You may be thinking, “We should slow down with all this AI stuff if it could end us all.” Oh, you silly fool. We can’t do that. There’s too much money on the line! It’s IPO or bust.

Also: China! We can’t let China beat us. Fear China!!! Right?

Actually, I’m not that afraid of China. They haven’t even figured out handcuffs or forks yet. And their fire drill is just everyone running around a car at a red light? Seems like a very poor way to prevent burns.

Tangent: We loved calling things “Chinese” when I was a kid…

• Chinese checkers

• Chinese water torture

• Chinese fire drill

• Chinese handcuffs

Well, turns out none of those things were actually Chinese. That’s just what we called things that were strange in the 20th century. And no, you will not find fortune cookies in China.

This kinda thing happened a lot back then…

• All those jokes about Polish people being dumb? Every Polish person I’ve met as an adult is an engineer, chess champion, or math whiz.

• “Indian giver” was the term for someone who took back a gift. Think about that. We stole their land and murdered them. But if someone wanted their scented candle back, THEY were the Indian giver.

• Then there’s cheese. People in Mexico don’t call it nacho cheese. And Switzerland folks do not call it Swiss cheese. No one’s saying, “I’ll have a turkey and us sandwich, bruder.”

• And in Vietnam, it’s not called the Vietnam War…because every war they’ve ever fought was a Vietnam War. There, they call it the American Imperialist War. (Um, whoopsie? Check out my joke about that here.

China’s impending takeover seems like a trojan horse. You know who’s really coming for us? Korea.

Korea took over pop music. They took over fried chicken. They took over barbecue. They took over skin care. They took over soap operas. They took over movies. Look, the invasion’s underway. We’re already living in the K-USA.

5 years ago, I didn’t even know what gochujang was. Now, I can’t live without it.

Korea’s gonna run everything eventually! They’re gonna take over hate groups. It’s gonna be the K-KKK. Finance too: You’re gonna retire with 401-(k)K’s. It’s about to be K’s all the way down.

I see you, Korea. I love you, but I see you. That Your Korean Dad guy? I love him! Feel like he’s my dad. Sooooo…I surrender.

Btw, I posted this Korea rant as a walk-and-talk bit recently (above) and it went viral – almost 800,000 views on IG so far.

As a result, I got thousands of new Korean followers. Not sure they’re gonna be as enthusiastic about my incel material though. We’ll see.

Also: The gochujang sauce I featured in the video offered to send me a bunch of free gochujang.

So next time you see me at a show, be sure to check out my merch table where I’ll be hawking fermented red chili paste.

🇰🇷 새로운 지배자님들께 감사드립니다 🇰🇷 (“Thank you to our new rulers.”)

🔌 Paid subscribers keep this free for everyone else. Plus, you get bonus stuff too. Go for it.

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Electioneering

🗣️ Kid Rock is the Macklemore of the right. The punishment for supporting him is having to listen to his music.

🗣️ The U.S. Senate is no place for a man like Graham Platner:

🗣️ Really tired of seeing this:
Politics • Trending
American Jews

It ain’t ever “Yeah, we’re trending!”

🗣️ Why don't I speak up about [your pet issue here]? I choose to invoke my Ta-Nehisian right to remain silent.

🗣️ The inside people wanna win the primary. The outside people wanna win the general.

🗣️ So 47’s closing statement is "The most macho thing you can do is admire another man's ass." He is attempting to pull off his greatest con yet. If they go for this, they'll go for anything.

🗣️ This administration is a mask for the greatest theft that’s ever occurred and they’ll get away with it because by the time it’s all uncovered, the robots will almost have destroyed humanity and we’ll have bigger fish to frA.I.

🗣️ Bill Maher keeps saying it’s good that he’s in the room with Trump and we all should cheer him on for doing it. But in what way has Maher actually had a positive impact on Trump? Is there any evidence at all that Trump has behaved differently due to these conversations? If not...

🗣️ Modern day America may be the only place that's ever existed in which foreigners understand the system of government better than the people who actually live there.

🗣️ Kinda crazy that the only person left in our society who does actual journalism (outside of the NY Times) is Pablo Torre. Can we just clone him and make those clones report on Congress?

🗣️ Speaking of, it’s amazing that society chose to trust podcasters hawking supplements over reporters practicing journalism. I know, everyone hates elites. But the end result of that is just an elevation of scrubs.

🗣️ Imagine if they just called it Scandinavian Capitalism instead of Democratic Socialism. Instant uptick in the polls by 20%, I’d guess. (I wish I didn’t have to think of everything.)

🗣️ The lack of monoculture means there’s no counterculture. And that means everyone takes their rebellion out via politics. So young people wind up being either socialist or fascist instead of just punk rock.

🗣️ Mayor Pete filmed a video in front of a Waffle House. Perfect way to swipe from Zohran since Waffle House is the white man's halal cart. 🥙➡️🥞

🗣️ Congrats! You owned the libs...and now you own nothing else.

Behind the paywall

How to feel about Abdul El-Sayed…

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I just taped a standup special. It went great.

If you like your comedy smart, funny, and button-pushing1, you’re gonna dig it. I spent years honing the material, cutting the fat, and trying to make every word count.

And that’s the problem.

I’m doing it all wrong. I’m following an archaic model. That approach might lead to good art, but it’s not a wise path to success these days.

Why? The attention economy increasingly rewards artists for how much they release, not how good it is. It’s now a Drake/Tony Hinchcliffe model (new drops on the regular) over a Sade/Chris Rock one (a killer release once every five years). You can’t just hit and run, you’ve gotta keep them hanging on.

On the Legion of Skanks podcast a while back, Tony Hinchcliffe said something revelatory. He targeted Marc Maron and Anthony Jeselnik by saying:

They have their once every three or four years special that they do when they come out like a groundhog and do something that people might see…while I put out two and a half hours of comedy content every week.

There it is. The measurement is hours of content produced per week. Was it good comedy? Doesn’t matter. We’re making widgets here. It’s not about thoughtful material, it’s about churning out a constant IV drip of good enough filler that keeps you active in user feeds. Forget mastering your craft, the focus now is on pipelines, funnels, and flywheels (whatever the hell those are).

Then: Kill your darlings. Now: Milk every last darling for all it’s worth. Chop everything up into 60-second clips and spread them out over multiple platforms. Do whatever it takes to please the algorithm. IG wants us all to do longform horizontal video now? Aye, aye, Captain!

We all see where this is going, right? Every video will be 2X speed. They’ll all start with some car crash or cliffhanger “hook.” The thumbnail will be people screaming at each other. Every caption will involve someone getting “eviscerated” or “destroyed.” And we’ll all massage our stuff so it fits into whatever story-du-jour is going viral.

For example, here’s me taking an existing joke and pretending it’s about that SNL “whore” joke…

Or this one that’s now about Billy Corgan, I guessssss…

And you can. never. stop.

You'd be a fool to disappear for three years to create your pièce de résistance. Instead, you need to be continuously present, show your process, promo constantly, build a “community,” and live inside a world of perpetual “engagement.” You can’t just be an artist. You need to constantly perform being an artist, the same way Lucy had to wrap all the candy on that conveyor belt.

This also sucks for aspiring creatives who can’t fail in the shadows like in the past. Online, you always need to look like you know what you’re doing (“we compare our behind the scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel”). But real progress requires making mistakes, wasting time, failed experiments, and wrong paths. The algorithm ain’t with you on any of that. You can’t figure it out. You need to know.

Of course, artists have always needed publicity. And the dire scenario I’m painting isn’t true for everybody. Some artists are established enough that they can avoid the incentives to be omnipresent. Or they can hire a team to do it for them. But the rest of us must play the game or get left behind.

The winners here? Tech platforms that milk all of us for user-generated content to sell ads and creators who excel at producing by the pound.

One popular comedian is putting out hours of stuff every week…but what would they make if they only put out one hour per year? I’d be curious to see that, but they’d be unwise to do it. This ecosystem is no place for people who want to craft, hone, and iterate on a single piece of work over time.

“Is it really that bad?” Of course, you gotta surf where the waves are breaking. I’m working with it (see above). The job now is to make modular stuff and then squeeze every possible drop out of it. The jokes from my special will get chopped into bite-sized clips for social media. Every podcast interview I do gets clipped up, too. And a lot of things I post online wind up in this newsletter. In a copy/paste world, everything is raw material for something else.

And I’m thankful for social media since without it, a lot of people would never see my stuff at all. The internet lets us find audiences without waiting for a network, label, publisher, or industry executive to bless them. It’s opened doors for people who never got into the club before.

Plus, all that masterpiece talk is kinda BS. Producing more material is often how you get to great. As puts it: Quantity leads to quality. He cites David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book Art & Fear…

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality...Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

The quest for perfection can become its own trap too. You could make something brilliant…or you might wind up like Axl Rose, holed up in the studio for a decade making Chinese Democracy. Welcome to another jungle.

