Shadowing Practice: The Lie You Tell Every Day - Learn English Speaking with Video

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You've told a lie today.

Probably more than one.

Not the kind you'd ever feel guilty about.

The small kind.

You agreed with a friend, even though you thought he was wrong.

You laughed at a joke that wasn't funny.

You said the food at a dinner party was great, even though it wasn't.

You went along to get along.

We all do this without thinking.

It feels like politeness, like keeping the peace.

But what if I told you this behavior has enormous consequences.

It's what determines whether your company hires the right candidate.

It's what allows extremists to dominate our politics.

And it's the same behavior that almost overnight brought down the Berlin Wall.

Thousands of East Germans came across the border today, perhaps more than a hundred thousand.

So many that border police lost count.

Today we're going to talk about a phenomenon that hides in every conversation, every workplace, every country in which you've ever lived.

It's called preference falsification.

Once you see how it works, you'll start to spot it everywhere, including in yourself.

We begin somewhere ordinary, a Friday night get -together with friends.

This story comes from Timur Koran.

He explores the gap between what people privately believe and what they say out loud.

He says the smallest version of this gap shows up in get -togethers with friends.

Sometimes when we go over to friends, we have to jointly decide what we're going to do together.

And sometimes it so happens that the group perceives that everyone wants to watch a movie when actually no one does,

or few do.

So people, to appear cooperative, say that they would like to watch a movie.

Maybe you've experienced this.

It's been a long week.

You're tired.

You don't want to commit to two -hour movie

but you don't see anything and neither does anyone else

and everybody ends up leaving the event dissatisfied

or less satisfied than they could have been they've watched a movie

when none of them really wanted to spend the evening

that way everyone goes home thinking they were the only one who didn't want to be there

and the cost is bigger than a wasted evening

the host now thinks the group loves movie nights so the next time everyone gets together they plan another one.

And no one will be brave enough to say, I never wanted to watch the first movie.

Please, God, not another one.

The lie doesn't disappear when the night ends.

It compounds.

Now turn the volume up.

Move from that get -together with friends to a workplace.

A few decades ago, Timur was a professor at the University of Southern California.

The economics department was under pressure to hire more women onto the faculty.

Most of his colleagues were on board, at least in public.

But in private, different conversations were happening.

There was a sense that if we limited ourselves to looking at women

or had decided in advance to hire a female candidate, that we might be making a mistake.

Notice what's been lost.

If a department has real concerns about a hiring process, those concerns are useful to hear they might lead to better policy,

a better search, a better hire.

But the concerns never make it into the room.

They die in private.

And the department makes its decision with an incomplete picture of what people really think.

Timur has a name for what's happening in moments like these.

I mentioned this at the start of the video.

Preference falsification.

Preference falsification is the form of lying,

but one aimed at disguising your true preference and also the information that underlies

that preference preference falsification is broader than self -censorship self -censorship

means staying quiet preference falsification can mean entering the conversation

and touting a belief you don't actually support you become an ambassador for a position

that you privately reject this is everywhere in our personal

and professional lives it's also woven into the fabric of the nations in

which we live to see this phenomenon at work we have to travel back in time to East Germany under communism.

For decades, the East German regime appeared to be one of the most ideologically unified governments on Earth.

Public surveys showed loyalty.

The dissidents who did exist were a tiny, hounded minority.

By every visible measure, East Germans believed in their system.

And then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

The barrier that had separated

East and West Germany for decades? it was gone.

And almost overnight, East Germans discovered that almost nobody believed in what that wall stood for.

Before the wall came down,

East Germans were almost unanimously supporting the prevailing regime.

There were very, very few dissidents.

After The wall came down.

Very few people would actually admit to having been sincere supporters of the regime that fell.

It became hazardous to admit that one sincerely believed in the regime.

The same pattern played out across

Eastern Europe as the Cold War ended.

Timur tells a story about a New York Times reporter who

went to Prague to talk to communist supporters of the old regime.

