The Tim Ferriss Show transcripts
An interview show built around specifics, books, routines, tools, which is exactly what gets lost in audio.
Why people transcribe this show
The Tim Ferriss Show is unusually list-heavy. Guests name books, supplements, tools, people and routines in quick succession, often several in a sentence, and those specifics are the reason most people listen. They are also the first thing you forget, and the most annoying thing to hunt for by scrubbing.
A transcript turns a recommendation round into something you can copy out. It is the difference between remembering that a guest recommended three books and having the three titles, spelled correctly, with the timestamp where they said it, which matters when the recommendation is the reason you listened to the episode in the first place.
How to do it
Three steps, and the first one is the only one with a decision in it.
- Get a link to the episode. Copy the episode link from Spotify or Apple Podcasts: the share link for the individual episode, not the show. A direct link to an audio file works too, and so does uploading the file yourself if you already have it.
- Paste it and pick a format. Plain text for reading and notes, SRT or VTT if the words are going on video, JSON if something else is going to read it. Speaker labels are worth leaving on for anything with more than one voice.
- Read, correct, export. Fix the proper nouns (see below for where they go wrong on this show), then export. The transcript stays in your library, so you only pay the minutes once.
What's awkward about Tim Ferriss Show
The parts worth knowing before you spend the minutes.
Titles and proper nouns arrive in bursts
Rapid-fire recommendation segments are dense with book titles and names, delivered fast and rarely spelled out. This is the single most error-prone part of the show, and it is also the part you care about, so read that section against the audio before relying on it.
The recurring questions make it worth having a house format
Because the same questions come round every episode, transcripts of this show compare well side by side. If you are collecting answers across guests, exporting to a consistent format, plain text or JSON, is more useful than reading each one in isolation.
Sponsor reads sit inside the episode
Ad segments are transcribed along with everything else, since they are part of the audio. They are easy to spot and delete in the editor, but worth trimming before you turn a transcript into notes.
Questions about Tim Ferriss Show
Other shows
Long, unedited conversations, and how to get one of them as text you can search.
A science podcast worth taking notes on, and notes are much easier from text.
Some of the longest interviews in podcasting, in a form you can actually search.
A produced, edited, multi-voice show, which changes what a transcript is good for.
Transcribe a Tim Ferriss Show episode
Paste an episode link and read it in about a minute. Thirty minutes a month are free, with no card.
PodcastsToText is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The Tim Ferriss Show or Tim Ferriss. We do not host or distribute transcripts of this show. This page explains how to generate your own transcript from an episode you already have access to.
