Prayers up to all the playa people… 🙏

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Hopefully things worked out okay for the Temple of Enamitek. “What’s Enamitek?” you say. A:

@mattrubycomedyBurning Man! The playa provides… #burningman #burningman2023 #burner #sf #sanfrancisco #art #artcar #temple

(Here’s a YouTube link if you’re too old to TikTok.)

Phew, at least Diplo and Chris Rock made it out! But, um, who cleaned up all their stuff? Radical self-reliance (except for celebrities), I guess.

The stuff I posted above went semi-viral which, of course, brought on some haters.

Fair. I’ve never been to Burning Man, but I feel like I get it. Still, everyone always tells me I need to go. “You would love it,” they say. But as a Jew, I’ve always felt like it’d be rude to my ancestors. I can practically hear them kvetch, “We spent 40 years trapped in the desert, and now you’re volunteering to go to one!? Oy vey.”

Also, I’m bad at logistics and planning in advance.

I hate porta potties too. (Hot take, eh?) So I’m especially thankful I wasn’t part of this year’s BM sh*t show. No wonder the initials are BM, amiright? 🚽 (And btw, I don't like how often we use the phrase "sh*t show" now. I prefer "vomit carnival." 🤮🎪)

Burners ain’t getting much sympathy online. Fyre Fest residue, I suppose. There’s just not a lot of empathy out there for rich kids, tech bros, and social media influencers. Also, we’ve all talked to someone who’s gone to Burning Man before and, well, it’s a thing.

For example, woo woo types love to talk about stuff they do by inserting a preceding adjective that’s actually a passive aggressive way to big up themselves:

• ethical non-monogamy

• effective altruism

• ecstatic dancing

• radical self-reliance

The hidden message: The way other people do these things is unethical, ineffective, joyless, and mundane.

Well, I’d like to give these folks some constructive criticism. This approach just makes you sound like a bunch of compassionate conservatives. And you know how we feel about that. Lesson: Just do the thing and let other people decide just how wonderful it is.

Btw, people who talk about "ethical non-monogamy" are the vegans of the bedroom. We get it, you're better at philandering than the rest of us. Now can you please stop mentioning it? Makes me appreciate how French people cheat and don’t talk about it because c’est la vie.

Meanwhile, the weather just keeps getting increasingly bonkers. I didn’t even know a desert flood was possible. Kinda makes me mad at the people who tried to warn us about climate change because they somehow undersold it. They were all like, “Ice caps will melt in 50 years and the average temperature will go up 1 degree over the next decade.” Reality: There are hurricanes in California, floods in the desert, a heat dome in the midwest, and poisonous smoke all over the east coast because of wildfires in Quebec. Ugh, you don’t have to “underpromise and overdeliver” the apocalypse.

To those still trying to escape the playa, I encourage you to remember what us Jews learned in Sinai: Even though God’s timeline may not align with ours, he doesn’t keep us in the desert forever. Also, if you’re the last ones out, you’ll totally be in the documentary that Hulu’s gonna make about all this titled Sick Burn. And that will be great promo for the new app you’re making that’s “ChatGPT meets crypto but for plant-based influencers and also it sends users’ retinal scans to the Defense Department” or whatever.

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Don’t make me beg. It’s unbecoming. Just go ahead and pony up a few bucks so I don’t feel like I’m wasting my youth typing this thing up every week. Thanks.

Quickies

🎯 Pretty cool how we’re constantly filming our kids. I mean, look how well that’s worked out for child actors.

🎯 The Republican primary: Which Ivy League guy who pretends to hate the elites do you trust the most?

🎯 A lesson for podcast listeners…

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🎯 chinsecure - that feeling you get when you go to post something but your phone shows you what you look like instead

🎯 How I’m like Einstein:

🎯 Egg freezing has 30something NYC women out here sounding like farmers: "'Twas a robust harvest this season. A healthy crop was captured, but work remains. Alas, there's been a frost in the Bumble DMs so it’s a race against the clock. But I won’t shave ‘til all the corn is in the bin. OK, time to hoe."

