Podcast appearances and mentions of jesse robbins

Enterprises are wrestling with delivering data to fuel their AI efforts, hitting roadblocks around data security and privacy concerns and sifting through use cases and models to put it to work. Too many are making high-stake gambles feeding vast quantities of data into massive models. Jesse Robbins, one of the founders of Chef, a progenitor of the DevOps movement, a builder of the early Internet infrastructure and now partner at Heavybit, joins host Eric Hanselman to look at alternatives to the path that many are taking in pursuit of successful AI projects. In much the same way that DevOps patterns look to shift application development to more smaller, incremental changes with a pipeline that drives continuous improvement, AI projects can work with smaller models and localized datasets to manage risk and iterate faster. It's a pattern that avoids concerns of pushing sensitive data to cloud-based offerings by working locally. Using smaller models reduces infrastructure costs and the need for vast quantities of GPU's. Larger models sizes and data sets create two problems – more computational power and supporting infrastructure is required and more data complicates data provenance, security and ownership issues. Starting smaller and expecting to iterate on the results locally can have multiple benefits. If the data being used never leaves the local confines, security concerns are constrained to local environments. Tools like the open source project Ollama can deliver a choice of models to fit a variety of use cases and infrastructure capacities. Just like DevOps patterns, starting small and iterating quickly can get further faster and with lower risk. More S&P Global Content: Big Picture GenAI report Kubernetes community capitalizes on open source and AI synergies Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guests: Jesse Robbins Producer/Editor: Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith Other Resources: The Data Pipeline is the New Secret Sauce Ollama Continue

“How can I practice self-awareness, and use that self-awareness to explore how I'm teaching my kids to grow up as men in our world? I feel like that is modern fatherhood.” -Jesse Robbins Hello friends! Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of 2 Dads 1 Car! This episode was recorded in Seattle, where our guest today is Jesse Robbins, a good friend of mine who currently runs a Krav Maga school in Seattle and is the very proud father of two young boys. Today's episode focuses on Jesse's journey in fatherhood and self-discovery while going through a turbulent divorce. Touching on the pertinent role of masculinity and emotional vulnerability in his healing journey, Jesse contextualizes his path towards self-acceptance and resilience through his expressions of love for his children, and his unwavering sense of responsibility as a father. This episode ends with a powerful message on loneliness as an epidemic, the crucial need for community and connection for fathers, and Jesse's personal experiences of support from his friends and rebirth through empowering others. Thank you all so much for joining us on this episode of 2 Dads 1 Car, and big shout-out to Jesse for sharing his time and story with us. Please visit our website on 2dads1car.com for the latest updates, and feel free to leave a comment below to keep the conversation going! I hope you love this episode! Credits: Podcast Guest: Jesse Robbins Podcast Host; Steven Ngo Podcast Producer: Baron Hsueh

AABP Executive Director Dr. Fred Gingrich is joined by Dr. Jesse Robbins and Dr. Brett Boyum to discuss this recent publication in the AABP peer-reviewed journal The Bovine Practitioner. This is a follow-up publication that evaluated a secondary method for euthanasia using a penetrating captive bolt (PCB) in youngstock to validate this procedure in adult animals. The primary method of euthanasia using a PCB in the frontal sinus location was the same for both groups of animals. This paper evaluated time to death, loss of consciousness and brain tissue damage between a second frontal sinus shot versus the other group of animals who received a second poll shot with the PCB. Our guests discuss the importance of the veterinarian reviewing humane euthanasia protocols with caregivers and owners on beef and dairy farms, ensure that these protocols are in compliance with AVMA and/or AABP guidelines, provide training and follow-up monitoring. Robbins discusses some of the advantages of PCB euthanasia versus gunshot or chemical methods.  This investigation found no significant differences in time to loss of consciousness or death (defined as lack of rhythmic respirations and no auscultable heartbeat) between the frontal-frontal group and the frontal-poll group. The average time to death was 7-8 minutes with a range of 2-12 minutes for all cattle enrolled in the study.  The authors recommend that veterinarians develop a checklist for ensuring appropriate euthanasia using a PCB is being performed on your client's farms. This includes correct landmarks, training, checking for consciousness, maintaining proper functioning of equipment, and confirming death. The authors remind listeners that it can take up to 12 minutes for unconscious animals to lack a heartbeat after appropriate PCB euthanasia and caregivers should monitor animals until confirmation of death as part of a humane euthanasia protocol. Links: Robbins, J. A., Sanchez, H., Spangler, C., Vazquez, S., Spatz, N., & Boyum, B. (2023). Assessment of time to death, brain tissue damage and clinical signs of consciousness in mature Jersey x Holstein cattle receiving a secondary penetrating captive bolt gunshot at the poll or frontal sinus locations. The Bovine Practitioner, 57(2), 67–73. https://doi.org/10.21423/bovine-vol27no2p67-73 Robbins, J. A. ., Williams, R., Derscheid, R. J. ., Boyum, B., & Spangler, C. (2021). Comparison of frontal-sinus and poll shot locations as secondary methods for euthanizing dairy cattle with a penetrating captive bolt gun. The Bovine Practitioner, 55(2), 115–119. https://doi.org/10.21423/bovine-vol55no2p115-119 AABP Guidelines for the Humane Euthanasia of Cattle   

In this episode, Rob sits down with the DevOps “party starter” himself, Jesse Robbins, to discuss the current state of software delivery. Is DevOps really dead, or are we simply witnessing a maturing model as organizations grow and evolve? Tune it to hear Jesse's valuable take on where he sees the industry moving and the potential complexities on the horizon.Download the 2023 State of Software Delivery Report here: circleci.com/resources/2023-state-of-software-delivery/For more information on platform engineering, visit: circleci.com/blog/platform-engineering-devops-at-scale/Have someone you'd like to hear on the podcast, let us know on Twitter @CircleCI! 

Alexandra Zatarain is on a mission to help others optimize their sleep for their best lives using new software and hardware technology. His startup, Eight Sleep, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Jesse Robbins, Kris Bryant, Anthony Pompliano, and Sophia Amoruso.

