تدريب Shadowing: Oligarchy is worse than you think - تعلم التحدث بالإنجليزية عبر الفيديو
اختر وضع التدريب
كل وضع يفتح غرفة تدريب بملء الشاشة.
754 جمل
إذا كانت الجمل قصيرة أو طويلة جدًا، انقر على Edit لتعديلها.
1
I want to tell you a story.
2
Miami, 1973.
3
An executive from a bank in the Bahamas is flying in to go on a date.
4
Wait, actually, I'm going to let Adam tell the Miami story.
5
Adam is my producer, who a few months ago I asked to look into the word oligarchy.
6
This concept that I hear about a lot lately, but I don't really understand what it means.
7
And we've been talking a lot.
8
Good afternoon, Adam why don't you take me through where you're at maybe
9
what this project really is is us weekly checking in about rich people for the rest of our lives
10
it could be do you mind if i burn some saudi incense
11
while we talk why we'll obviously sort of figure out what
12
like are you eating a bell pepper hole just like go miami 1973.
13
so this guy is the vp of a bank in the bahamas
14
and he is in town on business and
15
while he's there he has a date with this young woman
16
okay woman picks him up at the airport for dinner
17
but first they make a stop at her apartment where he leaves his briefcase
18
and what the man doesn't know is that the woman is a private investigator
19
and the friend who set them up is an informant for
20
the irs the us's tax collection agency he's an informant for a division of the irs
21
that back then was called the intelligence unit nice
22
so they get back in the car they continue on to dinner
23
and the friend who set them up the informant he enters a woman's apartment takes the briefcase
24
and brings it to some irs agents
25
and they start to photograph everything inside the briefcase once
26
they're done put everything back they send the informant back to the apartment with the briefcase
27
he leaves the briefcase there exactly as it was a couple comes back from their date.
28
Guy has no idea that anything happened, takes his briefcase, flies back to the Bahamas.
29
Inside those briefcase files, the IRS agents basically find exactly what they were looking for, which is a list of the bank's clients,
30
the people who are using this offshore bank in the Bahamas to evade taxes.
31
Okay.
32
And as they also expect, the list includes multiple known figures in organized crime.
33
But the vast majority of the hundreds of names on the list are not known criminals.
34
Instead, they realize that they are looking at a list of some of the richest people in America.
35
And the investigation becomes this historic turning point.
36
U .S.
37
investigators realized the degree to which the richest people in the U .S were moving
38
and hiding these massive amounts of money from the government in order to avoid paying taxes.
39
This intelligence unit basically realizes we've been trying to go after organized crime for tax evasion.
40
We haven't even touched the 0 .1 % in the country.
41
That may be where the big money is in terms of collecting these unpaid taxes, right?
42
So here's what happens next.
43
The IRS has a new director.
44
And when this new director learns about this investigation, he steps in.
45
He personally stops it from happening.
46
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
47
So the new head of the IRS doesn't like
48
that there is a crackdown on rich people hiding their money from the government?
49
This is like a former elite tax lawyer.
50
And he basically is like, this is not a proper use of the IRS's resources.
51
We shouldn't be spending all this time going after rich people.
52
I'm shutting it down.
53
And not only am I shutting it down, the intelligence unit is getting refocused and renamed.
54
It's now going to be called the Criminal Investigation Division.
55
In other words, we're going to be focusing on like typical crime, not ultra rich tax evasion.
56
The U .S decides at the very top, basically to turn a blind eye to the ways that the ultra -rich are avoiding taxes.
57
Whoa.
58
In 1973, the year of that Miami briefcase heist, the richest 0 .1 % of Americans had 9 % of the country's wealth.
59
Today, they have double that.
60
A group of Americans that would fit inside a double -decker bus has as much money as half the entire population.
61
And listen, I understand that the super rich live in a completely different universe.
62
We've made one or several videos about that.
63
But today we're gonna do something else.
64
We're gonna understand why it's so hard to change.
65
The very weird reality is whether we vote for liberals or conservatives, the world keeps getting more and more lopsided not less
66
and I know you know this like you don't need
67
this chart to tell you you can feel it the richer getting richer
68
and you aren't and you feel like you can't really do anything about it so
69
that story about the briefcase we heard
70
it from this professor who like a few weeks ago sent us
71
this email he had just gotten done watching one of our old videos
72
and he sent us this like quick note really short quick note to let us know
73
that we left like a couple things out.
74
And yeah, that short note.
75
It was the video that we made about the creation of the U .S.
76
Constitution.
77
And basically what he wanted to tell us was
78
that there is another way to look at that story of the founding of the United States.
79
And in his words, it's the story of a clash between democracy and oligarchy.
80
Oligarchy.
81
Oligarchy.
82
Oligarchy.
83
Oligarchy.
84
Oligarchy.
85
Oligarchy.
86
Oligarchy.
87
Oligarchy.
88
Oligarchy.
89
Oligarchy.
90
Oligarchy.
91
Oligarchy.
92
Oligarchy.
93
I've been hearing this word a bunch lately.
94
I remember learning about it in school.
95
It comes from this root word olig, which means like few or small in number.
96
And arky, which means like to rule.
97
It's a system where a small group of people rule.
98
My other association with oligarchy is like Russia.
99
Rich oligarchs who control
100
Russia's industries, like telecoms and oil and whatever.
101
And the reason we're hearing it all the time lately is because of these guys here in the U .S.
102
Our billionaires, or more specifically, these centibillionaires, guys who have more than a hundred billion dollars, the richest of the rich in the entire world.
103
Bezos, an oligarch.
104
Zuckerberg, one of the oligarchs.
105
Musk is an oligarch.
106
But Adam is telling me that there's a deeper story here.
107
If we want to understand oligarchy, they're like the tip of the iceberg.
108
That there's actually something going on that is harder to see, but much more important to understand.
109
And much more powerful than I ever imagined.
110
And once you understand it, you start to see it everywhere.
111
And help me out, what's everyone's favorite subject here?
112
Money, alright?
113
Okay, this is Kevin Trudeau.
114
He was like a 1990s infomercial superstar.
115
Mega Memory, featuring Kevin Trudeau.
116
He was a best -selling author.
117
He was a superstar pusher of quack pseudoscience, which is to say he was basically kind of a scam artist.
