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

Last time we looked at a peculiar word in the ancient Hebrew text of the Bible, that is actually untranslatable and we're going to continue the conversation to see if we can discover what it means.Your support sends the gospel to every corner of Australia through broadcast, online and print media: https://www.vision.org.au/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Have you ever read a word in the Bible you didn't understand and simply skip over it? That's pretty normal really, but what do you do about a word that's untranslatable and so is dropped from the Bible altogether? We're going to look at such a word today on Foundations.Your support sends the gospel to every corner of Australia through broadcast, online and print media: https://www.vision.org.au/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

1108. This week, we talk to Heddwen Newton about some of the unique and untranslatable words she's discovered while translating. She shares her thoughts on why the translation profession is being hit hard by AI and the kind of work that is likely to be lost. We also hear her book recommendations, including a novel and a nonfiction book about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary.This episode was originally a bonus episode released in March for people who support the show, the Grammarpaloozians. If you'd like to support the show, and get ad-free podcasts and bonuses right away, visit quickanddirtytips.com/bonus for more information. 

Discover 10 untranslatable words from around the world — from "poronkusema" to "saudade."

Have you ever felt uncomfortable splitting a dinner bill with friends or hesitated to join a group vacation because of the cost? Maybe you've wondered if your friends view money the way you do. Friendships are one of the most rewarding parts of life, yet they come with their own set of challenges—especially when money enters the picture.Today, we're diving into this problem with someone who has tackled this topic head-on. Kristin Wong, an award-winning journalist and author, has explored the subtle, often unspoken ways wealth gaps can impact friendships.Her recent article in The New York Times uncovers the nuances of these situations and how friends navigate the social and emotional dynamics of financial imbalance. Follow Kristin's Substack, “Untranslatable.”Join the So Money Members Club.Download Farnoosh's free investing blueprint.Hang out with Farnoosh on Instagram.

learn Japanese untranslatable words

New untranslatable words in the dictionary, what happened with Morgan Wallen on "SNL," and BOOB TUBE: "Mid-Century Modern," "The Righteous Gemstones," and "The Pitt" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

New untranslatable words in the dictionary, what happened with Morgan Wallen on "SNL," and BOOB TUBE: "Mid-Century Modern," "The Righteous Gemstones," and "The Pitt" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Language necessarily evolves to accommodate new ideas, new concepts and new cultural paradigms.But, what happens when a word exists in one language, but not another?There are lots of so-called ‘untranslatable' words in English, and some Irish ones have been added to the latest version of the Oxford English Dictionary.Fiona McPherson is Senior Editor at the Oxford English Dictionary and joins Seán to discuss.

Language necessarily evolves to accommodate new ideas, new concepts and new cultural paradigms.But, what happens when a word exists in one language, but not another?There are lots of so-called ‘untranslatable' words in English, and some Irish ones have been added to the latest version of the Oxford English Dictionary.Fiona McPherson is Senior Editor at the Oxford English Dictionary and joins Seán to discuss.

The Lake is pleased to present Works for Radio, where five artists and artist groups have created five new sound works for the radio. This year's edition of Work for Radio revolves around the theme "Untranslatable": A translation is the rendering of a text from one language to another, or a change in substance, form, or medium. In the process, something new emerges, and something else disappears. When an image is described, it becomes words; when words are spoken into a microphone, they become electricity; when electricity is sent through a speaker, it becomes sound. Translation is transformation—a shift in material, context, or form. Despite the intention to stay as close to the original as possible, we always end up somewhere else. Works for Radio 2024 is supported by Koda's Cultural Funds.

Have you ever felt uncomfortable splitting a dinner bill with friends or hesitated to join a group vacation because of the cost? Maybe you've wondered if your friends view money the way you do. Friendships are one of the most rewarding parts of life, yet they come with their own set of challenges—especially when money enters the picture. Today, we're diving into this problem with someone who has tackled this topic head-on. Kristin Wong, an award-winning journalist and author, has explored the subtle, often unspoken ways wealth gaps can impact friendships. Her recent article in The New York Times uncovers the nuances of these situations and how friends navigate the social and emotional dynamics of financial imbalance. Follow Kristin's Substack, "Untranslatable."Join the So Money Members Club.Download Farnoosh's free investing blueprint.Hang out with Farnoosh on Instagram.

