Shadowing Practice: History Professor Answers Corruption Questions | Tech Support | WIRED - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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I'm historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
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Let's answer your questions from the internet.
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This is Tech Support Corruption.
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Andy Doodle asks, how do third world rulers get so rich if their countries are so broke ass?
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Well, often those countries are broke and get broker because the dictator is stealing public funds.
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A good case in point is Mobutu Seziseko, who was the leader of Congo for three decades.
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He became immensely wealthy, amassing a fortune of five billion in a country where the average daily wage was $1.
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How did he do this?
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He stole public funds.
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He took tax money and directed it to his pet projects, also to Swiss bank accounts.
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He took kickbacks from foreign companies doing business, such as diamond extraction.
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Mobutu was an important ally in the Cold War.
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He was anti-communist.
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So the International Monetary Fund and the United States gave him lots of loans
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that were supposed to be to improve the country.
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Instead, that money went straight to his bank accounts.
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At Gadek asks, Alexa, define corruption.
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Corruption is the abuse of power for private gain.
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Now, corruption is also what we don't do, and that's called dereliction of duty, when we don't report abuses of power.
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When we look the other way at the weaponization of investigations against innocent people,
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or when we simply give up the idea of ethics in the workplace and in life.
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Rocky Wired asks, Be honest.
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Which country is the most corrupt in the world?
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Transparency.org tracks corruption and absence of transparency in countries around the world.
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So they have a list.
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And according to this list, South Sudan is the most corrupt, followed by Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen,
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Libya, Eritrea, Sudan, Nicaragua, Syria, and North Korea.
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Some of these countries, such as Venezuela, are corrupt because the government is in an alliance with criminal gangs,
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which are used as enforcers to beat up state enemies, also to get bribes from people.
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And there becomes a gray zone between the state and civilian criminal actors.
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Other countries such as South Sudan and Yemen are countries where authority has become fragmented and there are warlords,
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each of them with their own corruption networks.
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Myanmar is also on the list, and that is a military junta where the military has been allowed to become active players in corruption schemes.
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Military officials have amassed their own fortunes, and this is how dictators keep people tied to the system.
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Rockknocker61 asks, why does it appear that the number one job of all politicians is to enrich their family?
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Well, autocrats are family men in a way.
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Since Mussolini in Italy, they surround themselves with family members because family members can keep their secrets and be easily controlled.
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Mussolini appointed his son-in-law, Gagliazzo Ciano, as foreign minister, and Ciano and his family had their own corruption network we now know.
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Sons-in-law have an important place in the history of autocratic corruption.
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In Turkey, Erdogan's son-in-law runs the biggest drone-producing company in Turkey, which is drones used all over the world.
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In the United States, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, has been conducting private business on behalf of his company, which is partly funded by the Saudis.
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At the same time, he is representing the U.S government in sensitive negotiations in Ukraine and Iran.
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In healthy democracies, this would be called a conflict of interest, but the Trump administration does not recognize conflicts of interest.
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This is the privatization of foreign policy, and it's something that's very common in corrupt governments.
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Dover299 asks, Where do politicians get so rich from?
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Here we need to differentiate between politicians growing rich after they leave office, when they're not bound anymore by conflicts of interest.
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Former heads of state, and this is true all around the world, can become very rich after they leave office, from book deals, from speaking gigs,
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all kinds of things, consulting, anything that's going to use their expertise as a former head of state.
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Quite different are leaders who amass wealth while they're still in office, ignoring conflicts of interest.
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And that's the case with Donald Trump, who has amassed $5 billion in only 18 months in office.
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There have been deals made that involve profits for the companies owned by his family.
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He also promotes personal products with his name on them, which is something that former U.S presidents have never done.
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And over $640 million estimated has come in from foreign investments to Trump and his family.
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Ruby Z.
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Heumann asks, WTF is a kleptocracy.
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Literally, kleptocracy means rule by thieves, klepto being a thief.
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Kleptocracy is a government where corruption and thievery have become so institutionalized,
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so pervasive, that corruption is how you get things done.
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It's a system where elites use their political positions to amass private wealth,
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where private businesses are plundered by the state and have to pay bribes and kickbacks.
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If they don't, they're subjected to legal harassment, to tax audits, and sometimes even forced to sell at a loss.
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And the beneficiary of all this is the state.
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Ordinary citizens have to pay bribes to get basic social services.
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This was true often in the former communist countries, certainly in Romania, of Ceausescu,
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who had his country living in poverty while he lived in a grand palace.
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Many countries that have a lot of oil or energy deposits become kleptocracies, and this is known as the resource curse.
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The curse being that autocrats who have large supplies of oil or natural gas tend to stay in power longer.
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In Gaddafi's Libya, of course,
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the dictator was supreme, But oil profits created centers of extreme wealth around oil distribution and production.