At least I entered the madness of show business willingly. You know who I truly feel bad for? All the other careers that now require a social media “presence.” I pity the TikTok therapists giving advice, IG personal trainers showing their morning routines, YouTube plumbers running fiber-optic cameras down drains, X carpet cleaners displaying before/afters, etc. Errrbody gotta be a performer now. We’re all competing in a race to the bottom of other people’s brain stems, playing the lottery to win a prize (that might not even exist) while our tech overlords collect the real jackpot.

I’ll keep playing the game. Guess I just want to highlight how absurd it all feels. I don’t mind the option, I mind the obligation.

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Social-ism

🎯 I think we should refer to people who follow influencers as impressionables.

🎯 Doing your social media posts while applying makeup has real “I called you while stuck in traffic” energy.

🎯 Before you judge a man, scroll a mile in their algorithm. If you lived in their timeline, you’d feel how they feel.

🎯 I miss when being a vaccine/gen*cide/politics/AI expert woulda just made you seem like a total kook.

🎯 It’s wild how much the people who hate police love policing social media.

🎯 Every commenter: “Like me for my moral outrage!”

🎯 Social media excels at convincing you the problem is them. Who’s them? Doesn’t matter. It’s just not you. Never you. Them.

🎯 It’s absurd that we do our hate speech via delicious emojis now.

🎯 What’s with the faux “we just met in the street” intros? “You’re just a random stranger I met on the street, but sure, I’ll let you up to film my $3M apartment!” [Mulaney voice] It’s like which New York City do you live in?

🎯 On your screen, you are the center of the universe. IRL, you orbit around others. Increasingly, that feels like an untenable situation.

🎯 TikTok and reels blocked out reality. It’s a clips eclipse.

🎯 If you are always the first to know, you’re often the first to get it wrong.

🎯 Charismatic illiterates become heroes in a society that views intelligence as elitism.

🎯 The internet has murdered persuasion, negotiation, seduction, and compromise. Online, these become displays of weakness. Gandhi, MLK, Ram Dass…social media woulda hated all of ‘em. Too much nuance and empathy, not enough dunking.

🎯 Everyone on social media posts like they’re already in a fight with someone.

🎯 The generations are battling. The genders are battling. The left/right is battling. I’m starting to wonder if maybe we should all wake up to the fact that social media is us drinking battle juice.

🎯 Good art and social media are enemies. The former is nuance and complexity, the latter is tribalism and binary thinking.

Read more

🎯 We’re all into productivity and self-care yet we’ve never accomplished less or been so unhappy.

🎯 Rule of thumb: Oppose the other thumb.

🎯 Everyone on the internet acts like a detective who must solve a case no one ever assigned to them. Actually, you don’t have to call her out, accuse him of joke theft, do your research, speak up, crack that conspiracy, or any of the rest of it. NO ONE ASKED YOU TO DO THAT.

🎯 When someone shows you who they are, that’s the perfect time to try to fix them.

I’ll get you up to speed on Sunday night in NYC at my taping. Tickets are going fast so get ‘em now. Promo code “groovy” gets ya a deal.

🎯 Give up on being the first to know stuff and life becomes way easier. Added bonus: Being okay with knowing things later means you’re much more likely to get them right.

🎯 All the things I’m sad I don’t have are also things I’m not sure I want. But at least if I had them, I’d know for sure I don’t want them.

🎯 I know inflation’s getting outta hand ‘cuz some app just asked me for three-factor authentication.

🎯 I’m constantly starting things that I never wind up finishing. It’s the browser tab-ification of my entire life.

🎯 Confidence comes from repetition. Whether it’s standup comedy, shooting free throws, approaching strangers, or anything else. Online tries to sell you hacks and shortcuts, but actual belief in one’s self comes from a foundation of practice and patience.

🎯 I have a fake profile just for the propane stove I bring to Black Rock City. It’s my burner burner burner.

🎯 Men are like fire. They can cook you dinner or they can burn down your house. Actually, they won’t cook you dinner due to domestic labor inequality. But once your house is burnt to a crisp, they’ll probably be the firemen who show up and tell you there’s nothing they can do about it now.

🎯 I really like it when black people say someone is “doing too much.” It’ll be sad when white people eventually ruin that phrase by doing it too much.

🔌 I write this thing by hand, the ol’ fashioned way, so please subscribe to the paid plan. You’ll keep it free for everyone else and help stave off society’s slow descent into a pit of AI slop just a tiny bit.

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Politics

🗣️ AOC’s walking back “Woke 1.” But doesn’t “Woke 1” imply there will be a sequel? What’s it gonna be? Maybe “Woke 2: The Immunocompromised Lesbians Strike Back.”

🗣️ Why do these White House reporters always have to scream out for attention at 47’s press gaggles like a mob of hungry refugees? Can’t they just run those things like a deli counter where people take a number and wait their turn? In fact, that’s the whole reason to have a government...so there’s some semblance of order instead of society degenerating into chaos. The whole thing is such a top-to-bottom 💩show.

🗣️ My view on the conflict in the Middle East is these Jews and Muslims should try being more Buddhist.

Sports

🏅 Jay-Z choosing himself to perform at the Super Bowl halftime is giving the same vibe as when Dick Cheney headed up George W. Bush’s VP selection committee: “I found the perfect person for the gig and you’re never gonna believe who it is…”

🏅 Remember the emperor’s new clothes? The only person able to call it out was a little kid…cuz he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to tell the truth. Same same but diff:

LOS ANGELES -- In the aftermath of a 127-105 opening-night loss, Golden State Warriors rookie Yaxel Lendeborg said he “lost all respect” for Los Angeles Lakers superstar Luka Doncic because of the way he begs for foul calls.

“I had a lot of respect for him [because] I didn’t really watch the NBA much,” Lendeborg said. “I just watched highlights and seen him kill people. But being in it firsthand and seeing all the whining and complaining, I lost all respect.”

🏅 Just realized what the NBA is now missing: bank shots. You gotta either dunk or shoot a three pointer. Analytics killed the backboard. Tim Duncan must be sad.

🏅 In baseball, you start at home. And then you embark on a lengthy struggle to return home again. Basically it is “The Odyssey” turned into sports.

Thanks for reading.

-Matt

P.S. Inject this into my veins:

But how can France be this angry? They’re pretty much socialist, have universal healthcare, and hardly any billionaires...so problem solved, riiiiiiiight?

Watching the discourse around it, it feels like there’s something that’s becoming increasingly important in life:

Recognizing the difference between protesters and rioters.

Like, you can support the French high school kids but hate on the masked looters. You can condemn health care costs without going full Luigi. You can want to feed Gazans without cheering on horrific Hamas violence.

Why does this matter? If we fail to draw a sharp contrast between the movement and the mob, we’re just lubing up society for authoritarian regimes who will crack down on all of it.

It’s easy to dismiss a cause when bad actors hijack it for their own ends. A good tell: Rioters tend to desire violence or material possessions as their end goal.

Protestors want change for society. Rioters are in it for themselves.

The protests of the past few years also make what MLK did seem that much more incredible. Keeping resistance non-violent ain’t easy, yet he managed to keep his marches overwhelmingly peaceful. There was so little violence, looting, or fires when MLK was in the lead. And that was despite the opposition attacking protestors with fire hoses, dogs, etc. Pretty damn remarkable.

Here we go

Taping my special on Sunday (tickets still available). Got some powder from Sephora to make sure I don’t get too shiny. Fenty Beauty because I’m a Rhianna bitch.

Even if you can’t make it, tell a NYC friend. You can use my friend Gina’s description:

Dark humor, thoughtfully druggy around the edges. Not druggy like GOIN FOR IT BONG HITS but thoughtfully druggy. I also highly recommend you to people w dead parents. You get it, both in dark jokes and suuuuuoer thoughtful essays on the subject.

Hell yeah. You better get it because it’s sure as hell gonna get you.

🎥 Live special taping • October 25 • NY Comedy Club (24th St) • 5 & 7pm shows

🗯️ “Button-pushing…funny...a New York comedy institution.”
-NY Times

🗯️ “One of the smartest voices in standup right now.”
-Standupworld com

🎟️ Tickets here (promo code “groovy” for discount).

When they go low…

He’s just an amethyst ring away from inviting you to a sound healing workshop that ends in tantric massage. 😜

Btw, this caption is me when some IG model has a ridic BBL:

And speaking of 🍑…

He examined it!? “Oh. My. God. Becky, look at his butt. It is so big.”

More politics:

🗣️ I spent my entire youth being all “screw the man” and now my entire middle age is all “we desperately need institutions.” Wild.

🗣️ I’m torn about “I don’t pay attention to politics” people. On one hand, that seems super healthy. On the other hand, Elie Wiesel had a point: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”

🗣️ It’s a troll world now so libs need to try harder to own conservatives. Give us a candidate with this platform: “Free gender affirming surgeries to undocumented migrants who will then compete in women’s swimming!” 🏊‍♂️

🗣️ One side wants to cancel you for saying whore. The other wants to cancel you for mocking Charlie Kirk. Well, I believe in building bridges and finding common ground. That’s why I want everyone to know that Charlie Kirk was a whore. 😜

Life and death

Great convo with on his podcast about spirituality, death, art, AI, and more. Mike asks good questions!

