The Tim Ferriss Show - #247: Cool Tools for Travel - Tim Ferriss and Kevin Kelly
Episode Date: June 20, 2017Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) might be the real-life Most Interesting Man In The World. I've always wanted to travel with him, and we recently headed to Uzbekistan together. This episode co...vers some of our favorite travel tools. Kevin is Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, which he co-founded in 1993. He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a non-profit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth. In his spare time, he writes bestselling books, co-founded The Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all documented human language, and serves on the board of The Long Now Foundation. As part of The Long Now Foundation, he's investigating how to revive and restore endangered or extinct species, including the Wooly Mammoth. His newest critically acclaimed book is The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. As journalist David Pogue has said: "Anyone can claim to be a prophet, a fortune teller, or a futurist, and plenty of people do. What makes Kevin Kelly different is that he's right..." This episode touches on a lot of cool stuff, and we had a blast recording it in the back of a car in the mountains. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by WordPress, my go-to platform for 24/7-supported, zero downtime blogging, writing online, creating websites -- everything! I love it to bits, and the lead developer, Matt Mullenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times. Whether for personal use or business, you're in good company with WordPress -- used by The New Yorker, Jay Z, FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and Time, just to name a few. A source at Google told me that WordPress offers "the best out-of-the-box SEO imaginable," which is probably why it runs nearly 30% of the Internet. Go to WordPress.com/Tim to get 15% off your website today! This podcast is also brought to you by TrunkClub. I hate shopping with a passion. And honestly, I'm not good at it, which means I end up looking like I'm colorblind or homeless. Enter TrunkClub, which provides you with your own personal stylist and makes it easier than ever to shop for clothes that look great on your body. Just go to trunkclub.com/tim and answer a few questions, and then you'll be sent a trunk full of awesome clothes. They base this on your sizes, preferences, etc. The trunk is then delivered free of charge both ways, so you only pay for clothes that you keep. If you keep none, it costs you nothing. To get started, check it out at trunkclub.com/tim.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Can I ask you a personal question?
Now would have seemed the perfect time.
What if I did the opposite?
I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
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that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you.
And check it out. Hello, boys and girls girls this is tim ferris and welcome to another episode of the tim ferris
show where it is my job to typically interview world-class performers from all different domains
whether that be sports military business chess or otherwise to tease out routines habits
etc that you can apply and test in your own life.
This episode is a joint episode with Kevin Kelly, one of my favorite people on the planet. You can
say hi to him on Twitter at Kevin, the number two Kelly, or go to kk.org to see his writing.
Among others, 1,000 true fans, perhaps the essay I have recommended the most in the world to the most
audiences. Now, Kevin might be the real life most interesting man in the world. He sports an Amish
beard. He built his own house. He spends many months of the year traveling all over, and I've
always wanted to travel with him. We recently had the chance to head to Uzbekistan
together, and I jumped at the opportunity. This episode covers some of our favorite travel tools.
So who is Kevin? He is Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, which he co-founded in 1993.
He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at cataloging and identifying
every living species on Earth. That's not a joke.
In his spare time, he writes bestselling books, co-founded the Rosetta Project,
which is building an archive of all documented human languages, and serves on the board of the
Long Now Foundation. As part of The Last, he's investigating how to revive and restore endangered
or extinct species, including the woolly mammoth. And I guess that would not be part of the last, it would be part of the All Species Foundation. But you get the idea. He's a busy, busy dude.
And his newest critically acclaimed book is The Inevitable. That is the title,
subtitle, Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.
As journalist David Pogue has said of Kevin, anyone can claim to be a prophet, a fortune teller,
or a futurist, and plenty of people do. What makes Kevin Kelly different is that he's right.
He has an impeccable track record. So this episode covers quite a bit of cool stuff,
all very actionable. I hope you guys enjoy it. We had a blast recording it in the back of a car
in the mountains, and I will let Kevin get to it. This is also being simultaneously published
on his Cool Tools podcast,
which you guys should check out
and you can find it at kk.org.
Enjoy.
Mr. Kelly.
Hi, this is Kevin Kelly.
I'm sitting in the back of a car
crossing a mountain pass about 2,000 meters
in the Attenchin Mountains in Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan is a Central Asian country that's generally south of Russia,
north of Afghanistan, and next to all the other stands like Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan.
