Advanced English Listening Practice | Learn English Through Real Conversations

Hi, guys. Welcome back to my Slow English Podcast. Today, I have a special guest again. Hello, guys. I'm back. This is Olivia. Olivia is here with me today. We're going to be speaking slowly so that you can understand English in a fun and engaging way. So sit back, relax. Today, we're talking about the power of love because we both think that there's a lot of power in love. This podcast is for intermediate to advanced English listeners. But if you're a beginner, then challenge yourself by listening to this as well. Recently, there's a viral post saying about when the power of love beats the love of power, This comes from a couple. They climbed up on the Vampire State Building and they put the flag to show everybody about this phrase. So today, we're going to talk about what's the real power of love and how do you think the power of love. So Miss Honey, how do you think what is love for you? So for me, love, it has very different shapes and forms. There's lots of different ways to love in our lives. You can love your friends. You can love family. You can love things. You can love feelings. To me, love is to notice. So to pay attention and appreciate. When I'm walking in the park and I see that it's spring and there's flowers or even just something as simple as looking up at the silhouette of the tree branches and appreciating it and noticing it and really taking the time to be present in that moment. That's love to me. But love can also be with people, of course. It can be in friendships. It can be with family. And we were just talking about on our new podcast, actually. It's not an English learning podcast, but it's an English podcast. So go check that out if you want to see the full version. We elaborate a little more on the topic. It's really interesting. Yeah. We want to talk more about inspirations, motivations, about this world. So guys, check out our podcast. The Power of Love podcast. Go check that out, guys. Yeah. So to me, love is to be able to grow with another person, whether that's your friend, whether that's your partner, your family. If you can grow with someone and get support from that person and, you know, just have that unconditional love. Yeah, because when I feel love for someone, I'm always optimistic for that person. So Olivia, I'd love to know what is love to you? Okay. So for me, I feel like love is also support, especially when the struggle comes in, they will be there for you. They will be resilient with you. And also I feel like it's always the connections. You feel the mutual, like reciprocative feelings from each other. You always feel you're giving, but also you're receiving. It's about the connection, about growing up together, about improving yourself and then giving back the good energy back to them. Completely. Yeah. And what is your experience in feeling loved? Yeah, like you said, I think being loved is being seen. People can listen to you. They make effort for you. They make time for you. They try to understand you. Even from first beginning, they cannot understand you, you know. They have different perspective in life because we grew up in different ways. So we maybe have different values when it comes to one specific thing, but they're trying to understand why you're thinking in this way and they try to empathize you, you know. Empathize with you. Yeah, empathize with you. And they try to know what's in your mind. This kind of effort of understanding is so much, so much powerful, you know. And it is really let me feel I'm loved, you know. And also, it's also feel like they're trusting you, you know. They trust you so much. That's why they're trying to understand you. They're trying to integrate their perspective and yours together about this world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think understanding is a big part of loving. I look at, for example, my parents even and they're very understanding of each other. They can fight, they can have misunderstandings as well, but they still try to understand each other despite that. At the end of the day, because they know they love each other. So I will try to understand you no matter it wasn't in my system before. It wasn't in my life. I would I never know this happened before. It's not my value, but because I love you, I will try to understand you. Don't you think it's really powerful? It's completely true. It's like what we're saying the power of love. Yeah, the power of love is the power of understanding. Yeah, but yeah, I think love is a beautiful thing. Actually, this topic came from the phrase, you know, when the love of power, when the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace. Yeah. Yes. So the world knows peace when when we get over this this craving for power, we just want it and everybody in the world right now seems like they're pursuing power and it just blinds us it blinds us to compassion and it blinds us to love. So I think it's a very important thing. What what these two Russians did they climbed up to the Empire State and they waved a flag that just talked about love. It's crazy. It's like they went to jail after because of it. Like they were that passionate about that belief. So that's beautiful. So because in this sentence, we're also talking about the love of power. So why do you think people are so obsessed of power right now? Like and do you think there's any way we can kind of like, you know, let people chase more about love instead of power? Yeah, I think people are obsessed with power because they see people in power getting everything they want and doing anything they want. And I think it's even even me like I never wanted power. But at the end of the day, I know I need power. So it's like everybody needs to have some certain amount of power to survive in the world. It's a necessity now, even if you don't want it obviously billionaires and millionaires they take it to an unhealthy level and to a sickening level more than anything, but I think everybody else we're just trying to survive, you know, if people do crave that power, then what they're craving is acceptance what they're craving is actually love. It's not power. They're just craving connection. They're craving approval and it's never really even been about the money or or the status or anything. It's just that they want connection. They want to belong and what