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Also…

1) I'm filming a standup comedy special on Oct 25 in NYC! Woohoo.

2) Two shows (5pm & 7pm) with an afterparty to follow (location TBD).

3) 🎟️ Tix: https://bit.ly/rubytapes 🎟️ Early bird special: promo code “groovy” gets you discount if you buy now. (Tryna encourage early buying so it's not a last minute scramble.)

4) Gonna be my best show of the year. Been honing these jokes for a WHILE and it's now time to capture the magic/release them into the wild.

5) I need the best crowd possible so I'd love to see you there! Seriously, it'd be swell to look out and see folks who “get it” instead of a bunch of randos.

6) Tell your NYC friends! Please spread the word to anyone else who appreciates smartfunnydark™️ comedy too. 😎

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7) Blurb action:

🎥 Live special taping • October 25 • NY Comedy Club (24th St) • 5 & 7pm

RAVES FOR MATT RUBY

🗯️ “Button-pushing…funny...a New York comedy institution.”
-NY Times

🗯️ “One of the smartest voices in standup right now.”
-Standupworld com

8) If even the discounted price feels outta reach, reach out to me direct and I’ll hook you up.

9) Hit me up with any questions.

10) I love you!

-Matt

P.S. Wanna see me telling jokes? Check my clips out on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok.

Nerds gone wild

📡 October really is the scary movie season because that’s when Hollywood puts out all its exposés about tech CEOs.

📡 AI might wipe us all out before the decade ends? Wow! I will say, as a middle aged man with zero retirement plan, I’m starting to feel like I may have timed things perfectly. Turns out spending all my money on weed and vinyl wasn’t such a bad strategy after all.

📡 Throughout my childhood, it was hammered into me that weed, gambling, p0rn, and sentient robots were incredibly dangerous. Now, they’re the only things keeping our economy afloat.

📡 The top selling point for AI is that it’s gonna cure all these diseases and it’ll let us live forever. It’s kinda amazing that the big sales pitch is based on us all wishing we were vampires.

📡 Poor Petey.

Thiel on Trump:
“There are a lot of things I got wrong... was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought.”
“You wish they’d appointed more competent people.”
“administration is… staffed by not very smart but very loyal people”

Can’t believe con man do con on meeeeeee! 🙄

📡 If we had real leadership in this country, there would be an emergency AI supervisory board formed immediately. Mission: Propose smart AI regulation. Suggested members: Tristan Harris, Bill Gates, Lina Khan, Cory Doctorow, and/or others who get it but don’t want to wager humanity just so they can IPO.

📡 “An embarrassment of riches” would make more sense if any rich person was actually embarrassed about it.

📡 I’m half expecting to see someone from one of these companies put out a clip saying, “As head of PR for the Hugging Face Gain of Function Lab (Chernobyl location), I’m excited to tell you about the upcoming launch coming from our robotic bat program…” 🤖🦇

Bring on the nerd predators?

A nerd fraternity that assaults women? So basically we’re living out the plot to Revenge of the Nerds…

Or some other boys will be boys flick from that era…

Speaking of that Nerds film, I wrote this recently and it went viral:

The premise: All that jock-on-nerd bullying mighta been saving us all along. Back then, nerds were worried about their natural predators. Then we cracked down on bullies to the point they became fearless. Look where that’s gotten us. (Credit to mean girls for frying those geeks too. It takes a village to bully.)

Well, I was just reading this: “When humans introduce a specific predator to target an invasive pest, it is referred to as biological control.” Like when Yellowstone brought in grey wolves to control the deer population in the 90’s.

At the same time, I was listening to an interview with the author of "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy" and…

Lightbulb emoji!

Perhaps we need to do biological control on Silicon Valley. Bring in some jocks to run wild in Palo Alto! Then, we might read this entry on Wikipedia some day…

Biological control on AI nerds

The most famous example of using jocks to manage overabundant nerds is the 2026 reintroduction of bullying in Silicon Valley.

• The Problem: After humans eliminated bullying from schools in the late 20th century, the nerd and geek populations became extremely confident. They aggressively overgrazed the economy, stripping society of guardrails and creating nightmare scenarios that had only been seen previously in sci-fi books.

• The Reintroduction: Biologists brought 31 football players from SEC country into the Valley over two seasons.

• The Result: The jocks successfully lowered tech bro ambition and scattered the remaining nerds. More importantly, they created a “landscape of fear.” Because the nerds and geeks had to stay on the move to avoid ambushes, they could no longer linger and frack dating, democracy, art, and the economy. This triggered a massive cultural cascade, allowing society to regenerate, income equality to recover, and functional humans capable of eye contact to return to positions of power.

My other Substack about comedy

I write FUNNY HOW, a 3x-a-week newsletter for standup comedians who want to get funnier (and comedy nerds who want to understand the artform better). I break down how great comics, from Chris Rock to Bill Burr to Norm Macdonald, make us laugh. I offer my own ideas too (I’m a 20-year NYC comedy vet and Comedy Cellar regular with multiple specials). Judd Apatow called it “great” and he should know, right? Start with “Seinfeld’s 12 rules for comedy” or “George Carlin’s writing process.” Or just go sign up here:

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

More on the Cornell 7

The whole story is gross. Sorry, ladies. Men: Stop being a**holes.

It’s got me thinking about what the internet has done to young men re: p0rn and consent.

Read more

The hidden rules: Laws, effects, and paradoxes

Stendhal syndrome: Getting dizzy, even faint, from looking at great art. The writer Stendhal nearly passed out in a Florence basilica and “stumbled out of the chapel.”

The Abilene paradox: A group agrees to something nobody in it actually wants, because everyone assumes everyone else wants it.

The Gruen transfer: The moment a shopper forgets what they came in for and starts wandering and impulse-buying. Stores are designed to make it happen.

The idiot nephew theory: on record labels: They always pick the option the boss’s idiot nephew likes best.

The Wadsworth constant: You can safely skip the first 30% of anything online. Adam Mastroianni says it applies to first drafts too: “It’s like I’m giving someone a tour of my hometown and I start by showing them all the dead ends.”

The theory of maximum taste: David Brooks’s idea that junk culture won’t rot your brain, but never taking in anything great will. “Each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit.”

The dating app paradox: A dating app makes money when you keep looking, not when you find someone. The business model rewards the opposite of what it promises.

The friction theory of friendship: The little annoyances apps got rid of were quietly holding friendships together. “Some inconveniences aren’t merely costs. They are the hidden scaffolding of social life.” One formula: friendship = (proximity × repetition) + (idle time × low stakes) + shared irritation.

The Lindy effect: The longer something has lasted, the longer it’ll probably last. As Amor Towles put it, “history is very good at discarding all that is mediocre.”

The streetlight effect: Looking for your keys under the streetlight, not because that’s where you dropped them, but because that’s where the light is.

The ovation model: Political scientist Omar Wasow on how movements spread like standing ovations: a few people in the front stand up “and it’s a cascade through the auditorium.”

The radical flank effect: A movement’s extremists either make the moderates look reasonable by comparison or drag the whole movement down with them.

Lind’s law of nonprofit advocacy: Advocacy groups always push 10 to 30 percent past what voters support, because “if you just are advocating for what everybody believes anyway, nobody’s going to write you a check.”

Prevalence inflation: The way that some people consume so much about disorders that they begin to process normal problems of living as signs of a decline in mental health. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them, they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens.” (via )

The acceptance prophecy: Researcher Danu Anthony Stinson’s finding that expecting to be accepted makes you warmer, which makes people accept you. It works the other way too.

Concordance-over-truth bias: People resist true news that hurts their side more than they fall for fake news that helps it. The people most sure they weren’t biased turned out to be the most biased.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: Michael Crichton’s term for when you read a media story about something you know well, see it’s totally wrong, then turn the page and trust the next story anyway. “You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

Come see me tape a special live in NYC on Oct 25. Ticket link here – use the code “groovy” for a discount.

Why the conversation is broken: Politics and media

The exhausted majority: The roughly two-thirds of Americans who feel neither party listens to them. They’re sick of partisan screaming and actually want compromise.

Deference politics: ’s term for “the tendency of left-leaning people to substitute interpersonal obsequiousness towards ‘marginalized groups’ for the actual material change those groups demand.”

Deep canvassing: Changing minds by listening, asking people about their lives and being patient, instead of calling them out. Research proves it works, but it sure seems at odds with most political talk nowadays.

Neotoddlerism: ’s term for activism that tries to get a better world “the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy” (i.e. by being as loud and hysterical as possible).

Brokenism: Alana Newhouse’s term for the belief that our current institutions and the quality of services we depend on have been hollowed out. What used to work is not working for people anymore. (I woulda called it Jokerism.)

Alpha-victim masculinity: ’s term for macho victimhood.

