Podcasts about esl

When God calls you out of your comfort zone, will you hesitate—or say “yes” and let your purpose rewrite your story?In this inspirational, motivational episode, Matthew Terry—an English as a Second Language teacher turned screenwriter—shares how he went from unemployment in Chicago to answering a faith-driven calling in China. You'll hear how one prayer (“Lord, remove the barriers if this is Your will”), a Psalm on a chalkboard (Psalm 32:8), and courageous obedience opened doors to disciple students, host quiet Bible studies, and spark a new creative mission: English Corner, a miniseries inspired by true events.If you've felt stuck, scared to move, or unsure how to follow God's nudge, this motivational speech-style conversation will help you motivate your next step, build bold faith, and act with purpose. It's packed with inspirational takeaways on surrender, obedience, calling, and creativity—so you can stop waiting for perfect and start walking in purpose today.What You'll Gain:Practical clarity on discerning calling: how Scripture, prayer, and humble steps reveal God's next move—even when uncertainty feels loud.A repeatable framework for obedience: surrender, trust, and act—so motivation becomes momentum and purpose becomes lifestyle.Courage to create: how to turn lived testimony into impact (like Matthew's English Corner) and use your gifts to serve with bold, inspirational authenticity.Press play now to fuel your faith with this inspirational, motivational conversation and let this motivational speech move you from hesitation to holy action today.Matthew's Links:MATTHEW'S LINKS:Learn about Matthew's new screenplay, The English Corner, that he is working to bring to life! https://mattfterry.com/the-english-room-adapted-from-dragonflies/ If you'd like to support bringing this miniseries to life and supporting the ministry of Matthew Perry to inspire others in answering the call God has on their lives, please donate at: https://www.gofundme.com/f/english-corner-a-proof-of-concept-short-film Watch Matthew's Award-Winning Animated Screenplay, Children of God (The Last Remaining Sibling): https://mattfterry.com/children-of-god/inspirational, motivational, motivate, motivational speech, inspirational podcast, motivational podcast, Christian inspiration, faith and purpose, obey God's call, purpose driven life, testimony story, ESL teacher story, mission in China, Psalm 32:8, English Corner miniseries, screenwriter testimSend us a textSupport the showFor daily motivation and inspiration, subscribe and follow Real Talk With Reginald D on social media:Instagram: realtalkwithreginaldd TikTok: @realtalkregd Youtube: @realtalkwithreginald Facebook: realtalkwithreginaldd Twitter Real Talk With Reginald D (@realtalkRegD) / TwitterWebsite: Real Talk With Reginald D https://www.realtalkwithreginaldd.com Real Talk With Reginald D - Merchandise

This week on The Journey, I'm joined by Mary Votava, educator, yoga instructor, and behavior intervention specialist for Rockford Public Schools. Mary shares her journey from teaching English and ESL to her current work supporting students through mindfulness, movement, and social-emotional learning. We talk about how her yoga and breathwork practice has shaped her approach to student interventions and how these methods are being used through programs at Rockford Barbell and local partnerships like Nicholas Conservatory and Anderson Japanese Gardens. Mary also shares her personal love for the outdoors and her goal of hiking to the highest point in every state with her husband, Nick, a practice that reflects her commitment to being present, grounded, and intentional in both life and work. It's a meaningful conversation about mindfulness, education, and how connection, whether through movement, nature, or community, can create lasting impact.

How can churches and communities better support individuals with disabilities? Join John Fela (Felageller), Ministry Relations Manager at Joni and Friends Chicago, as he shares insights from his extensive experience in education, ministry, and special needs advocacy. As a public speaker, writer, and father to a son with autism, John brings practical wisdom, heartfelt stories, and expert interviews to equip churches and families with the tools they need for meaningful inclusion. Whether you're a church leader, educator, parent, or advocate, this podcast is your guide to creating welcoming spaces for all.About JohnJohn Fela (M.Ed) is a national disability advocate, working with both faith based and secular disability organizations. He previously worked for Joni and Friends, a global disability ministry. Prior to that, he spent almost 20 years in education, serving in a variety of roles as a classroom teacher in both public and private school settings, as well as being a mentor teacher and school director. He holds certifications in both Montessori and traditional teaching methods, and trained in a variety of specializations, including ESL and Special Education. He is a public speaker, blogger for a variety of disability advocacy platforms, and author of Faith Like My Father, a memoir of his journey as a parent of disability. John lives in Lyons, IL with his wife, Faith, and is father to his son Christopher (ASD/NV). Follow John on his website: www.johnfela.comAbout TheresaA wife and a mother to two children and grandmother, Theresa Alexander Inman is a Parenting Coach, Board Certified Behavior Analyst, Infant Toddler Development Specialist, Autism Spectrum Disorder Clinical Specialist. Introduced to behavior analysis in 2007 after years in the juvenile justice system.Her goal is to improve the lives of children and families by helping them strategize child development skills to prevent or reduce the effects of possible delays while having fun! She also served as a panelist on the first annual Autism World Summit.Theresa is also an author, having published ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠“Pathways to Early Communication”⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ in 2022. Find it at your favourite book seller.Connect with Theresa today!• Instagram | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Theresa Inman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• LinkedIn | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Theresa Inman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• BabyBoomer.org | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Theresa Inman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• YouTube | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Parenting with Confidence⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• Tiktok | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@parentcoachtheresa• Spotify via Anchor.fm | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Parenting with Confidence ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website: https://www.theresaalexanderinman.com/About Parenting on the SpectrumRaising autistic children comes with unique joys, challenges, and learning moments. Join host Theresa as she explores the diverse experiences of parenting kids on the spectrum. Each episode features expert insights, real-life stories, and practical strategies to help you navigate this journey with understanding, compassion, and strength. Whether you're a parent, caregiver, or ally, this podcast is your go-to resource for fostering connection and celebrating neurodiversity. Please share, comment, rate, and download! Be blissful! Theresa

Episode 435 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you an important “so that” construction. Send your questions about English and your comments and suggestions to EverybodyESL@gmail.com. (And let me know if you'd like to record the introduction to a future episode.)

Watch out for the witches this month!

World news in 7 minutes. Thursday 9th October 2025Today: Burkina Faso arrests. South Africa Mandela. Indonesia radioactive contamination. Australia Singapore meeting. Ecuador protests. United States Bahamas ambassador. Germany cannabis. Italy face covering ban. European Union veggie terminology.With Juliet MartinSEND7 is supported by our amazing listeners like you.Our supporters get access to the transcripts written by us every day.Our supporters get access to an English worksheet made by us once per week. Our supporters get access to our weekly news quiz made by us once per week. We give 10% of our profit to Effective Altruism charities. You can become a supporter at send7.org/supportContact us at podcast@send7.org or send an audio message at speakpipe.com/send7Please leave a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify.We don't use AI! Every word is written and recorded by us!Since 2020, SEND7 (Simple English News Daily in 7 minutes) has been telling the most important world news stories in intermediate English. Every day, listen to the most important stories from every part of the world in slow, clear English. Whether you are an intermediate learner trying to improve your advanced, technical and business English, or if you are a native speaker who just wants to hear a summary of world news as fast as possible, join Stephen Devincenzi, Ben Mallett and Juliet Martin every morning. Transcripts, worksheets and our weekly world news quiz are available for our amazing supporters at send7.org. Simple English News Daily is the perfect way to start your day, by practising your listening skills and understanding complicated stories in a simple way. It is also highly valuable for IELTS and TOEFL students. Students, teachers, TEFL teachers, and people with English as a second language, tell us that they use SEND7 because they can learn English through hard topics, but simple grammar. We believe that the best way to improve your spoken English is to immerse yourself in real-life content, such as what our podcast provides. SEND7 covers all news including politics, business, natural events and human rights. Whether it is happening in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas or Oceania, you will hear it on SEND7, and you will understand it.For more information visit send7.org/contact or send an email to podcast@send7.org

For this week's episode of Overtime On Inferno, Sam and Elliott are joined by special guest and friend of the show Brandon "BDog" Dog. Together they discuss the unfortunate demise of the ESL Impact circuit, the frontrunners for the Major, and Pro League Stage 2.VRS is a hot topic of discussion again as Fragadelphia temporarily became an RMR.Join the Discord:

In Episode 127 we're exploring Open Educational Resources (OER), an affordable, customizable alternative to pricey textbooks. We'll dive into what OER is, benefits of an OER, how and why Brent is building his own OER, and more. OER isn't without its challenges. Designing well and integrating activities can be tricky, as Brent explains. How can a teacher start building their own OER? Tune in to learn more! Show notes: www.DIESOL.org/127 

Episode 434 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you the phrase “to and fro.” Send your questions about English and your comments and suggestions to EverybodyESL@gmail.com. (And let me know if you'd like to record the introduction to a future episode.)

In this episode of English Makes No Sense, we explore 10 common English idioms and sayings with the word hammer. From “hammer something home” to “drop the hammer,” you'll learn what these expressions mean, how to use them, and hear real-life examples. Perfect for ESL learners, English students, and anyone who wants to sound more fluent and natural in everyday conversations.By the end of this episode, you'll be able to hammer out your English skills and confidently use these idioms in speaking and writing.#LearnEnglish #EnglishIdioms #ESL #EnglishPodcast #EnglishTips #FluentEnglish #IdiomsInEnglish #EnglishForESL #EnglishLearners

In this eye-opening episode of The Gritty Nurse Podcast, host Amie Archibald-Varley and special guest Jerry Soucy unpack the landmark case of DonQuenick Yvonne Joppy, the ICU nurse who courageously challenged racial discrimination, wrongful termination, and retaliation in healthcare. Recently, a federal jury awarded $20 million to Joppy after finding that Aurora Medical Center (Colorado) had retaliated against her and discriminated against her because she spoke up.  During her employment, she was wrongfully accused of causing a patient's death (charges later dropped) and faced a hostile work environment, unequal workloads, disciplinary scrutiny, and barriers to promotion. In this conversation, Amie and Jerry: Trace the legal journey of Joppy's case and the jury verdict Explore systemic racism and retaliation in nursing Expose how hospital culture perpetuates bullying and silencing Center the voices of nurses of color who often suffer in silence Propose strategies for advocacy, accountability, and cultural transformation in healthcare This is an essential listen for nurses, leaders, administrators, and all who believe in a just, equitable healthcare system.

World news in 7 minutes. Thursday 2nd October 2025.Today: United States government shutdown. Mexico parasite. Haiti UN mission. Philippines, Indonesia earthquake. Kyrgyzstan death penalty. Nigeria independence address. Morocco youth protests. Germany arrests. England Goodall dies. UK archbishop.With Juliet MartinSEND7 is supported by our amazing listeners like you.Our supporters get access to the transcripts written by us every day.Our supporters get access to an English worksheet made by us once per week. Our supporters get access to our weekly news quiz made by us once per week. We give 10% of our profit to Effective Altruism charities. You can become a supporter at send7.org/supportContact us at podcast@send7.org or send an audio message at speakpipe.com/send7Please leave a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify.We don't use AI! Every word is written and recorded by us!Since 2020, SEND7 (Simple English News Daily in 7 minutes) has been telling the most important world news stories in intermediate English. Every day, listen to the most important stories from every part of the world in slow, clear English. Whether you are an intermediate learner trying to improve your advanced, technical and business English, or if you are a native speaker who just wants to hear a summary of world news as fast as possible, join Stephen Devincenzi, Ben Mallett and Juliet Martin every morning. Transcripts, worksheets and our weekly world news quiz are available for our amazing supporters at send7.org. Simple English News Daily is the perfect way to start your day, by practising your listening skills and understanding complicated stories in a simple way. It is also highly valuable for IELTS and TOEFL students. Students, teachers, TEFL teachers, and people with English as a second language, tell us that they use SEND7 because they can learn English through hard topics, but simple grammar. We believe that the best way to improve your spoken English is to immerse yourself in real-life content, such as what our podcast provides. SEND7 covers all news including politics, business, natural events and human rights. Whether it is happening in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas or Oceania, you will hear it on SEND7, and you will understand it.For more information visit send7.org/contact or send an email to podcast@send7.org

Welcome to the My Adventures in ESL podcast—the show dedicated to helping ESL teachers like you feel confident, supported, and inspired in your classroom. I'm so excited you're here! As ESL teachers, we know how much time and energy goes into planning lessons, organizing materials, and meeting our students' diverse needs. But even the best lesson plan can fall flat if students aren't engaged. In this episode, I'm sharing three practical and easy-to-implement strategies that will help you create an engaging classroom where students are excited to participate and eager to learn. Here's what you'll discover in today's episode: Strategy #1: Quick, structured student talk activities – how to get every student speaking and practicing language without overwhelming them. Strategy #2: Student choice – simple ways to give students ownership over their learning, increase motivation, and build confidence. Strategy #3: Movement and interactive games – low-prep, high-energy activities that bring lessons to life and keep students actively involved. These strategies are designed to work for all grade levels and language abilities, and you can start using them immediately in your classroom. By the end of this episode, you'll walk away with practical tools to boost engagement, increase participation, and bring more joy into your teaching.