This week, I talk with Steph Smith, someone I consider a true curator of the internet. Steph is a writer, podcaster, and currently the host of the A16Z Podcast for the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. She's built an incredible online presence with her viral articles on remote work, productivity, and more, which have stood the test of time. Steph's work has led her to opportunities like running the Trends Newsletter for The Hustle and creating projects like Internet Pipes and her podcast, The Shit You Don't Learn in School. I admire Steph for her ability to expose people to new ideas and possibilities in their careers and lives. In this episode, we discuss her journey, her philosophy on impact, and how she approaches building her unique and impactful career. I think you'll find her story and insights as inspiring as I did. Let's get to it! In this episode: (00:00) - Intro (03:53) - Building community through shared experiences (07:16) - Documentary screenings (11:28) - How exposure to new things shapes your experiences (15:27) - Balancing specialization and exploration (18:50) - The nomadic lifestyle and remote work (22:55) - Personal growth through travel and learning (29:46) - How Steph's nomadic lifestyle has changed (33:48) - How marriage impacts life and work (42:23) - Settling down and building roots (45:41) - Pandemic reflections (49:20) - Multicultural upbringing and identity (56:06) - What led to Steph's creative explosion in 2019 (01:03:30) - How to break through the noise (01:14:52) - How Steph has approached podcasting as a full-time job (01:27:57) - What makes a great podcast host (01:37:25) - Untranslatable words: Capturing unique experiences (01:48:54) - Steph's beautiful future (01:51:50) - Who Steph is becoming​ Get full show notes and links at https://GoodWorkShow.com. Watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@barrettabrooks.

How can you stop translating in your head? What are some Chinese words that can't be translated? And why is translation a worthwhile learning activity? #learnchinese #translation #mentaltranslation Podcast listener survey: https://forms.gle/tVqRe8gVhoQwj9xM7 Link to article: Student Q&A, August 2024: Avoiding mental translation, untranslatable words and why practising translation is good: https://www.hackingchinese.com/student-qa-august-2024-avoiding-mental-translation-untranslatable-words-and-why-practising-translation-is-good/ How to improve fluency in Chinese by playing word games: https://www.hackingchinese.com/playing-word-games-to-practise-fluency/ The beginner's guide to Chinese translation: https://www.hackingchinese.com/the-beginners-guide-to-chinese-translation/ Improving your Chinese by translating from another language: https://www.hackingchinese.com/using-translating-to-improve-your-chinese/ How translation to another language can help you learn Chinese: https://www.hackingchinese.com/how-translation-can-help-you-learn-chinese/ More information and inspiration about learning and teaching Chinese can be found at: https://www.hackingchinese.com Music: "Traxis 1 ~ F. Benjamin" by Traxis, 2020 - Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (3.0)

I know you've been waiting with bated breath...at long last, it's the much-anticipated conclusion to our two-part episode on what happens when a word just doesn't want to be translated. I've covered some bad options here, now I'm proposing a few good ones. These will help not just if you want to write a translation of your own, but if you're not interested in any of that noise and just want to pick a good English version of a book you've heard rules in the original. Plus I sing in this one, so I'm pretty sure that's more than enough podcasting for one day. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute (now offering Old English instruction!): https://ancientlanguage.com/youngheretics/ Pre-order my new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: https://a.co/d/2QccOfM Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no relation): https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com

Untranslatable...that's what you are...and forevermore...that's how you'll...stay? This week, prompted by a listener who's working on a very cool coding project, I'm talking a little bit about famously untranslatable words like logos, ruach, and my personal favorite, aphiēmi. It's an ancient problem, debated and fussed over basicaly since the Bible was written...can it be solved? Where to begin? I'll crack open the question today, and try to answer it next week. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute (now offering Old English instruction!): https://ancientlanguage.com/youngheretics/ Pre-order my new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: https://a.co/d/2QccOfM Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no relation): https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com  

