Interview with Alastair about Pioneers of the Continuum (Intermediate)

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Nourish your career prospects by visiting boardb.ie forward slash talent academy. Applications now open. Welcome to Easy Stories in English, the podcast that will take your English from okay to good, and from good to great. I am Ariel Goodbody, your host for this show. Today's episode is

an interview with Alistair Budge of the English Learning for Curious Minds podcast. You can find a transcript of the episode at easystoriesinenglish.com slash pioneers. That's easystoriesinenglish.com slash pioneers. P-I-O-N-E-E-R-S. There you can also download the episode as a pdf. Today I have something exciting to tell you about. You might remember a few months ago

that we had an episode from another podcast, English Learning for Curious Minds. Well, the host of English Learning for Curious Minds, Alistair Budge, messaged me and asked if I wanted to work with him on a new project. Alistair worked with his colleague Emile to write an eight-episode podcast series called Pioneers of the Continuum, and the idea was that every

episode would be recorded by a different ESL podcaster. Alistair asked if I'd like to record one of the episodes and of course I said yes. I thought it was a brilliant idea. The story is about a group of friends who build a time machine. In each episode a different character travels through time in order to answer an important question. I love time travel stories and I

I had a lot of fun recording my episode, so hopefully you'll enjoy it too. If you're excited to listen, then good news! The first episode of Pioneers of the Continuum comes out today. You can find it on your regular podcasting app. If you listen to lots of ESL podcasts, you might know some of the other stars of the show, such as Luke from

Luke's English podcast, Andrew from Q-Lips English podcast, Lindsey from All Ears English, Tom from Thinking in English, Anna from English Like a Native, and Christian from Kangaroo English. My episode is the sixth episode in the series and comes out on the 13th of June. Pioneers of the continuum is for intermediate and advanced learners. So if you're a beginner and you're

listening to this, it might be a bit difficult for you. However, on the transcripts available at leonardoeenglish.com you can highlight words to get translations in lots of different languages. That's really cool. Try it and see if you can understand. If it is still too hard, well, then you have something to look forward to when you're feeling more confident.

I invited Alistair onto today's episode to talk a bit about the project, and you'll hear our conversation after this. We had quite an informal talk, so it might be a bit harder than the usual language level, but I think it will be interesting for you to hear something less planned.

But before that, I just want to thank my new patrons. Stefan Pulva, Karolín Vanessa and Radik Bužek. And a special thank you to my teachers, pet patrons Jana Švastová, Vénus and Vera Kovman. All right, let's get on with our chat. Hi Alesta, how are you? I am wonderful, how are you? I'm doing very well, thank you. You're all

the way in sunny Malta, although apparently it's not so sunny from what you said before. Strangely, it was not very sunny when you asked me just before we went on air and I turned around and had a look and the sun has come out so I retract my previous statement, it is now sunny.

Wonderful. Well it's very hot here but I actually closed the windows to make sure the sound is better so we don't have like loud children and lawn mowers outside so I'm sitting in a dark cave right now as you can see.

Unfortunately, the listeners can't. So tell me a bit about this project, Pioneers of the Continuum. You mentioned you worked with some colleagues on it, so kind of where did the idea come from?

Sure. So as a bit of brief background to me, I have another podcast that I've been making for almost three years called English Learning for Curious Minds. And the idea behind that show was, or it still is, I would really like to do

really research a particular subject or person from history or interesting thing and tell that story in a neat 20 to 25 minute episode. And I have a huge amount of fun doing that. But I've always wanted to try and do something a little bit more fictional. And I figured, right, I'll try to create a limited fictional audio drama, let's say someone used the

the term audio drama the other day and I've stolen it. So I wanted to create my own audio drama and worked with a colleague, Emil, who did the majority of the script writing actually,

to create this eight-part series about a group of time-travelling friends and not to reveal anything about the story or not to give away any spoilers.

But the theme is of a group of people who decide to go back in time to a place and time of their choosing. And each episode is one person story, really.

So there's a different narrator in each episode.