Hallie and Desi Peña of Panorama Speech chat about multilingualism: how to approach multilingual evaluations and therapy strategies.In this episode of SLP Coffee Talk, Hallie chats with Desi Peña, a Spanish-bilingual speech-language pathologist, about the real-world challenges of evaluating and supporting multilingual learners. From gathering parent input and working with interpreters to looking beyond standardized scores and trying out dynamic assessment, Desi shares practical strategies you can use right away. You'll walk away with tips to feel more confident in your evaluations, ideas for advocating with administrators, and the reminder that every child deserves to be seen for their strengths—not just a number.Bullet Points to Discuss: Multilingual evaluations and the essential information to collect.Considerations when using standardized tests with multilingual learners.Dynamic assessment and how it can guide clinical decision-making.The role of interpreters during evaluations and therapy.Strategies for supporting multilingual learners in therapy sessions.Collaboration with ESL teachers and classroom staff.Here's what we learned: Parent input is one of the most valuable tools in a multilingual evaluation.Standardized test scores don't always show the full picture.Dynamic assessment can reveal a student's true learning potential.Building strong relationships with interpreters makes the process smoother.Collaboration with teachers leads to better support for students.Every multilingual learner deserves to be seen for their strengths, not just a score.Learn more about Desi Peña: Website: www.panoramaspeech.com Instagram: @d.bilingualslp: https://www.instagram.com/d.bilingualslp @panoramaspeech: https://www.instagram.com/panoramaspeech @boldslpcollective: https://www.instagram.com/theboldslpcollective The Bold SLP Podcast: https://theboldslp.wixsite.com/theboldslpcollective Teachers Pay Teachers: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/d-bilingual-slp Free Resource: https://panoramaspeech.myflodesk.com/startherefreebie Learn more about Hallie Sherman and SLP Elevate:  

Episode 433 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you the idiom “been around the block.” Send your questions about English and your comments and suggestions to EverybodyESL@gmail.com. (And let me know if you'd like to record the introduction to a future episode.)

In recognition of National Hispanic Heritage Month 2025, Latina Today Podcast and Hispanic Chamber Cincinnati USA have launched Rooted Leadership / Liderazgo Arraigado, an initiative dedicated to highlighting the narratives that inspire Latino-rooted leadership, accomplishments, legacies, and lived experiences from across the United States. Today, we have Abriljoanna Huerta, a Mexican American artist who works closely within the community through her position at the Fairfield Lane Library and her co-creation of the Fairfield Hispanic Heritage Festival and Expo. Abril, a ten-year employee of the Fairfield Lane Library, reflects on the library's initial limited Hispanic or Latino patrons. She attributes this to the absence of programming specifically tailored to their needs. However, Abril's initiatives, particularly those initiated by Odalis Jimenez's Story time in Espanol and her own programming endeavors, have substantially increased the library's Hispanic clientele. These patrons now not only utilize the library for essential services but also actively participate in programming. This is of utmost importance as Hispanic communities have consistently been an integral component of the community. Abril, a native of the community, acknowledges the substantial Hispanic population. She is delighted to observe the heightened engagement of these individuals in the library's complimentary resources. In response, the library has stocked Spanish and ESL books, meeting the demand for bilingual materials for children. Additionally, programming initiatives have fostered community cohesion, enabling parents to connect and establish friendships. Abril recognizes the positive impact of these improvements on the library. She expresses gratitude for the supportive environment provided by the library over the past years. The library has become an ideal platform for these initiatives due to its accessibility and affordability. Abril emphasized that libraries have transcended their traditional image as quiet, silent spaces for reading. Today, they offer a multifaceted environment that encourages both academic pursuits and social engagement. Libraries host programming events that foster connections and provide opportunities for individuals to share knowledge and experiences. Furthermore, food programs cater to diverse dietary requirements and promote cultural awareness through culinary exploration. Additionally, specialized programming is designed to support individuals with developmental disabilities, ensuring their inclusion and providing a platform for learning, interaction, and socialization. Finally, Abril expressed, “If you feel lacking in self-confidence and believe you have a diminished voice, I encourage you to try speaking up. You may be surprised by the positive impact it can have. Ultimately, your voice matters. I always advocate for everyone, even those who feel awkward about it. I share your feelings, but remember that your voice matters. By speaking up, you will grow, and so will the community.”

Scott Allis, experienced ESL teacher and travel creator, joins Laura to share hard-won lessons from a global teaching career that spans China, Iraq, Thailand and beyond. In this candid conversation, Scott unpacks five key things to check before signing a contract—and what to do when the job doesn't match what was promised. Whether you're teaching abroad, considering your next move, or advising others on job offers, this episode is packed with practical advice and relatable stories to help you make informed career decisions.Watch with closed captions.TALKING POINTSWhat Looks Good on Paper Isn't Always the Right Fit: Scott reflects on contracts that promised the world, but delivered far less—and how to read between the lines.What Scott Checks Before Signing: From checking the exit clause to aligning work expectations with your lifestyle.Knowing Your Priorities: Why your dealbreakers matter more than rankings or salaries.Tips for Confident Negotiation: How to ask for what you need—without feeling like you're being difficult.ABOUTScottie is an experienced ESL teacher with over ten years of teaching in places like Wuhan and Baghdad, currently based in Bangkok, Thailand. Today, he shares five essential lessons on finding the right contract as an ESL teacher—focusing on what works for your lifestyle, not just what looks best on paper. Alongside his teaching, Scottie creates mindful adventure travel content on Instagram and will soon launch YouTube content. Follow Scott on Instagram: @scottallisRELATED EPISODESS4E9: The problem with native-speakerism - with Meri MaroutianS8E3: Three ways to grow your money - with Nicola PrentisSUPPORT US

VOV1 - Cuốn sách “50+ hoạt động phát triển năng lực cảm xúc – xã hội” do Ths. Đinh Thu Hồng là giáo viên dạy STEM và Gifted (tài năng năng khiếu) có trên 10 năm kinh nghiệm dạy tiểu học và ESL.

Struggling with the hardest words in American English pronunciation? In this essential accent training episode, we break down three of the most challenging words for non-native speakers: Worcestershire Sauce, Efficiency, and Vulnerable.Stop worrying about being misunderstood! Get a clear, step-by-step guide to mastering the subtle vowels, tricky consonant clusters, and syllable stress patterns for these high-frequency vocabulary words. Whether you're an ESL student, a business professional, or an actor working on accent reduction, this lesson will dramatically boost your speaking confidence and clarity in any American conversation.Links & Resources:Follow my InstagramJoin the Free CommunityAccent Training YouTubeIn this episode of the American Accent Pronunciation Podcast, you will learn:How to pronounce "Worcestershire Sauce": The definitive guide to tackling the silent letters and unique rhythm of this famously difficult word.The secret to saying "Efficiency": Master the precise vowel sound and syllable stress to use this word with a natural American flow.Breaking down "Vulnerable": Learn the subtle techniques needed for the "l" and "r" sounds to make this word sound effortless.The overall rules for American accent development that apply to all challenging vocabulary.Don't let these tricky words hold you back. Tune in now and take the next step toward a clear, confident American accent!BOOK A CONSULTATION HERE

Welcome to Episode #67 of The Real Life English with Gabby PodcastIn this episode, you'll learn 16 popular English slang words, idioms, and phrasal verbs for the Fall/Autumn season. It's the beginning of the beautiful Fall season here in the USA and we are ready for the cooler temperatures, apple pies and foliage. Autumn is not just a season, it's an experience here in the USA and it's a huge part of our culture. By the end of this episode, you'll be one step closer to speaking English naturally and with confidence. And the best part is that you get a free Study Guide that I create for every episode. This Study Guide includes: All the new words and definitionsEasy-to-follow example sentencesThe full transcriptPractice exercises so you can actually use what you learnClick >> HERE > CLICK HERE

Life was different 50 years ago!

Are you struggling with the tricky “TH” sounds in English? You're not alone! Many English learners confuse the voiced TH (/ð/) in words like this, that, these with the unvoiced TH (/θ/) in words like think, three, thank.In this episode of English Makes No Sense, we'll break it all down:✅ The difference between voiced vs. unvoiced TH✅ Easy tips to master tongue placement✅ Fun minimal pairs for practice (thin/then, thank/that, teeth/these)✅ Short sentences to improve fluency✅ Practical tricks to fix common mistakesWhether you're an ESL student, an English learner, or just want to improve your pronunciation and speaking skills, this lesson will help you finally conquer the “TH” sound with confidence.✨ Remember: English may not always make sense, but it can always be fun!#LearnEnglish #EnglishPodcast #EnglishPronunciation #ESLLesson #THSound #EnglishSpeaking #SpeakEnglish #AmericanEnglish #EnglishTips #ImproveEnglish #EnglishForBeginners #PronunciationPractice #LanguageLearning

World news in 7 minutes. Thursday 25th September 2025.Today: UN Assembly. Syria sanctions. Africa security council. Iran international cooperation. Ukraine arms race. Argentina Trump praise. Guinea new constitution. Malawi election. Uganda re-election approved. Thailand parliament dissolved. South Korea corruption trial. India flood deaths. Ukraine reparations loan. Ireland presidential nominations.With Juliet MartinSEND7 is supported by our amazing listeners like you.Our supporters get access to the transcripts written by us every day.Our supporters get access to an English worksheet made by us once per week. Our supporters get access to our weekly news quiz made by us once per week. We give 10% of our profit to Effective Altruism charities. You can become a supporter at send7.org/supportContact us at podcast@send7.org or send an audio message at speakpipe.com/send7Please leave a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify.We don't use AI! Every word is written and recorded by us!Since 2020, SEND7 (Simple English News Daily in 7 minutes) has been telling the most important world news stories in intermediate English. Every day, listen to the most important stories from every part of the world in slow, clear English. Whether you are an intermediate learner trying to improve your advanced, technical and business English, or if you are a native speaker who just wants to hear a summary of world news as fast as possible, join Stephen Devincenzi, Ben Mallett and Juliet Martin every morning. Transcripts, worksheets and our weekly world news quiz are available for our amazing supporters at send7.org. Simple English News Daily is the perfect way to start your day, by practising your listening skills and understanding complicated stories in a simple way. It is also highly valuable for IELTS and TOEFL students. Students, teachers, TEFL teachers, and people with English as a second language, tell us that they use SEND7 because they can learn English through hard topics, but simple grammar. We believe that the best way to improve your spoken English is to immerse yourself in real-life content, such as what our podcast provides. SEND7 covers all news including politics, business, natural events and human rights. Whether it is happening in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas or Oceania, you will hear it on SEND7, and you will understand it.For more information visit send7.org/contact or send an email to podcast@send7.org

In this episode of Pricing Heroes, we speak with Barrie Carmel, a pricing, margin, and revenue management consultant with more than 30 years of experience, including senior leadership roles at Bed Bath & Beyond and Michaels. Barrie shares her journey from foodservice into retail pricing leadership and reflects on what it means to balance precision and speed, manage promotions and customer perception, and lead pricing in an era of public scrutiny.Key Topics:Lessons from transitioning between B2B foodservice and large-scale retailHow to manage complexity when in-store price execution depends on laborThe decline of coupon culture and the challenge of generational shifts in value perceptionWhy framing conversations in customer-centric terms builds credibility and influence internallyElectronic shelf labels and AI — opportunities, risks, and why data protection is essentialHow litigation and regulation are likely to reshape fairness standards and reference pricing practicesRecommended Resources:Player Piano by Kurt VonnegutDombey and Son by Charles DickensPredictably Irrational by Dan ArielyConnect with Barrie Carmel:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrie-carmel-6227284/Get in touch with us----------Get your free copy of Get Ready for the Future Of Pricing with our A-Z Guide.For more information about AI pricing solutions, visit Competera.ai.

