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Shadowing practice: Interview | The 4-Hour Workweek | Tim Ferriss

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Full transcript

  1. Hey newly broke viewers, want to get out of the rat race and get rich doing it?0:02
  2. My next guest book claims to have the blueprint for living more and working less.0:06
  3. It's called the 4 -Hour Work Week, Escape 9 -5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich.0:11
  4. And it must be good because it was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for like forever or like 15 damn months.0:16
  5. It makes me sick to my stomach.0:23
  6. I hate you Tim Ferriss.0:25
  7. Here's the author, he says hailed as I am failed.0:26
  8. So Tim, the title of your book promises a hell of a lot.0:30
  9. It makes me a little skeptical.0:33
  10. What is a 4 -Hour Work Week like?0:35
  11. How do you do that?0:37
  12. Where I looked at how companies of two or three people could compete with companies of two to three thousand people.0:38
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  1. And what I did is I just took that and applied that to my personal life and looked at case studies of people who had reclaimed time using relatively new0:44
  2. tools.0:51
  3. For most people that starts with cutting back on unpaid overtime on the weekends and evenings.0:52
  4. But there are some examples of people who take it down to four hours.0:57
  5. But it's certainly not something you do overnight.1:00
  6. The bosses don't respond well to that.1:01
  7. Yes, I was just thinking I wanted to just tell Roger Ailes that I was only going to come into Fox four hours a week and then Demand to raise.1:03
  8. But Tim you're saying that problem...1:10
  9. One hour more than you do now?1:11
  10. Yes, actually I only really work for 45 minutes.1:13
  11. And even then I'm so stoned.1:15
  12. Tim, it's pathetic that I even have a job.1:18
  13. Now what is the first step in order to achieve this extremely successful but highly effortless lifestyle?1:20
  14. The first step really is looking at new measurements of time and how you spend that time.1:29
  15. So first of all I'd encourage everybody to look at their hourly income instead of their annual income because it's very common that you might make $50 ,000 a year,1:35
  16. get a raise to 55 ,000 but your workload goes up 20%.1:43
  17. So you're actually getting demoted over time until you end up getting roughly the amount per hour of a Burger King employee while you're working as an investment banker which1:45
  18. seems to be the fashion at the moment.1:53
  19. So a good way to approximate that is to just take your annual income, let's say it's $50 ,000, cut off the last three zeros and cut that in half,1:55
  20. you make $25 an hour.2:03
  21. So at that point if you can go to let's say Ask Sunday, there's a company called Ask Sunday that will route your calls from a New York number to2:05
  22. India and let's just suppose that you're a single mother and your son wants the hot new toy of the season, of course you are like the Tickle Me Elmo.2:14
  23. Rather than spend your entire Saturday looking for that toy, you call Ask Sunday, you say here's my zip code, call every toy store within 10 mile radius, reserve it2:23
  24. for me, call me when it's ready and you save yourself five hours.2:31
  25. So $125 for $2.2:35
  26. Tim, that may work if you want to Tickle Me Elmo doll, but I'm not that kind of sicko you think I am.2:37
  27. You know it's funny, I did the little equation for Bill and it came out to 37 cents an hour.2:42
  28. Yeah, actually that was more than I made out of it.2:47
  29. Now Tim, your philosophy behind this book, does it matter more or less now that we're in a recession?2:49
  30. I bet I can guess your answer.2:54
  31. I would say that it matters more, but precisely because I think retirement is in many respects a false idol.2:57
  32. When you talk to whether it's dot com millionaires or middle class people who have retired, you find that it really doesn't redeem all of that weighting in the deferred3:05
  33. life plan.3:14
  34. So I think reexamining time using tools to see exactly how you spend your time like rescue time dot com or other free tools is very important and that isn't3:16
  35. coming just from me, it's coming from people like the work family advisor to Al Gore and Jack Welch, it's coming from all sides.3:24
  36. So I think it's the perfect time to reexamine your priorities and where you're paying attention.3:31
  37. Now you're a best selling author, you speak at countless firms, so in order to sell your philosophy which sounds inviting, you probably work 80 hours a week don't you?3:36
  38. No I actually spend very little time promoting the book and spend most of my time working on either writing which is something I enjoy or investing believe it or3:48
  39. not.4:00
  40. But the important point is not being idol, so I'm not proposing that people lay on a beach rubbing cocoa butter on their stomachs for the next 20, 30 years.4:01
  41. Okay, just come out and ask me, I'll be busy but go ahead.4:10
  42. To simply reclaim their time which is a non -renewable resource, unlike income, and then to apply to the things that are important to them.4:15
  43. Okay, now I read you were working on a pilot for the History Channel, you're plotting to break a land speed record, you're training for a triathlon, you're planning a4:24
  44. flamenco dancing trip to Madrid, where do you find time to perform open heart surgery?4:34
  45. That's what I want to know.4:39
  46. I'm working on open heart surgery but I have short little hands and they're not very good for reaching into the cavities.4:43
  47. That's too bad because I knew you'd be good at it.4:50
  48. You have to stick to your strengths, stick to your strengths.4:51
  49. I don't have any strengths, that's my problem.4:54
  50. Tim Ferriss, congratulations on the phenomenal success of your book, like I said, I hate you for that.4:56
  51. But anyway, I'm going to read it when I get home.5:03
  52. The book is called The 4 -Hour Workweek, Escape 9 -5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich.5:05
  53. Thank you.5:10
  54. We'll close things out with a...5:11

