This is an All-Ears English podcast, episode 2512, how to riff in English for better small talk.

Welcome to the All-Ears English podcast downloaded more than 200 million times.

Are you feeling stuck with your English?

We'll show you how to become fearless and fluent by focusing on

connection, not perfection, with your American host, Aubrey Carter, the IELTS Whiz, and Lindsay

McMahon, the English adventurer, coming to you from Arizona and Colorado, USA. And to get your transcripts delivered by email every week,

go to all earsenglish.com forward slash subscribe. You've tried small talk and you've seen its limitations. It keeps things superficial. So today,

in this follow-up episode, let's look at a new way to engage called riffing. Get skills to riff on

three different topics for better connection today.

Are you feeling stuck at your English level? Are you sure what your real English level is?

If you take our free quiz, we'll tell you what level you're stuck at and how to reach your next English milestone. Go to all earsenglish.com slash fluency score now.

That's fluency score one word. Alleyersenglish.com slash fluency score.

Hello, Aubrey. How are you today? Excellent, Lindsay. How are you? Good. Aubrey, have a question for you to start off the day. All right. So are you good at riffing when you first meet someone? Yes. I think I am. This is one of my skills. I feel like that I quickly move from small talk to like making a joke, testing to find out

what we might have in common, saying something that's a little bit, you know, out of the

blue to see how they react and then riffing from there. Or if they say something like that,

I can, you know, I'm pretty witty. I can give something to

like quickly get to a little deeper. Yeah. So you become playful quickly. And we'll talk about

exactly what RIF means. But what is this episode inspired by? Yes. Earlier this week,

I interviewed Maya Rossignac-Milon, a professor at IESE Business School, about how riffing is the best way to turn small talk into connections. She had published an article in the New York Times about it that we loved. Yes. So today, we're going to show you how to do that. If you miss the interview, stay to the end. We'll share details. You can definitely listen to these out of order. But first, yeah, what does that mean, Lindsay, to riff? Yeah. Yeah, honestly, I really

think this could be the missing piece for so many of our listeners to bring their level up and really

find that connection that we're looking for, right? So to riff, it means to improve and build on a subject. That's the definition there,

but we'll go into more detail here, Aubrey. Yeah, to improvise. I love how Maya, if you haven't listened to it yet,

...