Trump is a thrice-married Lothario who combines the showmanship of a pro-wrestling heel with the wounded rage of a country-club rejectee. The result is a potent mix of cosmetic macho bluster and marrow-deep elite resentment.

Fairness signaling: Reporters bending over backward to look balanced, even when one side is obviously lying. From Mark Jacob’s list of dubious habits in political coverage.

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Pseudo-events: Daniel Boorstin’s 1961 term for events staged just to get coverage. One fan of the phrase: “It’s the perfect descriptor for the non-events that endlessly capture our attention & demand our commentary, numbing/distracting us from what’s really happening.”

Bespoke realities: Researcher Renée DiResta’s term for custom versions of the truth that tell us what we already want to believe. As David French put it, “We’re misinformed because we like the misinformation we receive and are eager for more.”

The antidotes: How to be less miserable

Neighborism: The ethic behind Minnesota’s resistance to ICE: protect the people around you, “whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu.” This used to be what we meant by “community,” before the internet perverted that term.

Truth sandwich: Linguist George Lakoff’s recipe for fact-checking: lead with the truth, mention the lie briefly, end with the truth again.

Healthy heat: Priya Parker’s term for the good kind of conflict, the space between war and peace.

One of the things that we do is we have companies or teams host a “hot takes” party, basically practicing prosocial conflict. They’re laughing, they’re arguing, they are finding they’re allowed to be disgusted with each other about stuff that doesn’t actually matter. They start normalizing fighting with each other, and low-stakes arguing is actually preparation for high-stakes arguing.

Collective effervescence: The buzz when a whole crowd feels the same thing at once. The feeling “multiplies, refracts, comes back to you heightened.” Comedy shows run on this.

Negative capability: English poet John Keats’ term for a writer’s ability, “which Shakespeare possessed so enormously,” to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” A literary work possessing negative capability may have a beauty to it that makes conventional notions of truth and morality irrelevant.

Inverse charisma: Instead of dazzling you, people with this charm you by how closely they listen. A biographer said of E. M. Forster: “To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.”

TCS: A maintenance plan for male friendship: text weekly, call monthly, see quarterly. Because friendship is “a relationship – it requires watering.”

Playing in the ruins: Sasha Chapin’s phrase for what happens when your perfectionist expectations collapse and you’re “living in a shipwreck of your expectations.” You stop trying to fix it and start to play with it instead.

And then you can look around yourself and say, okay, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day. Who am I actually, in this fallen place, this actuality foreign to my hopes and dreams.

Unclenching: ’s move for getting unstuck: relax in the middle of the anxiety instead of gripping harder. Letting go of control ends up “unleashing a vastly greater capacity for action, creativity and aliveness.”

Congruent: Therapy-speak for when who you are, what you do, and why you do it all line up. “It just means you make sense.” I typically say “alignment,” but this is nice too.

Dig this? Share it with someone you have congruent healthy heat with…

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Bonus: 5 more “new to me” terms ahead…

“The deal”: The old unwritten arrangement that tech could do whatever it wanted as long as its people paid high taxes and gave to charity.

People suggested that maybe rich people should pay more taxes instead of giving their money away — that perhaps the whims of some random rich person are not the best way to support the most vulnerable in our society. Andreessen and Horowitz suggest that this critique of philanthropy is simply jealousy. It also unbalanced “the deal.”

Learned ignorance: Knowing there’s always more to learn, even when you’re the expert. Historian Christopher Bellitto says it “should make even the most accomplished expert humble.”

Alpine divorce: When a man ditches his partner on a hike.

Women describe alpine divorce as going on a hike, climb or other outdoor adventure with a male partner, only to be abandoned or left behind – perhaps he went too fast and neglected to wait, or a fight on the trail resulted in him storming off. Breakups have quickly followed.

Reciprocity mindset: People tend to live up, or down, to whatever you expect of them. Steph Stiner says it matters most in dating, where “your standards define your experiences.”

Learned ignorance: Knowing there’s always more to learn, even when you’re the expert. Historian Christopher Bellitto says it “should make even the most accomplished expert humble.”

Thanks for reading!

M.

Come see me tape a special live in NYC on Oct 25. Ticket link here – use the code “groovy” for a discount.

The comedy world came together this week to attack Sebastian Maniscalco’s takeover of SiriusXM’s Raw Dog comedy channel.

This evolution of SiriusXM’s comedy programming has been harmful to working-class comics who depended on Raw Dog airplay and the royalties that came with it. Airplay has become significantly concentrated among the industry’s upper echelon of comics — living and dead — impacting passive residual income going to comics at lower levels.

Wrote about it over at Funny How:

Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian

Sebastian Maniscalco’s SiriusXM Takeover Is Crushing the Middle Class of Comedy

Sebastian’s new channel on SiriusXM is crushing middle class comedians who rely on payments from the company to pad income. Now some are fighting back. (Thanks to them!) Spread the word if ya care. Details below…

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a month ago · 15 likes · 2 comments · Matt Ruby

And I posted my own cheeky video about it too:

Because we’re comedians. Let’s do comedy, y’know?

A few more thoughts on it:

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Those who hate Israel really want you to say it. But the way they keep parsing the legal definition of the word to prove their case feels somewhat odd because, well, that’s the most Jewish way to behave. Arguing 24/7 over legal semantics? That’s our thing.

But here we are…

Podcaster Scott Galloway to Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed:

As a Jew, I find it entirely unfair and not accurate to describe what’s happening in Israel as a genocide. My understanding of the definition of genocide is the purposeful extermination of a people based on their religion, their ethnicity, or their nationality.

But El-Sayed is working off a different definition:

When people use dehumanizing language against a people, when they bomb their hospitals and their schools, when they attempt to displace them from where they are with the argument that, ‘Well, they’re all Arabs, these other people speak the same language, they might as well just be shipped over there’ — that seems to me to be deliberate targeting.

However, neither of them seems to be using the actual definition of the word from the 1948 Genocide Convention:

El-Sayed said to Galloway, “Neither you nor I are scholars on genocide. I leave it to scholars on genocide, in Israel itself, who’ve called this a genocide.”

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We eliminated bullying and look what happened. 🤓 Turns out the jocks and the mean girls might have actually been saving humanity. What a plot twist.

I’ve been thinking about AI a lot lately (unfortunately?)…

East coast dates and live special taping

Info on east coast tour dates. Also: See my live special taping in NYC on October 25.

Robots on the warpath

🤖 On social media, you can’t say AI might kill all of humanity. You have to say AI might unalive all of humanity. 'Cuz while the robots are exterminating us, they're also like, "Hey, let's watch the language."

🤖 On the plus side, it looks like my having zero retirement plan may not have been such a mistake after all!

🤖 Let’s put all the data centers in Idaho and power them like this:

🤖 David French:

Has there ever been an industry rollout, from a P.R. perspective, worse than A.I.? It has sort of been: It’s coming, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. It might end the world. It could very well destroy your job. But you know, as a consolation, this chatbot will help you describe how to commit suicide. The rollout has been one of “forced inevitability.” In other words, what the industry has basically said is essentially that there’s nothing you can do.

🤖 The thing about data centers is they take something abstract and amorphous (i.e. AI) and turn it into something concrete and physical. That’s why they’ve become the lightning rod for society’s collective rage at AI. They finally gave us an outlet.

🤖 Perfect time to do a deep fake of Mitch McConnell warning us about the dangers of AI while breakdancing.

🤖 Hey, everyone with one of those Japanese robotoilets…

…if the robots do try to destroy us all, doesn’t the john seem like the perfect place for ‘em to get it [toilet paper] rolling!? But go ahead, dangle your junk over that every day. 🤞

🤖 To sum up our current stage of capitalism: We went from drilling to fracking. And it ain’t just the ground. We’re fracking our brain stems, we’re fracking democracy, and we’re fracking the entire notion of humanity. And it fracking sucks.

🤖 I wanna do predatory capitalism right so I’m gonna see if I can bet on the destruction of humanity on Polymarket.

🤖 AI is the Kamala Harris of technology: No one asked for it, wants it, or voted for it in the past. Yet the powers that be keep thrusting it upon us while pretending it's something we are all excited about.

🤖 We’re getting so close to the logical conclusion of our maniacal incentives: “It is essential for our continued economic growth that we destroy humanity. No one’s happy about it, but what can we do?”

🤖 The problem is there’s no money in trying to prevent AI from exterminating humanity.

🤖 “A big problem in our society is we no longer recognize when people are on drugs.”
-Me whenever I see that guy from Palantir talk

🤖 Bad writing is now good writing because at least we know AI didn’t write it.

🤖 Pro-AI people are the angriest optimists I’ve ever seen. Nvidia leather jacket guy sure could use some Xanax. And I watched a Diary of a CEO panel where this furious guy (left) was the “AI will work out fine” pov and all I could think about was how much he reminded me of Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast (right).

🤖 Half the ads on the NYC subway are for some app that does AI-created pitch decks. Funny because no one wants to consume normal decks in the first place and now people are like “...but a robot made this one!” Oh, in that case, I’m even LESS interested.

