Shadowing Practice: How Porn Became the American Dream - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Today, there's no better way to become rich, famous and celebrated in modern culture than by making porn videos.
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Look at the porn stars from days gone by.
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They mostly ended up dead, addicted to drugs or washed up on the back streets in downtown LA somewhere.
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Now look at Mia Khalifa.
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She's a multi -millionaire who hosted shows with NBA legends, sat front row at Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks, modeled for Viviana Westwood and Moschino,
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runs her own jewelry business and has been interviewed by basically every major outlet on earth.
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She was a paralegal from a Lebanese family and she didn't turn out film for years,
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she just claimed she made 11 of them over a few months.
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And within a few weeks of her debut,
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she was the number one performer on the biggest adult site in the world where she received death threats,
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was shunned from her religion and her family stopped speaking to her.
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ISIS was after you?
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I'm not allowed back in Lebanon.
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I was banned from the Middle East which is crazy because they're the ones who watch my videos the most.
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Then she walked away from the industry forever after making just $12 ,000.
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Or at least that's what she claimed.
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You were paid a grand total of $12 ,000 US dollars
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and yet you made millions and millions of dollars for both Bangbros, the company that you worked with and the aggregating site.
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How could that be?
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That's just how it is.
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But between then and now, Mia Khalifa, like so many others, has used porn to become, in every sense of the word, famous.
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Not infamous, but legitimately famous, rubbing shoulders with A -listers and getting invited to their cocktail parties.
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Something huge happened in the world of adult content to create a pipeline to status and generational wealth.
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For Sarah Jo Chamoon, which is Mia's real name, she grew up right alongside the internet,
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and more specifically at a turning point for the sex industry.
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I mean, I'm a kid who grew up playing
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World of Warcraft and using dial -up internet and fixing the computer at home when it broke.
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Like that was my job because I was of that generation.
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So I think that I've always had a knack for what I like to consume online, which in turn influenced how I like to be online.
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Adult content back then was an analogue affair, driven by VHS tapes, magazines, and adult video stores.
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The money was limited and controlled by the gatekeepers.
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Performers like Mia got paid per scene with no way to self -publish or go independent.
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And like so many others, she was pulled off the street in Miami by a random man who asked if she thought about modeling,
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suggesting she come down to a studio and take a look around.
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The studio was Bang Bros, one of the leading studios at the time.
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It wasn't just, hey, do you want to come do point?
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It was more so, oh, you're beautiful.
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Like, would you like to do some modeling?
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Oh, you know, you have a great body.
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Like, I think you'd be great in nude modeling, things like that.
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And after I came in toward the studio, you know, it was very respectable.
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It was a gorgeous location.
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It was in Miami, in Doral, Florida.
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It was clean.
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Everyone who worked there was nice.
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All of their cubicles were decorated with family photos.
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Like, it was nothing.
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She signed the paperwork, came back the next day, filmed her first scene, and a month in, they put her in a hijab,
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which was incredibly controversial but decisive for her career.
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She told the studio that the video was going to get her killed.
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I verbatim told them, you guys are going to get me killed.
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And they said?
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they just laughed she did it anyway
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and after it premiered the avalanche started radical islamic sympathizers hacked her instagram
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and covered it in propaganda
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they photoshopped a picture of her onto someone being beheaded her
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family disowned her they photoshopped a picture of me onto someone getting beheaded
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and they said they said something along the lines of uh you're next she quit less than a month later
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but none of this blew over like she hoped it would and she couldn't get back into regular employment.
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Bang Bros disputed her account of her career and her argument that they ripped her off.
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They eventually created a website dedicated to calling her out called factspeakfiction .co,
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pushing back on her claims and stating that they paid her over $178 ,000.
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They even said she filmed before with a different studio under the name Mia Calista before
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Bang Bros and that her entire narrative was just a total lie.
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She claimed she walked away from adult content with her head held high.
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But adult content hadn't walked away from her, so naturally there was only one way to climb back up the ladder,
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and OnlyFans took over the entire industry at that exact moment.
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When Mia joined OnlyFans in 2020, she framed it as a moral response to the Beirut port explosion that killed 218 people in her home country.
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She publicly pledged to donate the first $100 ,000 she made on the platform.
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In 2020, I decided to join OnlyFans after the Beirut blast.
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I made the decision to join OnlyFans and donate.
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If I was able to make $100 ,000, I am donating $100 ,000 and that's why I'm joining this platform.
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It doesn't take a very high level of skepticism to wonder whether that was true or just ethical positioning.
