🎥 My new standup special “Bolo” is available to stream now for only $4. Don’t wanna pay? It’ll be coming to YouTube/MattRuby on January 9, 2025 at 7pm EST (sign up to get notified here). Here’s the 🆕 trailer:

Stream "Bolo" now for $4

My 2025 gift guide

Here it is!

Ah, we’re having fun.

But for real, Bourdain merch is a great way to celeb–

Wait a minute…

Whoops. Another L for generative AI.

But really, what should you get for your loved ones? Consider my new book titled “Vague New Age Captions for Instagram Baddies.” Here’s an excerpt… 👇

Pairs perfectly with a time-lapse Reel of you doing yoga poses!

“C’mon, gimme a real holiday shopping tip!” OK. Hold off on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and save up for Planned Obsolescence Thursday. Great deals on a bunch of products that will mysteriously stop working as soon as the warranty’s up. It’s capitalism’s way of saying, “Gotcha! 🤑”

Speaking of, I read this Businessweak headline…

…and this caught my eye: "The front of the plane is now a haven of luxury, while coach has turned into a low-cost shakedown." Actually, that sounds like the perfect description of modern day America.

Rubesletter bizness

Time for yours truly to get in on the action. Did you know you can gift the Rubesletter? Gimme all that green!

Give a gift subscription

Or just do you. Here’s a 20% off deal ‘cuz I gotchu:

Get 20% off for 1 year

Quickies

🎯 Don't tell any of these camouflage dudes that it's actually a French word. They'll merde their pants.

🎯 I'm now pretending to have a foot fetish 'cuz I'm worried I come off as too vanilla.

🎯 Fitness people hate Ozempic the same way veterans hate stolen valor.

🎯 I ❤️ Buddhism. But also, it can get annoying 'cuz you'll be like THIS AWFUL THING IS HAPPENING TO ME and Buddhists will go, "Perfect. This is actually a gift. Now you can practice your–" Dude, my arm just got chopped off...can you get a bandage instead of tryna Zen it up right now?

🎯 Dropping bombs:

mattrubycomedy

A post shared by @mattrubycomedy

🎯 moral clarity - how you describe someone who agrees with you on every issue

🎯 My view on the masculinity crisis: I liked it better when incels started mosh pits and fight clubs instead of podcasts and Reddit threads.

🎯 Let's be real: The more you're online, the more insane you are. But don’t listen to me. I’m online all the time.

🎯 Every show that's not on Broadway is off-broadway. It's like saying you're dating a non-supermodel.

🎯 Apparently, “the artist's way” doesn't include hiring a graphic designer who understands typography… 👇

🎯 Napkin over glass so bartender doesn't take it is pretty incredible user interface design. Right up there with mailbox flags.

🎯 As a Jew, I do not like scary movies. My ancestral trauma is frightening enough. I don’t need a haunted house; I've been to Anne Frank's house.

🎯 Nietzsche coulda been a contender in one of those mustache competitions:

🎯 Millenials need a dating advice book like “He’s Just Not That Into You” except it’ll be called “Just Settle Already.”

🎯 "Back then, I was in a toxic throuple."
"Is there any other kind?"

Comedy

🃏 NYC: One final Misguided Meditation show in soho at cool space on 12/18. Come thru.

🎟️ $5 off with promo code BREATHE5 here.

🃏 Jokes: Get ‘em (and more) on my social media at Instagram – TikTok – Threads – X – Substack Notes – Bluesky

🃏 Tour: Upcoming shows in Miami, Seattle, Victoria (BC), and NYC. Info here.

🃏 NYC weeklies: 1) GOOD EGGS (Mondays) at 7:30pm at NY Comedy Club (Upper West Side). 2) HOT SOUP (Tuesdays) at 10:30pm at Comedy Cellar. 3) GOOD EGGS (Wednesdays) at 8pm at NY Comedy Club (East Village).

🃏 FUNNY HOW: I have another newsletter all about the craft of doing standup. Check it out.

🃏 “Substance” Special: Watch my doc/special “Substance” at YouTube. Four nights, four shows, four states (high, drunk, 🍄, and sober). It goes hard.

🃏 “Bolo” special: 🎥 My new standup special “Bolo” is available to stream now for only $4. Don’t wanna pay? It’ll be coming to YouTube/MattRuby on January 9, 2025 at 7pm EST (sign up to get notified here).

A lil’ less quick

▶ On the plus side, Elon's shenanigans have made liberal Tesla owners waaaaay less condescending. Tough to act pretentious about your gas mileage when your car's manufacturer is also riding shotgun with totalitarianism, y'know?

▶ All this bathroom nonsense is so dumb. I went to Germany in the 90’s and they had unisex bathrooms everywhere and the country is fine. (Well, other than whatever weirdo stuff Germans have always been getting up to.)

▶ Teen wants to change gender: "We must respect their choice." Same person talking about 24yo Lewinsky giving a beej to Clinton: "She was naive and taken advantage of." Um, Can we just get some consistency on all this frontal cortex stuff?

▶ Speaking of the youth: American kids don’t get it. The first thing Jihadists chant after “Death to Israel” is “Death to America.” Seems to me a big hint someone is not your ally is when they call you “the Great Satan.”

▶ One awful thing about social media we don’t talk about a lot: It murdered the hyperlink. Big Tech took networking, the heart of the internet, and clogged up its arteries in order to monetize blood.

▶ The moral certitude of everyone on every side of every issue nowadays is so off-putting. Like, okay, have your opinion. But also, admit that it's complex and there are tradeoffs. Otherwise, you just sound like a child. Embrace the gray, I say! (And I’m 100% positive about this MIC DROP.)

5-spotted

🗯️ Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian:

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

🗯️ How Americans learned to root for the dark side.

The bad guys, reliable, sometimes interchangeable antagonists in our movie and TV morality plays, have been promoted to main character status…In these movies, the characters aren’t so much evil as bullied, belittled and misunderstood. What might have seemed like their essential flaws — the Joker’s nihilism, Cruella’s ambition, Elphaba’s defiance — turn out to be virtues, or at least understandable responses to unfair circumstances. Their stories, built on familiar source material, invite us to believe that we’ve been looking at the world, or at least those imagined worlds, all wrong.

🗯️ It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things.

Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

🗯️ The West misread the 21st century.

This is not an age of secular ideologies. It is an era of desecularisation. Our greatest challenge is not political or economic or military. It is in the deepest sense spiritual. No one expected this and we have not been equal to it. What rescued Europe from its last age of religious wars, in the 17th century, was not weapons but ideas: those of Milton, Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke that laid the foundations for religious liberty and the free society. Thus far the 21st century has been marked by an unprecedented series of new technologies, but no new ideas.

🗯️ Tennessee Williams on love:

The world is violent and mercurial–it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love–love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

Thanks for reading.

-Matt

P.S. Sign up to get creative inspiration from art legends at Working Methods:

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