Hard closing for enemies and strangers

Thoughts on fashion, parenting, OceanGate, risk, The Bear, real estate, Madonna, forbidden love, spiritual hierarchy, concept creep, and more.

💎 It's always a "soft opening for friends and family." Just once I'd like to get invited to a “hard closing for enemies and strangers.”

💎 Women’s fashion nowadays:

💎 My nephew hates wearing jackets and never gets cold. Nonetheless, my sister insists he take a jacket with him when it's cold outside. She doesn't care but she needs the other parents to not think she's negligent. And now I think that attitude is like 80% of parenting.

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🌊 Titanic sub

Shoutout to everyone who managed to make this OceanGate sub thing about whatever pet cause they're always prattling on about anyway.

In fact, it was all an ideal window (porthole?) into social media. Folks potentially suffocating in a coffin at the bottom of the ocean? Perfect time to mock the rich, dunk on a teen, or pivot to whatever pet cause you were gonna kvetch about anyway. Social media is where human beings go to treat other beings like avatars.

I get why it was tough to resist this though: “Stepson of missing billionaire on Titanic submarine shoots his shot with OnlyFans model as rescuers scramble to locate his stepfather.” Worst thing to happen to stepfamilies since YouP0rn.

While we're on the topic, stop exploring caves too. Let the caves cave. If you want to get into something dark and rocky, just ask me about my childhood.

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💎 If Glenn Frey was into Excel…

💎 I was asked to tell a story of a risk I’ve taken. My answer:

I think we often have the wrong idea about risk. We associate it with stepping out on some ledge, quitting your job, leaving where you’re from, etc. But sometimes the biggest risk is doing nothing and just continuing along the path you’re already on, even if you’re not feeling it. Inertia is the most powerful force in the universe. Just doing the same old thing day after day may feel “safe,” but it can be a fool’s path. I mean, I could tell you about moving from Chicago to NYC (my live-in girlfriend dumped me and the bass player in my band quit in the same week so I split town a month later). Was that a risky move? Eh, I feel like the bigger risk would have been to just stay put and not make a change. It felt like the universe sending me a message: If not now, when? So I left. Sometimes not leaping can be the most dangerous move.

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Politicked off

Trump can still run even if he’s convicted! Crazy that convicts can’t vote for President yet can run for President.

I’m amused by the right wing idea that the FBI and DOJ must be infiltrated by Antifa snowflakes as opposed to, y'know, accepting your cult leader is a con man and prosecutors tend to be like "yooooo" to defiant criminals who keep confessing on hot mics. Guess I shouldn’t expect a bunch of dudes with huge beards to understand Occam's Razor.

Chris Christie going full prosecutor mode is fun though. He should find as many MAGA people as he can and debate/argue with them constantly like Jordan Klepper on The Daily Show. The spectacle of that will be the only thing that comes close to the entertainment Trump provides.

The motley fanbase of RFK, Jr. makes me realize something: Anti-vaxx people have each other, message boards, rallies, and a cause they wanna fight for. Us "I trust scientists" dolts are just logical and lonely. There's no community in being right since it’s so “mainstream.” It’s an interesting side effect of the loneliness epidemic: There’s a lot more incentive to go full wackadoo now; at least that way you’ve got company.

Also, I just saw Ben Shapiro post about Barbie. Pretty crazy that dolls, The Little Mermaid, M&M's, and Mr. Potato Head are the things alpha males are supposed to care about nowadays.

As for Russia, who knew you could just "oopsy” a coup!?

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💎 Smartphones are digital Prozac. They compress your entire life so it's never that low but also never that high. You're never bored, but you're never interesting. Everything is just middling.

💎 Every generation has its own way to say something is true...

• Gen Z = "No cap"

• Millennials = "Facts"

• Gen X = "Word"

• Boomers = "Right on"

• Seniors = "Correct"

💎 A great compliment you can give me is to share the Rubesletter…

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The Bear

Normalize me telling people “let’s have a conversation but without you talking about what tv shows you like.” That said, let’s talk The Bear…

That no one is on the same episode of The Bear at the same time after we all got to share Succession eps together as a society is the strongest argument yet for streamers doing the 1 ep per week release schedule vs. the all-in drop. It gives us time to soak it in and get on the same page (well, screen).

Anyway, the show is great and both seasons have pulled off an interesting feat by getting richer with each cours–, er, episode. It’s like Chef’s Table meets Blues Brothers meets Michael Mann’s Thief (underrated Chi flick) meets Before Sunset meets Big Night meets The Karate Kid meets Seven Samurai. The editing throughout is top notch and the soundtrack makes me feel like I’m back living with my 90’s roomie, even if it made me cringe to read that the Replacements, Counting Crows, and R.E.M. are now considered “dad rock,” according to critic James Poniewozik.