Last time we looked at a peculiar word in the ancient Hebrew text of the Bible, that is actually untranslatable and we’re going to continue the conversation to see if we can discover what it means.Your support sends the gospel to every corner of Australia through broadcast, online and print media: https://www.vision.org.au/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Have you ever read a word in the Bible you didn’t understand and simply skip over it? That’s pretty normal really, but what do you do about a word that’s untranslatable and so is dropped from the Bible altogether? We’re going to look at such a word today on Foundations.Your support sends the gospel to every corner of Australia through broadcast, online and print media: https://www.vision.org.au/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fluent Fiction - Hungarian: The Untranslatable Connection: A Budapest Word Puzzle Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.org/the-untranslatable-connection-a-budapest-word-puzzle Story Transcript:Hu: Áron, Zsuzsanna és Gergő egy meleg és nyüzsgő szerda délutánon a Budapest belvárosában található egy kávézóban ültek. Áron éppen próbált magyarázatot adni a nyelvtörőben rejlő magyar szó összetett jelentését értelmezni Chrisnek, amerikai barátjuknak. Chris a zürichi székhelyű munkája miatt érkezett Budapestre néhány napra.En: Áron, Zsuzsanna, and Gergő were sitting in a café located in the downtown area of Budapest on a warm and bustling Wednesday afternoon. Áron was trying to explain to their American friend Chris the complex meaning hidden in the Hungarian word puzzle. Chris had come to Budapest for a few days due to his job based in Zurich.Hu: A szó, amit megpróbált elmagyarázni, "megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" volt. Az asztalnál ülő emberek arcán fel-felvillant a szórakozottság és a kamaszkori izgalom jelei a nyelvtanulástól idegenkedő Chrisen, amit a szó hossza okozott.En: The word he was attempting to explain was "megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért." The faces of the people at the table occasionally showed amusement and signs of teenage excitement at Chris, who was a bit wary of learning a new language due to the length of the word.Hu: "A gond ezzel a szóval," - kezdte Zsuzsanna mosolyogva - "hogy a valódi jelentése szinte már fel sem fedezhető az összes bővítmény között" Majd kitört a nevetés, amiben Gergő is osztozott, tekintetét pedig egy távoli füstfelhőre vetette, a Dunán túlra.En: "The problem with this word," Zsuzsanna started, smiling, "is that the real meaning is almost impossible to detect among all the extensions." Then laughter erupted, with Gergő joining in, casting his gaze towards a distant cloud of smoke across the Danube.Hu: A guzsalyas nesz, a tányérok zümmögése, a kávézóban duzzadó zene mind-mind alátámasztotta az őszinte, emberi kapcsolatukat, és ott volt a középpontban ez a hosszú, nevetséges szó. Jókedvű, vidám volt, és egyszerűen úgy érezték önmagukat: élnek és nevetnek ezen a pörgős szerda délutánon, a világ minden rezdülésétől függetlenül.En: The clattering of the loom, the buzzing of plates, and the music swelling in the café all supported their sincere, human connection, with this long, ridiculous word at the center. They were cheerful and lighthearted, simply feeling alive and laughing on this bustling Wednesday afternoon, regardless of the world's every movement.Hu: Chris, aki már egy ideje igyekezett megfejteni a szót, végül feladta és egyszerűen csak röhögött. Áron lefordította neki angolra, ahogy legjobban tudta, de még ez is bonyolultabb lett, mint előtte gondolták volna.En: Chris, who had been trying to decipher the word for a while, eventually gave up and just laughed. Áron translated it to him in English as best as he could, but even that turned out to be more complicated than they had initially thought.Hu: A nap végén a rohanó Budapest belvárosában, a göncöli kávézónak nevezett helyen négy ember elnevette magát egy hosszú, nagyon hosszú magyar szón. De ezen a napon mindegy volt, hogy sikerült-e Chrisnek megértenie a "megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" jelentését vagy sem. Mert a hangjuk összefonódott, és a történetük egyszerű volt: négy ember, akik megtanulják egymást tisztelni, értékelni és nevetni - ezen a pörgős szerda délután a Budapest belvárosában.En: At the end of the day in the busy downtown Budapest, at a place called Göncöl Café, four people laughed at a long, very long Hungarian word. But on this day, it didn't matter whether Chris understood the meaning of "megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" or not. Their voices intertwined, and their story was simple: four people learning to respect, appreciate, and laugh with each other - on this lively Wednesday afternoon in downtown Budapest. Vocabulary Words:Áron: ÁronZsuzsanna: ZsuzsannaGergő: Gergőcafé: kávézódowntown: belvárosBudapest: BudapestWednesday: szerdaafternoon: délutánAmerican: amerikaifriend: barátChris: Chrishidden: rejtettHungarian: magyarpuzzle: nyelvtörőword: szócomplex: összetettmeaning: jelentésto explain: magyaráznilaughed: nevetteextension: bővítményridiculous: nevetségescenter: középpontalive: élneklearning: tanulnirespect: tisztelniappreciate: értékelnifour: négypeople: emberlively: pörgős

