“Put a ring on it.”
-Saturn

"Psst. I'm a god in Norse mythology. But I don't tell many people that."
-Lowkey Loki

"We are the champignons...of the world!"
-French mushrooms singing Queen

“This is where the magic happens.”
-A magician showing you his hat

"Worst. Surprise party. Ever."
-Drunk at his own intervention

“So I did a thing.”
-Jeffrey Dahmer

"Is that a Banksy?"
-Me, examining vomit on sidewalk

"Are you going to put this in one of your sketches?"
-Someone in the middle of an incredibly boring story that no one has ever enjoyed

“I can change him.”
-Women

“I love no caps, no cap.”
-Modern day e.e. cummings

"It’ll be just like a podcast but without microphones.”
-Me, asking someone to have a conversation with me

"It's kinda like when an NFL team puts the franchise tag on a player they really like."
-Me, explaining marriage

“Stalk this person! C’mon, just one more time!”
-The Instagram algorithm

"Petty Hate Machine."
-Trent Reznor describing Twitter

“I’m an empath.”
-Person failing to realize how boring they are to everyone around them

“The woke are so childish!”
-People obsessed with Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, Little Mermaid, Harry Potter, and M&Ms

"Pretty sure I'm being shadowbanned."
-Me, not realizing I’m just unpopular

”Like, I’ll be a pop-culture reference and you’ll be, um, some animal in a nature documentary that, y’know, hunts or eats or whatever. And here’s a clever and witty insult. Zoom in!”
-Writer’s Strike Roman Roy

“I'm a real renaissance man.”
-Guy with syphilis

“FACT CHECK: Hulkamania is not actually like a single grain of sand in the Sahara desert that is Macho Man Madness. This is misleading.”
-CNN, failing to realize it's covering pro wrestling

"I understand you're upset about that thing that happened to you. But keep that energy going for this thing that happened to me. Because me!"
-Everyone who uses the phrase "keep that energy going"

“See that dog chained up in the backyard. How do we get humans to volunteer for that experience?"
-The team that invented phone chargers

"People on my side are the real victims here."
-Everyone on every side

“Do your research!”
-People who never read books

"He was great at targeting nonconsumers."
-Biz school dude explaining Jesus

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
-People who don't own actual disinfectant

"That deserved more."
-My tombstone

Quickies

🎯 A rainy Saturday is the universe giving you a permission slip to veg out.

🎯 Weird: The more generations your family's been in America, the more you hate America. Meanwhile, the most patriotic people are immigrants who just got here, because they know how much worse it can get.

🎯 Knowing your body count must be really tough if you're both a serial killer and a necrophiliac: "What's my body count? Well, you mean how many people have I killed or how many have I had sex with or how many people did I kill and then have sex with?"

🎯 Documentaries do too much now. They're all like "Fantastic Octopus 30 for 30 Triplet Ketamine Cowboys." And then there’s also gotta be an out-of-left-field plot twist before act three. It’s overwhelming. Just tell me a straight narrative about one interesting person's life and I’m good.

🎯 I don't know how ladies drink martinis, cosmos, or anything else that comes in one of those fancy glasses. I spill anything that's not in a rocks glass – and I'm not even wearing heels (most of the time).

🎯 Found the perfect caption for that Spiderman pointing at Spiderman GIF…

Comedy

😈 MISGUIDED MEDITATION WITH MATT RUBY RETURNS IN JUNE...

• 6/1 LOS ANGELES

• 6/9 BROOKLYN

(promo code "tunein" for discount)

A SHOW ABOUT MINDFULNESS, PSYCHEDELICS, THERAPY, MEDITATION, AND DEATH.

😈 Also doing a bunch of shorter sets in Los Angeles over the next week:
5/24 - Set Up @ Citizen Public Market (8pm)
5/26 - Comedy Chateau (10pm)
5/30 - Neal Brennan and Friends @ Westside Theater (8pm)
5/30 - Belly Room @ The Comedy Store (10:30pm)
5/31 - Totally Comedy Show @ Bar Lubitsch (8pm)
6/1 - Misguided Meditation @ Oeno Vino (8:30pm)*

* extended set

😈 I post clips of my standup at Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Here’s me dealing with a table of angry lesbians in Maryland:

😈 Check out my other newsletter “Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian.” A good recent post there: “There is no hack subject, only hack approaches.”

Tech, please

💿 Whenever I see a rich person on social media, I think, "What are you doing here?" Social media is where broke people go to pretend life is going well. It’s not for rich folks. Seeing them on it is like seeing a hot woman riding the bus: "Uh, you can get a ride. This place is for losers!"

💿 "You can be an influencer" is the way Zuckerberg and the Chinese government got an entire generation to work for them for free. It's like a massive unpaid internship pyramid scheme.

💿 Want people to value your stuff more? Stop calling it "content." That’s like saying you make "widgets" – it’s a term that inherently devalues the final product.

💿 Related: In the future, humans will make the art and AI will make the content.

💿 Tech conferences are, um, fun?

Podcasts

1) It’s perfectly fine if your job isn’t your passion. New KOAL podcast is live:

Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby Stereoactive Media 17 episodes

2) Deep dive interview with me all about standup and my latest special “Matt Ruby: Substance” on Behind the Bits:

3) Me on a podcast talking Jews, etc.: “We delve into psychedelics, comedy, American culture, and get very Jew-y! We discuss growing up Jewish, how it connects with comedy and reconnecting with Judaism as adults in new ways.”

Spotted

🗯 Musician Nick Cave, who is so damn eloquent, on AI, human limitation, and our audacity to transcend it.

I don’t feel that when we listen to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen — a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation — a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.

What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. 

🗯 Men are in crisis. But it can be weird to talk about it while society also does the whole “men are toxic” thing. Ezra Klein tries to thread the needle:

At a meta level, I often think in politics you face this implicit sense that compassion or concern is zero sum, that to care about one group or one issue is to care less about another. I just don’t believe that. I actually think there’s evidence is not true…Compassion, it’s not measured out in teaspoons from a cup. It’s quite the opposite. I think it’s much more of a habit, something we get better at, something we have more capacity for the more we practice it.

Another reason it’s a worthwhile discussion topic: When men are in crisis, it’s a problem for everyone.

Up ahead for paid subscribers: Saucy stuff I shouldn’t say! Bezos is engaged, a Gary Vee conference, iffy thoughts on gender, RIP Martin Amis, Dan Savage on incels/sex work, and a song that keeps getting more interesting the more it’s stripped down...