On this episode, my guest is Stephen Jenkinson, culture activist and ceremonialist advocating a handmade life and eloquence. He is an author, a storyteller, a musician, sculptor and off-grid organic farmer. Stephen is the founder/ principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School in Canada, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. Also a sought-after workshop leader, articulating matters of the heart, human suffering, confusions through ceremony.He is the author of several influential books, including Money and the Soul's Desires, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), A Generation's Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), and Reckoning (2022), co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson. His most recent book, Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work, was released in August 2025. He is also involved in the musical project Nights of Grief & Mystery with singer-songwriter Gregory Hoskins, which has toured across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.Show Notes:* The Bone House of the Orphan Wisdom Enterprise* Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart's Work* The Wedding Industry* Romantic Sameness and Psychic Withering* The Two Tribes* The Roots of Hospitality* The Pompous Ending of Hospitality* Debt, And the Estrangement of the Stranger* More Than Human Hospitality* The Alchemy of the Orphan Wisdom SchoolHomework:Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work | PurchaseOrphan WisdomThe Scriptorium: Echoes of an Orphan WisdomTranscription:Chris: This is an interview that I've been wondering about for a long time in part, because Stephen was the first person I ever interviewed for the End of Tourism Podcast. In Oaxaca, Mexico, where I live Stephen and Natalie were visiting and were incredibly, incredibly generous. Stephen, in offering his voice as a way to raise up my questions to a level that deserve to be contended with.We spoke for about two and a half hours, if I remember correctly. And there was a lot in what you spoke to towards the second half of the interview that I think we're the first kind of iterations of the Matrimony book.We spoke a little bit about the stranger and trade, and it was kind of startling as someone trying to offer their first interview and suddenly hearing something [00:01:00] that I'd never heard before from Stephen. Right. And so it was quite impressive. And I'm grateful to be here now with y'all and to get to wonder about this a little more deeply with you Stephen.Stephen: Mm-hmm. Hmm.Chris: This is also a special occasion for the fact that for the first time in the history of the podcast, we have a live audience among us today. Strange doings. Some scholars and some stewards and caretakers of the Orphan Wisdom enterprise. So, thank you all as well for coming tonight and being willing to listen and put your ears to this.And so to begin, Stephen, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to let those who will be listening to this recording later on know where we're gathered in tonight?Stephen: Well, we're in... what's the name of this township?Nathalie: North Algona.Stephen: North Algona township on the borders, an eastern gate [00:02:00] of Algonquin Park. Strangely named place, given the fact that they were the first casualties of the park being established. And we're in a place that never should have been cleared - my farm. It should never have been cleared of the talls, the white pines that were here, but the admiralty was in need back in the day. And that's what happened there. And we're in a place that the Irish immigrants who came here after the famine called "Tramore," which more or less means "good-frigging luck farming."It doesn't technically mean that, but it absolutely means that. It actually means "sandy shore," which about covers the joint, and it's the only thing that covers the joint - would be sand. You have to import clay. Now, that's a joke in many farming places in the world, but if we wanted any clay, we'd have to bring it in and pay for the privilege.And the farm has been in [00:03:00] my, my responsibility for about 25 years now, pretty close to that. And the sheep, or those of them left because the coyotes have been around for the first time in their casualty-making way... They're just out here, I'm facing the field where they're milling around.And it's the very, very beginnings of the long cooling into cold, into frigid, which is our lot in this northern part of the hemisphere, even though it's still August, but it's clear that things have changed. And then, we're on a top of a little hill, which was the first place that I think that we may have convened a School here.It was a tipi, which is really worked very well considering we didn't live here, so we could put it up and put it down in the same weekend. [00:04:00] And right on this very hill, we were, in the early days, and we've replaced that tipi with another kind of wooden structure. A lot more wood in this one.This has been known as "The Teaching Hall" or "The Great Hall," or "The Hall" or "The Money Pit, as it was known for a little while, but it actually worked out pretty well. And it was I mean, people who've come from Scandinavia are knocked out by the kind of old-style, old-world visitation that the place seems to be to them.And I'd never really been before I had the idea what this should look like, but I just went from a kind of ancestral memory that was knocking about, which is a little different than your preferences, you know. You have different kinds of preferences you pass through stylistically through your life, but the ones that lay claim to you are the ones that are not interested in your [00:05:00] preferences. They're interested in your kind of inheritance and your lineage.So I'm more or less from the northern climes of Northern Europe, and so the place looks that way and I was lucky enough to still have my carving tools from the old days. And I've carved most of the beams and most of the posts that keep the place upright with a sort of sequence of beasts and dragons and ne'er-do-wells and very, very few humans, I think two, maybe, in the whole joint. Something like that. And then, mostly what festoons a deeply running human life is depicted here. And there's all kinds of stories, which I've never really sat down and spoken to at great length with anybody, but they're here.And I do deeply favour the idea that one day [00:06:00] somebody will stumble into this field, and I suppose, upon the remains of where we sit right now, and wonder "What the hell got into somebody?" That they made this mountain of timber moldering away, and that for a while what must have been, and when they finally find the footprint of, you know, its original dimensions and sort of do the wild math and what must have been going on in this sandy field, a million miles in away from its home.And wherever I am at that time, I'll be wondering the same thing.Audience: Hmm.Stephen: "What went on there?" Even though I was here for almost all of it. So, this was the home of the Orphan Wisdom School for more than a decade and still is the home of the Orphan Wisdom School, even if it's in advance, or in retreat [00:07:00] or in its doldrums. We'll see.And many things besides, we've had weddings in here, which is wherein I discovered "old-order matrimony," as I've come to call it, was having its way with me in the same way that the design of the place did. And it's also a grainery for our storage of corn. Keep it up off the ground and out of the hands of the varmints, you know, for a while.Well that's the beginning.Chris: Hmm. Hmm. Thank you Stephen.Stephen: Mm-hmm.Chris: You were mentioning the tipi where the school began. I remember sleeping in there the first time I came here. Never would I have thought for a million years that I'd be sitting here with you.Stephen: It's wild, isn't it?Chris: 12 years later.?: Yeah.Chris: And so next, I'd like to do my best in part over the course of the next perhaps hour or two to congratulate you on the release of [00:08:00] your new book, Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work.Stephen: Thank you.Chris: Mm-hmm. I'm grateful to say like many others that I've received a copy and have lent my eyes to your good words, and what is really an incredible achievement.For those who haven't had a chance to lay their eyes on it just yet, I'm wondering if you could let us in on why you wrote a book about matrimony in our time and where it stands a week out from its publication.Stephen: Well, maybe the answer begins with the question, "why did you write a book, having done so before?" And you would imagine that the stuff that goes into writing a book, you'd think that the author has hopes for some kind of redemptive, redeeming outcome, some kind of superlative that drops out the back end of the enterprise.And you know, this is [00:09:00] the seventh I've written. And I would have to say that's not really how it goes, and you don't really know what becomes of what you've written, even with the kind people who do respond, and the odd non-monetary prize that comes your way, which Die Wise gamed that.But I suppose, I wrote, at all partly to see what was there. You know, I had done these weddings and I was a little bit loathe to let go, to let the weddings turn entirely into something historical, something that was past, even though I probably sensed pretty clearly that I was at the end of my willingness to subject myself to the slings and arrows that came along with the enterprise, but it's a sweet sorrow, or there's a [00:10:00] wonder that goes along with the tangle of it all. And so, I wrote to find out what happened, as strange as that might sound to you. You can say, "well, you were there, you kind of knew what happened." But yes, I was witness to the thing, but there's the act of writing a book gives you the opportunity to sort of wonder in three-dimensions and well, the other thing I should say is I was naive and figured that the outfit who had published the, more or less prior two books to this one, would kind of inevitably be drawn to the fact that same guy. Basically, same voice, new articulation. And I was dumbfounded to find out that they weren't. And so, it's sort of smarted, you know?And I think what I did was I just set the whole [00:11:00] enterprise aside, partly to contend with the the depths of the disappointment in that regard, and also not wanting to get into the terrible fray of having to parse or paraphrase the book in some kind of elevator pitch-style to see if anybody else wanted to look at it. You know, such as my touchy sense of nobility sometimes, you know, that I just rather not be involved in the snarl of the marketplace any longer.So, I withdrew and I just set it aside but it wasn't that content to be set, set aside. And you know, to the book's credit, it bothered me every once in a while. It wasn't a book at the point where I was actually trying to engineer it, you know, and, and give it some kind of structure. I had piles of paper on the floor representing the allegation of chapters, trying to figure out what the relationship was [00:12:00] between any of these things.What conceivably should come before what. What the names of any of these things might be. Did they have an identity? Was I just imposing it? And all of that stuff I was going through at the same time as I was contending with a kind of reversal in fortune, personally. And so in part, it was a bit of a life raft to give me something to work on that I wouldn't have to research or dig around in the backyard for it and give me some sort of self-administered occupation for a while.Finally, I think there's a parallel with the Die Wise book, in that when it came to Die Wise, I came up with what I came up with largely because, in their absolute darkest, most unpromising hours, an awful lot of dying people, all of whom are dead now, [00:13:00] let me in on some sort of breach in the, the house of their lives.And I did feel that I had some obligation to them long-term, and that part of that obligation turned into writing Die Wise and touring and talking about that stuff for years and years, and making a real fuss as if I'd met them all, as if what happened is really true. Not just factually accurate, but deeply, abidingly, mandatorily true.So, although it may be the situation doesn't sound as extreme, but the truth is, when a number of younger - than me - people came to me and asked me to do their weddings, I, over the kind of medium-term thereafter, felt a not dissimilar obligation that the events that ensued from all of that not [00:14:00] be entrusted entirely to those relatively few people who attended. You know, you can call them "an audience," although I hope I changed that. Or you could call them "witnesses," which I hope I made them that.And see to it that there could be, not the authorized or official version of what happened, but to the view from here, so to speak, which is, as I sit where I am in the hall right now, I can look at the spot where I conducted much of this when I wasn't sacheting up and down the middle aisle where the trestle tables now are.And I wanted to give a kind of concerted voice to that enterprise. And I say "concerted voice" to give you a feel for the fact that I don't think this is a really an artifact. It's not a record. It's a exhortation that employs the things that happened to suggest that even though it is the way it is [00:15:00] ritually, impoverished as it is in our time and place, it has been otherwise within recoverable time and history. It has.And if that's true, and it is, then it seems to me at least is true that it could be otherwise again. And so, I made a fuss and I made a case based on that conviction.There's probably other reasons I can't think of right now. Oh, being not 25 anymore, and not having that many more books in me, the kind of wear and tear on your psyche of imposing order on the ramble, which is your recollection, which has only so many visitations available in it. Right? You can only do that so many times, I think. And I'm not a born writing person, you know, I come to it maniacally when I [00:16:00] do, and then when it's done, I don't linger over it so much.So then, when it's time to talk about it, I actually have to have a look, because the act of writing it is not the act of reading it. The act of writing is a huge delivery and deliverance at the same time. It's a huge gestation. And you can't do that to yourself, you know, over and over again, but you can take some chances, and look the thing in the eye. So, and I think some people who are there, they're kind of well-intended amongst them, will recognize themselves in the details of the book, beyond "this is what happened and so on." You know, they'll recognize themselves in the advocacy that's there, and the exhortations that are there, and the [00:17:00] case-making that I made and, and probably the praying because there's a good degree of prayerfulness in there, too.That's why.Chris: Thank you. bless this new one in the world. And what's the sense for you?Stephen: Oh, yes.Chris: It being a one-week old newborn. How's that landing in your days?Stephen: Well, it's still damp, you know. It's still squeaky, squeaky and damp. It's walking around like a newborn primate, you know, kind of swaying in the breeze and listening to port or to starboard according to whatever's going on.I don't know that it's so very self-conscious in the best sense of that term, yet. Even though I recorded the audio version, I don't think [00:18:00] it's my voice is found every nook and cranny at this point, yet. So, it's kind of new. It's not "news," but it is new to me, you know, and it's very early in terms of anybody responding to it.I mean, nobody around me has really taken me aside and say, "look, now I want to tell you about this book you wrote." It hasn't happened, and we'll see if it does, but I've done a few events on the other side of the ocean and hear so far, very few, maybe handful of interviews. And those are wonderful opportunities to hear something of what you came up with mismanaged by others, you know, misapprehend, you could say by others.No problem. I mean, it's absolutely no problem. And if you don't want that to happen, don't talk, don't write anything down. So, I don't mind a bit, you know, and the chances are very good that it'll turn into things I didn't have in mind [00:19:00] as people take it up, and regard their own weddings and marriages and plans and schemes and fears and, you know, family mishigas and all the rest of it through this particular lens, you know. They may pick up a pen or a computer (it's an odd expression, "pick up a computer"), and be in touch with me and let me know. "Yeah, that was, we tried it" or whatever they're going to do, because, I mean, maybe Die Wise provided a bit of an inkling of how one might be able to proceed otherwise in their dying time or in their families or their loved ones dying time.This is the book that most readily lends itself to people translating into something they could actually do, without a huge kind of psychic revolution or revolt stirring in them, at least not initially. This is as close as I come, probably, to writing a sequence of things [00:20:00] that could be considered "add-ons" to what people are already thinking about, that I don't force everybody else outta the house in order to make room for the ideas that are in the book. That may happen, anyway, but it wasn't really the intent. The intent was to say, you know, we are in those days when we're insanely preoccupied with the notion of a special event. We are on the receiving end of a considerable number of shards showing up without any notion really about what these shards remember or are memories of. And that's the principle contention I think that runs down the spine of the book, is that when we undertake matrimony, however indelicately, however by rote, you know, however mindlessly we may do it, [00:21:00] inadvertently, we call upon those shards nonetheless.And they're pretty unspectacular if you don't think about them very deeply, like the rice or confetti, like the aisle, like the procession up the aisle, like the giving away of someone, like the seating arrangement, like the spectacle seating arrangement rather than the ritual seating arrangement.And I mean, there's a fistful of them. And they're around and scholars aside maybe, nobody knows why they do them. Everybody just knows, "this is what a wedding is," but nobody knows why. And because nobody knows why, nobody really seems to know what a wedding is for, although they do proceed like they would know a wedding if they saw one. So, I make this a question to be really wondered about, and the shards are a way in. They're the kind of [00:22:00] breadcrumb trail through the forest. They're the little bits of broken something, which if you begin to handle just three or four of them, and kind of fit them together, and find something of the original shape and inflection of the original vessel, kind of enunciates, begins to murmur in your hands, and from it you can begin to infer some three-dimensionality to the original shape. And from the sense of the shape, you get a set sense of contour, and from the sense of contour, you get a sense of scale or size. And from that you get a sense of purpose, or function, or design. And from that you get a sense of some kind of serious magisterial insight into some of the fundament of human being that was manifest in the "old-order matrimony," [00:23:00] as I came to call it.So, who wouldn't wanna read that book?Chris: Mm-hmm.Thank you. Mm-hmm. Thank you, Stephen. Yeah. It reminds me, just before coming up here, maybe two weeks ago, I was in attending a wedding. And there was a host or mc, and initially just given what I was hearing over the microphone, it was hard to tell if he was hired or family or friends. And it turned out he was, in fact, a friend of the groom. And throughout the night he proceeded to take up that role as a kind of comedian.Audience: Mm-hmm.Chris: This was the idea, I guess. Mm-hmm. And he was buzzing and mumbling and swearing into the microphone, [00:24:00] and then finally minimizing the only remnant of traditional culture that showed up in the wedding. And his thing was, okay, so when can we get to the part where it's boom, boom, boom, right. And shot, shot, shot, whatever.Stephen: Right.Chris: There was so much that came up in my memories in part because I worked about a decade in Toronto in the wedding industry.Mm-hmm. Hospitality industry. Maybe a contradiction in terms, there. And there was one moment that really kind of summed it up. I kept coming back to this reading the book because it was everything that you wrote seemed to not only antithetical to this moment, but also an antidote.Anyways, it was in North Toronto and the [00:25:00] owner of the venue - it was a kind of movie theatre turned event venue - and there was a couple who was eventually going to get married there. They came in to do their tasting menu to see what they wanted to put on the menu for the dinner, for their wedding.And the owner was kind of this mafioso type. And he comes in and he sees them and he walks over and he says, "so, you're gonna get married at my wedding factory."Audience: Mm-hmm.Chris: In all sincerity.Stephen: Mm-hmm.Chris: Right.Without skipping a beat. Could you imagine?Stephen: Yeah.I could. I sure could.Chris: Yeah. Yeah.Stephen: I mean, don't forget, if these people weren't doing what the people wanted, they'd be outta business.Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: No, that's the thing. This is aiding and abetting. This is sleeping with the enemy, stylistically-speaking. [00:26:00] The fact that people "settle" (that's the term I would use for it), settle for this, the idea being that this somehow constitutes the most honest and authentic through line available to us is just jaw dropping. When you consider what allegedly this thing is supposed to be for. I mean, maybe we'll get into this, but I'll just leave this as a question for now. What is that moment allegedly doing?Not, what are the people in it allegedly doing? The moment itself, what is it? How is it different from us sitting here now talking about it? And how is it different from the gory frigging jet-fuelled aftermath of excess. And how's it different from the cursing alleged master of ceremonies? How can you [00:27:00] tell none of those things belong to this thing?And why do you have such a hard time imagining what doesAudience: Hmm mmChris: Well that leads me to my next question.Stephen: Ah, you're welcome.Chris: So, I've pulled a number of quotes from the book to read from over the course of the interview. And this one for anyone who's listening is on page 150. And you write Stephen,"Spiritually-speaking, most of the weddings in our corner of the world are endogamous affairs, inward-looking. What is, to me, most unnerving is that they can be spiritually-incestuous. The withering of psychic difference between people is the program of globalization. It is in the architecture of most things partaking of the internet, and it is in the homogeneity of our matrimony. [00:28:00] It is this very incestuous that matrimony was once crafted and entered into to avoid and subvert. Now, it grinds upon our differences until they are details.And so, this paragraph reminded me of a time in my youth when I seemed to be meeting couples who very eerily looked like each other. No blood or extended kin relation whatsoever, and yet they had very similar faces. And so as I get older, this kind of face fidelity aside, I continue to notice that people looking for companionship tend to base their search on similitude, on shared interests, customs, experiences, shared anything and everything. This, specifically, in opposition to those on the other side of the aisle or spectrum, to difference or divergence. And so, opposites don't attract anymore. I'm curious what you think this psychic [00:29:00] withering does to an achieve understanding of matrimony.Stephen: Well, I mean, let's wonder what it does to us, generally, first before we get to matrimony, let's say. It demonizes. Maybe that's too strong, but it certainly reconstitutes difference as some kind of affliction, some kind of not quite good enough, some kind of something that has to be overcome or overwhelmed on the road to, to what? On the road to sameness? So, if that's the goal, then are all of the differences between us, aberrations of some kind, if that's the goal? If that's the goal, are all the [00:30:00] differences between us, not God-given, but humanly misconstrued or worse? Humanly wrought? Do the differences between us conceivably then belong at all? Or is the principle object of the entire endeavor to marry yourself, trying to put up with the vague differences that the other person represents to you?I mean, I not very jokingly said years ago, that I coined a phrase that went something like "the compromise of infinity, which is other people." What does that mean? "The compromise of infinity, which is other people." Not to mention it's a pretty nice T-shirt. But what I meant by the [00:31:00] phrase is this: when you demonize difference in this fashion or when you go the other direction and lionize sameness, then one of the things that happens is that compromise becomes demonized, too. Compromise, by definition, is something you never should have done, right? Compromise is how much you surrender of yourself in order to get by. That's what all these things become. And before you know it, you're just beaten about the head and shoulders about "codependence" and you know, not being "true to yourself" as if being true to yourself is some kind of magic.I mean, the notion that "yourself is the best part of you" is just hilarious. I mean, when you think about it, like who's running amuck if yourself is what you're supposed to be? I ask you. Like, who's [00:32:00] doing the harm? Who's going mental if the self is such a good idea? So, of course, I'm maintaining here that I'm not persuaded that there is such a thing.I think it's a momentary lapse in judgment to have a self and to stick to it. That's the point I'm really making to kind of reify it until it turns ossified and dusty and bizarrely adamant like that estranged relative that lives in the basement of your house. Bizarrely, foreignly adamant, right? Like the house guest who just won't f**k off kind of thing.Okay, so "to thine own self be true," is it? Well, try being true to somebody else's self for ten minutes. Try that. [00:33:00] That's good at exercise for matrimony - being true to somebody else's self. You'll discover that their selves are not made in heaven, either. Either. I underscore it - either. I've completely lost track of the question you asked me.Chris: What are the consequences of the sameness on this anti-cultural sameness, and the program of it for an achieved understanding of matrimony.Stephen: Thank you. Well, I will fess up right now. I do so in the book. That's a terrible phrase. I swear I'd never say such a thing. "In my book... I say the following," but in this case, it's true. I did say this. I realized during the writing of it that I had made a tremendous tactical error in the convening of the event as I did it over the years, [00:34:00] and this is what it came to.I was very persuaded at the time of the story that appears in the chapter called "Salt and Indigo" in the book. I was very, very persuaded. I mean, listen, I made up the story (for what it's worth), okay, but I didn't make it up out of nothing. I made it up out of a kind of tribal memory that wouldn't quite let go.And in it, I was basically saying, here's these two tribes known principally for what they trade in and what they love most emphatically. They turn out to be the same thing. And I describe a circumstance in which they exchange things in a trade scenario, not a commerce scenario. And I'm using the chapter basically to make the case that matrimony's architecture derives in large measure from the sacraments of trade as manifest in that story. [00:35:00] Okay. And this is gonna sound obvious, but the fundamental requirement of the whole conceit that I came up with is that there are two tribes. Well, I thought to myself, "of course, there's always two tribes" at the time. And the two tribe-ness is reflected in when you come to the wedding site, you're typically asked (I hope you're still asked) " Are you family or friend of the groom or friend of the bride?" And you're seated "accordingly," right? That's the nominal, vestigial shard of this old tribal affiliation, that people came from over the rise, basically unknown to each other, to arrive at the kind of no man's land of matrimony, and proceeded accordingly. So, I put these things into motion in this very room and I sat people accordingly facing each other, not facing the alleged front of the room. [00:36:00] And of course, man, nobody knew where to look, because you raised your eyes and s**t. There's just humans across from you, just scads of them who you don't freaking know. And there's something about doing that to North Americas that just throws them. So, they're just looking at each other and then looking away, and looking at each other and looking away, and wondering what they're doing here and what it's for. And I'm going back and forth for three hours, orienting them as to what is is coming.Okay, so what's the miscalculation that I make? The miscalculation I made was assuming that by virtue of the seating arrangement, by virtue of me reminding them of the salt and indigo times, by virtue of the fact that they had a kind of allegiance of some sort or another to the people who are, for the moment, betrothed, that those distinctions and those affiliations together would congeal them, and constitute a [00:37:00] kind of tribal affiliation that they would intuitively be drawn towards as you would be drawn to heat on a cold winter's night.Only to discover, as I put the thing into motion that I was completely wrong about everything I just told you about. The nature of my error was this, virtually all of those people on one side of the room were fundamentally of the same tribe as the people on the other side of the room, apropos of your question, you see. They were card carrying members of the gray dominant culture of North America. Wow. The bleached, kind of amorphous, kind of rootless, ancestor-free... even regardless of whether their people came over in the last generation from the alleged old country. It doesn't really claim them.[00:38:00]There were two tribes, but I was wrong about who they were. That was one tribe. Virtually everybody sitting in the room was one tribe.So, who's the other tribe? Answer is: me and the four or five people who were in on the structural delivery of this endeavour with me. We were the other tribe.We didn't stand a chance, you see?And I didn't pick up on that, and I didn't cast it accordingly and employ that, instead. I employed the conceit that I insisted was manifest and mobilized in the thing, instead of the manifest dilemma, which is that everybody who came knew what a wedding was, and me and four or five other people were yet to know if this could be one. That was the tribal difference, if you [00:39:00] will.So, it was kind of invisible, wasn't it? Even to me at the time. Or, I say, maybe especially to me at the time. And so, things often went the way they went, which was for however much fascination and willingness to consider that there might have been in the room, there was quite a bit more either flat affect and kind of lack of real fascination, or curiosity, or sometimes downright hostility and pushback. Yeah.So, all of that comes from the fact that I didn't credit as thoroughly as I should have done, the persistence in Anglo-North America of a kind of generic sameness that turned out to be what most people came here ancestrally to become. "Starting again" is recipe for culture [00:40:00] loss of a catastrophic order. The fantasy of starting again. Right?And we've talked about that in your podcast, and you and I have talked about it privately, apropos of your own family and everybody's sitting in this room knows what I'm talking about. And when does this show up? Does it show up, oh, when you're walking down the street? Does it show up when you're on the mountaintop? Does it show up in your peak experiences? And the answer is "maybe." It probably shows up most emphatically in those times when you have a feeling that something special is supposed to be so, and all you can get from the "supposed to" is the allegation of specialness.Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: And then, you look around in the context of matrimony and you see a kind of febral, kind of strained, the famous bridezilla stuff, all of that stuff. [00:41:00] You saw it in the hospitality industry, no doubt. You know, the kind of mania for perfection, as if perfection constitutes culture. Right? With every detail checked off in the checkbox, that's culture. You know, as if everything goes off without a hitch and there's no guffaws. And in fact, anybody could reasonably make the case, "Where do you think culture appears when the script finally goes f*****g sideways?" That's when. And when you find out what you're capable of, ceremonially.And generally speaking, I think most people discovered that their ceremonial illiteracy bordered on the bottomless.That's when you find out. Hmm.Chris: Wow.Stephen: Yeah. And that's why people, you know, in speech time, they reach in there and get that piece of paper, and just look at it. Mm-hmm. They don't even look up, terrified that they're gonna go off script for a minute as [00:42:00] if the Gods of Matrimony are a scripted proposition.Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that with us, that degree of deep reflection and humility that I'm sure comes with it.Stephen: Mea Culpa, baby. Yeah, I was, I got that one totally wrong. Mm-hmm. And I didn't know it at the time. Meanwhile, like, how much can you transgress and have the consequences of doing so like spill out across the floor like a broken thermometer's mercury and not wise up.But of course, I was as driven as anybody. I was as driven to see if I could come through with what I promised to do the year before. And keeping your promise can make you into a maniac.Audience: Hmm hmm.Chris: But I imagine that, you [00:43:00] know, you wouldn't have been able to see that even years later if you didn't say yes in the first place.Stephen: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I wouldn't have been able to make the errors.Chris: Right.Stephen: Right. Yeah. I mean, as errors go, this is not a mortal sin. Right, right. And you could chalk it up to being a legitimate miscalculation. Well, so? All I'm saying is, it turns out I was there too, and it turns out, even though I was allegedly the circus master of the enterprise, I wasn't free and clear of the things we were all contending with, the kind of mortality and sort of cultural ricketiness that were all heirs to. That's how I translated it, as it turns out.So, PS there was a moment, [00:44:00] which I don't remember which setting it was now, but there was a moment when the "maybe we'll see if she becomes a bride" bride's mother slid up to me during the course of the proceedings, and in a kind of stage whisper more or less hissed me as follows."Is this a real wedding?"I mean, that's not a question. Not in that setting, obviously not. That is an accusation. Right. And a withering one at that. And there was a tremendous amount of throw-down involved.So, was it? I mean, what we do know is that she did not go to any of the weddings [00:45:00] that she was thinking of at the time, and go to the front of the room where the celebrant is austerely standing there with the book, or the script, or the well-intentioned, or the self-penned vows and never hissed at him or her, "is this a real wedding?"Never once did she do that. We know that.Right.And I think we know why. But she was fairly persuaded she knew what a real wedding was. And all she was really persuaded by was the poverty of the weddings that she'd attended before that one. Well, I was as informed in that respect as she was, wasn't I? I just probably hadn't gone to as many reprobate weddings as she had, so she had more to deal with than I did, even though I was in the position of the line of fire.And I didn't respond too well to the question, I have to say. At the moment, I was rather combative. But I mean, you try to do [00:46:00] what I tried to do and not have a degree of fierceness to go along with your discernment, you know, just to see if you can drag this carcass across the threshold. Anyway, that happened too.Chris: Wow. Yeah. Dominant culture of North America.Stephen: Heard of it.Chris: Yeah. Well, in Matrimony, there's quite a bit in which you write about hospitality and radical hospitality. And I wanted to move in that direction a little bit, because in terms of these kind of marketplace rituals or ceremonies that you were mentioning you know, it's something that we might wonder, I think, as you have, how did it come to be this [00:47:00] way?And so I'd like to, if I can once again, quote from matrimony in which you speak to the etymology of hospitality. And so for those interested on page 88,"the word hospitality comes from hospitaller, meaning 'one who cares for the afflicted, the infirm, the needy.' There's that thread of our misgivings about being on the receiving end of hospitality. Pull on it. For the written history of the word, at least, it has meant, 'being on the receiving end of a kind of care you'd rather not need.'"End quote.Stephen: That's so great. I mean, before you go on with the quote. It's so great to know that the word, unexamined, just kind of leaks upside, doesn't it? Hospitality, I mean, nobody goes "Hospitality, ew." [00:48:00] And then, if you just quietly do the obvious math to yourself, there's so much awkwardness around hospitality.This awkwardness must have an origin, have a home. There must be some misgiving that goes along with the giving of hospitality, mustn't there be? How else to understand where that kind of ickiness is to be found. Right? And it turns out that the etymology is giving you the beginnings of a way of figuring it out what it is that you're on the receiving end of - a kind of succor that you wish you didn't need, which is why it's the root word for "hospital."Chris: Hmm hmm. Wow.Audience: Hmm.Chris: May I repeat that sentence please? Once more."For the written history of the word, at least, it has meant, [00:49:00] 'being on the receiving end of a kind of care you'd rather not need.'"And so this last part hits home for me as I imagine it does for many.And it feels like the orthodoxy of hospitality in our time is one based not only in transaction, but in debt. And if you offer hospitality to me, then I owe you hospitality.Stephen: Right.Chris: I'm indebted to you. And we are taught, in our time, that the worst thing to be in is in debt.Stephen: Right?Chris: And so people refuse both the desire to give as well as the learning skill of receiving. And this is continuing on page 88 now."But there's mystery afoot with this word. In its old Latin form, hospice meant both 'host' and 'guest.'"Stephen: Amazing. One. Either one, This is absolutely amazing. We're fairly sure that there's a [00:50:00] acres of difference between the giver of hospitality and the receiver that the repertoire is entirely different, that the skew between them is almost insurmountable, that they're not interchangeable in any way. But the history of the word immediately says, "really?" The history of the word, without question, says that "host" and "guest" are virtually the same, sitting in different places, being different people, more or less joined at the hip. I'll say more, but you go ahead with what you were gonna do. Sure.Chris: "In it's proto Indo-European origins, hospitality and hospice is a compound word: gosh + pot. And it meant something like [00:51:00] 'stranger/guest/host + powerful Lord.'It is amazing to me that ancestrally, the old word for guest, host, and stranger were all the same word. Potent ceremonial business, this is. In those days, the server and the serve were partners in something mysterious. This could be confusing, but only if you think of guest, host, and stranger as fixed identities.If you think of them as functions, as verbs, the confusion softens and begins to clear. The word hospice in its ancient root is telling us that each of the people gathered together in hospitality is bound to the others by formal etiquette, yes, but the bond is transacted through a subtle scheme of graces.Hospitality, it tells us, is a web of longing and belonging that binds people for a time, some hithereto unknown to each other is a clutch of mutually-binding elegances, you could say. In its ancient practice, [00:52:00] hospitality was a covenant. According to that accord, however we were with each other. That was how the Gods would be with us. We learn our hospitality by being on the receiving end of Godly administration. That's what giving thanks for members. We proceed with our kin in imitation of that example and in gratitude for it."Mm-hmm.And so today, among "secular" people, with the Gods ignored, this old-time hospitality seems endangered, if not fugitive. I'm curious how you imagine that this rupture arose, the ones that separated and commercialized the radical relationships between hosts and guests, that turned them from verbs to nouns and something like strangers to marketplace functions.[00:53:00]Stephen: Well, of course this is a huge question you've asked, and I'll see if I can unhuge it a bit.Chris: Uhhuh.Stephen: Let's go right to the heart of what happened. Just no preliminaries, just right to it.So, to underscore again, the beauty of the etymology. I've told you over and over again, the words will not fail you. And this is just a shining example, isn't it? That the fraternization is a matter of ceremonial alacrity that the affiliation between host and guest, which makes them partners in something, that something is the [00:54:00] evocation of a third thing that's neither one of them. It's the thing they've lent themselves to by virtue of submitting to being either a host or a guest. One.Two. You could say that in circumstances of high culture or highly-functioning culture, one of the principle attributes of that culture is that the fundament of its understanding, is that only with the advent of the stranger in their midst that the best of them comes forward.Okay, follow that. Yeah.So, this is a little counterintuitive for those of us who don't come from such places. We imagine that the advent of strangers in the midst of the people I'm describing would be an occasion where people hide their [00:55:00] best stuff away until the stranger disappears, and upon the disappearance of the stranger, the good stuff comes out again.You know?So, I'm just remembering just now, there's a moment in the New Testament where Jesus says something about the best wine and he's coming from exactly this page that we're talking about - not the page in the book, but this understanding. He said, you know, "serve your best wine first," unlike the standard, that prevails, right?So again, what a stranger does in real culture is call upon the cultural treasure of the host's culture, and provides the opportunity for that to come forward, right? By which you can understand... Let's say for simplicity's sake, there's two kinds of hospitality. There's probably all kinds of gradations, [00:56:00] but for the purposes of responding to what you've asked, there's two.One of them is based on kinship. Okay? So, family meal. So, everybody knows whose place is whose around the table, or it doesn't matter - you sit wherever you want. Or, when we're together, we speak shorthand. That's the shorthand of familiarity and affinity, right?Everybody knows what everybody's talking about. A lot of things get half-said or less, isn't it? And there's a certain fineness, isn't it? That comes with that kind of affinity. Of course, there is, and I'm not diminishing it at all. I'm just characterizing it as being of a certain frequency or calibre or charge. And the charge is that it trades on familiarity. It requires that. There's that kind of hospitality."Oh, sit wherever you want."Remember this one?