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Shadowing practice: Pavel Durov on Manifesting Reality and Hard Work

Listen to the line, then say it out loud
Line 1

Full transcript

  1. Another thing we've talked about, which I think is a fascinating topic, is the power of the mind, power of thought.0:02
  2. Do you believe you can affect your life and reality by thinking about it, by manifesting it into being?0:13
  3. What do you think?0:23
  4. There are many explanations why it works.0:24
  5. One thing most people agree on is that setting goals and staying positive and confident does allow you to achieve the things you want to achieve.0:28
  6. It's very hard to believe though that you can just manifest things into being without applying effort in the direction that seems to be logical.0:43
  7. Maybe some people exist that can just sit on a bank of a river and materialize things by the power of their thought, but I'm not sure in one of0:59
  8. these people I always found it more easy to believe that if you couple this optimism and faith with logical action, then it is bound to be successful.1:13
  9. Prolonged effort, hard work coupled with positive focus thinking about the thing.1:34
  10. Oh yeah.1:42
  11. So over many, many, many days, it is possible to imagine our world as a high dimensional universe where humans have the ability to navigate through it with the power1:42
  12. of belief which is coupled with positive emotion and logical thinking.1:57
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  1. But we are getting into an esoteric realm.2:11
  2. We don't have any proof of that, but we also know that we probably at this point haven't discovered even 1 % about this universe.2:15
  3. I agree with you fully and I like what you said in the way you were thinking about it.2:29
  4. You've told me before that maybe there's a way that with effort and with the focused mind you can shape, you can morph the landscape of probabilities around you.2:36
  5. It's a nice way to visualize it that somehow our effort and our focus changes the things that are likely and less likely.2:49
  6. And by focusing on it we make those things more and more likely.3:03
  7. At least as an estimate, as a kind of field that we throw our thoughts and our actions change that field.3:06
  8. And then there's 8 billion of us doing so.3:15
  9. And together there's this collective intelligence that creates the world we see around us.3:18
  10. Like the mice.3:23
  11. And like you said, us as a humanity together are perfect.3:26
  12. I like that you said that.3:32
  13. I admire your belief in the fact that we get to experience this together because it's not obvious.3:34
  14. Maybe each of us experiences his own or her own universe.3:45
  15. And maybe every second the universe splits into a billion of different universes and everything that can happen happens.3:50
  16. And there is a universe where, say I died in 2013.3:58
  17. Maybe every time I die I actually get to shift to a parallel universe when I don't die.4:05
  18. And then it keeps going.4:12
  19. And at certain points we achieve this quantum immortality when we're 1000 years old.4:14
  20. But a lot of people from other versions of reality think we are long gone.4:23
  21. Yeah, this is something you explained to me.4:33
  22. The idea of quantum immortality, which is a thought experiment which I find deeply fascinating.4:35
  23. People should look into it.4:40
  24. Which is a very crisp, clean consequence of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that we as conscious beings can't experience our death.4:41
  25. You can only, as we branch into these many worlds, only the living consciousnesses get to experience it.4:52
  26. So in some sense, yeah.5:03
  27. There's many universes.5:05
  28. If we're to seriously take the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there's many universes where you died many times, especially you.5:08
  29. And I'm glad we're in a universe where we get to share the table with this impressive bone, a little humor and a lot of serious topics covered today.5:15
  30. Once again, I can't say enough.5:27
  31. Ajan, thank you for me.5:30
  32. And Ajan, thank you from hundreds of millions of people that follow your work for you fighting for the freedom of all of us to speak and creating a platform5:32
  33. where we can do so.5:43
  34. And thank you so much for talking to me, brother.5:45
  35. It's been an honor getting to know you and to be able to call you a friend.5:47
  36. Thank you for saying that.5:52
  37. I'm also incredibly grateful to you and to the fact that I happened to be in this version of reality when I haven't died at least yet.5:55
  38. And hopefully we'll get to spend more fun moments in the years to come together.6:06
  39. Thank you, brother.6:13

A C1 Podcast Conversation for English Listening Practice

This clip is taken from the Lex Fridman Podcast, a two person conversation between Fridman and Pavel Durov about manifesting reality and hard work. It runs at 136 words per minute, faster than most of the catalogue, and is rated C1, so it rewards a listener who already has a working vocabulary. Nothing here is scripted for learners: two men reason out loud about belief, effort and probability, and every sentence carries real content. That density is exactly what makes it worth using for english speaking practice rather than a slower, simplified clip.

Durov moves from a plain claim, that effort has to be paired with belief, into abstraction: high dimensional universes, probabilities, a collective intelligence made of eight billion people. Following that shift out loud is harder than repeating a line from a movie scene, and it is closer to what listening to a real podcast in your target language actually feels like once the vocabulary stops being the obstacle.

The Language Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman Actually Use

Three lines from the opening show what you are working with here.

  • "It's very hard to believe though that you can just manifest things into being without applying effort in the direction that seems to be logical." One long unscripted sentence with no reductions marked in this recording, so every word is said in full, a clean target for american accent training.
  • "Prolonged effort, hard work coupled with positive focus thinking about the thing." Not a full sentence at all, Durov is summarising his own previous point out loud, and the stress falls hard on "prolonged" and "hard work".
  • "You've told me before that maybe there's a way that with effort and with the focused mind you can shape, you can morph the landscape of probabilities around you." The rare words "morph" and "probabilities" sit inside an otherwise ordinary conversational sentence, a good place to work on how to pronounce english words that look academic on the page but are spoken casually here.

How to Shadow Lines 1 to 16 of This Clip

Work through the opening in this order rather than jumping around.

  • Start with line 1, "Another thing we've talked about, which I think is a fascinating topic, is the power of the mind, power of thought." Short, one breath, a fair first line for english shadowing practice.
  • Move to line 5, the longest sentence in the opening: "One thing most people agree on is that setting goals and staying positive and confident does allow you to achieve the things you want to achieve." Break it at "agree on" and again at "staying positive" before saying the whole thing.
  • Take line 6 next and say it twice before moving on, it is the sentence the rest of the exchange keeps returning to.
  • Shadow line 9, the fragment "Prolonged effort, hard work coupled with positive focus thinking about the thing", on its own, it is short enough to match Durov's rhythm exactly rather than your own.
  • Finish the set on line 16, the "morph the landscape of probabilities" line, and only move past line 16 once you can say it at full speed without slowing down for "probabilities".
  • Repeat the same five lines the next day before touching new material, this clip works better as daily practice than as a single pass.
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