Sitting next to me as we cross the mountains is Tim Ferriss, the legendary
exploiter and explainer of world-class performances. And we're going to do a joint
recording. Tim's going to tell us about his favorite four cool tools, and we'll find out
what he's up to lately. Tim, why don't you tell us about your
first cool tool? Okay, the first cool tool, if we're sitting in the back here, we have bags around
us, bottles of water, a bunch of different gadgets and objects piled in my lap. The first that I can
talk about is actually in my other piece of luggage. I don't have any checked luggage and it is a jacket that I roll up and travel with constantly. It's from a brand called Now
N-A-U. I believe it's based in Portland. You can think of it as a blazer or a
riding jacket. What makes it unique is a number of different factors. A, you can
roll it up and throw it on to say a
black t-shirt and you look like you're ready for a business dinner or a formal
or semi-formal occasion. So it saves me the trouble of packing a lot of collared
shirts for instance. There are collared shirts that don't wrinkle but they do
take up more space than say a black t-shirt. So this now, and it could be, I have
several different models at home, weather resistant. Of course, if it was designed in the Pacific
Northwest, you would expect that, which comes in handy. So that would be my first cool tool.
Plenty of pockets, but there are lapels so you can get away with murder. You could wear it in
a light rain or you could wear it at a nice dinner and it is an
incredibly flexible piece of clothing. So one of the hazards for me anyway if I try to roll up a
jacket I never quite get the wrinkles out. So no iron shirts you can kind of hang in your hot
shower and it'll dissipate. How does this work in terms of unwrinkling it or does it just magically
unwrinkle? So this particular jacket has a number of features, I think, that disguise wrinkles. And
there's also just the material science aspect. The fabric blends that are used tend not to wrinkle, number one. Number two, it has folds and pockets and lapels
that for whatever reason make any wrinkles less noticeable.
Cool.
And then there's the color.
So if you want to avoid problems with wrinkles,
generally, at least in my experience,
you want darker clothing so that under light,
you're not having shadows cast across or beneath the wrinkles.
So this is a charcoal color jacket.
It's kind of like your typical suit jacket length or is it more like an outdoor jacket at the waist?
I would say typical dinner jacket length.
So it's not getting cut off, doesn't show off any midriff for
those of you who are looking for that you're out of luck yeah so you'd be able
to see your belt if it were unbuttoned in the front right okay so that's and
it's very lightweight and about tell the readers about how big it compresses into
if you were to roll it up well and if you want to know how to roll
up a jacket like that well, you could actually go online and look at how, say, a judo uniform is
folded. And if you roll it up well, you are looking at, let's just say, the bottom three quarters, meaning it'll cover the very bottom fabric of a standard sized school backpack.
So we're not talking about a hiker's backpack.
So if I had to estimate, I would say we're looking at, I get it down to about a roll that is 10 inches in length and about three to four inches in diameter.
Well, that's very impressive.
I carry a lightweight down jacket that compresses into something very small,
but it's certainly not as fancy or, you know, suitable for a dinner jacket like yours is.
And, I mean, a couple other tips for folks
and by i'm by no means a a hyper minimalist say appalachian trail hike or anything like that but
i also have for instance a synthetic because i don't want to lose the uh
insulating ability if it gets wet i have a synthetic down vest that is also stuffed into
this backpack, which I can put on top of that sort of fancy looking jacket in the case that
I need more warmth. Yeah, that's brilliant. That's a brilliant hack. So again, that's called the Now Jacket? N-A-U, Now.
Now, okay.
And approximately, what's the cost?
Just give me a range.
That's a really good question.
I bought it a long time ago.
It's not cheap, but then again, if you're comparing it to any type of dinner jacket or outdoor jacket, it's not horribly expensive.
I'd say it's in the $150 to $350 range, if I had to
guess. Okay, good. That's fantastic. So what else do you have in your backpack, which is stuffed
here in the back of our car right now? In my bag of tricks, I have a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard.
And just to put this in perspective, it is about the, it's slightly
larger than say a paperback book, like a five by eight inch trim paperback book. It is narrow
enough that I will very often stick it into a journal to protect it. Meaning it's, it's probably
the width of eight to 10 paperback pages. And it holds a charge very, very well.
