Seven Videos: Some Are Putting on an Act, Some Are Keeping It Real

WEEKLY · Weekly Roundup
2026-10-12  |  VOBC × Literary Mouthpiece
What’s put on gets old at a glance;
What can’t be faked gets richer the more you savor it.
I posted seven videos this week. Not one was made up—they’re all real.
After watching all seven, you’ll realize they’re really two kinds of people: one group trying hard to “put on a show”—faking the excitement, the image, the respectability, the name, even someone else’s face; the other quietly getting on with being “real”—real skill, real sweat, honest words, and true craftsmanship.
The world never runs short of absurdity; what’s missing is someone willing to serve it up just as it is.
All seven are below, with each video right after its description. No need to hunt them down one by one—just pick a title that catches your eye.
1 Chinese Entertainment Slammed on the Hot Search: Veteran Artists Aren’t Props, They’re People
Mr. Hu Jun went on a variety show and was told to learn how young people “recommend things.” The old-timer took it seriously and asked Li Naiwen, “How many should we plant?” They made up their minds: two. Those two patches of grass ended up planted right on the grave of Chinese variety TV.
The latest top trending topic starts with: “Chinese entertainment, stop making old-man variety shows.” But viewers aren’t criticizing the performers’ age—they’re criticizing the production team for taking the easy way out. They throw actors in their fifties into young people’s competitive games: roller skates, dances they’ve just learned, passing water while holding a wine glass in their mouths. The moment Li Naiwen puts on the skates, he loses the ability to speak and spends the whole time going, “Yoyo-yoyo.”
And it gets worse: Zhang Jin had just had a heart stent put in, and they made him dance. Liu Genghong has worked out for over twenty years, and even he kicked off his shoes. Sixty-four-year-old Harlem Yu went on Singer and was eliminated in the first round. As one netizen rightly asked: “Did they invite the seniors just to put them through the wringer?”
I make talking-head videos myself, and this line of work depends on contrast. But contrast should make people laugh, not feel bitter. You laugh at your dad fumbling around in his reading glasses, then feel bad afterward. A TV show laughs at an award-winning actor for not knowing how to plant grass, and as soon as it airs, it’s trending—and getting slammed.
A funny person is entertaining at any age; an unfunny show is hard to watch no matter how young the cast is.
2 Huang Renxun’s AI Tour: The World’s Richest Man Reposts a Fake Video
A guy dug up footage of Michael Jackson’s 1992 concert in Bucharest and replaced Jackson dancing onstage with Huang Renxun in a leather jacket. The moonwalk, the spotlights—it all looked completely natural. The audience was swapped out too: Cook, Su, Altman, Musk—a row of tech-industry heavyweights screaming for Jensen.
The video went viral overseas, and Elon Musk himself reposted it with just one caption: “This is why memory is so expensive.”
You might think he was just making a joke, but he was actually the only one there telling the truth. Memory prices really are going up this year. I wanted to add two sticks of RAM to my old computer, and when I looked up the price, it was nearly 300 yuan more than a year ago. Jensen warned us back in March: a memory shortage is great news for Nvidia.
The comments online were even funnier than the video. One person said, “The era of seeing is believing is over.”
The world’s richest man personally reposted a fake video—and what the video sang about was all true.
3 I Made a Video in Just Half an Hour
This week, I went ahead and filmed a “behind-the-scenes video,” walking through my entire process for making a video on camera.
People always ask: How long does it take you to make a talking-head video with a digital avatar? Half an hour. It’s not because I’m fast—it’s because I’ve broken it down into three steps, no more.
Step one: Choose a topic and write the script. I don’t force myself to come up with everything from scratch—I have a tool I built called “Mouthpiece Wordsmith.” Feed it a trending topic, and it lays out the jokes and punchlines for me. I tweak a couple of lines, and it’s ready to use. Step two: Feed the script to a digital avatar. The person speaking is my stand-in; it has my voice and my face, and I don’t even have to move my lips. Step three: Add a cover. I have a whole set of templates ready to go. Drop in the title, and you’ve got a cover in five minutes.
Choose a topic, make the video, design the cover: one person, half an hour, one video.
I never showed my face in any of these seven videos, but every single one was still “me.”
4 The “Business Tricks” of Sisyphe: Books Are the Décor, Coffee Is the Business
Over the past five years, the number of independent bookstores across China has halved. Everyone thought brick-and-mortar bookstores couldn’t survive—but there’s one chain bringing in 3 billion yuan a year, with more than 500 company-owned stores. It’s called Sisyphe.
