Shadowing practice: Intuition vs. Reason with Liv Boeree | A Bit of Optimism

This clip is a short exchange from Simon Sinek's show, with poker player and decision scientist Liv Boeree working through when to trust intuition and when to trust the math. It is a real American accent training source, not a scripted lesson: two people thinking out loud, correcting themselves mid sentence, circling back to a point.

The speech sits at C1 and moves at 224 words per minute, faster than most of the catalogue, so this is not a beginner clip. It rewards someone who already has the words and wants to practise english speaking at conversational speed, with the hesitations, the self corrections and the layered clauses that a scripted C1 text would smooth over. Rare words like disparaging, inherent and moderation show up because this is unrehearsed argument, not a script written for learners.

Quote three lines and you can already hear the shape of the argument. Line 2, "There's an error rate inherent in my intuition, and we should maybe talk about that," hedges twice in one breath, first with an abstract noun phrase, then with maybe. Line 4, "I wouldn't go so far to say as I was disparaging of the gut, but I called for moderation," is a correction pattern worth shadowing on its own: deny one claim, then restate a softer one. Line 9 runs on past where a written sentence would stop, "Now I've, I'd say I've swung back in the other direction again, and think that there is almost like some kind of shared knowledge going on that we can tap," with the false start on I've and the sentence still open at the end of the line.

• Line 2: the hedge maybe softening a claim about error rate
• Line 4: a denial followed by a restated, softer claim
• Line 9: a false start, I've, I'd say I've, then a sentence that keeps building

Work the argument in order rather than jumping around, since each line answers the one before it.

• Start with line 1, "In poker, sometimes my gut is right, but sometimes it's wrong," and shadow the contrast stress on right and wrong before moving on.
• Take line 2 next and say the hedge, and we should maybe talk about that, at the pace it was said, not slower.
• Line 4 is the hardest turn in the clip: record yourself on I wouldn't go so far to say and check the recording caught the whole clause before called for moderation.
• Lines 6 to 8 are the back and forth about failure rate, difficult problem, trust the math. Shadow them as one block to keep the reasoning intact.
• Finish on line 11 and the phrase tap into some borderline supernatural realm of inspiration, said in one breath at full speed, which is the real test of whether you can keep up with a C1 lecture at 224 words per minute.
• Once the block is smooth, replay it against the app's scoring to see which words dropped and repeat only those lines, not the whole clip.