I feel grateful

If I didn’t move to California in 2023, I’d probably be hiding somewhere.

Instead, I get to occupy a spot, a slot, a place in the lineup. With people I had never met before. With friends I just made who think I’m rad.

These photos I take with other comedians … there would have been no Terry Bu. I would have been a ghost. hiding somewhere. Like I had hidden away for many years. I would have been invisible. Not in LA for sure.

For me to be here. With these people. Fellow comics. And meet new people and deepen friendships with existing people. Everyday feels like a privilege. A real joy.

The kind of joy I had always escaped from … I had never really known before in my life.

The joy I can give out on stage is only as much as the joy I have within myself :)

My ability to exude Joy and Happiness and Fun and Empathy out into the world is amplified by my ability to harness joy, happiness, fun and empathy within myself. Not only amplified, but made possible only through my ability to be happy in myself. 

To feel happy about myself, to feel joyous about who I am, what I achieved and what I do … To have fun with genuine things deep inside my soul that inspires curiosity … and to feel love and empathy for myself and for everybody else … first …

and then stepping on the stage becomes really natural and easy from that. 

Then you are not on stage to get validation from laughter and prove something about yourself, that you are funny.

Instead, you get on stage to give gifts to people. Share with people. All the joy you have within yourself to make people smile. And you don’t need them to laugh back. You just give out your gift freely. And sometimes they laugh, sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t matter. You are there to do your duty as a comedian to give out your joy. share your joy.

all angels sing in heaven

I was thinking today that all angels sing in heaven. that there’s no distinction between an “artist” “creative” and a normal person.

We all used to think there’s artists and the rest of us who are not so special. But that’s not true. We’ve actually lost touch with what is our divine destiny and what our goal should be (which is self realization and evolution) and so there are people who forget or choose to forget that divine goal. When we remember and decide to pursue self actualization and evolution, we naturally become artists and creatives in our own right. To pursue self-actualization means to actually learn to create for yourself. Create your own life for yourself … to be creative … is just a natural by-product of that. To take the reins to design your own life, your own world.

Instead of being a passive cell in this world, You are choosing to “happen” to things and take initiative to make things happen in the world and in your life instead of waiting for things to happen, fun to happen, etc.

My mom tends to judge me harshly when I sing and post on social media lol because she doesn’t understand. She seems massively bothered by it. I think most people are unfamiliar with the importance of self-expression, creative artistic expression and the importance of “doing” things in the spirit of flow of action … and how that impacts our brain and our well-being … rather than caring too much about the “end result” of it.

To be a creative person is to lose the fear of expressing yourself, and instead to revel in the act of making. It’s essentially a decision to think that way and act that way, instead of doing nothing and just staying as a passive observer. Instead of watching TV at home, instead, we can be active in the the act of creating. That action piece I think scares most people because they are so afraid of being judged, criticized or rejected. When in fact, it’s really not that bad when somebody judges you harshly, and that action is critical to leveling up, evolving as an artist, as a creative person. As you learn how to express yourself more authentically, more relatably, more uniquely, one mistake at a time. You have to make it a habit to express yourself. Otherwise you lose yourself in the ocean of … self-doubt, inertia, and … of course aging and old age. We just die if we just let things happen. You need courage and balls to make things happen in this world.

I think when people who are not yet capable of understanding that fact judge others harshly because they automatically think “oh you are trying to impress” or “oh you are trying to be that” … I wasn’t trying to be anything. That was me having fun, and some other people had fun as a result of me having fun. It was weirdly cathartic for all of us.

And all angels in heaven are free. Free to express. Free to sing. My goal is to try to become one of those angels. They become unafraid to express themselves because they realize God is always protecting them and there’s no need to fear others. That we were, since the time of birth, designed to create, sing, express, make art, and make our life into a masterpiece … just like God our divine creator. That we sing and create art and comedy not to please one person, or one booker, or one audience …. but to please God within us who knows that we are trying our utmost to bring out what is within us and capable inside us to bring out in the glory of God. In honor of God. And when we die, God will be proud of us. I am absolutely certain of that without a shred of doubt … It just came to me this morning.

