Modifying your speech deliberately in order to conceal a deeper intent, to gather further information about the state of other people or to adapt the message to the intended purpose is a widely used technique that is mainly used implicitly, in this episode Baer and Alex discuss the topic with a critical perspective.

There are situations in which the existence of a conflict of interests leads us to not be as direct as we could be, misrepresenting reality to maximize our objectives(the example of a teenager getting hammered), others require mitigation due to the limited capacity of the other party to understand things to your level (either because this person is limited cognitively, is a child or because of the knowledge asymmetries that specialization requires).