Well, I went looking for communists and I couldn't find a communist anywhere.

And people who had made a career by rising in the Communist Party,

running communist organizations, they were now all saying that they were not really communists at any point,

that they were simply playing along in order to advance, in order to feed their children,

in order to have a roof over their head.

Sit with that for a second.

For 40 years, an entire society had been performing belief in something that when the pressure lifted, almost no one actually endorsed.

The true believers had mostly been acting.

They were so good at it that even the people running the country couldn't tell the difference between sincere loyalty and performance.

This is the same phenomenon that we saw in that movie night scenario, just at a much larger scale with much bigger stakes.

There's an important point to be made here.

Once the Berlin Wall fell and all the communists declared that they had been capitalists all along, preference falsification did not disappear.

It was like a pendulum, but now on the other side.

To say that you were a communist

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while everyone around you sang the praises of the free market would leave you feeling out of step.

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Even if you missed the old regime, you now said you didn't.

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preference falsification had changed sides.

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So how does a regime get tens of millions of people to outperform the same lie at the same time?

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In authoritarian regimes, where it's especially dangerous to step out of line, the answer, of course, is violence.

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Or to be more precise, the threat of violence.

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Timur Koran says that history has shown us

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that you don't actually need to imprison many people to get them to toe the line.

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You just need to imprison the right people in front of an audience.

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In 2013, North Korea's supreme leader,

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Kim Jong -un, had his own uncle dragged out of a major political gathering in front of hundreds of party officials.

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After a short trial with a foregone conclusion, the uncle was executed.

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This morning, North Korea is reeling.

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Its supreme leader, Kim Jong -un, completed a stunning power play Thursday against his uncle.

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North Korea's news agency announced the regime's number two man was executed for trying to overthrow the government.

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Kim could have done this quietly, arrested his uncle at home, held the trial in secret, buried the story.

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Instead, he chose theater.

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One of its effects was to make

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North Korea's dictator signal that absolutely anyone could be punished and punished severely for disloyalty.

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If Kim can execute a relative and do so without any due process,

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he could do this to anyone.

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The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein used the same playbook decades earlier.

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In one of the party congresses, he identified somebody in the audience,

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had them dragged out and shot in the hallway and the entire party congress heard the shot and nobody made a move.

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Nobody made a move.

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The point of the public execution was not just to scare the victims, allies, and family.

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It demonstrated in front of every powerful person in the room

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that no one would step up to defend you if you stepped out of line.

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Once that principle is demonstrated, you don't need to engage in violence very often.

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People carry around the sound of that gunshot in the hallway.

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They censor themselves before anyone tells them to.

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From this point on, it isn't the regime that keeps preference falsification spreading.

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It's everyone else.

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In 1977, a Czech pleric named Václav Havel and a small group of friends signed a document called Charter 77.

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It asked the Czechoslovakian government to honor the human rights agreements it had already signed.

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From the outside, it seemed like a modest request.

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But the government launched a campaign of vilification against the signers.

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Newspapers condemned them.

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Schoolchildren wrote letters denouncing them.

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And then friends stopped speaking to them.

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People who knew Vaclav Havel would see him coming and cross to the other side of the street.

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The system perpetuates itself by turning the victims into victimizers.

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And everyone becomes complicit in this system of oppression,

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which also creates a great deal of guilt in people.

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One of the reasons why Vaclav Havel's friends would move to the other side of the road

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when they saw him coming is that it gave them pain to have to ignore Vaclav, not say hello to him.

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Picture that for a second.

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You see your old friend walking toward you on the sidewalk.

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You agree with the document he just signed.

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You may have wanted to sign it yourself, but you see how everyone else is treating your old friend.

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So you cross the street.

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Because if someone sees you nod hello, what might they do to you?

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Could you lose your job, your apartment, your child's spot at that nice school?

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Each person who crosses the street makes the next person more likely to cross the street themselves.

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Every act of conformity becomes a small weight pressing down on everyone else who sees it.

