Daily Dose of English 223
Deep Conversations
Daily Dose of English 223
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about deep conversations as a little follow-up from yesterday. Deep conversations, interesting, huh? So, deep conversations, deep is the adjective we use to describe a conversation that goes deep, oh great, I'm using the word, that goes very far into a topic where you're either really dissecting it, really examining the topic, or it might even be that you're talking about very specific emotions, right? There's a couple different kinds of deep that I think we can talk about here. So that first one of depth of conversation is basically where you get very specific, right? So if you imagine conversations as like being up the surface of water or something like that, that's where the most generic general things live. And the further down you go, the deeper you go, the more specific you can get in a conversation. right and so like a very basic conversation about cats would be talking about if you have a cat if you like cats and whatnot but a deeper conversation would be like about the different different cat breeds or the process of adopting a cat or what it's like to travel internationally with a kitty cat. Things like that are more deep conversations about cats. Dude, the reason that I thought of cats is because my cat jumped up here and he was being annoying. So that's, that's like how you get a deeper into a conversation is basically by asking more, more, more specific, specific or in specific or is that a word specific or I don't think that's a word. More and more specific questions. That doesn't sound right because you're asking more specific questions and you're getting more and more specific. No, that's right. What? Do I speak English? I don't know. So the first kind of deep conversation is really interesting. They can be quite fun to have, but they also require somebody to work with you, to be on your same wavelength is a thing you can say. When two people are on the same wavelength, that basically means that you're thinking in similar ways. It's difficult to have a conversation with somebody if they're not on the same wavelength because they're basically talking about something else and that can be a little frustrating, a little difficult. There's many different reasons that being on a different wavelength as somebody doesn't really work for a conversation, especially if you want to go deeper down. Yesterday we talked about small talk and you don't have to be on the same wavelength exactly as somebody. You can still have a decent little chat if you're just trying to go quickly. But if you're trying to go deep into a conversation, into a topic, it can be a lot harder if somebody's not working with you. I don't know if you ever had that happen where you wanted to talk about something or somebody wanted to talk about something else with you and one of you was just like, no, I don't want to talk about that. That does not sound fun. It's hard. Okay that's all I have actually. There's no but there. The other kind of deep conversation is deep in terms of like emotions. This is another type of deep conversation and it's sort of similar but it's more about emotional stuff and it typically has to do with opening more and more doors or opening up more to the person that you're talking with. Talking about your own personal fears, your own personal desires, right? Things like that. And this is also a good conversation to have, especially if you're trying to get to know somebody better. But it's also a harder conversation to have because it means that you have to be more honest and more open in lots of different ways and also be able to listen. That's a big key part of really any kind of conversation, but especially if you want to go deeper, you have to be able to also listen to the other person or else you're just having a deep monologue. A monologue, so mono is one, right, which compares to dialogue, di means two, and then log is like the conversation or words basically. And so a monologue is when one person is basically just talking, and it's very common to hear two people monologuing together, basically, where they're not really talking together they're talking sort of at each other. And that is not the best way to have a conversation because a conversation implies dialogue. And so especially if you're trying to have a deeper emotional conversation or deeper in specificity conversation, you definitely want to make sure that you're having a dialogue with somebody else or else it's going to kind of get lost in the weeds. You're not really going to understand each other and you're going to be just talking past each other is a good way to describe that. So with emotions, I'm first off not great at this. It's a lot harder for me. However, I've been trying to get better talking with people about sort of emotional things, but not strictly about emotions, but more about like beliefs is where I've started because it's a little bit easier for me to talk about like a concrete belief. So like one conversation I had relatively recently was I asked the question like what would be your maximum earnings like how much if you were offered a job and you choose your salary, what is the highest number that you'd ever really want. Because I think that's important. A lot of people might say infinite, right? They don't, there's no limit, or they'll just take as much as they can. But I think there's a, personally, I think there's a very real limit that you should set. And anything else just you don't need. There is a a massive overemphasis on accumulation of wealth. That's a really good word, accumulation. That's basically where you just get more and more and more and more and more and more and more of something, and you build up essentially a huge pile, a big stockpile of, in a lot of cases, money. right? And I sort of like the, somebody brought up a given example of like a maximum wealth, right? Like it's fine that like somebody, I think the example they use is like Jay-Z, a rapper, who is very rich, right? He's got plenty of money. He can do whatever he wants. It's what my dad calls fuck you money. where you have so much money that you can basically say to anybody, fuck you, I've got a lot of money. You don't really have to listen to anybody in terms of what you can and can't do. Obviously, you still need to stick within the laws. However, rich people typically don't do that. So we need to fix that part of life. But at a certain point, if you have like a certain amount of money, you can just tell anybody to fuck off, right? You fuck you money. But beyond that, there's no real difference, right? You don't need money to the point where you can like I don't know, buy a yacht that fits inside your other yacht because you can't get to your bigger yacht because there's a literal bridge in the way. I think that actually happened with Jeff Bezos or something like that. Could be wrong, but I'm not, I wouldn't be surprised if it was real because like insane stuff like that is like at the point of like having literal billions of dollars. And so there's definitely a point where I would not want more money. And for me, I think that's probably around, currently, as we are in the world, around $150,000, $200,000 per year. And that's a lot still, right? I don't plan to get to that point. But if I was making 200K a year, I would not need any more, for sure. I probably wouldn't need any more at 100K, honestly. But I just don't make that, so I don't know exactly what it feels like to have that. It's also very different if you own a home already. If you already own a house, right, you could probably do like half of that, right? And so there's a big question there, but I think I would pretty quickly find an upper limit and then just try to find a way to either donate the rest of that money or probably give it to like more specific donations. I like the idea of, I think they're called angel investors. Angel investors are generally people that are relatively wealthy. They're not like mega rich, but like if they can give a large amount of money to a person with a big idea or who wants to start a business or something like that. Um, I think that's what they're called. Angel investors are like individual people that want to like support somebody that they know or that they're connected with monetarily saying like, okay, you have this really cool idea for a business. Here's $500,000. Go try to build something cool. If I get my money back, that's great. If not, at least you tried, at least you gave it your all. I think that's what an angel investor is, but doing something like that I think would be really interesting and be really cool as an experience. And so that's probably what I would do if I ended up with just an excess of money, is try to find people that are gonna use it to do something actually good in the world, really interesting in the world, rather than having to depend on bank loans and things like that that might not be the most, that are more focused on return on investment rather than return on goodness in the world. But yeah, anyways, so that's my deep conversation episode. I hope that you enjoyed. I would love to hear your responses down in the comments below. Pretend like we're having a little deep conversation and let me know what you think on some of these topics. But that's everything for today. I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a great rest of your day. Bye bye.
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