470. Michigan Comedy Diaries, The Jetsons in NYC & 'The Shit is Out Of The Horse...'
Plus! Sarah Elizabeth Hill, A Waking Up Sketchbook, & A throwback to Morris with a tiny squishface
Hey again, friend.
Welcome to Issue #470 of New York Cartoons. As I’m writing this, my brain is throbbing from a week of live drawing events, and I’m still reeling from the Traverse City Comedy Festival I attended last week.
I’m still writing up the recap of each incredible day, which I’ll be publishing in the coming week. But in the meantime, keep an eye out for my recap of my conversation yesterday with Michael Gerber (editor of The American Bystander's Viral Load ). It was a really interesting chat.
Aaanyway, Here are some of my diary entries from my adventures in The Mitten…
Day 1:
Day 2:
Day 3:
Stay tuned for the final big day… including a performance at an opera house theatre and a private lunch with Gary Gulman!
The Sketchbook I’m sharing with you this week is a portrait done for the Waking Up App. I like Robin, and this was a really good chat. You can listen here.
The MTA is currently demanding a standing ovation.
They finally figured out how to let us tap our phones on a piece of plastic to enter a subterranean tube that smells like a wet golden retriever that just rolled around in warm Chinatown garbage. Meanwhile, tech billionaires are testing “silent” air taxis over the Hudson River. What a time to be alive.
So this West Coast startup, Joby Aviation, is running test flights out of the West 30th Street Heliport just east of my old building right now. You know, that place near the pickleball courts where the “Blade” helicopters get you to JFK in 5 minutes while whistling the Succession theme in your head?
Their PR department is aggressively claiming their electric aircraft is “revolutionary” because it operates at exactly 65 decibels. They describe this volume as the exact equivalent of a “normal conversation.”
Whoever wrote that press release has clearly never spoken to a human being in Manhattan. A normal conversation in Hell’s Kitchen starts at 95 decibels and involves two people screaming at each other over a reversing rubbish truck about what is and isn’t Mamdani’s fault. Sixty-five decibels is not a conversation. Sixty-five decibels is a hostage negotiation. It’s a terrified whisper shared by two people on the subway.
I don’t think we’re worried about the ‘noise’ of these things…
If you caught my chat with Sarah Elizabeth Hill, you know we didn’t bother with small talk. We dove straight into the deep end.
Sarah writes, produces, and runs Bobi Media. She took $400 and built it into an agency that works with Oscar winners, Deepak Chopra, and brands you see on billboards. On paper, it looks like she just levitated to the top of New York media. Spoiler: nobody floats in this city. You claw your way up, or you get chewed up.
Sarah didn’t sugarcoat the human cost of the hustle. She talked about the time the grind nearly broke her completely:
“I was working so much I wasn’t leaving my desk... I hadn’t developed my habits and so was hospitalised, because I couldn’t get my brain to stop spinning.”
Keep reading/watching below:
I was invited to a screening of a new movie…
It is titled The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist and is directed brilliantly by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell. The premise is incredibly simple and deeply terrifying. Roher is expecting his first child. He wants to know exactly what kind of world his kid is going to inherit, so he takes a camera and interviews the leading artificial intelligence experts, billionaires, and computer scientists on the planet. It’s the “An Inconvenient Truth” of AI films.
Look. When you sit down in a dark room to watch a documentary, you expect to be entertained and hopefully informed. You do not expect to experience a profound existential crisis about the survival of the human race. The film perfectly captures the absolute whiplash of living in the current year. You spend half the movie marvelling at technological miracles of machine learning, and the other half calculating the odds of global thermonuclear extinction.
“Welp, the shit is out of the horse …and the horse is gonna keep shitting.”
The documentary starts by completely demystifying how these large language models actually function. They digest the entire internet. They consume every single thing ever made by a human being, all of Wikipedia, every Reddit thread (oof), and every social media post (double-oof). The developers give the system one singular job: figure out the patterns of that information and use them to predict the next word in a sentence.
Sounds fairly straightforward, right? Keep reading below..
Apocaloptimism & Why We Should Probably Stop Letting Billionaires Grade Their Own Homework
When I launched this wee newsletter you’re reading, I fully expected to spend my time exclusively dissecting the particular neuroses of my life in New York as a cartoonist and comedian.
And look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads
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