Note: Don’t want to read all this every week? You can also listen to my podcast Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby. It offers similar smartfunny™️ content but, y’know, for your earballs.

Quickies

🎯 OnlyFans revealed the chasm between how much we claim to hate feet compared to how much we secretly love them. I call this the toe gap market gap.

🎯 I'm bad at remembering people's names. Can I make up some phony disorder for this trait so instead of seeming rude people consider me a victim? "Oh, it's Jeff? And we've met before? Look, dude...chill. I have anamic aphasia and I don't appreciate you shaming me for it."

🎯 “There’s no way TikTok will ever be sold,” says the Chinese government while also claiming it has nothing to do with the ownership of TikTok. Um, how’s that work exactly?

🎯 Relationships should be defined like Instagram DMs: "Look, am I your PRIMARY partner, are we just dating in GENERAL, or am I merely in your REQUESTS tab?"

🎯 No one goes to the office anymore and everyone has a podcast. Solution: Just turn all the office buildings into podcast studios.

🎯 I feel like "trust the science" would be more plausible if we didn't all turn on the TV and see an endless stream of "we clearly haven't figured this out yet" plastic surgeries.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

Twitter: "We removed what made the blue check valuable and now that it's worthless, we're charging you for it!"

9:47 PM ∙ Mar 24, 2023

🎯 "he ghosted me" = So weird because ghosts would be amazing boyfriends. They're always around, constantly say your name, are extremely attentive, and desire a long-term relationship.

🎯 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives!? I feel like the firearms/exposives guys must give a HUGE amount of sh*t to the alcohol/tobacco guys. "Yeah, I just defused a bomb. But, y'know, good luck with all those confiscated clove cigarettes!"

🎯 Great thing about growing up Gen X is we spent decades believing anyone who cared about zombies, dragons, comic books, or conspiracy theories was a loser – and I’m pretty sure we were right.

🎯 Loved the absurdity of Ja Morant going to "waving a gun around the VIP room at the strip club" counseling for a week in order to learn how to "manage stress better." Just say ya gave him a time out and move on with it instead of performing this mental health kabuki.

🎯 true definitions:
food insecure = starving 
remote worker = shut-in
side hustle = second job
entrepreneur = unemployed
athleisure = still wearing my pajamas

🎯 Crazy how we’ve decided the solution to our deteriorating economy is legalizing weed and sports betting. "How did America return to being a great empire?" "They ate 50mg gummies and then took the Grizzlies -3.5 against the Pelicans."

Subscribe

The Rubesletter is supported by readers (free or paid subscriptions available). If you want to support my work, the best way is to crack open that wallet and pay for a subscription. C’mon, it’s just credit card debt. What’s the worst that could happen? 😇

Comedy

😈 Thanks to all the new visitors here who arrived thanks to my appearance on We Might Be Drunk, the fun podcast hosted by two of the best comedians in the game: Mark Normand and Sam Morril. I show up around the 40min mark. You can watch on YouTube (below) or wherever ya get your pod on.

😈 I post clips of my standup and more at Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Here’s an especially quick/dumb one…

😈 Watch my new standup special/documentary “Substance” where I perform high, drunk, on 🍄, and sober.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

"Substance" is a different kinda comedy special 😇 📺 youtube.com/watch?v=2Ak5CQ…

6:06 PM ∙ Mar 27, 2023

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5Likes3Retweets

Contact with a foreign tribalist

A couple weeks back, I wrote about why we hate VC’s.

Capitalism on the way up with socialism on the way down ain’t nothing but a scam. We’d all love to order the reward, hold the risk. But some of us don’t get to go off menu like that.

You can read the full thing here:

The Rubesletter • by Matt Ruby (Vooza)

Why everyone hates VC's

Greetings to all the new subscribers who showed up after Bill Simmons posted about last week’s Rubesletter: Welcome aboard! I’m a big BS fan so it was neat to see that. As a special treat, here’s a 20% off subscription offer: And just for y’all, I squeezed in mentions of Stephen A. Smith and the Greek Freak below. Onward…

Read more

14 days ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Matt Ruby

After, I got into a back and forth with one reader who responded. With his permission, I’m publishing the exchange here because I think it’s clear we occupy different information streams (and realities?) yet managed to have a good faith discussion nonetheless.

…

William A. White writes:

Matt - 

We shouldn't hate all VCs, just the evil ones! And even the evil ones deserve a bit of a break when the government unilaterally and arbitrarily closed the doors on the businesses they provided said VC to. 