[00:57:00]"We don't stand on ceremony here.""Oh, you're one of the family now." I just got here. What, what?But, of course, you can hear in the protestations the understanding, in that circumstance, that formality is an enemy to feeling good in this moment, isn't it? It feels stiff and starched and uncalled for or worse.It feels imported from elsewhere. It doesn't feel friendly. So, I'm giving you now beginnings of a differentiation between how cultures who really function as cultures understand what it means to be hospitable and what often prevails today, trading is a kind of low-grade warfare conducted against the strangeness of the stranger.The whole purpose of treating somebody like their family is to mitigate, and finally neutralize their [00:58:00] strangeness, so that for the purposes of the few hours in front of us all, there are no strangers here. Right? Okay.Then there's another kind, and intuitively you can feel what I'm saying. You've been there, you know exactly what I mean.There's another kind of circumstance where the etiquette that prevails is almost more emphatic, more tangible to you than the familiar one. That's the one where your mother or your weird aunt or whoever she might be, brings out certain kind of stuff that doesn't come out every day. And maybe you sit in a room that you don't often sit in. And maybe what gets cooked is stuff you haven't seen in a long time. And some part of you might be thinking, "What the hell is all this about?" And the answer is: it's about that guy in the [00:59:00] corner that you don't know.And your own ancestral culture told acres of stories whose central purpose was to convey to outsiders their understanding of what hospitality was. That is fundamentally what The Iliad and The Odyssey are often returning to and returning to and returning to.They even had a word for the ending of the formal hospitality that accrued, that arose around the care and treatment of strangers. It was called pomp or pompe, from which we get the word "pompous." And you think about what the word "pompous" means today.It means "nose in the air," doesn't it? Mm-hmm. It means "thinks really highly of oneself," isn't it? And it means "useless, encumbering, kind of [01:00:00] artificial kind of going through the motions stuff with a kind of aggrandizement for fun." That's what "pompous" means. Well, the people who gave us the word didn't mean that at all. This word was the word they used to describe the particular moment of hospitality when it was time for the stranger to leave.And when it was mutually acknowledged that the time for hospitality has come to an end, and the final act of hospitality is to accompany the stranger out of the house, out of the compound, out into the street, and provision them accordingly, and wish them well, and as is oftentimes practiced around here, standing in the street and waving them long after they disappear from view.This is pompous. This is what it actually means. Pretty frigging cool when you get corrected once in a while, isn't it? [01:01:00] Yeah.So, as I said, to be simplistic about it, there's at least a couple of kinds, and one of them treasures the advent of the stranger, understanding it to be the detonation point for the most elegant part of us to come forward.Now, those of us who don't come from such a place, we're just bamboozled and Shanghai'ed by the notion of formality, which we kind of eschew. You don't like formality when it comes to celebration, as if these two things are hostile, one to the other. But I'd like you to consider the real possibility that formality is grace under pressure, and that formality is there to give you a repertoire of response that rescues you from the gross limitations of your autobiography.[01:02:00]Next question. I mean, that's the beginning.Chris: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Thank you once again, Stephen. So alongside the term or concept of "pompe," in which the the guest or stranger was led out of the house or to the entrance of the village, there was also the consideration around the enforcement of hospitality, which you write about in the book. And you write that"the enforcement of hospitality runs the palpable risk of violating or undoing the cultural value it is there to advocate for. Forcing people to share their good fortune with the less fortunate stretches, to the point of undoing the generosity of spirit that the culture holds dear. Enforcement of hospitality is a sign of the eclipse of hospitality, typically spawned by insecurity, contracted self-definition, and the darkening of the [01:03:00] stranger at the door.Instead, such places and times are more likely to encourage the practice of hospitality in subtle generous ways, often by generously treating the ungenerous."And so there seems to be a need for limits placed on hospitality, in terms of the "pompe," the maximum three days in which a stranger can be given hospitality, and concurrently a need to resist enforcing hospitality. This seems like a kind of high-wire act that hospitable cultures have to balance in order to recognize and realize an honorable way of being with a stranger. And so I'm wondering if you could speak to the possibility of how these limits might be practiced without being enforced. What might that look like in a culture that engages with, with such limits, but without prohibitions?Stephen: Mm-hmm. That's a very good question. [01:04:00] Well, I think your previous question was what happened? I think, in a nutshell, and I didn't really answer that, so maybe see how I can use this question to answer the one that you asked before: what happened? So, there's no doubt in my mind that something happened that it's kind of demonstrable, if only with the benefit of hindsight.Audience: Right.Stephen: Or we can feel our way around the edges of the absence of the goneness of that thing that gives us some feel for the original shape of that thing.So you could say I'm trafficking in "ideals," here, and after a fashion, maybe, yeah. But the notion of "ideals," when it's used in this slanderous way suggests that "it was never like that."Chris: Mm-hmm.Stephen: And I suggest to you it's been like that in a lot of places, and there's a lot of places where it's still like that, although globalization [01:05:00] may be the coup de grâce performed upon this capacity. Okay. But anyway.Okay. So what happened? Well, you see in the circumstance that I described, apropos of the stranger, the stranger is in on it. The stranger's principle responsibility is to be the vector for this sort of grandiose generosity coming forward, and to experience that in a burdensome and unreciprocated fashion, until you realize that their willingness to do that is their reciprocity. Everybody doesn't get to do everything at once. You can't give and receive at the same time. You know what that's called? "Secret Santa at school," isn't it?That's where nobody owes nobody nothing at the end. That's what we're all after. I mean, one of your questions, you know, pointed to that, that there's a kind of, [01:06:00] what do you call that, teeter-totter balance between what people did for each other and what they received for each other. Right. And nobody feels slighted in any way, perfect balance, et cetera.Well, the circumstance here has nothing of the kind going with it. The circumstance we're describing now is one in which the hospitality is clearly unequal in terms of who's eating whose food, for example, in terms of the absolutely frustrated notion of reciprocity, that in fact you undo your end of the hospitality by trying to pay back, or give back, or pay at all, or break even, or not feel the burden of "God, you've been on the take for fricking hours here now." And if you really look in the face of the host, I mean, they're just getting started and you can't, you can't take it anymore.[01:07:00]So, one of the ways that we contend with this is through habits of speech. So, if somebody comes around with seconds. They say, "would you like a little more?"And you say, "I'm good. I'm good. I'm good." You see, "I'm good" is code for what? "F**k off." That's what it's code for. It's a little strong. It's a little strong. What I mean is, when "I'm good" comes to town, it means I don't need you and what you have. Good God, you're not there because you need it you knucklehead. You're there because they need it, because their culture needs an opportunity to remember itself. Right?Okay. So what happened? Because you're making it sound like a pretty good thing, really. Like who would say, "I think we've had enough of this hospitality thing, don't you? Let's try, oh, [01:08:00] keeping our s**t to ourselves. That sounds like a good alternative. Let's give it a week or two, see how it rolls." Never happened. Nobody decided to do this - this change, I don't think. I think the change happened, and sometime long after people realized that the change had had taken place. And it's very simple. The change, I think, went something like this.As long as the guest is in on it, there's a shared and mutually-held understanding that doesn't make them the same. It makes them to use the quote from the book "partners," okay, with different tasks to bring this thing to light, to make it so. What does that require? A mutually-held understanding in vivo as it's happening, what it is.Okay. [01:09:00] So, that the stranger who's not part of the host culture... sorry, let me say this differently.The culture of the stranger has made the culture of the host available to the stranger no matter how personally adept he or she may be at receiving. Did you follow that?Audience: A little.Stephen: Okay. Say it again?Audience: Yes, please.Stephen: Okay. The acculturation, the cultured sophistication of the stranger is at work in his or her strangerhood. Okay. He or she's not at home, but their cultural training helps them understand what their obligations are in terms of this arrangement we've been describing here.Okay, so I think the rupture takes place [01:10:00] when the culturation of one side or the other fails to make the other discernible to the one.One more time?When something happens whereby the acculturation of one of the partners makes the identity, the presence, and the valence of the other one untranslatable. Untranslatable.I could give you an example from what I call " the etiquette of trade," or the... what was the word? Not etiquette. What's the other word?Chris: The covenant?Stephen: Okay, " covenant of trade" we'll call it. So, imagine that people are sitting across from each other, two partners in a trade. Okay? [01:11:00] Imagine that they have one thing to sell or move or exchange and somebody has something else.How does this work? Not "what are the mechanics?" That can be another discussion, but, if this works, how does it work? Not "how does it happen?" How does it actually achieve what they're after? Maybe it's something like this.I have this pottery, and even though you're not a potter, but somebody in your extended family back home was, and you watched what they went through to make a fricking pot, okay?You watched how their hands seized up, because the clay leached all the moisture out of the hands. You distinctly remember that - how the old lady's hands looked cracked and worn, and so from the work of making vessels of hospitality, okay? [01:12:00] It doesn't matter that you didn't make it yourself. The point is you recognize in the item something we could call "cultural patrimony."You recognize the deep-runningness of the culture opposite you as manifest and embodied in this item for trade. Okay? So, the person doesn't have to "sell you" because your cultural sophistication makes this pot on the other side available to you for the deeply venerable thing that it is. Follow what I'm saying?Okay. So, you know what I'm gonna say next? When something happens, the items across from you cease to speak, cease to have their stories come along with them, cease to be available. There's something about your cultural atrophy that you project onto the [01:13:00] item that you don't recognize.You don't recognize it's valence, it's proprieties, it's value, it's deep-running worth and so on. Something happened, okay? And because you're not making your own stuff back home or any part of it. And so now, when you're in a circumstance like this and you're just trying to get this pot, but you know nothing about it, then the enterprise becomes, "Okay, so what do you have to part with to obtain the pot?"And the next thing is, you pretend you're not interested in obtaining the pot to obtain the pot. That becomes part of the deal. And then, the person on the making end feels the deep running slight of your disinterest, or your vague involvement in the proceedings, or maybe the worst: when it's not things you're going back and forth with, but there's a third thing called money, which nobody makes, [01:14:00] which you're not reminded of your grandma or anyone else's with the money. And then, money becomes the ghost of the original understanding of the cultural patrimony that sat between you. That's what happened, I'm fairly sure: the advent, the estrangement that comes with the stranger, instead of the opportunity to be your cultural best when the stranger comes.And then of course, it bleeds through all kinds of transactions beyond the "obvious material ones." So, it's a rupture in translatability, isn't it?Chris: You understand this to happen or have happened historically, culturally, et cetera, with matrimony as well?Stephen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.Yeah. This is why, for example, things like the fetishization of virginity.Audience: Mm-hmm. [01:15:00]Stephen: I think it's traceable directly to what we're talking about. How so? Oh, this is a whole other long thing, but the very short version would be this.Do you really believe that through all of human history until the recent liberation, that people have forever fetishized the virginity of a young woman and jealously defended it, the "men" in particular, and that it became a commodity to trade back and forth in, and that it had to be prodded and poked at to determine its intactness? And this was deemed to be, you know, honourable behavior?Do you really think that's the people you come from, that they would've do that to the most cherished of their [01:16:00] own, barely pubescent girls? Come on now. I'm not saying it didn't happen and doesn't still happen. I'm not saying that. I'm saying, God almighty, something happened for that to be so.And I'm trying to allude to you now what I think took place. Then all of a sudden, the hymen takes the place of the pottery, doesn't it? And it becomes universally translatable. Doesn't it? It becomes a kind of a ghosted artifact of a culturally-intact time. It's as close as you can get.Hence, this allegation of its purity, or the association with purity, and so on. [01:17:00] I mean, there's lots to say, but that gives you a feel for what might have happened there.Chris: Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for being so generous with your considerations here.Stephen: You see why I had to write a book, eh?Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: There was too much bouncing around. Like I had to just keep track of my own thoughts on the matter.But can you imagine all of this at play in the year, oh, I don't know, 2022, trying to put into motion a redemptive passion play called "matrimony," with all of this at play? Not with all of this in my mind, but with all of this actually disfiguring the anticipation of the proceedings for the people who came.Can you imagine? Can you imagine trying to pull it off, and [01:18:00] contending overtly with all these things and trying to make room for them in a moment that's supposed to be allegedly - get ready for it - happy.I should have raised my rates on the first day, trying to pull that off.But anyway.Okay, you go now,Chris: Maybe now you'll have the opportunity.Stephen: No, man. No. I'm out of the running for that. "Pompe" has come and come and gone. Mm.Chris: So, in matrimony, Stephen, you write that"the brevity, the brevity of modern ceremonies is really there to make sure that nothing happens, nothing of substance, nothing of consequence, no alchemy, no mystery, no crazy other world stuff. That overreach there in its scripted heart tells me that deep in the rayon-wrapped bosom of that special day, the modern wedding is scared [01:19:00] silly of something happening. That's because it has an ages-old abandoned memory of a time when a wedding was a place where the Gods came around, where human testing and trying and making was at hand, when the dead lingered in the wings awaiting their turn to testify and inveigh."Gorgeous. Gorgeous.Audience: Mm-hmm.Chris: And so I'm curious ifStephen: "Rayon-wrapped bosom." That's not, that's not shabby.Chris: "Rayon-wrapped bosom of that special day." Yeah.So, I'm curious do you think the more-than-human world practices matrimony, and if so, what, if anything, might you have learned about matrimony from the more-than-human world?Stephen: I would say the reverse. I would say, we practice the more-than-human world in matrimony, not that the more-than-human world practices matrimony. We practice them, [01:20:00] matrimonially.Next. Okay. Or no? I just gonna say that, that's pretty good.Well, where do we get our best stuff from? Let's just wonder that. Do we get our best stuff from being our best? Well, where does that come from? And this is a bit of a barbershop mirrors situation here, isn't it? To, to back, back, back, back.If you're thinking of time, you can kind of get lost in that generation before, or before, before, before. And it starts to sound like one of them biblical genealogies. But if you think of it as sort of the flash point of multiple presences, if you think of it that way, then you come to [01:21:00] credit the real possibility that your best stuff comes from you being remembered by those who came before you.Audience: Hmm.Stephen: Now just let that sit for a second, because what I just said is logically-incompatible.Okay? You're being remembered by people who came before you. That's not supposed to work. It doesn't work that way. Right?"Anticipated," maybe, but "remembered?" How? Well, if you credit the possibility of multiple beginnings, that's how. Okay. I'm saying that your best stuff, your best thoughts, not the most noble necessarily. I would mean the most timely, [01:22:00] the ones that seem most needed, suddenly.You could take credit and sure. Why, why not? Because ostensibly, it arrives here through you, but if you're frank with yourself, you know that you didn't do that on command, right? I mean, you could say, I just thought of it, but you know in your heart that it was thought of and came to you.I don't think there's any difference between saying that and saying you were thought of.Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: So, that's what I think the rudiments of old-order matrimony are. They are old people and their benefactors in the food chain and spiritually speaking. Old people and their benefactors, the best part of them [01:23:00] willed to us, entrusted and willed to us. So, when you are willing to enter into the notion that old-order matrimony is older than you, older than your feelings for the other person, older than your love, and your commitment, and your willingness to make the vows and all that stuff, then you're crediting the possibility that your love is not the beginning of anything.You see. Your love is the advent of something, and I use that word deliberately in its Christian notion, right? It's the oncomingness, the eruption into the present day of something, which turns out to be hugely needed and deeply unsuspected at the same time.I used to ask in the school, "can you [01:24:00] have a memory of something you have no lived experience of?" I think that's what the best part of you is. I'm not saying the rest of you is shite. I'm not saying that. You could say that, but I am saying that when I say "the best part of you," that needs a lot of translating, doesn't it?But the gist of it is that the best part of you is entrusted to you. It's not your creation, it's your burden, your obligation, your best chance to get it right. And that's who we are to those who came before us. We are their chance to get it right, and matrimony is one of the places where you practice the gentle art of getting it right.[01:25:00] Another decent reason to write a book.Chris: So, gorgeous. Wow. Thank you Stephen. I might have one more question.Stephen: Okay. I might have one more answer. Let's see.Chris: Alright. Would I be able to ask if dear Nathalie Roy could join us up here alongside your good man.So, returning to Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart's Work. On page 94, [01:26:00] Stephen, you write that"hospitality of the radical kind is

