Podcast

New ep of Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby is available:

Or listen to the audio version wherever you podcast:

Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby Stereoactive Media 37 episodes

“Substance” screening in NYC

Tonight (8/15) in NYC: Substance screening + Q&A with director Matt Salacuse, editor Anthony Verderame, and me. Tickets/info.

What happens when a comedian performs on shrooms? And how does it compare to performances on weed, alcohol, and sobriety? "Substance" finds out! Join us for a special screening followed by a Q&A with Psychedelic Comedian Matt Ruby!

Watch trailer here:

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Standup

I have an unpopular view on body positivity:

NYC: You can catch me Tuesday nights at Comedy Cellar for Hot Soup and Wednesday nights at NY Comedy Club (East Village) for Good Eggs.

Watch more of my standup at YouTube.

Funny How

I also write a newsletter about the craft of standup called “Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian”. Recently there:

Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian Comic Matt Ruby offers standup comedy philosophy, advice, and inspirational quotes from great comedians. Some praise for posts here...Judd Apatow: "Great." Gary Gulman: “Love this!” By Matt Ruby

5-spotted

🗯️ Are We Thinking Ourselves Sick? by River Page in The Free Press:

Eventually, I stopped reading about autism because I realized how neurotic it made me feel. It was up to me, and it’s up to all of us, to stop pathologizing our personalities as disorders, our quirks as maladies, and our problems as traumas. We must come to grips with the terrifying, ego-destroying realization that most of our problems are ordinary. We must realize that an entire industry is dedicated to convincing us otherwise and that we’d do ourselves a favor by avoiding it altogether. 

🗯️ Ed Catmull warns that viewing Steve Jobs' early behavior as a role model is misleading for young people, as Jobs himself recognized that his early behavior was problematic.

Initially, Jobs lacked empathy, but over time, he made significant changes in how he treated people, listened, and cared. Around the early 1990s, Jobs underwent a tremendous transformation that made everyone who worked with him willing to follow him for life.

🗯️ Derek Thompson: The Democratic Party appears to have made a conscious choice not to make young men a political priority.

The left has become more adept at shaming toxic masculinity than at showcasing a positive masculinity that is distinct from femininity. Progressive readers of the previous sentence might roll their eyes at the notion that it is the job of any left-wing political movement to coddle men’s feelings. But if a large shift rightward among young male voters helps Trump eke out a victory in November, Democrats will have little choice but to think up a new message to stop the young-male exodus.

🗯️ Your phone is why you don't feel sexy by Catherine Shannon:

Today, everyone and everything is always available, and there’s nothing less sexy than that. There’s no chase. Our phones don’t allow us time to dwell, and they don’t allow us time to yearn. Why force yourself to daydream about the guy you’re seeing when you can easily look at dozens of photographs of him online? Why walk into a store in Soho and see what’s on offer when you can stay home and scroll the entire inventory from the comfort of your couch? Why go to the library to find books about a topic that interests you when you can look it up on Wikipedia in two minutes and move on with your day?

🗯️ Toni Morrison on survival.

How do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.

Thanks for surviving this newsletter. I appreciate ya. Please share it if you dig it.

-Matt

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