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But either way, it clearly worked out for her career.
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This is where Mia Khalifa became the bridge between two completely different worlds.
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The old world of adult content that chewed the old porn stars up and spat them out,
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leaving them in places like the tunnels under Las Vegas.
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And then there's the new world of about content that makes celebrity entrepreneurs.
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Let's take Sophie Rain.
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In 2022, she was a 19 -year -old waitress, Betty covering her bills.
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She didn't come from an adult entertainment background, but OnlyFans was still her exit.
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My sister was doing OnlyFans and I was like,
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maybe I'll try it so I can get out of this serving job because I was just serving.
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I was working literally every day, nine to five.
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It's called Papa Joe's.
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It was some Italian restaurant down in Tampa, but it was fun.
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Like I loved it.
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I love serving, but I just wasn't making money.
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It all kicked off with her infamous
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Spider -Man video.
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Every time I was like, no, it's not me, no, it's not me.
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They're like, no, you're lying, it is.
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So I just kind of ran with it.
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It wasn't even her, but she made about $95 million in three years from a case of mistaken identity.
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So in three years, how much have you made?
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I think last time I checked, it was at $95 million.
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Here's what really happened.
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In September 2023, Sophie and her sister
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Sierra posted the Spider -Man themed photo set on their OnlyFans.
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Around the same time, another creator called Naomi, who happens to look like Sophie, filmed an explicit video in a skin -tight black
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Spider -Man suit.
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The internet saw the photo set and the explicit video and conflated the two.
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Millions of men became convinced Sophie had secretly leaked hardcore content.
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She clocked that it was free traffic and started dressing up as Spider -Man on TikTok to deliberately stoke the rumor.
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There is no real Sophie Reigns Spider -Man video.
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The whole thing is a fantasy that lived in the minds of her audience.
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She also created scarcity around her content by describing herself as a virgin, though she backtracked on that a year later.
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I don't think people talk enough about how much these poor addictions can quietly affect your life, especially when it starts early in your life.
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It's one of those things that seems harmless at first, but over time it chips away at your focus, your discipline, and even your confidence.
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And the worst part is, most people try to fix it with willpower alone, which almost never works long term.
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You just end up stuck in the same loop.
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And that's why I want to talk to you about this.
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There's content blockers out there like our sponsor Quitter, which is an app designed to make quitting porn a lot more practical.
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Instead of relying on willpower,
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you just turn on the content blocker and it blocks all porn content from even reaching your phone in the first place.
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So you're not constantly fighting the urge, you're just removing the trigger.
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Once it's on, you don't have to think about it as it just works in the background.
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And it also tracks your progress, which is a big part of it,
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as you can see your streak stay consistent and you're doing it alongside thousands of other people going through the same thing.
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One of their best features is the panic button.
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If you ever feel the urge, you just hit it and it immediately redirects you and helps you kill that urge in the moment,
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which is usually the hardest part and it just handles it right there.
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If this is something you've been trying to get under control, this makes it a lot more structured.
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So make sure to hit the link in the description or pinned comment below, or scan the QR code on screen and download Quitter today.
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Use code MOON to try it out.
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Sophie said her content involves some level of nudity, which is probably understated, but she's definitely not out there doing what Bonnie Blue is doing,
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which epitomizes exactly what adult content has become, selling the fantasy of personal access to an attractive woman.
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Sophie now has 16 million Instagram followers, when she walks through a shopping mall in Miami,
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paparazzi camp outside to ask her about her rumored collab with Drake.
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The mansion she co -founded with seven other OnlyFans creators was
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described in the mainstream press as the Gen Z version of the Playboy Mansion.
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She's constantly associated with big celebrity events.
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The industry has swallowed itself and given birth to something entirely new.
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A monetized intimacy economy where the content can be softer, the stigma lower and the money exponentially bigger.
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All while the sexual acts are actually increasingly optional.
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What the f* are the guys paying for at that point?
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It's curiosity and then also like - With that specific person?
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Yeah.
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I guess, right, yeah.
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Yeah, because you can sit there and have a conversation with me, you know?
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Like you don't get that just from going on Instagram.
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Mia got paid $12 ,000 for explicit permanent graphic content.
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Sophie got paid $1 .4 million by one man for messages.
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That was back in 2025.
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It's over $6 million now.
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I want to say last time I checked, it was like 1 .4.
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Wow.
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Wow.
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But that was like, that's of all time.
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That's of all time.
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And I've been doing this for going on two years now.
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Who the f* is this guy?
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That's gotta be like a f*ing Middle Eastern princess.
