Simplified Speech #245 – Robots and fantasy investing

Hello and welcome to Q-Lips, you're listening to simplified speech. The Q-Lips series for intermediate English learners, which features clear, natural and easy to understand, English conversations between native speakers. My name's Andrew, it's great to be back here with you again for another English lesson everyone. I hope you're doing well and in just a second I'll be joined by my co-host Cassie and we're gonna just catch up and chat about what's new in our lives. Cassie's got a few exciting updates on her end to share and I have a few exciting updates on my end to share and we're gonna let you listen in and enjoy the conversation just like you were hanging out in the room right along beside us. We'll get to that conversation in just a minute but before we do let me tell you about the helpful study guide, interactive transcript and other learning resources that are available for this episode. 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We have an awesome member community who participate each and every week and the new classes that we are going to be adding. They're going to be something a little bit different so we're going to be having some fun like game classes. We'll probably have some grammar classes as well. Something new and exciting and yeah I'll announce the full details once we get everything organized but that's what's on the horizon here at Qlips. So I'm really excited about that and I hope you will be as well. Okay well without any further ado why don't we get started with this episode in earnest. So let's welcome in Cassie and we'll get things going. Hope you enjoy it. Here we go. Joining me now to catch up is my co-host Cassie. Cassie how's it going? I am doing excellent. How about you Andrew? I'm doing great Cassie and yeah it's nice to be chatting with you again. It's been a little while and when we haven't talked for a little while Cassie we always like to catch up and that's what we're going to be doing in this simplified speech episode is just sharing some new news and updates from our lives with each other and letting listeners from around the world join in and listen as well. So yeah I hope you guys enjoy it out there in Qlips lands and Cassie why don't you do the honors. I'll ask you the question what's new with you? What's going on? Well I've been super busy these days. This time of the year is just crunch mode at school. Crunch mode is when there's just lots of things do. There's lots of events happening. It's just it's chaos. But I'm hanging in there. I'm surviving and I've found a new passion in the last few weeks that I have only scratched the surface of. I haven't learned too much about it yet but I'm really looking forward to getting more involved in in the next school year and that is robotics. Robotics no way that's awesome. Yeah so our school has a robotics program that they built from the ground up which means the program didn't exist until just a few years ago and it's now really big and the robotics program it's a program where kids are given kits where they have to build their robots according to a list of rules and schematics and then they meet at a competition and each year there's a new game and in this game there's certain rules that you follow and certain ways that you can score points and so they have to program and build their robots to try to get maximum points during each match and it's so cool. Man that is really cool. I wish that kind of thing existed when I was a student. Yeah me too. I probably wouldn't have joined them. Yeah maybe me neither like when I was in high school we had an automotive program we had like a metal working program woodworking program all of these things that I would have loved to have taken in retrospect but yeah I was more like into literature and music and I didn't take those cool hands-on classes kind of regret that now to be honest but that's awesome that students at your school have that opportunity. Cassie I'm curious if you could build any kind of robot what kind of robot would you like to build not like considering your skill as a robotics engineer because you're just starting but like your dream robot what kind of robot would you like to build. I mean if I had unlimited resources and the brain power to be able to build it I would build a robot that could clean my house for me like in what was that TV show the Jetsons did they clean the Jetsons yeah yeah I hate cleaning so much okay well you know we might not be that far off it seems like there's been a lot of advancements with robots just within the last year or two I think a lot of the big tech companies are building robots like Teslas building a robot I know maybe that's even a different company one of those Elon Musk companies yeah China is making big gains in the robotics field as well. Yeah did you see the I think it was the the Chinese New Year the lunar New Year celebration oh yeah I saw a clip it went viral right there was like this TV show and they had these robots come on and and dance or do some cool moves. Yeah and I feel like I can't complain too much because when you think of our modern day washing machines compared to you know what they had to do in the past which is hand wash we already have very advanced technology but I could still use more. Well yeah that's a good point when you think about it like a washing machine or something like this right they're just specialized robots for one task and they just don't look like humans but yeah it's kind of a robot yeah I don't know I'm a little bit worried I guess I'm pessimistic about robots but there's this company from the USA I think they're called Boston Dynamics have you heard of them before they make these wild robots and they make ones that are humanoid but