In this episode, we cover: 00:00:00 - Introduction  00:04:30 - Early Dark Days in Chaos Engineering and Reliability 00:08:27 - Anecdotes from the “Long Dark Time” 00:16:00 - The Big Changes Over the Years 00:20:50 - Mandi's Work at PagerDuty 00:27:40 - Mandi's Tips for Better DevOps 00:34:15 - Outro Links:PagerDuty: https://www.pagerduty.com TranscriptJason: — hilarious or stupid?Mandi: [laugh]. I heard that; I listened to the J. Paul Reed episode and I was like, “Oh, there's, like, a little, like, cold intro.” And I'm like, “Oh, okay.”Jason: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability and learning from failure. In this episode, we take a trip down memory lane with Mandi Walls to discuss how much technology, reliability practices, and chaos engineering has evolved over her extensive career in technology.Jason: Everybody, welcome to the show, Julie Gunderson, who recently joined Gremlin on the developer advocacy team. How's it going, Julie?Julie: Great, Jason. Really excited to be here.Jason: So, Mandi is actually a guest of yours. I mean, we both have been friends with Mandi for quite a while but you had the wonderful opportunity of working with Mandi.Julie: I did, and I was really excited to have her on our podcast now as we ran a podcast together at PagerDuty when we worked there. Mandi has such a wealth of knowledge that I thought we should have her share it with the world.Mandi: Oh, no. Okay.Julie: [laugh].Jason: “Oh, no?” Well, in that case, Mandi, why don't you—Mandi: [crosstalk 00:01:28]. I don't know.Jason: Well, in that case with that, “Oh no,” let's have Mandi introduce herself. [laugh].Mandi: Yeah hi. So, thanks for having me. I am Mandi Walls. I am currently a DevOps advocate at PagerDuty, Julie's last place of employment before she left us to join Jason at Gremlin.Julie: And Mandi, we worked on quite a few things over a PagerDuty. We actually worked on things together, joint projects between Gremlin, when it was just Jason and us where we would run joint workshops to talk about chaos engineering and actually how you can practice your incident response. And I'm sure we'll get to that a little bit later in the episode, but will you kick us off with your background so everybody knows why we're so excited to talk to you today?Mandi: Oh, goodness. Well, so I feel like I've been around forever. [laugh]. Prior to joining PagerDuty. I spent eight-and-a-half years at Chef Software, doing all kinds of things there, so if I ever trained you on Chef, I hope it was good.Prior to joining Chef, I was assistant administrator for AOL.com and a bunch of other platform and sites at AOL for a long time. So, things like Moviefone, and the AOL Sports Channel, and dotcom, and all kinds of things. Most of them ran on one big platform because the monolith was a thing. So yeah, my background is largely in operations, and just systems administration on that side.Jason: I'm laughing in the background because you mentioned Moviefone, and whenever I think of Moviefone, I think of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer decides to make a Moviefone competitor, and it's literally just his own phone number, and people call up and he pretends to be that, like, robotic voice and has people, like, hit numbers for which movie they want to see and hear the times that it's playing. Gives a new meaning to the term on-call.Mandi: Indeed. Yes, absolutely.Julie: And I'm laughing just because I recently watched Hackers and, you know, they needed that AOL.com disc.Mandi: That's one of my favorite movies. Like, it's so ridiculous, but also has so many gems of just complete nonsense in it. Absolutely love Hackers. “Hack the planet.”Julie: “Hack the planet.” So, with hacking the planet, Mandi, and your time working at AOL with the monolith, let's talk a little bit because you're in the incident business right now over at PagerDuty, but let's talk about the before times, the before we practiced Chaos Engineering and before we really started thinking about reliability. What was it like?Mandi: Yeah, so I'll call this the Dark Ages, right? So before the Enlightenment. And, like, for folks listening at home, [laugh] the timeline here is probably—so between two-thousand-and-fi—four, five, and 2011. So, right before the beginning of cloud, right before the beginning of, like, Infrastructure as Code, and DevOps and all those things that's kind of started at, like, the end of my tenure at AOL. So, before that, right—so in that time period, right, like, the web was, it wasn't like it was just getting started, but, like, the Web 2.0 moniker was just kind of getting a grip, where you were going from the sort of generic sites like Yahoo and Yellow Pages and those kinds of things and AOL.com, which was kind of a collection of different community bits and news and things like that, into more personalized experiences, right?So, we had a lot of hook up with the accounts on the AOL side, and you could personalize all of your stuff, and read your email and do all those things, but the sophistication of the systems that we were running was such that like, I mean, good luck, right? It was migration from commercial Unixes into Linux during that era, right? So, looking at when I first joined AOL, there were a bunch of Solaris boxes, and some SGIs, and some other weird stuff in the data center. You're like, good luck on all that. And we migrated most of those platforms onto Linux at that time; 64 bit. Hurray.At least I caught that. And there was an increase in the use of open-source software for big commercial ventures, right, and so less of a reliance on commercial software and caught solutions for things, although we did have some very interesting commercial web servers that—God help them, they were there, but were not a joy, exactly, to work on because the goals were different, right? That time period was a huge acceleration. It was like a Cambrian explosion of software pieces, and tools, and improvements, and metrics, and monitoring, and all that stuff, as well as improvements on the platform side. Because you're talking about that time period is also being the migration from bare metal and, like, ordering machines by the rack, which really only a handful of players need to do that now, and that was what everybody was doing then.And in through the earliest bits of virtualization and really thinking about only deploying the structures that you needed to meet the needs of your application, rather than saying, “Oh, well, I can only order gear, I can only do my capacity planning once a year when we do the budget, so like, I got to order as much as they'll let me order and then it's going to sit in the data center spinning until I need it because I have no ability to have any kind of elastic capacity.” So, it was a completely, [laugh] completely different paradigm from what things are now. We have so much more flexibility, and the ability to, you know, expand and contract when we need to, and to shape our infrastructures to meet the needs of the application in such a more sophisticated and almost graceful way that we really didn't have then. So, it was like, “Okay, so I'm running these big websites; I've got thousands of machines.” Like, not containers, not services.Like, there's tens of thousands of services, but there's a thousand machines in one location, and we've got other things spread out. There's like, six different pods of things in different places and all this other crazy business going on. At the same time, we were also running our own CDN, and like, I totally recommend you never, ever do that for any reason. Like, just—yeah. It was a whole experience and I still sometimes have, like, anxiety dreams about, like, the configuration for some of our software that we ran at that point. And all of that stuff is—it was a long… dark time.Julie: So, now speaking of anxiety dreams, during that long, dark time that you mentioned, there had to have been some major incidents, something that stands out that that you just never want to relive. And, Mandi, I would like to ask you to relive that for us today.Mandi: [laugh]. Okay, well, okay, so there's two that I always tell people about because they were so horrific in the moment, and they're still just, like, horrible to think about. But, like, the first one was Thanksgiving morning, sometime early in the morning, like, maybe 2 a.m. something like that, I was on call.I was at my mom's, so at the time, my mom had terrible internet access. And again, this time period don't have a lot of—there was no LTE or any kind of mobile data, right? So, I'm, like, on my mom's, like, terrible modem. And something happened to the database behind news.aol.com—which was kind of a big deal at the time—and unfortunately, we were in the process of, like, migrating off of one kind of database onto another kind of database.News was on the target side but, like, the actual platform that we were planning to move to for everything else, but the [laugh] database on-call, the poor guy was only trained up in the old platform, so he had no idea what was going on. And yeah, we were on that call—myself, my backup, the database guy, the NOC analyst, and a handful of other people that we could get hold of—because we could not get into touch with the team lead for the new database platform to actually fix things. And that was hours. Like, I missed Thanksgiving dinner. So, my family eats Thanksgiving at midday rather than in the evening. So, that was a good ten hour call. So, that was horrifying.The other one wasn't quite as bad as that, but like, the interesting thing about the platform we were running at the time was it was AOL server, don't even look it up. Like, it was just crazytown. And it was—some of the interesting things about it was you could actually get into the server platform and dig around in what the threads were doing. Each of the servers had, like, a control port on it and I could log into the control port and see what all the requests were doing on each thread that was live. And we had done a big push of a new release of dotcom onto that platform, and everything fell over.And of course, we've got, like, sites in half a dozen different places. We've got, you know, distributed DNS that's, like, trying to throw traffic between different locations as they fall over. So, I'm watching, like, all of these graphs oscillate as, like, traffic pours out of the [Secaucus 00:11:10] or whatever we were doing, and into Mountain View or something and, like, then all the machines in the Secaucus recover. So, then they start pinging and traffic goes back, and, like, they just fall over, over and over again. So, what happened there was we didn't have enough threads configured in the server for the new time duration for the requests, so we had to, like, just boosted up all of the threads we could handle and then restart all of the applications. But that meant pushing out new config to all the thousands of servers that were in the pool at the time and then restarting all of them. So, that was exciting. That was the outage that I learned that the CTO knew how to call my desk. So, highly don't recommend that. But yeah, it was an experience. So.Julie: So, that's really interesting because there's been so many investments now in reliability. And when we talk about the Before Times when we had to cap our text messages because they cost us ten cents a piece, or when we were using those AOL discs, the thought was there; we wanted to make that user experience better. And you brought up a couple of things, you know, you were moving to those more personalized experiences, you were migrating those platforms, and you actually talked about your metrics and monitoring. And I'd like to dig in a little on that and see, how did that help you during those incidents? And after those incidents, what did you do to ensure that these types of incidents didn't occur again in the future?Mandi: Yeah, so one of the interesting things about, you know, especially that time period was that the commercially available solutions, even some of the open-source solutions were pretty immature at that time. So, AOL had an internally built solution that was fascinating. And it's unfortunate that they were never able to open-source it because it would have been something interesting to sort of look at. Scale of it was just absolutely immense. But the things that we could look at the time to sort of give us, you know, an indication of something, like, an AOL.com, it's kind of a general purpose website; a lot of different people are going to go there for different reasons.It's the easiest place for them to find their email, it's the easiest place for them to go to the news, and they just kind of use it as their homepage, so as soon as traffic starts dropping off, you can start to see that, you know, maybe there's something going on and you can pull up sort of secondary indicators for things like CPU utilization, or memory exhaustion, or things like that. Some of the other interesting things that would come up there is, like, for folks who are sort of intimately tied to these platforms for long periods of time, to get to know them as, like, their own living environment, something like—so all of AOL's channels at the time were on a single platform.—like, hail to the monolith; they all live there—because it was all linked into one publishing site, so it made sense at the time, but like, oh, my goodness, like, scaling for the combination of entertainment plus news plus sports plus all the stuff that's there, there's 75 channels at one time, so, like, the scaling of that is… ridiculous.But you could get a view for, like, what people were actually doing, and other things that were going on in the world. So like, one summer, there were a bunch of floods in the Midwest and you could just see the traffic bottom out because, like, people couldn't get to the internet. So, like, looking at that region, there's, like, a 40% drop in the traffic or whatever for a few days as people were not able to be online. Things like big snowstorms where all the kids had to stay home and, like, you get a big jump in the traffic and you get to see all these things and, like, you get to get a feel for more of a holistic attachment or holistic relationship with a platform that you're running. It was like it—they are very much a living creature of their own sort of thing.Like, I always think of them as, like, a Kraken or whatever. Like, something that's a little bit menacing, you don't really think see all of it, and there's a lot of things going on in the background, but you can get a feel for the personality and the shape of the behaviors, and knowing that, okay, well, now we have a lot of really good metrics to say, “All right, that one 500 error, it's kind of sporadic, we know that it's there, it's not a huge deal.” Like, we did not have the sophistication of tooling to really be able to say that quantitatively, like, and actually know that but, like, you get a feel for it. It's kind of weird. Like, it's almost like you're just kind of plugged into it yourself.It's like the scene in The Matrix where the operator guy is like, “I don't even see the text anymore.” Right? Like, he's looking directly into the matrix. And you can, kind of like—you spend a lot of time with [laugh] those applications, you get to know how they operate, and what they feel like, and what they're doing. And I don't recommend it to anyone, but it was absolutely fascinating at the time.Julie: Well, it sounds like it. I mean, anytime you can relate anything to The Matrix, it is going to be quite an experience. With that said, though, and the fact that we don't operate in these monolithic environments anymore, how have you seen that change?Mandi: Oh, it's so much easier to deal with. Like I said, like, your monolithic application, especially if there are lots of different and diverse functionalities in it, like, it's impossible to deal with scaling them. And figuring out, like, okay, well, this part of the application is memory-bound, and here's how we have to scale for that; and this part of the application is CPU-bound; and this part of the application is I/O bound. And, like, peeling all of those pieces apart so that you can optimize for all of the things that the application is doing in different ways when you need to make everything so much smoother and so much more efficient, across, like, your entire ecosystem over time, right?Plus, looking at trying to navigate the—like an update, right? Like, oh, you want to do an update to your next version of your operating system on a monolith? Good luck. You want to update the next version of your runtime? Plug and pray, right? Like, you just got to hope that everybody is on board.So, once you start to deconstruct that monolith into pieces that you can manage independently, then you've got a lot more responsibility on the application teams, that they can see more directly what their impacts are, get a better handle on things like updates, and software components, and all the things that they need independent of every other component that might have lived with them in the monolith. Noisy neighbors, right? Like, if you have a noisy neighbor in your apartment building, it makes everybody miserable. Let's say if you have, like, one lagging team in your monolith, like, nobody gets the update until they get beaten into submission.Julie: That is something that you and I used to talk about a lot, too, and I'm sure that you still do—I know I do—was just the service ownership piece. Now, you know who owns this. Now, you know who's responsible for the reliability.Mandi: Absolutely.Julie: You know, I'm thinking back again to these before times, when you're talking about all of the bare metal. Back then, I'm sure you probably didn't pull a Jesse Robbins where you went in and just started unplugging cords to see what happened, but was there a way that AOL practiced Chaos Engineering with maybe not calling it that?Mandi: It's kind of interesting. Like, watching the evolution of Chaos Engineering from the early days when Netflix started talking about it and, like, the way that it has emerged as being a more deliberate practice, like, I cannot say that we ever did any of that. And some of the early internet culture, right, is really built off of telecom, right? It was modem-based; people dialed into your POP, and like, that was the reliability they were expecting was very similar to what they expect out of a telephone, right? Like, the reason we have, like, five nines as a thing is because you want to pick up dial tone, and—pick up your phone and get dial tone on your  line 99.999% of the time.Like, it has nothing to do with the internet. It's like 1970s circuits with networking. For part of that reason, like, a lot of the way things were built at that time—and I can't speak for Yahoo, although I suspect they had a very similar setup—that we had a huge integration environment. It's completely insane to think now that you would build an integration environment that was very similar in scope and scale to your production environment; simply does not happen. But for a lot of the services that we had at that time, we absolutely had an integration environment that was extraordinarily similar.You simply don't do that anymore. Like, it's just not part of—it's not cost effective. And it was only cost effective at that time because there wasn't anything else going on. Like, you had, like, the top ten sites on the internet, and AOL was, like, number three at the time. So like, that was just kind of the way things are done.So, that was kind of interesting and, like, figuring out that you needed to do some kind of proactive planning for what would happen just wasn't really part of the culture at the time. Like, we did have a NOC and we had some amazing engineers on the NOC that would help us out and do some of the things that we automate now: putting a call together, or when paging other folks into an incident, or helping us with that kind of response. I don't ever remember drilling on it, right, like we do. Like, practicing that, pulling a game day, having, like, an actual plan for your reliability along those lines.Julie: Well, and now I think that yeah, the different times are that the competitive landscape is real now—Mandi: Yeah, absolutely.Julie: And it was hard to switch from AOL to something else. It was hard to switch from Facebook to MySpace—or MySpace to Facebook, I should say.Mandi: Yeah.Julie: I know that really ages me quite a bit.Mandi: [laugh].Julie: But when we look at that and when we look at why reliability is so important now, I think it's because we've drilled it into our users; the users have this expectation and they aren't aware of what's happening on the back end. They just kn—Mandi: Have no idea. Yeah.Julie: —just know that they can't deposit money in their bank, for example, or play that title at Netflix. And you and I have talked about this when you're on Netflix, and you see that, “We can't play this title right now. Retry.” And you retry and it pops back up, we know what's going on in the background.Mandi: I always assume it's me, or, like, something on my internet because, like, Netflix, they [don't ever 00:21:48] go down. But, you know, yeah, sometimes it's [crosstalk 00:21:50]—Julie: I just always assume it's J. Paul doing some chaos engineering experiments over there. But let's flash forward a little bit. I know we could spend a lot of time talking about your time at Chef, however, you've been over at PagerDuty for a while now, and you are in the incident response game. You're in that lowering that Mean Time to Identification and Resolution. And that brings that reliability piece back together. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?Mandi: One of the things that is interesting to me is, like, watching some of these slower-moving industries as they start to really get on board with cloud, the stairstep of sophistication of the things that they can do in cloud that they didn't have the resources to do when they were using their on-premises data center. And from an operation standpoint, like, being able to say, “All right, well, I'm going from, you know, maybe not bare metal, but I've got, like, some kind of virtualization, maybe some kind of containerization, but like, I also own the spinning disks, or whatever is going on there—and the network and all those things—and I'm putting that into a much more flexible environment that has modern networking, and you know, all these other elastic capabilities, and my scaling and all these things are already built in and already there for me.” And your ability to then widen the scope of your reliability planning across, “Here's what my failure domains used to look like. Here's what I used to have to plan for with thinking about my switching networks, or my firewalls, or whatever else was going on and, like, moving that into the cloud and thinking about all right, well, here's now, this entire buffet of services that I have available that I can now think about when I'm architecting my applications for the cloud.” And that, just, expanded reliability available to you is, I think, absolutely amazing.Julie: A hundred percent. And then I think just being able to understand how to respond to incidents; making sure that your alerting is working, for example, that's something that we did in that joint workshop, right? We would teach people how to validate their alerting and monitoring, both with PagerDuty and Gremlin through the practice of incident response and of chaos engineering. And I know that one of the practices at PagerDuty is Failure Fridays, and having those regular game days that are scheduled are so important to ensuring the reliability of the product. I mean, PagerDuty has no maintenance windows, correct?Mandi: No that—I don't think so, right?Julie: Yeah. I don't think there's any planned maintenance windows, and how do we make sure for organizations that rely on PagerDuty—Mandi: Mm-hm.Julie: —that they are one hundred percent reliable?Mandi: Right. So, you know, we've got different kinds of backup plans and different kinds of rerouting for things when there's some hiccup in the platform. And for things like that, we have out of band communications with our teams and things like that. And planning for that, having that game day to just be able to say—well, it gives you context. Being able to say, “All right, well, here's this back-end that's kind of wobbly. Like, this is the thing we're going to target with our experiments today.”And maybe it's part of the account application, or maybe it's part of authorization, or whatever it is; the team that worked on that, you know, they have that sort of niche view, it's a little microcosm, here's a little thing that they've got and it's their little widget. And what that looks like then to the customer, and that viewpoint, it's going to come in from somewhere else. So, you're running a Failure Friday; you're running a game day, or whatever it is, but including your customer service folks, and your front-end engineers, and everyone else so that, you know, “Well, hey, you know, here's what this looks like; here's the customers' report for it.” And giving you that telemetry that is based on customer experience and your actual—what the business looks like when something goes wrong deep in the back end, right, those deep sea, like, angler fish in the back, and figuring out what all that looks like is an incredible opportunity. Like, just being able to know that what's going to happen there, what the interface is going to look like, what things don't load, when things take a long time, what your timeouts look like, did you really even think about that, but they're cascading because it's actually two layers back, or whatever you're working on, like that kind of insight, like, is so valuable for your application engineers as they're improving all the pieces of architecture, whether it's the most front-end user-facing things, or in the deep back-end that everybody relies on.Julie: Well, absolutely. And I love that idea of bringing in the different folks like the customer service teams, the product managers. I think that's important on a couple of levels because not only are you bringing them into this experience so they're understanding the organization and how folks operate as a whole, but you're building that culture, that failure is acceptable and that we learn from our failures and we make our systems more resilient, which is the entire goal.Mandi: The goal.Julie: And you're sharing the learning. When we operate in silos—which even now as much as we talk about how terrible it is to be in siloed teams and how we want to remove silos, it happens. Silos just happen. And when we can break down those barriers, any way that we can to bring the whole organization in, I think it just makes for a stronger organization, a stronger culture, and then ultimately a stronger product where our customers are living.Mandi: Yeah.Julie: Now, I really do want to ask you a couple of things for some fun here. But if you were to give one tip, what is your number one tip for better DevOps?Mandi: Your DevOps is always going to be—like, I'm totally on board with John Wallace's [CAMS 00:27:57] to, like, move to CALMS sort of model, right? So, you've got your culture, your automation, your learning, your metrics, and your sharing. For better DevOps, I think one of the things that's super important—and, you know, you and I have hashed this out in different things that we've done—we hear about it in other places, is definitely having empathy for the other folks in your organization, for the work that they're doing, and the time constraints that they're under, and the pressures that they're feeling. Part of that then sort of rolls back up to the S part of that particular model, the sharing. Like, knowing what's going on, not—when we first started out years ago doing sort of DevOps consulting through Chef, like, one of the things we would occasionally run into is, like, you'd ask people where their dashboards were, like, how are they finding out, you know, what's going on, and, like, the dashboards were all hidden and, like, nobody had access to them; they were password protected, or they were divided up by teams, like, all this bonkers nonsense.And I'm like, “You need to give everybody a full view, so that they've all got a 360 view when they're making decisions.” Like you mentioned your product managers as part of, like, being part of your practice; that's absolutely what you want. They have to see as much data as your applications engineers need to see. Having that level of sharing for the data, for the work processes, for the backlog, you know, the user inputs, what the support team is seeing, like, you're getting all of this input, all this information, from everywhere in your ecosystem and you cannot be selfish with it; you cannot hide it from other people.Maybe it doesn't look as nice as you want it to, maybe you're getting some negative feedback from your users, but pass that around, and you ask for advice; you ask for other inputs. How are we going to solve this problem? And not hide it and feel ashamed or embarrassed. We're learning. All this stuff is brand new, right?Like, yeah, I feel old talking about AOL stuff, but, like, at the same time, like, it wasn't that long ago, and we've learned an amazing amount of things in that time period, and just being able to share and have empathy for the folks on your team, and for your users, and the other folks in your ecosystem is super important.Julie: I agree with that. And I love that you hammer down on the empathy piece because again, when we're working in ones and zeros all day long, sometimes we forget about that. And you even mentioned at the beginning how at AOL, you had such intimate knowledge of these applications, they were so deep to you, sometimes with that I wonder if we forget a little bit about the customer experience because it's something that's so close to us; it's a feature maybe that we just believe in wholeheartedly, but then we don't see our customers using it, or the experience for them is a little bit rockier. And having empathy for what the customer may go through as well because sometimes we just like to think, “Well, we know how it works. You should be able to”—Mandi: Yes.Julie: Yes. And, “They're definitely not going to find very unique and interesting ways to break my thing.” [laugh].Mandi: [laugh]. No, never.Julie: Never.Mandi: Never.Julie: And then you touched on sharing and I think that's one thing we haven't touched on yet, but I do want to touch on a little bit. Because with incident—with incident response, with chaos engineering, with the learning and the sharing, you know, an important piece of that is the postmortem.Mandi: Absolutely.Julie: And do you want to talk a little bit about the PagerDuty view, your view on the postmortems?Mandi: As an application piece, like, as a feature, our postmortem stuff is under review. But as a practice, as a thing that you do, like, a postmortem is an—it should be an active word; like, it's a verb, right? You hol—and if you want to call it a post-incident review, or whatever, or post-incident retrospective, if you're more comfortable with those words, like that's great, and that's—as long as you don't put a hyphen in postmortem, I don't care. So, like—Julie: I agree with you. No hyphen—Mandi: [laugh].Julie: —please. [laugh].Mandi: Please, no hyphen. Whatever you want to call that, like, it's an active thing. And you and I have talked a number of times about blamelessness and, like, making sure that what you do with that opportunity, this is—it's a gift, it's a learning opportunity after something happened. And honestly, you probably need to be running them, good or bad, for large things, but if you have a failure that impacted your users and you have this opportunity to sit down and say, all right, here's where things didn't go as we wanted them to, here's what happened, here's where the weaknesses are in our socio-technical systems, whether it was a breakdown in communication, or breakdown in documentation, or, like, we we found a bug or, you know, [unintelligible 00:32:53] defect of some kind, like, whatever it is, taking that opportunity to get that view from as many people as possible is super important.And they're hard, right? And, like, we—John Allspaw, on our podcast, right, last year talked a bit about this. And, like, there's a tendency to sort of write the postmortem and put it on a shelf like it's, like, in a museum or whatever. They are hopefully, like, they're learning documents that are things that maybe you have your new engineers sort of review to say, “Here's a thing that happened to us. What do you think about this?” Like, maybe having, like, a postmortem book club or something internally so that the teams that weren't maybe directly involved have a chance to really think about what they can learn from another application's learning, right, what opportunities are there for whatever has transpired? So, one of the things that I will say about that is like they aren't meant to be write-only, right? [laugh]. They're—Julie: Yeah.Mandi: They're meant to be an actual living experience and a practice that you learn from.Julie: Absolutely. And then once you've implemented those fixes, if you've determined the ROI is great enough, validate it.Mandi: Yes.Julie: Validate and validate and validate. And folks, you heard it here first on Break Things on Purpose, but the postmortem book club by Mandi Walls.Mandi: Yes. I think we should totally do it.Julie: I think that's a great idea. Well, Mandi, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Real quick before we go, did you want to talk a little bit about PagerDuty and what they do?Mandi: Yes, so Page—everyone knows PagerDuty; you have seen PagerDuty. If you haven't seen PagerDuty recently, it's worth another look. It's not just paging anymore. And we're working on a lot of things to help people deal with unplanned work, sort of all the time, right, or thinking about automation. We have some new features that integrate more with our friends at Rundeck—PagerDuty acquired Rundeck last year—we're bringing out some new integrations there for Rundeck actions and some things that are going to be super interesting for people.I think by the time this comes out, they'll have been in the wild for a few weeks, so you can check those out. As well as, like, getting better insight into your production platforms, like, with a service graph and other insights there. So, if you haven't looked at PagerDuty in a while or you think about it as being just a place to be annoyed with alerts and pages, definitely worth revisiting to see if some of the other features are useful to you.Julie: Well, thank you. And thanks, Mandi, and looking forward to talking to you again in the future. And I hope you have a wonderful day.Mandi: Thank you, Julie. Thank you very much for having me.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