What we should ALL hate is the willy-nilly way in which our government closed down our businesses and sent us ALL inside to kill each other to avoid us being killed by a virus that, by and large, only killed the weak and the sick. Why didn't they all just stay indoors and let the rest of us healthy people work and participate in a free society?

Maybe the unpredictability of government action is partly the cause of the VCs greed?  It wouldn't be justified, but hey, make hay while the sun shines because we're all just one virus away from the economy being forced to shut down!

My reply:

I hear ya. As a New Yorker, I can tell ya there was fear/panic at the outset and refrigerator trucks parked outside hospitals to keep all the dead bodies. That environment led to some rash decisions for sure. Mistakes were certainly made but I'm not sure if doing nothing would have been a better path. So the question is finding the right balance somewhere between everything and nothing. I think we went too far at first but we didn't know and then we eventually got it mostly right and also if it was so easy then which countries are the ones that totally nailed it and escaped the pandemic unscathed? 

I was once a youngish Libertarian but nowadays I've come to see the value in regulation, institutions, and the other guardrails that keep freedom and democracy on the rails. Government is just us as a society making decisions together and somehow we've gotta figure out how to all get along or else we'll deteriorate into a pit of war, selfishness, and greed. 

The end goal is to work together toward unity, compassion, and empathy somehow.  At least that's what the mushrooms keep telling me.

…

Thanks for the thoughtful reply Matt. 

There was quite a bit of fear mongering happening at that time and it created an environment where the public became very compliant. For me, that was the scariest thing of all: Watching the citizens of this "free" republic willingly give up their freedoms based on what the government was telling them. 

Regarding your comment "Government is just us as a society making decisions together" I have push back on this one....That is what government is SUPPOSED to be, but that ideal has gone the way of the Betamax. The truth is "us as a society" has NO IDEA what's actually happening and the government has done such a good job controlling the information flow through the media, and now "Big Tech" that we only see what they want us to see.  

The thing you said the government is protecting us from (deteriorating into a pit of war, selfishness, and greed) is EXACTLY what the government is achieving with us. We're more divided than ever, and the government is actively pushing an agenda to make certain that continues. 

Look at Critical Race Theory as an example. How does that bring anyone together? The whole doctrine is the exact opposite of "working together towards unity". The cool thing about our country has always been that we were this amazing "melting pot" where people from all cultures came and BECAME Americans. Now, everyone still wants to come, but some don't want to be part of the melting pot and become Americans, rather they come and seek to shape America into some better version of the place they came from. And our government bends over backwards to make sure those people can do whatever they want in the name of our most highly coveted moral ideal: Tolerance. Tolerance is killing us. We've abandoned the melting pot and have instead become Banchan. So many small plates on the same table each with distinct flavor and texture. 

Don't get me wrong, I love the variety and what other cultures do to make the US a much better place. We just need to stop being apologetic for expecting people to BE Americans. My girlfriend is from Thailand and she speaks Thai and, of course, loves Thai food. So do I (love Thai food) She and all of her friends are VERY clear about the gift that is America and they embrace our laws, customs, and culture. When you come from a poor county riddled with corruption, its natural to crave something better. We spend a lot of time in Miami, the same can be said for most of the Cubans I've met. If we continue on this path we'll cease to be the place where people seek refuge from the poverty and corruption as we'll be just another place with poverty and corruption. Then where will we go? New Zealand? Thanks for listening.

…

My reply:

The government has less control of information than ever before. How is the government pushing a CRT agenda? I get opposition to it but it also seems a rather hysterical response (like the trans opposition) to an issue that isn't really impacting society in any significant way but is able to upset people/get clicks/gives Tucker something to rant about. 

The reason we're all so aggro nowadays is technology and vampire capitalism combining to create an attention economy where rage/anger are incentivized because they are the best way to frack our brain stems. 

I agree with you plenty (viva the melting pot! and thai food!) and I appreciate you reading my newsletter even though it probably doesn't always align with your views. I think discourse and people genuinely interacting with each other is the solution to a lot of this.

…

Thanks again for the prompt and thoughtful reply, Matt. 

Regarding your comment about the government having less control than ever of media / information than ever, I can see where you're coming from. The interweb, with the various social platforms has given voice to the heretofore voiceless. However, for every "dissenting" voice there is, there seems to be 10 much louder voices opposing the dissent. 

