All channels โ†’ Effortless English ยท Wed, 12 Fe

Casual Chat About Challenge and Stimulation

Vocabulary

  • grumpy irritable or bad-tempered. Example: "The baby started getting a little grumpy in the evening."
  • fuss to worry or complain unnecessarily. Example: "The baby cries and fusses before going to bed."
  • neurons nerve cells that transmit information in the brain. Example: "Our brains create new neurons throughout our lives."
  • stimulation the action of arousing interest or activity. Example: "New experiences provide mental stimulation that keeps the brain healthy."
  • sharp mentally quick and alert. Example: "Steve Kaufman is very sharp mentally because he keeps learning new languages."

Full Transcripttap the text to seek

Welcome to the Effortless English Show with the world's number one English teacher, A.J. Hogue, where A.J. 's more than 40 million students worldwide finally learn English once and for all, without the boring textbooks, classrooms, and grammar drills. Here's A.J.

with a quick piece to help you learn to speak fluent English effortlessly. I'm A.J. Hogue, the author of Effortless English, Learn to Speak English Like a Native.

Join my Business English course at EffortlessEnglishClub.com. EffortlessEnglishClub.com. Today is actually the last day for the discount code. Our website crashed again during the weekend.

I don't know. I don't know. The technical team finally got everything fixed. But my apologies. I know lots of you were trying to buy the business course at the last minute to use the business code.

I got messages on Gab saying, your website is down. Anyway, my apologies for all of that. Website is back up. Knock on wood. Hopefully it's going to stay up.

So, anyway, I just let the discount code continue a few extra days because of that. So, you still have a chance. Today is your last chance. Business English course at EffortlessEnglishClub.com.

Use that discount code I gave you. Alright, so I've been very busy today with baby stuff. So I don't really have much of a topic. I'm just going to casually chat.

I'll answer some questions in the live chat. And I just chat about a couple things. Number one, our challenge and the idea of challenge. And number two, the idea of stimulation.

Stimulation and challenge. Stimulation and challenge. So just a hello to everybody joining live. You're going to hear babies in the background. It's evening time now.

This is when they start getting a little grumpy. They start getting sleepy. They just had food, but before they go to bed, they've got a couple hours where they cry and they fuss and they make lots of noise. Anyway, you'll hear it in the background.

Don't worry. Anyway, hello to everyone who's joining live. Okay, I think we have enough people joining live. Let's go ahead and I'll just chat a little about the topic.

Hey, Sarah and Aberdemont. Good to see you. And then I'll get into comments, questions about whatever you want to talk about. One of those ask me anything type of things.

Try to ask me something different, though. I get tired of answering the exact same questions a thousand times, like how do I grow my vocabulary and How do I pass the TOEFL exam? Okay, I've answered that question millions of times.

Check out all my other videos. So if you've got something interesting, ask me something interesting. Okay, so the topic at hand. I'm doing a training right now.

As I mentioned, I have twin babies. One of the babies was basically born very, very small. And both babies were born a little early, but one was born really small.

And so he's got some physical issues going on. And anyway, we're working on therapy and things like that. And I've been doing a lot of research about babies and their physical development and their mental development.

And, you know, the exciting thing is that with babies and even adults is that our brains can continue growing our entire lives by creating new brain cells. Even when you're an adult, your age, we can create new brain cells, right? And new, which are called neurons, like nerve cells.

And this is great. And, of course, we can even heal damage in our brains, right? or heal the damage, or create new areas in our brain. You know, like people who have strokes, for example, a stroke, right, where maybe one side of their body doesn't work anymore, and they can't talk much.

They can actually, it's not easy, but they can eventually, you know, function again very well. The through developing their brain. And two of the primary ways that we develop our brain are through stimulation and challenge, which in some ways are similar.

Stimulation basically just means newness, anything new, anything new. So this is number one for your children and even for yourself. for aging well and keeping your brain awake and alive as you age, as you get older, is you need newness. Your brain responds to newness.

