Luke's ENGLISH Podcast - Learn British English with Luke Thompson · Luke Thompson

The Words of the Year 2025 📖 with Amber & Paul [968]

December 25, 2025·1 hr 47 min·5 clips

Luke explains how 'vibe coding' lets you create apps by just talking to AI, skipping years of coding education.

Luke publishes this episode on the 25th of December, and he notes that it is Christmas Day. He greets listeners warmly and sets it up as an end-of-year moment, with 2025 ending and 2026 beginning. Amber joins him in the conversation. Together they talk about "aura farming" as a phrase for trying to build an impressive or polished aura around yourself, especially for clicks or online attention. The idea becomes a way into a wider shift toward a tech-dominated world, where identity is increasingly mediated and pulled away from everyday reality. From there, the conversation widens into a reflection on authenticity and performance. Luke and Amber point out how social media can make even ordinary experiences feel as though they need to be recorded, edited, and posted. Luke questions why people share so much of what they are already enjoying in the moment, while Amber’s example of having a great day in Paris highlights the gap between living something and packaging it for the feed. They also touch on a counter-trend among younger people: posting without makeup, showing flaws, and trying to be more openly authentic. Even that stays complicated, because putting authenticity online can become another kind of self-presentation. The result is a friendly, reflective conversation with the familiar LEP mix of vocabulary discussion, self-correction, humour, and side thoughts.

As heard by us

A year-end chat that treats aura farming and online authenticity as a language problem, not a slogan.

Luke and Amber's year-end conversation uses aura farming as a way into a larger point about how online language keeps exposing the gap between performance and authenticity in modern identity.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a friendly guide to the slang and self-myths of online life.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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