also they make animal like robots like these dogs and then they get yeah really scary because they can run fast like I'm like oh my gosh these are gonna be the next generation of soldiers it freaks me out it's like two sci-fi for me. Yeah I have seen videos of them they're scary yeah that's scary but robots are cool and I think that's a great hobby so good for you how are you doing it like did you buy a beginner kit or so no I'm not making the robots I am I helped volunteer in the scoring as like a referee for the students at our school and I'm gonna get even more involved in the scoring and repping side of the robotics program. Okay cool that's really fun. Yes, is there anything else new on my end? I'm going to have family members come visit soon. I don't know if I mentioned it on any of the latest episodes, but ever since I moved to my new home, I have had more family members come to visit me than ever before Andrew. In the past year, I have had two groups of family members come already. My mom came and then my aunt, my uncle and my cousins came from the Eastern US. Then this trip, my aunt and my uncle and my sister are coming. My family in Sweden might also come next winter. It's just like back-to-back-to-back family trips, which is super cool. Do you like hosting? Is that something that you enjoy or do you find it a little bit stressful to, I don't know, house and feed and tour guide people? Yeah, it's definitely stressful and I do like it. I am not much of a host. I don't really invite friends over to my house on a daily basis. Not that I don't want to. I'm just, I have a young baby. I'm a little bit of a, like I'm a little messy. I'm not like in everyday host, but having family members come visit and show them where I live and what my favorite foods are here in Korea. It's really fun and it's great that I can show them a place that's so different from where they live. Now do you think they're all coming to see you because you moved to a nicer, bigger place or do you think that it's because maybe your son's finally at the age where it's appropriate to visit? They're probably really curious about the baby, right? They want to see him and meet him. When you have an infant, maybe it's not a good time to visit, but how old's your son now? Almost two probably, maybe? He's 19 months. He's growing so fast. Yeah. 19 months. Yeah. I think it's a little bit of both. I think having him here is a big draw. He's super cute at this age. I think it's also just a good time in what my mom is going to come regardless because of her grandson. I think the rest of my family members are coming now just because it works out with their current lives. For example, my aunt and uncle that are coming, this is a little sad, but they have had a dog who was really old and he couldn't be left alone or with strangers for several years because he needed special care and he just passed away recently. He lived a really great long life, so it's okay. But my aunt and uncle are finally able to travel more, which they haven't been able to because of their beloved puppy, dog. Other family members, their kids are getting older, so it's easier to travel. It's all just culminating in this year and next year, which is great. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay. Very good. Well, enjoy the family visits. I think I'll let you know how it goes. Sure. Andrew, how about on your end? What's new? Well, I don't have too many new updates that I can share with you, Cassie, because our QLUPS listeners have probably already heard me talk about a lot of new things, but there's one thing that just came to mind that when you were talking about robots, it actually reminded me and I haven't shared this with our QLUPS listeners yet, so this is perfect. I don't know about the circles that you run in, Cassie, your circles of friends, but I'm 41 years old soon to be 42, unfortunately. Guys in their 40s, do you know what we're into? Cassie or at least a lot of my friends are into and it occupies a lot of our conversation these days. Can you guess? A health? Yeah, but also money and investing. Oh my God. When I meet with my friends, most of the talk is about the markets, is about investing, is about stocks, is about real estate, blah, blah, blah, and I'm not really a finance guy. I'm not really an investing guy. Yeah, probably to my detriment, like it's probably not great for my finances, but I don't really invest. Now, thankfully my wife does, she does some investing, so it's not like we're completely out of the picture, but yeah, I don't really. And so my friends are like, "Andre, come on, come on, you got to get an investing account, you got to start trading, you got to start doing this and that and buying this and buying that." And there's kind of freaking me out, but I'm worried because it's a really complicated world out there. So our difficult and complicated and I'm worried that if I started buying stocks that I would lose my shirt rather quickly and loser shirt means to lose all of your money. Like I would go bankrupt quickly, so I don't want to do that obviously. Now I remember when I was back way back in the day, maybe in like grade six or seven of elementary school or maybe it was a little bit later like early middle school somewhere around then. A little bit foggy, but I used to use the website Yahoo, which was like the precursor to Google, right? Yahoo search engine. And they had this awesome feature when I was in, when I was that age, which was like fantasy stock market. So you could go in and everything was like not real, it was all fake, but you could, you'd start off with a certain amount of money, like I don't know, a thousand dollars or something. And you could buy real stocks and it followed the real market, but everything was fake and fantasy. And