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MisLED

I get it. LED candles are more convenient. They’re safer. You don’t have to find a lighter or clean up wax. I understand why they now dominate at comedy clubs, yoga studios, and bedside tables.

The only problem: They ain’t f*cking fire.

And I want fire. Fire is cool. I’ll go get the wood. I’ll crumple up the newspaper. Real candles? Don’t sweat it, I’ll clean up the wax. Bring on the drip.

It’s goddamn absurd that I need to defend fire, yet here we are…

Fire delivers randomness instead of mechanical predictability. It snaps and cracks at you. I don’t even know why, but I can stare at one for an hour without getting bored. I don’t know how/why, but some part of my reptile brain lights up when a fire’s lit. It’s an ancestral activation.

“But it’s dangerous.” So’s love. Besides, I like knowing fire can burn the house down or cook a meal. A reasonable amount of danger is part of what life’s about.

Gimme Danger [2023 Remaster] - Iggy Mix The Stooges

Mindfulness-disguised-as-productivity guru Oliver Burkeman recently mentioned fire while arguing now is the time to double down on reality:

The antidote to all of this, in the broadest terms, is more reality, more immersion in the finite here and now: more writing on paper; more gathering in person and in public; more looking strangers in the eye; more scruffy hospitality; more queueing for the supermarket checkout that’s staffed by a human, if there even is one; more feeling the weather on your face and staring into fires; more living as creatures, not machines.

I crave creatures in the real world. Gimme standup comedians over TikTok influencers. Journalists who knock on doors over (lapt)op-ed warriors. Escorts over OnlyFans. Engage me with reality. I can take it.

It's like the Modern Lovers sang:
🎶 If these guys, if they're really so great
Tell me, why can't they at least take this place
And take it straight 🎶

Also: Eyeballs over VR goggles. IRL talent over algorithmic slop. Psychedelic hallucinations over AI hallucinations. Humanity over pixels.

Oof, these pixels. Everywhere. We ride the subway staring at a 5” screen to go to work all day on a 15” screen so we can come home and watch a movie on a 50” screen. We’ve got screens at the gyms, screens in the elevators, screens on the dashboards, screens at the bars, screens on the buildings, and screens in the taxis. If aliens came down to Earth, they’d be certain screens are what we worship. We can’t even take a 💩 without swiping anymore.

Pixels are like ivy. You have to decide to fight back or else they will grow all over you.

All this “disruption” killed actual disruption. New music sounds like it comes off a laptop conveyor belt. I don’t want quantized drums, I want John Bonham. I don’t want Antonoff compression, I want loud-soft-loud Pixies dynamics. I don’t want plug-ins and autotune, I want three chords and the truth.

“But convenience!” The convenience is the problem. We keep trading quality for efficiency. Gimme friction.

Ep 1 // We keep trading quality for efficiency. Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby 13:37

“But it scales!” So what? They’d serve us all baby food and tell us it “solves” chewing if we let ‘em. (Oh wait, they already tried that.)

Technology has become a boa constrictor, squeezing everything until its safe, efficient, scalable, and devoid of life. To hell with that. I don’t want plastic roses that last forever, I want real ones that give up the ghost. BBLs and lip injections creep me out, I want natural 🍑 and 👄.

I want the scenic route. I want the hard way if it’s right. There’s no point racing to get somewhere no one wants to be. Let the rest of them enjoy a "flame-like element that moves from side-to-side." I wanna stare into the fire.

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Quickies

🎯 Thanksgiving tip: There's a reason they call it a nuclear family. It’s ‘cuz they're the ones who know best how to make you go nuclear.

🎯 I would be an amazing landlord because nothing ever lives rent free in my head...I always pay the price.

🎯 Subletting is just apartment polyamory.

🎯 Sports betting is consistently done by the most broke a** people I know. "Wait, you bet how much on this game? Damn, I had 3:1 odds on you having zero disposable income.”

🎯 We need a word for people who don't actually watch sporting events yet consume sports documentaries voraciously. A peeping tom (brady)?

🎯 Sunday Night Football showed Kevin Hart in the stands…because if there’s one thing people watching sports on TV think, it’s “I wish I could see more of Kevin Hart.”