Fluent Fiction - Hungarian: Untranslatable Bonds: A Budapest Friendship Game Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.org/untranslatable-bonds-a-budapest-friendship-game Story Transcript:Hu: Szilvia, a lánya, csodálatos arccal és tűzpiros hajjal, egy rohanó reggelén találkozott Budapest szívében, a Duna partján, hűs árnyékot vető fák alatt.En: Szilvia, the daughter, with a wonderful face and fiery red hair, met in the heart of Budapest on a busy morning by the Danube River, under the cool shade of trees casting their shadows.Hu: Későn virradt, a nap arany függönyén keresztül a folyón csillogó nyomokban keresztülhúzva a várost.En: It was a late dawn, with the sun shining through the golden curtain, shimmering traces across the river, painting the city.Hu: Szilvia Gergővel, a jó barátjával találkozott, egy magas, sötét hajú, ipari designert.En: Szilvia met her good friend Gergő, a tall, dark-haired industrial designer.Hu: Gergő egy új játékot talált ki a barátaival való szórakozásra.En: Gergő had come up with a new game for fun with friends.Hu: A játék célja, hogy találd meg a lefordíthatatlan magyar szót.En: The goal of the game was to find the untranslatable Hungarian word.Hu: A játék izgalmas volt, és sok jó pillanatot és kacagást szerzett.En: The game was exciting, bringing many joyful moments and laughter.Hu: A barátok, akik sokszor ugyanazon a helyen összeültek, most hevesen vitatkoztak és nevetgéltek.En: The friends, who often gathered in the same place, now engaged in lively debates and laughter.Hu: Még a nap is, mintha élvezné a játékot, növelte a fényét.En: Even the sun seemed to enjoy the game, intensifying its light.Hu: A játék során Gergő és Szilvia egyre versenyfogóbbak lettek.En: During the game, Gergő and Szilvia became more competitive.Hu: Mindketten nyerni akartak.En: Both wanted to win.Hu: Gergő hirtelen kitalált egy szót, „Szerelem”.En: Suddenly, Gergő came up with a word, "Love."Hu: De Szilvának igen jó szótudása volt, és könnyedén lefordította angolra mint „Love”.En: But Szilvia had a good knowledge of words and easily translated it to English as "Love."Hu: Gergő próbált nevetni, de a verseny erőfeszítése elfogyasztotta a mosolyát.En: Gergő tried to laugh, but the competitive effort stole his smile.Hu: Szilvia kijött a nyertesként, amikor kiejtette tökéletesen lefordíthatatlan szavát: „Szabadságvágy”.En: Szilvia emerged as the winner when she flawlessly pronounced her untranslatable word, "Desire for freedom."Hu: Gergő, bár elvesztette a játékot, de elismerően bólintott.En: Gergő, although losing the game, nodded approvingly.Hu: Úgy érezte, hogy Szilvia becsületesen játszott.En: He felt that Szilvia had played honestly.Hu: Az est folyamán a barátok megkönnyebbültek és kacagástól hangosan beszélgettek.En: As the evening progressed, the friends relaxed and chatted loudly with laughter.Hu: Még a Duna is örült, ahogy az ezüst hullámai halkan csapkodtak a parton.En: Even the Danube seemed delighted as its silver waves gently lapped the shore.Hu: Végül a nap véget ért, a kacagó hangok lassan csendessé váltak, a fák pedig álomba merültek.En: Finally, as the day drew to a close, the laughing voices slowly quieted, and the trees fell into slumber.Hu: Szilvia és Gergő még mindig az álmatlan Duna partján ültek, mosolyogva az egyszerű, de boldog emléktől.En: Szilvia and Gergő still sat on the sleepless Danube shore, smiling at the simple yet happy memory.Hu: Egyszerű játékuk szorosabbra fűzte a barátságukat, és még jobban mélyítette a magyar nyelv szeretetét.En: Their simple game strengthened their friendship and deepened their love for the Hungarian language even more.Hu: A szél kelt fel és elszállt, elvitte velük a Duna dallamos éneklését, és hagyta őket ott, hogy az éjszakában tovább keresgéljenek a szavak között.En: The wind picked up, carrying away the Danube's melodious singing, leaving them to search among the words through the night.Hu: Hosszú, hűvös éjszaka várta őket, de Szilvia és Gergő békén és boldogan fogadták.En: A long, cool night awaited them, but Szilvia and Gergő welcomed it peacefully and happily.Hu: A kalandjaik csak most kezdődtek.En: Their adventures were just beginning. Vocabulary Words:A kalandjaik csak most kezdődtek.: Their adventures were just beginning.

