You may or may not have been asking yourself, “Why the glasses, Pete?” as I’ve been wearing the glasses in quite a lot of videos. Here’s the reason why.

Why the glasses?

Pete, what’s with the glasses? What gives? What’s up? Why are you wearing glasses all the time?

So, I thought I would do this quick episode to explain, what’s the deal? What gives? What’s up? Why am I always wearing the glasses?

First and foremost, I wear these all the times when I’m outside. So, any time I’m walking from A to B, from one place to another, I protect my eyes, especially somewhere like Australia where you’ve got a lot of sunlight, a lot of UV. I protect my eyes and I like wearing sunglasses.

Secondly, I want to to wear them as something that differentiates me. So, obviously, in the world of podcasts or personalities in general online, on Facebook, on websites, on YouTube, on TV, whatever it is, you need to have a way to differentiate yourself, and something that isn’t necessarily invasive or incredibly stupid, you know. If I was to have a mohawk that was pink that would be a way of differentiating myself but to be honest it’s not really me. That’s not my kind of personality. So, I wear the sunglasses more because I want to be somewhat recognised and remembered as “The dude who wears sunglasses”. I don’t really care about weather or not I have sunglasses on, like, I’m not trying to hide something from you guys at all. I don’t mind taking them off. I don’t mind talking to you normally. I’m not ashamed of my eyes or anything like that, although, it is somewhat bright where I’m sitting at the moment looking out of the window. But yeah, so they’re the first two reasons.

The third reason, and this is one that I picked up from a YouTube personality a few months ago who mentioned this and it seemed incredibly, I guess, how would I explain it? It seemed intuitive. It’s one of those things where I don’t mind not wearing glasses when I’m talking directly to the camera, I’m riffing, I’m ad libbing, I’m making it up on the spot and I can look at you. But when I have to refer to notes on the computer, which is actually down here, if I take my camera you can see my computer down here, if I have to refer to that, even for the just dot points, which I use sometimes in these episodes, I don’t like the fact that my eyes are darting around all the time, especially when I re-watch these videos. I find it sort of confusing, frustrating and almost like I’m not concentrating.

And so, I don’t want to pass on that kind of image or message when people are watching these videos. So, part of the reason that I wear these sunglasses is that it looks like I’m always looking at the camera. So, even though at the moment I’m looking down, I’m looking up, I’m looking left, I’m looking right, it looks like I’m looking directly at the camera, because you can’t see the whites of my eyes as they move around.

And so, it’s just one less thing that you guys are going to focus on when you’re watching these videos and you’re trying to practice your English, you’re not going to be thinking, “What’s he looking at? What’s he doing? What’s that over there? What’s this over here?”.

So, anyway, that’s my rationale, that’s my reason for wearing the sunglasses in quite a lot of videos.

First and foremost, I like protecting my eyes when I’m out and about and I also don’t like squinting. So, if I’m videoing outside and the sun’s in my face, I don’t really want to be there the whole time doing these ones. Like, you know, it’s uncomfortable and it’s just not very photogenic for the camera.

Secondly, I… what was the second reason again? I’ve totally just forgotten… Secondly, I want to differentiate myself. Everyone is going to know someone who has no hair, who has blue eyes, who is Australian, but if you say “The Australian guy who wears sunglasses in all of his videos and teaches English.” there’s probably going to be very few of them online currently doing what I’m doing. So, that’s the second reason.

And the third one is to not distract you guys with my eye movement when I am looking down and reading the dot points that I have listed here on the spreadsheets and word documents while I’m trying to make these episodes.

Let me know what you think guys. I don’t know if it’s a bad idea or a good idea. It’s just something that I’ve started doing. Maybe you think it’s dumb, maybe you think it’s a distracting idea to have these in there, maybe you think it’s a good idea. Let me know below. I’ll chuck this up on YouTube and you guys can give me some feedback. And yeah, give me a thumbs up if you liked the video and subscribe to the channel if you want to learn more Aussie English. Catch you all later!