When you have new experiences, you're learning new things, you encounter new... Anything really, visually, through your ears, through your body, through knowledge, all of these things. Anything new stimulates brain growth. This keeps your brain healthy as you get older.

so that you keep what you have already, and it actually can help your brain grow and develop and get stronger, right? So, for example, what you're doing, learning English, fantastic. Learning a new language is an absolutely fantastic thing to do at any age, but especially as you're getting older, keeps your brain strong, right?

You can see this with someone like Steve Kaufman. He's in his 70s. He's very sharp mentally, right? Because he keeps his brain very active by constantly learning new languages.

But it doesn't have to be language. It can be anything new. You could do a new sport. Okay? You could do a new sport. So, for example, a few years ago, I learned how to do kite surfing.

It was kind of a strange thing to do at my age. I was 47, I think, at the time. And it's not an easy thing to learn, especially when you're 47. But it was very good for my brain.

I had to learn a lot of completely new things. I'd never done anything like that before. I never did skateboarding. I never did surfing. Nothing like that.

So learning to kite surf was a totally new activity for me. It was very good. I started learning golf at kind of a later age also. I like to do physical things.

Those physical challenges I find help my brain also. So anything new is the point. Traveling to new places, that's great. Trying new foods, that's great.

Anything new. So newness is good for your brain. New things are good for your brain. And we call that stimulation. New things stimulate your brain. When it's the same thing all the time, your brain kind of goes to sleep a bit.

But when something new is in your environment, right, then it wakes your brain up. Another way you can do this, some very simple things you can do. And this was, I was watching some brain experts, some videos from them. And they're saying that even, for example, in your home, that maybe every couple months, change everything in your home.

Change the decorations in one room or change the decorations in the whole house. Right? Different colors, different things on the wall. Rotating different artwork or different posters or different things on your wall.

Change the furniture. Put them in different locations. Change where the chairs are. Change where the tables are. Change everything around sometimes. This is a kind of, it's a very simple, but it's a kind of mental stimulation.

It wakes your brain up a little bit. Music. Music. We all have favorite music, and we will often listen to music from our teenage years. There are some bands that I loved when I was a teenager.

I still like them. But on the other hand, again, it makes our brain go to sleep just listening to the same songs again and again. So find some new bands. Find some new music.

In fact, try some totally different kinds of music. So if you like classic rock... Try classical, or opera, or country and western, or techno, whatever. Try some very different kinds of music.

I've been doing a little bit with classical music. I don't know a lot about it, but I've been listening to Beethoven and Mozart and Bach a bit. Very enjoyable. It's very interesting.

It's another kind of stimulation. Completely new and different than The usual kind of music. Same with reading books. Read books on different topics. So, we all have our favorite topics.

Some people like fiction. Some people like non-fiction. Like, I used to read lots and lots of business books. And that was helpful. But... It's easy sometimes we get stuck reading about the same thing all the time.

And again, it makes our brain kind of, you know, go to sleep a little bit. So another kind of stimulation is to read about crazy topics. Something that you're not, that you never thought about before. That just seems totally weird.

Like you might read about a country that you never even cared about before. Like, I don't know, you could just pick a random country on the map. Just, you know, get on the map and look on the map and just pick a country you know nothing about it and just start reading about it. The people, the culture, the religion, the history, right?

Or read about topics. Read about archaeology or biology or astronomy or whatever, right? Or read biographies about famous historians. But do something completely different than what you normally do.

And just frequently keep doing this. This is one reason that people who get older become boring. This is a criticism, right? This is the criticism, probably the main criticism of young people.

Old people are boring. They tell the same stories. They're not flexible. And there's truth in that criticism. That's an honest criticism from young people.

And it is, in fact, a weak point of many older people. And it's important that we don't do this. It is easy as you get older just to keep doing the same things all the time. But if you start changing things around, you won't become this boring old person.

Your brain won't become hard, rigid, we say. You'll keep that aliveness, that energy, the mental energy, the curiosity, the enthusiasm. Your brain will stay sharp as you get older, even when you're 60s, 70s, 80s, even 90s, perhaps, if you live that long, right? So newness, newness, newness.