Joining us on the podcast today is Native American jeweler Jesse Robbins, who is one of the top up-and-coming jewelry makers rising through the ranks in this exciting category of art. Jesse will be at Santa Fe Indian Market later this month, where he will be showing his work with some of the best jewelers in the country. This episode is sponsored by Native American Art magazine.

Las malas prácticas de seguridad y confiabilidad pueden causar interrupciones que afecten a millones de personas. Ya es hora de que la seguridad se vuelva parte del movimiento DevOps, porque cuando vivamos en un mundo DevSecOps, podremos dejar volar nuestra creatividad para mejorarla. Antes los equipos encontraban un punto vulnerable al mes. Hoy, el desarrollo de software avanza rápidamente gracias a los procesos ágiles y los equipos de DevOps y Vincent Danen nos explica cómo eso nos ha llevado a un drástico aumento de los puntos vulnerables. Jesse Robbins, el ex maestro de los desastres en Amazon, explica cómo actualmente las empresas se preparan para los errores y problemas catastróficos. Y Josh Bressers, director de seguridad de los productos en Elastic, analiza el futuro de la seguridad en la tecnología. No podemos tratar a los equipos de seguridad como si fueran gruñones malhumorados. Escucha el podcast para saber cómo hacen los equipos de DevSecOps para reunir a los héroes y mejorar la seguridad.

In episode 23 of Venture Confidential, Heavybit's Jesse Robbins interviews Jonathan Heiliger of Vertex Ventures on counseling founders and making big infrastructure bets.

In episode 23 of Venture Confidential, Heavybit's Jesse Robbins interviews Jonathan Heiliger of Vertex Ventures on counseling founders and making big infrastructure bets.

In episode 23 of Venture Confidential, Heavybit’s Jesse Robbins interviews Jonathan Heiliger of Vertex Ventures on counseling founders and making big infrastructure bets. The post Ep. #23, Counseling Founders with Jonathan Heiliger of Vertex Ventures appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 23 of Venture Confidential, Heavybit’s Jesse Robbins interviews Jonathan Heiliger of Vertex Ventures on counseling founders and making big infrastructure bets. The post Ep. #23, Counseling Founders with Jonathan Heiliger of Vertex Ventures appeared first on Heavybit.

Sergeant first class Jesse Robbins, Assistant team leader for the golden knights gold demonstration team, joined AM Tampa Bay to talk about the U.S. Army Golden Knights Parachute Team.

This episode we speak with Kolton Andrus, the CEO and co-founder of Gremlin. Topics include: The role of a Call Leader in incidents, using Chaos Engineering as runtime validation, FIT and application level fault injection, Jesse Robbins and early experiments at Amazon, oncall training, Lineage Driven Fault Injection (LDFI), the value of looking at real traffic instead of synthetic transactions, and the challenges people face when starting to do Chaos Engineering.

This episode we speak with Adrian Hornsby, a Senior Tech Evangelist at Amazon Web Services. Topics include: Curiosity and breaking things, the cost of downtime, Jesse Robbins and early failure injection at Amazon, making the case to management for Chaos Engineering, forming a hypothesis, and random experiments vs Game Days.

Bad security and reliability practices can lead to outages that affect millions. It’s time for security to join the DevOps movement. And in a DevSecOps world, we can get creative about improving security. Discovering one vulnerability per month used to be the norm. Now, software development moves quickly thanks to agile processes and DevOps teams. Vincent Danen tells us how that’s led to a drastic increase in what’s considered a vulnerability. Jesse Robbins, the former master of disaster at Amazon, explains how companies prepare for catastrophic breakdowns and breaches. And Josh Bressers, head of product security at Elastic, looks to the future of security in tech. We can’t treat security teams like grumpy boogeymen. Hear how DevSecOps teams bring heroes together for better security. These changes mean different things for everyone involved, and we’d love to hear your take. Drop us a line at redhat.com/commandlineheroes, we're listening...

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Andrew explains what microbrew beers are, and why we enjoy them so much. Jesse and Andrew also talk about nanobrews and homebrews, which are beers that we can make at home on our own, and our favorite microbeer store/bar called Chucks! Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Website: dialog.fm/lple iTunes: bit.ly/LPLEiTunes Facebook: bit.ly/LPLEFacebook Twitter: bit.ly/LPLETwitter Patreon: bit.ly/LPLEPatreon   TRANSCRIPT  Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hey, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: You just came back from Vancouver BC in Canada. Andrew: I did, yes. Jesse: And during that time, it sounded like you had your fair share of microbrews. Andrew: I did, actually, which is good news for me because I'm a huge fan of beers that are made in a style that is not the common Budweiser, light lager style of the type that you can buy in almost every country. Jesse: One of the things I want to talk about in this episode is microbrews because microbrews is something that you and I really enjoy. Andrew: Yes, and I think people in our city, in Seattle, are actually very fond of this style of beer in general. Jesse: So, let's start with what is a microbrew. How would you define a microbrew? Andrew: Sure. I will start by defining a macrobrew, which is to say large companies like InBev, Anheuser-Busch, SABMiller, etc., who make very popular beers that are made in very large batches and distributed very widely. You might have heard of Budweiser, or Heineken, or Miller, or Corona; these are beers that are made by very large companies, they are made to taste the same wherever you go, wherever you get them, and they're very popular. But, they are also very plain to taste because they have to appeal to a lot of different people. Think about, like, for example, Coca-Cola, which is made everywhere, and always stays the same, and everyone likes it. If you like unique flavors or different flavors of soda, you might have to look for a smaller company that makes a more interesting soda, but doesn't sell it everywhere; and, microbrews are the same idea with beer. They are small companies--or even people doing this is as a hobby--that are making beers that have interesting and new flavors, that don't follow the same recipe rules that a Budweiser or a Corona might, and it gives you many different and interesting options to try when you go to a restaurant or to a bar in a place that carries them. And, the Pacific Northwest, which includes Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada, and also Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon in the United States, are all cities that have been very supportive of microbrews coming up and being sold right alongside the big names like Budweiser. Jesse: "Macro" means "big," "micro" means "small," and the word "brew" is another word for "beer." Andrew: Ah, "brewing" is the process that is used to make beer, much like "baking" is the process used to make bread. Jesse: So, microbrews are pretty popular in Vancouver BC, Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest, and also parts of California, as well. Andrew: Oh, yes. Definitely. The entire west coast of North America tends to make very flavorful, very hoppy beers that are not the normal style that is made in the big companies. Other towns have taken this up; Austin, Texas is known for it, Denver and Boulder Colorado make a lot of beers, and also many cities on the East Coast, although I have not been to them to try their own local flavors. Jesse: What are the main ingredients in a beer? When you think about making your own beer, and you, Andrew, have actually made your own beer before... Andrew: Yes. Jesse: ...What are the main ingredients that you can control in a beer? Andrew: Beer is actually very simple in terms of the number of ingredients. All you need is grain, and water, and hops. And, hops are a flowering vine whose bud, the flower part of the plant, contains a lot of very strongly flavored oils that almost make a kind of tea with the water and the grain. Most beers are made with barley, but you can also find them made with corn and rice; so if you buy a Budweiser, it is made mostly with rice as the grain. All you're doing is extracting the sugars from the grain and then using yeast to process the sugar into alcohol. And, what makes the flavor of a beer unique is the combination of the type of yeast, the type of grain, and the number and types of hop that you put into the mash, which is the yeast and grain mixture. Jesse: Now, the word "extraction" means "to take out," right? Andrew: Yes. Jesse: So, you're trying to take out the sugar from the rice, or the corn, or the... Andrew: Barley. Jesse: ...or the barley. Andrew: Or wheat, sometimes. Jesse: Now, isn't the water also really important? The quality of the water? Andrew: It is definitely true that some places have more flavorful water than others. So, depending on where your water is from, it might have more sulfur in it, it might be more clear, or in some places like big cities such as Los Angeles, California the water is very processed and cleaned and doesn't have a very crisp or clear flavor, and that definitely impacts the flavor of the beer, unless you treat the water or clean it; and, so it depends on what the brewery does to prepare the water before the beer is made. Jesse: When I went to Vietnam a couple of months ago, one of the things I was really excited about was that in Ho Chi Minh City they have a microbrewery. Andrew: One... Jesse: One, which is a big step for many reasons. One, it means that there are more people in Vietnam who are exploring different tastes. The popular beers in Vietnam are Heineken, Tiger, Saigon Beer, Hanoi Beer, and these are macrobrews, right? Andrew: Yes. Jesse: They're made in large quantities and sold throughout the country, if not the entire region of Southeast Asia. Andrew: Right, and they also have the same characteristics of most of those more popular, more broadly distributed beers, and that is that they are very mild in flavor and in taste, and so there is a lot of room to make things more interesting with a microbrew where you can use more specific ingredients to get something interesting. Jesse: There was a small microbrew bar in District 2 that I went to. Now, their selection was very small--that's fine. They had about 10 or 12 different kinds of microbrew, and I had the chance to try about three. I was really excited because, again, you and I really appreciate microbrews. I think the biggest challenge that microbrews have in Vietnam, especially at a bar, is being able to serve them cold. Now it's of course very hot in Vietnam, and you want your beers to remain as cold as possible. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: However, when you order a pint of a microbrew in Vietnam, it gets warm really quickly... Andrew: Right. Jesse: ...and the common practice in Vietnam is to put ice in your beer... Andrew: Oh no... Jesse: But, you don't do that with microbrews; that ruins everything about how the beer was made and the flavor, right? Andrew: It definitely changes the balance and makes the flavor weaker. And, much like watering down tea or watering down coffee makes it taste less rich and less full, the same thing happens with beer. And, especially beer because beer is carbonated--they're the fizzy bubbles in it--and when you put the ice in it removes most of that carbonation, and the bubbles actually have a flavor to them. The carbon dioxide tastes a bit bitter, and it adds to the overall taste, and when you put the ice in, it gets more watery, less flavorful, and less bitter, all at the same time, which never works out well. Jesse: One of the things I really love about our city is that we can legally make our own beer. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: We can't sell it, right? But, we can make it and share it with friends. Andrew: Right, it's called "home brewing" or "homebrew." Jesse: Right, so we have macrobrew, microbrew, we also have nanobrew, and then we have homebrew. Andrew: Right. Jesse: Again, the homebrew cannot be sold to anybody. Macro, micro, and nano can. Andrew: And, nanobrew..."nano" just means "very small," whereas "micro" means "small," so it's an even smaller brewery. And, really the only difference between a nano brewery and a home brewery is that they have gotten the permission to sell the beer that they make, as well as be making it in a small establishment, or even a kitchen. Jesse: How many times have you make beer at your house? Andrew: Oh gosh. Probably 10-20 times. Jesse: And, what is your favorite style of beer that you make at your house? Andrew: I almost always make IPAs, which stands for India Pale Ale. It is a type of recipe for beer that uses a lot of very strong hops in it. And the reason for that is that originally the hops were added to the beer because it keeps the beer safe to drink even if the water has gone bad. So, on long ship voyages, the British would bring beer along for the trip, but it would go bad unless they added extra hops. And, so this style of beer was sent on the ships that were going all the way across the world to India, the very long trips where the normal beer would go bad. That style has been taken over by the western United States and western Canada, and they have made it even more strong and even more flavorful, and the hops they use are even richer and have even more interesting tastes to them. And, that has become the main style that is made here and then my very favorite style, as well. Jesse: In Seattle, we have a lot of microbreweries, and we even have a few nanobreweries, as well. Andrew: Oh, many. Yes. Jesse: Our favorite store to go to is a place called Chucks. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: And at Chucks they have fifty different kinds of microbrews on tap. Andrew: Right, and they're different every time because they bring one batch in, and as soon as it's empty they bring another one to replace it. So, there's always something new to try. Jesse: Right. If you ever visit Seattle, and for the listening audience I hope you do, when you come to Seattle, if you like beer, or even if you're curious about different kinds of beer, talk to us. We will happily take you to Chucks. Andrew: I can't wait to see you. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Hi everyone, this is Jesse Robbins, host of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English. Thank you for downloading this solo read episode of LPLE. In these solo read episodes, I will read to you news articles related to previous topics Andrew and I discuss in previous episodes. I will also read to you articles related to my wonderful city of Seattle. ----------- As a follow up to episode number 10, I want to read to you an article about online dating and ethnicity. If you haven't heard that episode already, then we encourage you to listen to it before or after you listen to this episode. The article is entitled "Multiracial Asian Americans 'Most Popular' in Online Dating Study" The article was written by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang from NBCnews.com, and it was published on July 13, 2015. Follow the below link to read the full story, as well as learn new words and vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation and listening comprehension. NBCnews.com Multiracial Asian Americans 'Most Popular' in Online Dating Study http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/multiracial-asian-americans-most-popular-online-dating-study-n389521 Published July 13 2015 By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang  Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Website: dialog.fm/lple iTunes: bit.ly/LPLEiTunes Facebook: bit.ly/LPLEFacebook Twitter: bit.ly/LPLETwitter Patreon: bit.ly/LPLEPatreon