🎯 Her: "It was a rough childbirth. They had to give me a caesarean."
Me: "Couldn't have been that rough if they're giving you pizza."
Her: "Um, I think you mean Sicilian."
Me: "Oh, right. Either way, it's a helluva slice!"

🎯 Pretty wild the people who hate cultural appropriation the most are white ladies who do yoga, use chopsticks, and wear keffiyehs.

🎯 Rolexes are blue checks for capitalism.

🎯 I think a lot about how both David Bowie and Leonard Cohen knew exactly how and when to check out. The lesson: Make great art about your own mortality and then leave this mortal coil right before the tackiness takeover.

🎯 Server: “Do you know how the menu works here?”
Me: “Sure. I set it on fire and use the smoke signals to communicate with the chef, right?”

🎯 The last acceptable form of discrimination in this country is Basic Economy. If they treated people like this on a bus in Selma in the 60's, we'd all be outraged. But somehow, since it's a 2024 Delta flight, it's fine.

🎯 If “face blindness” is real then I want to sell “name blindness” as a thing. That way, I can tell people I forgot their names because I have a disorder and not because I’m rude.

Dating, love, and gender

❤️‍🩹 Wild that sex leads to parenthood because it's a weak correlation of skills. Someone who's good in bed probably isn't a good parent. And someone who's a good parent is probably too tired to screw.

❤️‍🩹 My answer to Hinge prompt “Why you should date me”: “Society doesn’t talk enough about how pleasant it is to date someone with low self-esteem. It provides a lovely break from people who know their worth.”

❤️‍🩹 Crazy how much undateable people love telling you about their icks. It’s like listening to starving people discuss their food allergies.

❤️‍🩹 Somehow the male gaze is toxic yet women constantly comment like this when their friend posts a selfie:
- So insanely beautiful
- Wow wow sexy lady
- Hot 😍🔥
- hot af
- gorg

❤️‍🩹 Let's admit it: Men are better than women at hoarding cables.

❤️‍🩹 We should start referring to the 9 months of pregnancy as Pregoland.

Tech

📡 People were so rarely eviscerated before the internet.

📡 Podcasting is easy to monetize. The unfortunate result: Talking fast is the new being an expert.

📡 Work from home is generational warfare. It's Millennials and Gen X benefitting at the expense of Gen Z since it's great for, say, parents of toddlers yet crappy for kids just entering the workforce. Water cooler convos/happy hour drinks are lame AF for 40 year olds but kinda essential networking opps in your twenties.

📡 Amazing thing about social media is everyone is either on vacation or a victim. The reality is most of us are neither. In truth, everything's kinda fine. Boring, mundane, fine. But that doesn't make for good content so...

📡 If Bluesky was really so great, I feel like folks wouldn't be showing up at Threads/X all the time to talk about it. That's like commenting constantly on your ex's IG posts in order to prove you're so over them. (Anyway, I’m @mattruby on Bluesky.)

📡 Social networks should be like nightclubs. A new one pops up, it's hot for about 18 months, and then slowly degrades until all the cool kids pivot to some new spot. Entropy is a fact of life...might as well roll with it.

📡 "This form could have been an email."
-Me whenever I'm asked to fill out a form

📡 We spend all day listening to true crime podcasts, watching serial killer documentaries, and doomscrolling...and then we wonder why we're feeling so anxious.

📡 There also seems to be a Trans Derangement Syndrome – main symptoms are using the phrase "woke mind virus" incessantly and owning X.

Politics

🇺🇸 That politician with the eye patch is really committed to his shtick.

🇺🇸 The country is too big to be ruled over by one leader. My proposed solution: Every time zone gets its own President. We'll never agree on all these other issues when we can't even agree on what time it is. So let the mountains mountain and the coasts coast.

🇺🇸 A thing that saddens me is how little empathy I see from pro-Israel folks about what's happening in Gaza. You can argue the IDF’s actions are right/necessary while still showing a little heart. A Jewish faith completely detached from any sense of compassion doesn’t feel all that spiritual to me.

🇺🇸 What this election taught us: patriarchy > ethnic identity. For a lot of men, it had little/nothing to do with issues and everything to do with 🍊 being, in their eyes, the last man who acts like a man. More at this post about the UFC at MSG I attended.

🇺🇸 Ironically, wearing camouflage does a terrible job of hiding your political views.