And then the second one, as you can guess from my topic, is challenge. So newness, just newness is great, even if it's not difficult newness, like just changing your furniture, changing your decorations in your house. That's not really that difficult to do, but it's new and it's good for your brain. The other thing is challenge, right?

Forcing yourself, pushing yourself to do difficult things, right? To learn something difficult, to overcome difficult problems, to deal with difficult things.

especially new and difficult things, right? And these can be physical. So it could be running a marathon, going on a long hike, climbing a mountain, whatever, triathlons, lifting weights and trying to break your personal record with weights, whatever it is, but you challenge yourself physically and then mentally, right?

English is certainly a challenge, right? What you're doing now. We have a challenge happening right now, our speaking challenge. This is difficult, great.

A lot of you are doing really well with that. We'll check in with that next week and see how people are doing. But any kind of challenge, anything difficult. So it's easy for us to become lazy, a little bit soft.

This is also not good for our brain. Our brain gets weaker if we don't challenge it. Just like our muscles, right? Our body. Our body gets weaker if we don't challenge it.

Our body needs to do difficult things if our body... is always doing easy things, always doing the same things. It won't get stronger. In fact, it will go backwards.

It will get worse. It will get weaker. And our brains are the same. We've got to challenge our brains in different ways, challenge ourselves in different ways, and this keeps our minds, our brains strong also.

So, stimulation and challenge. This is also true, by the way, for young children, including babies. If you want your baby to grow and have a good brain and to learn well and to be intelligent...

and also physically in good shape, then you want your, with your baby, your baby and your children, they need lots of new things all the time, new experiences, stimulation, and they need challenges. This is why spoiling children is bad. It's not good for them. If you spoil them, if everything's too easy for them, then they, it's not good for their brains, actually, and it's not good for their emotions, it's not good for them

It's not good for their happiness, right? Children need challenges too. They want challenges. They get excited about it. They're interesting to them. So challenge and stimulation.

All right, let's get into our comments. And I'll just chat with you a little bit. And if my babies start going super crazy, then I'm going to have to go early. Sorry.

Katya from Russia. Good to see you. Vladislav, good to see you. Funda. How old am I? 51. People are always asking me this question. Catlin says, knowing ourselves, knowing myself is a powerful thing.

We need to know who we are and what we want to do. Yep. In general, good advice. Fernanda, great to see you. Nice to see you. Beethoven, greetings from Germany.

Yeah, those German composers. What was going on in Germany, man? Germany and Austria. They were quite impressive. Quite impressive. Ah, this is nice. Sarah says, I was like Bilbo last week.

I had to make an important decision. I heard your voice in my head that you said, don't think too much, just do it. Finally, I could decide. Thank you, AJ.

Great. Yes, it's good. You know, that's a nice little, we got a nice little bit of advice from Bilbo. And really, with a little help from Gandalf, sometimes you need that little push and you just decide and go.

Stop thinking so much about it. Just take action, which is what Bilbo finally does. Oh, Abraham Ali says, I've been reading business books since August 2019 until now.

Oh, that's not so long. Is something wrong with me because I get bored and I pick another kind of books? No, nothing wrong with you. You're really into that now.

When I say I read business books, for years I read business books. Years and years and years I read not only business books, but I read lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of them until finally I feel like I know all I need to know about business that I'm going to get from a book.

But you're just starting. It's less than a year now. If you're learning a new topic, you may need several years. But I guess my point would be, sometimes, Ibrahim Ali, stimulate yourself and continue reading business books.

That's fine. Continue doing that. But sometimes, just, I don't know, once a month or once every couple of months, Pick a book on something totally different.

It'll be good for your business, too, because you might get some creative ideas that will actually help your business. Steve Jobs gave a famous speech about that.

So don't limit yourself to business, I would say. Pick some random topic that just seems kind of crazy and read about it. Transformation Videos says, My boss fired me for no reason. You were right about every word you said.

I don't know what to do because it's very hard to find a job. Any advice besides your business course? Yeah, you know, I'll just give you the first quick thing to do. Make a list of 15...

companies you want to work at, you know, and the specific jobs, the specific departments, the specific jobs you want. And then research those 15 companies and start writing letters to them.