So I use this oftentimes if I have any issue with my laptop.
I can pair it to my iPhone, which is a larger sized iPhone,
and balance the iPhone or lean it against, say, a glass of iced tea.
And I can get any type of writing done that I need to get done.
Also, if I feel like taking a day trip but not taking this backpack,
which is one of my main pieces of luggage and stuffed full of stuff, it's kind of heavy,
I can take the keyboard and my iPhone and head off to some coffee shop,
say, 10-15 minutes away without carrying all of my gear with me.
So I'm going to try to
describe this a little bit further. It's very very thin and very lightweight. It feels like it's made
of aluminum and it has kind of a matte texture matte finish on it. It feels very velvety, and it's mostly charcoal color with white letters.
So this would serve as a keyboard with a phone,
and the keyboard itself is pretty large in terms of your finger spacing,
so there'd be no cramping.
That is really cool.
Yeah, it's a great device.
I've had this now for, I would say, two years,
and I've never had a great device. I've had this now for, I would say, two years, and I've never
had a technical fail. So as a form of backup, I find it to be very cheap insurance because
as you can see in person, this is lightweight enough that I'm not going to get scoliosis
for having this as an additional piece of gear. I just stick it into a large format
journal or even a magazine, and I can travel with it.
Yeah, that's really cool.
And so it pairs up through Bluetooth, I imagine, right?
That's right.
Right, and so you can pair it up to an iPad if you wanted to as well as a phone if you happen to be carrying one.
Definitely.
Yeah.
So what's that called again?
This is a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard.
Okay.
And we'll put the exact model in the show notes for everybody.
And next up we have, these all kind of travel together.
I very rarely take these out of my backpack in this case.
This is Max Earplugs silicone earplugs, which unlike foam earplugs are not inserted
into the ear canal and then left to expand. These are effectively smeared
over the ear opening and you have in all caps, do not insert just cover ear
opening. These I found through swimmers in, and they are very waxy and almost look like candies,
some type of caramel, but they're white colored.
And I find them to block sound much more effectively than any type of foam earplug, although there
are some good ones on the market to be sure.
Do you use them just once or
can they be reused or recycled or they last a little bit then you have to they get grungy or
what's their use i definitely reuse these i would say if i had to guesstimate i would say four to
five nights and then they they start to lose their adherence because they get less tacky over time.
The most important feature or benefit that I don't want to overlook is that as someone who tends to rotate from back to side,
so I sleep on my back and on my side, foam earplugs will very often hurt.
They'll get pushed into your ear when you roll onto your side.
That is not the case with these.
So for side sleepers, these are a real cool tool because it allows you to sleep on your side
while you have these earplugs in.
Definitely. And even as someone who kind of tosses and turns, in my case,
I don't tend to wake up on my side, but I'm constantly going onto my side,
and foam earplugs often will wake me up. Okay cool and is this mostly just
used for sleeping or can you use these or do you use these for other sorts of
sound abatement? These earplugs live in each of my bags that I tend to
travel with so I have I have redundant caches of earplugs.
One in this bag, one in my other bag, and sometimes I'll even have them in jackets.
But mostly for sleeping? Mostly for sleeping, definitely. Or if you're sitting on an airplane
and you're trying to read and just want to drown out the sound. Then you can use
them as well, for sure. Or you're swimming and you want to avoid swimmers. Swimmers,
okay, right. Okay, so what's your fourth uh cool tool my fourth cool tool and
i might i might might go over slightly here but my my fourth cool tool is a neck pillow and i want
one of those i've tried many different neck pillows yeah Most of them are very uninspiring and even less effective for helping me sleep.
This, and I'll do my best here, Cabo,
I believe is the pronunciation, C-A-B-E-A-U,
and it has Evolution Pillow written on the side.
You can see that it compresses down very nicely.
The size of a, what do you call it?
Cantaloupe, like a small cantaloupe or a large
grapefruit and you can certainly compress it more uh and the the actual bag that it comes in allows
you to wrap it up and then compress it down to a smaller size and it is just very nice in essence
memory foam neck pillow that also clips in the front. What I've found is not only
does it help me sleep if I'm sitting upright, but it's also very, very helpful for getting to sleep
when I'm laying prone, whether it's on an airplane or even in a hotel room, if the pillows are of
dubious quality. And do you have to inflate this with like pumping air in, blowing air into it, or is it self-expanding?