Further, the algorithms that decide who gets attention are skewed in the favor of those who side with leftist policies and ideals. What Elon dropped a few months ago cannot be ignored. Twitter employees giving the White House editing rights over so-called "sensitive" tweets that were critical of Biden (or Hunter) etc. This is what happens in Banana Republics. 

There may be more access to media / information to independent thinkers today, BUT they are severely outnumbered and their voices are drowned out by those with views more in-line with the government and those who are willing to criticize the independent thinkers. We are a woefully undereducated populous and people no longer think for themselves. They read (more often hear) soundbites from their favorite "influencer" sources and they accept and adopt that message as their own and repeat it OVER AND OVER until it is accepted as fact and anyone who disagrees is made out to be a rube, hillbilly, bigot, or worse, homophobic misogynistic and racist. 

This is the strategy: If anyone disagrees with them, they shut down and call them a racist, and once they're labeled a racist, NOTHING they say can be valid because they're evil, and evil people can't have valid opinions. I'm no Trump apologist, far from it, but what the media did to him was a perfect example. They repeated the talking points ALL DAY EVERY DAY: Racist, misogynist, bigot, etc. 

Moreover during the election the media constantly reiterated the refrain that he was "the worst world leader in the way he handled COVID". No facts, not data, not statistics, just THE WORST...What is most troubling about this is how EVERY anchor and EVERY guest on nearly EVERY media outlet repeated the same refrain, almost to a word, as if they received a memo from the government. 

If this sounds far-fetched, let’s remember what Elon Musk shared with us as well as Donna Brazil's revelation about the 2016 presidential debates. Mainstream media is in the Democrat Party's pocket and the Democrat Party has been hijacked by the left. Again, Most people have NO IDEA what is happening with our government. Look how long it took for the facts to surface about the money flow from China to members of the Biden Family. For years various agencies within the government have been blocking the release of this information. This is a real story, but will it get any airtime on CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC etc? Likely not. New York Times? Maybe burred somewhere deep in the paper with a benign headline that won't attract many eyeballs. 

I wish things were different, and really wish more than anything that we lived in a society like the one you described in your earlier message, a society who's "end goal is to work together toward unity, compassion, and empathy somehow."  So long as the government (through the media) can convince us all that we are working toward that goal (when we're clearly not) they'll keep winning.  In the immortal words of Keyser Soze;  "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.”  Thanks for listening.

…

My reply:

However, for every "dissenting" voice there is, there seems to be 10 much louder voices opposing the dissent. 

Louder than Ben Shapiro, Russell Brand, Joe Rogan, etc.? You know millions more people watch/listen to Rogan than Stephen Colbert, right? I’m astounded by how everyone on every side is convinced they’re being ignored. 

Further. the algorithms that decide who gets attention are skewed in the favor of those who side with leftist policies and ideals. 

Again, the anti-vaxxers, racists, Evangelicals, etc. all seem to be getting plenty of attention. For example, the right wing has a massive advantage on Facebook. 

What Elon dropped a few months ago cannot be ignored. 

Really? I’ve enjoyed ignoring it and my life has gone without any issue. Mostly because I can't handle another hysterical 1 of 386 Twitter thread from Taibbi. But if the end result is more regulation of social media platforms, then by all means bring it on. I’m no fan of Musk/tech execs deciding what people should/shouldn’t know. 

Twitter employees giving the White House editing rights over so-called "sensitive" tweets that were critical of Biden (or Hunter) etc. This is what happens in Banana Republics. 

I think everyone did their best to deal with a last minute news drop pre-election and tried to not repeat the same stuff that happened four years earlier. But again, why on earth are Twitter employees being put in this position? They’re not journalists or politicians. If social media is going to have this much power in our society, we should agree on ways to regulate it the same way we did with newspapers, TV news, etc. Tech got us into this mess and we should do more to challenge how it is failing us as a society. 

There may be more access to media / information to independent thinkers today, BUT they are severely outnumbered and their voices are drowned out by those with views more in-line with the government and those who are willing to criticize the independent thinkers. 

What’s the evidence of this? How are they being drowned out? Could any lack of traction they’re experiencing be because their ideas lack merit? Idiots sometimes fail to become popular because, well, you get it.

We are a woefully undereducated populous and people no longer think for themselves. 

Agreed!

The media constantly reiterated the refrain that [Trump] was "the worst world leader in the way he handled COVID". No facts, not data, not statistics, just THE WORST...What is most troubling about this is how EVERY anchor and EVERY guest on nearly EVERY media outlet repeated the same refrain, almost to a word, as if they received a memo from the government. 