What keeps it going? Definitely not books. Books make up 75% of its revenue, but the gross margin is only 28%—basically, it’s working for the publishers. The real cash cows are the café inside and the colorful notebooks by the entrance.
The café takes up just 15% of the floor space, but brings in over 60% of the profits. A latte has a 70% gross margin; a canvas bag, 80%. Wow—selling books is for making friends; selling bags is how you make a living. And the inventory trick is even better: if books don’t sell, they go right back to the publisher. Not a single copy gets stuck on the shelves.
I’ve run a small business and worked behind a counter. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is this: the things placed in the most prominent spots are often the least profitable.
Once you understand Sisyphe, you understand every “artsiness”-branded business: it isn’t selling products, but the feeling that makes you willing to pay for the experience.
5 Shanghai City: A Guide to Putting on an Artsy Front in the Magic City
This Beijing City-style rap is about my cousin—a young guy who’d just arrived in Shanghai, eyes shining with excitement. The next day, I took him to look at apartments: the sales office was grander than a hotel, the agent in a perfectly pressed suit, sizing up your finances before he even said hello. You needed 5 million yuan in verified assets just to get a look at the luxury apartments.
On the way out, my cousin asked: “What are the girls in the city like?” Listen up, kid—the girls here these days like to split everything into groups: six people share one afternoon tea, forty people share a hotel suite. Their photos are edited so much even their own mothers can barely recognize them. They can keep up appearances on social media, but not pay a bill. And when they turn around, those luxury cars turn out to be rented props.
But Shanghai isn’t all flashy shows either. There are young people here quietly pushing forward: people in cross-border trade working until they’re gaunt, coders writing until they feel sick, shopkeepers working until their hair turns white, delivery riders never stopping, rain or shine. What really keeps this city going isn’t its influencer-famous buildings, but the people who keep their heads down and hone their craft to perfection.
I’ve spent five years trying to make it in Shanghai, and I’ve learned how to put on airs too. But after writing this song, what I really want to say is something else: Shanghai has its rules, and what it respects is integrity.
6 Huawei Doesn’t Make Cars: It Hasn’t Built a Car, but It Has Built a Whole “Jie” Lineup
Today’s trending topic is Maextro again. I wasn’t interested in cars, but I clicked in and got completely confused: I still can’t tell Huawei’s cars apart.
AITO, Luxeed, Stelato, Maextro, Shangjie—come on, say them after me: AITO, Luxeed, Stelato, Maextro, Shangjie. By the end, I’d tied my own tongue in knots.
A netizen came up with a catchy rhyme, and I know it better than my times tables: “The rich buy Maextro, bosses buy AITO, those seeking enjoyment buy Stelato, the sensible buy Luxeed, and workers buy Shangjie.” You ask what kind I bought? I ride shared bikes—scan once, ride once.
Look a little closer, and those five “jie” brands aren’t all from one automaker—they’re from five different companies: AITO is Seres, Luxeed is Chery, Stelato is BAIC, Maextro is JAC, and Shangjie is SAIC. Huawei doesn’t make cars itself. It does one thing: invites all five players into its palace, then sits in the middle and runs the show.
The technology names inside the car are even more over the top. One netizen summed it up perfectly: “An electric car comes with half a Classic of Mountains and Seas.” The cockpit is called HarmonyOS, the chassis Tuling, the chip Kirin, the body Xuanwu, the battery Giant Whale, and the assisted-driving system Qiankun… I studied history, and when I saw that list of names, my first thought wasn’t to look at the car—it was to open a book.
This is what’s most romantic about Made in China: it won’t even give a battery an ordinary name.
7 Shenzhen City: Once You’re Here, You’re a Shenzhener—Believe It or Not
The Shenzhen version is about an old Shenzhen local who knows the city inside out. He says you can’t understand Shenzhen by just craning your neck to look at the buildings. To really know this city, you have to look at two things first: how crazy the prices are for the most expensive homes, and who gets to live the easiest life.
One stomp on the accelerator and a celebrity takes me to see a luxury development—Shenzhen Bay No. 1, 200,000 yuan per square meter, with 30 million yuan in assets required just to qualify. Then I look back at the office towers, their lights still on as people toil till dawn. On this side, we work ourselves to the bone and still can’t pay off a mortgage in a lifetime; on the other, the landlord enjoys endless morning tea every day.