And not one letter, but many. Dr. Lally says, um... Is it better to do shadowing 10 minutes for a paragraph five times or 25 minutes for the paragraph? Oh, a 25-minute paragraph twice.

In other words, like something longer or something shorter. It depends. It's up to you. There's not a right answer. I would just say you could mix both.

Do some short ones and repeat a lot. And then if you get tired of that, try something longer. So I don't think it matters. Yeah, Amir says language learning is a hell of a thing to do for challenge and stimulation, right?

Yes, correct. It's superbly challenging and stimulating. So it is great, yes. Oh no, baby's going... Cool, Fabiano says, pretty happy because although I'm a beginner, I can understand you completely.

By the way, I'm from Brazil. Good job, Fabiano. I think you're more than a beginner if you understand me completely. I'd say you're intermediate at least.

Ahmed, I mean, asking, am I familiar with Montessori? Yes, I am... I'm familiar, but I don't know a lot about the details of Montessori. I know it's an approach to childhood education.

I'll check it out. Oh, this is very nice. Priscilla Candido says, You changed my life, AJ. I've overcome my fears. Thank you so much. Well, that's nice, and congratulations to you.

That's great. Very nice. Hey, Jarmila, good to see you. All right, this is a good one. This is something I have a lot of experience with, Vladislav, so I think I can help.

AJ, today is a lazy day for me. Sometimes happens to me. Days when you're lazy and it's difficult to make yourself do anything. You just hesitate. How do you overcome that kind of crisis?

This happens to me all the time. Frequently, this happens where I have lazy days. So, here's the thing. If it's just one day or one or two days, then I'll push myself.

But sometimes, I have lazy periods. I'm having one right now, the last few months, where, you know, just the motivation drops, energy drops, just not that motivated to do much.

And so what I found, I don't know if this is the right answer. I'm sure some people would, some like very motivated people would give you different advice. But my advice is to just relax and let yourself relax

Be lazy for a while. The only danger is if you become lazy for life. And you fail to do things you want to do because you're too lazy. But on the other hand, I don't think it's a big deal if you have a few months or six months or heck, even a year of being pretty relaxed and lazy.

I've had whole years where I've been pretty lazy, you know. But on the other hand, I've also had whole years where I've been extremely motivated and super active, you know.

I think that's the key thing. I think of it as kind of cycles and waves and just like, you know, each day we need to be awake and we also need sleep, right? We need that rest. You know, I think also we need periods, or at least I do, of being kind of much more relaxed.

For me, it happens usually in the winter, actually, if I think about it, that it's very common. that in the wintertime, I'm just not motivated. I just stop exercising. You know, this happens almost every winter.

Not every winter, but many winters. I get pretty lazy about exercising. I don't do much. Maybe walking, I kind of stop lifting weights or doing bodyweight exercises.

I don't really do anything intense at all. I can sometimes get lazy about work and about other stuff. This winter I've been pretty lazy also because my sleep is terrible because of the babies and I'm just tired during the day and I don't feel like exercising. I don't feel like being really super disciplined about anything.

But here's the thing. So I'm experiencing this now, Vladislav. But in my mind, I know, I just have kind of in the back of my mind, I know I'm like, okay, I'm going to let myself be lazy this winter. I kind of have in my mind that there's a limit.

And that's the key. I just put a limit on it. Instead of forcing myself right now, you know, it's kind of a Taoist approach, right? I try not to fight against nature.

I try not to fight against these things too much that, that Pushing things too much just doesn't seem to work. So I have a limit. In my mind, I know when spring comes that it's going to get warmer and sunnier.

And I know that every spring that I always start feeling more energetic. You know, my mood goes up. My physical energy goes up. Everything just starts feeling better, right?

Getting outdoors more. And that's when, usually in the past, and again this year, I plan to get motivated again, get active again, stop being so lazy.

So you just kind of have to put a limit on it. Just decide for yourself. Like, okay, I'll let myself be lazy for a few weeks or a couple months or whatever the time is. And then I'm going to get serious.