118
Your wish is your command.
119
Love that.
120
He was sort of like a catch -all infomercial guy.
121
He was a classic infomercial pitchman, basically.
122
Knowledge is power, but only if you can remember it.
123
And he is easy to laugh at, but he also got insanely rich.
124
It's disputed, like, how much money he was actually worth, but, like, it's somewhere in the range of a few hundred million dollars is,
125
like, what he eventually built this fortune.
126
A few hundred million dollars in, like, what is this, the 90s or something?
127
Yeah.
128
He got real successful off these infomercials.
129
He was a joke, but he was a rich joke.
130
And eventually the U .S government caught up with him.
131
The government sues him, and eventually they jail him and order him to pay back almost 40 million dollars.
132
As this is all going on, before they issue that ultimate judgment of this is what you have to pay back, he knows what's coming.
133
And he's like, must get money out of the U .S and into banks overseas.
134
Every company needs accounts offshore.
135
This is this guy typing this right before he goes to jail.
136
And the government demands that he pays a bunch of money.
137
So once the government does that, though, it's too late.
138
His money managers have already moved all this money to Belize and Liechtenstein and Seychelles and Mauritius.
139
Like, it's all gone, right?
140
And it literally says in the filing, it was beyond the FTC's reach, beyond the government's reach.
141
The United States just literally did not have the jurisdiction to touch.
142
So he had been completely successful in hiding his money from the government.
143
He said, I got no money.
144
Okay, wait, this feels like we're talking about offshore tax havens or like hiding your money.
145
I thought we were making a video about oligarchy.
146
This is a fair question.
147
We are talking about oligarchy, but not because Kevin Trudeau himself is an oligarch.
148
It's kind of questionable whether he was, right?
149
The reason we're looking at him this early in the story is because he gives us a very important feature of oligarchy.
150
Which is what?
151
It's that wealth, at a certain level, it can give you the power to evade your own government.
152
And that idea is basically going to be what we look at for this entire first part of the story.
153
Part one is going to be about the way that the ultra -rich use that power.
154
which is they use it to stay rich.
155
That is kind of definitionally what oligarchy does.
156
How the rich use power to stay rich.
157
And then part two is going to be this other question.
158
We're going to step back a little bit and we're going to ask sort of, okay, this is what oligarchy looks like.
159
Why can't we, the people, seem to do anything about this, right?
160
Like we live in a democracy, we have power.
161
Why does the power of the rich seem so ingrained that it seems like our political system cannot change that?
162
And that's going to require us to look back in time a couple hundred years.
163
Okay, so why the system has such a hard time reining this in?
164
So first is the machinery that makes that happen, a .k .a the people who helped Kevin Trudeau move all that money.
165
Because they, those people, they were part of something big and important.
166
Something that scholars call this wealth defense industry.
167
Wealth defense industry.
168
Wealth defense industry.
169
The wealth defense industry.
170
A loose network of millions of lawyers, accountants, lobbyists, tax experts, political operatives, money managers, think tanks.
171
As state planners, all working for one simple goal, to keep the government from taking rich people's money.
172
You don't like taxes, you don't like certain policies,
173
you move around the globe and the wealth defense industry offers all of those services to be able to do that.
174
That's Jeffrey Winters.
175
He's the guy who emailed us, literally wrote the book on oligarchy.
176
Has a new book that just came out that is about oligarchy today.
177
A lot of the stuff in this video is coming from Winters' new book on oligarchy.
178
It's called The Blind Spot.
179
We did read more than one book for this video, but Winters is kind of the oligarchy guy.
180
And he has kind of a unique way of thinking about oligarchy.
181
And it starts with this idea that wealth doesn't buy you power.
182
Wealth is itself a type of power, if that makes sense.
183
People are empowered in different ways.
184
And one of the ways is concentrated wealth.
185
Those people who are empowered in that way are oligarchs.
186
This is like a different definition from what a lot of modern scholars would tell you.
187
A lot of them will tell you more broadly, oligarchs are just people who are wealthy and powerful.
188
Oligarchy is about the marriage of political and economic power.
189
So the blending of political and economic power.
190
But Winters is more specific.
191
He says that wealth is power.
192
And what that means is that we have to kind of shift what our idea of oligarchy is.
193
Yeah, because, like, I'm starting this video, candidly, with what I learned in school.
194
It's like you're learning about the different types of governments.
195
Oligarchy is a type of government, we learn.
196
It's the rule by a small number of people.
197
He is saying you have to let go of
198
that idea of a government ruled by a small group of people in two ways.
199
Number one, it's not just anyone.
200
It's not just a group of randomly selected 10 guys who are running a government.
201
Oligarchy, this goes back to Aristotle, oligarchy is specifically about the rich.
202
That's the first thing.
203
Second thing is you don't have to be running a government.
204
Oligarchy means rule, but that can just mean power.
205
It can just be the power held by the rich.
206
They don't necessarily need to be in an official role, but nonetheless exercise outsize power for their own personal interests, their own personal wealth.
207
So if oligarchy isn't rich people running a government, what does it actually look like?
208
So for the most part, it looks like this obsession that extreme wealth gives you.
209
It gives you power, but it also gives you this specific obsession with protecting that power.
210
Throughout history, if you have an enormous fortune, others are threatening it.
211
Other oligarchs threaten oligarchs.
212
So one way that the wealthy get much wealthier in feudal times, for example, is to knock off other oligarchs and take everything they have.
213
In other words, oligarchs in these days had to do literal wealth defense, like physical.
214
What happens in the modern state is that for the first time,
215
all of the defenses of wealth and property are actually in place by an armed state.
216
That's what's different.
217
Oligarchs are willing to give up their role as rulers
218
and being armed in exchange for a very strong guarantee from the state to do those functions,
219
which allows oligarchs to appear as simply wealthy, not needing to be political, not relying on coercion.
220
But just because the state technically is meant to protect your wealth and your property for you, it doesn't mean that your wealth is completely safe.
221
States can be redistributive.
222
They can use taxation and other kinds of policies to reduce the overall wealth of oligarchs and redistribute it in society.
223
So historically, being an oligarch meant having to use your power to defend your wealth this way.
224
Today being an oligarch still means using your power to defend your wealth, but now you're trying to defend it against this.
225
Against the government trying to tax you.