After seeing the most luxurious building, he led me down a little path nearby. By the entrance, a figure sat fanning himself: baggy shorts, an old tank top, stylish flip-flops, and a huge bunch of keys jingling at his waist as he walked. I thought, “That poor old man must be so lonely in his twilight years.” My buddy nudged me: “Every building from here to there—more than a dozen of them—is in his name.” One month of his rental income is worth years of your hard work.
That’s when I understood: flip-flops are the real passport to this city.
But Shenzhen isn’t all scheming and money. Before dawn, an auntie’s stall is already steaming its first pot of rice. A huge bowl of pork-trotter rice costs just 12 yuan, with plenty to go around. What holds this city up has never been its skyscrapers, but the pairs of eyes reddened from working through the night.
Beijing values loyalty, Shanghai values style, and Shenzhen believes in nothing but hard work.
This week, I confirmed one thingThe seven videos are really about two ways of living. One is about “putting on an act”: faking excitement, appearances, respectability, a name, or someone else’s face. The other is about being “real”: real skill, real sweat, real words, real craftsmanship.
The pattern is clear: the fake stuff dazzles at first glance, then gets old the more you see it. The real thing may not stand out at first, but the more you sit with it, the more you appreciate it.
Huawei named a battery after the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and it made the hot search. But in the end, whether a car is any good still comes down to its chassis. Your Shanghai social-media posts can rack up likes, but they won’t pay your bills. AI can swap in any face, but it can’t replace the judgment in your head.
It’s the same with the videos I make. The voice can be cloned, the face can be digital, and AI can write the script. But you can’t fake the judgment of “just how absurd is this, really?”
The world is making it easier and easier to “put on an act,” so people who can be “real” are becoming more and more valuable.
SERVICE · Technical Know-How
How These Seven Videos Were MadeHere’s something you may not have noticed: I never showed my face in any of these seven videos.
The voice is cloned, the person is digital, the script is written by AI, and the cover is made from a template. Along the whole production line, the only real thing is my judgment of “just how absurd is this, really?”
I can teach you how to do all this now: (A Complete Guide to Making Talking-Head Videos with Digital Avatars), the whole process in three steps:
Step One · Write viral copy. This might ruffle some feathers, but viral copy and ordinary copy are two completely different things. For the exact same subject, why does one person write a press release while another turns it into a joke? That’s what this step teaches.
Step Two · Make your own talking-head videos with a digital avatar. Clone your voice and use your own likeness on screen—no memorizing scripts, no makeup, no need to show your face.
Step Three · Create an eye-catching cover. A good cover determines whether anyone clicks in. This step is the easiest to overlook—and the best value for your effort.
I have my own go-to tools and methods for every step, so you don’t have to scour the internet for software or figure it all out by trial and error. The document explains exactly how to do it and how long it takes. Once you pay, I’ll teach you step by step.
A Complete Guide to Making Talking-Head Videos with Digital Avatars
Become Your Own KOL
Start with just one video
DM me if you’re interested
NEW · New Service Announcement
We visit seniors at home to make them a memoirThis week, we also launched a new service: making memoirs for seniors in their own homes.
This isn’t just a simple recording of someone telling their story. We go to their home, sit down with them, and talk through the story of their life, one conversation at a time. Then we shape it into a book that can be passed down. We can also use their own voice to turn the book into an audio recording they can listen to anytime.
There are things some seniors have never told anyone in their lives. There are names that no one will remember if we don’t ask now. Let’s do it while there’s still time.
We’ll write a separate post later explaining how to book and what the different packages include. For now, we just want you to know: this service is a real thing.
And just like that, the week was over: seven videos, seven true stories.
Some people put on an act; others are the real deal. What I do has always been the same: find the line you want to say but haven’t managed to say out loud, hidden inside something absurd.
This world keeps giving us fresh material,
so we’ll keep on,
We’ll help you tell their story.
WeChat Channels | Search “VOBC” to watch these seven videos
Mouthpiece Wordsmith | Search “WorkBuddy” in the mini program
Register to get 2,000 points → Tap “Experts” → Search “Mouthpiece Wordsmith”
A Complete Guide to Making Talking-Head Videos with Digital Avatars | Learn the Whole Process
Custom Memoirs for Seniors, Made at Home | Coming Soon
I write copy: DM me or leave a comment