It's self-expanding.
So you can think of it almost like a sponge-like material that you can compress down,
and then when you release it, it inflates, or I should say rather expands automatically.
And is it one of those horseshoe shape items or is it just a
little kind of wedge that sits behind your neck? It is a horseshoe shaped, if you
imagine a horseshoe being hung around the back of your neck, that is the shape
that you can clip in the front and the design is such that there's a ridge that
supports basically the occipital area at the base of
the skull. So it's very ergonomic in that sense. It is. It's the most comfortable neck pillow that
I have found. And so I am. It's pretty light. It's a little bulky, but it's pretty light.
Yeah, it's light. And as far as neck pillows go, not very bulky at all yeah but if you're gonna have a neck pillow
generally speaking in my experience at least it's going to be inflatable and quite uncomfortable
or you're going to end up with this type of compromise and this is this is the best I've
found right so it does I mean it could pretty easily disappear into a day pack oh I think it
absolutely could and certainly if you wanted you could lash
this to the outside of a pack i happen to have enough space in my bag so i include it but you
could lash it or hang it on the outside okay yeah i think i like to i mean sometimes you have the
privilege of flying first class and you can lay down but other times if you're
stuck in the economy then you really need one of these things to sleep in a seat. Yeah, I do. I do at least. And well,
the last thing I'll mention, and then I want to ask you about an app that you have, which is very,
very different. So another app that I use a lot when I'm traveling and I use it at home as well,
it's called Apnea Trainer and I don't use it for its intended use. So I have an off-label use.
But apnea trainer is used by people who are training for freediving and want to improve their breath hold times.
And there are different types of tempos that you can use for different types of training.
So there's pranayama breathing.
There is the apnea breathing, which would say be a ratio
of inhale, hold, exhale, or inhale, hold, exhale, hold.
So you might have something like five seconds in, 10 second or 20 second hold, 10 second
exhale.
So it's a one, four, two ratio.
And what I found is that I, if I only have say five to 10 minutes and I don't have time
for my usual morning meditation, which I like to do, which is generally something like transcendental
meditation of 20 minutes, that five to 10 minutes or five minutes, let's just say of breathing,
uh, training with a voice that will count down for you is very much grounding for the rest of the day.
So it's like kind of like a substitute to meditation because you're focused on your breath,
but you're focused on kind of holding your breath, not just sort of breathing regularly.
That's right. Yeah. And I would say it is meditation, but it's a guided breathing
meditation that has the side effect of performance enhancement,
if that's what you're going for.
And obviously, I'm not a doctor.
I don't play one on the internet. So people who are listening, especially you crazy haphazard males,
do not use this right before you go into the water.
And don't try to break any personal records holding your breath without very,
very qualified supervision.
Because you can die with shallow
order blackouts and other issues. I use this just as a kickstart to my day.
Right. So the worst, you're sitting in maybe a position or something, the worst that could
happen is you'd fall over. That's right. Yeah. I'm just sitting on a hotel bed or a hotel couch
generally. Right. That's super. And that's called again, Apnea Trainer. What is the app that you have on your phone that you were showing me earlier today?
Yeah, so I have a little tiny app on my iPhone.
I think it's on Android as well.
It's called, actually, I know it is.
It's called MyTrax.
And what it does is it makes a GPS log for our travel, wherever you're going.
And the important thing is it does it without having to have
cellular service somewhere.
Because in these foreign countries, I don't normally
turn my cell phone service off.
But it's still getting GPS signals.
And just with that information, it's enough to create a GPS
log of a journey.