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Episode 432 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you the idiom “to air your dirty laundry in public.” Send your questions about English and your comments and suggestions to EverybodyESL@gmail.com. (And let me know if you'd like to record the introduction to a future episode.)

October can feel like a turning point in the school year. Your routines are set, your students are finding their rhythm—but sometimes, the excitement from August and September starts to fade. If you've ever stared at your lesson plans this month thinking, “I need something fresh!”—this episode is for you. In this episode of My Adventures in ESL, I'm sharing three simple, seasonal, and interactive lesson ideas that you can start using in your classroom right away. These activities are designed to save you time, engage your students, and make learning fun again—without adding hours of planning to your already full plate. Here's what you'll discover in today's episode: ✨ Lesson Idea #1: Take your students on a virtual field trip to a pumpkin patch—integrating culture, science, and math while practicing essential language skills. ✨ Lesson Idea #2: Celebrate International School Library Month by turning your classroom into a mini-library exploration and helping students fall in love with reading. ✨ Lesson Idea #3: Dive into spooky folktales and legends from around the world to inspire storytelling, collaboration, and creativity in your ESL classroom. October is the perfect time to bring energy, curiosity, and collaboration back into your lessons. These ideas will help you keep students engaged while giving you back a little peace of mind.

Step into Episode 179 of On the Delo as David DeLorenzo sits down with chef-restaurateur Doug Robson—Mexico City–born, Arizona-made—for a straight-shooting conversation about immigration, grit, and building neighborhood restaurants that people actually return to three and four times a week. From a 1983 move to San Antonio to Scottsdale Culinary Institute (1996), the Phoenician and Roaring Fork, through the LGO crucible and beyond, Doug lays out the mindset shifts that turned ego into collaboration and fine-dining polish into community comfort.You'll hear the real story: $7.35/hour kitchen days, 9/11's night-of impact on reservations, opening Gallo Blanco in 2009 on just $65K, closing “Gallo 1.0,” launching Otro Café in 2013, then expanding his canvas with Tesota—all while learning to delegate, welcome failure as tuition, and reset in Greer with long hikes that spark new recipes.Chapter Guide (Timestamps): (0:14 – 1:12) Cold Open & Episode 179 intro; Lake Powell guitars and banter. (1:13 – 3:04) Origin story: Mexico City → San Antonio (1983); psychology major; industry since 16; SCI (1996). (3:05 – 6:52) Early career: The Phoenician (Robert McGrath), Roaring Fork, Michael's at the Citadel; ESL grind. (6:53 – 9:38) Meeting his wife; support system; $7.35/hour realities and expectations. (9:39 – 12:06) Owning the dream; 9/11's same-day reservation crash. (12:07 – 15:22) LGO years: 5 a.m.–11 p.m. shifts, ego check, neighborhood focus, “I wanted to do tacos.” (20:08 – 23:30) Audience > opinions; “feed the masses” philosophy; the no-parking $8M goal. (23:31 – 26:06) B-locations with vision; Gallo Blanco (2009) for $65K; kept and grew the team. (26:07 – 31:27) Letting go to lead; embracing $20K–$100K mistakes; Rich Melman's portfolio math. (31:28 – 41:27) Health reset, Greer cabin hikes, sourcing from Phoenix, Santa Fe road trips → menu R&D. (41:28 – 44:17) Restaurant guide: Otro (flour tortillas, huevos/barbacoa, pancakes), Gallo (nixtamal corn tortillas, ceviches, embuelto), Tesota (global veg plates, wood-oven eggplant, Sonoran pasta). (45:58 – 50:38) Rapid-fire: chili as a secret weapon; add sour cream + extra egg to pancakes. (50:39 – 54:56) Bigfoot vs. bears; Motley Crüe; why early angst powers classic records; close & subscribe.

