Transcript of AE 1410 - The Goss: Scotland, Safaris, and the Future of English- Dad’s 2026 Plans Revealed

G'day, you mob! Pete here. And this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen.

And we talk about the week's news, whether locally Down Under, here in Australia or non-locally overseas in other parts of the world, okay. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right? If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in the Goss.

So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English.

So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au, where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time, okay.

So if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript. Listen and read at the same time. Keep practising. And that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

How's it going, Dad?

Going well, Pete, how are you?

I had a coughing fit at the start here that we've, that we've removed for the listener's pleasure.

Or not removed. Depending on it. That's on you..

Suffer through it.

How much you're willing to edit.

So you've got, we just did an episode on plans for 2026 and you mentioned, I think. You had 1 or 2 trips? Planned for this year?

One big one this year.

Yeah. Going to Scotland for five weeks.

Oh! Look out!

Mmm!

Why Scotland?

Why not?

Oh, whisky. Whisky.

No, actually, I may end up. No, I'll certainly be drinking.

"May end up."

I "may" end up going to a distillery or two. But that's not, that's not the. We're not going to the area that's got our favourite distillery.

Isla.

Yeah. Isla and...

Isle of Isla.

Yes, the Isle of Isla and the Isle of Skye.

Mhm.

But no, it was. Yeah. I've only ever been to Scotland once and so was your mother and we just loved it. And so we thought, go back and do some places that we haven't seen and I've always had Orkney and Shetland, the two groups of islands that are part of Scotland. But north of the. For want of a better term, if you can have mainland on an island. Mainland Scotland.

Got mainland of Australia.

Funnily enough, the two main islands, one in Orkney and one in Shetland, they're both called mainland. So.

Yeah.

You go from mainland Scotland to mainland Orkney to mainland Shetland.

So what is it about that place that has a pull on you?

Well...

Why do you want to go there?

Wildlife.

Yeah.

So there's lots of birds and, you know, dolphins and seals and stuff, but also the history and prehistory. So both Orkney and Shetland have had, you know, human occupation for...

Thousands of years.

Thousands of years. And there's, these a lot of old, you know, Iron Age, Bronze Age sites that, that are still there and you can go and walk around the ruins of them and stuff.

And they're Viking too, right. You've got the Viking era?

Viking era as well. So there's, there's Viking villages that are, you know, a thousand years old.

Yeah. Or more. Yeah.

And, and there, you know, the remnants of those. So it's, just somewhere that I've always wanted to go.

When you're half Scottish, so I guess I...

I am but.

Back to...

My father was born about as far away from northern Scotland as you can get and still call yourself Scottish. But, but I do have relatives. You know, my two times great grandparents came from northern Scotland. So.

Yeah.

It'd be good to...

I assume it's pretty mixed in terms of the genetics and everything. You would have all been in over the last few hundred years at least, or probably even earlier than that, moving around quite a bit. I remember watching like really nerding out on that sort of Bronze Age, Iron Age history with Time Team and other documentaries over the last year or so.

With your Time Team binge?

Yeah, I know finished all 19 seasons in about, I don't know, half a year.

Yeah, they're still going. I think. There's...

There's little odd bits, but there's not like...

It's not a weekly thing. But they're still doing special...

I think they have like specific, they organise a grant, a certain amount of money that they can put together and then they can go to a certain location and do it over a few days. But Time Team is a really good series if you're interested in archaeology, especially in the UK, obviously. I don't know if they do Ireland, they probably do if they get involved...

There's the odd one that they've done in Ireland, but it's mostly in.

England.

In England..

Scotland, Ireland.

It's almost entirely in England, a few places in Scotland and Wales. But..

But it's just really cool to learn about that history. And it's so because it was obviously pre-writing, right? Like the Romans were the first group to get to the UK that were literate in terms of writing history down. So prior to that, there's just very little understanding of what was going on, and it's just really cool to learn about it. It was funny. I was watching one doco about, I think they found a skeleton of a woman in the UK somewhere from a certain period that would have been Iron Age or Bronze Age, and they did the, the bone isotope analysis and worked out that she was actually from the Balkans or something from somewhere like Israel or, you know, somewhere crazy...