🤖 You just know 47 is dying to rename AI so it stands for “American Intelligence.” 😜

🤖 Dear anti-regulation bros: You know what we do with the airline industry to make sure we don’t die in a plane crash? Let’s just do that with tech.

🤖 There’s only one man smart enough to stop AI…paging Will Hunting!

Why do the AI companies want to be regulated now?

Is AI reeeeeally going to destroy humanity or is this recent pivot to “regulation is good” just a scheme by the AI companies to lock in profits via regulatory capture?

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"Tech bros, your balls are like data centers. We don't want them anywhere near us."

WIRED: Why No One Wants to Date Tech Bros

Once seen as nerdy but harmless innovators, men in tech are now widely regarded as red-pilled Elon Musk wannabes. It’s made getting laid a whole lot harder.

Woe to those bros. But actually, I think there’s something deeper happening here. And it reminds me a lot of the cultural downfall of finance bros back in the day. Watch the video above to learn more and see why I think this is about way more than just tech.

Share this post with someone else who will dig it…

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East coast dates + NYC live special taping

Related:

Behind the paywall

Sneak peek at some AI/tech jokes I’m working on…

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But I ain’t mad at her. She has equity and is an official partner in this betting company…so she’s actually elevating sex worker to sexecutive. Brav🍈.

Did you know that comedian Bill Hicks actually wrote that ad decades ago? I’ve got cross-cut proof that’s going viral:

As for the whole backlash, c’mon. Me to the haters: Dontcha get itttttt? The purpose of advertising campaigns is to get attention. And the best way to do that now is to incite rage. (Thanks, algorithms!) If you’re furious about an ad, that’s great for advertisers. And if you post angrily about it, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Madison Avenue’s gone from being Don Draper at work (clever) to being Don Draper at home (gross).

As always: Incentives gonna incentive.

(Originally posted about this over at .)

In a way, Sydney Sweeney is to b👀bs what Macklemore is to antizi0nism. What do I mean by that? ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Macklemore fuss

I’ve always said no one understands the plight of the oppressed more than white rappers from Seattle. ✊

I kinda relate to Macklemore because I too am frequently an opening act who doesn’t move many tickets, gets oddly political, and makes things weird for the headliner. Luckily, I only perform at DIY indie stadiums. (Or tiny comedy clubs…see below.)

So which side is right in this whole Macklemore/Sheeran/Kraft brouhaha?

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I was on Stavros Halkias’ podcast telling him the story of how my parents met:

They’re dead now, but my sis saw that clip and told me I got some details wrong. (FYI Eve is my grandma.)

FYI I post funny clips (and some more serious rants) to my YouTube channel all the time. Subscribe here.

Some recent stuff:

I write about the craft of standup over at FUNNY HOW (also on Substack):

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

Recently there:

Tell a friend about this newsletter. It helps.

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You can also check out my stuff on Instagram and TikTok too.

P.S. Filmed a bunch of good stuff recently for “Misguided Meditation” (gonna be a combo platter special of comedy/drama/sketches/animations/soundscape). Gonna be a doozy. Topics covered: ayahuasca, therapy, death, mindfulness, non-violent communication, consent, land acknowledgements, mental health, and more. Stay tuned to this newsletter for updates.

“Did you get your steps in today?”
-Fitbit and/or AA meeting

“Unlike you, I respect indigenous cultures!”
-Man tossing virgin into a volcano

“L’eggo my ego.”
-Buddhist waffles

“Practice. Location. Practice. Location. Practice. Location.”
-Real estate agent trying to sell Carnegie Hall

“I swear, I am not responsible for Aaron Rodgers.”
-Ayahuasca

“Bert people Bert people.”
-Ernie

“Hear me out. What if the receptionist is, get this, SASSY?”
-Screenwriters

“I’m an early adopter of wisdom.”
-Old souls

“Wait till these ladies see this fish i just caught! Hinge gals about to go crazy!”
-50% of men apparently

“Benedict Arnold was actually the good guy and George Washington was the problem.”
-Me trying to get booked on a manosphere podcast

“It’s just like a data center. Except instead of housing data, it houses humans.”
-Me trying to get them to build affordable housing

“You must put wax in your ears to resist the call of the sirens.”
-Christopher Nolan when it’s time to write dialogue for female characters

“I choose violence.”
-Extremely online people

“Actually, it does NOT take a village.”
-Townships

“What you need to understand is how much oil this box contains.”
-Pandora

“No one could have seen this coming.”
-Person who ignored everyone trying to warn him this was coming

“But I WANT the ick.”
-Chapst

“Trigger warning!”
-How kids call for the passenger seat now I’m guessing

“The surgeon was a woman.”
-Me joking around with my female surgeon…uh oh, she is not at all amused…now I’m pretty concerned

“Methinks thou doth protest too much.”
-Me at any protest when they start doing slam poetry

“Shut up and dribble.”
-Quiet baby to crying baby

“Flock around and find out.”
-The surveillance state

“Stop Asian hate!”
-Me while pointing out Israel is in Asia

“I’ve been red pilled!”
-Me eating Flintstones vitamins

“I’m just asking questions.”
-Socrates on his podcast “Just Asking Questions” before breaking to do an ad read for MeTogas

“AI is really stealing my thunder.”
-Climate change

Sick pics

📷 Make. The index cards. Bigger.

📷 The guy they hired to fix the reflecting pool looks like he should be a character from a Coen brothers movie.

📷 East coast tour dates upcoming…

And I’m taping a special in NYC on October 25. Promo code “groovy” gets you discounted tix if purchased before October 1.

📷 These two are cute:

📷 ZUI = Gen Z User Interface. Dial it in just right.

📷 We need to set up the women outside the Lindsay Clancy trial with the men outside Andrew Tate’s jail cell. Those ladies will either date or murder ‘em. Either way, society wins.

📷 Worst Coachella lineup everrrrrr.

No one understands the plight of the oppressed more than white rappers from Seattle. ✊

📷 Fin!

Gems

💎 My version of hell is those 10-minute standing ovations at film festivals because it’s just a bunch of show biz people congratulating themselves for the heroic act of being show biz people.

💎 Why Vegas is suffering: No need to go to Sin City when the sins will come to you.

💎 Old school TV: “It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?” Imagine those ads now. Parents would go, “Yeah, he’s on the couch, on his iPad, watching some livestreamer on Twitch. Same as the other 23 hours of the day.”

💎 I read that men get more abusive right before a relationship is about to end. I think that’s what’s up with baseball umpires. The ABS thing is a sword hanging over ‘em so now it’s all “don’t wear your hat that way” as a last lick before they get replaced by robots.

💎 Email: “Good day Sir/Madam”
How they think I’ll respond: “Finally, correspondence from a true GENTLEMAN. Go onnnnnn...”

💎 Idea: A doomsday bunker tax. They can build one, but only if we get everything else they own. Otherwise: Nah, they gotta be in the soup with the rest of us.

💎 Re: Steve Ballmer, I just can’t believe a billionaire was actually held responsible for doing something. So it IS possible. 🤯

💎 Being polite is a version of being a performative male…and I miss it.

💎 Why the hell are we now changing how we say Czech and Turkey in int’l sports? Decades of my life have gone by and it’s too late for me to adjust now. Related: I think all this hair plug money is going to Turkey’s head.

💎 Gen Z dresses like a slop bowl of fashion. In Bushwick, it looks like there was a wildfire and everyone had to put on whatever clothing was closest before being consumed by flames.

💎 Addiction can leap. For example, Hunter Biden used to be addicted to crack, but now he’s addicted to appearing on podcasts.

10 more fauxtations

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…and I want you there. Tickets available now (code “groovy” gets you discount before October 1). It’ll be really good so assemble the laughers.

Some tour dates too (MA, MD, VA, NY):
Sep 15 Queens, NY (Grove 34)
Sep 16 Fredericksburg, VA (Galvin’s)
Sep 18 Manassas, VA (The Salisbury Center)
Oct 07 Cambridge, MA (The Comedy Studio)
Oct 17 Livingston Manor, NY (Space Acres)
Oct 18 Frederick, MD (Cellar Door)
Oct 25 NYC (New York Comedy Club) * LIVE SPECIAL TAPING *
Nov 19 Pitman, NJ (Broadway Theatre)

🎟️ Show info here.

Young folk have no idea how much this impacted an entire generation’s view of trans people:

The quality of color grading and camera lenses on Ossoff videos is astounding. If nothing else, he should totally win the vote of the cinematography community. 🎥🎬😜

Related: Campaign slogan idea: “Ossoff or F- Off!”

Who ya got in the "always in a black v-neck with jeans" showdown?

Speaking of leftist politics…

My crazy idea: Before we go full fledged socialism, how about we get America to be okay with unions? Like, give the people a little collective bargaining foreplay before you try to ram your Mao into ‘em.