they don't realize is that you can belong without power. Lots of people who live in poor communities. They're much happier than these billionaires that have nobody to connect with because they feel like they're better than everyone else superior. Yeah, they're superior. But what do you think? Why do you think people are so obsessed with power because power sometimes means more control people want to do control more about themselves. Sometimes they couldn't so they want to like they want to project on something else. So they wanted to control others when it comes to romantic relationship. That's why we always say there's going to be someone manipulator also when they wanted to control their money and their property and also their reputation social status. They wanted to control how people think of it because people wanted to feel safe deep down in their heart, but I wanted to tell this is not nothing to do with safety when you have power. I think power is relatively a good thing and passing in the same time as you said at the end of the day. We all need power, but when it's too much we're obsessed with power. You are going to become a monster chasing the power and chasing and chasing the desire, you know, so you're going to become very desperate. So I think people are chasing for that. Sometimes it would be too much. So I think yeah, you want to have like certain power. It's good. You can have a control over yourself, but don't try to control others. Don't try to control the society. I think the best way to live in the society is giving the love, you know to love the people and to feel the love from people. That's more important than just the controlling the power of controlling. Yeah, like we were talking about connections. Yeah connections basically being having a community community is so important. It doesn't matter how much money how much power how much status you have if you don't have a community then there's really no reason to be alive, you know, like we're social human. We're social beings. Yeah, we're social beings and also I do believe at the end of the day like the fulfillment is come from people to people, you know from human. It's not just about you because think about it. If you live in this world have all the money you want but nobody actually talked with you move you along. There's so many millionaires you think seems like they have big house sport car. They don't actually feel very happy, you know, and I see a lot of people living like a middle class or lower middle class. They have a lot of friends to hang out every day. They just cook meals together hang out doing some like, you know, stupid like, you know, entertaining thing and they're happy. They don't need a lot of money. They don't need the social status. Yeah, and we were talking about that like you either have time or money. Why not just enjoy both you don't need soup an insane amount of money and you don't need to be just working hard when you're young. You can be enjoying while you're young and using the money that you're making to enjoy your life as well because we could save so much money if we just didn't enjoy life. We could just be at home just working and just saving all our money basically, but we decide to we decide to use our savings and and to work and live we decide to put them together. That's a work-life balance. That's why one thing I talked to you before. I don't like about the Chinese Society right now for working because for us majority of the people will work like the term was a 996. 996 is basically you work from 9 a.m. Until 9 p.m. 6 days a week. That's a lot of work and also after you like work go back home. You just don't do it. You just don't want to do anything. You just want lying on your bed and the scrolling your phone doing something like, you know, not cause to your brain power and non-meaningful and then go to sleep and you feel super exhausted and the next day is repetitive. Repetitive. It's repetitive and you don't feel the passion for the life anymore. You don't feel the love you don't feel anything and you just become numb and you become a working machine. And yeah, it's good. Sometimes they give you holidays. You have some like national holidays, but you know usually doing this national holidays, for example five days everybody's going to be out there. So you pay the extra money. For example, basically you pay like $30 for the hotel usually and for the holiday is three times more. So you work so hard to save that money and when it comes to holiday you pay three times for more for everything and also there's going to be tons of people over there. You cannot even enjoy. So what is this vacation for? So I just feel that's really really miserable. That's why I think people should find the balance when to work and when to relax sometimes take it off day, you know, I know sometimes it's out of control, but you have you get a fight for it, you know, try to find a you know off day, you know, just tell your like leader or whatever. Yeah, try to fight for it. Find a normal like weekday go for a vacation. You pay like way less and less people and you feel much more quiet. Yeah, it's just like you really need to find the balance. Yeah, it's like valuing your time your life loving yourself. You're putting yourself before work, which is how it should be but it is a cultural thing. I think a lot of different cultures are like that. Luckily, it's not super engraved in Mexican culture, but definitely in Japanese Chinese even American culture. Yeah, American culture as well. Yeah, this is should be you work for leave. It's not you leave for work. Exactly. You work to live you don't live to work. Oh, yeah. Thank you Olivia for joining us. Of course again again. Everybody loved you last time. Thank you guys. Everyone was like we love Olivia. We want more so I decided to bring her on again for you guys and I will see you guys in the next episode on Wednesday. Be sure to like this video and subscribe to learn English with me and Olivia and be sure to check out our podcast. We did a full episode on this in the channel linked in the description. If you want to see more of us that's going to be our podcast the power of love podcast. If you want to see more inspiration motivation, you want to know our life stories you want to build it up your own life stories. Yeah, come to check it out the power of love. We'll see you there. See you there. Bye.