Bones and teeth.

Yeah. And it turns out that they, when they dug in, pun intended, and looked at a lot of different skeletons. Oh, Dad's famous.

Dad's...

Unknown caller! It's gonna be spam.

Spam? It is spam just by the phone. Sorry about this.

It's this call coming from Madagascar.

Yeah.

I love that.

It's all it's always from Melbourne, and it's always the same thing. It's, you know. Yeah. There are grants to, you know, convert you to another electricity provider.

Yeah.

Well, it's not. There aren't.

Can you just send me money?

Yeah. No, it's just, you know, it's a way around. And I, you know, the grumpy old fart in me says this is just a way around the rules of not being able to call, spam call. Because my phone number is on the do not call list, but only, there are only two conditions, two groups of people that are allowed to call on the no call list, one of which irritates the hell out of me. And that's charities.

Mmm.

They get special permission. And not that I have a problem with charities, but why should they? Why is a charity any different from a small business? But the other one is anything in government business can, which is obvious. But these guys get around it by going, well, you know, there's a you know, you can get $100 grant to, you know, change your electricity. The government will give you. And, you know, I've looked it up and my provider is the cheapest one I can get anyway. So I'm not going to change. I'm not going to get the $100, get off. So yes, there's about 1 or 2 phone calls a day with those. And the trouble is you can't block them because they just have robots behind them. And it's a different phone number every time. So.

Yeah. Anyway, back to the story.

Back to the story!

So they were digging up these, these skeletons and doing this analysis on them throughout Europe. And I think they found they were called the Beaker people.

Yes.

So once they got to the UK, all of a sudden from mainland Europe- This technology of creating beakers. I think the, there where they put the cremated remains. They put them in beakers, and then bury them instead of burying bodies. Or just cremating them and putting them in certain locations, they have a beaker, an actual like vessel made of clay or pottery or whatever that they put them in. But they showed that there was so much movement of these people from mainland Europe all the way up to the UK, down to Spain, you know, towards the Middle East. And that, you know, even if you were born in one location, you could move thousands of kilometres, which to me is just mind blowing because you just assume back then with hunter gatherer,

But most.,

.. type societies,

Local area.

Yeah, you wouldn't expect it. But they showed this woman had come thousands of kilometres and had likely walked it obviously,

Well.

Through the mainland.

.. not catching a plane, was she?

Yeah. But I mean, you know, not using horses or other things would have just taken a trail. It would have been insanely difficult and, and dangerous. And I guess it also makes you think these people either spoke multiple languages or it was, you know, relatively intelligible languages that they could use or share or whatever at the time. So I don't know, I find that stuff really fascinating. And, and what we think we know about them is so, so limited to, you know, a few things that we find in there in the archaeological digs. So yeah, I would be, that'd be one of the biggest reasons, I think for me to go to the UK. It'd be like, I want to go to these sites, see them, feel them, experience them as someone who has heritage there and think, these are my people. But the other thing that's crazy from going through those Time Team episodes is that like different humans and different species of human, you know, have like including Neanderthals and erectus, Homo erectus have lived on that island, the UK, for over a million years, but then been wiped out during glaciation. So when you've had ice ages, the ice caps have expanded.

Too cold..

And well..

.. just covered it.

Multiple kilometres of ice have covered the UK and then they retreat again. And so I think apparently..

Come back!

Modern humans have only lived in the UK for 8000 years or...

Something like that, 8 to 10,000 years.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because it was covered in ice, previous to that. But then before that, there were a few hundred thousand years earlier than that. There were other hominids and Neanderthals. And then a million years ago, they have evidence of other humans living there and hunting as well. And you're just like, isn't that crazy that it's been colonised multiple times by different waves of different humans? So yeah, I can imagine going to.