And the advantage to that is, one, you have a record of your
journey that you can import into Google Earth just with the KLM KML format but more importantly
if you have a camera that has a clock in as they all do these days you can
synchronize your clock to the local time and you'll have a way to timestamp and geotag your photograph. So
the software will look at the timestamp for a particular photograph and then it'll show you
the exact coordinates where that photograph was taken. So I don't have to remember where was I
when I took that photograph. I can just import that into Lightroom or something, and it's going to show me the geographical locations for every
one of my photographs. And so I found this fascinating, and it also begged the question
for me, let's just say you're going on an excursion through the Grand Canyon or going on an extended trip overseas, is there a potential safety element
where that data could be then pinged back
to some type of service
that can monitor your last known whereabouts
if you go MIA,
which if you are a developer of this app
or know the developer,
would love to know the answer
or if there's something similar that's available.
But I thought that was a very, very very cool app that would be really cool if you could live stream basically your location to you know permitted interested parties so that every and i
would just have to imagine that there would be an app that did that somewhere yeah you would think
you'd think there must be one available somewhere. And one other cool tool that you have, which is more common here than I would have expected,
but in retrospect, I shouldn't be surprised, it is very, very hot here.
It can get very, very hot.
And the sun is extremely powerful to the extent that we visited a solar furnace not long ago
that can be used to melt
various objects at absurdly high temperatures 3000 degrees centigrade yeah exactly uh and uh
you have well our guide has our esteemed guide has an umbrella smart move to create shade wherever
he wants it and you have an umbrella but you made a modification to your umbrella yeah so i just had an ordinary cheap you know chinese black
really compact umbrella that i carry in my little camera bag all the time and i spray painted the
top of it silver so that it reflects the light and it makes it a little bit cooler on the inside because
just with the black umbrella it tends to absorb that infrared and re-radiate it back down on your
head um i've having a silver reflective layer bounces at least you know 60 of that packet to
the sky it's a lot cooler and um there are versions of the silver umbrella they're
extremely lightweight they're not as collapsible as the ones i have but they're made for hiking
they're they're they're i think it's called like the silver dome if i'm not mistaken
and they weigh only a few ounces um and people out west if you're climbing even at the high altitudes a lot of the long distance
hikers now carry an umbrella portable shade and they walk along under the shade shade follows them
and it really makes a huge difference when you're backpacking because you can really work up a sweat
and the hat doesn't allow your head to cool off but
the umbrella does yes I've had umbrella envy since I since I landed on this trip
and Kevin I've had so much fun I've wanted to travel with you for ages
overseas and here we are so I'm really glad that it came together yeah and Tim
thanks for your great cool tool reviews and where can people who never heard of
Tim Ferriss find out what you're up to?
And by the way, what are you up to next?
Up to next?
Well, I have a new TED Talk that should be coming out shortly.
Very personal and talks about fighting off the dark moments and overcoming self-doubt and so on. So it's a very personal journey through how to overcome some of those darker and even dangerous moments.
So you have to search Tim Ferriss at TED Talk?
Yeah, if people search Tim Ferriss, TED Talk, they will be able to find at least one,
potentially two if including the new one.
And I'll be giving away several hundred pages
of my favorite Stoic writing,
along with modern essays that I've added in
and new artwork and original commissioned illustrations
and calligraphy, all sorts of fun stuff.
I'll be giving all that away for free
in three volumes called The Tao of Seneca.
So people can just search The Tao of Seneca free book.
They should be able to also find it on Amazon.
And that should be available, I would say, in early to mid-June.
And that's going to be orderable on Amazon and on your website?
It should be available on Amazon.
It should be available via PDF.
I'm just going to unleash it into the wild.
And they can certainly go to tim.blog to find everything related to
the projects that i want to as well as those ebooks and pdfs and everything else tim.log
tim.blog
okay tim.blog yeah tim.blog it's a lot easier to spell than previous urls and kevin for people who
don't know how to find you and want to learn more, where can they find you? I'm kk.org. Did you say kk.pork?
It's the air pressure. Our ears are not working.
And anything that you're working on that you'd like people to check out well i have the paperback
version of my book the inevitable which is being launched in june so it's pre-order for 12 bucks
it's cheaper than printing it out yourself so um go there at amazon and um in june i'll be
talking a little bit more about the updated version, which is not updated.
So I haven't changed my mind about anything in the last 12 months about the coming 20 years.
So I stand by everything I said.
Now it's in paperback.
Well, thank you, Kevin.
And we have many adventures ahead.
Yep, thanks.
So you have another cool tool to talk about. In fact, it's kind of like just
about in my mouth. It's up against my face. Tell me, what is this thing? I get that response a lot.