American accent training with a fast paced Tim Ferriss Show interview

This clip is a television interview segment: a host introduces Tim Ferriss and his book The 4 Hour Work Week, needles him with mock outrage, then hands off to a back and forth about working fewer hours. It sits at B2, and it moves at 216 words per minute, faster than 75 percent of the catalogue, so it is a solid pick once slower clips feel too easy.

The accent is American, and the delivery is presenter style: clear consonants, punchy sentence endings, jokes landed on a beat. That combination makes it useful for american accent training and for english speaking practice, because you get natural speed without the slurred edges that make some conversation clips hard to parse on a first listen. Working a clip like this means matching a rhythm, not just reading words aloud.

The banter and the questions in this Tim Ferriss interview clip

Three lines carry the clip's character and are worth isolating before you shadow the whole thing.

  • "It makes me sick to my stomach." A short, flat statement used for sarcastic effect. The stress sits on "sick" and "stomach", and the whole line is delivered without a smile in the voice, which is the joke.
  • "So Tim, the title of your book promises a hell of a lot." A long single breath group with no pause before "promises", the kind of run that trips up learners who stop at every comma when there isn't one.
  • "One hour more than you do now?" A question built entirely from stress and pitch, not from extra words. Say it flat and it reads as a statement, so the rising pitch on "now" is doing all the work.

How to shadow this line by line before working through the whole clip

Work the exchange in order rather than jumping around. This is a case where the sequence of turns is the joke, so the order matters for meaning as much as for pronunciation.

  • Start with "It makes me sick to my stomach." and "I hate you Tim Ferriss." back to back. Shadow this line pair until the flat, deadpan delivery stops sounding sarcastic to you and starts sounding normal, that is the sign you've caught the tone.
  • Move to "So Tim, the title of your book promises a hell of a lot." Say it once slowly to find the words, then again at full speed without a breath before "promises".
  • Take the two question and answer lines together: "One hour more than you do now?" and "Yes, actually I only really work for 45 minutes." Record yourself on both and compare your pitch on "now" and "minutes" against the clip.
  • Finish with "And even then I'm so stoned." on its own, since it lands the joke and closes the exchange.
  • Only after those four short passes, run the full clip once at native speed. This is everyday english conversation practice as much as it is english shadowing practice: the value is in the exchange, not in any single sentence.
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