What do you call it when you're homesick for a place you've never been? Is there a word for letting books pile up in your house without reading them? How about weather that looks beautiful out the window, but that you wouldn't want to go out in? For this episode, we worked with Babbel to bring you our second annual Untranslatable Words challenge. In it, resident linguist Grace East pits the Twenty Thousand Hertz crew against each other in a hilarious and enlightening multilingual game show. Sign up for Twenty Thousand Hertz+ to get our entire catalog ad-free. If you know what this week's mystery sound is, tell us at mystery.20k.org. Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. Watch our video shorts on YouTube, and join the discussion on Reddit and Facebook. Learn a new language with Babbel. Get 55% off your subscription at babbel.com/20k. Episode transcript, music, and credits can be found here: https://www.20k.org/episodes/untranslatablewords Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing Molly White Reddit Is Said to Sign AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO Quora raised $75M from a16z to grow Poe, its AI chat bot platform End of an era: The phone book goes the way of the fax machine as it drops through doors for the very last time after almost 150 years Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline's chatbot Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh Walmart agrees to buy Vizio to grow ad business Nielsen crowns YouTube #1 Streamer in America 12 months straight! Untranslatable foreign words Molly on Sam Bankman-Fried Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.'s Hottest Start-Ups Kids Online Safety Act secures enough support to pass Senate New Google sign in Waze new features 'Rat Dck' Among Gibberish AI Images Published in Science Journal TikTokker vs her breakdancing bitcoin dad Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts/Typefaces - Leo's Pick chocolate 3-d printer 'I love to twirl the cord': the young people pushing for a landline renaissance wiki edit wars ChatGPT goes temporarily "insane" with unexpected outputs, spooking users Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Molly White Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: rocketmoney.com/twig

Introducing Molly White Reddit Is Said to Sign AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO Quora raised $75M from a16z to grow Poe, its AI chat bot platform End of an era: The phone book goes the way of the fax machine as it drops through doors for the very last time after almost 150 years Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline's chatbot Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh Walmart agrees to buy Vizio to grow ad business Nielsen crowns YouTube #1 Streamer in America 12 months straight! Untranslatable foreign words Molly on Sam Bankman-Fried Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.'s Hottest Start-Ups Kids Online Safety Act secures enough support to pass Senate New Google sign in Waze new features 'Rat Dck' Among Gibberish AI Images Published in Science Journal TikTokker vs her breakdancing bitcoin dad Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts/Typefaces - Leo's Pick chocolate 3-d printer 'I love to twirl the cord': the young people pushing for a landline renaissance wiki edit wars ChatGPT goes temporarily "insane" with unexpected outputs, spooking users Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Molly White Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: rocketmoney.com/twig

Introducing Molly White Reddit Is Said to Sign AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO Quora raised $75M from a16z to grow Poe, its AI chat bot platform End of an era: The phone book goes the way of the fax machine as it drops through doors for the very last time after almost 150 years Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline's chatbot Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh Walmart agrees to buy Vizio to grow ad business Nielsen crowns YouTube #1 Streamer in America 12 months straight! Untranslatable foreign words Molly on Sam Bankman-Fried Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.'s Hottest Start-Ups Kids Online Safety Act secures enough support to pass Senate New Google sign in Waze new features 'Rat Dck' Among Gibberish AI Images Published in Science Journal TikTokker vs her breakdancing bitcoin dad Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts/Typefaces - Leo's Pick chocolate 3-d printer 'I love to twirl the cord': the young people pushing for a landline renaissance wiki edit wars ChatGPT goes temporarily "insane" with unexpected outputs, spooking users Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Molly White Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: rocketmoney.com/twig