I wasn’t always pro-union. But I’ve seen how effective the police one is. I mean, non-union Amazon workers can’t even get a bathroom break. Meanwhile, cops get paid leave after shooting someone. If that ain’t an incentive for workers of the world to unite… 🤷‍♂️

Basically, there’s an ongoing battle between labor and capital – and it seems pretty clear to me that, in this moment, labor could use all the help it can get. In an atomized world, collective bargaining becomes more and more essential. Divided we fall and all that.

: Eight different insiders have issued warnings that AI could kill everybody before the end of the decade. Hey, look on the bright side: Odds are it probablyyyyy won’t destroy humanity.

I think I’ve got the perfect analogy for AI…

[Up ahead: More AI talk, “The Nerd Reich,” the genius innovation of Big Tech, the root canal heard ‘round the world, Maslow, the Approval Matrix, why identity is a trap, and more.]

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Until her passing, that is. Ever since, my timeline’s been a surprising reveal of what lurked underneath the persona, the true depth of her artistry and humanity. In fact, I’ve cried every day since her passing at something she said or sang. (Shocking to me too!) Only now am I realizing just how beautiful she was in ways that had nothing to do with her appearance.

But let’s start with the way she looked, because that’s what everyone did. Parton knew the secret that all comedians know: If you beat them to the joke, they can’t hurt you.

Dumb blonde, bimbo, trailer trash, whore. With all of them, she got there first. She wasn’t the butt of the joke because she was the one telling the joke. And even in on-the-spot moments, she could riff better than most crowdwork comedians.

When an interviewer told her he had spent nearly nine months interviewing Barbra Streisand, Dolly’s eyes brightened, and she quipped, “We could have a baby if we started now.”

And by twisting the whole “trash” thing, she made those who might condemn her look the fool. She wasn’t hiding the wigs, the eyelashes, the sequins, etc. So she oozed, “I have nothing to be ashamed of.” Honestly addressing all her fakery made her seem 100% sincere.

“Do you ever feel that you’re a joke or that people make fun of you?” asked Barbara Walters in an interview that now feels like that Frost/Nixon showdown but for feminism.

Parton didn’t flinch: “I know they make fun of me, but actually all these years the people have thought the joke was on me, it’s actually been on the public. I know exactly what I’m doing and I can change it at any time or I make more jokes about myself than anybody because I am sure of myself as a person. I’m sure of my talent and I’m sure of my love for life…I’m very content.”

A comms expert even used this interview as a case study for “label upgrade” strategy.

“Dolly,” Walters began. “Where I come from, would I have called you a hillbilly? … When I think of hillbillies, am I thinking of your kind of people?”

“I think you probably are,” she replied. “But we were very proud people, people with a lot of class. It was country class, but it was a great deal of class. And most of my people were not that educated, but they are very, very intelligent. Good common sense — horse sense, we called it.”

To Walters, “hillbilly” clearly meant “backward” or “unsophisticated.” But Parton owned it and changed the meaning: Being a hillbilly was now about being proud, practical, and wise.

And I love her go-to bit in interviews where she’d discuss the origin story of her “country girl’s idea of glamor.” (Definitely glamor, not glamour.)

“Well, cheap lookin’, flashy lookin’,” Parton said about her style, before diving into a story about her hometown of Locust Ridge.

“I kind of patterned myself after what they called the town tramp in my hometown, when I was little,” she told The Early Show’s Julie Chen in 2006.

“There was this woman that was very much a loose woman, but I didn’t know what that meant and I just told her how beautiful she was, ’cause she had this beautiful yellow hair.

“She left a big impression on me, and I would talk about how beautiful she was and different ones would say, ‘Oh, she’s just trash.’ And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up. I’m gonna be trash!’ And that is how I look,” Parton continued.

“I’m gonna be trash!” That’s how you do it. As she told Adam Grant in 2022: “I just like to look the way I look. I’m so outgoing inside, in my personality, that I need the way I look to match all of that,” she said.

Now let’s get to what was underneath all that glitz. Parton’s looks allowed her to smuggle in her ideas. See, Dolly Parton was a dumb blonde the way Saturday Night Fever was a movie about dancing. That was just the bait. Once you were on the hook, the darkness unfurled around you. (It’s similar to how South Park can get away with the most biting political commentary on TV because “it’s just a cartoon.”)

Saturday Night Fever seems to be about superficial disco joy. In truth, it’s a bleak drama about working-class despair, racism, misogyny, suicide, and sexual assault. Parton’s music carried a similar darkness (just more southern gothic than Bay Ridge bummer). In her songs, there are murderers, cheaters, insane asylums, abortions, hookers, abuse, and endless variations on hardship.

And the perspective on all this darkness was coming from a woman. Billie Holiday may have gotten at this level of despair through her vocals, but Dolly was the one actually writing these songs. Groundbreaking stuff.

🔌 This is made by a human. Please go paid to support…or I will have to use AI to write this…and there’s no way AI could ever write this…so you can see the pickle we’re in here. Also, you’ll get bonus stuff. Thanks.

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Listen to “A Gamble Either Way.” Whoa.

The opening line is punk as hell:

“Being born was the worse and the first mistake I ever made. The doctor didn’t spank me, he just slapped me in the face.”
-Dolly Parton, “A Gamble Either Way”

Reminds me of this…

“I was saying ‘let me out of here’ before I was even born.”
-Richard Hell and the Voidoids, “Blank Generation”

You want it darker? Dolly’s got you…

On a dusty road at 15 in a yellow cotton dress
With the desert sun like an angry dragon breathing down my neck
And the dry cracked plains would make me think of a prehistoric time
Should I fear what lay before me less than what I’d left behind?

A 15-year old girl don’t have no trouble hitching rides
But sometimes when you’re riding free, you’ll pay the highest price
On back roads and in back seats and in cheap highway motels
But what’s a few more strangers in a life of nothing else?

Though the deck is stacked against you
Win or lose, you have to play
The hand that life has dealt you
And it’s a gamble either way

The last verse ends with the narrator becoming a prostitute.

What Johnny Cash was to suffering men, Dolly was to suffering women. One sang about prisoners; the other sang about whores.1 Both were singing gospel songs in the truest sense. What would Jesus do? He’d show deep compassion and radical empathy. But instead of preaching about it, they sang it.

In “Just Because I’m a Woman,” she turns the tables on all those songs about men who cheat. Guess what? Women make mistakes too. Sometimes it’s complicated.

Now a man will take a good girl
And he’ll ruin her reputation
But when he wants to marry
Well, that’s a different situation
He’ll just walk off and leave her
To do the best she can
While he looks for an angel
To wear his wedding band
Now I know that I’m no angel
If that’s what you thought you’d found
I was just the victim of
A man that let me down
Yes, I’ve made my mistakes
But listen and understand
My mistakes are no worse than yours
Just because I’m a woman

Writing/singing that in 1968 (!) was something else.

“The Seeker” could be sung at a gospel church or plant medicine ceremony.

Then there’s “I Will Always Love You,” which might be the sweetest kiss-off that’s ever been sung.

Bitter-sweet memories
That’s all I am taking with me
Goodbye, please don’t cry
We both know that I’m not
What you need
And I will always love you

Might be top of the list of breakup songs that people mistakenly think are “we’re in love” songs. (Because no one really listens to lyrics. Also up there: “The Way You Wear Your Hat.”) Dolly loved her some bait and switch.

“Jolene” might be her best song. The White Stripes live version blew me away decades ago with its ferocity.

But honestly, I’m Team Jolene. If your man is crying out my name while he sleeps, that ain’t on me.

With all this newfound perspective on Parton, an artist I keep coming back to in comparison is Ziggy-era David Bowie. Both delivered authenticity by covering it up with massive amounts of artifice.

In fact, this equation feels pretty true to me:

Live, Parton was more than just a singer. I keep noticing how much she throws in little giggles and asides during her performances. “Let’s do it again,” she tells the girls in “Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow.” In Kenny Rogers duets, she slips in jokes about Kenny in between verses. She offers running commentary to Chet Akins while they collaborate on “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?” She fights and scratches with her TV partner Porter Wagoner on these tracks:

The end result is a good-timey Rat Pack vibe – she’s a singer, comedian, and, well, just a star.

And by the way, she was a goddamn angel offstage. How Dolly Parton spent her days:

She starred in several movies, at least three of which are good; wrote or co-wrote a handful of memoirs, several children’s books, a few cookbooks, and one novel; and created a sprawling business empire that made her into not only the most famous export of Sevier County but also its largest employer. To honor her father, who never learned to read, she started a charity, the Imagination Library, that sends a free book every month to roughly one in seven preschool-age American children. That would have been plenty; richer people usually do far less. But, when her home county was devastated by wildfires in 2016, she sent a thousand dollars a month for six months to every family that had lost a home, and, when the coronavirus came around four years later, she donated a million dollars to help fund the development of a vaccine. As her fellow country-music stars Montgomery Gentry once sang, that’s a life you can hang your hat on.

So refreshing to see someone behaving like Christ instead of just constantly invoking him.

Was she a feminist? Dolly resisted the label. She repeatedly insisted how much she loved men and rooted for them. Feminism felt like taking sides and she wasn’t on the attack against anyone. Her lesson was one in empathy, not condemnation.