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I can't like, I can't say much obviously because I'm not going to air anyone's shit out, but it's, he's a good guy.
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Rightly or wrongly, it still destroyed aspects of her social life.
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Her parents both got fired and she became their provider.
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Right now, like I'm, I'm supporting them completely.
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Um, they both got fired from their jobs because of me.
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So I feel a little bit of guilt in that
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and like I feel like I need to provide for them also because my fault, I guess.
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Sophie Raine built an empire on a video that never existed, but a couple of years before that,
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a young actress called Chloe Cherry ran the inverse strategy for the same result.
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She'd moved to Miami the week she turned 18 to do adult content,
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and spent the next few years becoming one of the most watched performers on Pornhub.
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Then during lockdown, she filmed a pornographic parody of HBO's teen drama Euphoria.
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Not long after, the real creator of the genuine Euphoria emailed her asking her to audition for the show.
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She got the part again proving how can scaffold women to a new path in life.
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Within months of her first episode airing, she'd walked New York and Milan Fashion Week,
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fronted a Versailles campaign and starred in the music video for Charli XCX's 360.
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In just under a year, she went from being the most watched woman on a specific
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up category to being a face the fashion industry was actively competing for.
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This isn't entirely new.
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20 years before OnlyFans existed, a young LA socialite proved that a leaked sex tape didn't have to end a woman's career.
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It could actually build one.
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That woman was Kim Kardashian, one of the most widely known names on the planet.
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The promiscuity of people like herself and Paris Hilton was creating sex entrepreneurs without going through the poor industry.
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It was classier, more refined and more marketable.
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The Kardashian tape was filmed with her then boyfriend
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Ray J in 2003.
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It went public in February 2007.
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At the time, an explicit video of a young woman with no particular fame
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or career wasn't viewed as the norm like it might be today.
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When these tapes leaked, they were massive news stories and the entertainment industry was paying very close attention.
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Because somewhere in the media frenzy that followed, someone in a boardroom ran the calculations.
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And the math said
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that what happened to Kim Kardashian could be converted with the
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right packaging into one of the most lucrative television deals of the decade.
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Keeping up with the Kardashians premiered 8 months later
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and propelled the whole family to the centre of celebrity culture for nearly a decade.
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Today, Kim Kardashian's worth roughly 1 .7 billion dollars and the tape
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that kicked it all off is a mere footnote in her CV
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Would you be where you are had there not been a next tape?
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You know, I think that's how I was definitely introduced to the world.
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It was a negative way so I felt like I really had to
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work 10 times harder to get people to see the real me.
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She's quite honest about Impact, saying the worst part wasn't the humiliation itself, but having to explain the tape to her grandmother.
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She says she was grateful her father had died four years earlier and didn't live to see it.
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I had to explain that to my grandmother.
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So I think I was more...
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And you're most glad you didn't have to explain it to...
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My father.
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Which is basically a premonition of how many OnlyFans models feel today.
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Only fans relies on publicity and self -promotion.
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You can't easily shoot scenes under an Elias and hide them as a double life.
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What Kim had inadvertently proved is that attention itself is the asset, and you need to market yourself as a person.
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Whatever generates the attention is almost secondary.
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The market logic of modern porn rewards whatever generates the most clicks, and everything else is downstream of that rule.
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Which is exactly why porn marketing stunts are getting more controversial and extreme.
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The porn hall of fame today looks more like an arms race where performers compete for a share of the audience's attention.
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Like in 2019 when Belle Delphine sold jars of her own bath water for $35 each.
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She faked her own arrest with a photoshopped
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Metropolitan Police mugshot and briefly ran a book count that turned out to be videos of two roosters.
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Her whole thing was just absurdist performance art,
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dressed up as sex work and made her one of the most famous e -girls on the internet. In 2021,
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a 17 year old called Bad Barbie who had become briefly
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famous on Dr. Phil for telling the audience to catch her outside, teased her OnlyFans launch for weeks on Instagram.
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She then opened the account the day she turned 18 and made a million dollars in six hours.
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Lil Tay would then follow in her footsteps years later.
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In May 2025, an Australian creator called Annie Knight hired a swingers club on the Gold Coast
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and had sex with 583 men in six hours.
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She was then hospitalized with vaginal bleeding and posted the hospital photo to Instagram,
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captioned, I guess 583 guys in a day isn't that good for your body.
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In October 2024, the 23 -year -old British model called Lily Phillips invited 101 men into an Airbnb
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and had slept with all of them in a single day.
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She filmed it as a documentary.