🇺🇸 Every barista in Brooklyn looks like they're auditioning to be on LibsOfTikTok.

Trumpland

🍊 We just traded democracy for cheaper eggs and if you thought vegans were annoying and condescending before…oh boy.

🍊 Trump team doing a poor job of vetting. Somehow, they've managed to let through a couple of cabinet nominees that aren't tied to sexual assault allegations.

🍊 When you prioritize loyalty, you deprioritize competence.

🍊 These cabinet picks make perfect sense if you think the government doesn't actually do anything.

🍊 I get it, Trump is "alpha." But all the men who kiss his ass, betray their values for a seat at the table (see: RFK's Big Mac), wear his face on a t-shirt, and tell him he won an election he lost? They're the biggest bunch of betas I've ever seen. He just keeps moving on 'em like a b*tch ‘cuz when you're a star, they let you do it.

🍊 No, Trump is not "good for comedy." Comedy heightens. It's tough to heighten when reality is already absurd. "They're eating the dogs and cats." Where do you go from there? It's already a punchline. "Mexico will pay for the wall" is already a joke. It's all lame and tired.

🍊 A big lesson from this election is how much we are all incapable of remembering anything anymore. We are all Tom Hanks in that Mr. Short-Term Memory SNL sketch now. The past is memory holed instantly and thus we are doomed to repeat it in increasingly rapid cycles.

🍊 Matt Gaetz is “unemployed,” eh? I prefer to say "between indictments." 👇

🍊 Did ya hear? Billionaires are the new counter-elites! Also, Brazilian butt lifts are the new feminism! 😂

Working Methods

Get creative inspiration from art legends at Working Methods. Coming soon: Zadie Smith, Ray Bradbury, George Carlin, and more. Sign up here...

Working Methods Advice from legendary artists to kickstart your creative process. Curated by Matt Ruby. By Matt Ruby

And I deep dive on standup at Funny How…

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

🗯️ The difference between lies and bullshit.

The task [philosopher Harry] Frankfurt sets himself is to define bullshit. What it is not, he argues, is lying. Both misrepresent the truth, but with entirely different intentions. The liar is “someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood”. He or she knows the truth or could lay hands on it – but they certainly aren’t giving it to you. The bullshitter, on the other hand, “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Bullshitters couldn’t give two hoots about the truth. They just want a story.

🗯️ Kat Rosenfield: Stop Saying Dating Is Terrible.

A chief characteristic of our contemporary dating discourse is that we take it—and by extension, ourselves—much, much too seriously. The way we talk about even the most banal interactions in terms of violation and trauma reveals an underlying belief that if dating is a game, it’s one with monumentally high stakes, and there’s nothing fun or funny about any of it.

🗯️ Taylor Lorenz: Why Democrats won't build their own Joe Rogan.

The conservative media landscape in the United States is exceptionally well-funded, meticulously constructed, and highly coordinated...Leftist channels do not receive widespread financial backing from billionaires or large institutional donors, primarily because leftist content creators support policies that are completely at odds with what billionaires want.

Left leaning influencers argue for things like higher taxes on the rich, regulations on corporations, and policies that curb the power of elites. Wealthy mega donors aren't going to start pouring money into a media ecosystem that directly contradicts their own financial interests. And so, progressive creators are left to rely on meager crowdfunding efforts to make a living. 

🗯️ NY Mag: Can Journalism Survive? The Media Elite on Its Future.

Some longtime media executives find this new world befuddling. “I’m surprised that people are okay with the subscription model, where they don’t have that many listeners or viewers but are making money, so they’re just good with it,” says one of them. “The Substack writers, people with Patreon podcasts. My generation was wired completely differently. We wanted to be read or listened to by as many people as possible. And now this new generation is like, I’m totally cool with having 9,000 die-hard fans.”

🗯️ Brené Brown on men and vulnerability in her book “Daring Greatly”:

Here’s the painful pattern that emerged from my research with men: We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust. And men are very smart. They know the risks, and they see the look in our eyes when we’re thinking, C’mon! Pull it together. Man up. As Joe Reynolds, one of my mentors and the dean at our church, once told me during a conversation about men, shame, and vulnerability, “Men know what women really want. They want us to pretend to be vulnerable. We get really good at pretending.”

You’re doing a great job. Keep it up.

-Matt