Well, it's not hard to get to. I think that's the other thing too, is that it's, you know, even now it's only, was it 20 something kilometres across?

Well, during glaciation, that would have been gone.

It would have been. Yeah, exactly.

The seas would have been a land bridge and you could just walk across as things were melting. But yeah, it's weird. I always envy people who live in Europe and especially the UK, just because of the amount of archaeological stuff they've done. And you can see and learn about that. You can just go digging anywhere and effectively go through hundreds of thousands of years worth of history. Whereas in Australia, I mean, potentially you could find tens of thousands of years worth of history with indigenous people. But because they didn't have any metal, you know, they didn't have any bronze or iron or any kind of metallurgy.

Exactly.

You don't really find many archaeological things.

And they didn't...

Maintain themselves through thousands of...

Aboriginals also didn't keep much.

Yeah, yeah.

So even, even when they had settlements.

Yeah.

They didn't, you know, they didn't keep objects as such, you know, so. But yeah, I know my aunt and uncle lived in Winchester in Hampshire, in southern England. And I remember my aunt telling me a story when I was over there visiting her. And I only met her once and she was saying that the people next door to them were digging a swimming pool and found skeletal remains and weapons of Oliver Cromwell's army from the Civil war in England, which was in the 17th century!

Yeah.

And.

Well, the number of times you watch something like Time Team and they'll have started an archaeological dig for that program.

Yeah.

Because someone was doing- digging a garden bed, or doing something in their backyard. And then all of a sudden they have to stop. I think they do legally, right? If they come across...

If you find human remains.

Yeah. Or even some of these archaeological...

Or archaeological artefacts.

Like coins and everything like that. You have to let people know that you found them and hand them in. And tell them about it and give them the option.

... access to them first, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, I mean, in the case of my aunts, my aunt and uncle, the, their address probably gave it away because they lived in Oliver's Battery Crescent in Winchester, which is Oliver as in Cromwell, Battery as in fort.

Yeah.

So.

Geez, that's nuts. Yeah. I guess that that part of it is so foreign to me. That's one of those big differences where Australia, for us at least, is as European Australians who recently arrived in the country. You don't have the same kind of like deep, historical attachment to the land, the same way...

That indigenous Europeans would.

Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing I envy Indigenous Australians.

And that's the irony is that, you know, it's a, it's a standing sort of gag is how do you tell the difference between an Australian and a European? And that is, a European thinks a hundred miles or 100km is a long way, and Australian thinks 100 years is a long time. Unless you're an indigenous Australian, because they've got, you know, the oldest continuous population of people in the world. And that's, you sort of think it's ironic that, you know, we our country is only 125 years old. We've only had European settlement here since the late 18th century. Yet we've had people here for 60,000 years.

Well, the saddest thing about it, this is the thing that frustrates me about, well, not just indigenous Australian culture, history or whatever, is that there's just no written down stories.

No.

So you can't really get to.

Their stories are all songs and oral.

Yeah. But I mean, like, you don't really get to know any of these characters. There must have been so many interesting stories and people and characters and all sorts of events that happened in the past over whatever 60,000 years that indigenous people were in Australia. And you have zero that, that weren't either more recent handed down orally, in which case you sort of like, how true are they? How accurate are they? Because they're obviously based on someone's memory to pass it down each time. Or they're more recently written down after colonisation through the eyes or lens of a Westerner or European who's not going to describe things objectively.

And certainly is not going to understand them either.

Exactly. So I feel like that's...

Even if they're trying to be objective.

The more you learn about like deep history. It's sort of like the tragedy of it is just not like anytime you watch those docos with Time Team digging up bones, you're like, that was a human that lived a life or had children, probably had loved ones.

What was their day to day life like?

What were the drama? What were the things they were worried about? What did they do? What did they what were they scared of? What were they not scared of?

Exactly.

What were they- there were so many questions that you sort of like, they're close enough to touch, but you can't really see anything, get anything deep from.

