Shadowing Practice: How to Tell What’s Real Online - Learn English Speaking with Video

I've been thinking a lot lately as an educator and especially as a scientist, when you search online for answers and knowledge,

wisdom and insight, what do you trust?

How do you trust it?

What is involved to decide whether something is true or not true?

And it's not easy at all.

I know a lot about a lot of stuff, But when I look things up that I don't know, it's like, you know, this doesn't seem to feel right.

There's something odd about it.

Let me keep checking.

But let me first off the top say

so many people are now using some variant of AI to answer their questions that they might have.

When I search things where I fully know the answer, AI gets it right 85% of the time.

15% of the time it's flat out wrong or didn't fully understand what's going on.

Of course, large language models are, they don't think really, they're just assembling words

that have appeared next to other words that various people have written and posted on the internet.

And so there's no guarantee that what people have posted is correct.

What I encourage people to do is don't trust what the large language model AI is giving you.

If it's worth its weight in salt, it'll give links to where it got that information.

Just like the old days, when you did a search, you'd have a list of websites.

And then you would click on the websites and assemble your own answer, which is what AI is doing for you now.

So I don't rely on AI, just based on the errors I know it makes when I already know the answer to something.

So what is objectively true really matters to everything I do say

and think and produce and so I check things double-check them triple-check them verify

if my bias isn't is influencing what I'm finding am I

just choosing what I like versus what I don't like all of

that matters which is why finding the truth is a hard thing

so in my experience extracting that which is objectively true from the internet.

I have found that websites that are .edu, which is typically a university or otherwise educational institution,

that you are more likely to get correct information.

So if it's not from those, I would put up a yellow flag.

How about somebody's online and they're defending the actions of an industry in which they work?

Yellow flag.

Not a red flag.

There are people who will just discount it just because the person's paid by the industry.

They could be telling you the truth.

So it's a yellow flag.

It means whatever they tell you, listen with caution.

Because they have a vested financial interest in having their view match that of the industry.

So what's an example of this?

Uh, hmm.

We went through decades with the tobacco industry telling us there was nothing wrong with tobacco.

Meanwhile, other sources of information said that there was.

The industry is not always lying to you.

You put up a yellow flag and then you look deeper to verify or falsify it.

Here's another case.

Podcasts are everywhere.

There's millions of them.

Millions.

That's Starktalk just one of them.

Some podcasts, the host just tries to get really cool people on, and in the interest of views,

clickbait, public interest, to get someone with a kind of fringy view that's still kind of fun to listen to.

Maybe someone got abducted by aliens and you're listening to them.

If the host has insufficient expertise to probe and to inquire and to criticize what they're listening to, yellow flag.

If you really like what's being said, find another place to verify that information.

Here's another one.

When someone is handing you their opinion, Yellow flag.

If the source, the internet source, tells you how you should feel about information,

in that case they are handing you their opinion on the expectation that it will become your opinion.

Instead of finding sources that contain objective information, then you assimilating that, digesting it,

and then forming your own opinion independent of people coming at you with their opinions.

It may be that the person says things that resonate with you.

I never thought about it that way.

I agree with that.

That feels good.

I don't have a problem with that.

But what you're not in control of is what information they're basing their opinion on.

And it could be that if you had access to other information, you'd arrive at a different opinion than they did.

The internet overflows with people handing you their opinions.

And I've never seen that as a healthy landscape on which to glean objective knowledge about this world.

Here's how I look at opinions.

Have whatever opinion you want, but work really hard to base it on objective truths that you obtain for yourself.

Let me throw out another.

If there's content that has been lifted from its original source and reposted, there's a yellow flag.

First, you don't know if it's out of context.

Usually there's commentary that surrounds it because they want to get you to think about

that clip what they think about that clip And

if it's not in its original platform in its original format in its original length That's a yellow flag.

Maybe it's just an innocent.

I'll check this out.

It's funny I enjoyed it, but if it starts containing information that you need to absorb to make your own decisions about things

Then go back to the original source.

I once gave a two-hour public talk and and 90 seconds of it was clipped and reposted, and someone railed on it.

Say, how does he dare he say this?

What, he doesn't ever, without knowing what preceded those 90 seconds.

The whole analysis was completely false because he didn't see the rest of it.

But he's bringing his following into it so that he can hand them his opinions of a snippet of something I said.

So that's my first hand example of that.

But of course, this would apply to anybody at any time.

Go back to the original source.

And some content is longer than others.

Yes, it's easier to see the 30 second clip, the two minute clip.

But if you care about what is objectively true in the world, the yellow flag tells you, go find the original source.

I got another one that's kind of in between a yellow and a red flag.

Here's how science works.

When you're on the frontier, We're scratching our head, we don't know what is true yet,

but I can have a scientific result that hints at something, or declares that one thing is true rather than something else.

If there's no other research to verify it, that's a yellow flag.

That's interesting.

That's worthy of further research to see if this result holds true.

And generally, if it makes it into the news, it's a result that's unexpected.