In fact, she bristled at the term during this podcast interview. She only came around when the host described her as a feminist “in practice.”

JAD: [Writer Sarah Smarsh] told us there are the feminists in theory, but there are also the feminists in practice. And she puts you in that category.

DOLLY PARTON: That’s the one. That’s me. That’s me.

JAD: Like, it’s about how you live.

DOLLY PARTON: Yes, that’s a good way to say it. I think that’s a good way of saying it. I live it. I work it. And I think there’s power in it for me.

That feels like a powerful reveal. This woman who looked incredibly superficial couldn’t stand the most superficial thing of all: talk. She wasn’t talking it because she lived it and worked it. That’s why it was so powerful.

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Let’s go back to that Walters interview. Walters commented the singer lived in her “imagination,” prompting Parton to reframe again:

“I want to try a fairy tale on you. Once upon a time, there was a little girl. Her name was Dolly Parton. And she lived in a small town in the mountains, which she loved because it was a comfort because she knew there was love and security there in her family.”

“But she was a child, very curious, and she wanted all the things that she had always been impressed with, like the fairy tales of the Mother Goose stories and the Cinderellas and the lost slipper,” Parton continued.

“Well, I guess she kind of wanted to find the other slipper in sort of a way. So she worked hard and she dreamed a lot and one day it came true. She was a fairy princess and she lived happily ever after.”

This monologue from the film Boyhood says something similar:

Mason: Dad, there’s no real magic in the world, right?

Dad: What do you mean?

Mason: You know, like elves and stuff. People just made that up.

Dad: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, what makes you think that elves are any more magical than something like a whale? You know what I mean? What if I told you a story about how, underneath the ocean, there was this giant sea mammal that used sonar and sang songs and it was so big that its heart was the size of a car and you could crawl through the arteries? I mean, you’d think that was pretty magical, right?

We imagine that fairy tales and magic exist somewhere outside reality, in the ether. But maybe they’re actually ways of seeing the world. We just need to reframe (or “label upgrade”) reality, the same way Parton repeatedly does with Walters’ questions. Do that, and the ordinary world reveals itself as something wondrous.

Maybe that’s the final lesson Dolly left us with: Your whole life can be a fairy tale if you’re willing to look at it the right way. Magic can hide right in front of your eyes. Just like Dolly always did.

-Matt

P.S. Let all this Dolly love be a lesson: We could all start saying a bunch of nice things about Willie Nelson right now.

The antisemite of the week is… 🥁

Mark Ruffalo!

He spoke out against Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion plan to buy Warner Bros. Discovery which led to pro-Israel influencers putting his head on a Piker.

wrote, “[Ruffalo’s criticism] never had to say ‘Jewish.’ The framing of the argument, targeting a Jewish family connection to Israel, said it for him.”

Noah Tishby wrote, “This week, Mark went after David Ellison and his father Larry Ellison over the Paramount—Warner Bros. merger, and in doing so engaged in age-old antisemitic tropes.”

Those are two of the more reasonable Israel stans too. (Don’t get me started on the NY Post’s insatiable headline hatemongering.)

Typical caveat here: I’m a Zionist Jew and my dad is from Israel blah blah blah.

That said: Just because I think Ruffalo is a BDS ridicuwoke, please don’t make me carry water for creepy oligarchs who aim to serve as lube for an authoritarian regime here in the USA. Anyone paying attention to the Ellisons has to be at least a tiny bit suspicious about their motivations. That’s not being antisemitic, that’s being aware.

Also: Sigh.

Increasingly, the whole pro-Israel vs. pro-Pali debate is making me realize the thing I detest most is propaganda, regardless of which side it’s advocating. I don’t need an incessant stream of tribalist hokum that tells me my side is right while incessantly dunking on the enemy. Gimme the truth, goddamnit. I’m a grownup, I can handle it. (Et tu?) I crave the nuance of reality as opposed to the simplicity of lazy binaries. Sadly, this is putting me on a very lonely island lately.

When you’re a pro-Israel hammer, everything looks like an antisemitic nail. Ruffalo may be a loon when it comes to Israel (i.e. never any admission of complexity and, in comparison to Gaza, it’s odd how little genocides in China/Myanmar matter to him), but there are plenty of good reasons to oppose this merger and the Ellisons (see: that FCC goon, 60 Minutes, Colbert, Kimmel, etc.).

I wrote about the Ellisons’ agenda here:

The Guardian gives background: “[Larry] Ellison is also close to Netanyahu and has donated heavily to the Israeli military through the non-profit Friends of the IDF. He gave the organisation its biggest-ever donation at the time.” Ellison was also a witness in Bibi’s graft trial, hosted Bibi on a vacation at his island, and, according to The Financial Times, was drawn to put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News because of her “pro-Israel stance.”

And then there’s the whole Trump connection. Larry Ellison has a decade-long history with the Republican party and a close relationship with Trump going back to the president’s first term. Ellison has frequented Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for dinners and met him in the Oval Office…Trump said, “[Ellison’s] an amazing man and an amazing business person.” As for the son, I’m gonna take a wild guess that the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree – the one bankrolling his whole life.

I don’t hate the idea of this merger because I’m antisemitic, I hate it because I love America. And democracy. And freedom of speech. And not being ruled by a corrupt, delulu, narcissist con man who wants to use a secret ballroom bunker as his catering truck while the rest of America flies on the decoy plane.

I’m just so tired of dumb binary thinking. I believe both Mark Ruffalo and Larry Ellison are schmucks. Extremely online tribalists may not be capable of handling this level of nuance, but I swear it’s not that hard.

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Gems

💎 NY Times: “Why is everybody under the age of 30 these days dressed like an actual lunatic?”

💎 Pretty sure half of these “rushtok” vids are just GAP ads from the 90’s.

💎 At this rate, I'm honestly kinda surprised he didn't sell off the naming rights and call it Lake Polymarket, Lake Skyrizi, or Lake Smoothie King.

💎 Been tearing up at Dolly clips all week. Got me thinking: Can we make Dolly day an annual thing? Been the perfect timeline cleanse. She was so talented, silly, bold, and unique. And constantly giving back too. Truly refreshing to see someone who just acted like Christ instead of constantly prattling on about him.

💎 An “I’m freezing my eggs” announcement is like watching someone apply for a job. Congrats and all that, but let’s see if it works out.

💎 I hate it when finance people are so evil that they force me to learn about finance. Fine, I’ll finally learn what private equity actually means.

💎 The WNBA commissioner must be so disappointed that all this trans trolling is squeezing out the league’s attempt to be ground zero for a race war.

💎 Slightly disappointed that RFK Jr is just nuts and not a grifter. We should have RFK Jr brand lettuce on the shelves by now.

💎 It’s like the worst Beach Boys song ever…

🎶 We’ll have fun fun fun till our Donny takes the tariffs away 🎶

💎 Hahahahaha. The chutzpah of this guy…

From him? Seriously? It’s the tech world version of this:

💎 “Was going away not an option?”
-Me every time I see Hunter Biden getting interviewed

💎 It’s fun when everyone going to Burning Man tries to rent out their NYC apartment at the same time. There should be some kinda exchange program where finance bros get to experience Bushwick for two weeks…but hmm, they’re all in the Hamptons. Maybe let some DSA folks crash there? But they’ll probably never leave because “property is theft” or whatever. Anyway, if you’re okay with an apartment filled with glitter, platform boots, hula hoops, and unread books about shamanism, now is your time to experience NYC.

💎 I just heard two music critics on a podcast arguing about nepo babies and industry plants and all I could think is how the conversation around art now gives me a headache. So many filters to run stuff through. I never had to think this much about, say, Led Zep when I was a kid. I heard John Bonham’s kick drum and I just KNEW. No one ever had to debate if Iggy Pop was a psy op. That we even have to ask these questions now feels like all the answer you need.

Rock on. 🤘

-Matt

The problem is they don’t talk, they write. And that means they continually invent terms that ignore how human beings actually speak.

Human beings like to cut to the chase when they’re speaking. Yet the woke/tolerant/PC/whatever-we’re-calling-it-now way is almost always the long cut. It shouldn’t be faster to say the hateful word or phrase than the correct one and yet…

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Me:

Um, paging Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.1

Look, if you’re taking psychedelics and you’re still right-wing…THEN YOU DIDN’T TAKE ENOUGH.

I’ve never been tripping balls on shrooms and thought, “We need more masked agents grabbing people off of the street and putting them into unmarked vehicles! Now crank the Khruangbin, man.”

According to the piece, the psychedelic spotlight is now shining on Ibogaine. Why? One big reason is because no one knows what the hell it is – and the real drug our society is addicted to is novelty. We long for things that are “BREAKING,” the latest trending topics, and anything else that comes without the baggage of history.

In this case, the focus on Ibogaine conveniently lets Rick Perry and crew rave about the healing power of plant medicine without having to deal with messy hippies prattling on about peace and patchouli. After all, Gabon, the African country where Ibogaine originates, is literally far out.