Putting myself out there is scary! But we must have the courage to be disliked and misunderstood LOL :) …

I have nothing to lose. Sing in public. Do Roxy Hart in public. Authentic self-expression to the core. Who knows if I will be this healthy again? Will be this spiritual again? This young and 35 again? The answer is never. I put myself out there, despite all the odds, and see if I can make an impact in my small way before my death … which is inevitable. Tell jokes to the public. Especially the controversial ones. That’s who I truly am. How I learned from Bill Hicks, George Carlin … that’s the way they did it. And Bill will always be with me, as long as I do my comedy and art with love and truth … not as an attempt to offend or just create controversy for the sake of starting a fight.

Everything becomes fun

Even moving your body is fun. Going for a walk. Just having any occasion to do stuff becomes satisfying on its own. So weird.

When you play videogames all the time and watch porn, all you wanna do is to sit sedentary on your computer screen.

Instead, just going for a walk for no reason outside becomes fun. I guess that’s why dancing is fun for some people in the first place. Because moving your body, especially if you do it well, is fun. It was always fun. We just lost that fun.

The fun of taking care of your friends.

The fun of taking care of plants and animals.

The fun of listening to music. Playing music. The fun of singing.

The fun of sharing with others, loving others, talking to others.

The fun of engaging with others. The fun of listening to others.

The fun of healing others. The fun of teaching others.

The joy of eating a meal, cooking a meal, preparing a meal. The joy of tasting a healthy meal. The joy of tasting a fruit. The joy of tasting a vegetable. The joy of tasting in general.

The joy of learning. The joy of … just 10,000 other things. The fun of meeting old friends. The fun of making new friends.

The fun of reading. The fun of writing. The fun of living. The joy of life.

You recover it all when we realize the truth. It was all shrouded in mystery. But the truth was …

We were always meant to be joyful. But we lose it in the world.

We could always be this joyful. But we made choices. I made choices to lose it on worldly pleasures. So I lost touch with who I was, who I was meant to be, what I was supposed to do. How I was supposed to live.

Broccoli tastes sweet after fasting, on Keto diet

Once your sugar sensitivity comes back to your palate, after extensive fasting or keto diet, baked broccoli tastes sweet with just salt and pepper … amazing.

The whole act of eating becomes really satisfying after fasting in general but added with the taste recovery, I can eat broccoli more than I ever ate them. I used to hate broccoli.

So the whole fuss was because I had lost control of my own appetite and my own palate so I had begun to lose out on the true subtle taste of real veggies, real fruits, etc.

Even the granny apple the sour green ones tasted amazing today, I used to hate those and avoid those at all costs … it was my first real fruit after the 10-day fast.

So the whole focus should have been NOT messing up my palate now with smothering it with unhealthy things like doughnuts, candy, etc, cookies, cakes … that everybody else eats ….

Extended fasting makes me different every time

Filled with ideas and motivation for action. Trying new things. More intellectual curiosity. More joy in life. Wanting to move. Appreciation for music and sound. I see things and understand more clearly. I process things at like 1.5x usual speed … I move slower though because my muscle strength is not completely back but my mind is super active. Calm and active, not busy.

I can taste the subtlest sweetness in asparagus, broccoli, tomatoes … I ate a whole tomato like a fruit yesterday.

so strange. The next 30 days, I’m just going to do keto diet and not water fasting but I hope some of those ketosis brain benefits continue. I hope I don’t ruin it this time. All thanks be to God.

The Future of Comedy with possibilities to incorporate AI or Machine Learning

In the future, can AI be used to create or understand laughter? Can it be an impartial, objective entity to judge a joke’s value? Theoretically speaking, this is possible now through machine learning.


In simpler terms, we could start training a machine learning model that will get fed all the jokes told by past comedians that we know to be “great”. Ultimately, we could devise an AI that learns how to laugh at good jokes or understand bad jokes … or even attempt to creates jokes … kinda like Eve from Wall-E who understands humor.