Yeah, I know, and that's the, the challenge with, with any of those, you know, whether it be just general history or family history of, you know, when I wrote, you know, my family history. One of the things I was trying to do in there is to put the stories around the people, not about the people. So, you know, where do they come from and how do they get here and those sort of things rather than, you know, James William Jackson was born on this date in this suburb, in this town.

Yeah, yeah..

He married this person. And sometimes that's all, you know, when you go back 150 years or more. That's all you know.

But you want to know why, right?

Yeah.

What made you make these choices? Make these decisions, decide to do this.

And the thing with, you know, Europeans and you know, not Asians and Africans and, you know, Americans are migrating to Australia. You, you got to look at and go, what was the reason? Why did people choose to come here? Now, a lot of early Australian settlement with Europeans, people didn't have a choice. They were convicts. They were sent here as prisoners. But the majority of immigrants to Australia have come here for, you know, to make a better life. So what was their life like, where they came from and what was the motivation and what sort of like, I can't imagine what it was like 150 or now 170 years ago when my first relatives arrived in Australia, the. And my great great grandfather, he came to Australia with his wife and first child. And never spoke to his parents again. In fact, his father died before he got here.

Yeah.

But he wouldn't have known about that for probably 6 to 12 months.

And it was...

Because he would have arrived and then probably not written home immediately, but written home, it would have taken 3 or 4 months for those letters to get home.

On a ship, yeah.

On a ship. And then another 3 or 4 months to get the letter back going, Oh, by the way, your father died.

Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day. I'm like, unless someone was dying of a disease incredibly slowly. There must have been so many times where I assume even if you just lived a few tens of kilometres away, you would have only really found out about it through letters, through mail. Or maybe if someone had taken a horse or a cart to see you as quickly as possible. But there must have been so many times where family members were just like, Oh, they're dead. And it was days ago, weeks ago, months ago. And I guess that's it. And how did you view that?

Yeah.

I mean, it would have been tragic and sad, but is that sort of like, well, that's just what happens. Like what other options are there?

We've, we're fortunate, as you know, family historians and just social historians in general. We're fortunate that a lot of that family records and things were recorded in letters.

Yeah.

Now, you know, text messages are ephemeral.

Mhm.

You know, phone calls are not recorded.

I keep wondering about Facebook messages.

Yeah. So that...

They're going to be locked up somewhere.

They will. But, but nobody. But you're not going to. At what point are they going to be openly accessible?

Well...

So.

You would use...

Your children, you know, in 30 years time when I'm dead and your children are going by Nana and Grandpa get married, what can we find out about them? And...

AI, ChatGPT...

And that was actually...

Go through all of Ian Smissen's messages on Facebook that are now that are now public. Can you let me know...

Most of which would have been...

Have you ever said anything?

I went and photographed this bird.

Yeah. We're coming over at eight. Bring beer.

Yeah, exactly.

No, but I wonder. Yeah, there'll be a lot. I feel like there will be a lot of. That sort of private information catalogued and there for you to use. Some kind of system is to go through at some point. Of people in the past like. And I think I would be inherently interested if I found out that my great great grandfather had the equivalent of a Facebook account 200 years ago or whatever, and had been messaging people on a daily basis, I feel like I would be interested to know what was he dealing...

... talking about?

Yeah. What was, what were his issues? Was he like, you know, talking about getting beer, hanging out with people, having a whinge about the neighbour, you know. And to who? How did he speak to the different friends that he had? What was the list of people that he was talking to most and why?

Yeah.

And then you realise, oh, he's just on marketplace the whole time looking for guitars.

Looking for guitars. Yeah. Or selling his plants.

Yeah, exactly.

But mostly I suspect they wouldn't have been those things. There was no necessity to it because communication, other than writing letters to people that you didn't see, your communication was face to face. The people that you worked with and your neighbours, you know, in your village, your town, your suburb, the street. If you were living in a big city, you know, other than, you know, we were talking earlier about people moving thousands of kilometres in a lifetime on foot, but most people just lived in their own local area. You know, for generations.