226
So my next question is, what does this actually look like today?
227
Banking bombshell causing shockwaves around the world.
228
Richest most powerful people on the planet.
229
Hiding their money in an effort to avoid taxes.
230
Global shadow financial system for the rich.
231
Secret offshore accounts.
232
Money laundering.
233
Widespread corruption and tax evasion.
234
Panama.
235
Panama.
236
Panama.
237
Panama.
238
Panama Papers.
239
Panama Papers.
240
I remember the Panama Papers story breaking like a decade ago.
241
Yeah, it was huge.
242
And I think the reason that I didn't understand it is it was necessarily a very complicated story.
243
It involved the analysis of just like terabytes of data and the mapping of connections.
244
The Panama Papers were the leech documents of this one company based in Panama.
245
They were called Mossack Fonseca, basically a one -stop shop for wealth defense.
246
They served lots of different types of people.
247
So there were criminals among their client base.
248
There were also politicians.
249
There were also like just regular old millionaires, right, who wanted to like use them to set up a trust or something.
250
But a huge part of their client base was oligarchs.
251
The key thing about tax avoidance is you can only afford to do that once you've amassed a certain amount of capital.
252
An echelon of services that is only available to the richest of the rich.
253
At the core of what these sort of major players in the wealth defense industry are doing, it's actually not that hard to understand.
254
If you imagine any kind of asset, it can be money, it can be property, it can be stock or whatever.
255
The government can only tax an asset if it knows who owns it, because you can't tax nobody.
256
And so the job of the wealth defense industry is to muddy the link between an asset and its owner.
257
You can see the asset, but you don't know who owns it.
258
And you can see the rich person, but you don't really know what they own.
259
The point is that the connection between asset and owner runs through a maze that is impossible to navigate.
260
The webs are different every time.
261
These shell companies, you can't emphasize how important they are to everything from campaign finance
262
and financial secrecy and offshoring to the rise of oligarchy.
263
They are this kind of core ingredient that touches on everything.
264
It sounds like this is supposed to be shadowy and difficult.
265
I would love to understand at least a teaspoon of how these people hide their money.
266
So it's the whole thing here is that it's complicated.
267
This is sort of like what somebody laid out on a napkin for me.
268
On a basic level, you have investors or limited partners and there's city fund administrator.
269
All of this comes down to a Cayman.
270
Cayman?
271
Right.
272
There's a management agreement with an investment manager.
273
It's a subsidiary in Hong Kong.
274
Private placement memorandum.
275
It's structured to have investments in Russia, Africa, Ukraine, Southeast Asia.
276
Every single person only has a view of the structure that they worked on.
277
Okay, well, I didn't understand any of that.
278
Okay, so they're hiding their money.
279
They're doing it super well.
280
How much are we talking here?
281
The amount of money that governments around the world basically don't get to collect in taxes globally, it's about half a trillion a year.
282
Right, and that's not the amount of money that's like offshore.
283
Bad amount of money is like, you know, between 10 and 15 trillion right we're just talking about like the money
284
that would be generated by that money that governments could collect in taxes
285
that they could use to fund programs to help their people half a trillion every year
286
they're losing out on in the u .s alone it's in the neighborhood of like a hundred billion
287
that we miss out on every year it's not remake the united states government money
288
but it is a couple government agencies several times over
289
and in 2001 they determined that the average american is paying 15 percent more in taxes
290
because of the taxes the ultra -rich aren't paying the whole problem is anything that's that's not being paid
291
that should be paid i mean that's basically what the honest taxpayer is making up
292
which basically means that everybody is paying 15 more that's 25 years ago
293
and i got news for you ultra -rich pay less in taxes than they did 25 years ago
294
so that number is almost certainly more than uh 50 today
295
so we pay more in taxes because these guys hide their money from the government well
296
now to be 100 clear wealth defense encompasses like a lot more than just tax evasion
297
when these guys do wealth defense
298
it does look different right like the world's 40th richest guy very rich billionaire the state
299
that he lived in was going to raise taxes on the rich
300
he spent a few million dollars on an ad campaign to defeat the law
301
it worked now he pays way less in taxes because of it
302
or there's this australian mining billionaire australia put a new tax on mining so he started his own political party,
303
got a few people into parliament, parliament repealed the tax.
304
These things are wealth defense too, but they are like one part of it.
305
And what Winters and people like him say is that the oligarchs,
306
the people whose wealth gives them power and whose power they use to defend their wealth, right?
307
It's not just Bezos and Zuckerberg.
308
It's a class of thousands upon thousands, most of whom you have never heard before.
309
Not long ago, Elon announced that SpaceX is acquiring XAI, which could create the most powerful tech company in the world.
310
And as a handful of billionaires continue to expand their influence across AI, media, and geopolitics, the line between corporate
311
and government power is starting to blur in strange and kind of dangerous ways like we've never seen before.
312
That's kind of why we're making this video.
313
These shifts are happening incredibly quickly, and the stakes couldn't be higher.
314
Who controls the technology?
315
Who shapes the information we receive who actually holds the power
316
and how the world is changing
317
because of it has become harder than ever to follow through the noise
318
which is why i've been partnering with ground news who's today's sponsor
319
i've partnered with them for over a year ground news is an app and a website that
320
thousands of articles from all around the world, and it organizes them by story.
321
It breaks them down by bias, reliability, and who owns the sources you're reading.
322
Ground News has been recognized by the Nobel Peace Center for Advancing Media Literacy.
323
And here's why that matters.
324
Take the story we were just talking about with this big merger.
325
This was covered by over 400 outlets, all with different angles.
326
With Ground News, you can look at them all in one place.
327
You can filter by ownership, factuality, location.
328
This allows you to see the full context before you decide what to think.
329
Take these two.
330
You have this left -leaning outlet that focuses on the scale and concentration of wealth and power,
331
framing this merger as part of Musk's growing corporate empire ahead of a potential public offering.
332
Whereas this right -leaning outlet focuses on innovation and ambition, framing this merger through Musk's goal of accelerating humanity's future.
333
Same story, two totally different angles.