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A clip of her crying afterwards, her friend's arm around her, got 200 million views in one tweet.
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She has then since faked a pregnancy, faked an arrest, filmed a classroom roleplay with 18 -year -olds
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and announced she'd be beating the existing world record by sleeping with a thousand men in a day.
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And then of course there's Bonnie Blue who took the record of 1057 men in 12 hours.
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She also faked a pregnancy and will risk arrest, deportation or practically anything to stay relevant.
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And somehow this has gotten her on the podcast circuit like all of these girls.
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These stunts echo the much wider trend across social media where AI slop
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and brain rot content dominate for their acute ability to hijack our dopamine.
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MrBeast, Sidemen and others mastered that formula with escalating challenges
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that became more and more and more outrageous leaving nothing off the table in the pursuit of attention.
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It's all pervasive and adult entertainment naturally made a home in social media's algorithmic universe
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because ramping up the shock value is so easy when it's someone's body.
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Behind all of these stunts is usually an incredibly well engineered business that proves how much porn has transformed.
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They have staff, a logistics operation and marketing budgets rivaling tech startups.
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Probably the biggest weapon they have in their marketing arsenal is those who oppose them.
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It's all the Karen's sat at home that are going to complain about me being here,
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that are making me rich because they make it blow up
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and then when they're sat at home complaining about it to their husbands, they're then wanting to come and subscribe.
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Putting their self -destructive elements of the lifestyle aside for a moment, they're savvy operators who understand the algorithm,
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the incentives and the market better than anyone.
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Sophie Reign's instinct to leverage a video that wasn't even hers is annoyingly smart.
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Bonnie Blue will hang around any big influencer of the time, whether it be Andrew Tate or the Nelk Boys,
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as she knows doing so will keep the money pumping into her operation.
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Mia Khalifa found a way to make herself look innocent in front of mainstream audiences.
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And this is why culture had to stop ignoring them.
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Every magazine, podcast and TV channel is starving for attention
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and these women are sitting on more of it than anyone else in the room.
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Ignoring them doesn't make them go away it just hands the traffic to whoever covers them instead
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so the commercial decision becomes to platform them like
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when bonnie blue said this on uk daytime tv
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when anyone could have been watching you're like a premiership footballer you're boys i mean i work with balls
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so it's the same thing so barely legal 18 year olds um
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because as i started my content i realized it was not necessarily relatable
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so it's the average person
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and i wanted to make my content relatable i'm just a girl i'm relatable and sort of the girl next door vibes.
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People commented things like interviewing a prostitute at 10 .35am is okay for family viewing
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and how can they have this conversation on morning tv as if it's normal?
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Imagine if you were a kid watching
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that asking your parents who Bonnie Blue was
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and what she meant by working with balls or switching to barely 18 year olds.
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But there is another side far away from this very public layer that we've not yet explored.
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Because while the conversation has spent the last decade arguing about whether those women are empowered or or exploited, two -dimensional, sophisticated.
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Victims or villains?
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The really smart ones are those who built the industry.
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You can almost certainly picture some of the girls in this video.
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You know what Mia looks like, you know what
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Kim looks like, you'd recognize Bonnie Blue in a supermarket.
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These are some of the most visible people alive.
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The men who own the platforms they work on, however, are notoriously invisible.
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When Mia Khalifa was filming for Bang Bros in late 2014, Bang Bros was independent,
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but was soon rolled up into a vast internet empire backed by institutional cash and managed by faceless executives.
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The parent structure behind most of her distribution was a Canadian -operated conglomerate called MindGeek, which owned P,
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RedTube, Brazzers and several hundred other sites, all controlled through a network of shell companies across the world.
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One of its recent owners, a guy called Bernd Bergmaier, wasn't known to the media or photographed in public until recently.
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MindGeek wasn't just built for the love of the game, it was backed with nearly half a billion dollars from JPMorgan Chase among other major investors,
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and weirdly, even Cornell University.
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The same institutional capital that owns stakes in Meta by Dance
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and Google is also indirectly exposed to the adult platforms and the companies that profit from them, which means ordinary people's retirements are in very small
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and very diffused ways invested in the same economy that Bonnie Blue is helping to expand.
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OnlyFans is the next level, springing out of the studios and making the girls do most if not all of the legwork.
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And when you look at what OnlyFans really is, it looks exactly like Amazon Fiverr or DoorDash.
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Thousands of near -identical thumbnails of near -identical women doing near -identical poses, all fighting for the same attention, all undercutting each other on price,
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all promising more than the last one.
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It personifies the direction of today's tech industry.
