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Our guest on the Cool Tools Show this week is Tim Ferriss. Tim was listed as one of Fast Company‘s “Most Innovative Business People” and one of Fortune’s “40 under 40.” He’s an early-stage technology investor and advisor (Uber, Facebook, Alibaba, and 50+ others) and the author of four #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, including The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (reviewed on Cool Tools). He is the host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, which has exceeded 150 million downloads and has been selected for “Best of iTunes” three years running.

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Tim’s Tools:

Nau Vice II Blazer ($280)
“It is a jacket that I roll up to travel with constantly. What makes it unique is a number of different factors. You can roll it up and throw it on 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. … Plenty of pockets, but there are lapels so you can get away with murder. You can wear it in a light rain or you could wear it at a nice dinner. It is an incredibly flexible piece of clothing. … The fabric blends that are used tend not to wrinkle, number one. Two, it has folds and pockets and lapels that for whatever reason, make any wrinkles less noticeable. …I get it down to about a roll that is 10 inches in length and about three to four inches in diameter.”

Logitech Ultra-Portable keyboard ($34)
“In my bag of tricks. I have a Logitech bluetooth keyboard and just to put this in perspective, it is slightly larger than say a paperback book, like a 5 x 8 inch trim paperback book. It is narrow enough that I will very often stick it into a journal to protect it and it’s probably the width of eight to ten paperback pages. And it holds a charge very, very well so I use this often times 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 a glass of iced tea and I can get any 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 ten to 15 minutes away without carrying all of my gear with me.”

Mack’s Pillow Soft Silicone Earplugs ($4)
“[Max silicone earplugs] 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 fact 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 ear plug … I definitely reuse these. I would say if I had to guesstimate, I would say four to five nights and then 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.”

Cabeau Evolution Memory Foam Travel Pillow ($40)
“Most of [travel pillows] are very uninspiring and even less effective for helping me sleep. What I found is not only does [this pillow] 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 a hotel room, if the pillows are of dubious quality. … 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. … It is a horseshoe-shaped, if you imagine a horseshoe being hung around the back of your neck, that is the shape. It 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. … It’s the most comfortable neck pillow that I have found.”

Apnea Trainer ($3)
“So another app that I use a lot when I’m traveling and I use it at home as well is called Apnea Trainer and I don’t use it for it’s tended use. I have an off-label use. Apnea Trainer is used by people who are training for free diving and want to improve their breath hold times. There are different types of tempos that you can use for different types of training, so there is Pranayama breathing. There is the apnea breathing which would say be a ratio of inhale, hold, exhale or inhale, hold, exhale, hold. … What I found is that if I only have, say five to ten minutes and I don’t have time for my usual morning meditation, which I like to do, that five to ten minutes of breathing training with a voice that will countdown for you is very much grounding for the rest of the day.”


Yellowtec iXm microphone ($760)
“This is a microphone that can capture just 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 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 anytime, anywhere and shizam.

Kevin’s Tools:

myTracks (FREE)
“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, is enough to create a GPS log of a journey. The advantage to that is one, you have a record of your journey and you can import into Google Earth just with a KML format, but more importantly, if you have a camera that has a clock as they all do these days, you can synchronize your clock to the local time and you’ll have a way to time stamp and geotag your photographs.”

Cheap compact umbrella with top spray painted silver to reflect the sun, keeping it cooler
“I just had an ordinary cheap, 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 a black umbrella, it tends to absorb that infrared and reradiate it back down on your head. By having a silver reflective layer, it bounces at least 60% of that back into the sky and it’s a lot cooler. There are versions of the silver umbrella that are extremely lightweight. They’re not as collapsible as the ones I have, but they’re made for hiking. I think there’s called the Silver Dome if I’m not mistaken and they weigh only a few ounces, and people out west, if you’re climbing even into 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 in a hat. It doesn’t allow your head to cool off, but the umbrella does.

06/21/17