstone rock.
The heat of the sun baked it and traces of iron in the stone reacted with moisture causing this rust coloured rock you can see everywhere (like the way rust appears on an old bike).
So, imagine a huge plateau of sandstone rock, baked by the sun. A massive plateau that covers an area of hundreds of square kilometres.
I’m sorry I’m not sure of the time frame here but we’re talking about stuff that happened hundreds of millions of years ago and changes that occurred over that period, give or take a few hundred million years. I can’t even imagine that much time, but it’s a really really long time. Even longer than this episode of the podcast.
By the way, here I am talking to you about geology. I’m just an English teacher remember. There might be some of you out there who are actual geologists and I don’t want you to feel like I’m, what, teaching my grandmother to suck eggs (that’s an old expression which means – teaching something to someone who already knows it).
Anyway, I’m just trying to give some context. About 3.5 billion years of context. Ha!
This is stuff that I read about when I was there because it helped us to understand the significance of the place that we were visiting.
So, tectonic plates are moving under the surface all the time. Sometimes the plates push against each other or rub over each other, causing the land on the surface to rise.
That activity creates mountain ranges and sometimes volcanoes. The mountain ranges then eventually get glaciers forming on top as moisture collects there, it snows and the snow gets ever more compact and turns into lakes of ice – glaciers. Those glaciers slowly move down the mountain because of gravity and they scrape and crush all the rock from the mountains, carving out valleys as they go. As the glaciers get lower and they melt their rivers carry stones and rock sediments out to sea.
These are the sediments needed to make these big sandstone plateaus which are exposed when an ocean dries up. In this case these mountains are the rocky mountains to the north – that’s where all the sediment originally came from.
These tectonic plates move everything on the surface around over millions of years so that Bryce Canyon and the whole Grand Staircase has kind of shifted north from an equatorial zone, to a sub-equatorial zone to its present location.
Also volcanic activity underground can push the land up – not just forming mountains, but whole areas can be lifted up. You might end up with a whole plateau rising up over many years, turning it into high ground – not a sudden mountain, but a gradual swell over hundreds of miles, so that what was once the bed of the ocean becomes a huge plateau that’s at quite a high altitude.
That’s what happened at Bryce and the surrounding areas.
The whole thing that used to be this ocean floor and a lake basin, got pushed upwards to form this high plateau of sandstone. A lot of it is also limestone from deposits of things like shells or animal matter that was in the water. There are loads of fossils in this area and you can track the evolution of animals by comparing evidence from each stage in the staircase. It’s like a time ladder or something – it tells you the story of life.
So this sandstone with a limestone layer on top becomes a high plateau. Like I said before, remember, if you stand on the edge of Bryce Canyon (which is not actually a canyon because there’s no significant river at the bottom – unlike the Grand Canyon which has the Colorado river running through it) If you stand on the edge, like my wife and I did, you can see in the distance, on the horizon the other part of this plateau, but in the middle now there’s a huge series of canyons with massive bits of rock that stick up in ridges, and on the top of each ridge there are tall towers of rock in all sorts of weird shapes, and they have different lines of colour depending on what layer in the staircase they are from.
This whole place was formed from that plateau.
Here’s how that happened.
Basically, cracks formed in the top of the plateau as it rose. A bit like when cracks appear on the top of a cake as it rises.
Over millions of years these cracks were subject to erosion – the movement of things like water or ice and maybe wind.
At the top of the plateau moisture freezes in winter to become ice. The ice sits like a layer on top of everything. During the day it melts a bit and then flows into the cracks. At night it freezes again, and we know that water expands when it freezes (imagine leaving a bottle of beer or wine in the freezer – it cracks the glass because the liquid has expanded as it froze) so as the water trickles into existing cracks in the rock and then freezes again and expands it cracks the rock.
The water/ice works its way down, cracking the rock as it goes. Some of the rock is harder than other parts so not all of it gets cracked – not all of it disintegrates. So these creepy looking towers are left behind by the erosion of the ice and water.
It’s like the ice, the water and just the passage of time have worked on these towers of rock, sculpting them into different shapes that stand like statues above the open space of the canyon below them.