Related tangent: When the music from your youth becomes classic rock, it's time to get your prostate checked. But otherwise, someone's numerical age is feeling increasingly irrelevant. Gonna just start telling people my age is "I need the light on my phone to read the menu" but at least I'm not "I had to increase the font size on my phone" yet.

I liked Poniewozik’s take on the Copenhagen episode though:

A great restaurant, it argues, is about care. Caring for the customer, making the guest feel cared for — characters talk about service like it’s a religious vocation…But there’s also taking care, learning discipline, doing things the hard way because it’s the right way. In his Danish sojourn, we watch Marcus try to scoop a perfect quenelle while his mentor tells him, over and over, that it’s not good enough. This kind of scrutiny can be abusive — we saw this in Season 1 flashbacks to Carmy being terrorized by a past boss (Joel McHale). But here it is simply firm and honest. Try again, try again. It’s unsparing, but it comes with the belief that you can do better because you are better.

It’s refreshing to see discipline presented as kind.

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💎 I’m real estate ignorant. And that’s tough 'cuz someone will go, "My apartment is [X] square feet." And then I just have to nod along even though I have no idea if that's the size of a football field or a bathtub.

💎 Read my other newsletter

Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian

. Spotted there recently: Joan Rivers vs. hecklers, Steven Wright’s rules for comedy, John Mulaney on telling stories, and more.

💎 Good working assumption: Any website that has “truth” in the title is BS and any food that has “light” or “healthy” in the title ain’t actually good for you.

💎 Really enjoyed this convo with Kevin Kelly (and ok, I stole that “truth” thing from him). Wise dude.

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Age rage

It’s weird how normal plastic surgery is becoming…

“What kind of medicine do you practice?”“I’m a restrained surgeon.”

It’d be cool if Madonna chose to age gracefully instead of constantly flaunting her various surgeries. At this point, I feel like I admire her more as an artist than she does. She's 64 and keeps acting all "Don't you wanna f– me?" And it’s like, "Uh, no, we don't. We want to hear what you THINK! You're Madonna!!! Respect yourself!"

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💎 On the other hand, I’m all for forbidden love. It’s why this dance scene from Witness (below) is so great. She’s Amish and he’s Harrison Ford so they can’t be together. Religion is a real pain like that. But damn, they want to so badly…

…Mmm, so juicy to watch lust, joy, and fear intertwine. “You love it,” he says. And she does. But she can’t. Oh my.

💎 I post clips of my standup at Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Some recent clips:

💎 Jules Evans writes about Ken Wilber and spiritual hierarchy and provides this Interesting critique of “green-stage thinking.” Bottom line: Power is dirty.

‘Green-stage thinking’ is supposedly anti-elitist, anti-hierarchical and pro-tolerance and diversity. But it is itself elitist (only college-educated people understand it), and aggressively intolerant of other forms of thinking.

It’s not really anti-hierarchical, it’s got its own intersectional hierarchy — female trumps male, black trumps white (and all other ethnicities), queer trumps straight, trans trumps cisgender, neuro-diverse trumps neuro-normative, non-western trumps western and so on.

It criticizes western civilization for its historical abuses — fair enough. But try having power rather than criticizing it from the moral purity of victimhood. See how progressive your anarchist utopia ends up. See how radical liberationist alternatives worked out in Russia or China or Cuba. Power is dirty, I’m afraid. Yes, we should recognize the stains of the west’s historical abuses. But no power is entirely clean.

💎 As religion declines, it increasingly seems like our new form of worship is collectively filming things to prove we were there, in the exact same spot, as everyone else who was filming the same thing…

💎 We desperately want things to be binary (see: the DSM), but nature relentlessly proves to us everything is fluid. The trick is to realize the problem isn't with nature, it's with us and our attachment to ideas out of step with reality. It doesn’t have to be that way. As Robert Greene writes, “The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.”

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Podcast

Listen to Kind of a lot with Matt Ruby.

A clip from a recent ep:

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💎

Gurwinder

defines “Concept Creep”:

As a social issue such as racism or sexual harassment becomes rarer, people react by expanding their definition of it, creating the illusion that the issue is actually getting worse.

Up ahead for non-freeloaders: Casinos, WFH, Google, Musk vs. Zuck, Tyler Durden, Harry Potter, Anthony Bourdain, and more.