334
Every outlet chooses their narrative and leaves out the bits
335
that goes against that narrative what ground news does is it makes all of
336
that visible i've been using this app for years
337
because it gives me full transparency
338
that i can't really get from anywhere else it allows me to be a more critical thinker
339
and it's completely subscriber funded so there's no corporate influence deciding what you see
340
so you can get in on the vantage plan
341
which is the one i use gives you all these features
342
and you can get 40 off that plan
343
if you sign up with my link it is ground .news johnny harris
344
or you can scan the qr code here on screen
345
that's ground .news slash johnnyharris to finally see the full picture on every story.
346
With that, let's get back to our story on oligarchy.
347
I almost automatically had this picture of like, okay, this industry is doing so much damage to our society in a way.
348
It must be masterminded by a few nefarious people by a cabal.
349
And the bottom line is that if you want to picture like who are the workers in this industry,
350
the best way to picture it is to go to Shutterstock and type in financial service worker,
351
and that gives you the perfect picture of who is working in this industry.
352
It's just this guy.
353
Now we know what he's doing.
354
He's just, he's setting up the shell company.
355
Yeah, this one actually I think has a tough client because she gets kind of frustrated at this point.
356
And probably like, if this pays well, which I imagine it does, you're actually attracting some of the best minds to go protect people's wealth.
357
I mean, this is what Kimberly Hong told me, right?
358
She teaches a lot of students who are there because they're like the smartest of the smart, not because they're the richest of the rich.
359
And those people are like, listen, I'd love to work for a public interest law firm, but like.
360
Even at the age of 21, they're like, well, how can I live a comfortable lifestyle?
361
Well, to go work in the private sector, to lend your like talents and your brain to the private sector.
362
And most students are pragmatic, right?
363
And part of why I wanted to pull this stuff is that he just had a big idea.
364
I mean, this guy just came up with like the thousandth iteration of the shell company maze structure
365
that he came up with that day.
366
These are not people who see themselves as doing bad things.
367
And I don't know, maybe they aren't.
368
These are just people with jobs.
369
This is how I kind of look when I do my job.
370
Many of the people that I study, they'll say, well, yeah, that's all true.
371
But if the systems were different, I would do it differently.
372
I'm just a cog in the system.
373
Until the systems change, this is how I have to do business.
374
These guys get really good at stuff and probably way better than the government gets good at enforcing stuff.
375
The state in the United States now doesn't have the capacity to pay regulators the salaries
376
that they can make in the private sector.
377
So, the big lesson for me, the big reframe that I'm having right now is like,
378
oligarchs are not just people who like buy elections and squash tax reform.
379
It's actually a lot more vanilla.
380
It's like people who can afford to hire these armies of wealth defense soldiers who help hide their money from taxes,
381
like way more widespread and way quieter and way harder to actually see and track down.
382
Right.
383
And the thing that
384
Winters wanted us to understand is that this level of wealth, it gives these people power whether or not they choose to use it.
385
You can buy an election, you can make an effort to pay zero taxes, or you can not do those things.
386
I would argue all of them are oligarchs, whether they're active or not.
387
They can turn on that power anytime they want.
388
And it's that capacity they have that we don't have, which distinguishes us from them.
389
there's a youtube channel that has posted one viral video
390
and never post it again they posted it in 2012
391
you've probably seen it it basically visualizes how people believe wealth is distributed they believe
392
that the top have more wealth but like around this much
393
and then they believe that it actually should be distributed more like this
394
and then the video shows how wealth is actually distributed whoa
395
the question for me is like the majority of us are down here right why can't
396
we do something about this yeah so this is where we got to talk about this study
397
this is the study that we've already talked about in another video
398
And when it came out in 2014, it was like a gigantic bombshell.
399
Two political scientists looked at almost 2 ,000 policy cases over 20 years.
400
They found that average citizens' preferences have essentially zero estimated impact upon policy change.
401
To be clear, a bombshell among like 43 nerds at a conference in Southern California.
402
Yes, it was covered by exactly one mainstream news show for about three minutes and then never spoken of again.
403
But in the world of political science, this changed everything.
404
OK, so let me show you what it actually says, right?
405
What that middle chart is showing us is
406
that for what they call economic elites or what you could call the ultra rich, the more that the ultra rich wants something,
407
the more rich people want something, that's the horizontal axis, the more likely it is to happen in terms of policy decisions.
408
So like if 100 percent of rich people want a certain policy thing to happen, you know, it's very, very likely to happen.
409
There's a correlation between rich people wanting something to happen in terms of policy and it happening.
410
And if you go to the top chart, that's showing that exact same thing, but for everybody else, not the rich people.
411
And it's totally flat.
412
It's like the more the average person wants it, it doesn't change the likelihood at all.
413
It barely makes a difference in terms of policy outcomes what average citizens want.
414
A sprawling data set highlighting this economic elite that is able to have all kinds of outsized influence on policy decisions,
415
even if they're not politicians themselves.
416
The problem with that is wealthy people's interests are not always aligned with the interests of ordinary people.
417
You know, like mic drop.
418
No kidding.
419
This was a huge deal because basically the conventional wisdom in political science had been in a democracy, if something is more popular,
420
it's more likely to happen.
421
It's not a sure thing.
422
But the more popular something is, probabilistically, it's more likely to happen.
423
And this was basically saying, well, yeah, but if you pull apart the ultra -rich and everyone else,
424
then you actually see that that's not the case.
425
Is the implication here that, like, democracy is not a thing, that it's all fake?
426
What the study is basically saying is it's not saying your vote doesn't matter.
427
It's saying that your vote can matter as long as you're not in conflict with the ultra -rich on something.
428
In other words, if the ultra rich all agree
429
that they want something and all the everyone else agrees that they want something else, guess who's going to win pretty much every time.
430
Right.
431
But that's not every issue.
432
There are a lot of issues on
433
which the ultra rich as a class either don't care or they don't agree with each other.
434
Right.
435
And a good way to think about this is to sort of like visualize to picture the wealth pyramid as a triangle.
436
In reality, it's more like it looks more like the Space Needle or the Eiffel Tower.
437
You sort of have to like squish it like it goes like that.
438
pretend it looks like a regular triangle, right?
439
And sort of one way to think through different issues in society, different political issues, whatever, is that you can think about them as having A,
440
a vertical dimension, right?
441
Which is to say, if the rich are at the top
442
and everyone else is sort of at the bottom of the pyramid,
443
the vertical dimension of some kind of issue is what deals with any kind of conflict
444
or trade -off between the very wealthy and everyone else.