So it is, it is interesting. The more I sort of learn about and think about convicts, the more I sort of feel sorry for them because a lot of them were trumped up charges.

Oh no, it was, it was just social cleansing.

Yeah. It was getting rid of the lower class filth from, you know, southern England and with a reason of like colonising Australia. Hey, we can get free labour effectively that are slaves for seven years or more. Send them out there so that they have to do it. And they pretty much don't have any recourse or any way back. And they're most likely going to die.

And it was never an intention initially for it to be a...

Permanent.

Permanent and developing a city or a, you know, a long term thing. It was. Hey, the French are hanging around in the South Pacific. We need to get our foot on the ground out there...

Just in case.

So that we can claim it for, you know, king and country.

But it must have been just so strange, especially some of those younger people. Like I think some of the youngest convicts were like 11 or 12, right, as kids. And they were likely brought out like, like a few years older than Noah or Izzy, my niece, you know, being just ripped away from their families. With no real ability, probably illiterate. So they probably couldn't even write letters and just likely to never see them again. And no. Well, yeah, it just, it'd be like sending someone to Mars.

Yeah. Exactly.

Like it's just, it's just insane to think about what that would have meant for both sides and the sort of trauma that that must have introduced into society. Like you read a lot about...

Yeah. And, and science and, and even the ones who, even the people who were transported for there was sort of, you know, three tiers. Really? It was seven years, 14 years or life. But seven years was life for most of them.

All of them were!

Because you were never going to be able to afford to go back.

And what are you going to- it'd be like us being able to save up enough money...

For a very odd, one of the...

... space trip, right? Became rich enough.

Wealthy enough to actually travel back to England. But.

Exactly. And so I think there's very few stories, right, of, of that initial batch of convicts actually ever making it home and staying there. Most of them died here, lived here, set up life here, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So yeah. Anyway, back to plans for your trip...

... in twenty-twenty...

So you've got the Scotland trip.

Scotland. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's this year. So.

Yeah.

And that's, you know. That really sort of put paid to any other major trips because it's a financial commitment to go away for that long.

Are you seeing family over there at all? Or is it just..

I'm not sure yet. I've got, I might drop in depending on what we're doing. We're really just we're landing in London, getting a car and then just driving north.

Yeah.

But one of your distant cousins through your mother's side.

Yeah.

That your mother has been communicating with. Ironically, I was communicating with him about 15 years ago when I was doing work on your mother's family before...

This King Charles, right?

Yeah.

King Charles? Cousin, King Charles?

I don't think he knows...

Does he return your phone calls?

He doesn't return the phone calls, no. So we may go and see him.

Yeah.

Umm...

Not King Charles?

Not King Charles.

The other cousin.

He lives just out of, out of London.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was sort of half thinking about driving down to Winchester and seeing my cousin. But I think that's just going to be too far out of the way now.

It's a tiny island!

Yeah.

You're from Australia. It's nothing. It's not even like driving to what, Sydney?

The other thing is, you know, my brother in law lives just near the, the place that we'll probably go and see Martin. Your mother's sort of fourth or fifth cousin or whatever he is. And so may drop in on him, but probably not.

Yeah.

And I have no known living relatives in Scotland. There will be relatives there, but.

Yeah.

None that I'm...

Just an ancestry DNA thing. Check it out and then look for your closest...

... down there.

That hits and just be like, Hey, have you got a bed or a couch that I can I can spend some time...

Your sixth cousin?

Yeah!

Allegedly.

Oh, cool. And what about the trip to Africa?

Africa's 2027.

Okay, so you've organised that too. You've spent most of my inheritance on that.

Yeah. Pretty much! We're going to, we're going to be poor.

Shit poor!

It is!

God.

But it's also one of those ones where you. Because the, we're going to East Africa, Tanzania and to southern Africa, to Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. And because of the type of trips that we want to do there, the safari trips that we want to do in there, you've got to book them more than a year in advance because they book out so quickly.