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Over time, these executives and others in the state bureaucracy who had to do with oil became immensely wealthy.
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On the way, corruption becomes endemic.
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It becomes pervasive.
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In Gaddafi's Libya, which was a kleptocracy, everyone involved in the oil industry, whether private or in the government,
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amassed private fortunes and were stealing these profits.
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Instead of putting the oil profits for public good, for roads, for public welfare, most of them were siphoned off into Swiss bank accounts.
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Now, sometimes if the dictator falls from power,
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as happened to Gaddafi, this can lead to instability after because these people can become almost like warlords.
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And so you have a fragmentation of power once the dictator leaves.
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El Rey asks, how do corrupt dictators hide their money?
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Asking for a friend.
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In the olden days, dictators used Swiss bank accounts because until 2018,
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you could be anonymous and there was no transparency regarding these bank accounts.
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So you could stash your money in these Swiss bank accounts and feel safe.
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Nowadays, offshore finance is the game.
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Because anonymity is guaranteed, you can create a shell corporation
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or have your money under someone else's name very convenient for the bad actors in the world.
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Until the 21st century, United Kingdom outposts such as Gibraltar were big places for dictators to put their money.
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Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, had his money in United Kingdom banks offshore.
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Nowadays, the United States has come to be one of the main players in offshore finance.
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States such as Nevada and Delaware and South Dakota are places where many warlords, arms dealers, dictators reportedly stash their funds.
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Yet another Band21 asks, so what corruption is Benjamin Netanyahu involved with again?
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Netanyahu faces three separate cases of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.
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Regular politicians, if they're facing investigation or have charges against them, they don't want to run for office.
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Journalists could start poking around.
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Who knows what might come out?
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If you are a wannabe autocrat, though, like Netanyahu, you are compelled to run for office
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because the point is to get into power and fix the judiciary so your legal problems can go away.
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A list of leaders who were under investigation when they ran for office includes Vladimir Putin,
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Silvio Berlusconi three times, Donald Trump three times,
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and Netanyahu, who came into power and immediately pursued something he called judicial reform,
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which was supposed to fix the judicial system to make his legal problems go away.
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From the Ask a Russian subreddit, where did Putin get his wealth?
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Russia is a kleptocracy, and President Vladimir Putin is rumored to be among the richest men in the world.
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How did he do it?
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On one hand, he plundered public agencies, in particular Gazprom, which is the oil and natural gas conglomerate.
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Basically, kleptocrats see public agencies as pots of money that they can take for themselves.
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So that's one way Putin did it, by siphoning off profits from public agencies.
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The second is by plundering private businesses.
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A shocking one out of six Russian businesses has been seized by the state
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or threatened by the state or had a shakedown, which requires them to pay bribes or sell at a loss.
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And so, again, it's the private sector and the public sector.
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When you put these together, you create a formidable income stream for a dictator.
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Legitimate Sunday8460 asks, Is Trump the most corrupt president?
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Without a doubt.
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Donald Trump has made over $5 billion just in the 18 months he has been in office.
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Donors have been given contracts for businesses, high political positions.
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He promotes personal goods, profits to which go toward the companies owned by his family or companies owned by donors.
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Trump has also pardoned financial criminals as well as political criminals.
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The Poor Man's Thinking Man on Quora asks, why are the cronies of dictators always rich?
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Here we have the concept of authoritarian bargains.
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Dictators make bargains with elites, could be media elites, financial elites, business elites.
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They make money in return for absolute loyalty.
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There are no bid contracts.
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Competition is gamed in their favor.
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The state doesn't go after them.
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Over time, this results in what's called a mafia state,
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where clans associated by profit to the dictator become immensely wealthy and powerful in and of themselves.
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In Putin's Russia, for example, there's the dictator, Vladimir Putin,
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and there are the oligarchs who become immensely wealthy by sharing profits from illicit transactions.
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And this is how the dictator keeps them tied to him.
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It can be dangerous to speak out, even if you're immensely wealthy, against a dictator.
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In Russia, you might fall out of a window.
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Corruption isn't only about finances.
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It's a way of keeping people in line.
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The dictator knows your secrets.
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In Russian, this is called kompromat.
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And the dictator, especially if he comes from an intelligence background like Putin, keeps information on those oligarchs, which he can use at any time.
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And so this too is part of the authoritarian bargain.
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It's not just profit, but it's keeping each other's secrets.
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Where you at 42 Wallaby Way asks, hmm, I wonder why corrupt leaders always beef with the press.
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If you want to know if someone is trying to be an autocrat, look at how they talk about the press.
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Do they deride them as fake news?
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Do they say they're corrupt? not to be trusted?
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Usually.
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That's because autocratic leaders or wannabe autocrats usually have secrets to hide, and they know the press could expose them.