Introducing Molly White Reddit Is Said to Sign AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO Quora raised $75M from a16z to grow Poe, its AI chat bot platform End of an era: The phone book goes the way of the fax machine as it drops through doors for the very last time after almost 150 years Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline's chatbot Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh Walmart agrees to buy Vizio to grow ad business Nielsen crowns YouTube #1 Streamer in America 12 months straight! Untranslatable foreign words Molly on Sam Bankman-Fried Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.'s Hottest Start-Ups Kids Online Safety Act secures enough support to pass Senate New Google sign in Waze new features 'Rat Dck' Among Gibberish AI Images Published in Science Journal TikTokker vs her breakdancing bitcoin dad Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts/Typefaces - Leo's Pick chocolate 3-d printer 'I love to twirl the cord': the young people pushing for a landline renaissance wiki edit wars ChatGPT goes temporarily "insane" with unexpected outputs, spooking users Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Molly White Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: rocketmoney.com/twig

Introducing Molly White Reddit Is Said to Sign AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO Quora raised $75M from a16z to grow Poe, its AI chat bot platform End of an era: The phone book goes the way of the fax machine as it drops through doors for the very last time after almost 150 years Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline's chatbot Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh Walmart agrees to buy Vizio to grow ad business Nielsen crowns YouTube #1 Streamer in America 12 months straight! Untranslatable foreign words Molly on Sam Bankman-Fried Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.'s Hottest Start-Ups Kids Online Safety Act secures enough support to pass Senate New Google sign in Waze new features 'Rat Dck' Among Gibberish AI Images Published in Science Journal TikTokker vs her breakdancing bitcoin dad Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts/Typefaces - Leo's Pick chocolate 3-d printer 'I love to twirl the cord': the young people pushing for a landline renaissance wiki edit wars ChatGPT goes temporarily "insane" with unexpected outputs, spooking users Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Molly White Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: rocketmoney.com/twig

Introducing Molly White Reddit Is Said to Sign AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO Quora raised $75M from a16z to grow Poe, its AI chat bot platform End of an era: The phone book goes the way of the fax machine as it drops through doors for the very last time after almost 150 years Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline's chatbot Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh Walmart agrees to buy Vizio to grow ad business Nielsen crowns YouTube #1 Streamer in America 12 months straight! Untranslatable foreign words Molly on Sam Bankman-Fried Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.'s Hottest Start-Ups Kids Online Safety Act secures enough support to pass Senate New Google sign in Waze new features 'Rat Dck' Among Gibberish AI Images Published in Science Journal TikTokker vs her breakdancing bitcoin dad Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts/Typefaces - Leo's Pick chocolate 3-d printer 'I love to twirl the cord': the young people pushing for a landline renaissance wiki edit wars ChatGPT goes temporarily "insane" with unexpected outputs, spooking users Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Molly White Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: rocketmoney.com/twig

Writer, editor and prominent intellectual Oksana Forostyna joins Ivan Vejvoda from Lviv to discuss the ongoing situation in Ukraine, her recent essay on Ukrainian jokes and humour and their importance as a shield against trauma and aggression, the political life of the country during wartime; and daily family life during these difficult years.A co-founder of Yakaboo Publishing Oksana was chosen for the New Europe 100 list of outstanding challengers from Central and Eastern Europe in 2014 and made the Top 100 People in Ukrainian Culture list by Novoe Vremya illustrated weekly in 2017. Her debut novel Duty Free was published in Ukraine in December 2012. She is also an author of essays and articles in Ukrainian and English. Forostyna was a former executive editor for Krytyka Journal and for Critical Solutions — an online media project of Krytyka. In 2015, she launched the independent publishing imprint TAO. Formerly a Marcin Król Fellow at Visegrad Insight, she is a Europe's Futures fellow at IWM this year.Find her on twitter @ForostynaRead her essay on Ukrainian jokes at The European Review of BooksIvan Vejvoda  is Head of the Europe's Futures program at IWM where, in cooperation with leading European organisations and think tanks IWM and ERSTE Foundation have joined forces to tackle some of the most crucial topics: nexus of borders and migration, deterioration in rule of law and democracy and European Union's enlargement prospects.The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) is an independent institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences. Since its foundation in 1982, it has promoted intellectual exchange between East and West, between academia and society, and between a variety of disciplines and schools of thought. In this way, the IWM has become a vibrant center of intellectual life in Vienna.The IWM is a community of scholars pursuing advanced research in the humanities and social sciences. For nearly four decades, the Institute has promoted intellectual exchange across disciplines, between academia and society, and among regions of the world. It hosts more than a hundred fellows each year, organizes public exchanges, and publishes books, articles, and digital fora. you can find IWM's website at:https://www.iwm.at/

Hosted by Al Filreis and featuring Jerome Rothenberg, Pierre Joris, and Charles Bernstein.