Sounds like extortion to me. The amount of money it costs.

It's...

Six figures or something you were saying, to get out there and do the whole holiday?

To do, yeah. But that's, that's four separate trips in a six week period.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's not cheap. And you know, the irony is we're not going to Kenya. But you know, Kenya is one of the poorest countries in the world, but it's one of the most expensive places to travel. If you want to do that high end travel now, we don't need to stay in five star hotels and things, but the style of safari that we want to do is small groups, dedicated guides, those sort of things, which means you're...

A lot of moving parts, organisation.

And you're paying somebody to do the organisation for you.

Yeah.

But also going to see my, I've got another cousin who lives in Cape Town or just out of Cape Town and her three sons and I haven't seen them for 45 years.

Yeah.

I met them once when they came to Australia. So going to see them and one of her sons is a safari guide. And so he put me onto the company that he works with.

Yeah.

And they're doing the organisation for us. You know, we gave them the plan, the rough plan, and they went, right, we can do this, we can do this, we can put you here. We can do that. But then you've got to, you know, pay 25% deposit on it 18 months in advance.

Great. So you brushing up on your Xhosa...

Yeah!

Zulu...

Swahili..

Swahili. Yeah.

Yeah. No.

I would love to learn Xhosa. That would be such a cool language with the clicks.

Yeah. Yeah, I... It's.

It's just you don't have a use for it.

No.

There's so many languages like that. People always ask me, why don't you learn this one...

Why don't you learn Icelandic? Yeah. There's probably three people in...

In Australia.

Victoria, that speak Icelandic.

And because nobody in Iceland speaks it, they all speak English...

They all speak English phenomenally.

Yeah.

I know. No, Xhosa would be really cool because of just the clicks and the- I find that so interesting. They've actually got heaps and heaps and heaps of sounds in those languages.

Yeah.

Click languages. There's like loads and loads of different phonemes. So I feel like it would be interesting.

Well, Asian languages are like that too, that...

With tones.

Yeah. You learn Mandarin for a couple of years at school and, you know, for different ways of pronouncing the same word and they all mean completely different things.

That poem. Shi. The sure poem where there's like every single word is "shi".

Yeah.

But it's like, "shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi..."

High. Low. Rising. Dropping. Yeah, it's.

It's pretty- well in Cantonese is even worse. I've got students who are Cantonese, and you look it up. I think there's somewhere between 6 and 9 accents or tones in Cantonese. And I'm like, fuck, how do you hear the, the one that rises? And then there's the one that rises slightly more.

I know, it rises and levels out.

Oh my God. And this is actually important for phonemic information that differentiates between the meanings of words.

And the only, the only things, and we've mentioned it before is the "good on you" in Australian English...

Sarcasm and the...

And it's a lot of Europeans, and I don't know about Asians or Africans...

Or there's other languages yeah...

But a lot of Europeans cannot hear the difference between "good on you" and "good on you".

Yeah. And I think most Australians don't appreciate how- the number of times I have, I have now been teaching English for ten years, and you have conversations with either people who are Australian, who don't speak foreign languages, or even foreigners learning English. They will almost always say English is super easy. Foreign languages are hard, English is easy, and you'll just be like, all languages are hard. It depends on what your native language is. How close is it to the language that you're trying to learn? Because the further away it is, like Japanese, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese for English. Super fucking hard.

Yeah.

And it's, it's, it's a directional thing. It's like distance, right? Like...

Well, Arabic is, it's a different alphabet. But it's a phonetic alphabet that once you learn the sound..

The alphabet is, but the grammar.

All that, all that's different...

Definitely difficult.

But with, a lot of Asian languages where like Japanese, Cantonese or Cantonese and Mandarin is the same written language.

Well, one's traditional characters and one's been simplified.

But there, but there. Yeah, there's two different versions of the written language, but you can't look at something and understand how to pronounce the word.