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The regime doesn't even need to do that much to get you to conform.

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Ordinary citizens are now doing the heavy lifting.

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You might be tempted to think that this is something that happens only in other places, in countries ruled by dictators.

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In the United States, we have a free press.

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We have a constitution.

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People say what they want.

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But recent surveys show a majority of Americans, on both the left and the right, are afraid to share their political views openly.

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They worry about losing jobs, friendships, business contacts.

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The fear of social punishment doesn't require a gulag.

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It just requires a workplace and a Slack channel.

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This fear that ordinary people feel, it's arguably even more amplified for politicians.

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Timur points to an example from Donald Trump's primary campaign in 2015 and 2016.

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Trump didn't just argue with his rivals.

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He insulted their wives.

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He mocked their fathers.

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He even mocked

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Senator John McCain for having been a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

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Many observers, Timur included, expected that the McCain attack would be the moment that

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Trump's campaign collapsed.

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Instead, he went up in the polls.

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Through those insults and attacks,

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Trump was sending in 2016 that if you crossed him, no matter who you were,

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you would get attacked and he would try to destroy your reputation and that his followers would join in attacking you.

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And it was very important that he demonstrate that nobody was immune to this.

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He has attacked leading commentators on Fox News who have been among his supporters.

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He's tried to destroy their reputations.

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He's insulted them.

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The message he sends by doing that is very similar to the message

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North Korea's dictator sent when he had his uncle executed in plain sight.

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Senator Bob Corker, one of the few

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Republicans who openly broke with Trump, put it bluntly when his colleagues refused to vote for a trade amendment that they privately supported.

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I bet that 95 % of the people on this side of the aisle support intellectually this amendment.

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And a lot of them would vote for it if it came to vote.

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But no, no, no. Gosh, we might poke the bear.

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If the president gets upset with us, then we might not be in the majority.

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And so let's don't do anything that might upset the president.

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95 % of his colleagues may have agreed with him in private.

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In public, zero.

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There's a more recent example.

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In Donald Trump's second presidential term, as the Republican Party was facing headwinds going into the 2026 midterms, Trump demanded that

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Republican state legislatures draw up new electoral maps.

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I've long thought that the practice of gerrymandering is disgusting and absurd.

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Instead of people selecting their leaders, politicians are selecting their voters.

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Some state legislators in Indiana refused to go along with Trump.

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They stood on principle.

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In the next state election, Trump backed primary challengers and got rid of most of those pesky legislators.

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Why would a president spend so much money and take the time to get involved in local state elections?

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It sent a message, cross me and I'll come after you.

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I will derail your political future.

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This isn't just a right -wing phenomenon.

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The same machinery operates on the left.

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In 2020, California, one of the most progressive states in the country, voted on Proposition 16.

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The measure would have restored affirmative action in state government and public universities.

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It was endorsed by Kamala Harris, by Gavin Newsom, by virtually every prominent democratic institution in the state, by every public signal you could read,

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it was going to pass easily.

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It lost, by a wide margin, in a deep blue state.

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Affirmative action, whether it's racial affirmative action or gender -based affirmative action,

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it has generally been unpopular even in heavily democratic states states this is what we find

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when we poll people giving them anonymity in public though especially

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in heavily democratic states many people pretend that they support it

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and the extent of preference falsification is especially high among educated people among corporate leaders in academia in journalism.

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And so because they strongly support affirmative action,

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we get the sense that this is a widely supported policy measure.

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But in fact, it is not.

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Pundits on TV and executives at conferences give you one answer.

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A private vote on a ballot gives you a completely different answer.

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Once you start looking for preference falsification,

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you start to notice a strange thing it's everywhere in plain sight often hidden inside something that looks completely innocent

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like comedy for decades harvey weinstein was one of the most powerful producers in hollywood he could make

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or break careers and as we've learned since then it was an open secret

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that he was a sexual predator occasionally that secret would leak out into public view

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this is from the sitcom 30 rock don't do it jaymo

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you don't want to mess with weird out oh please I'm not afraid of anyone in show business.