🎯 You think men are bad now? Just wait until the AI sex robots show up. The only thing keeping men on the rails up till now was our desire to impress women. Once that’s gone…yikes.

🎯 US Open 🎾: Those boxes with the players’ “teams” are getting way too much screentime and attention now. Related thing I learned: I'm always gonna root for the player from a central European country whose box contains just one person and it's his stonefaced coach who looks like an extra from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

🎯 My fave Vonnegut term (from Cat’s Cradle) is karass:

🎯 The second full moon in a calendar month is called a “blue moon” – and that’s how we got the phrase “once in a blue moon.” (How did I not know this until now?)

🎯 Vivek Ramaswamy keeps bashing Millennials and Gen Z as a way to kiss up to old people. He's like an Uncle Tom but for young people.

🎯 Crypto is astrology for dudes. Whether it's the saturn moon or the price of Bitcoin, everyone wants something that's "rising."

Comedy

🃏 NYC: Come to my psychedelic comedy show on Sept. 14: Misguided Meditation with Matt Ruby comes to the Psychedelic Assembly (a groovy space in midtown). Comedy + visuals + sounds + open bar. It's a show about psychedelics, death, therapy, mindfulness, and more. Coupon code MISGUIDED5 gets you a discount. Here’s a sneak peek at the visuals from a previous edition:

🃏 I post clips of my standup (and more) at Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube.

🃏 Check out my other newsletter: Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian.

Podcast

Check out Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby. Is it like the Rubesletter? Same same but different. Listen up and see what I mean:

Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby Stereoactive Media 27 episodes

Clip from a recent ep:

5-spotted

🗯 Author Lauren Hough: Keep your therapy-talk out of my psychedelics use.

If psychedelics have therapeutic value, I don’t want to know. They’ve already ruined weed — they, the people who ruin things — by adding the word “medicinal.” I don’t need another medication. I’m not searching for enlightenment. Concerts are just better with a little nudge. I do drugs because it’s fun.

Amen, sister. Related: Watch me do standup sets in altered states in “Matt Ruby: Substance.”

🗯 The millennial pause: the split-second millennials wait before they start talking in a video.

The pause is a technical hangover from using older technology that did not start recording instantly. Moreover, while millennials may be accustomed to documenting their lives in photos, the millennial pause is an indicator of discomfort with recording videos absent from those generally made by Gen Z.

I’m more about the Gen X interruption.

🗯 The “urban doom loop”:

When fewer workers commute downtown, there’s less business for downtown shops, less vitality and a diminished sense of safety, so even fewer people want to commute downtown.

Eventually tax revenue dips and it gets harder for cities to keep services running, a cycle…The doom loop could be especially severe for public transportation. Lower ridership could lead to cuts in service or fare increases, which could send ridership even lower.

Eventually, we’re going to connect the dots between a bunch of societal ills and our refusal to go back to the office.

🗯 The two routes to learning a language, according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

There are two routes; the first is to memorize imperfect verbs, grammatical rules, future vs. past tenses, recite boring context-free sentences, and pass an exam. The second approach consists in going to a bar, struggling a little bit and, out of the need to blend-in and integrate with a fun group of people, then suddenly find yourself able to communicate. In other words, by playing, by being alive as a human being. I personally have never seen anyone learn to speak a language properly by the first route. Also, I have never seen anyone fail to do so by the second one.

Viva playing.

🗯 Another thing Gen Z is losing: slow dancing. They’re okay with twerking though. Go figure.

Ironically, the once-chaste act of slow dancing may now be more taboo among young people, because of the intensity of its intimacy. When you are slow dancing, you are face to face with another person, staring into their eyes for an extended period of time. That is a stark difference from most approaches to twerking, where a woman’s back is to another person’s front, as a song that emphasizes the casualness of sexual interactions blasts in the background.  

I’ll add it to the RIP list along with making eye contact.

OK, we did it. Thanks for reading. Go ahead and fwd this to an enemy. That’ll show ‘em.

-Matt