Below that the trickling water and wind smooth out these gullies and creek beds that go down and down into the canyon.
So you can walk down into these little riverbeds, down the sides of the canyon and walk around looking up at the towers of rock.
You commune with the rock formations.
To the native Americans who used to live here, these places were very sacred and special and they believed that spirits lived in the rocks. In fact they saw the faces of loads of different spirits and gods in the stones when they looked at them.
As you see all these abstract shapes your mind attempts to make sense of it and it’s easy to see faces, animals and even little stories in the formations. You know when you see big clouds in the sky and sometimes they look like things – like, “that one looks like a dog!” or “that one looks like a face” or “That one looks like Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un kissing” or something, there are hundreds of faces in the rocks. It’s stunning to look at.
Actually, ‘seeing faces or shapes in rocks or clouds’ is a recognised phenomenon called
Pareidolia (/pærɪˈdoʊliə) is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists (e.g., in random data).
Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, the Man in the Moon, the Moon rabbit, hidden messages within recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing indistinct voices in random noise such as that produced by air conditioners or fans.[1] (Wikipedia)
Basically, when your mind is presented with a stimulus – like a pattern or just random sounds, it tries to make sense of it and often will kind of read the stimulus as something familiar. This probably accounts for the way people can see ghosts in swirling mist, or they can see images of Jesus in toast or something. Either that or Jesus is trying to tell us something and putting his face in toast is the only way he can do it.
These towers in Bryce Canyon are called “Hoodoos” (sounds a bit like voodoo doesn’t it) and some of them have very human forms. They look a bit like old Roman statues, worn away be the rain. Or they look like architecture by Gaudi the guy who designed various buildings in Barcelona, like the Sagrada Familia cathedral.
In any case they look like spooky, ghostly statues standing in these huge auditoriums made from the erosion of rocks over millions of years.
It’s incredible and a lot more powerful than any of the art we saw in Los Angeles.
Genuinely breathtaking stuff.
After an afternoon of being wowed by the spectacle of Hoodoos and a big naturally occurring bridge in the rock we did a moderate hike into the canyon. This was late afternoon so the whole place got flooded with this incredible orangey pinkish rust coloured light. It was absolutely amazing.
A MOUNTAIN RANCH
Buffalo in the field (though we can’t see them), chickens running around.
Cows and horses.
Slept in a little wooden cabin.
Absolutely insane stars in the night sky. The milky way is incredible. No light pollution. It’s like someone has poured milk into black coffee.
This episode includes anecdotes and descriptions of our short visit to Las Vegas, including stories of more rental car issues, Las Vegas craziness, winning and losing $$$ and 11 English idioms that come from gambling.
⬇️ Episode script and notes (Idioms list below) ⬇️
Why Vegas?
It was just as a stopover between L.A. and other areas, and to have a one look in your life, see what all the fuss is about sort of experience.
Take the rental car back to the car rental company.
Remember them, from part 1 of this?
Wrong Cars™
When we picked up the car in LA – just a Nissan hatchback by the way, nothing fancy, at the start of the trip we had to go and wait in a boiling hot car park in Inglewood or somewhere, where I stood waiting on my phone for ages waiting to get through to someone to tell them we had arrived, standing there on hold with my arm going numb and the sun beating down on both me and my pregnant wife, and after about 40 minutes a guy in a rental car came and picked us up, and told us “oh yes, the shuttle busses are in the garage – they broke down on Tuesday”.
We drop off the car, pay the money, ask about the difference in price between the bill and the receipt –
“Sorry Mani, isn’t here today.”
“Can you do it?”
“Sorry, I can’t. He’s the manager.”
(We got fobbed off by the girl behind the counter)
There’s supposed to be a shuttle (bus) service back to the airport.
But it’s obvious that this is a crappy little rental car company that is cutting corners and fobbing everyone off with this talk of the “shuttle” that is mysteriously always in the garage.
Again we’re told that the shuttle is in the garage so we squeeze into another rental car with a German couple this time.
My wife is in the front, and I’m squeezed in with the Germans.
