Hey everybody, welcome to this week's phrasal verb episode.
I hope you're doing great.
I hope that you've enjoyed learning a lot of different phrasal verbs with these episodes so far.
And in today's episode... we're going to look at two different phrasal verbs.
The first one is bail out and the other one is bail out on, or a lot of times people just say bail on.
It's the same thing, really.
Bail out on or bail on.
So you might hear either of those.
So first, let's define the phrase bail out.
So bailout means to rescue a person or organization or business from financial difficulty.
So for example, my parents bailed me out when I couldn't pay the fine.
So a fine is like a ticket that you get for some infraction, something that you did wrong, like you broke the rules and now you have to pay a fine.
But in this sentence I'm saying that I couldn't pay it, so my parents had to bail me out and they paid it.
So they kind of rescued me from that financial difficulty.
So that's bail out.
And how about bail on or bail out on?
This means to abandon or stop supporting someone when they need help or they're in trouble.
For example, my brother bailed on me when I was accused by my parents of stealing the money.
So in this sentence I'm saying that my parents accused me of stealing money, and maybe my brother.
He knew that I didn't do it, or whatever.
And instead of supporting me, he just abandoned me and he didn't back me up.
And he said, I don't know, maybe Connor did it.
I don't know.
So that could be the situation or whatever.
It could be something else, but really what I'm saying is that my brother didn't support me, even though I expected him to.
He abandoned me, he stopped supporting me in that situation when I was in trouble.
So that's bail on or bail out on.
So now I want to use these two phrasal verbs in different sentences.
And in order to do that, I'm going to tell you a story which is not true.
This is a fictional story, but similar things have happened before.
Okay, so it's based on true stories.
Okay, so hopefully by the end of this you will have heard these two phrasal verbs used a lot in different sentences.
So let me tell you about a certain bank failure.
That didn't really happen, but let's pretend that it happened.
So the leaders of a pretty large bank here in the US made some terrible decisions and because of that they ended up having to get bailed out.
So what kind of decisions did they make?
Well, the bank was doing well for a certain time period.
And this bank started taking more risks with the investments that it was making.
It was the classic case of someone feeling really comfortable, they're doing well and they decide to take more risks because ah, they're in a good position.
They feel invincible, and that's what happened with this bank.
They invested in a very bad way.
They made some bad decisions and had to get bailed out afterwards.
Why?
Well, because this bank started failing financially, okay?
And when a bank fails, this is a big deal, if it's a big bank.
And this bank was pretty big.
The bank needed help.
They asked the government for a bailout.
At first, the government said, no, we're not bailing you out.
You got yourself into this trouble.
You have to suffer the consequences.
But what often happens when banks fail is that people freak out and think that this is going to cause terrible effects on the economy, and not just in the US but around the world, because banks, Our financial systems, are so interconnected all around the world.
So when a big bank fails, it really affects a lot of people.
And because of that, People think that these banks need to get bailed out so that they don't fail and don't cause this horrible catastrophe to happen.
A catastrophe is like some terrible destructive event where a lot of people suffer or die or whatever.
So, even though the government said that they wouldn't bail out this bank, Eventually there was so much pressure put on them to bail the bank out that they decided to do so.
And when the government bails out banks or really any big companies, a lot of people criticize the government.
A lot of people think that it's necessary, but then many people will also criticize criticize this and say that it's not fair, right?
If a small business fails, this business doesn't get bailed out by the us government, right?
So why should these big businesses get this support?
Why do they get bailed out?
What's special about them?
And a lot of people, they hate these bailouts because it encourages these banks to be reckless.
When you're reckless, this means that you are not careful, you're not thinking carefully about, about your actions, your decisions.
You're just doing whatever without worrying about the consequences.
That is being reckless.
So when banks see that the government is doing bailing out other banks well, these banks say well, it doesn't matter if we make bad decisions, the government will bail us out.
The government will rescue us.
And that's dangerous, right?
Because it encourages the decision makers of these banks to do whatever they want because, At the end of the day, they won't suffer all the consequences that a small business will suffer when they fail.
The bank will get bailed out by the government, so they will never fail.
We have certain financial institutions in the US that are actually designated as being too big to fail.
Like the government, will never allow these institutions to fail, probably because they're too big.
The effects will be too catastrophic if they fail.