Well unless you learn the pinion. Yeah.

And you know.

I said they should just change the pinion. Stop using the characters!

Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. How anglocentric can we be? Make it easy for me!

Yeah.

Not the billion Chinese who already understand it.

I know, I know. Well, come on, you just got to be forward thinking. There's been other things that have happened.

When you go to India and there's, you know, 60 or 70 different dialects.

Oh, 700 of. In India.

But but but, but different dialects that are actually completely different languages.

Yeah, yeah.

Not the ones that are just variations on those as well.

But I think it's one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. I didn't realise that most Indians don't speak Hindi.

No.

Or at least like they don't use it as their lingua franca. They use English.

Yeah.

And I remember having my mind blown where obviously there are loads of Hindi speakers. I think it's around the centre of the country, right? But then if you go north or go south, a lot of them are like, I don't speak Hindi. I speak English and communicate with them using that. And you're like, What? Like, that's so bizarre.

I know.

It'd be like me learning Mandarin Chinese to communicate with New Zealanders or something. I don't know, it's just I feel like, well, not New Zealanders, maybe the French. You'd just be like, isn't that sort of a step too far?

Like out of your own?

I might have mentioned this one before. In another episode, there's a there's a famous episode of The West Wing, that American political drama show from about 25 years ago.

Yeah.

Where the, there's sort of this complex diplomacy going on. And the, the nobody in the group of American diplomats and politicians spoke the language of the person who was there, but they found somebody who was Portuguese, who also spoke this language, and someone else who spoke Portuguese.

Yeah.

And then all these people and they were going through this sort of three way translation. Then the guy that they were trying to talk to eventually just said.

"Sorry, guys!"

Yeah. Eventually just said, Why don't we speak in English?

Yes. Good gag. Yeah. It's getting interesting with with ChatGPT and AI and translation tools. Now you wonder if we'll get to a point where you'll have the, is it the babel fish from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Yeah. Where he just has his little... that goes in the ear. And you can just understand every language.

And not only that, but we've got Google Translate works with images as well.

Yeah.

So you can just put your camera on your phone over a menu and you know, you can go to a Chinese restaurant with it all written in Chinese.

Yeah.

And put your phone over it, you know, take a photograph of it and then Google Translate will just give it to you in English!

It's just nuts. I wonder how much it'll become a luxury or like a learning a foreign language unless you're migrating to the country. But like...

Yeah, you've got to do business or live there.

Yeah, obviously it's going to be a lot easier..

But yeah, if you're travelling to Spain for a week. Do you need to learn Spanish?

Just use this device or this AI tool or something?

Yeah, exactly.

Put it in front of my face and just.. And I've talked to a bunch of my students and friends that have travelled overseas and they're like, half the time I can just open up Google Translate or AI of some kind and just have it translate between two languages. And I'm just like, fuck, people are going to stop learning foreign languages.

Yeah, Google Translate does it by voice as well. Yeah, you can say something in Portuguese and it'll just say it in English to me. Yeah.

That's pretty bizarre. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, good chat dad.

Mhm.

It's getting a bit hot up here...

Scotland and Africa. It is getting. It's getting. It's about, it's getting close to 40 degrees here at the moment.

It's pretty brutal, guys. We're hanging out upstairs.

I know, it's sort of because the rest of the family's downstairs in the air conditioning. We don't have whole house air conditioning. We only have air conditioning in one room. So.

You live like animals.

The big living area. Well, you don't have it either.

No we don't. We used to!

Yeah, I know.

It was great when we used to have it. But getting it piped into every room would probably be a very expensive exercise.

Well, yeah, we can't do it because.

Nah, we could, but.

No, we'd have to do it underfloor. And underfloor air conditioning doesn't work very well.

No, no.

Because you've got to have a pretty large fan to pump cold air. Whereas if you've got cold air running around in your ceiling, it falls into the room.

All right. Well, thanks anyway for joining us guys and we'll see you next time.

Thanks!

See ya!

Bye!