Two types of input data:

  • First is joke textual data, meaning jokes written out in plain text.
  • Second is auditory or video data, meaning jokes told to an audience and analyzed through audio recordings or video recordings.

(Another possible input data type is number of recommendations from other proven, successful comedians. Kinda like Google’s “Backlink” mechanism that adds validity to a website based on how many links it’s getting from other websites, those recommendations will add validity to the fact that something is a good joke, although I put this as just an option because any human element in this algorithm has the chance of being manipulated through favoritism or nepotism)

So in simple terms, we could start training a machine learning model that will get fed all the jokes told by past comedians that we know to be “great”. We need to write these out in plain text, word for word.

Once we do that, we have an AI that can see a sentence in text form and try to deduce if it looks like a good joke or not, hopefully with 80-90%+ accuracy. We could potentially add other labels on the joke like “outdated” meaning it could have been a good joke that worked in Pryor’s time but likely won’t work today. Or labels like “potentially offensive toward LGBTQ” or “potentially offensive toward Latinos”. This would be possible through a well-trained model … theoretically. And then once we feed in YOUR joke, it will run its trained algorithm and say “Hmm, this joke is potentially offensive toward that race with about 30% chance but could be very funny with about 85% accuracy.”

Also, jokes are not just textual words. So audio analysis or video analysis will help immensely with this machine learning model. But since video files are so large in size, it would be difficult to try to add video in from the beginning. So we could stick to audio recordings to start.

Based on laughter feedback from audiences captured inside the audio recordings, especially at real shows, once we feed that into the machine learning model, it will get good feedback that “okay, so that joke is funny,” but also “okay, if you tell that joke in this manner, it doesn’t work that well but if you add intonation and say this part louder, then this joke is funny.” An audio data expert/engineer would be able to help us determine what is actually possible to calculate through audio data or not. At the least, after feeding this ML model like 5,000 to 10,000+ audio recordings, we would be able to deduce the general formula, the general sound pattern of what a joke sounds like. So at least this model will know, “oh, man, that sounds like a great joke.”

Theoretically, after this AI is fairly accurate and complete, the next possible sophistication could be to do take in the entire “set” of a comedian’s act. Instead of judging comedians by individual jokes alone, how did he/she arrange the jokes? What was the overall reception at the end of this set? Does this person’s set model a great comedian’s set arc/set order pattern? So Jane could have told 1. A+ joke 2. C- Joke 3. B joke, and instead of just totaling up those jokes and averaging them out, and saying Jane is kind of a B-level comedian, you could feed the ML entire sets like 100 of recordings to help it determine “okay, well Jane did badly that night but overall speaking with 95% accuracy, Jane is an A-level comedian.”

P.S.

One easy MVP (minimal viable product) of this idea could be a “Funny or Not” app. Basically akin to the app “Hotdog or Not Hot Dog” invented by the character Jian Yang played by Jimmy Yang on Silicon Valley, At the very least, it could offer guidance to beginner comics that a joke you are trying to do is unnecessarily long, or racist, or problematic, or unclear, or too derivative of some other joke in the past.

Fasting realizations

Extended fasting is helping me yet again to cleanse my mind and look at different parts of myself. Last time, it was inspiring me to move to LA and pursue comedy once again which turned out to be literally the best decision in my life. This time, I think it’s telling me something a little different. 

Lust and Gluttony are two aspects of an overactive animalistic human brain stemming from our evolutionary ancestors. If we let that part of our brain take hold of us, it becomes so big to the point where all you wanna do is focus on porn, sex and food … just like gorillas in the zoo who were fed white bread by their zookeepers and all they wanna do afterwards is to masturbate and mate, and for sure, end up dying early. Reproduction is a very taxing activity for both the male and the female.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were manipulative devils all over the world. Those who flaunt their sex appeal for attention and money on social media are essentially doing the devil’s work. As well as men like Jeffrey Epstein who sell little girls for the pleasure of old men with money . They are devil incarnate. Not just sexual lust but people who prey on the brain’s certain animalistic urges and aggravate them in order to … make profit or take advantage of other human beings. Essentially food marketing/advertising/commercials of McDonald’s or Popeyes seek to do that on TV by highlighting how good their item is and how good it will taste. Fitness programs and health products advertising do the same by trying to convince you to eat a particular vitamin or superfood. They try to convince you that they can make you fitter, sexier, stronger, smarter or more attractive. But that burger is never as good once you finish eating it. And that superfood doesn’t really make you smarter or fitter overnight.