So basically, everyone knows that the government will bail them out if something bad happens.
And, like I said, that can encourage very reckless behavior, because if someone is always gonna rescue you and bail you out, why do you need to be careful, right?
It's like a kid, a teenager or a young adult or whoever, if they know that their parents will always bail them out, they'll always come to the rescue, then they might not take responsibility for their own decisions, their own actions.
I'm sure you've met people like this before.
Whereas people that don't think that they're going to be rescued or bailed out by someone.
Those people tend to make more effort, analytical or conscious decisions.
They're actually analyzing the effects of their actions, the possible consequences.
They're going to think more about those things usually because they feel like if they fail, no one's going to bail them out.
So you might have already heard about some of the famous bank bailouts that have happened.
Even just in 2023.
There were some very uh, high profile banks that got bailed out in the us, and i can't remember how many banks failed or got bailed out, but there were a lot of bad things happening in terms of uh, different banks last year, And this is something that has actually happened a number of times in recent years.
It's going to continue to happen probably in the future.
And this is something that will continue.
Probably have to deal with time and time again.
And with this specific bank.
In my fictional story, the CEO received almost all the blame for the bad decisions that were made.
And even though this CEO had a team of people with him that really were just as involved as he was in making these decisions, even though he had that team with him, he received a Pretty much all the blame.
When people talked about this situation, they just focused on the CEO and the other people that helped him make these decisions.
They bailed out on him.
When he received a ton of criticism, they didn't stand by him and say, we all made mistakes.
We were part of the decision making process.
No, they pretty much just bailed on him.
They blamed him as well.
They made it sound like he was just running the bank poorly, even though they were completely on board with all of these decisions.
When you're on board with something, this means that you agree with it and you accept this decision that is being made.
So even though they were on board with the decisions, they helped make the decisions.
When their CEO was receiving all the blame, they bailed out on him and just started criticizing him as well.
It was a very bad, nasty thing for them to do, because they pretty much stabbed him in the back, as we say.
Right, they completely bailed on him, and it wasn't just that they bailed on him, it's that they started attacking him too.
It's like they wanted everyone to think that it was just him and And it wasn't their fault.
So they also criticized him.
So not only did they completely bail on him when he needed them by his side, they attacked him as well.
You can imagine, of course, that the CEO was super disappointed that the people who he trusted would back him up ended up bailing on him when he needed them to kind of help calm the public down.
They really made it sound like he was running the bank really poorly and he made people even more scared about the future of the bank.
And some of these people, these decision makers, were close friends with the CEO.
So his close friends bailed on him.
It wasn't just co-workers, colleagues.
He considered some of these people to be close friends and he was stabbed in the back.
They completely bailed on him.
They started attacking him, criticizing him.
And I don't know if you've ever had this happen to you, but it's horrible when the people you are supposed to be able to trust end up bailing on you and end up abandoning you when you need them the most.
It's terrible.
I'm not defending this CEO and I think that these banks make terrible decisions, these banks that fail, and I'm not sympathizing with them.
I'm just talking about human nature in general.
I can imagine being in this position and the world is turning against you and saying that you made horrible decisions.
And maybe it's true.
It probably is true.
But you would expect that the other decision makers, many of whom are your good friends, you would expect that they would also stand by you and accept responsibility for making bad decisions.
But no, they bailed on you completely. and they also attacked you, and that would be terrible.
So I hope that doesn't happen to you anytime soon.
I hope it doesn't happen to me anytime soon.
Thankfully, I can't say that I've had many experiences where people have completely bailed on me when I needed them the most.
But I'm sure at some point or another in my life that'll happen, because people do that sometimes, unfortunately.
So hopefully you don't bail on the people that are counting on you and you don't act like the fictional people that I described here in this story.
So I hope you were able to hear these phrasal verbs used again and again in different sentences.
Hopefully now you feel more comfortable with the phrase bail out And the phrase bail out on or bail on.
Hopefully these are clearer for you now.
And hopefully you'll be able to recognize them when other people use them.
And maybe you can even use them in your own sentence if you have the opportunity.
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And we have normal conversations about many different topics.
It's a lot of fun.
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That's a skill that you'll definitely need to develop eventually.
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All right.
Thank you so much for listening to this phrasal verb episode, and I'll talk to you in the next one.