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Autocrats are afraid of journalists uncovering their corruption, and so autocrats try to silence, especially investigative journalists.
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That is a very dangerous profession.
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Damn Dirty Ape asks, why do some governments become corrupt?
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Are there structural issues that make some governments more prone to corruption?
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There can be corruption in any kind of political system, democracies, autocracies.
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Corruption can happen anywhere in the world where there's a leader
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and a political system that promotes it because of the imperative of self-preservation.
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Autocrats are deathly afraid of being prosecuted.
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This could be in Turkey where Erdogan has repeatedly fired prosecutors and judges and watchdogs.
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The same thing happened in Hungary where Orban stopped an EU investigation against his son-in-law from taking place.
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So it's not just in third world countries.
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Corruption could be anywhere if the conditions are right.
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P. Gadapabooks asks, Can democracy survive corruption?
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Corrupt systems create environments in which things that used to be considered illegal and immoral, such as lying about elections,
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stealing from the public, sexual abuse, they become normalized.
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When that happens and institutions get retooled to protect immoral people, then democracy suffers.
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Now, sometimes sexual assaults can be a prompt for a democracy to protect itself.
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That happened in Italy when Berlusconi, who had sex parties with young women, was actually forced to step down.
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He was investigated and convicted not only for bribery and fraud, but for sex with a minor.
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Around the world, foreign governments have been prosecuting politicians who associated with Jeffrey Epstein and appear in the Epstein files.
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That has yet to happen in the United States.
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ZGermans31B asks, Denying elections, hmm, what has history taught us about this occurrence?
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Many autocrats commit electoral fraud.
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If the election doesn't go your way, you claim it was rigged, or you refuse to have the votes counted, or in the worst case, you refuse to leave office,
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But election denial is something that's often not considered in under the bucket of corruption.
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But I believe it is because it is public officials conspiring to lie to the public.
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In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election and claimed it had been rigged.
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Later, he tried to stage a coup to prevent Lula da Silva from coming to power.
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He now sits convicted with 27 years sentence.
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Sigour asks, how does a country uncorrupt itself?
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And what are some of the best examples of this from recent times?
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A country can uncorrupt itself by restoring regulations that autocracies have removed.
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They can restore professional ethics requirements for civil servants, compliance for businesses and corporations,
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and they can rein in the leader who has to be held accountable.
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We're seeing this in Hungary where Peter Magyar, the successor of Viktor Orban,
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is restoring regulations that Orban discarded in order to restore transparency and accountability to Hungary.
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So those are all the questions for today.
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Thanks for watching.
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RE2 Unit 11B
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Why This Video Is Great for English Speaking Practice
This video is a goldmine for shadow speech practice because it blends casual question-and-answer flow with formal historical examples, exposing you to natural conversational rhythms and academic vocabulary. The host’s clear, deliberate delivery makes it easy to mimic pronunciation, while the mix of short questions and detailed answers helps you practice both quick responses and extended explanations—key for real-world English use.
Breaking Down Natural English Phrasing
Let’s look at 3 phrases that sound authentic and why they work:
- "Well, often those countries are broke and get broker because the dictator is stealing public funds." The casual "well" and "broke and get broker" (colloquial for "more broke") make this relatable. It shows how native speakers simplify complex ideas in everyday speech.
- "Corruption is the abuse of power for private gain." Short, direct, and memorable. This definition uses active voice and clear vocabulary, perfect for practicing concise pronunciation.
- "In healthy democracies, this would be called a conflict of interest, but the Trump administration does not recognize conflicts of interest." The contrast "but" creates a natural pause, teaching you how to emphasize differences in tone. The repetition of "conflict of interest" reinforces key terms.
A Simple Shadowing Routine for This Clip
Use this shadow speak exercise to improve your pronunciation and fluency:
- Watch the video once to understand the context. Focus on the host’s intonation—where she pauses, stresses words, or raises her voice.
- Pick a 30-second segment (try the part about Mobutu or corruption definitions). Play a 2-second clip, pause, and repeat it immediately, mimicking her tone and rhythm. This is called shadowing.
- Record yourself. Compare your recording to the original. Notice differences in vowel sounds (e.g., "private gain" vs. "private game") or word stress (e.g., "corruption" vs. "corrupTION").
- Do this daily for 10 minutes. Over time, you’ll start to naturally adopt native-like phrasing and pronunciation. For extra practice, use a shadowing site to slow down the audio if needed.
This routine works because it trains your brain to match the speed, tone, and pronunciation of native speakers—key for sounding more natural in English.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | has been conducting · have been prosecuting |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has become fragmented · has been allowed · have amassed |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | has been allowed · be easily controlled · would be called |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | Turkey, which is · company, which is · them, which is |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.