I remember loving that when I was a kid, I'd be wheeling and dealing by in stocks and selling stocks and making fantasy money. It was so fun. And so I was reminded of that and I thought, well, I don't know if that service is still around and I could practice. Oh, it totally is. Yeah, but I couldn't find the Yahoo one. The Yahoo one doesn't exist anymore. And there were some other services, but I, you had to pay for them. They, you know, it was called paper trading and the ones that I could find were like, yeah, they didn't look so great. And I didn't want to pay money to practice this. So these days we live in this crazy world where AI can make basic kind of websites for you. And so I went to AI and I said, this is what I want to do. I want to make a fake trading platform that's linked to real stock market data. And I want to start with just $100 and then I can try and because I thought if I, if I start investing, I'm going to start really small. I'm going to start with just $100 a month. And so that's what I did. I built this fake trading platform, fantasy trading platform. I started last month with $100 and I just checked today. Actually, it's been about a month since I've been wheeling and dealing and trading. And now I'm at $140. So I had a 40% increase over my one month of trading. I thought, wow, that's really high. Pretty good. Pretty good. So Andrew, I recommend safely investing in index funds. They follow the market and they're a lot less risky. So you don't get 40% gains, but you also don't get like 40% losses either. Yeah. I think it was a little bit of beginner's luck to be honest. I'm sure if it was real money, yeah, I probably would have gone the opposite way. I'd be down 40%. Yeah. Yeah, I used to be super into investing too. So one of my favorite episodes we did in the past, Andrew, was the one years ago when they had, we were talking about stocks and stocks going, shooting to the moon. That was when GameStop was being shorted and then all of the local community were buying GameStop stock so that they could screw over the big businesses that were shorting them. That was such a cool time. Yeah, that was a really interesting time and I don't know if that saga is actually finished. I think it's kind of going on still. I mean, I don't follow it super closely, but yeah, I think Cassie, that's the safe thing, index funds or ETFs where maybe you're not putting all of your eggs in one basket. You're spreading your eggs into multiple baskets so that if one fails, then you're not going to be out to lunch. Yeah, anyways, it's been fun. I don't know if I'm going to actually go for it. The other things that I need to consider as well is like on my fake trading platform, this fantasy platform, I don't have to pay service fees or trading fees or taxes or anything like that. But in reality, we have to pay all of these little fees to make trades and so that would make it less profitable. Yeah, I'm gonna keep it up at least for a few more months just to learn how to do things. And it's been a fun game to play, at least. Yeah, it's cool that you used AI in a unique and engaging way as well. Yeah. These days, with AI, I swear, if you can think of the idea, you can pretty much build it as long as it's not too complicated. But some little thing like this, doing my own-- it's not like a service that I'm opening for millions of people. It's just for me, it only exists on my computer. For this kind of situation, you can build it. I've been experimenting with building all different kinds of personal tools. Just for me, I made another tool for cataloging all of my records so I can see-- I've got hundreds of records. So if I want to find a record to listen to, sometimes I don't know where it is. They're not very well organized. But I can just see on my phone where it is. And yeah, all of these different tools, it's really fun to make. Wow, that's so cool. Yeah, going back to your investing, too, you could also use AI to pick maybe some of your favorite index funds or ETFs and see how they've been performing over the last few years. And then use that to calculate how much you should invest each month so that you can reach a certain goal by a certain year. And then AI can do all the math for you. And you could just run different scenarios to find your ideal fit. Oh, yeah. I did do some kind of math like that using AI to go back and see how much money I could have made if I had been doing this since I got married. Oh, no, that's sad. And if I had been investing the way that I invested this month during the few years that I've been married here, like the five years or so that I've been married, oh, I could have-- Yeah, my wife and I could have been in a much better financial situation. So yeah, that retrospective math can be heartbreaking sometimes. Yes. All right, good. Well, Cassie, I think we should wrap things up here. But it was fun to hang out and to catch up. Guys, we would also love to catch up with you. We have our Discord community, which is the place where CubeSlisteners from around the world gather to hang out with each other and to practice our English and be active with our English, with writing it and speaking it. It's an amazing place just to hang out and spend some time. Much better than Instagram or those other social media platforms, which are just brain rot. Here on Discord, you can actually use your English in a fun and productive way. So come on over and join us. It's free to do so. The link is in the description for this episode. And we want to hear what's new with you. Cassie and I shared our updates, but we're waiting to hear what your updates are. So come on over and let us know. All right, everyone. Until next time, please take care. And we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. - See ya.