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It's the gig economy with sex as the product, using a subscription model backed by viral marketing.
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On the top layer, the man who owned OnlyFans until his death in March was worth $4 .7 billion.
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On the bottom layer for every Sophie Reign, roughly 10 ,000 women upload content nobody is paying for, subsidizing the traffic that makes Sophie Reign possible,
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while the platform takes a big cut, routes it through a holding company, and into a private equity deal being negotiated in Silicon Valley.
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All to completely p*ify our entire society, and do untold damage to our culture because of this.
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What has been labeled as empowerment really involves giving someone on OnlyFans the ability to negotiate the terms of their own exploitation,
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take home a larger cut of it and then call the result a business,
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which on the individual level looks like a meaningful improvement versus Mia Khalifa's situation in 2014.
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On the collective level it's built the most efficient content extraction machine in the history of the internet.
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Millions of women competing against each other producing an unlimited library of material for a platform
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they don't own in exchange for a wage that for most of them works out to be less than minimum wage.
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The thing the industry figured out somewhere around 2016 is
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that you don't need to exploit anyone if you can get them to exploit themselves.
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You just need to build the infrastructure, take a cut of the door, and let the market do the rest.
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And those who become mainstream celebrities using as a gateway to something more, create something to aspire to, even though most will never make it.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “How Porn Became the American Dream”. This video has 304 sentences and 3977 words to shadow. The speech runs for 20:03. The speaker talks fast, about 198 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 80% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| tape noun | /teɪ̯p/ | Flexible material in a roll with a sticky surface on one or both sides; adhesive tape. |
| celebrity noun | /səˈlɛb.ɹɪ.ɾi/ | Fame, renown; the state of being famous or talked-about. |
| explicit adjective | /ɪkˈsplɪs.ɪt/ | Very specific, clear, or detailed. |
| layer noun | /ˈleɪ̯ɚ/ | A single thickness of some material covering a surface. |
| compete verb | /kəmˈpiːt/ | To be in battle or in a rivalry with another for the same thing, position, or reward; to contend. |
| mainstream adjective | /ˈmeɪn.stɹiːm/ | Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of population, market, scientific community, etc. |
| creator noun | /kɹiːˈeɪ̯təː/ | Something or someone which creates or makes something. |
| identical adjective | /ɪˈdɛntɪkl̩/ | Bearing full likeness by having precisely the same set of characteristics; indistinguishable. |
| urge verb | /ɜːd͡ʒ/ | To press; to push; to drive; to impel; to force onward. |
| leak noun | /liːk/ | A crack, crevice, fissure, or hole which admits water or other fluid, or lets it escape. |
| stunt noun | /stʌnt/ | A daring or dangerous feat, often involving the display of gymnastic skills. |
| performer noun | /pɚˈfɔɹmɚ/ | One who performs for, or entertains, an audience. |
| photoshop verb | /ˈfoʊ.toʊ.ʃɑp/ | To digitally edit or alter (a picture or photograph). |
| ignore verb | /ɪɡˈnɔː/ | To deliberately not listen or pay attention to. |
| naturally adverb | /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/ | In a natural manner. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| walk away from verb | To abandon or leave; to shun; to refuse. |
| dress up verb | To put on special or fancy clothes. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. |
| grow up verb | To mature and become an adult. |
| back up verb | To move backwards, especially for a vehicle to do so. |
| blow over verb | To blow on something causing it to topple. |
| blow up verb | To explode or be destroyed by explosion. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- ISIS was after you?
- It wasn't just, hey, do you want to come do point?
- It was more so, oh, you're beautiful.
- I love serving, but I just wasn't making money.
- They're like, no, you're lying, it is.
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 | you've been trying · I've been doing |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | has been interviewed · was shunned · was banned |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | East which is · Chamoon, which is · kid who grew |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been interviewed · I've always had · have you made |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 60 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, wasn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: grandmother /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/, bath /bɑːθ/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, ethical /ˈɛθɪkəl/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: photoshop /ˈfoʊ.toʊ.ʃɑp/, controversial /ˌkɑn.tɹəˈvɝ.ʃəl/, mansion /ˈmæn.ʃən/, institutional /ˌɪn.stɪˈtju.ʃə.nəl/, shock /ʃɔk/
- Long words — get the stress right: celebrity /səˈlɛb.ɹɪ.ɾi/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/, controversial /ˌkɑn.tɹəˈvɝ.ʃəl/, institutional /ˌɪn.stɪˈtju.ʃə.nəl/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like tape, celebrity, explicit.
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.