The Germans are quite nice, but it’s pretty clear they didn’t have the best experience with their car and they’ve driven a really long distance, without cruise control (which is standard for rentals usually) and they’re saying to the driver,
“Do you not have cars with cruise control? Because it’s very uncomfortable to drive 4,000 miles without cruise control, you know?”
I’m thinking – 4,000 miles! Without cruise control. His leg must be knackered.
The driver goes “Cruise control? Yes, there is cruise control.”
“No, there is no cruise control in this car.”
“This was your rental?”
Turns out the “shuttle” is just the same car the Germans just rented.
“Yes, there is no cruise control in this car. It was very difficult for us. Do you not have cars with cruise control?”
The driver is not interested in taking questions. He says “Some of them do and some of them don’t.”
“I think it would be good if your cars have the cruise control”
“I’m just the driver man”
I note in my head that our car had cruise control, and I never used it, not once, but I don’t say anything. I don’t think it would have helped.
“Well, our car had cruise control, and guess what we never used it! Ha ha, it would have been useful if we’d swapped, right? I bet you would have appreciated that after the first 3,000 miles!!”
But I didn’t say that. I just ‘enjoyed’ the really awkward vibe in the car, and the knowledge that my wife was pretty much steaming, but keeping herself under control.
After the Germans got out my wife chose to cross-examine the driver.
“So, where are the shuttles?”
“Oh, they’re in the garage, we had some trouble with them.”
“Both of them?”
“Yes, it’s just a coincidence.”
“OK. When did they go in the garage?”
“Oh just on Friday.”
“Well last week you said they broke down on Tuesday.”
“I’m just the driver”
“I know you’re just the driver but…”
“You’re getting driven there, I’m driving you personally…”
“I know but we just don’t appreciate being lied to, that’s all…”
At this point he got really angry and started making it personal.
“OK, you’re getting personal with me now, and I don’t appreciate you making personal attacks against me, ok?”
As I was taking the bags out of the back, I was trying to say, “Look, it’s not personal we’re just commenting on the service. We were told one thing, we get another thing. It’s not you, right? it’s your management, right?”
He just went “Well I deliver you to the airport and you make it personal” and he just got in the car and drove off.
I couldn’t help feeling bad for the guy. I think he probably has no choice but to lie about the shuttle thing because the crappy management of this company keeps telling their customers there will be a shuttle. It’s written in their emails and stuff. I imagine he’s just trying to keep his job.
He couldn’t really say “Yes, well to be honest sir our company is lying to you. We don’t have any shuttles, it’s not worth it – you know? Because we don’t get enough customers to justify using a whole bus, and there’s obviously nowhere for us to park one anyway, so we just use these cars and I’m always dealing with these problems, but it’s because the management keep lying.”
He can’t admit that the company lies or is wrong. It’s unfair on him. I know, I’m making excuses for the guy, but what can he do?
The management should just say they have a personal car service, it would solve the problem.
That’s the solution. We don’t care about shuttles. Just say there’s a personal car service. The driver can introduce himself. “Hi, I’m Carlos, I’m your driver, where are you guys from?” Etc. That would solve the problem. Instead, Carlos (or whatever he’s called) is on the defensive and can’t start talking to the customers because he knows they’re not happy. Poor Carlos, and poor customers.
I wonder what’s really going on there – at this particular franchise of Wrong Cars™.
Anyway, after that we got on our plane for the short flight to Vegas. We could have driven but we planned this to make sure there was as little driving as possible, because when you’re pregnant it’s not good to sit in a vibrating car for hours on end, and anyway it sucks to be stuck in a car all the time.
We arrive in Vegas
It’s hot.
It’s in the middle of the Mojave Desert for goodness sake.
We rent a car from another company this time – more established. Enterprise. Admittedly, it’s a bit more expensive but we don’t want to risk it because we’ll be driving in some fairly deserted spots and we want a car that will not break down and that has customer service that’s actually available by telephone.
So we get to the car rental area – a massive building in airportland. Dazzling service. We’re in the car in a matter of minutes and it looks brand new. We rented a small SUV. The main thing was that it was comfy and could deal with bits of rough terrain if needed. We get a Jeep Renegade. It’s pretty cool. Wife is happy and in comfort. OK.