445
The question of higher taxes on the wealthy is the most obviously vertical question in politics, right?
446
But issues can also have a horizontal dimension.
447
That is like something that deals with the differences among the rest of us.
448
Like abortion, religion, basically culture wars.
449
You might call it like the things on which we fight each other.
450
And the truth is that on these issues, on issues that have a heavy horizontal dimension,
451
we do have a lot of freedom to determine the outcome as voters.
452
They're like, you guys, fight about marijuana legalization.
453
As long as you don't talk about taxes, that's fine.
454
and it turns out keeping people heavily focused on that left
455
and right of you dimension who's getting what down the street
456
or at my place of work distracts them from an ability
457
to all say well instead of what divides all of us what actually unites us
458
and that is the fact that we don't have much
459
and others at the top have a lot immigrants are taking our job we have a problem with white supremacy.
460
This transgender movement, this LGBTQ.
461
The right -wing mob.
462
Our number one political enemy is women.
463
A lot of these
464
Republicans are dumbish.
465
The truth is that every single one of those statements is one that oligarchs are very comfortable with you making.
466
And it's not because they all represent the same political view.
467
They extremely don't.
468
But it's because of who they all don't point the finger at.
469
And what Winters would say is that that is the exact reason why our politics, as practiced by our leaders, as practiced by our media,
470
allows such an open playing field.
471
What's so unique about our era is that we have what I call participatory inequality.
472
We actually have real freedoms.
473
Democracy is not fake.
474
It's not a sham, but it's very limited.
475
Democracy is real.
476
Oligarchy is real.
477
They coexist.
478
We live in both systems at the same time, right?
479
It is a balance.
480
It's an old balance and if things are feeling different to you right now, if the last...
481
10 years, you're all of a sudden feeling like people who are worth $100 billion or more,
482
they seem like they're really everywhere and they seem to really be controlling everything.
483
And, you know, they're buying these political campaigns and they're standing behind the president at the inauguration.
484
If it feels new, what
485
Winters would actually say is that it's not just that oligarchy just showed up, it's that it's getting more obvious.
486
We're in a moment of what I've called in -your -face oligarchy.
487
It is so visible.
488
I think partly what's happening is that people are beginning to say there's something
489
that isn't horizontal about this there's something vertical about it
490
and the last time oligarchs have been this visible this clearly present
491
was the gilded age if you're still watching this video it means
492
that you're probably really into this stuff you really want to understand the world
493
and so do the thousands of members of our club called NewPress.
494
NewPress is a place where smart curious people come to get a deeper version of what we do here on the channel.
495
In -depth interviews with the experts that we talk to, conversations between our creators, and the ability to connect directly with other members to talk
496
about what's going on in the world with other smart curious people.
497
Right now it's 60 bucks a year to become a founding member of the NewPress Club.
498
That money goes directly to supporting this work.
499
You can go
500
Go check it out at newpress .com, the link's in the description, let's get back to it.
501
These guys, you may not recognize all of their faces, but you know their names.
502
Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Duke.
503
These are guys who made huge amounts of money in oil, railroad, steel, banking, real estate, tobacco.
504
They built huge empires in these industries, like over a hundred years ago.
505
And in many cases, they consolidated full monopolies over these industries.
506
Basically the same dynamics that we're seeing right now.
507
Increased monopolization, lack of actual taxation or success in implementing taxation.
508
Lots of brand new technologies and businesses getting in on them, making some people incredibly rich all while there was very little government regulation.
509
And the wealth concentration that it produced was gigantic.
510
By the late 1800s, the richest 1 % of Americans owned half the country's wealth.
511
These were these era's oligarchs.
512
And their wealth defense wasn't these stock footage guys.
513
It was government corruption, paying off local judges and US senators and entire state governments to do their will,
514
which is why they became known as the robber barons.
515
Back then they used another
516
Greek word, plutocrats.
517
Today we use oligarch.
518
But all of this inequality and corruption and unconscionable labor practices, all of this poverty at the other end of the pyramid,
519
it eventually produced a backlash.
520
In 1877, railroad workers went on strike in West Virginia.
521
It turned into a massive uprising that spread almost to the entire country.
522
It was the beginning of years of mass strikes.
523
Labor agitation.
524
And then this wasn't just strikes, this also gave way to populist politics politics, people who came into government looking to reform the system.
525
The very visibility of oligarchs then generated a backlash,
526
generated a kind of politics of limiting the power of the few.
527
And in 1890, Congress finally passed a major anti -monopoly law.
528
And then in 1894, we got the federal income tax.
529
The federal government now has the power to take the money from the top
530
that is highly concentrated and redistribute it to the rest of the country.
531
This was a very big deal.
532
But here's what happens next.
533
Less than a year after the income tax law has passed, the US Supreme Court steps in and votes five to four that it's unconstitutional.
534
Struck down.
535
eventually the gilded age would give way to what we call the progressive era
536
when reformers gain more power in the u .s
537
and they try to right a lot of the wrongs of
538
the gilded age strong anti -monopoly laws campaign finance laws constitutional amendments
539
that let us vote directly for our senators for the first time
540
which we couldn't do that before
541
and finally we did get an income tax we had to do it via a constitutional amendment
542
that was 1913 nearly 20 years after congress had first passed it
543
and now look what happens this line is the income tax for the top earners in the country
544
and this line is the concentration of wealth among the 0
545
.1 percent the top 0 .1 percent in america watch what
546
happens okay play the graph look at this graph look look the income tax goes up
547
this huge wealth inequality goes down the golden age of american
548
capitalism 1950s 1960 1970s where a lot of people made a lot of money
549
but it wasn't concentrated to the same degree
550
that it is now okay let's just hang on i want to just go back
551
because we got the income tax and it fixed a lot of things
552
and it was transformative but i just want to like review part of that story 1894
553
congress passes the income tax it goes into effect
554
it becomes law 1895 supreme court overturns it says this is unconstitutional
555
so it's a five to four decision which means
556
that five men overturn the representatives of the entire country
557
and then it takes almost 20 more years like a whole generation passes before we're able to actually get
558
that lawed via a constitutional amendment, which is insanely hard to pass a constitutional amendment.