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Hi everyone, this is Jesse Robbins, host of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English. Thank you for downloading this solo read episode of LPLE. In these solo read episodes, I will read to you news articles related to previous topics Andrew and I discuss in previous episodes. I will also read to you articles related to my wonderful city of Seattle. In today's solo read episode, I will read to you an article about Tesla, the popular electric car company, that we talked about in episode number 9. If you haven't heard that episode already, then we encourage you to listen to it before or after you listen to this episode. The article is entitled "Tesla files for $2B stock sale to back Model 3; shares skid." The article was written by Christine Wang from CNBC.com, and it was published on May 18, 2016. Follow the below link to read the full story, as well as learn new words and vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation and listening comprehension. CNBC.com Tesla files for $2B stock sale to back Model 3; shares skid http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/18/tesla-raising-2b-for-model-3-shares-plunge.html Published May 18 2016 By Christine Wang Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Website: dialog.fm/lple iTunes: bit.ly/LPLEiTunes Facebook: bit.ly/LPLEFacebook Twitter: bit.ly/LPLETwitter Patreon: bit.ly/LPLEPatreon

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew reflect on their travels to Japan, and Jesse talks about his favorite thing to do when he's in Japan.  Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Website: dialog.fm/lple iTunes: bit.ly/LPLEiTunes Facebook: bit.ly/LPLEFacebook Twitter: bit.ly/LPLETwitter Patreon: bit.ly/LPLEPatreon   TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hey, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: Before we begin, I'd like to say a special hello to students from two different schools now who are listening to LPLE to improve their English listening skills. Students from EKO English Pronunciation in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and I also found out that we have some students from our local City University who are also using LPLE for their school assignments and, just in general, to improve their English listening comprehension. So, hello! Andrew: That's great news! Welcome, folks! Jesse: Andrew, one thing you and I have in common is we have both been to Japan. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: When did you go? Andrew: It's been a while; I went back in 2008. Jesse: So, that's about... Andrew: Eight years ago? Jesse: Yeah, that's right. A lot has changed since. Andrew: I'm not surprised. Jesse: The last time I was in Japan was last fall, and before that it had also been about eight years. Let me tell you, I love Japan. I think you feel the same way.  Andrew: I really enjoyed my trip. Jesse: There's a few things I really enjoy about Japan. Every time I go, I always have a wonderful time, and it's primarily because, one, I have friends there, and they always take really good care of me. In general, not just because I have friends, but Japanese people, in general, are very welcoming. Did you experience that yourself? Andrew: That's very much what I experienced when I went there. Even just from people on the street, or the people you met in stores or on the train, they were all very kind and very accommodating, and I was going without any Japanese language experience--I was speaking only English--and they were very accommodating of my need to work in my own language and learn my way around the city and find out what I needed to do. Jesse: So, very similar to my experience in Vietnam, because I can speak Japanese, I found that social barriers and any level of potential discomfort in interacting with a foreigner is immediately removed. Andrew: Right. Jesse: It also makes it much easier for me to establish--to create--my own social network in Japan. That's why every time I go back to Japan, I always let my friends know in advance and then I start to schedule time with them to go have dinner, to go have drinks, and, more importantly--I would say probably most importantly--I make sure to schedule time to go to karaoke. Andrew: Hahaha! That's the only reason you're going to Japan, isn't it, Jesse?... Jesse: Let me tell you, if I ever lived in Japan, I sincerely believe that I would be going to karaoke probably every day, if not every other day. I love it that much when I'm in Japan. You know what's funny? I live here in Seattle, and we have plenty of karaoke places. There's actual places that are just for karaoke and then there are bars, and in bars, there are karaoke machines, and you stand up on a stage in front of people, and you sing. When I'm in Seattle, my desire to go to karaoke is pretty small; I don't think about it that much. When I'm in Japan, that's almost all I can think about--is "when am I going to be going to my next karaoke party?" Andrew: Okay, so what is different about going to do karaoke in Japan that makes you so excited about it? Jesse: Well, in Japan the entire system is different when it comes to karaoke. Again, in America, it's very common to stand up on a stage in front of strangers and sing. Andrew: So you have to put on a performance for people you don't know. Jesse: That's right. So, it feels very intimidating, especially for people who are new. However, in Japan, it's very different. All karaoke places have separate rooms that you rent, and the rooms vary on size: Some rooms are very small for only four people--actually maybe even smaller I hear, sometimes for only two people; very small--and they can be as large as enough to fit 10 people or 15 people; an actual big party. So, you're in a room with just your friends, so the level of intimidation and fear to sing in front of people is a lot lower, and even in those rooms, because you feel more comfortable then you can let yourself have a lot of fun, specifically in this particular room I went to last time they had a mini stage with a microphone stand, and you felt like you were giving a performance, but you were giving a performance to all of your friends who are cheering you on. Now, not only do I speak Japanese but I also can sing in Japanese I will not touch you with my singing in Japanese right now you will have to come because I sing in Japanese and his friends and I'm a foreigner who can speak Japanese in Japanese and that much more amusing to watch them no. And it's a positive feedback loop because I'm having fun and my friends are having fun and then cheering me on which makes me have that much more fun when I'm singing for them overall look I love Japan I love going to Japan I love speaking Japanese I love Japanese food I love Japanese culture music everything but if there's one thing I love the most about going to Japan it's going to karaoke. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Jesse and Andrew talk about and analyze what President Obama's visit to Vietnam could mean for the United States and Vietnam's economic growth, including US allowing Vietnam to purchase weapons from the US, and VietJet Air's purchase of 100 Boeing airplanes. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Website: dialog.fm/lple iTunes: bit.ly/LPLEiTunes Facebook: bit.ly/LPLEFacebook Twitter: bit.ly/LPLETwitter Patreon: bit.ly/LPLEPatreon   TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hey, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: This has been an interesting week for our president, right? He is currently in Asia, East and Southeast Asia. Most recently, he's visited Vietnam. Now, this makes me very excited for many, many reasons. Number one, I studied Vietnamese for three years and can speak it pretty well. Two, I actually lived in Vietnam for a total of one year: three months in Hanoi and about nine to ten months in Ho Chi Minh City. And, furthermore, this makes me excited because the nature of his trip went a bit beyond standard meet-and-greet diplomacy. Andrew: Definitely. Jesse: If I'm not mistaken there were some economic opportunities that he was trying to stimulate by going to Vietnam. Now, Vietnam recently had an election, so they have undergone some new political changes themselves. So, a new government is coming in, while in America our president is leaving. But, nevertheless, this created a really unique opportunity for the two countries to really think about the economic partnership that they can create. Andrew: Definitely. They took this opportunity in a big way. The United States ended its embargo of selling arms to Vietnam, while the president was there. And, what that means is... Well, first, as background, for a long time since the end of the conflict in Vietnam where America was fighting a war there, the United States has made it forbidden for any American companies to sell weapons like guns or military aircraft to Vietnam; and, that embargo was lifted, meaning that companies like Boeing and Airbus and others can now sell their products in Vietnam for the first time. Jesse: That is a huge deal. That's probably the first of many large economic opportunities that came from this trip. We could spend this entire episode just focused on that economic opportunity alone, about America lifting its arms embargo off of Vietnam, that America can now sell weapons to the Vietnamese government. It's worth remembering that America sells billions of dollars worth of arms to other countries. We are good at this; we as a country are good at manufacturing weapons and selling them to other countries. So, it sounds like Vietnam is going to be our newest customer. Now, the second thing that immediately came from this opportunity, from this visit was that VietJet Air placed an order for 100 Boeing airplanes. Now, of course VietJet Air and Boeing we're probably working on this contract well before the president came to Vietnam. Andrew: Definitely. Jesse: But, it sounds like they knew the president was coming, and so they decided to hold off on signing the contract until he got there so that the president could include that in his remarks about the economic opportunity between the two countries. Andrew: It is a good symbol of the kind of commerce and economic cooperation between the countries that can happen in the years to come. Jesse: Before now VietJet Air only purchased airplanes from Airbus. Airbus is a European company. Now, with this purchase of 100 airplanes from Boeing, that introduces economic opportunity for us. Here in the Northwest, in our city, Boeing is here. Boeing has offices here, but they also have manufacturing plants here. So their purchase a 100 planes is going to mean good things for our local economy. Andrew: That's right. The factories that build the 737 they are going to sell are right here in town, which means that your company in Seattle is going to be selling airplanes to the cities you love in Vietnam. Jesse: So as I think about Vietnam economic future, I foresee a lot more companies paying more attention to Vietnam, especially now after President Obama went to Vietnam. And that's great, because it sounds like Vietnam is a growing market. When I lived there, it was extremely obvious that the education system is progressing very fast and there are a lot of educated, English-speaking, local Vietnamese there. I see in the future a lot of jobs being created in Vietnam, which also means that local companies here might be outsourcing some other work to Vietnam where the skill of labor might be equal but the wages are a lot lower in Vietnam. Andrew: Right. It means a lot of opportunities for good paying jobs for Vietnamese working for American companies in the future as part of this economic cooperation. Jesse: This kind of diplomatic exchange is very common. We know this. One of the big things that was happening that I think we in America did not hear much about was similar diplomatic relationships being created between a few countries in Africa and China. Andrew: Yes. China is investing very heavily in Africa in the same way that America is investing in parts of Asia to build those connections and create those opportunities both for Chinese products being sold and used in Africa, but also for resources and jobs being developed in Africa for China. Jesse: There are mutually beneficial reasons why countries engage in these kinds of diplomatic relationships. Sometimes country A has resources that country B wants, and sometimes country B creates many products that country A wants. And, so what they're doing is they're negotiating to make it easier for those two countries to get those goods and services and natural resources to each other in a way that is equitable, mutually beneficial, and looks good politically. Because, at the end of the day, politicians want to do things that are going to keep them in power, that are going to keep them in their offices, so of course it makes sense that they're going to do things that are going to help their people, so long as they remind their people that, "hey it was our party that helped increase your economic opportunity." Andrew: I can't wait to see how much Vietnam has changed as a result of this new economic opportunity the next time we go back. Jesse: That's right. We should plan another trip! Andrew: And soon! Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse talks about taking his wife to Vancouver BC, Canada for the Night Market. Andrew gives Jesse recommendations on two good restaurants: Japadog and Banana Leaf.  Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world.  Website: dialog.fm/lple iTunes: bit.ly/LPLEiTunes Facebook: bit.ly/LPLEFacebook Twitter: bit.ly/LPLETwitter Patreon: bit.ly/LPLEPatreon TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hey, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: My wife and I are going to be taking a weekend vacation to Canada... Andrew: Excellent. Jesse: We call it a "weekend getaway." Now, this is because it was her birthday this week, and we were thinking about how we can celebrate. We also recognize that we haven't been to Canada in a while. We live in Seattle, so if we get in our car and drive, it really only takes us--assuming no traffic... Andrew: ...About two to two-and-a-half hours. Jesse: That's right. So, one of the things that my wife and I like to do when we travel is eat good food, and, as I understand it, in Canada--in Vancouver and in Richmond--there are all sorts of places for good food. Andrew: That is totally right. Vancouver is actually very well known for its food in large part because there are a lot of different cultures and communities living within different parts of Vancouver; and, that means that you can get different styles of food from all different parts of the world in a very small space and try all kinds of things that you might not have access to if you are in a different city that doesn't have as many options. As you said, Vancouver is very close to Seattle and the United States, so it shares a lot of cultures and customs and it is easy to travel to, but that also means that it has a lot of the same common foods that you would find here. You can get good hamburgers, you can get good steak, you can get a lot of traditional American dishes, but you also can get a lot of the ethnic dishes that you might not be able to find elsewhere. There is a very, very large Asian population in Vancouver and specifically in the suburb of Richmond, which is just to the south of the city, and that means that you can find all kinds of Vietnamese neighborhoods, and Chinese neighborhoods, and Japanese neighborhoods, and Thai neighborhoods, and almost every single kind of food you might find in Asia and Southeast Asia, in large parts of Africa, most of Europe, all of it is available in one place, and that makes for a really great food tourism trip. Jesse: During this 3-day, 2-night weekend getaway, we've rented a house in Richmond. Now, luckily Richmond and Vancouver are right next to each other, right? Andrew: Very close. Jesse: We're going up to Richmond primarily for this thing called a "Night Market." This happens every year during the late-spring to mid-summer, I believe... Andrew: Usually during the fair-weather months--the part of the year where it's not going to be too rainy, it's going to stay light longer, and it's easier to have a nightly event. Jesse: Right. This is outdoors. Andrew: Right. Jesse: So, it stands to reason that they want to have this night market during the times when the weather is going to be very nice. At this night market, there are lots of great Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and Hong Kong foods. So, we've rented a place nearby the night market, but we're also going to spend a lot of time in Vancouver. Now, before we get into what we're going to eat or where we should go, as I understand it, the exchange rate is pretty favorable for us. Andrew: For Americans. Jesse: For Americans. Andrew: The Canadian dollar is not worth the same amount as the American dollar, even though we are living right next to each other. And, it actually moves, so relative to the American dollar, the Canadian Dollar might be worth more or less. And, a few years ago we were actually at parity, which means that the Canadian dollar is equal to the American dollar, so you could use one or the other and they were worth the same. In each country, the prices don't change very much year over year. So, if you are making money in Canada and spending money in Canada, you don't notice this exchange rate. But, many people living in Vancouver might come to the United States to shop and vice-versa--Americans going to Canada to shop--depending on what that exchange rate is like. And, right now, fortunately for American tourists going to Canada, the Canadian dollar is cheap, which means they can use the same number of American dollars and buy more things in Canada. Jesse: Now, you go up to Vancouver a lot--multiple times in one year. Andrew: Yes. I have friends up there, so I have a place to go to stay, and I get to visit with my friends, and get to enjoy the good food, besides. Jesse: So, not just for me, but also for the listening audience, if they go up to Vancouver, what are the, let's say, one or two, maybe at most three places that you would absolutely recommend that we go. Andrew: So, one of the popular food cart style places that got its start in Vancouver--and Canada in general--that is worth going to see is called Japadog. And, this is a hot dog food cart that serves Japanese-style hot dogs, which means that instead of the more traditional toppings like onions, and mustard, and ketchup, there are a lot of different varieties of Japanese-inspired flavors that they put on these hot dogs. So, you can get different varieties of sauces like fish sauce, plum sauce, some tempura vegetables, and a lot of the same types of ingredients that might go into a teriyaki or sushi dish, mixed up with the hot dog, and it makes for a very interesting flavor. And, you can try different varieties between you and your wife, or you and your friends when you go. My favorite place, though, is a more formal restaurant--not fancy just a place to go in, and sit down, and have a meal--and it serves Malaysian and Singaporean style food. That place is called Banana Leaf, and there are multiple locations around Vancouver, so it's easy to find one that is nearby. They make very, very good family style meals that you can put together. And, the set meal that I try to get when I go up is a combination of Rendang, which is Malaysian or Indonesian beef stew, and that comes as a side, I get Roti, which is the fried bread, up front with butter and peanut sauce to snack on. They bring coconut rice wrapped up in a steamed banana leaf to go with the Rendang, and they also have a white fish in black oyster sauce, I believe, that is cooked up beautifully. Oh, and, finally, as a vegetable side, they make Sambal Green Beans, which are crunchy, fried green beans in shrimp paste. And, for some reason, those combinations of flavors together in one meal are just about the best meal that I can find up there. And, I can't get it in Seattle, so I look forward to it every time I go up. Jesse: That sounds fantastic. Andrew, if I could, I would buy that and bring it down for you when I come back to Seattle. But, I don't think I can. Andrew: Sadly, I don't think there's going to be any left when you're done. Jesse: One of the things I really enjoy eating when I'm in Vancouver is Chinese food, specifically soup dumplings. Soup dumplings are very popular here in Seattle. We have Din Tai Fung--now has two or three restaurants in the-... in the area. In Vancouver, there are many other places to get soup dumplings, and every time we go up, we always go to a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant. We usually have to wait in line for an hour because, again, it's a small restaurant... Andrew: And it's so popular. Jesse: ...And it is so popular, and we always order soup dumplings, and we always leave very satisfied. This is going to be a vacation; this is going to be three days of us gaining weight. Andrew: Hahaha. I wouldn't have it any other way. I hope you have a good trip. Jesse: Thank you. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew talk about female heroes in action movies and television, and compare what they liked and disliked with the Black Widow character in the recent Avengers movie with the female heroes in Game of Thrones. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world.  Website: dialog.fm/lple iTunes: bit.ly/LPLEiTunes Facebook: bit.ly/LPLEFacebook Twitter: bit.ly/LPLETwitter Patreon: bit.ly/LPLEPatreon TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hi, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: Over the past couple of weeks, you and I have been watching a lot of TV and a few movies. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: One of the conversations we had about TV and movies is the role of the women characters. Andrew: Ahhh, yes. Jesse: Now, you and I have had some pretty impassioned discussions about this; very passionate conversations. We have our opinions about what makes an ideal heroine character. Andrew: Right. You mean-... I think you and I have been trying to find a way to agree on what makes for a powerful female lead character in a story and in a TV show, the heroin, the woman who is the main character and the one we are rooting for to succeed. Jesse: The female hero. Andrew: Right. Jesse: A lot of the shows and movies we have been watching have been from the Marvel Universe. So, for listeners who may be unfamiliar with this, Marvel is a comic book company they are the company who has created The Avengers, The X-Men...what else? Andrew: Characters like Captain America, and Ironman, and Hulk, and Thor, and Spiderman. Jesse: Right. And then, we've also been watching a few other individual shows outside of that particular company. So, one show that comes to mind is Game of Thrones, a very popular show. And, you've also been watching Orphan Black. Andrew: That's right. Jesse: And, if I'm not mistaken, the main character in that show is a female. Andrews: Main characters, in fact. Jesse: Main characters. One of the things I mentioned to you was my disappointment in how the female characters were portrayed in the recent Avengers movies. Andrew: Okay, yes. Jesse: Now, you also shared some similar disappointments with a couple of the characters, mainly the Black Widow, if I'm not mistaken. Andrew: Correct. This is Scarlet Johansen playing the one female hero in The Avengers movies next to many other male characters. And, to be clear, you and I agree on a basic point, that is: We think there should be more strong female characters in many of these stories, and the conversation we're having is about what that looks like and what types of representations, what types of characters are best suited for these roles. Jesse: Now, before we continue this conversation, let me just acknowledge the fact that you and I are two males in our early to mid-thirties... Andrew: [chuckling] Right. Jesse: ...Talking about what we think a strong female character looks like in a show. Andrew: [laughing] Right. So you can just shut off the podcast now and stop listening, because we have no right to be having this conversation at all, but we're going to do it anyway... Jesse: [laughing] For those who are still interested in practicing their English listening comprehension skill, please continue to listen on. Andrew: [chuckling] Maybe the rage and insult that you feel from hearing us talk about this will motivate you to practice your English so you can tell us how we're wrong. Jesse: Exactly! Yes. Good point! For the listening audience, if you have an opinion about this matter after listening to this, please share your opinion with us on the LPLE Facebook page. Know that we would love to hear your opinion about this. If there's one thing that you and I agree on, as you just said, we would love to see more strong female characters represented on TV, in general. Andrew: Yes. Jesse: For the Black Widow character in the Avengers, if I remember correctly you weren't a fan of how she was portrayed. Andrew: I like the character in the movies, but I don't like the way that she is underused in the main story lines of the movies. So, she is always present when the Avengers go and do something, but she is usually on the sidelines while someone like Captain America or Iron Man is doing all of the talking, and making a lot of the decisions, and fighting in most of the most complicated battles against enemies, and I wish that she had a more central role to play in the storylines. Jesse: So, my opinion on the matter is I feel like she does have a central role to play in those movies; I'm not a fan of her delivery, of her acting. So, when you mentioned that she should have her own movie, I agree with you that the Black Widow should have her own movie, I'm just not a fan of that particular actress playing that character. So, let's take a look at Game of Thrones; I mentioned Game of Thrones. At our recent group dinner on Monday I came to you excited because I felt like I found a good comparison. Andrew: Right. Jesse: The women on the show Game of Thrones, they don't have too much screen time; although, in this season I think they're having much more. For the limited amount of screen time that they have, I'm a big fan of both their plot position in the show because it's very prominent--I appreciate just how strong they are as a particular-... as that figure in that show, but more importantly I'm a big fan of their acting. Andrew: Right. And, I don't disagree. I think that the Game of Thrones characters are growing and developing very well, and they are being shown very well in the show; and, I agree, also, that the acting being done in most of those cases is very, very good. So, we agree on all of those points. I think that if there is a disagreement, it is about whether or not that is the only way to present a strong female character or not. And, I think where you and I disagree on Black Widow--part of it may be a preference for the actress, which is just personal between you and me, and the other part might have a little bit to do with the character that she is playing and whether that character is bold, and loud, and in-your-face, or more of a subdued personality as a character that might be making her performance less interesting to watch. Jesse: The Black Widow's character, by nature, is supposed to be somewhat subdued, right? Andrew: Yes. She usually tries to stay out of conflicts until absolutely necessary. And, while she has her own opinions, she is not as invested necessarily in the outcomes of some of the disputes that happened in the movies that she's in. And, I think that, to my mind, contributes to why she is less forceful, and less forward, and less commanding like many of the Game of Thrones characters are. Jesse: Do you think that if she had her own movie that that would change? I think by nature, because she is a spy, she can't really engage too much. I mean, it would sound like she would be the female version of Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity, to some extent, right? Andrew: Right. I agree, and what I think would be different about a Black Widow movie that is standing alone is that instead of being a character in other people's stories--like she is in Captain America movies or Avengers movies--she would have a chance to be the main character in her own story, and she might have a much stronger opinion and an opportunity to be much more forceful in those stores. Jesse: Well, to that extent, I really do hope that Marvel gives some consideration, like you suggested, to creating a Black Widow movie. I like Scarlett Johansson, I think, in general, she's a fantastic actress. I feel as though her role in this movie is challenged given the nature of her character. But, nevertheless, it does warrant some consideration for an individual spinoff Black Widow movie. Andrew: I have heard rumors that they are planning to make one, and I can't wait to see it. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew talk about online dating, older methods of meeting people, and the loss of the ability to introduce one's self to a stranger. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world.   Website: dialog.fm/LPLE iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/lple/id1098735563 Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM Twitter: twitter.com/LPLEDialogFM Patreon: patreon.com/LPLE TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hey, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: Let me just say that dating in our society--modern-day dating--confuses the hell out of me. Andrew: I am right there with you. Jesse: We are both in our early thirties... Andrew: Yes. Jesse: ...and when we look back on our twenties--common dating age--dating was a lot different than what dating looks like now. Andrew: Yes. I think the dating culture that you and I grew up with was a much more traditional form of dating--that's the type that is probably closer to the kind of dating that maybe even our parents did when they were younger--and technology and social networking and the internet have kind of broken all of the rules that you and I used to follow... Jesse: ...and have created their own rules. Andrew: Yes. New standards and also ways of interacting and ways of meeting people that you and I didn't even have when we started going out to meet romantic partners. Jesse: Now, of course, there are pros and cons, there are the benefits and drawbacks, to this new form of dating, and you can say there's benefits and drawbacks, pros and cons, to the old way of dating back in our twenties. Andrew: Right! Jesse: I feel confident enough to say that if I were a single man now, I just could not handle the modern-day dating scene, which is-... I'm mean, what are the common apps that people use nowadays? Andrew: I think that nowadays rather than going to the bar and trying to meet someone you've never seen before, or being introduced through a friend, or asking someone out who you knew in a different context, either at work or to school, is not the most common way anymore because we have matchmaking websites like OkCupid or Match.com in the United States, or I think the most popular in our city is Tinder, which is the mobile app on our phone that lets us meet people without a whole lot of introduction and without a whole lot of detail about who the person is. It is like Facebook reduced to a picture and two sentences, and people make decisions on the spot about whether or not they are interested in meeting the other person. And, my understanding--I've never used this; I feel like a very old man just because I'm no longer in the market for this service--but, my understanding is you look at a bunch of pictures, see the person's first name, and read two sentences about them, and you say "yes, I'd like to meet this person," or "no, I wouldn't," and that is enough to carry on the conversation to the next level, because once both people say "yes" then they're allowed to contact each other and make plans for a date, which is about like walking into a coffee shop, and making an order, finding out the person behind you made the same order, and then going on a date next, which seems kind of crazy fast to me and without a whole lot of planning or preparation. Jesse: The screen on your phone, even with a [iPhone] 6 Plus, is not that large to contain a lot of information about someone, and then make a determination of whether or not you want to spend the next hour, or two hours, or five hours of your life with them. Andrew: Hahaha... Jesse: That's really what you're doing. You're trying to create-... Have the best looking photo of yourself and combine the best mix of words such that you will attract somebody. Andrew: Right. I think we are coming off sounding a bit old and out of fashion with this... Jesse: Yeah, out of touch. Andrew: ...out of touch, really, because we are used to meeting people earlier in the process and kind of evaluating from afar or being introduced, and things move a bit more slowly, and you are considering a person rather than an idea, and I think that's just us not being ready for this technology more than anything else, because I think you and I, because we have partners, don't need to be out finding new people all the time. And, what this technology lets you do is skip the part where you have to bravely introduce yourself to someone you don't know in the bar, or beg all your friends for introductions, or hope you are lucky enough to meet someone at a sports team, or a job, or a school that meets your interests. There's a lot of research that we had to do--I guess, in general--that people can skip and go to meeting people right away, and that seems to be what everyone wants in the first place. So, I think it's actually probably a good thing. Jesse: In the end, it's definitely made the process a lot easier for people. The barrier to talking to new people is dramatically reduced. Andrew: Right. Jesse: But, therein also lies a problem: We've lost the ability to talk to other people, right? If you think about, we've somewhat lost the ability to effectively introduce ourselves to a complete stranger and strike up a normal conversation. Andrew: Do you think that people had to practice being social and charming in person because they were forced to because of all of the dating that needed to happen before you got to know someone in the past, and that now people don't need to practice, and so they aren't as good at it? Jesse: I think there's an element of training that goes on--trial by fire, learning through experience. When I look back, before I met my current wife, when I was in the dating scene, when I was engaged in dating and introducing myself to women, yeah, there was an element of learning how to introduce myself appropriately, there were some successes and there were plenty of failures. Overall, I felt like it was a good skill to learn, primarily because you eventually learn how to get over that fear of introducing yourself to a stranger, and I think that skill carries over into a lot of other things. You can carry that skill over into your professional life, which is just learning how to go into a new room and introduce yourself to new people. I think that there's-... As nice as it is to streamline, to make it easier to meet people for the purpose of a potentially romantic relationship, I do believe that there's an element of social interaction that is lost, a particular skill that is lost. Andrew: And, I think I agree with you in terms of the software not being able to add that social interaction. What I think is happening is that people get to know more about the person before they have to expend the energy, so people who are naturally social, naturally friendly can go out there and meet people the old fashion way. But, they also have this tool to meet more people sooner, which lets them practice sooner with more people, if that is their stumbling block. So, I think, on balance, it is probably better, it is-... We have the old ways and we have the new ways, and people have more options, in general, when they're going out to find their next date. Jesse: Much like I would assume everybody in the dating scene agrees: The more options, the better. Andrew: Agreed. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew talk about the Tesla Model 3, and Andrew explains how automatic self-driving cars work and why the will become a thing of the future. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world.  Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM   TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hi, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: About a month ago, Tesla had made available for pre-order the Model 3. Andrew: That's right. Their new, smaller car; their smaller electric car that is more affordable so that more people will be able to buy it. Jesse: That's exciting. It's-... It's big news all around. It's an electric car, and it's also a... Andrew: ...Autonomous car. It's a car that can at least partially drive itself when you are going from one place to another. So, you don't need to be using the gas and the steering all of the time. Jesse: Now, we like the idea of having an electric car, but I'm really fascinated with this self-driving aspect. This is brand new technology! Andrew: It's a big deal. It's never been done before very well, and it's being tested right now on tens of thousands of Teslas that are already out there on the roads, so it is getting better very, very fast. Jesse: Right now, in Seattle and let's just say the Puget Sound, in general--Redmond, Bellevue, places where there's lots of technology companies... Andrew: Right. Jesse: And, when I say that there's places where there's technology companies, I also mean that there is plenty of people with large salaries who can afford self-driving cars right now. Andrew: Right. We're talking about places in the west coast of America like Seattle and San Francisco where people who are interested in technology--also, have enough money to try products when they're still newer and a little bit more expensive--they are buying Tesla's Model S cars more often than other parts of the country and more often than most of the world. And, so, we are lucky enough to live in a city where there are a lot of Teslas out on the road, and one of the unique things about this car is that after most of the people had bought theirs, the company that made the car sent out an update to the software that runs it, and suddenly these cars that were normal cars powered by electricity suddenly were electric cars that were also able to drive themselves for parts of trips, so highway trips and other long stretches of road that were well-marked. Jesse: Overnight, people who owned that car received a self-driving car. Andrew: That's right. It's like getting an update to the software on your phone, only this is happening to the car that's parked in your garage. On Tuesday, you drive to work like a normal person having to control the steering wheel and the gas and the turn signals, and you come home, you park it, you get up the next day, and suddenly your car can drive itself to work while you keep an eye on it to make sure that everything's going well. Jesse: Is it safe to say that currently on our roads right now there are self-driving cars? Andrew: Yes, almost every day on freeways and highways across America and probably parts of Europe and Asia, as well. The cars don't need a map to follow, they can just use the GPS that's built in, and they look at the actual road that they're on to determine where lanes are, and they use radar and sonar to figure out where other cars are. So, they're actually driving in reaction to the vehicles around them. That means that when cars in front of you slow down and go lower than the speed limit, your car sees them slowing down and slows down, as well. If you want to change lanes, you put on the turn signal and then the car looks to make sure that there is space, and then accelerates and turns the wheel automatically to move into the new lane. You're not touching the gas-... the gas pedal, you're not touching the steering wheel; the car does all of this by itself. Jesse: Now that there are self-driving cars on the road right now, are people actually using that feature, or have people become comfortable with the idea of letting their car do the driving for them? Andrew: That's a good question. I think-... I think some people are ready to trust the vehicles and other people are going to take some time to get used to the idea, because this is the first time that this has been possible on a normal roadway. And, I think that most people feel like driving on the road, especially at high speed like on a highway, is a dangerous task or one that is unpredictable, because people could move in front of you and cut you off, they could slow down really fast if there's a traffic jam, you might need to change lanes and try to find a gap that is big enough for your car to fit in, and all of these things are actually quite hard for humans to do driving behind the wheel. And, so, the idea that they would trust a computer in their car to do it for them is really uncertain and unsettling for them. But, actually, what their finding with all of this testing is that the computer is actually paying closer attention than you could to what's going on on the road around you. So, when someone stops suddenly in front of you it might take you half of a second to find out that it's happening, and then another quarter of a second to react and put your foot on the brake; the computer can see that and hit the brakes immediately. And, so, it's actually much safer to allow the computers to make these decisions for you. Jesse: So, the Model 3 is going to now have the feature of automated driving. Andrew: That's right. So, right now the vehicles on the road that can do this are mainly from the Tesla car company, and they're mainly in the Model S, which is their luxury vehicle. It costs a lot of money, it's about $70- or $80,000 US to buy new. And, so, only the more wealthy people in our city have them, and we just see them on the road when people are commuting. The new vehicle, the Model 3, is going to be about one-third of that price, it's going to be about $35,000 to buy one of these cars, which is coming out in a couple of years; but, the automatic driving part of the car--those features which they call "autopilot"--are going to be available no matter what on all of those vehicles. So, suddenly, in 2019 or so, they're going to be a lot more of these cars out on the road than there are now, all driving themselves and reacting to traffic and other vehicles on their own. Jesse: That makes me really excited considering after work, for example, I'm mentally exhausted, so the idea of getting in my car, and then letting the car drive for me to take me home, or to take me to my friend's house or, to come hang out at a bar is really nice because I can just get in the car, turn off my brain, relax, take a nap-... Would you say that's recommended, or should I, as the driver sitting in the driver's seat, still be alert and still need to take control over the car. Andrew: Right now, it's important that drivers in these automatic vehicles be paying attention, and sitting in the driver's seat, and be ready to take over in case something goes wrong. Right now, the cars that are driving automatically can keep track of the road when the road is predictable, when the lines are clear between the lanes, and when the routes are well marked. But, when things get complicated in neighborhood streets, at slower speeds, when there are lots of pedestrians around, and when there might be something unexpected like construction or pedestrians walking across the street, the cars are worse at noticing and reacting to those situations. Usually, they are playing it safe, and, so, they will stop and refuse to move so that they don't hit something, so it's not like they're going to run over a small child crossing the street. But, that means that the cars are most automatic when they are on the freeway taking long drives. So, it's not a good idea to fall asleep at the wheel just yet; that might be more of an option in the future. Right now, think of it as a fancy form of cruise control: You set your speed, you set your destination, you let the car take you there, and it will react to traffic and move into lanes when you want it to, and you don't need to pay attention to traffic slowing ahead, but you still need to be awake, and you need to be ready to take over the wheel in case something happens that the car doesn't know what to do with. This is just a preview of what's to come, though, because these autopilot cars have only been around for less than two years, and they're already out there driving on the freeways in large numbers. They're getting better all the time, and in the very near future we're going to have a lot of cars on the road that don't need us to help him get around; and that's going to be a very exciting time. Jesse: We are truly living in the future. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse talks about moving into a new house. Andrew explains states, cities, and neighborhoods in America. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hi, Andrew! Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: Cool story. A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I moved into a new house. Andrew: I know! We're actually sitting in it right now. Jesse: We're actually recording this podcast on our new dining table in our new living room. It's quite nice! Andrew: It's a very nice, brand new place. Jesse: Now, we live in the Rainier Valley neighborhood. Now, for those who are unfamiliar with how geography and...what, what's a good word? Municipalities? Andrew: I would just say how cities are laid out... Jesse: How cities are laid out. Andrew: Or, how Seattle is laid out. Jesse: Right, because some cities do it differently. Andrew: Right. Jesse: One big example is New York, where they have something that I don't think any other city has in the nation, which is burrows. Andrew: Well, yes. And, I would call those neighborhoods, but the burrows are mainly-... The burrows are defined by geography, right? By the islands that make up part of New York City and also where you are in relation to the freeway and downtown, is that right? Jesse: I have no idea how burrows work, honestly... Andrew: [hahaha] Jesse: Well, skipping that for just a moment here. How Seattle works is you have the Washington State, you have counties within the state, you have cities within the counties, and then you have neighborhoods, within the cities. Andrew: That's right. Jesse: So, we live in the Rainier Valley neighborhood. The old neighborhood we lived in before was called Judkins Park. We moved from Judkins Park to the Rainier Valley. Andrew: That's interesting, actually, because when you spoke about neighborhoods I was actually thinking about, I guess, a larger version of the "neighborhood" definition. So, Seattle is broken down by different areas, which I would consider to be places like Capitol Hill, First Hill, the Central District, North Beacon Hill, and so on. What you're describing are actually smaller parts of those areas, which are the actual, I guess, communities inside those neighborhoods like Judkins or Rainier Valley, and they refer more closely to the roads and the intersections that are around the area where you live, is that right? Jesse: Yeah, that's correct. Now, originally where we lived before in Judkins Park, we were about seven minutes to 10 minutes away from Chinatown and downtown. Andrew: That's right. Jesse: Now we live five to seven minutes away from Chinatown and downtown. So, we're moving ever closer to Chinatown and downtown, without actually living inside either one of those two areas. Andrew: Yes, which is interesting because you are actually moving south, away from most of Seattle, a little ways away. Jesse: Now, we live in a house-... a style of house that's called a "townhouse." How do we describe a townhouse for people who are unfamiliar with this kind of architecture? Andrew: That's a good question. I think when people think of normal family homes in the United States, in general, they are usually a traditional structure with a sloping roof, they are usually one or two stories tall, and usually take up a lot of space on one floor with a large yard around side it--around it outside. I think I would describe a townhome as taking up much less space with much less yard, and having more floors instead so that they are about the same size inside the home, but on maybe three or four floors instead of one or two. Jesse: That's right, that's right. On our ground floor, immediately when you enter the front door there are stairs going up to the, kind of the main area the living room, the kitchen. But, also on the ground floor when you enter you have the option of going to the side of the stairs to two different bedrooms and a bathroom. Andrew: Right. Jesse: So, they're basically compressing, they're making--for maybe lack of a better word--shrinking the size of a normal house; instead of building wider they're building taller. Andrew: That's correct, yes. And, I would say that it is not--... again it is not smaller, it is just stacked differently. So, like you say, there are only two bedrooms on the ground floor, which means that the floor is smaller, but then the next floor up you have a living room and a kitchen, which in a more traditional American home might all be on the same floor. Jesse: Right, right. Are there townhouses in other states? I think that maybe townhouses are more commonly found in denser cities where land is sma-... where land is fewer. Andrew: I think land is more expensive near big cities, and that is why people choose to build taller rather than wider. Jesse: Yes. Andrew: I think traditional American cities had more space, and many of them are still like that. So, for example, in the middle of the country, in the midwest cities like St. Louis or Chicago, tend to have more space and so they have more single family homes with yards. In cities that are denser like New York or like Seattle or San Francisco, there's not as much space to have a yard and to build out, and so they build up instead, and that's why town homes have become more popular. But, they're also very nice because they are built with the newest technology. Jesse: Yes. Andrew: So, they have bigger windows, they have better insulation so they don't get as cold or as hot in the weather, and they're cheaper to run, so it costs less money to keep them warm in the winter and cool in the summer. And, they stand up to weather well, as well. Jesse: That's right. You talk about yards. Now, how do you feel about yards? Andrew: I personally don't care much for them. I don't-... Let me say that differently, I don't value them very highly because I don't spend my time out in them. I am usually out in the city, and when I want to go out into nature, I drive to the mountains and the forests nearby. So, to me the yard is pretty to look at, but it also means a lot of work. I need to mow the grass, I need to pull weeds, I need to plant flowers or a garden, and these are things that I would not want to do normally for myself. So, they are kind of a responsibility that I don't want. I like living in the city because I am close to everything that I like to do, so bars, restaurants, theater, bands, and other performances, and also to be close to my friends. And, so, I don't feel like it is as important to have an estate, a big piece of land to live on, as well. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse shares another story about his experience visiting Vietnam and is impressed by how local Vietnamese try to practice English with foreigners. Andrew wonders how foreigners might feel about random locals coming up to foreign travelers to practice speaking English. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM   TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hi, Andrew. Andrew: Hey, Jesse. Jesse: Another interesting story about Vietnam. Remember, I was there for two-and-a-half weeks, and during this trip to Vietnam I actually had the chance to visit another province. Now, when most people think about going to Vietnam they think about going to Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, maybe even Ha Long Bay. You visited those places didn't you? Andrew: I did. You took me around and played tour guide. Thank you! Jesse: During this particular trip I spent one week in a province called Dong Thap. It's about a three-and-a-half hour to four-hour bus ride southwest of Ho Chi Minh City. Andrew: Okay, so in the south of the country. Jesse: Yeah. I was there for one week and it was a very fun experience. The city itself where I was in, which is called Cao Lanh, is a pretty small but rapidly developing city. It's small compared to, of course, Ho Chi Minh City. But, you start to see a lot of commercial businesses starting to grow. Andrew: That's good. Jesse: Yeah. Exactly, there's big hotels, there's stores that sell lots of computer peripherals and whatnot, there's...it's a rapidly growing city, which is really exciting. And, the people were so welcoming. That's not to say that other parts of Vietnam aren't. I'm sure they are. In this city we had the chance to meet college students at the local university; and, these students are practicing English. And, because there's not a lot of foreigners that come into the city or province in general, they are so excited to meet us. Andrew: That's great that they had a chance to speak with people who were native speakers. Jesse: There was one afternoon I walked around the lake--there's a popular lake there. It's not as big as our Green Lake, right, in terms of size, but it is still made for a pleasant walk around the lake. And, multiple times as I walked around the lake I was stopped by local Vietnamese just because they wanted to say "hi" and ask where I'm from. Andrew: Do you think that was because they recognized that you were foreign to Vietnam and that you probably spoke English? Do you think it was an opportunity for them to practice their language skills? Jesse: It's a combination of both. I think it's a combination of, one, I'm a foreigner, more specifically, I am an atypical-looking foreigner... Andrew: ...Meaning you don't look like a white American. Jesse: Correct. Now, in Vietnam, it was very hot, so I tanned very quickly. I got darker skin very quickly, so any chance of me looking even remotely American or European was gone. So, there was an element of 'I'm a foreigner' but there's also a sense of 'I'm a strange-looking foreigner.' Andrew: You felt like you looked unique? Jesse: Very much so. And, that's not a bad thing; it's fine. I kind of expected it at this point. And then there's also the element of them wanting to practice their English, which is also fine. So, that leads me to another story I wanted to talk to you about. It's not just about how friendly the local residents of the city were. It's not how welcoming the university students were for us. There's one common theme I've noticed that makes me admire people studying the English language in general. The Vietnamese I met work so hard to find a way to practice English. They find every opportunity they can, and they are not shy about it. Andrew: Does this make them rude or did they interrupt your other events or conversations? Jesse: Not at all. So, they were really respectful. Now, you know, maybe one could say that it might be rude of them to yell "hello" when I'm just trying to have a peaceful walk around the lake, but they don't know I'm trying to have a peaceful walk around the lake. Andrew: They reached out and introduce themselves and engaged in a conversation from scratch without any introduction Jesse: Exactly, and I admire that. I admire that tenacity. I admire that enthusiasm. I admire that dedication. And, I admire that energy from them. When learning a foreign language, one of the biggest challenges I think we as Americans have is we are so afraid of making a mistake we don't want to try to practice our Spanish that we learned for one year because we're somehow embarrassed by it. Whereas these students who have been practicing English for, of course, over one year but who have never left Vietnam in their life let alone seen many foreigners in their city... Andrew: ...Were completely ready to walk up to a stranger and start speaking in their new language. Jesse: Exactly, and I truly admire that. So, for many foreigners who are unfamiliar with traveling in a country like Vietnam where people are working so hard to practice English because they know that English is going to provide them with an economic opportunity. Andrew: Right. It gives them a better jobs. It gives them access to opportunities they wouldn't have if they don't speak the language of business, which is usually English. Jesse: Right. If you're a foreigner who goes to this kind of country and you're not familiar with that kind of mentality, of course it could seem pretty rude or disruptive to your schedule because maybe you're just trying to enjoy the scenery or take some photos, you just want time to yourself. I want to encourage people listening to this, you know, as you, you in the audience, as you practice English by listening to this podcast and as you introduce yourself to foreigners and say "hello" just know that there are many people who admire what you're doing because what you're doing is not easy at all Andrew: Agreed! Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse recounts how many of his Vietnamese female friends dislike being asked by friends and family about when they're going to get married. Andrew explains how American women also experience the same trouble with being asked about their plans for marriage. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hey Andrew. Andrew: Hey Jesse. Jesse: So, as you know, I was in Vietnam for the past two-and-a-half weeks. Andrew: That's right! Jesse: And, I had the chance to catch up with many friends during my time in Ho Chi Minh City. Now, turns out that many of my friends happened to be female, and they're also around my age, and they're also single. Now, you might be asking, "where are you going with this, Jesse?" Andrew: I was about to ask. Jesse: Well, mind you, these women--these friends of mine--they already know I'm married, they already know who my wife is, they've already met my wife. The reason why I start this story out like this is because I can say for certain that 100% of all of my female friends I talked to said the exact same thing, which is: They are so tired of getting asked by their relatives and friends when they are going to get married. Andrew: That is excellent, I share their sentiment. I know exactly how they feel. Jesse: You can just see how frustrated they are. They-... Every time they say, "Ah, yeah, my parents keep asking me 'when are you going to get married?' 'We want you to have kids.'" I can see the expression on my friend's face, and that expression is very sad, very annoyed, very frustrated. Andrew: Right. Jesse: In Vietnam, I assume that if you're not on some sort of path to a marriage, which is to say if by 25 you're not in a serious relationship with somebody, that starts to create some sort of concern, panic... Andrew: ...on the part of your family. Jesse: ...On the part of the family, correct. Because, by the time that you start to hit 28, if you're still not in some sort of committed relationship, then there's this term, and this is the derogatory term and actually really don't like this term, the concern is you're going to be called, "ế," which is a term that-... It's like saying "an old maid." Andrew: Right, okay. I was going to say, in the US there is a similar set of terms: "You're a spinster," "you're an old maid." Jesse: Right. But you what the funny thing is, here in the States I don't hear those terms. I know they exist, I know these terms exist. But, for our current culture and our current society--now, perhaps this might be just my understanding based on the fact that I live here in Seattle--my understanding is we don't refer to women like that anymore. Andrew: Not directly, and you and I being young men probably wouldn't hear it, but I'm sure that the feeling that that term, or those terms, are associated with are still alive and well. By which I mean families usually have an interest in seeing their daughters, especially, go on to have happy family lives, and there is an expectation for most of them that they will find a boyfriend, get married, and have children. And, so, I know many female friends of mine on my own who are in a similar situation where they are in their late twenties or thirties and have still not settled down, as it's called, they haven't found a permanent relationship and they have not gotten married and they have not had kids, and they are receiving all kinds of pressure from their families and even sometimes their friends to go down that path and achieve those goals, even if they don't want them themselves. Jesse: You know what's interesting, as a guy--now, I've been married for going on four years, I've been in a relationship for eight prior to that--so, you're right, I'm not-... clearly I've never had to experience that kind of pressure. Whenever my dad asks me, "So, son, when are you going to have children? I want more grandchildren," my answer is always, "We're still thinking about it. Stop asking me." Andrew: Yes. Imagine tha-... that question being asked and that amount of frustration you feel magnified ten or a hundred times, or alternately, imagine that he's asking you it every hour of every day and I think you begin to understand what a lot of these especially women are going through. My girlfriend and I have been together for a little bit over a year, but because we are both around 30 years old the expectation is that we will be taking those next traditional steps very soon. So, I occasionally get a question from my family, "when are you getting married?" or "when you get married..." assuming that I will soon, she gets it every time she talks to her family. Jesse: She's still very young, too. She's in her mid-twenties if I'm not mistaken. Andrew: She is 29, turning 30 this year. But, she is old enough that she has been getting those questions for quite a while. And, everyone seems to be very, very interested in knowing when they-... When people our age are going to take their place in traditional family society, and that's becoming less and less common and popular for people our age, at least in the United States, so it creates this conflict. Jesse: Out of my friends in Vietnam, they-... Again they express this frustration about hearing this question. It's really interesting to hear that women here in the States still experience that same line of questioning. I honestly had no idea. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew talk about the current presidential election season and the possibility of having our first female president. Andrew explains about America's two-party system--Democrat and Republican. Jesse explores how where he grew up and lives influences who he supports to be the next president. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Hi, Andrew! Andrew: Hi, Jesse. Jesse: How you doing? Andrew: Hanging in there. Jesse: We are in an interesting time in our country. This year is an election year. Andrew: It is, and there is a guarantee that we will have a new president of the United States by the end of the year. Jesse: That's right. Every four years we have a presidential election, and this is the fourth year. So, it's easy to remember: 2016, then every four years after that. Andrew: 2016, 2020, 2024, 2028, at which point we will be very, very old people and probably cranky people, also. Jesse: This year may be the first year that we have a female president in our country. Andrew: It's possible. One of the strong candidates on the Democratic side is Hillary Clinton who is in a good position to win her party's nomination, which leads us into the confusing part about American politics, which is that we have two basic parties--two sides that tend to run against each other every year. And, this is different from most other Western countries because many Western countries are run as a coalition, which means there are many parties that have to team up to run the country. And, in the United States, it is either a Democratic president or a Republican president, and we have had a Democratic president for eight years in President Barack Obama, and now we are waiting to see whether we can have another presidency on the Democratic side. Jesse: My understanding is that in recent time it's always one swung one direction and then the other, right? Andrew: In-... In the past twenty years or so, that is true. Ronald Reagan ran twice and had eight years as president. We had another president on the Republican side, President Bush, who only lasted one four-year term, and then we had President Clinton with eight years in office--he was a Democrat--then President Bush who was eight years in office--a Republican--and then President Obama who was eight years in office--a Democrat. Jesse: This might be the first time where we have back-to-back presidents who are both from the same party. Andrew: Right...in about 20 years. Jesse: Yes. Andrew: It's been a very long time. Jesse: That's right. This is going to be a unique time in our election season not just because we have a strong female candidate who has a really strong chance of becoming the first female president of the United States, but then there's also the element of having two back-to-back democratic presidents who are different from each other, then there's also the element of Hillary Clinton being the wife of a former president, as well. Andrew: Right! We've had a interesting run of elections in the past 25 years or so, where President Bush the senior was president, and then eight years later his son became the president, and now we are in a similar position where President Bill Clinton was president for eight years and now his wife Hillary Clinton is running. So, we are dealing with some very political families that tend to stay in power for a very long time whether by their sons and daughters or their spouses. Jesse: Election Day is in November, November 8th, which is a Thursday. I did tell my boss that I may be showing up late for work on the morning of November 9th... Andrew: ...Because you'll be staying up to see what happens. Jesse: Primarily because I will be staying up late to see what happens, and there may be some celebration in or sharing of sorrows involved depending on who is elected. Andrew: Right. Jesse: Now, I feel it's comfortable enough between you and I to share with the audience which side we take in terms of Democrat or Republican. Andrew: Yeah, that's right. Both of us are strong support of the Democratic Party in the United States. So, both of us voted for Barack Obama... Jesse: That's right. Andrew: And, we both hope that Hillary Clinton will become the next president. Jesse: This is interesting because part of and--maybe I'll speak for myself here--part of my support of the Democratic Party, part of my left-leaning thinking, comes from my upbringing. We live in a liberal city. Andrew: Right. And, we should be clear, in the United States, which is not the same as in some other countries, the Liberal party and the Democratic party and the more Progressive party are all the same thing. So, when we say we are left-meaning-...when we say we are left-leaning, with we also mean we are Democratic, or, rather we support the Democratic party... Jesse: Correct. Andrew: ...And, that is opposite from the Republican party, which is the conservative party, which is the right-leaning party. Jesse: So, terms like "left," "Democrat," and "liberal" are all grouped together. Andrew: Right. Jesse: And then terms like "right," "Conservative," "Republican," "GOP" are all lumped together. Andrew: That's right Jesse: That's right. Because, in some other countries those terms will be dramatically different and represent two different parties. Andrew: Exactly. What you say is correct. We both live in Washington State, which is a state that tends to vote very strongly towards the Democratic party most of the time. So, we will call it a "Liberal State," and that is tending-...that tends to be the truth in the entire west coast of the United States--and actually the east coast in many parts, as well. So, Washington and Oregon and California tend to vote liberally for the Democratic party, so does New York, New Jersey, on up and down through Massachusetts and other parts of the northeastern part of the United States. Jesse: I heard said that the coasts, both west coast and east coast, tend to lean left, and then there's a mix in the center, and then when you go south in America, that's where you get a lot of conservative voters. Andrew: Right. People who vote for the right-wing party or the Republicans. Jesse: Well, I'm excited to see what happens in November. Andrew: So am I. Jesse: We'll have a fun night watching the election together... Andrew: ...and I look forward to celebrating the outcome. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Andrew talks about hiking and enjoying the natural beauty of Washington State. Jesse talks about his hobby of salsa dancing, and how it helps him exercise. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM TRANSCIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Andrew! Andrew: Jesse! Jesse: Tell me, what do you like to do on the weekend? Andrew: On the weekend, most of the time I am trying to catch up on exercise because I work at an office and sit or stand at a desk most of the day. So, on the weekend, usually I'm trying to find a way to go outside and hike in the mountains or go for a run depending on who is available to join me in these activities. Jesse: Nice! Living in Seattle, there's many places to go hiking nearby. Andrew: Yes! We're very close to a lot of mountains, and for running there are beaches and a lot of pretty scenery to look at when you're outside. Jesse: Tell me, why do you like hiking? Andrew: I like hiking because it is close and also because it is good exercise with new things to look at each time you go out. So, for example, if I were to go on a run near my house, I would have to run by the same things everyday and it gets boring. When I go out hiking I can go in a different direction each day. I will drive to a different mountain, and I can climb to the top and see different views, and also there are different trails with different conditions. So, some are rocky, some are dusty, sometimes there is snow, and that makes each hike new and fresh. Jesse: When you go hiking, do you like to take a lot of pictures? Andrew: Yes, usually-... Well, on the pretty days I like to take pictures. At the top, if it is sunny and bright and you can see clearly for a long way, the pictures look amazing and you can see not just the mountains nearby but sometimes very far away. Even if the hike is a long way away from the city, like 30 or 60 minutes drive away, sometimes you can still see from the top of the mountain the skyscrapers in the city of Seattle, or our famous mountain, Mount Rainier, nearby all the way away down to the south and east. Jesse: When you go hiking, how long do you usually hike and what do you usually bring with you? Andrew: That's a good question. The hikes are sometimes nearby and they take only 30 to 45 minutes to drive to. But, sometimes when I go with more enthusiastic friends we might go somewhere further away that might take two or three hours to get to by car. Once we're there, usually we are hiking for about four or five miles up and then four or five miles back, and that takes about two or three hours to go up, and then it is usually a little bit faster to go downhill back to the car. So, these are long trips; they take most of a day to complete, between the driving and the hiking. That means that you need to bring food and prepare to be out all day. So, we dress in layers to stay warm while we're cool and to take some of them off when we are working hard and get hot and sweaty. And, we also take water and snacks like granola bars or chips. We will also bring a meal sometimes for the top, a sandwich or something like that, for lunch, and we usually bring extra just in case something might happen, or if we meet someone else who does not have enough food along the way. Jesse: Who do you usually go hiking with? How many friends and how often? Andrew: It depends on the season. In the summer, it is warmer so we can get to more places that are not covered with snow and ice and are dangerous to drive to. And, in the winter, sometimes with extra preparation--bringing things like snow shoes or spikes to put on your shoes so we don't slip--we can go out into snow hikes. During the summer, we usually try to hike once every one or two weeks, usually on the weekend. And, in the winter, it is probably closer to once each month. Jesse: Nice. When are you going to go hiking again this year? Andrew: Right now, I am training for some runs, so I am running more than I am hiking. But, once the weather warms up again, it is January now, so maybe April or May I will probably start hiking again more regularly. Jesse: Excellent. During the weekend, my favorite hobby is salsa dancing. I've been salsa dancing for about 10 years now. And, it's a very invigorating activity. Invigorating means I use lots of energy, I use a lot of body energy, I'm moving around a lot. Andre: And, how does it make you feel? Jesse: It feels like--... Probably it feels the same way you feel when you're jogging. You're breathing heavily, you're sweating, your heart is beating very fast--your heart is racing. But, it's also very fun for me. So, it's a similar activity in that I can move my body around a lot, but it's also very fun because I get to listen to very, very fun and exciting music, and I can be creative, matching my body movement and dance steps to the music, and also I get to make new friends and meet old friends. In Seattle, we have a salsa dancing community. That means that whenever there's a salsa event during the week, there is a good chance that I will meet the same people again and again and again. And, because I get to meet them multiple times, I learn their name, I learn more about them, and then we become friends. So, now it feels like I'm not dancing with strangers all the time, but I'm dancing with people who I feel very comfortable with. It's a very fun activity. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew talk about their coffee and tea preferences, and what it was like to experience tea and coffee in different countries. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM TRANSCRIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Andrew: Last night, my girlfriend and I went to dinner and a movie, and we went to eat at an Indian style restaurant. And, at this restaurant they serve tea Indian style, which they called chai, and they're very nice about making sure that you always have a full cup, so I love going there. But, while we were eating, it made me think about all of the different ways that coffee and tea are served in different cultures and places in the world. I take my Indian tea hot with milk and sugar so it's sweet and creamy, and I've always had it that way. My girlfriend asked me at dinner why I like drinking tea with milk and sugar when I like drinking my coffee black without any milk and without any extra sweetness in it. And, she's right; I like my coffee bitter but hot, and I like my tea creamy and sweet. But, there's actually a lot of different ways to take coffee or to take tea and it varies by custom. When I'm in Vietnam, for example, or eating at a Vietnamese restaurant even in the United States, they serve Vietnamese coffee, which means a different kind of coffee; it's brewed stronger they brew it into the glass that you're going to drink it directly, and they pour it over condensed milk, so again it is creamy and sweet, and usually you serve it with ice, so it's actually cold. So, I like coffee and both of these cases. But, in my morning routine when I am having breakfast and getting ready for the day, the kind of coffee I want is black and bitter, and I only want coffee Vietnamese-style when it is served at a Vietnamese restaurant with a Vietnamese meal or when I'm visiting the country directly. And, I think that's true of most people, so I wanted to ask you how you take your coffee and how you like to drink at another places. Jesse: That's a really good question. Let me just say that on rare occasion will I ever drink drip pour coffee straight black. So, if I go to Starbucks and I ordered a tall drip [coffee], I will always put a little bit of half-and-half [milk] and one package of sugar--raw sugar, the thick, brown granulated sugar. Andrew: This is raw sugar, but it's not molasses sugar, right? This is just... Jesse: Right, it comes in that brown package, I think, it's called Sugar In The Raw. I can't remember the name. Andrew: Right. This is a form of unrefined white sugar. Jesse: Right. Whenever I have drip coffee, it's always with that small combination; a little bit of cream or milk and a little bit of sugar--just the right taste. When I'm in Vietnam, it's always iced coffee with condensed milk. On rare occasion if I'm in someplace cold like Da Lat or in the winter time, then I'll remove the ice; then you could take it just straight drip coffee with condensed milk, hot. Generally speaking, when I'm at a Vietnamese restaurant here in Seattle, it's always the iced...Vietnamese iced coffee. In fact, that Vietnamese iced coffee is very popular among non-Vietnamese, because they know it is very, very strong right. One of my favorite memories with coffee and tea was when I was in India. So, remember, back in the MBA program at the University of Washington, we had Study Tours, right? Andrew: I went to Brazil and you went to India, yes? Jesse: No, well you went to Brazil and I led China...I co-lead China. Right before, in our first year I went to India as a participant. And, in India, by luck, I was going to be in India during the time that one of my friends was getting married--one of my Indian friends was getting married. Andrew: You got to go to an Indian wedding? Jesse: I got to go to a traditional Sikh wedding. So, when we think of Indian weddings we think of the big parties, very, very elaborate. And, I'm sure he had that, but, from what I remember and what I understand, this was a wedding that took place over a few days and the Sikh part of it, this one was more religious, a religious ceremony at his house. Smaller, intimate; close friends and family. Andrew: How many people, about?... Jesse: I want to say about 50 to 70 people there. Andrew: That's the "small" version?...[hahaha] Jesse: And then, after that, there was a wonderful banquet afterwards in his backyard. And, I remember one of the wait staff coming around with a big jar of chai tea. Andrew: This is served hot with milk? Jesse: Hot with milk, correct. He'll give you a clay--a very, very rough feeling, very rough clay cup. A small cup. A very, very small cup. If you think of that Chinese tea cups that you get at a Chinese restaurant--about that size, if not smaller. And then, he'll pour it, and then you just sip it. Unlike my natural tendency to shoot it as if it were an alcoholic shot, use just casually sip on it. And, mind you, it is a very hot day, so you're not trying to consume a lot of hot liquid at one time. That was delicious; I made sure to find him again multiple times during my visit to my friend's house to get more of that chai tea. Very, very good! Andrew: Excellent. I think it's funny, the different ways we expect to receive our drinks depending on where we are and our circumstances. Even in the United States, the way people drink tea is different by custom. In Seattle, here, we're usually drinking tea as a substitute for coffee because we have a strong coffee culture. Jesse: Right. Andrew: And, so, we take our tea hot in water and maybe with sugar. And, that's different from, for example, how it is taken in the United Kingdom or in Britain, where the expectation is that tea is served hot with milk, for example. Or, even in the south or the southern part of the United States where tea is served as a refreshing drink in the hot summers where it's almost always iced tea and it's very, very, very sweet. So, they add lots and lots of sugar. And, if you asked for tea in, for example, Georgia in the middle of the summer and you're expecting to get a hot chai or chamomile, potentially served with a little bit of sweet, you would be very disappointed to receive this, this cold beverage, instead. Jesse: That's right. You raise an interesting point. For example, you go to--let's say you are an Indian native from India. You come over, you come to Georgia, you're invited to someone's house. And, someone asks, "would you like some tea?" And, in your mind, you have one definition of the word "tea." You--when you think of tea, you think of it based on your culture and the context of your culture, based on your experience with tea from your native country. And then, when you're served, chances are it's cold and in a big glass with lots of sugar and a slice of lime. Andrew: Right. Think about how disappointed you would be, right? Jesse: Absolutely. One of the interesting coffee-tea combinations here in Seattle that I really enjoy and that I also want to recommend is 'matcha latte.' Andrew: 'Matcha latte.' What goes into a matcha latte? Jesse: "Matcha" is Japanese-style green tea. That takes care of the 'tea' side, right? And then, 'latte' is your standard form, your regular espresso-style drink. Andrew: Regular in Seattle. So, that is pressure-brewed coffee, very strong, mixed with hot steamed milk. Jesse: Right, exactly. Andrew: And then, so, matcha co-... matcha latte?... Jesse: Yes. Andrew: A matcha latte, if I'm understanding right, is tea instead of the coffee? Or is it tea plus coffee and the steamed milk? Jesse: Tea plus coffee--... matcha green tea powder mixed in with an actual latte with the caffeine. That's my understanding. Andrew: OK. So it has both. You're getting a little bit of both sides at the same time. Jesse: Yes. And the matcha latte comes out green. So, for anyone unfamiliar with drinking anything that has a green color to it, I think people who drink matcha latte for the first time are a little scared. Andrew: Right. Of the color... Jesse: Of the color, right. However, when you drink it, it's--... it's absolutely delicious. A little sweet. It has the green tea flavor and yet has the warm texture and feel of a latte. Overall, I highly recommend it. There's a few places in Seattle that serve matcha latte. Andrew: Is this a Starbucks option or do you have to go somewhere locally? Jesse: No. You have to go to a small café. The café I like to go to is called Panama Cafe. Panama Cafe is in the International District in Seattle, and there, that's the only place I know right now that has matcha latte. Now, before, a few years ago, Starbucks used to sell--and I still think that they do sometimes, maybe during the summer--Starbucks sells a matcha Frappuccino, and that came from Japan. I remember--... I remember--this is going to sound very hipster--I remember drinking matcha Frappuccino in Japan before it was ever introduced to the American Starbucks. Andrew: ...And then you came back and they brought it to the stores in Seattle. Jesse: Yes. I think they brought it back from me. I don't know. Andrew: [hahaha] But you like them. The Frappuccino is a sweet--... Almost like a sweet milkshake kind of drink, right? Jesse: Yes. Coffee milkshake, yeah. Andrew: ...With whipped cream on top? Jesse: Yes. Andrew: And, so they added the matcha power to that, as well. Jesse: Yes. So it's green. It's very green. It's tastes delicious. I highly recommend it. If you're ever in Japan or here in Seattle during the summer, I recommend you try it. Andrew: I'll have to try the matcha latte or matcha Frappuccino soon. Jesse: Great. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew talk about how they celebrated Christmas and the turn of the New Year. Jesse introduces the concept of a "bachelor party." Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM TRANSCIPT Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from Dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Andrew. Andrew: Jesse. Jesse: Happy New Year! Andrew: Same to you. Jesse: We are in January; it is 2016. I'm curious, how was your holiday vacation back in December? Andrew: Very good. It has been a busy couple of weeks, but I had a lot of time to visit family and friends, and, so, in addition to the Christmas holiday at the end of December, I also went to a wedding that happened on New Year's Eve, and then celebrated the New Year before coming back to work in January. Jesse: That's fantastic! Whose wedding? Andrew: This was a wedding for two of my good friends who live across the border in Canada. We are here in Seattle, and the wedding and the New Year's Eve celebration we had was up in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada, about 2 to 3 hours drive away. Jesse: How long did you stay in Canada? Andrew: Let me see... We went up the day before New Year's Eve, so December 30th, the wedding was on December 31st, and, so, we had the wedding ceremony during the day, and after the wedding was finished we went to downtown Vancouver to watch the fireworks at midnight to celebrate the New Year, and then went home with lots of traffic in the early morning of January 1st. Jesse: For New Year's celebration, every year my wife and I go to our friends' house. Our friend lives in a neighborhood called Capitol Hill. They live in an apartment and their apartment has a rooftop that people can go on to to have a beautiful view of downtown Seattle. Andrew: So, this is a tall building on a tall hill in the middle of the city. Jesse: Correct. Andrew: And there's a good view of the downtown city area where the fireworks happen. Jesse: Yes. So, we hung out at a friends' place for a few hours. And then, 15 minutes before midnight we took a bottle of champagne, we went up to the rooftop, and we waited for the fireworks. The fireworks event was happening at a place in downtown called Seattle Center. On the rooftop of our friend's apartment there were many people, so it was a little bit crowded. However, we had enough space to have a clear view of the Space Needle. Andrew: That's great! Jesse: So, we waited, and then when it was New Year's we all drink champagne and we gave each other a hug, we wished each other "Happy New Year," and then after that I quickly went back inside the house because it is very cold outside... Andrew: ...in December in Seattle, yeah. Jesse: How was your Christmas? Andrew: My Christmas was also very good. It was a little bit busy because this was the first year that my girlfriend and I were trying to see both my parents and her parents all on the holiday. So, on Christmas Eve we went down to my parents' house, which is about 30 minutes away, and spend the night there to get up in the morning, and exchange gifts, and have a Christmas dinner meal in the middle of the day. And, my dad's parents--my grandparents--were also there to celebrate with us. And then, we had to leave that evening to go to her parents' house up north of the city, about an hour away. So, there was a lot of driving involved, but we got to see everyone and have dinner with both sides and get back in time to jump into the other activity that I had to fit into this busy season, which was the bachelor party for my friend who was getting married. So, December 25th and 26th it was Christmas celebrations, and December 27th and 28th, which was the weekend, my friend from Vancouver came to Seattle with some friends, and we went around the city to drink and celebrate his wedding that was coming up very soon. Jesse: Let's explain a bachelor party really quickly. A bachelor party in American society is when the groom--the guy who is, the man who is going to get married--has a party with his guy friends before the wedding. Sometimes it's the night before the wedding... Andrew: And that's a bad idea [haha]. Jesse: Sometimes it's the week before the wedding. Sometimes it can even be a couple of months before the wedding. Typically a groom has a bachelor party, and usually a bachelor party includes drinking alcohol and beer, going out into the city, or...or even going to a destination, a far away place like a cabin or... Andrew: Another city to take a vacation. Jesse: Exactly. Andrew: And, usually there are other activities to celebrate the occasion of his getting married like going out to dance, or going to a show, or celebrating at someone's house. We did a lot of those things and had a very good time. Although, some of the guests had a little bit too much to drink and had headaches the next day, they had a hangover. I believe the bride also had her version of this party, so she had a bachelorette party that was up in Vancouver. So, they were separated to celebrate on their own independently, and then came back together for the wedding the next week. Jesse: Typically, for a bachelor party there are no women in the group Andrew: Correct. Jesse: Likewise, typically, for a bachelorette party for the bride there are no men in the group, it's only women. Andrew: Correct. Jesse: For my Christmas holiday, it was very relaxing. We had Christmas dinner at my wife's family's house. They live very nearby. And then, throughout the day I relaxed at home and watched four movies. Andrew: [haha] That's a long...a long day! Jesse: Four movies, back-to-back-to-back-to-back. Andrew: Eight hours or so of film? Jesse: Yes. Whenever I have a holiday vacation like Christmas, or like Thanksgiving, or like New Year's, I like to spend time watching movies at home. It's a chance for me to catch up on many movies that I missed over the past four or five years. Andrew: Four or five years? Jesse: Yeah! Not just this past year, but over the past few years. So, I stayed at home watching movies and just relaxing. That was it. Andrew: Sounds like a good time and a good way to relax before coming back to work and your normal life after the holiday. Jesse: Exactly. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. If you have questions or comments about English, or if you would like for us to use a word, grammar, or idiom in our conversation so you can learn how to use it correctly, we would love to hear from you on Twitter at @dialogdotfm or Facebook at facebook.com/dialogFM.