And then it kind of lets your mind and your body just rest a bit. And then you attack it again a little later. Yeah, like Olga says, I've noticed myself, when I stop learning new things, my brain becomes stupid. I don't like it.

I decide every day I must learn something new and do exercise every day. Yep, exercise is good for your brain too. Physical exercise is very good for your brain.

And just anything new. Any newness. This is one of the reasons travel is so great. You're going to someplace new or different than your usual environment.

So it's going to be new New sites, new events, new sounds, new food, everything, you know, kind of stimulates your brain and wakes you back up. How are the twins, Funda? They're doing just fine.

Thank you. Keeping me busy. Okay, Hassan says, I want to share my success with English. Yesterday I talked to my cousin who's a native speaker from Britain.

He was kind of surprised because before months, oh, he's kind of surprised. I kind of surprised him because before months I had talked to him. Ah, great, great. So four months ago, talked, we're not so good.

Then talked recently and doing much better. And your cousin, well, that's fantastic. It feels good, right? Good for you. That's really great. Good for you.

Oh, here's the follow-up. I see. He put two comments. But he didn't understand me. Now he understands me so well because of effortless English. Thank you so much.

Congratulations, Hassan. Very good. Excellent. Congrats to you. Hey, Evgeny. Good to see you. Uh-oh. Baby's getting crazy. Sabine is in the train to Hamburg to find a new job.

Good luck to you. Baby's starting to get crazy, guys. I'm going to have to go soon. It's going to be a little short tonight. This is kind of a hard time with the babies.

That's why I've been doing shows at weird times because they get really crazy right now. Very crazy. Hey, good to see Carol. Nice. Alright, let's see.

I know you're really busy. I'm wondering if you've received my Gab message. I have not, Carol. I'll check it. Because people in my Skype group and I are a little surprised you haven't said anything about it.

Uh, it's because I've just been busy with some other stuff. I haven't really read, um, Gab. I don't know if you, did you send me a direct message on Gab?

But anyway, my apologies. I'll, uh, I'll check it out tonight after the show and, uh, I just pulled my gab up. So I'll... I'm pretty far behind on replying and reading my gab messages.

So I'll check on that, Carol. Sorry about that. Have you heard about Uzbekistan? I... Flew through Uzbekistan. I did a layover there, but I never traveled there before.

So I know of Uzbekistan, for sure. A few people commenting on my beard. Thank you. My winter beard. I'll shave in the spring. Maybe earlier. I don't know.

Oh, cool. Ken says, Thank you, AJ. Your methods helped me very much. Now I can watch and understand, mostly understand, the World Economic Forum 2020s videos on YouTube.

Well, that's some high-level stuff. Good for you. Excellent. Very nice. Is it possible for a Francophone like me to speak like you? I mean, with the same accent.

I'm from the Ivory Coast. You can get close. You can get quite close. You have to focus a lot on pronunciation, obviously. I think, you know, Since you speak French, then I think English won't be terribly hard for you.

So, yeah, you can develop a very, very, very, very good accent pronunciation. But, you know, it'll take some work. That's all. Yeah, like Carol says, and this is a good point, repetition's hard for me.

I need novelty or newness all the time. Otherwise, it kills my enthusiasm and I get bored. But I think we have to find the right balance. Yeah, Carol, I'm the same.

I probably, you know, I've noticed that when I push myself to do too much repetition, I can do repetition. I don't know. I have the ability to do it at times. But I do get bored.

And I kind of questioned recently whether... like maybe I did too much repetition in the, with some things like my Japanese, for example, if, uh, I was just repeating too much and not really learning, uh, anymore because I'm just, my brain is just kind of going, eh, whatever, right? Getting bored. Cause I was getting bored.

Um, I agree. I think, yeah, it's a balance that maybe is different for everybody, but, uh, I do think we need both. And, uh, Maybe more newness and less repetition.

I don't know. It depends. I think it also depends on your level. I think that for beginners, repetition is more important. For something like language or like a new sports skill or something, you need some repetition of the basic stuff.

And then as you become more advanced, that repetition starts getting more boring and you might want more newness. And it depends on the sport. It depends on the activity. So it's hard to answer that question completely.