559
The only way to stop the Supreme Court, which had made this decision in favor of oligarchs, was to change the Constitution.
560
There was no other way.
561
And this is the thing that Jeffrey Winters emailed us about.
562
He wanted us to understand that the American system, where five men can overrule the will of millions like this,
563
this is very, very deliberately designed.
564
This is an example of how oligarchy is baked into the system to begin with.
565
And to understand what he wanted us to know about this,
566
we have to go back even farther in history to the beginning of the United States.
567
So here's Jeffrey Winters' email.
568
Short email, as we've said.
569
Real quick note, he dashed off.
570
Love this guy.
571
He had just watched this video about how the American federal government was designed.
572
And I would love if every viewer paused and went to watch that video.
573
But if you're not going to do that, all you need to know to understand the point that
574
Winters wants us to understand is sort of two things.
575
Number one, federal U .S government, it's split into three sections, right?
576
Congress, the president, the federal courts.
577
So Congress, bicameral, split into two houses, right?
578
Lower house, the House of Representatives.
579
This one is voted on directly by us.
580
We get to vote on who our representative is and they represent us directly in the House of Representatives, right?
581
The Senate, today, we do the same thing.
582
Today, we do vote for who our senator is.
583
But for the first 100 plus years of the United States, it was not that way.
584
The way it's written in the Constitution is the state government, the state legislature gets together and they decide this is who
585
New York's senator is going to be.
586
So it's not democratically elected.
587
It's decided upon by the state.
588
The president, chosen by famously the Electoral College, which today, again, has a connection to how we vote in each of the states.
589
But at the time, didn't really, It was supposed to be the electors,
590
a wise group of men who was going to decide who the president was.
591
And then you have the federal court system
592
and who the judges who sit in the federal court system are selected by the president
593
and they are confirmed by the U .S.
594
Senate.
595
And the second thing you have to understand is that for any law to exist in the American system, all these bodies have to align.
596
So both houses of Congress have to agree to pass a law.
597
If either of them disagrees, it doesn't pass.
598
The president can always veto a law that he doesn't like.
599
And the court system can always decide this is unconstitutional.
600
This law is actually not allowed.
601
So there's a lot of different ways a law can fail in the American system.
602
And what we learn about in school is that's called checks and balances.
603
Another way of saying that is that it spreads power around multiple bodies.
604
And this is what we say in our video.
605
Spread around so it doesn't get centralized around a king.
606
Yes.
607
But what Winters was emailing us about, what he was saying, is that if you look at who's actually choosing,
608
who gets to be in these different bodies within the federal government, distributing power among them is not really spreading power around.
609
Because only this one part of it is designed to be responsive to the democratic will of the people,
610
and the rest of them are chosen by other powerful people.
611
The Supreme Court's role is to make sure democracy can't do certain things.
612
And the function of the Senate is to block what the House does.
613
That's its historic function.
614
Winters' whole theory of the founding of the United States is that the Constitution, the American Constitution, doesn't spread power around.
615
It is consolidating power with rich people. So in that
616
Constitution video, I remember taking great pains to go into these transcripts and really emphasize what these guys were saying,
617
what they were saying in that room, to sort of tell our story.
618
And you're telling me that there's an alternative set of quotes
619
that tells this other story that these guys were actually designing an oligarchy.
620
What were they saying?
621
I'm curious what those are.
622
It's true.
623
Like, you can go into the transcripts of the Constitutional Convention and you can tell two different stories.
624
Which of those stories is correct?
625
They're probably both correct.
626
So let's look at this one, right?
627
So you have James Madison warning that, you know, under democracy, poor and working people — or as he says,
628
those who labor under all the hardships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution — under democracy,
629
those people are going to outnumber what he
630
He calls those above the feelings of indigence.
631
So rich people, right?
632
And that power will slide into the hands of the former.
633
In other words, democracy might not give rich people enough power.
634
Or there's another one.
635
Another founder, he basically reminds his colleagues, guys, remember, a big reason that we created the Senate was to secure the rights of property.
636
There's another one saying the evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.
637
I don't know if any of these things is a smoking gun.
638
But to me, what it sounds like it adds up to is they weren't just sort of like ideologically skeptical of a democracy
639
that hadn't been tried before.
640
They were specifically skeptical of regular working and poor people having too much power.
641
It is this idea of a tyranny of the majority, that you need to balance out the majority with something else.
642
And this is a core part of America's system of government.
643
And I don't think it's wrong.
644
It's just that
645
Winter says there's another way to look at it.
646
What he says, basically, is that is a big part of why it's important to talk about the U .S.,
647
even though oligarchy is a global system.
648
The United States in the 1780s set the model for how oligarchy and democracy were going to coexist.
649
Many of the limitations on what democracy could do were thought up, put in place institutionally in the United States.
650
And that really became a model for democracies around the world.
651
So, what Winters would call the oligarchy that's baked into our system, this idea that you can't have a tyranny of a majority,
652
that you have to have these tempering forces that counterbalance what the majority wants, we definitely exported that.
653
It coexists with a true democracy, with a place where regular people do have a voice
654
but there's a tension and a spectrum between oligarchy
655
and democracy that's like a slider that goes back and forth
656
and we as we've seen that one graph that dips down
657
when the income tax comes in and then comes back up we're just sliding back
658
and forth on that spectrum and again the point is not
659
that like oh the US is an oligarchy at heart no it's
660
that the US is both of these things and globally
661
if you live in a democracy you won't certainly live in a system that is both of those things.
662
The U .S is not unique in this sense.
663
We're Americans.
664
We like to talk about America.
665
But the U .S is also important to talk about in this story because of our role
666
in the formation of what modern democracies look like, our role in terms of the concentration of wealth that we have here, et cetera.
667
At our founding, in our source code, oligarchy is right there.
668
So is democracy.
669
But they're both there.
670
We have within our reach a far more healthy society
671
but inequality tears at the fabric of society it wears it thin
672
and it increases those conflicts horizontally among us okay
673
so now what like what does all
674
this mean what can we do about it first let me just state plainly what i see is wrong here
675
it may be different than what you see is wrong here,
676
but my read in all of this is that it's not actually bad to have rich people in a society.
677
Someone who invented something, started a business, whatever, fine, get rich, sell your stuff, get customers, get rich, buy cool stuff, whatever.
