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After 12 hours in LA I'm a stand-up comic doing ASMR with a side gig as a music promoter

2023-01-06 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:55 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube (also: Personal life, Economics, Pop culture) · mode: Curiosity & trivia · tags: on location

Squatting after hurting his knee while ice skating, Hank muses in Los Angeles that awards ads there target fewer than 10,000 Academy members, says people marvel at an AI's bad joke but adapt to AI within a month, guesses a living computer will come in his lifetime, and recommends a song he found on a sticker.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Hank's ice-skating dive for Orin hurts his knee, so he squats; LA awards ads begin

  • ★★ Hank says he did not fall while ice skating but dove in front of Orin to make him laugh, hurting his knee; that is why he is now squatting. (playful) — 00:00:00 · Orin Green
  • ★★ Hank finds it weird that Los Angeles is full of advertisements, tens of millions of dollars' worth, asking him to consider films or TV shows for awards. — 00:00:00 · Los Angeles

00:00:46 — Awards ads aimed at the Academy's 9,921 members; 'stand-up upset'

  • ★★ Hank says the Academy has 9,921 members, so each awards ad is for an audience of fewer than 10,000 people. — 00:00:46
  • ★★ Hank reasons the ads must work, since otherwise nobody would buy them; they are really aimed at the 45 or so voters who might change their votes, because there is that much economic value at stake. — 00:00:46

00:01:31 — AI's bad jokes, how fast we adapt to AI, a living computer in his lifetime

  • ★★★ Hank observes that a bad joke from him gets groans, but a bad joke from an artificial intelligence makes everyone lose their minds, just as a person doing hard arithmetic would impress while a computer would not. — 00:01:31
  • ★ Hank wonders whether people were as freaked out when computers first did math problems as they now are when AI writes a requested poem. (unsure) — 00:02:00
  • ★★★ Hank says people already treat AI feats, like hotwiring instructions written as a Shakespearean sonnet, as no big deal after just a month: we adapt so fast. — 00:02:35
  • ★★ Hank says it seems humans will make a living computer sometime in his lifetime. (hedged) — 00:02:35
  • ★★ Hank imagines a living computer would be huge news on Friday and not even new gossip by Wednesday (11 January 2023), the gossip 40 years from now still being Harry Styles and Taylor Swift doing something; a year later, introducing a computer friend would be nothing weird. (playful, speculative) — 00:02:35

00:03:17 — A sticker for Samantha Rose Garrison's song Vampire Boy; sign-off

  • ★★ Hank reads a sticker he found advertising Samantha Rose Garrison's song Vampire Boy, available on all streaming platforms, says everyone should listen to it, and plays some of it. — 00:03:17

In the description and comments

  • ★ Replying to a viewer who read his low shots as taking John's 'take it down a notch' literally, Hank's comment says he should have gone lower every shot. (playful) — creator comment

Humor (significant)

  • Hank explains his injury: he did not fall while skating, he dove in front of his son on purpose — 00:00:00

    “Because I will do anything to see that little kid smile.”

  • Squatting low because of his knee, Hank says he is doing stand-up comedy, except he is not — 00:01:10

    “A lot of stand-up comedy these days is really just stand-up upset.”

  • Reasoning that awards ads only need to sway the few voters who might change their minds — 00:01:10

    “If you could just find those 45 people and give them each a million dollars, it would be the same thing.”

  • Imagining how quickly a living computer would become normal, Hank introduces a future friend — 00:02:35

    “He's a computer man. He's a man made of computer.”

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: artificial intelligence · Vampire Boy

Also: People: 50 Cent · Harry Styles · Orin Green · Taylor Swift · William Shakespeare

Works: Gilligan's Island

Organizations: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Concepts: advertising · hedonic adaptation · value (economics)

Places: Los Angeles

Only in the description or credits: Samantha Rose Garrison

Also centred on artificial intelligence: Google in your Brain · Question Tuesday Except I'm an AI · Asking an AI Image Generator for Pizza Johns · AI tells me if AI will write novels. · Things are Changing Very Fast · The Coming AI Invasion

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