So this is the Yellowtech IXM microphone, and I travel with this almost always it is see what would you compare
this to I would say if you took 6d batteries and laid them end-to-end
perhaps old-fashioned flashlight yeah or an old flat old-fashioned flashlight
this is a microphone that can capture just a tremendous quality of audio. It automatically equalizes, and it has playback buttons on the side.
It all records to an SD card that's inserted in the bottom,
and it's battery-powered so that you can take it on the road.
Everything is contained in this and housed in this one unit
that then goes in a tiny zip-up bag.
So this just lives really inside my
backpack. So if I don't have a chance to bring more gear or don't want to bring more gear,
I can use this at any time, anywhere, and shazam. So you might record an introduction to one of
your podcasts from the back of a car going over the mountain pass in Uzbekistan, right?
And so you'd be able to just pull it out and record it,
and it would have as good a quality as any real digital studio might.
It very often does.
I've recorded podcast intros in airplane bathrooms before.
Just certainly not ideal.
But you can really get away with murder with this device and it makes up for
a lot of environmental factors that could otherwise really screw things up and also if
you're on the move and you happen to say bump into someone who is fascinating in my case and
i say you know would you would you mind if i ask you just a few questions and they're up for it you
can really on the drop of a dime
capture these moments that would otherwise be lost. Right, and so just to emphasize this is
a microphone that has a built-in recording device into the handle of it so it's all in one. It's
more than a microphone, it's a recording device, digital recording device built into a microphone.
That's right, and then when I'm done recording, I would
pop out this SD card. I would slap it into a laptop when I have access to one and drop the
file then into a Dropbox folder, which would sync at the first opportunity to connect to Wi-Fi.
And then that is available to my team. So I can send a link to that Dropbox through Slack to my team,
and off to the races.
They have the interview files, they have the intro files,
whatever it might be,
and then it can all be polished for publication.
So it's in some kind of a way, except for the ambient sound,
it's a portable recording studio.
Oh, it absolutely is a portable recording studio,
and I think that some of my best audio that has appeared, say, on the podcast has come from this mic.
And people find it hard to believe because they'll ask which studio I use in San Francisco, and I'll say my bedroom and a handheld mic.
That's my studio.
That's really great. It's a really cool tool.
Can you give me kind of a range of the price just so we have some idea?
We'll have show notes about the actual particular model, but just give it a little bit of a range.
Yeah, if I had to guess on this, it's been a long time since I looked at the pricing,
but I would say it's somewhere between $400 and $700. It's not cheap. But when I consider
the alternatives, let's just say the H6 Zoom, which is the general recorder that I use with the XLR
cables and the stage mics and everything else involved, you're getting into a similar price
range or above. This just offers a lot more convenience in terms of its form factor.
And I have to tell you, Tim travels light. He's not an an ultra light traveler, but a very lightweight traveler with very minimal bags. And this is one of the things that you pack.
So it's very impressive that it's light enough, small enough, that even when
you're not packing much else, you can fit this into it, even if you are a very
weight-conscious traveler. Definitely. And I mean mean there are other alternatives. I mean I had enough space to pack
also a Rode iXY microphone which is intended to be connected via lightning port to say an iPhone.
So I am testing different alternatives to compare sound quality but thus far the
Yellowtech iXM has not let me down so So I'll continue using it until I find a superior
solution. Definitely a cool tool. Thanks. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things
before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email
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all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign
up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Trunk Club. There are two types of men
out there. You know who you are. Guys who love shopping for clothes but are short on time,
category A. And those of you who hate it, category B. I am in the latter category. My fashion sense is also probably somewhere between
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This episode is brought to you by WordPress, my go-to platform for blogging, writing online,
creating websites, everything. I love WordPress to bits.
My site, every site just about that I have is run on WordPress.
And the lead developer of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg,
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The very first episode in particular is amazing.
The second I took a ton of notes on.
So you should check it out.
But WordPress, where do I even begin?
I mean, The New Yorker uses it.
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it to the extent that I became very close friends with Matt and then became an investor slash
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That is how much I believe in this.
And that's how a lot of my most successful products
and investments have come about
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And that includes everything from the huge sites
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