Are your ELL students falling behind—even when you're doing everything you can to support them?Welcome back to the Equipping ELLs Podcast! In this insightful episode, host Beth Vaucher breaks down the six most common mistakes educators make when working with English Language Learners (ELLs)—and, more importantly, how to avoid them. As the school year begins, this is the perfect time for reflection and adjustment. Whether you're a seasoned ESL teacher or new to supporting multilingual learners, this episode provides practical, actionable advice to transform your teaching mindset and classroom practices.Beth emphasizes that intention, not perfection, is key to successful ELL instruction. She unpacks the dangers of waiting too long to involve ELLs in meaningful classroom work, explaining why full participation from day one matters. Listeners will gain strategies for scaffolding content, using visuals, and engaging newcomers without isolating them.Another crucial point discussed is the "silent period"—a misunderstood phase where students are actively learning despite not speaking. Beth offers reassurance and practical tools to support these learners without forcing premature speaking. The episode also dives into the importance of understanding language levels and how misinterpretation can lead to either too much or too little support.Beth addresses the reality many teachers face: trying to figure it all out alone. She underscores the power of community and collaboration and shares resources like the Equipping ELLs membership and active online communities. Another major misconception? Treating all ELLs as a homogenous group. Beth urges educators to go beyond labels and use student profiles to plan more purposefully.Finally, she reframes language development as a whole-school responsibility, reminding us that every teacher is a language teacher—regardless of subject. This episode is full of encouragement, real talk, and empowering tools for teachers who want to help their ELLs not just survive, but thrive.Don't miss Beth's call to action to join the Equipping ELLs membership, now offering 20% off with the code EQUIP20. Plus, discover how to access free tools, training webinars, and community support to elevate your ELL teaching game.If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review and share it with a fellow educator who supports English learners. Your support helps amplify best practices in ELL education. Tune in now and empower your classroom for success!Links and Resources:Sign Up for the FREE Webinar⁠⁠⁠Join the Equipping ELLs Membership Shop our TpT Store

Welcome to Episode #66 of The Real Life English with Gabby PodcastIn this episode, you'll learn 25 popular English slang words, idioms, and phrasal verbs for fashion and style. Whether or not you're "into fashion," you'll notice how important this topic is in many cultures. It's important to know how to describe fashion and style in English if you're ever going to communicate in English with Americans or other English speakers. By the end of this episode, you'll be one step closer to speaking English with confidence. And the best part is that you get TWO free lesson PDFs with this episode. First, you get the free Study Guide that I create for every episode. This Study Guide includes: All the new words and definitionsEasy-to-follow example sentencesThe full transcriptPractice exercises so you can actually use what you learnClick HERE For the Study GuideYou'll also get a FREE Bonus lesson from my new course English through Media. In this free lesson, you'll get a lesson based on three clips from The Devil Wears Prada that will teach you vocabulary, listening and more!When you sign up for the Study Guide >> HERE > CLICK HERE

Are you hungry to learn English? In this episode of English Makes No Sense, we serve up 10 common food idioms that native speakers use every day. From a piece of cake to spill the beans, you'll discover the meanings, examples, and how to use these idioms in real life.Whether you're an ESL beginner, intermediate, or advanced learner, this episode will help you:Understand the most popular English food idiomsLearn natural example sentencesImprove your listening, speaking, and vocabulary skillsSound more fluent and confident when speaking English