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If it's a completely expected scientific result, no one is going to talk about it.

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This might ultimately prove to be true when verified by other results, hence the yellow flag.

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It means don't rearrange your life just yet, but keep an eye on it.

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It becomes a red flag when there are other research projects that conflict with that one result.

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And at that point, you're cherry picking from the moving frontier of science

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because that particular result is what you need it to be, what you want it to be, or what's consistent with your religion,

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your politics, your culture, or just your mood.

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some case studies of this.

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There was a research paper that suggested certain vaccines caused autism.

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Suggested it.

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That's an interesting result.

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Oh my gosh.

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That spawned a lot of other research to check that.

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And it has never been verified.

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And hundreds of papers have shown that it is a false correlation.

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And there is no cause and effect.

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But people looking for something to blame, kept going back to that original research paper,

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cherry picking it from the frontier that had already achieved consensus and was moving on.

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That's an example.

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If someone has a video,

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and anywhere in that video they mention conspiracy, red flag.

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It doesn't mean there's never been conspiracies in the history of the world.

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Of course there have been.

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I'm just saying the likelihood of something being true when someone needs the conspiracy for it to be true is very low.

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What all conspiracy theories have in common is

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that the person already knows the outcome

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and they assemble the data trail until the data do not agree with the outcome they seek.

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If it doesn't agree, they still have to gap that somehow.

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And the way to do that is to say, it's a coverup.

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It's a conspiracy.

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They're withholding this information.

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They're stopping you from knowing it.

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So invested were they in the outcome that they needed,

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that they wanted, they were in denial of the release data from the authorities that they said were hiding the data.

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And they just said, oh, this is just fake data because they don't really want you to know this result.

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Red flag, 100% of the cases.

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Do some more homework on this.

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A lot more homework.

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Red flag, if someone wants you to think that there's something wrong with mainstream thinking, and they alone have the answer.

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Since when did mainstream become a bad word?

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When Einstein published the theories of relativity, mainstream physics was like classical physics.

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Quantum physics comes around, relativity comes around.

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It is not mainstream.

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It was published in peer-reviewed journals and it transformed physics.

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The difference is all of classical physics is still correct in the regimes over which it was tested.

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And relativity and quantum physics absorbed classical physics within them.

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Point is, if someone gets on social media or anywhere on the internet and says, mainstream is wrong and they're suppressing my view,

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which is correct, red flag, pure and simple, red flag.

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Mainstream is not your enemy.

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Just a couple more, thanks for hanging with me here.

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Anytime someone indicts an entire demographic,

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red flag, they say, the Jews, the gays, the blacks.

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If you hear that out of anybody's mouth, red flag.

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They want to declare they know everything they need to know about you without actually having a conversation with you.

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That takes effort, by the way, to learn who people are, to learn the nuances that distinguish one person from another,

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one person's thoughts, behaviors, actions, motivations, from another.

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One of the greatest travesties of what it is to be human is to tribalize in that way.

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Generally, if someone feels comfortable categorizing demographics in that way, it means they don't know many people from that demographic.

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That's really all that means.

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You've led an isolated life.

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For the same reason, if someone lumps an entire industry together and indicts them for any reason at all,

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that should be a red flag.

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Especially huge industries where there might be some companies within there that have a moral code that distinguishes them from others.

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Surely you've heard people say, I hate big pharma.

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Like, really?

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You just wanna put them all together as one monolith?

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By lumping them together, you are denying that possibility within a huge range of business practices.

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It doesn't mean there isn't a practice that they're all doing that you indict,

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But to indict all practices of all companies that are part of a sector, that should just simply be a red flag.

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It is way too easy to just lump everybody together and declare that you understand who and what they are.

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Someone posted a video, there's less of this out there, but just there's less of it.

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Someone says that they've discovered some process phenomenon, material, that defies the known laws of physics.

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Red flag.

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Do I need to go further on this one?

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One more to round out an even dozen.

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Somebody tells you they invented something that will render an entire industry obsolete and that you better buy it now,

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otherwise that industry is gonna close down their channel.

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Red flag.

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Baker's dozen.

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If someone says they've met the aliens, red flag.

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Hold them to a higher standard than just their eyewitness testimony.

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Hold them to a higher standard than fuzzy video taken in Twilight.

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Hold them to a higher standard.

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Again, we're after objective truths here.

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And in that higher standard, have them bring forth the alien of which they speak.

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It's tough today because AI can just create that in a video.

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So meet me in Times Square or in Speaker's Corner

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or in Venice Beach with the alien at this time and we can all look at your alien.

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That's how you establish objective truths.

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That's my baker's dozen list of cautions

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as you proceed to establish that which is objectively true supported by evidence and that which is not.

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And this has been another What's Up With That?

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Trying to cope with the modern ocean of information that's out there.

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Until next time, keep looking up.

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Thank you.

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.

Shadowing Practice: How to Tell What’s Real Online - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Grammar & Expressions in Context

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What is the Shadowing Technique?