Vanity, Gluttony, Pride, Sloth, Lust … these are the sin triggers that devils use to manipulate humans into their snare. The ways that angels use to win people over are love, humility, selflessness, joy, patience, kindness, discipline, compassion, forgiveness, temperance, diligence and modesty … which persevere over darkness every time.

I see different aspects of goodness and evil present in people closest to me, which is sometimes painful to see. You would want your best friend and family members to only embody the good qualities, but that’s the opposite of truth. 

In one of my friends, I see excessive envy and pride, who gets extremely triggered whenever he sees me doing well in comedy … and he tells me “you will never be like Trevor Noah so why try hard? Just give up and hang out with us and party more.” … I imagine inside this person’s brain, is insecurity stemming from him not trying so hard in life so he wants me to not try harder for self-actualization either. So he tries to discourage me. These attempts stop working as soon as you start paying attention to what’s going on. Not just focusing on the content of the message being sent by this person but deciphering the original intent of the SENDER of this message. It might have worked in the past when I was weak and susceptible to outside influences. But when you see the truth inside other peoples’ brains, it becomes so clear how you must protect your own brain energy and not be swayed by the senseless brain activity of people who want you to fail or not grow at all. Haters trying to come after you and want you to fail is because they feel bad about themselves when you are actualizing, going after your goals and being awesome. Extremely common online and in real life. Most people are actually like this.  

 In one of my family members, I see excessive sloth … he gets triggered when he see me working extremely hard to better my diet and fitness. He is overweight and diabetic from lack of discipline in controlling his diet and addiction to sweets during his youth … and therefore tries to discourage me from fasting or exercising because it makes him feel bad about being addicted to fat sugary foods all his life. He perhaps feels insecure also from not being able to attempt or do extended fasts himself. Recently he told me “Why do these difficult fasts? Maybe these fasts are pointless. YOLO. Just eat the stuff you wanna eat.” That was his comment to me, which was completely irrational. I felt like he was telling me ‘I’m unhealthy. So I want you to be unhealthy like me too. It’s okay.’ Some kind of a weird devil’s whisper. 

I kept wondering what’s going on in his brain, which was weird and discomforting but also fascinating at the same time. It’s probably because “Just eat the stuff you wanna eat” was the attitude he’s been programming himself his entire life until he realized that he became diabetic and realized it was too late to revert his habits. There might have been some sense of regret for his lack of discipline during his youth. But because he was too proud or scared to admit that his discipline during his life had been low and inconsistent, now he wants a younger family member to make the same mistakes he made because if I go down the same trap that he did, it will make him feel better. Instead of admitting that he was wrong to indulge his appetite all the time to the point of diabetes, he wants me to suffer the same, which would then prove, that he wasn’t the only person undisciplined and stupid in his youth. Because if everybody else was lacking in discipline like he had been, then he could rationalize “Hey, I’m not so bad. Look at Terry. He is falling down the same trap that I did. I’m not undisciplined. Terry is undisciplined too.” So his insecure ego gets a sadistic kick from watching other people fail at their diet too.

My message for today is we must not let other people from discouraging us or even rub off on us while we are trying to better ourselves. It is easier said than done. Some people’s influence on you can be extremely positive and beneficial, while some people (and to be honest, most people) can influence you in extremely discouraging and negative ways. My entire life, I was confused about this, whom to let inside my mind and my heart, and whom to protect myself against them. It was way too open and vulnerable. But now I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer, that despite the love I have for both my family and friends, I must be the most receptive to the energy I receive from God, and protect myself from everything else.