678
The problem I think we can all agree upon is that
679
when a small group of the top rich people in a country play by different rules to protect their money.
680
That's wrong.
681
That's unjust.
682
That's money that belongs to all of us according to our laws.
683
That's oligarchy.
684
Rule by a few in the interest of those few.
685
And it happens through all this boring paperwork.
686
It's invisible.
687
It's hard to track down.
688
And it's incredibly hard to change.
689
I teach a lot of 19 and 20 year olds.
690
And one of the things that scares me the most about that is if they think politicians are greedy and corrupt,
691
then they're not going to participate.
692
And if they don't participate, there are no
693
Democratic guardrails that prevent the rapid concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
694
And I think that's precisely what oligarchs want.
695
They want like a paralyzed and cynical body politic.
696
But there actually are a few things that we could change right now.
697
First, we actually have laws that would help this.
698
So we have something called the Corporate Transparency Act.
699
It is a law on the books.
700
Like we have a law that actually bans anonymous shell companies.
701
It created a whole reporting system inside the U .S.
702
Treasury Department.
703
And then in 2025, the Treasury suddenly made a rule that every U .S company is exempt from it.
704
Simply having transparency in this realm would have been a massive setback for oligarchs.
705
Next.
706
Let our government actually investigate financial crimes of the ultra -rich.
707
Right now, the government can't really investigate super -rich people
708
because super -rich people have armies of wealth defense professionals hiding their money for them.
709
We just don't have enough resources to actually fight that fight.
710
So instead, the IRS ends up going after like your rich dentist neighbor, instead of going after the billions that are being stolen away by oligarchs.
711
Properly funding the IRS, an agency
712
that every single person in this country hates is actually something we should do so they go after the right people.
713
Experts also talk to me about a wealth tax, so let's not just tax income, let's tax the actual wealth of the richest people.
714
Average citizens are already paying a wealth tax.
715
It's called a property tax.
716
It's assessed by the government.
717
You pay it annually.
718
But listen, for this to really change, it's going to have to be something deep and structural,
719
something that changes in the DNA of our country, how our system works.
720
Much deeper structural transformations that would really change the way wealth,
721
power, and its political influence would be felt.
722
And Winters in particular can get kind of radical here.
723
One is eliminate all senates.
724
Now someone would say, how do you do that?
725
It's in the Constitution.
726
And what I'm saying is, during ruptures, things which one would think are not possible become possible.
727
I don't know if we need to go that far.
728
I don't know.
729
Maybe. Who knows?
730
But there is another way of looking at this, which is that we can also tell ourselves different stories.
731
Would it be possible to disrupt this link between being rich and being good?
732
So many people take for granted that you need to run the government like you run a business.
733
It's not true.
734
They're not the same things.
735
But remember, we've done this.
736
A version of it.
737
We've made this kind of change once before.
738
We were in a situation where a few rich unelected dudes controlled the whole society.
739
And look, we reversed it.
740
But you know what?
741
That didn't happen all at once.
742
It happened because for decades, people were talking about it.
743
They were clamoring about something being wrong, calling it out, stewing on solutions, not letting this be normal.
744
And then it took a catastrophe, a world war, a Great Depression, to create the opening for those ideas to actually take root.
745
The idea is that what seems absolutely ridiculous,
746
undoable, not feasible, is actually possible during crises, during ruptures.
747
And the key question is, are you ready?
748
Which means today we need to be looking at this stuff.
749
We need to be questioning it, questioning our beliefs about it, so that when the moment is right,
750
we will be ready to upgrade our society to one that is hopefully a little more equal and a little more fair here.
751
Stories like this one look very different depending on where you read them.
752
Ground News helps me see those perspectives side by side.
753
Go to ground .news .johnnyharris for 40 % off the Unlimited Access Vantage plan to see for for yourself.
754
Thank you.
تنزيل التطبيق
كل ما تحتاجه للتحدث بطلاقة
تقييم النطق بالذكاء الاصطناعيتقييم كل جملة
تدريب IPAأتقن كل صوت
المفرداتابنِ رصيدك من الكلمات
لعبة المفرداتتعلّم أثناء اللعب
نفس القناة
B21
What I've been working on all year
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B23
1955 vs 2025, who actually had it better?
American AccentDaily ConversationWorking Adults
C16
The REAL reason China built so much
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B26
The Internet Didn't Fail. It Was Taken.
American AccentBusiness EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B22
At North Korea’s Border
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B22
What’s really happening in the ocean’s “dark zones”
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B22
Your Olive Oil is (probably) a Lie
American AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
The Problem With Elon Musk
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C12
Why is Russia So DAMN BIG?
American AccentUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
What’s ACTUALLY Happening in North Korea
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B24
Why This Country Was Erased From History
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B210
How The US Stole The Panama Canal, Mapped
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C17
Why you’re so tired
American AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
FOR YOU
فيديو موصى به
C11
143 جمل
"Where are we not telling the truth?" | Jon Lovett | Google Zeitgeist
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
118 جمل
The Anatomy of Fraud
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
546 جمل
Every Secret Deeper Meaning in the Story of Solomon (Richest Man Ever)
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
322 جمل
How Money & Banking Work (& why they're broken today) - Lyn Alden
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
184 جمل
Chills Will Run Down Your Spine When You Hear this Story - Eric Weinstein
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B23
69 جمل
How the rich avoid paying taxes
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
C13
246 جمل
$15 Trillion Money-Making Machine | How BlackRock Became Too Powerful to Ignore
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C14
55 جمل
OpenAI’s lead engineer was secretly a spy...
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
82 جمل
Nobody Outsmarts Reddington | The Blacklist 4K Scene
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B27
23 جمل
Piratage du fisc : «Les cyberattaques qui touchent l'État ne sont pas du tout complexes», relève
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
522 جمل
S13 E26: Kimberly Guilfoyle & Generic Drugs: 10/11/26: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B216
60 جمل
She Demanded The "Soft Life." So I Audited Her Finances.