World news in 7 minutes. Thrusday 18th September 2025Today: UK Trump visit. Germany Putin comments. Saudi Arabia Pakistan pact. Afghanistan internet ban. Colombia pet travel. Chile elections. Cuba US militarisation. United States ice cream. United States Kirk assassination. Guinea constitution referendum. Chad constitution change. Sudan rights prize.With Juliet MartinSEND7 is supported by our amazing listeners like you.Our supporters get access to the transcripts written by us every day.Our supporters get access to an English worksheet made by us once per week. Our supporters get access to our weekly news quiz made by us once per week. We give 10% of our profit to Effective Altruism charities. You can become a supporter at send7.org/supportContact us at podcast@send7.org or send an audio message at speakpipe.com/send7Please leave a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify.We don't use AI! Every word is written and recorded by us!Since 2020, SEND7 (Simple English News Daily in 7 minutes) has been telling the most important world news stories in intermediate English. Every day, listen to the most important stories from every part of the world in slow, clear English. Whether you are an intermediate learner trying to improve your advanced, technical and business English, or if you are a native speaker who just wants to hear a summary of world news as fast as possible, join Stephen Devincenzi, Ben Mallett and Juliet Martin every morning. Transcripts, worksheets and our weekly world news quiz are available for our amazing supporters at send7.org. Simple English News Daily is the perfect way to start your day, by practising your listening skills and understanding complicated stories in a simple way. It is also highly valuable for IELTS and TOEFL students. Students, teachers, TEFL teachers, and people with English as a second language, tell us that they use SEND7 because they can learn English through hard topics, but simple grammar. We believe that the best way to improve your spoken English is to immerse yourself in real-life content, such as what our podcast provides. SEND7 covers all news including politics, business, natural events and human rights. Whether it is happening in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas or Oceania, you will hear it on SEND7, and you will understand it.For more information visit send7.org/contact or send an email to podcast@send7.org

We're teaming up for a shared episode with the Anna and Shè from the Teacher Think-Aloud Podcast to talk about the what reflective teaching is and how to start finding ways to incorporate it into your work. This is part two of a two-part experimental mini-series, continuing where we left of and moving into conversations about practical strategies to implement Reflective Teaching. The previous episode was done the DIESOL way, and this episode is done the Teacher Think-Aloud Podcast way. If you liked this episdoe, please check out more of Anna and Shé's work as they do excellent work contributing to the field. Show notes: www.DIESOL.org/126

Episode 431 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you the idiom “in a new light.” Send your questions about English and your comments and suggestions to EverybodyESL@gmail.com. (And let me know if you'd like to record the introduction to a future episode.)

Welcome back, amazing teachers!

Why do companies sponsor the cycling teams?

Are you struggling to pronounce some of the trickiest words in American English? You're not alone! In this episode of [Your Podcast Name], we break down four of the most challenging words for non-native speakers: "Squirrel," "World," "Comfortable," and "Three."Join us as we provide a step-by-step guide to mastering these common pronunciation pitfalls. You'll learn the secrets to a perfect American accent, and gain the confidence you need to speak clearly and naturally in any conversation.In this episode, you'll learn:How to pronounce "Squirrel": We'll tackle the tricky combination of the "skw," "ur," and "l" sounds, a common obstacle in American English pronunciation.The secret to saying "World": Get a clear guide to mastering the "r" and "l" sounds in this one-syllable word.Breaking down "Comfortable": Discover how to handle this four-syllable word that is often shortened in spoken English.A simple trick for "Three": We'll show you how to correctly place your tongue for the "th" sound, a key element of a natural American accent.Whether you're an ESL student, a professional working on accent reduction, or just looking to improve your public speaking skills, this episode is your key to sounding more like a native speaker.Click here to Join the FREE Accent Training Community! BOOK YOUR CONSULTATION WITH ME HERE

Did you know the most common sound in English is not /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, or /u/? It's the schwa /ə/—the weak little “uh” sound that shows up in thousands of English words and sentences.In this episode of English Makes No Sense, we break down:✅ What the schwa sound is and why it matters.✅ How the schwa can be spelled with ANY vowel.✅ Examples in words like banana, support, problem.✅ How the schwa makes English sound fast and natural.✅ Practice sentences to help you use the schwa in everyday speech.If you want to sound more fluent in English and understand native speakers better, mastering the schwa is a must. Don't stress every vowel—learn when to relax into the schwa and speak with natural rhythm.

Join Thorin, Mauisnake, and guest TeaTime on Snake and Banter as they dissect the latest Counter-Strike esports drama in this can't-miss esports podcast episode! We have an in-depth discussion on the current state of CS2 and the evolving esports landscape. The conversation also tackles big-picture topics such as the decline in top-tier team narratives, FaZe Clan's struggles, MOUZ's concerning T-side stats, and how roster changes at organizations like Astralis and Spirit could shift the CS2 competitive landscape. Thorin, Mauisnake, and TeaTime debate the importance of star players versus win-by-committee styles, the role of specialist talent in broadcasts, and the politics between TOs like ESL and PGL that affect event quality. The trio dive into the realities of working in Tier 2 Counter-Strike, from pay disparities and post-pandemic opportunities to the grind of online tournaments and the challenges of breaking into Tier 1. They examine the impact of Valve's VRS system, how it's reshaping the tournament calendar, and why 2025 might be one of the best years ever for Tier 2 competition. Along the way, they share behind-the-scenes stories about commentary careers, networking, and surviving in the volatile world of esports broadcasting. Whether you're a hardcore Counter-Strike fan, a CS2 player, or just an esports enthusiast, this episode offers sharp analysis, insider perspectives, and plenty of candid banter about the game's biggest storylines Go to https://buyraycon.com/SNAKE to get 20% off sitewide TODAY! One thing to pack, five ways to power! You can get 10% off Ridge's Power Bank by going to https://www.Ridge.com and using code SNAKE at checkout

World news in 7 minutes. Thursday 11th September 2025.Today: Poland Russian drones. Sweden child crime. EU state of union. Indonesia floods. China reserve. Hong Kong bill veto. Cuba power. United States megachurch leader. Congo Ebola. Botswana wealth fund. Africa school meals.With Juliet MartinSEND7 is supported by our amazing listeners like you.Our supporters get access to the transcripts written by us every day.Our supporters get access to an English worksheet made by us once per week. Our supporters get access to our weekly news quiz made by us once per week. We give 10% of our profit to Effective Altruism charities. You can become a supporter at send7.org/supportContact us at podcast@send7.org or send an audio message at speakpipe.com/send7Please leave a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify.We don't use AI! Every word is written and recorded by us!Since 2020, SEND7 (Simple English News Daily in 7 minutes) has been telling the most important world news stories in intermediate English. Every day, listen to the most important stories from every part of the world in slow, clear English. Whether you are an intermediate learner trying to improve your advanced, technical and business English, or if you are a native speaker who just wants to hear a summary of world news as fast as possible, join Stephen Devincenzi, Ben Mallett and Juliet Martin every morning. Transcripts, worksheets and our weekly world news quiz are available for our amazing supporters at send7.org. Simple English News Daily is the perfect way to start your day, by practising your listening skills and understanding complicated stories in a simple way. It is also highly valuable for IELTS and TOEFL students. Students, teachers, TEFL teachers, and people with English as a second language, tell us that they use SEND7 because they can learn English through hard topics, but simple grammar. We believe that the best way to improve your spoken English is to immerse yourself in real-life content, such as what our podcast provides. SEND7 covers all news including politics, business, natural events and human rights. Whether it is happening in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas or Oceania, you will hear it on SEND7, and you will understand it.For more information visit send7.org/contact or send an email to podcast@send7.org

Immigrant/newcomer students are here- and their language needs are changing in the face of education! On this episode, we dive into the growing wave of multilingual learners in today's classrooms, exploring how schools need to adapt and what this means for the future of education. Join us as we break down the history of ESL programs, hear how we got to this place and see how people are feeling about it. We'll listen to a chat with a teacher on the frontlines, and hear firsthand from a student navigating their own language journey. Language barriers? Not so much, We're talking about a new era of education- and it's all about embracing diversity in the classroom.

Kids are back to school and Schedules are changing, We start off with the changes taking place and how we have to adapt. Shootings in Minneapolis schools and how we feel about the government going about it. We also realize we needed ESL as kids lol and how we are dealing with that now. Finishing up with shitty people with no integrity and no balls sabotaging one of our boats and how we have to deal with that whole situation. Share the pod and drop a review..    Pura Cultura , sin censura 

Episode 318 brings another round of real questions from real educators around the world—including one all the way from Iran.This week we dig into:What to do when students are below grade level, but admin says “teach the curriculum anyway”Strategies for students who refuse to follow class procedures and transitionsHow to respond when parents enable poor behavior—even on day threeShould you accept late work in high school? (Let's talk about it.)Practical ways teachers can boost energy and prioritize healthManaging obnoxious (but not intentionally rude) studentsHow to run teacher detentions that are actually usefulHow to teach in multiple classrooms you can't decorate or make your ownIdeas for teaching multigrade classes with multiple curriculaHow to decide what to wear for a full week of teachingNavigating extended medical leave as a teacherWhat to do when students are mad about assigned seatsFeeling overwhelmed by the messiness of teachingBuilding connections as an ESL teacher when you don't speak the same language_____________________________________________________

Episode 430 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you the expression “common sense.” Send your questions about English and your comments and suggestions to EverybodyESL@gmail.com. (And let me know if you'd like to record the introduction to a future episode.)

WWW.ADVENTUREFREAKSSS.COM Find your Ideal Destination Here:  https://adventurefreaksss.com/ideal-destination-finder/================================= How to work with me: =================================

One day, nationally acclaimed poet Maria Kelson hit “a poetry wall” for no identifiable reason. “It was frustrating,” she says, “because I had devoted myself to poetry. For 15 years, it was my primary focus.” What happened next–she followed an emerging passion, crime fiction. ‘As i was casting about I thought, I want to explore the dark side.” In this episode we talk with Maria about shedding layers of creative identity, finding new community, art as a way to explore and expose issues of social injustice, and the surprising ways poetry informs her new award-winning thriller.Maria Kelson has two collections of poetry (as Maria Melendez) with University of Arizona Press, which were finalists for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Colorado Book Award. NOT THE KILLING KIND is her debut novel. If you're a mystery/thriller reader drawn to strong female leads, the scary beauty of the redwood country, moms who push it to the limit, or crime-fighting ESL teachers, she wrote her debut novel NOT THE KILLING KIND for you! It received the inaugural Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Crime Fiction Writers of Color from Sisters in Crime and just won the WILLA award for best mystery/thriller. She has served as an American Voices arts envoy in Bogotá, Colombia. A Mexican-American educator from California, Maria lives near Yellowstone. She's writing a new thriller set there. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

We're teaming up for a shared episode with the Anna and Shè from the Teacher Think-Aloud Podcast to talk about the what reflective teaching is and how to start finding ways to incorporate it into your work. This episode goes deep - far beyond thinking about your lesson and moving into transformative teaching for dedicated educators. Listen in for a deeper understanding of reflective teaching and approaches you can make to use it to improve experiences for both you and your students. This is part one of a two-part experimental mini-series. This episode is done the DIESOL way, and the next episode will be done the Teacher Think-Aloud Podcast way. We hope you'll check out more of Anna and Shé's work as they do excellent work contributing to the field. Show notes: www.DIESOL.org/125 

Episode 429 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you a confusing way that we talk about the days of the week and the future. Send your questions about English and your comments and suggestions to EverybodyESL@gmail.com. (And let me know if you'd like to record the introduction to a future episode.)

Ileana Najarro, reporter for Education Week covering race and opportunity in U.S. schools, and Kate Menken, professor of linguistics and a research fellow at the Research Institute for the Study of Language in an Urban Society at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and co-editor in chief of the journal Language Policy, discuss the news that the Trump administration has rescinded a 2015 directive standards for English Language Learners in U.S. schools.