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss two poems by Armand Schwarner: "Tablet XXV" and "'daddy, can you staple these two stars together to make an airplane?'"

在本期节目里，我们仨将和大家聊一聊几个没法翻译成别的语言的中文词汇以及背后的文化。

On this episode of the So Japanese podcast, we share 10 of our favourite words and phrases that can't be easily translated into English.  We think the phrases we chose help to understand the mindset of Japanese people. 今回のエピソードは、僕らの好きな”１０の英語に訳しずらいフレーズ”を紹介していきたいと思います。このフレーズを知ることで、日本人の考え方をより深く理解できればと思います。

Is translation really just a problem of finding the right words in one language to fit the words in another language? Or, is there much more than meets the ear? Lisa Foran, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin (Ireland), discusses the ways in which translation can be problematic as well as constructive, not just with the aim of communicating, but also with the aim of improving how we live our lives. She delves into the deeper, ethical significances of what means to find yourself unable to translate something or even someone into familiar terms.Living Philosophy is brought to you by Philosophy2u.com.Host:Dr Todd MeiSponsors:Philosophy2u.comHillary Hutchinson, Career and Change Coach at Transitioning Your LifeHermeneutics in Real LifeGeoffrey Moore, author of The Infinite Staircase     Links Related to this Episode:Lisa Foran (UCD)Twitter (@LisaForan10)Emmanuel Levinas (SEP)Jacques Derrida (SEP)Barbara Cassin (Wikipedia)Alasdair MacIntyre (Wikipedia)Ferdinand de Saussure (langue et parole/language as structure and speech)Emily Apter (NYU)Structuralism (Wikipedia)Post-structuralism (Wikipedia)The Myth of Self-Sufficiency (Philosophy2u)Future-tensed and Present-tensed Languages, (The Conversation)Music: Earth and the Moon, by KetsaLogo Art: Angela Silva, Dattura Studios

As a teenager, Evan Craft took seriously Jesus's call to love our neighbors but he realized he couldn't love them well if he couldn't talk to them.  So many of his neighbors spoke Spanish and while this wasn't his culture or language, he determined to break that barrier and build a bridge instead. Evan studied Spanish and landed in Latin America at 21 years old and said, "Here I am Lord. Use me."  Evan weaves English and Spanish together in his music and builds bridges of connection between cultures. To worship God in a language that connects to our hearts is what we all long for, and when we can worship together, with our different cultures and languages it's a glimpse of heaven.  You're going to love Evan's heart. Join me for a great conversation with my new friend, singer-songwriter bridge builder… Evan Craft.  05:20 Worship in your heart language11:30 Individuality is beauty14:39 Untranslatable words19:04 All the nations, tribes, and tongues!

Chad and Jared get together to talk about Game Shows. They talk about the shows they remember from childhood, their favorite genres of game show, and popular game shows around the world. First, they share some new Untranslatable phrases from all over the world.  Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com