Staying at New York New York Hotel.
Vegas is completely insane and, honestly, not a great place. In fact it’s the most tawdry, sleazy, tacky place ever.
Pick the most touristy part of any town and amplify it by 1000. It’s like that.
It’s boiling hot outside but inside it’s freezing, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to build this massive place with all these things like swimming pools, hotels and golf courses in the middle of the desert.
God knows how they get their water.
And it’s just a weird place cut off from reality in which you are constantly being seduced and distracted by flashing lights and big things and encouraged to gamble your money away. It’s like one huge sales pitch in the form of a city.
Inside the casinos there are no windows. They’re like huge circus tents on the inside, with big restaurant facades around the edge, tables for gambling – playing poker or roulette or the one where you throw the dice and there are loads of different numbers and letters and it’s a bewildering illusion of choice, big individual gambling machines, lamp posts (inside the hotel), fake little streets, massive Irish pubs (which is never really a bad thing in itself) but all this stuff and you look up to the sky and it’s the black ceiling of the hotel above you, quite high and in the background. It’s probably daylight outside, but you can’t see the desert sun. Inside the hotel’s gambling area there’s this black canopy of the ceiling above all this trashy fake stuff.
It’s so weird to come to the desert and then find yourself in this totally synthetic place all set against a black backdrop.
This is some people’s idea of a wonderful place – a vast plastic playground with so many attractions, but there’s something very unnatural and twisted about it.
Weird things
People smoke indoors and this feels wrong now after 10 years since the smoking ban. No big deal, but still… I think the reason is that they prioritise the gambling, so even though it fills the air with harmful smoke, it means people stay at the tables and don’t go outside to smoke their cigarettes.
There are tourists wandering around, families and stuff but also you spot these grizzled gamblers losing fortunes.
You see some old people who have travelled for miles to spend their money because they don’t really know what else to do with it, so it all goes in these machines.
There are some really drunk people, sitting at the bar.
But also families with kids walking around.
Even some bars have gambling machines built into them, so you can lose money (or maybe win) while you’re taking a break from the bigger tables.
In one casino, where we went to the theatre – there was a girl in suspenders dancing erotically on a table, and kids were wandering around.
Seriously weird.
It was like a strip club in Disneyland. It was like a cross between Disneyland and a lap dancing club. Adult Disneyland, but with families wandering around in it.
Our hotel had a rollercoaster going around it.
Yep, a rollercoaster, with tracks that actually went around the outside of the hotel.
You can stand in the bedroom and every now and then you hear the rumble of the rollercoaster and the muffled screams of people outside the window. This is from inside your hotel room..
If you part the curtains and look out you can see part of the track twisting around past the window and eventually you’ll see the rollercoaster race past, people screaming.
Take a look into the distance and there are the mountains, some desert and then closer to you just weird, big shiny bright buildings and Trump tower. A massive tower with his name at the top in huge gold letters.
“We’ve got the greatest buildings folks, all the best casinos. You’re gonna have fun, and you’re gonna make so much money. We’re gonna Make America Great Again. Believe me folks.”
And the house always wins.
That’s the thing with these casinos.
You have to enjoy the process of it, because you’re basically paying money to experience the excitement of possibility of having more money, even if the probable outcome is that you’ll end up with less.
You’re paying for the excitement of losing, it’s exciting because there’s a possibility that you won’t lose, but the fact is you will probably lose.
So the chances are that you’re going to lose
but you might win
and that’s what makes it exciting
to throw your money away.
The house always wins.
Sometimes somebody wins.
But most people are losing.
And the house is always winning.
Fair enough though, people choose to gamble and they probably enjoy it. People seem to enjoy it – that’s their choice, but it doesn’t appeal to me very much, beyond just having a go to see what the fuss is all about.
But there are some good things about Vegas, ok!
It’s not all awful! It’s fun for a night or maybe two, depending on what you do.
It is a big spectacle – some of the hotels look amazing and massive, and also there are some spectacular shows that you can see – like dance shows such as Cirque du Soleil or Blue Man Group and magic shows like David Copperfield or Penn & Teller.
We chose to go there as a stopover but also to experience it and we did have a laugh!
