5-Bullet Friday — Tech Tricks Galore, Making Radio-Ready Music in 60 Seconds, Stargazing for Inner Peace, The New Yorker Who Conquered UK Quiz Shows, and More

Hi All!

Here is your weekly dose of 5-Bullet Friday, a list of what I’m pondering and exploring. Feel free to forward along if the spirit moves you.

This edition is brought to you by Momentous. Be sure to see their offer in the P.S.

iPhone and Mac trick I’m using and sharing

​Track a flight in real time on iMessage, on iPhone or Mac. If you are looking to quickly get info on your flight or that of a loved one, all it takes is a text. No Googling required. Just text yourself (or someone else) the flight number with no spaces (e.g., UA8181), and you can easily track it inside iMessage. Tap on the auto-generated link (right-click on laptop), and time, gate, and more will automagically appear in a preview pop-up. See this screenshot for the exact steps. Hat tip to Loni!

Profile I’m reading

“The New Yorker Who Cracked the U.K.’s Premier Quiz Show” by David Segal for The New York Times.

New AI tools I’ve been playing with nonstop

​Suno and Udio. Here’s one of many prompts from Suno: “Heavy metal song about panicked polar bears that eat too much edible cannabis on New Year’s Eve.” It produced two song variations about 90 seconds later, and the quality was unbelievable. This AI-music arms race is heating up fast, and it’s also straining under the explosive demand. When I tried to use Suno for this bullet, it was freezing and producing errors, so I tried a competitor named Udio for the first time. I was up and running in seconds.
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From coverage in Tom’s Guide: “The brainchild of former Google DeepMind engineers, the [Udio] platform has already drawn both investment and attention from parts of the music community, including will.i.am and Common.”​
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​I used this prompt:
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​“an upbeat reggaeton song about a newsletter named 5-Bullet Friday that brings joy like a bathtub full of puppies”
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​Click here for the song it created in about 90 seconds, which I then extended. It’s unreal. I suspect some of you will also get a laugh out of the cover art, which I generated on the platform with “Tim Ferriss in a bathtub full of puppies.” Click the heart, and perhaps it’ll trend. :)
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​You could throw a lot of these AI songs on a sound system at a party tonight, and no one would raise an eyebrow.
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My song is in Spanish, but the English lyrics via Google Translate are below. It sounds a lot better in Spanish! The “extend” function could use some work blending the segments, but it is already a mind-blowing experience:
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​The newsletter that lights up the week, joy
Five bullets that wake me up every day, every day
Like puppies playing, they make me smile, smile
Bathtub full of joy, there is no better breeze, that breeze
Their stories carry us, every Friday is a party
5-Bullet Friday, the joy it injects you
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​Fresh news arrives, Friday is ready, oh yes
With each bullet, my heart bursts, bursts
Rhythm in words, like a complete, complete party
5-Bullet Friday, is the spark that resonates and connects
Under the Friday sun, the vibration does not stop
Five pure moments, drive away sadness​
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Once again, here’s the link to listen. And if the links are down for some reason, I downloaded my creation, so here’s a backup version.
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Mere moments after making the above, I got the warning “Due to heavy load, generations are much slower than usual. We’re working hard to improve performance.” The race goes to the swift!

Tech tricks I’m using

​Momentum Dash. You can see my screen at this link and the message I had for myself when I was working on Tools of Titans back in 2016. Momentum Dash is outstanding, but you’ll likely end up paying for it. My close friend found a free alternative with basic functionality, and it gets the bare-bones job done: New Tab Random Quote.

Poem I’m pondering

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

— Walt Whitman, as recommended to me by Maria Popova, who invited me to read this poem aloud at her event in Austin this past Sunday.
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If you’d like to see me as nervous as a whippet at an air-horn festival, watch 1:36:13 in this video onward. It was my first time ever reading poetry publicly, as I was a last-minute replacement for a cancellation. There were thousands of people in the audience, and my palms were sweating buckets. Relax, Ferriss! The annual event is called The Universe in Verse, and I highly recommend attending. I had a blast.

You can complement this edition of 5-Bullet Friday with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s foreword to Tools of Titans, my interview with Margaret Atwood, and my conversation with Eric Schmidt on the promises and perils of AI.
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And, as always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @tferriss and put #5BulletFriday at the end so I can find it.
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Have a wonderful weekend, all.
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Much love to you and yours,
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Tim

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