Meanwhile, the other hot substance du jour is 5-MeO-DMT. That’s too processed for me…I only lick farm-to-toad.

Anyway….

This whole “the GOP is trippin’” premise is pretty rich considering the right flank are the folks who brought us the war on drugs (not to mention all the other unwinnable wars America’s been fighting).

A guest raised what he saw as the central contradiction of the evening: preaching “just say no” to kids while the attendees sat at a fund-raiser for ibogaine. “Most of the people in this room are probably conservative, and we’ve had to take a position that is almost the opposite of where we were, say, five years ago,” he said.

How can you preach “just say no” to kids while advocating for plant medicine? Here’s an idea: Stop putting all drugs in the same evil bucket. We’re able to cheer on antidepressants while criticizing heroin usage. Embrace nuance a bit. After all, ayahuasca is often a way for people to beat their addiction.

And speaking of wars, pro-legalization orgs like MAPS focus their PR efforts on how plants can help heal veterans. The goal is to get the PTSD & BBQ set onboard in order to grease the legalization wheels. Start with these Texas good ‘ol boys and the rest of the dominoes will fall (in theory).

I get the strategy; the psychedelics industry thinks veterans with PTSD are the guards and tackles to get clinical trials/legalization over the goal line. Sure, whatever it takes. But c’mon, don’t make me pretend there’s depthful alignment with a right-wing political philosophy so wildly disconnected from the lessons plant medicine teaches.

That said, I’m onboard with whatever it takes to get those injured soldiers the help they need. And my psychedelic dream is one day we’ll stop focusing so much on giving plant meds to PTSD vets and give them to the guys who keep starting these wars instead. Let’s sign up the board of Halliburton for a jungle retreat in Peru, y’know?

As I’ve argued before, I also wish the emphasis wasn’t constantly on the ways plant medicine can cure PTSD, addiction, and “deaths of despair.” Of course, go for that. But the result is so much energy going toward toxic stuff when betterment of the well is glorious too. Michael Pollan discussed that here…

[Researcher Bob] Jesse was ultimately less interested in people’s mental disorders than in their spiritual well-being—in using entheogens for what he calls “the betterment of well people”…

The first time I raised the idea of “the betterment of well people” with Roland Griffiths, he shifted in his chair and chose his words carefully. “Culturally, right now, that’s a dangerous idea to promote,” he said. And yet, as we talked, it became clear that he, too, feels that many of us stand to benefit from these molecules and, even more, from the spiritual experiences they can make available.

“We are all terminal,” Griffiths said. “We’re all dealing with death. This will be far too valuable to limit to sick people.”

“Culturally, right now, that’s a dangerous idea to promote.”

Bummer sentiment. We’re a spiritually sick society and plant medicine might be our best hope for chaging that. Feels like it’s actually more dangerous for us to not promote that idea. If the antidote to all this venom is out there, let’s not hide it away.

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Comedy

Come see me headline in Arlington, VA on Friday, August 21. Tickets here.

And I’ll be back in Narrowsburg, NY on Tuesday, September 1st (with Mark Normand). Tickets here.

More on psychedelics

🍄 Men need psychedelics to realize things women know innately. And women need alcohol to experience the unearned confidence men feel innately.

🍄 Babies love peekaboo because our entire lives are peekaboo. Time went on for centuries before us and will go on and on after us. Our lives are but a mere blip. The universe: “Now you see ‘me,’ now you don’t.”

🍄 Men learn empathy from shrooms because we’d rather listen to the woods than women.

🍄 People are afraid to do psychedelics because they might have a bad trip. But then they doomscroll all day long which is the ultimate bad trip.

🍄 “I’m afraid to try psychedelics.” One thing to note: Fear is often ego in disguise.

🍄 Psychedelics people talk a lot about how ya need to “shake the snowglobe” which is weird ‘cuz that sounds much more like something coke people do.

🍄 Some people say doing psychedelics is like 10 years of therapy in a single day. And to those people, I offer this humble suggestion: Your therapist might suck.

🍄 We treat psychedelics like GLP-1s for the brain. “Flip the switch” and you’ll no longer be an addict, depressed, have PTSD, etc. But let’s get real: Actual change usually comes with time/effort.

🍄 I keep changing the channel yet always wind up back at the default neural mode network.

Thanks for reading. ✌️

-Matt

P.S. Plenty more on psychedelics and my ayahuasca “downloads” in the archives.

She keeps giving interviews that make her seem like a psy op designed to make people dislike the DSA. After listening to her, I feel like DSA members probably watch Die Hard and root for Asian Dawn.

I guess we’re pendulum swingers that must go from far right to left now. My hatred of all things 🍊 is giving me mixed feelings…because do we really have to swerve all the way to the other pole of kooky extremism?

The more you live inside your phone, the more convinced you are that America should either be socialist or fascist. I still don’t understand how we’re expecting a country that won’t even go for unions to be cool with swing state socialism. Like, how about we do unions first? Wouldn’t that be a good step in…eh, forget it. That’s just me and my dumb logic brain.

But maybe they can sell it because…AIPAC.

ICYMI: AIPAC is to the DSA what trans is to MAGA…and “say genocide” is their “cry uncle.” In addition to proving you are a moral superhero, condemning AIPAC is basically code for “get money out of politics” which okay, sure, but maybe we could save some of that vitriol for the 190 other lobbying groups that spend more than AIPAC?

Re: “genocide,” I can’t help but wonder if antisemites realize that endlessly arguing over the legal definition of a word is actually the most Jewish behavior imaginable.

But they can’t help it. “Platforming,” “lived experience,” “genocide”...these are all words you can just drop into a convo and then you automatically win and the other person needs to DO BETTER. Pretty magical stuff.

Btw, have you noticed how the people who love all this the most are under 40? My theory: Gen Z didn’t experience the last century, which is why they keep trying to bring back things like socialism, antisemitism, and jorts.

Gems

💎 I know how to get affordable housing built: Start referring to it as “AI data centers.” The big wigs will find a way.

💎 If dogs could speak, I feel like the first thing they’d say is “Actually, we hate bandanas.”

💎 Those who can, do. Those who can’t, podcast.

💎 fitness rage bait = fit bait

💎 DC! (Well, Arlington.) I’m coming at ya live August 21. Tickets here.

💎 My big conspiracy theory is segregation was started by water fountain manufacturers. Blame Big Water Fountain!

💎 I always set mousetraps using organic peanut butter because the little guys deserve a gourmet last meal.

💎 It’s no coincidence that low T rhymes with goatee.

💎 We eliminated bullying and look at us now. I feel like we owe bullying an apology.

💎 I wish to live inside the Venn diagram overlap of “looks impressive” and “not a lot of work.” For example: Big ice cubes. People are wildly impressed by them even though it’s still just frozen water. I talked about that here:

💎 Watching p0rn is illegal in Texas. More like LONGHORNY if you ask me.

💎 Everyone on social media haaaaaated journalists so damn much until it came time for someone to find out if Mitch McConnell is alive. Now, it’s 24/7 kvetching about the lack of the profession we furiously attacked for years. Maybe if everyone didn’t crap all over “the lamestream media” for a decade, there’d still be some old school reporters with contacts inside that hospital.

💎 No one drinks or has sex anymore. GLP-1s mean we don’t gorge on food. Gambling apps are everywhere. So of course Las Vegas is struggling.

💎 You’re into ethical non-monogamy? I get it. I’m into artisanal shoplifting and respectable identity theft.

💎 You’ve seen my last special, right?

Gonna be taping another one soooooon.

💎 Hoops talk: When pundits say you have “one of the best contracts in the league,” that likely means you have one of the worst agents in the league.

💎 Lip filler ladies look like they put their mouth in a Swedish pen1s pump.

💎 Non-neurodivergent is a lot of syllables to say normal.

💎 The human brain was not built to handle social media. It’s wild to expect people to process jokes, hate speech, activism, news, and unlikely animal friends in rapid fire succession.

💎 The Odyssey is rebooted IP. Totally the same plot as The Warriors.

💎 Nini Munoz (“science communicator”) on Fauci:

I am reminding folks: science is the process of reducing uncertainty, or, put another way, becoming progressively less wrong.

And somehow, people keep treating evidence of that process as evidence that scientists were lying (This is about Dr. Fauci...AGAIN).

Science begins with observations and hypotheses that are tested as we collect evidence. Then it discards those that don’t survive, refines ones that do, and updates conclusions.

The right way to talk about science (and a lot of other things too) is less emphasis on “was it always right?” and more on “does it keep getting more right?”

💎 You know how Triumph ends sentences with “for me to poop on”? I’ve started doing that with new technology, but I use the phrase “if you’re a shut-in.” This new app that makes it so you never have to [go outside, talk to someone else, etc.] is really great (if you’re a shut in).

💎 You never hear about gay incels. Pretty good advertisement for going gay.

💎 Can you be an anchor on MSNOW who does NOT wear glasses or is that not allowed by the network?

The race war will begin in…the WNBA!?

This post outraged people:

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