You have to just go with it a bit and just go ‘ wow, look at that, that’s ridiculous!’
A lot of the time we were walking around, couldn’t believe our eyes, saying “this is insane” “Look at that! It’s a massive Egyptian pyramid!
Our hotel was basically a recreation of the New York skyline. Other hotels have things like an Eiffel Tower, an Egyptian Sphinx, massive fountains and light shows.
It was pretty weird to see the Eiffel Tower considering we see it every day in Paris.
Also, it’s a very convenient place – in the sense that it’s really easy to access the airport, it’s not all that big, things are open 24 hours a day.
People are helpful and friendly.
There was a wholefoods there. In fact there are a few Wholefoods supermarkets there – say no more!
Some of the stuff is good fun.
So, that’s that then isn’t it.
Penn & Teller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJhYySXzOq0
Gambling in the Casino
We played some one of the “one armed bandits” – the fruit machines. It’s like one dollar to pull the arm and watch some things spinning around. We put aside about 50 dollars for fun. My wife enjoys the one armed bandits and she’s actually very lucky. I’m a lot more sceptical about it.
But she thinks she’s blessed with luck or something.
(Actually she’s blessed with Luke, but anyway… I’m not sure “blessed” is the right word – “married to” is probably better)
In England, when we had first met each other, we took a trip to Brighton, on the south coast, and we went to the pier (a wooden walkway that stretches out over the sea, wooden legs supporting it – a pier) where there are lots of arcade machines and gambling machines and other attractions, and she was convinced she would win money on the machines and I was going “ but the house always wins” and she was saying “no I’m magic!”.
I was shaking my head thinking “there is no magic, only the force” and she put one pound in a slot machine and promptly won £20, and said “I told you I was magic”. We walked away £20 richer. We didn’t continue gambling. I think she’s smart enough to know that you quit while you’re ahead.
The same thing happened years later, we were in a little resort in the north of France where you find some casinos. She’s not a gambling addict or anything. She just likes playing the machines a few times when we’re on holiday sometimes.
We went to a casino and chose to spend no more than 50E. A 50E limit. Ooh, big bucks, right?
We were walking around trying to find a good machine. There were some slightly sad looking people just sitting there plugged into these persuasive light shows – it’s a sort of low level basic addiction (or high level for some people) – an addiction to the sales pitch, basically.
I was being very sceptical, and making various sceptical noises.
We ended up leaving with 80E, 30E up from when we went in.
Not bad.
We quit while we were ahead.
In Vegas we did some gambling on the machines. I was thinking, “Well, she is magic. Maybe we’ll win enough to get a half decent dinner.”
We lost all the money we took in. All of it.
It was a steady one directional flow of us putting money into the machines and getting nothing in return. Las Vegas just ate our 50 dollars like a crocodile eats a chicken. One gulp, all gone, didn’t even chew. It didn’t even touch the sides as it went down.
We won nothing.
Well, almost nothing. We always seemed to win a few credits just before our money ran out, which I’m sure is a little trick to encourage you to put more money in because you think the machine is going to ‘start paying out’ at some point.
Obviously, we didn’t know what we were doing. We had no clue and I’m sure those machines were the wrong ones to be playing, and some of the casinos are better than others, but anyway we weren’t really there for the gambling. We were more interested in playing it safe.
11 Gambling Idioms (that don’t just apply to gambling)
to be on a winning streak (when you’re winning)
to be on a losing streak (when you’re losing and nothing is going your way)
to break even (when you take the same amount of money that you spent – in gambling or in business. No profit, no loss.)
