I am very jetlagged

You can find audio versions of Garbage Day on every major podcasting app. If it’s not there, here’s an RSS feed.

Hello dear reader,

Today’s issue is going to be a short one. I just spent 13 of the last 14 hours on planes and I’ve achieved a level of jet lag that is making me feel like Dr. Manhattan. While typos are, of course, always on purpose in this newsletter, any you notice in this issue are especially on purpose.

Today marks the beginning of a little summer world tour Garbage Day is doing. I’ll be in Tbilisi, Georgia, this week, presenting at the Zeg Storytelling Festival. If there are any Garbage Day readers here, shoot me an email!

Before we get into the garbage, I wanted to plug my friend Josh Chapdelaine’s new podcast. I’m super excited about it (this is not a paid ad lol).

It’s called Everyone Knows That: The Search For Ulterior Motives and it was produced by Josh and… Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas. It’s all about the search for “Ulterior Motives,” known widely as “Everyone Knows That”. You can listen to the series premiere now at lostmedia.fm, via this RSS feed, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A Real Good TikTok

@jordanreviewsittt

Wow amazing! #work #workhumor #corporate #office #officehumor #corporatehumor #relatable #funny #satire

The Weird Kennedy Did An Interview With Town And Country

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Jack Schlossberg is JFK’s grandson. He’s also a prolific Massachusetts Instagram maniac (iykyk). And he did an interview with Town And Country, the exact outlet you would want for this kind of story. You can read the whole interview here. It’s a lot more lucid than I was expecting. And I actually found this insight about how social media works now a little profound.

““It’s a lot harder for a positive message to spread than it is for a takedown,” Schlossberg told Town And Country. “I think that if there was anything strategic about my videos, it was to try to combine those two things so that a strong opinion, which travels fast online, was combined with a serious set of facts. And I think that you need that combination in order to break through, and to make things exciting.”

Apple Isn’t Working On A Vision Pro 2 Anymore

This comes from The Information, who got the scoop on this. Instead Apple is going to focus on a cheaper model, currently codenamed N109. I assume that’s short for “Does aNy1 still want this,” am I right? (I have not slept since Monday night).

I got messages from more than few readers saying I went a little far in downplaying Apple’s influence last week. But my main point is that technological revolutions require a big influx of users to really catch on. And you cannot do that by selling headsets that costs the same as a used car.

Incidentally, though, I actually spotted my first Vision Pro in the wild today. A guy was wearing one on my flight from Paris to Tbilisi (he was in first class obviously).

X’s Revenue Is Down Almost 50%

This comes from some recent filings Bloomberg reported on. Basically, Elon Musk wants to add a payment app inside of X because he’s desperate to turn it into an Everything App like WeChat and you can’t do that unless people are using it for transactions.

But in order to get regulatory approval to add a payment feature, X had to disclose a bunch of financial information. Which is how we now now that revenue for X was 40% lower in the first half of 2023 than what it was during the same period in 2022.

Masterful gambit, sir.

UMG Has Partnered With An AI Audio Company

This is a big deal. This would be close to a Spotify moment for AI audio. Universal Music Group inked a deal with a startup called SoundLabs, which has a plugin called MicDrop. The plugin lets artists create audio clones of themselves on the fly and works with any major production software.

It’s a bit of a chilling thought, but these next few months, before this plugin rolls out, are basically going to be the last time we can kinda-sorta be sure that what we’re hearing is from a human being and not AI-generated.

Though, that’s totally dependent on whether or not this thing sounds good. But if it doesn’t sound good, that might even be more interesting.

The “autotune” sound that we all think of is actually what happens when a musician dials up the settings all the way and it starts to degrade the audio. So it’s really hard to predict how these AI models are going to start influencing music once they make their way into producers’ hands.

If Font Were Outfits

Some Stray Links

• “Ecuador’s Risky War on Narcos”

• “Inside the Drowning of Crystal Lake”

P.S. here’s a good Noam Chomsky post.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***