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I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions.

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Out of five.

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And in 2013, at an Oscar nomination ceremony, Seth MacFarlane told this joke.

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The 2012 nominees for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role are Sally Field in Lincoln,

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Anne Hathaway in Les Miserables, Jackie Weaver in Silver Linings Playbook,

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Helen Hunt in The Sessions and Amy Adams in The Master Congratulations,

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you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein Did you hear that laughter?

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Everyone got it

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Humor is used in repressive societies

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and in contexts where people feel constrained in what they can say

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or to signal that one is aware of certain contradictions without taking ownership of the preferences being expressed

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or the facts being pointed to.

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In laughing, they signal that they understand what is being communicated, but don't have to take ownership for it.

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This is the role the court jester used to play.

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Of all the people in the medieval royal court, only the jester could speak truth to the king,

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because everyone agreed in advance that it wouldn't count.

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If you want to know where a society's taboos are, watch its comedians.

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They are the ones poking at those unspoken truths, forcing us to see them.

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It's clear that in many environments, preference falsification can be a dangerous phenomenon.

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But in your personal life, is preference falsification always such a bad thing?

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After all, it keeps the peace with your friends.

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It smooths over disagreements at work.

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Even at a national level, preference falsification can hold together political coalitions that would otherwise tear themselves apart.

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Isn't going along to get along the price we pay for civilization?

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Timur would say yes and no. Yes, because imagine what would happen if everyone said exactly what they were thinking all the time.

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Social life would be unbearable.

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Friendships would implode.

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Work colleagues would be at each other's throats.

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There's a reason we tell people their haircut looks fine.

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But the answer is also no, because the cost of large -scale preference falsification is simply enormous.

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One of the huge costs is that we can't have an informed debate.

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All sorts of ideas that might prove very useful don't get expressed.

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A society that is silently lying to itself cannot course correct.

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Good ideas with rough edges never get smoothed.

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Bad ideas that everyone privately doubts never get challenged.

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And the middle ground, where most people actually live, becomes the most dangerous place to stand

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and it's one of the manifestations of it is the hyperpolarization

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we see in the united states today in both parties we are seeing struggles between extremists and moderates

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and it's the moderates who are finding it necessary to falsify their preferences to give up certain nuances in their arguments.

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And those individuals find it very risky to participate in debates because they get demonized by both sides.

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Extreme positions rarely require nuance or compromise.

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Moderate positions almost always do.

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So extremism is easier to defend in public than moderation.

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Over time, the moderates fall silent.

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The extremists keep talking.

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What looks like a polarized society is actually a society

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that is mostly silencing itself with two vocal minorities screaming from the edges.

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There's one final consequence of preference falsification, and it's an important one.

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It hides reality from the people in charge.

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Almost no one saw the collapse of communism until it happened.

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Not the CIA, not the KGB, not the dissidents on the ground.

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Then it happened.

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This is what preference falsification does at scale.

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It makes a society look stable when it's weak.

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It makes a regime look popular when it's actually hated.

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It makes a workplace, a friendship, a marriage look like everyone is on the same page when underneath, almost no one is.

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And then one day, the smallest thing tips the balance and the whole arrangement collapses faster than anyone thought possible.

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Timur's own family in Turkey experienced this.

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They believed in a secular Turkey.

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They assumed the religious resentments around them would fade with education and modernization.

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They couldn't see what was bubbling under the surface

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because the people who disagreed with the country's direction were not allowed to say it out loud.

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Decades later, Turkey would change in ways that no one in Timur's circle predicted.

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Every society and every relationship contains fault lines under its surface.

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The question is whether you release this pressure slowly and safely by talking about differences and disagreements,

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or whether you let the pressure build up to the point of an earthquake.

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Tumor isn't saying that there is a quick fix for preference falsification.

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This is a phenomenon that is woven into how humans interact with one another.