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
المفردات وملاحظات التحدث لهذا الدرس
هذا الدرس في المحادثة مبني على الفيديو “Oligarchy is worse than you think”. أكثر الكلمات تكرارًا في الفيديو: rich, wealth, oligarchy. يحتوي هذا الفيديو على 607 جملة و8579 كلمة للتدرب على الترديد. مدة الكلام 48:14. يتكلم المتحدث بسرعة طبيعية، نحو 178 كلمة في الدقيقة، قريبة من المحادثة اليومية. 86% من الكلمات ضمن أكثر 3,000 كلمة شيوعًا في الإنجليزية، ويُستحسن مراجعة الباقي قبل البدء.
أهم المفردات في هذا الفيديو
15 كلمة من الفيديو تستحق التعلّم، مع النطق والمعنى:
| الكلمة | النطق | المعنى |
|---|---|---|
| wealthy صفة | /ˈwɛl.θi/ | غَنِيّ |
| constitutional صفة | /ˌkɒn.stɪˈtjuː.ʃ(ə)n.(ə)l/ | بُنْيَوِيّ |
| concentration اسم | /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/ | تَرْكِيز |
| dimension اسم | /daɪˈmɛn.ʃən/ | بُعْد |
| whoa | /woʊ/ | قِف, قِفِي |
| defend فعل | /dɪˈfɪnd/ | دَافَعَ |
| shell اسم | /ʃɛl/ | صَدَفَة |
| vertical صفة | /ˈvɝ.tɪ.kəl/ | عَمُودِيّ, رَأْسِيّ |
| inequality اسم | /ˌɪn.ɪˈkwɑ.lɪ.ti/ | عَدَم مُسَاوَاة |
| horizontal صفة | /ˌhoɹəˈzɑn.təl/ | أُفُقِيّ |
| billionaire اسم | /ˌbɪl.jəˈnɛɚ/ | مِلْيَارْدِير |
| chart اسم | /t͡ʃɑɹt/ | مُخَطَّط بَيَانِيّ, مُخَطَط |
| curious صفة | /ˈkjʊɹ.i.əs/ | فُضُولِيّ |
| visible صفة | /ˈvɪzɪb(ə)l/ | مَنْظُور |
| amendment اسم | /əˈmɛndmənt/ | تَعْدِيل |
الأفعال المركبة التي ستسمعها
| الكلمة | النطق | المعنى |
|---|---|---|
| come up with فعل | جَاءَ بِـ, أَتَى بِـ | |
| pay back فعل | /peɪ bæk/ | جَازَى |
| come out فعل | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | خَرَجَ, غَادَرَ |
| give up فعل | تَنَازَلَ, تَخَلَّى | |
| go down فعل | نَزَلَ | |
| go up فعل | صَعِدَ, يَصْعَدُ |
جمل تستحق التكرار
جمل قصيرة وكاملة من الفيديو يمكنك استخدامها في الحديث اليومي:
- Why don't you take me through where you're at.
- How much are we talking here?
- Why can't we do something about this?
- What can we do about it?
- I don't know, maybe, who knows?
القواعد في هذا الفيديو
أكثر التراكيب التي يستخدمها المتحدث، مع العبارات نفسها من الفيديو:
| التركيب | في الفيديو |
|---|---|
| المضارع التام المستمر have/has been + -ing — حدث بدأ سابقًا وما زال مستمرًا | we've been talking · we've been trying · I've been hearing |
| الجمل الشرطية if + جملة، will/would + فعل — شرط ونتيجته | if the systems were different, I would do |
| المضارع التام have/has + اسم المفعول — حدث ماضٍ ما زال له أثر الآن | haven't even touched · We've made · have already moved |
| المبني للمجهول be + اسم المفعول — التركيز على ما يحدث لا على من يفعله | was called · are not known · be called |
نطق يحتاج إلى انتباه
يستخدم المتحدث 138 من الصيغ المختصرة، مثل don't, they're, we're. انطقها بصيغتها القصيرة كما تسمعها.
- أصوات “th”: wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/, thin /ˈθɪn/
- أصوات “sh” و“zh”: constitutional /ˌkɒn.stɪˈtjuː.ʃ(ə)n.(ə)l/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, dimension /daɪˈmɛn.ʃən/, offshore /ɒfˈʃɔː(ɹ)/, shell /ʃɛl/
- الكلمات الطويلة — انتبه لموضع النبر: constitutional /ˌkɒn.stɪˈtjuː.ʃ(ə)n.(ə)l/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, inequality /ˌɪn.ɪˈkwɑ.lɪ.ti/, horizontal /ˌhoɹəˈzɑn.təl/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/
أصوات يجدها متحدثو العربية صعبة:
- /p/ — ليس /b/: انطقه مع نفخة هواء: corruption /kəˈɹʌpʃən/, transparency /tɹænsˈpæɹənsi/, pyramid /ˈpɪɹ.ə.mɪd/, complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/, participate /pɑːˈtɪs.ɪ.peɪt/
- /v/ — ليس /f/: مع اهتزاز الأوتار الصوتية: vertical /ˈvɝ.tɪ.kəl/, visible /ˈvɪzɪb(ə)l/, narrative /ˈnæɹ.ə.tɪv/, investigate /ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/, vast /væst/
- تتابع الصوامت — لا تضف حركة بينها: ultra /ˈʌltɹə/, constitutional /ˌkɒn.stɪˈtjuː.ʃ(ə)n.(ə)l/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, defend /dɪˈfɪnd/, chart /t͡ʃɑɹt/
كيف تتدرب بهذا الفيديو
- استمع إلى الفيديو كاملًا مرة واحدة دون أن تتكلم، ودوّن الكلمات التي لا تعرفها.
- ابدأ بسرعة 0.75×، وردّد جملة جملة، ثم عُد إلى السرعة العادية عندما يصبح الأمر سهلًا.
- سجّل صوتك وقارنه بالأصل، مع الانتباه إلى كلمات مثل wealthy, constitutional, concentration.
ما هي تقنية التظليل الصوتي؟
التظليل الصوتي (Shadowing) تقنية تعلم لغة مدعومة علمياً، طُورت أصلاً لتدريب المترجمين الفوريين المحترفين. الطريقة بسيطة لكنها قوية: تستمع لصوت إنجليزي أصلي وتكرره فوراً بصوت عالٍ — كظل يتبع المتحدث بتأخير 1-2 ثانية. تُظهر الأبحاث تحسناً كبيراً في دقة النطق والتنغيم والإيقاع وربط الأصوات والاستماع والطلاقة.