I think you just have to kind of find your own answer. And like I said, some activities are different than others. I've used the golf example many times. Golfers practice the same swing for decades, years and years and years and years.

Yeah, Vladislav said, ninth grade at school was totally lazy for me. I wanted to relax, but school pushed me. That was the year I wrote a letter to the police and signed my history teacher as the letter sender. Remember that?

nice i had an experience like this too i uh i don't see i don't know if it's laziness sometimes what we say is laziness is not really laziness it's just a lack of motivation to do something and we're and it's why it's because we want to do something else so maybe we're lazy to do one thing but we're not lazy to do another thing and i'll give you the example of this from my own school i was in grad school getting a master's in social work and um

Did my first year. I was a really good student, blah, blah, blah, right? Very motivated. But then during the summer, during the summer break, I went off and I traveled around India, which I've mentioned before, my first time to travel in another country.

And it was such an amazing experience, so powerful, so incredible, that when I came back, I came back from my second year of school, I was now lazy, meaning I had zero motivation for school. I did not want to be sitting on my butt in a class. And I had a terrible attitude, and I was completely unmotivated and lazy about... doing anything for school.

I wanted to be traveling. I wanted to go see the world. So I wasn't lazy about travel, but I was very, very lazy about school. And I managed to graduate, but I came very close to leaving.

Maya says, do you teach at a Japanese school? I don't. No. Only online. Can you come to the south of Iraq? Maybe someday. We'll see. Yusuf says, hi, AJ.

I'm from Turkey. I've been your follower for 10 years. Nice. Thanks. In this period, I've improved my English a lot in different respects. You made me feel brave.

I'm sincerely thankful. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's great. Maybe I'll meet you in Turkey someday. I'm sure that's the country I'll go back to.

Okay, here's a nice one. Mo Min says, what are you going to do if you try so hard in something and it doesn't work? Well, it's happened to me in the past. I think most people have this experience in life.

Sometimes you try very, very, very, very hard for something and you fail. You don't get the result you want. You don't get what you want. So what do you do about it?

Well, you learn from it as best you can and you're disappointed, but then you just have to let it go and find something else. keep moving forward it happens in life we can't do everything right we're not always going to fail I mean always going to succeed there are no guarantees in life sometimes also you choose a goal and after working hard for the goal you finally realize you really don't care about it anymore and you just stop and sometimes you realize I'm not very good at this or I don't like it or I whatever I'm not good enough I can't do it um

So it just happens. You just have to learn and move on. There are lots of things to do in life. So if you fail at a few, no big deal. There are lots of other things you can do.

Ah, Fernanda. Good to see you. Fernanda says, I started to learn French. Excellent. I hesitated previously because I didn't want to disturb my English learning.

I'm excited. Never... I'll let my English beside. Good. My English is my dream. Excellent. Well, yeah, why not? You can do French also. English can be your strong language and, you know, your kind of main foreign language.

And then you can also have French as number two. That's the thing, too. I think Steve Kaufman talks about this. I like his attitude that a lot of people online, especially these people, so-called polyglots, you know, they have this kind of crazy attitude that...

That you have to be great at every single language you try to learn. You don't have to be great. It's up to you. It's your choice. You're an independent learner.

That's the whole love of it. You don't have to be good. I know you all want to be good at English. That's why you're following Effortless English. But how good do you want to be in English?

It's your choice. Some of you want to be like the Ivory Coast person. You want to sound like an American. You want to be super great in English. But I know a lot of you don't care about that level.

You want to be good enough to travel and have friends. And that's fine. And you don't care about going higher. Some of you have very specific goals for English.

You need to do business in English, for example. And so you're just focused on business English and you don't really care about understanding movies, for example. All of that's fine. There's no rule.

You don't have to be great. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to learn all of it. It's your choice. That's what's great about it. And it's the same if you try to do any other language.

It's totally fine. You know, I've done this many times where I've just learned. In fact, this is what I usually do. I just learned what I call survival language.