Welcome to LPLE, "Let's Practice Listening in English!" Jesse and Andrew, your LPLE hosts, talk about their favorite foods and travel experience. Join in the conversation! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ask us questions about English conversation and meet other English language learners all over the world. Twitter: @LPLEDialogFM Facebook: facebook.com/LPLEDialogFM   Transcript Intro [Jesse]: Hi everyone. My name is Jesse Robbins, and welcome to LPLE from dialogue FM. We're the podcast that lets you practice listening in English. We speak English slowly and clearly so that you can follow along and understand native English speakers more easily. I'm excited to help you improve your English listening skills, as well as help you learn new vocabulary, grammar, and idioms commonly heard and conversation among native English speakers. If you want to practice listening in English, then we invite you to join our conversation. Jesse: Andrew, what is your favorite food? Andrew: Pizza is the first thing that comes to mind. Jesse: Why do you like pizza? Why is that your favorite food? Andrew: I think it has all of the things that are unhealthy for me and all of the things that taste good all at the same time. Jesse: For me, I also like pizza. But, I like my pizza to be very simple--Not a lot of ingredients. My favorite pizza is pepperoni and sausage; very basic, very simple, any pizza place has it. What is your favorite kind of pizza? Andrew: I think I am the same. I usually order pepperoni and sausage and cheese. I also like pizzas that have everything on it. Everything on the menu, though; pepperoni, sausage, peppers, onions. They call it a supreme usually; a supreme pizza. Jesse: When people think of a popular pizza, they usually think Chicago or New York; most likely New York over Chicago... Andrew: Most likely Chicago over New York. Jesse: Exactly. That's one of the funniest debates when it comes to food between two cities: it's who has the best pizza in New York or Chicago Andrew: It's a point of pride. Jesse: Very two--two very different styles of pizza. New York pizza is very wide and very thin, right? And, in Chicago, has their Chicago deep-dish pizza, which actually doesn't really resemble a pizza once you cut into it. Andrew: It is more like a meat and cheese pie that is baked all together with sauce and spices. It is delicious. Jesse: I preferred New York pizza, and I've had both. I've tried Chicago deep-dish pizza and I've tried New York pizza, and I favor New York pizza. Sometimes I also eat fast food delivery pizza. But, yet again, here is a point of difference between you and me. Between Domino's Pizza and Pizza Hut, I prefer Pizza Hut. Jesse: Alright, let's talk about travel. Andrew: OK. Jesse: Most recently, a couple of months ago, I travelled to Japan. That was my most recent international trip. I was in Japan for one week and it was very fun. The weather was hot. It was the end of summer, so of course it was also very humid. But, I still had a great time. I got to see friends. I got lots of delicious Japanese food. I got to sing karaoke--very fun. And, I did a little sightseeing. Not a lot, only a little. Primarily because when I lived in Japan about 10 years ago, I live in Japan for 3 months. So I had plenty of opportunity to sightsee. So, what about you? What was your most recent international trip? Andrew: I haven't travel internationally in a little while. The last trip I took was about two years ago, but it was a longer trip so I got to see more places. I was traveling with a friend and we went through many countries in Southeast Asia. We flew to Laos, and then took a train to Thailand, and then flew to Bali/Indonesia, and from there I actually met up with you in Vietnam for the last week of our trip. And, I had a great time. I actually miss traveling and I want to do it again soon. I'm actually planning another trip back to Thailand early next year. Jesse: Why are you going back to Thailand? There's many other countries in the world for you to travel. Thailand is a fantastic country. You're going back. Is there something about Thailand that you really like? Is it more to introduce Thailand to somebody else? Andrew: Both, actually. Thailand is a great place to start traveling because the people are very friendly and there are a lot of hotels and tour guides and is easy to get around to travel to see sites and see the country. And, I'm also traveling with some friends who have not traveled outside of the United States very often and so this is a good place to start. So, I'm happy to go back. I love Thailand. I'm also excited to show parts of Southeast Asia to friends who haven't been there before. And, this is a good chance to do both of those things at once. Jesse: How long is your trip this time? Andrew: We are going for a little bit less than two weeks, so I think about ten to twelve days. And, we are going to start out in Bangkok, we're going to spend a few days at a city by the beach, and then for some of them--some of the people I'm traveling with who are leaving early--we are going to go to Singapore for a few days to show them the city. And then my girlfriend and I are going to stay and go back to Thailand to go to the north part of the country to a town called Chiang Mai and see more of what the north part of the country has, which is different weather, different culture, and just a different feeling than the big city of Bangkok. Outro [Jesse]: Thank you for listening to this episode of LPLE, Let's Practice Listening in English, from Dialog.FM. Subscribe to LPLE on iTunes to hear the latest episodes, or listen to past episodes on our website, Dialog.FM. That's d-i-a-l-o-g-dot-f-m. 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