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But Tumor's research points to something useful, and it's easier to accomplish than you might expect the first step is just to notice preference falsification around

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you to notice when you're nodding along with something you don't believe to pay attention

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when no one in the room is saying what they're saying in the hallway outside to take note

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when laughter at a joke is the only honest reaction in the room

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you will not fix the world by speaking up at a work meeting

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sometimes the polite lie is the right call but every once in a

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while in the room where it actually matters

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you may be the only person willing to say what almost everyone is thinking privately

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and the moment you do might be the moment you find out

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you were never alone thank you for watching

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this video each week on the hidden brain audio podcast i bring you ideas

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and insights from the world's leading researchers if you'd like to have your mind stretched please check us out on Apple,

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Spotify, or at hiddenbrain .org.

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I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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See you soon.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “The Lie You Tell Every Day”. This video has 310 sentences and 3528 words to shadow. The speech runs for 24:01. The speaker talks at a steady 147 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 81% 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
preference noun	/ˈpɹɛf(ə)ɹ(ə)ns/	The selection of one thing or person over others (with the main adposition being "for" in relation to the thing or person, but possibly also "of")
regime noun	/ɹəˈʒiːm/	Mode of rule or management.
communist noun	/ˈkɑ.mjə.nɪst/	An advocate of a society based on the common ownership of property; a proponent of communism.
phenomenon noun	/fəˈnɒm.ɪ.nən/	A thing or being, event or process, perceptible through senses; or a fact or occurrence thereof.
uncle noun	/ˈʌŋ.kl̩/	The brother or brother-in-law of one’s parent.
privately adverb	/ˈpɹaɪvɪtli/	In a private manner.
affirmative adjective	/əˈfɝməɾɪv/	pertaining to truth; asserting that something is; affirming
hire verb	/ˈhaɪɹ/	To obtain the services of in return for fixed payment.
moderate adjective	/ˈmɑdəɹət/	Not excessive; acting in moderation.
workplace noun	/ˈwɝkˌpleɪs/	The place where someone works.
colleague noun	/ˈkɒliːɡ/	A fellow member of a profession, staff, academic faculty or other organization; an associate, a workmate.
execute verb	/ˈɛksɪˌkjuːt/	To kill, especially as punishment for a capital crime.
ordinary adjective	/ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/	Having regular jurisdiction; now only used in certain phrases.
friendship noun	/ˈfɹɛn(d)ʃɪp/	The condition of being friends.
demonstrate verb	/ˈdɛm.ənˌstɹeɪt/	To show how to use (something).

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
come down verb	To descend, fall down, collapse.
get along verb	To interact or coexist well, without argument or trouble.
bring down verb	To make (a ruler or government) lose their position of power.
come across verb	To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition.
drag out verb	To extend or lengthen excessively; to draw out.
draw up verb	To compose (a document), especially following a standard form; prepare a plan.
end up verb	To bring to a conclusion.
find out verb	To discover, as by asking or investigating.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

You've told a lie today.
Not the kind you'd ever feel guilty about.
You laughed at a joke that wasn't funny.
It's what allows extremists to dominate our politics.
Isn't going along to get along the price we pay for civilization?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	You've told · you've ever lived · you've experienced
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	been lost · be made · was executed
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	one who didn · people who had · People who knew

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 45 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, isn't, couldn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: theater /ˈθi(ə)tɚ/, gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/, underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: regime /ɹəˈʒiːm/, friendship /ˈfɹɛn(d)ʃɪp/, ownership /ˈoʊnɚʃɪp/, punish /ˈpʌnɪʃ/, censorship /ˈsɛnsɚʃɪp/
Long words — get the stress right: phenomenon /fəˈnɒm.ɪ.nən/, affirmative /əˈfɝməɾɪv/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, minority /maɪˈnɒɹ.ɪ.ti/, disagreement /dɪsəˈɡɹiːmənt/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like preference, regime, communist.

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 technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: The Lie You Tell Every Day - Learn English Speaking with Video

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