to quit while you’re ahead (stop when you’re winning)
the house always wins
to bet (to gamble) “I bet you £20 that Arsenal win the game” or (a challenge) “I bet you can’t throw this paper ball in the bin from there!” or (an expectation) “I bet all the tickets are sold out”
to show your hand (show the cards in your hand / reveal your position)
a poker face (a facial expression which reveals nothing – used while playing poker, or in any other situation where you keep a straight face)
don’t push your luck (take a big risk and try doing something that could end in failure – it’s a bit like saying “watch what you’re doing” or “be careful”)
to raise the stakes (the stakes = the money which you have to gamble in a round of poker. The expression is used to mean to increase the amount of money you can win or lose in a gambling game, but also to raise the general level of what you can win or lose – e.g. this line from a recent Daily Mail news article “Mr Trump raised the stakes in the escalating crisis over North Korea’s nuclear threats, suggesting drastic economic measures against China and criticising ally South Korea.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-4847836/North-Korea-conducts-nuclear-test-making-hydrogen-bomb-claims.html
the chips are down (chips = the plastic coins you use while gambling. The expression means – when you’re feeling bad, or when the situation is bad) E.g. in cricket – “When the chips are down for England, Moeen is often the side’s most useful player.”
I once saw a great documentary by Louis Theroux about high stakes gamblers in Vegas. Some of them lose thousands of dollars, but they keep gambling because they think they’re going to eventually start winning it all back. I’ve put some videos from the documentary on the page for this episode. I love Louis Theroux’s documentaries. They’re fascinating.
The phrase that I take away from one of the videos: Louis and a high-stakes gambler are standing in the biggest hotel suite in the city, looking out of the window at the huge hotels and Louis says “Vegas – they didn’t build these casinos on winners you know” and the guy says “I think in the lifetime, everyone’s a loser. But the thrill of being able to win today, lose next month, win the year after. I think it’s the challenge. I think it’s the thrill. I think it’s the entertainment in this city.”
Louis Theroux Gambling Documentary – video clips
Louis hangs out with a high-stakes gambler in a very expensive hotel suite in Las Vegas
Here’s the same guy, after losing about $400,000 dollars in 3 days
Louis gambles with a couple of gambling “enthusiasts” (addicts?)
Louis plays the “one armed bandits” with Martha (these are the machines that took our $50 in just a few minutes) Martha says “I lost 4 million dollars in the casino in 7 years.”
Louis gets lucky playing Baccarat
“Because I resigned myself to failure that night, Lady Luck had decided to tantilise me by making me win.”
How gambling can be dangerous
It seems that this is how it goes:
You might begin by winning some money. Then you feel lucky so you bet bigger, but you lose it.
You then start digging yourself in deeper and deeper, expecting your luck to change but there is absolutely no certainty that it will.
Some people talk about ‘the law of averages’ – suggesting that in time any sequence will balance out. E.g. you might spend a certain amount of time losing, but ultimately this will be balanced out by the number of times you win.
But that’s assuming that gambling in a casino is random. Usually it is subtly weighed in favour of the casino so that the pattern is that the casino wins more often than you. Even if you win a lot, the casino can afford it because more people have lost overall.
Often these high stakes gamblers keep betting because they think they’ll eventually start winning. They often don’t and then leave utterly devastated by the loss.
The house always wins.
Then what might happen is that you’ve lost, you’re dejected. You resign yourself to failure but play another game because why not, and then you hit a winning streak.
What a powerful combination of defeat and then victory, all out of your control. You’re at the mercy of this external force, playing around with “luck”. (Not Luke)
And the house always wins.
We drove along the strip. It’s madness out there! Just all the flashing lights and the spectacle, it’s like Picadilly Circus on steroids and the steroids are also on steroids.
Unbelievably massive plate of pancakes for breakfast.
Then we got out of town.
I told you I would talk about nature and canyons, and big rocks! All that stuff I really loved seeing, but I got carried away – distracted by tales of gambling in Vegas.
Las Vegas – a place that seems diametrically opposed to somewhere like Bryce National Park or The Grand Canyon.
I’m glad we only spent an afternoon, one evening and a night there.
Natural beauty is so much more real.
Well, anything is more real than Las Vegas, I suppose.
Thanks for listening.
Join the mailing list.
Thanks to the Orion transcription team and Andromeda proofreading team.
Shout out to the comment section crew.
Shout out to the Long-Term LEPsters, you know who you are.
Shout out to the new listeners, I hope you stick with us.
Shout out to every single one of you all around the world, listening to this right now and united by the fact that you are all citizens of LEPland or Podland or whatever we are calling this community which crosses international boundaries.
Be excellent to each other and party on!
Speak to you in the next episode.
Luke
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