I lived through the pandemic and consumed the news every day and don’t recall ever hearing these things you say were constantly reiterated. Maybe watch less cable news? I find the NYT pretty good at pissing off extremists on both sides which nowadays feels like a good sign you're doing journalism properly. 

Anyway, I hate Trump. He’s a narcissistic con man. It’s true. Every New Yorker knows it’s true. The fact that we even have to debate anything about him feels silly to me. If people used the wrong bad words to describe him, I don’t really care that much. He was a fool at those press conferences and was telling people to inject bleach and the whole thing was like watching Jackass Goes to The White House. He’s the worst. (Although I admit this: he’s the greatest con man to ever live.) The fact that I can see this doesn't make me "deranged," it just means I have eyes and a brain that works. 

Remember what Elon Musk shared with us as well as Donna Brazil's revelation about the 2016 presidential debates. Mainstream media is in the Democrat Party's pocket and the Democrat Party has been hijacked by the left. 

This obsession with the mainstream media feels very 2006. Look at where the actual traffic/attention is going and you’ll find where the real power lies. I watch Donna Brasile every Sunday on ABC's This Week panel and she’s off her rocker and not worth listening to in any mindful way. 

As for "hijacked by the left" – which laws have the Dems passed that show they’ve been hijacked by the left? And do you feel the right has been “hijacked” by racists and religious kooks or nah? Can you see how those arguments sound similar?

Look how long it took for the facts to surface about the money flow from China to members of the Biden Family. For years various agencies within the government have been blocking the release of this information. 

Who hasn’t heard about Hunter Biden and his laptop by now? Is it possible that people just don’t care? How many times can you tell the same story to people who don’t wanna hear it? He's a junkie who liked whores and got a sweetheart deal from a foreign government. We. Get. It.  

So long as the government (through the media) can convince us all that we are working toward that goal (when we're clearly not) they'll keep winning. 

The government isn’t winning. The government is incompetent. They can’t pass any laws. They’re owned by lobbyists and corporations. Politicians care more about going viral than ever making any meaningful compromises that might help this country.

And that’s what I think we actually need. Compromise. The more we just go to our battle stations and label the other side as conspiratorial enemies, the more we’ll remain stuck in the mud.

I appreciate you engaging in a mindful conversation though. People with varying viewpoints should be interacting more. The only way out is through.

Share

5-spotted

🗯 David Sax left his phone at home. Totally intentionally.

When you leave your phone behind you notice a few things:

You reach for that phone a lot. When you are bored, or angry or the conversation lulls, or as the microwave turns.

You don’t need it all the time. I am not an ER doctor on call, CEO, or world leader. An hour or two incommunicado won’t even be noticed.

You are instantly calmer. An anxious appendage has been removed from you.

You notice things. A hawk circling, a weird squirrel eating a bagel, your kid.

Time kind of floats by.

You never, ever regret leaving the phone behind.

🗯 The Honest Broker on how the web is turning into the online equivalent of the Las Vegas strip. 

What happens when an entire culture shifts to intermittent reinforcement models?

Everything gets faster. That’s why TikTok creators are speeding up their songs and visuals.

Everything gets shorter. That’s why song duration is shrinking—the 3-minute pop song has been replaced by the 2-minute pop song.

Everything new soon seems old. Trends come and go as users churn through novelties.

Everything gets dumber. Hey, just look around you.

Do we want this? It doesn’t really matter, because we’re getting this…

The most powerful response is to do the exact opposite—namely, offer deeper and richer entry points into music, arts, and other cultural idioms.

🗯 Nick Maggiulli: When is the Right Time to Buy a House?

Regardless of what is happening in the housing market, the right time to buy a home is when you can meet the following conditions:

You plan on being in the home for at least 10 years

You can afford it

You have a stable personal and professional life

🗯Escaping Flatland explains how MrBeast learns.

There are ways you can see the most viewed videos on YouTube every day…And you just start to notice patterns. Like the thumbnails on the most viewed videos, or videos that go super viral, tend to be clear, tend to not have much clutter, tend to be pretty simple. Titles tend to be less than 50 characters. Intros tend to be this. Stories tend to be this. After you see those thousands and then tens of thousands of times, it just starts to click in your head. This is what it looks like.

🗯 Benjamin Franklin once said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." But it wasn't originally meant to mean what people think.

It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.

Thanks for reading.

-Matt

P.S. Check out my other newsletter “Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian” for standup advice.