I learn enough to travel and and survive in a country. And then usually I find it's enough for me. That's enough. That's how much I like. I learned Thai.

the Thai language when I was living in Thailand am I fluent in Thai? I am not I learned what I would call survival Thai I can order I don't know now if I can but anyway when I was living there I could order food I could do basic you know give directions to taxi drivers ask for directions all those really basic life things make reservations really simple stuff and I was able to function and live in Thailand for two years and enjoyed it quite a bit and that was enough Thai for me

You know, I don't know. Some people, I guess, feel this pressure. Like, oh, if I start learning a language, then I have to become advanced. You don't have to.

You don't have to. So, like, you could just learn French. Just learn a little French. Enough to just travel a little bit and enjoy French. A little bit.

Even if you can't speak very well. That's still totally fine. It's good for your brain. At least it's good for your brain. And you can probably still enjoy some nice experiences even with just a little bit.

So just relax. It's up to you. You're not in school anymore. It doesn't matter. Al said, have you ever visited Vietnam? Yes, many times. I'll be back.

I'll do seminars there again. They're trying to bring me back. It's my babies. I can't leave right now. But maybe this year I'll go to Vietnam. If not, definitely next year.

Probably this year. All right, a couple more and then I've got to go. Yeah, that's right. Gabrielle. Gabrielle Nazio says, before long, we'll be able to listen to AJ's babies talking instead of crying in the background.

Yes. That's amazing. Big hugs from Brazil. Thank you. You will. That's right. I'm using some different teaching techniques on them. They're definitely learning.

They're starting to understand some language, but they can't talk yet, obviously. That's right. You can hear them. They'll be talking soon. Yeah, like Noel says, I hate to stay in the same place all day.

That makes me crazy. I want to travel around the world and learn good skills. Meet other people. That's my dream. I'm the same. Like, for me, I go crazy if I'm in my apartment all day.

It happens now with the baby sometimes. I really don't like it. I like to be out, out, out, walking around, you know, going to different places, just, you know...

Changing my environment around, being outdoors, I find is mentally stimulating for me. And I hate being stuck indoors. That's why for me, my whole life, the worst job for me was an office job. I hated, hated, hated working in an office, stuck inside an office all day.

Made me crazy. So, yeah, I agree. I like it. I'm the same. I like to change my environment around. Priscilla, if one day you come to Brazil, it would be a pleasure to receive you and your family in my home.

That's very nice, Priscilla. And I accept if I get to Brazil, hopefully I will get to Brazil eventually. I would love to go to Brazil for many reasons.

Dominican Republic 2. Thank you, Domingo. Which days do you do this kind of video? Domingo's asking. I don't have much of a schedule right now because of my babies.

I was doing this every single day. And recently, I've been too busy with my children. But I'll try. You just have to watch my gab, gab.com, AJ Hoag, and you'll see me going live.

All right, one more, and then I'm going to go. Okay, I'm just trying to pick which one. Ah, here's an interesting one. Okay. Payam says, I used to exercise too much in the past.

I got an injury. Walking is the only thing I can do now, one hour per day. Walking is great. I just do my best. Sometimes I get disappointed for a moment, but life is beautiful.

Yeah, you know, I've had this point, especially when I was running. I know, you get injured sometimes, right? And then you can't do anything, and it's frustrating. You're like, ah, you're ready.

You want to do something more. But the truth is, walking is an excellent exercise, an hour a day. I would say it would be the minimum. But... That's great, though.

Don't be too disappointed about walking. Walking is really a great exercise. It's all I'm doing right now, pretty much. I do a very tiny amount of pull-ups or push-ups or something occasionally, but I'm more or less just walking.

But it keeps a kind of baseline, a foundation of at least decent fitness. Yeah, you're not a superstar or anything, but... Just by walking enough at least keeps you in a half decent, you know, good enough health and fitness level.

So then later when your injury is healed, you'll be ready to jump back into something more, more easily. If you're a runner, you can get right back into running without much of a problem or swimming or biking or whatever you're doing.

So yeah, running, I mean, walking is great. Okay, guys, lots of love to you. I got to go help two babies get to sleep. All right. See you next time. Bye for now.

Thank you.