In this episode of the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Scott Allender and Jean Gomes talk to Dr Tim Lomas. Tim is one of the world's leading researchers in positive psychology. He has published numerous papers on meditation, Buddhism and masculinity and has written several books including his most recent publication ‘Happiness - Found in Translation. A Glossary of Joy from Around the World'. In 2018 he delivered a TEDx talk where he introduced his current project, creating a crowd sourced lexicography of untranslatable words relating to wellbeing.  Visit The Positive Lexicography2.12 How did you become interested in cross cultural perspectives on wellbeing.6.43 Defining positive psychology.13.04 What inspired you to start creating the positive lexicography of untranslatable words, and what is this work revealing?   19.40 Exploring how so many of the words within the lexicography are not one emotion, but are more often a mixture of competing emotions.26.45 Some of Tim's favourite words that have helped him become more connected and aware of his emotional experience.31.31 Exploring the lexicography, old friends or mysterious strangers.34.26 How much do you think we encourage people to ask themselves how they are actually feeling?39.24 In your research, have you noticed how some cultures have greater granularity in their language around emotions than others?44.45 Thinking about our discussion today, what is the call to action for a leader? 46.24 What's next for you? The Global Wellbeing Initiative. Getting back in front of the mic. Social: Instagram           @evolvingleader LinkedIn             The Evolving Leader Podcast Twitter               @Evolving_LeaderThe Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Friend of the pod, David joins Chad and Jared to catch up and talk about his 2nd year in Czech Republic as a grade school and private online language teacher. They talk about exploring and falling in love with Czech Republic, coronavirus in Czech Republic, and teaching new students of all ages. They also share some Untranslatable phrases, a song of the pod, and talk about Chad's journey learning Russian. Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!

Chad and Jared attempt to take an objective look at the cruise industry. Neither of them have been on a cruise in the past 10+ years, and they try to figure out if there's anything they're missing out on. They also share some new Untranslatable Phrases... and even one Untranslatable name, and a new Song of the Pod. Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!

Chad and Jared talk about The Great Firewall of China. No, I didn't misspell a popular tourist attraction. They talk about China's strict internet censorship and ways  to (allegedly) get around it. Chad also talks about his experience with the great firewall and tells Jared why it may not be totally bad, but also why it is. They also share some new Untranslatable phrases, and a Song of The Pod. Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!

Chad and Jared talk about Tight and Loose Cultures- a theory invented by Michele Gelfand. They discuss the criteria for being a tight or loose culture, the benefits and drawbacks of the cultural differences, and then also which culture they think best fits them. Of course, they share new Untranslatable phrases and a Song of The Pod. Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!

Chad is home! After a 32 hour flight half way across the country, Chad and Jared reunited for a podcast in person. Chad tells Jared about his long trip from Bali to Michigan via Seoul, Korea. Then, he shares some gifts from his time in Bali. they share some new Untranslatable phrase before trying to figure out what the heck Chad is going to do with the next six months of his life, and where he'll be moving to next. Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!

The Untranslatable Podcast is On The Road Again! Chad is officially done with his fellowship, and he's got time to kill in Bali. His first stop is Ubud. He talks about his time adjusting to the culture, and cuisine. He also schools Jared on some of the basics of Indonesia. They also share some new Untranslatable phrases, and a Balinese song of The Pod. Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!

Happy New Year everyone. We are in a new decade. Who knows what the future has to hold? No one, really, but Chad and Jared can certainly pontificate. They make their predictions for the next Decade of course, keeping it Untranslatable Podcast related with Travel, language, cultural, and Technological predictions. The also share a new Shoutout Of The Pod, Untranslatable Phrases, and a Song of The Pod. Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!

Welcome back to the second Untranslatable Appisode! This time they're talking about must have American Apps. They also compare the American apps to the must have Chinese apps Chad talked about in Episode 150. They also spread a little love with some Shoutouts of The Pod, share some Untranslatable Phrases, and a new Song of The Pod. Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!

Welcome to the first official Untranslatable Appisode. Chad is an expat English teacher with no Chinese experience, and he shares the apps the he absolutely can't live without while living in China. They also share some Shoutouts of the Pod and new Untranslatable Phrases. Also, they share a new Song of The Pod. Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!

New Podcast! Chad and Jared are joined by friend of the show Don Strite and host of the Millennial State Of Mind Podcast. the three of them talk about travel-related financial tips and the best and worst travel credit cards. They also decipher some new Untranslatable phrases from all around the world, and share a new Song of The Pod. Check out Don on The Millennial State of Mind Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Podbean Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!

Chad and Jared talk about what they look for when checking out the nightlife while traveling. different cultures have their own way of partying. The Untranslatable Podcast want you to maximize your fun and not get arrested, so they also discuss some laws in various countries you probably haven't heard. They also share some new Untranslatable Phrases, and a Song of The Pod.   Website: Untranslatablepodcast.com Twitter- @Untranslatable1  Instagram- @untranslatablepodcast Email- Untranslatablepodcast@gmail.com The Untranslatable Podcast is in Video! Check out our Youtube Channel to watch the Pod!