There are no heroes here 🦸‍♂️

Threads, Jonah Hill's texts, a great Steve Martin line, Dr. Bronner, and much more.

🥁 Tell me how depressed you are on a scale from 0 to Hope Sandoval singing "Fade Into You."

🍄 My issue with the "psychedelic community" is this: Making psychedelic use your entire life identity seems like the OPPOSITE of integration.

📲 Substack is OnlyFans for dorks.

🃏 I post clips of my standup (and more) at Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube. Here’s a recent one on why right wingers are so mad at drag queens:

🍄 David Bronner, top executive at Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps and donor to psychedelic causes, looks like the exact opposite of his soap.

FYI here's the OG Doc Bronner:

🗯 "Go deeper and weirder and make something that is so human and so strange that it can't be duplicated by an algorithm."
-Owen Egerton

🎯 “I like these TV shows" is the new "this is my personality." At least when bands served this purpose, people would get into weird niche categories. Now, we're all either Successioners, Bears, or I Think You Should Leavers.

📲 Work from home tip: Leave the house just so you can get annoyed. You need consistent slight exposure to humanity. Otherwise, the irritation builds up to the point where you can't even handle strangers anymore.

👔 Too bad RFK Jr. isn't running for President of the "I don't understand that correlation is not causation" club, because he's really killing it on that.

🗯 Just learned the Czech word litost, translated as “the humiliated despair we feel when someone reminds us, through their accomplishments, of everything that has gone wrong in our lives.” Reverse schadenfreude!

🥁 🎶 I wanna do right but not right now 🎶 Great version of “Look at Miss Ohio.” And the way Gillian Welch rhymes “Atlanta” and “fantasy” is 🤌.

👔 Primaries are dumb: "Let's find the two craziest politicians willing to lie the most to extremist morons in 'the base' and then make them face off against each other and pretend they didn't mean any of it and they're actually right in the middle."

🎯 Intriguingly one letter apart:

• lonely | lovely

• scared | sacred

• father | farther

• entourage | encourage

• player | prayer

• comedying | come dying

• aloha | alpha

• topical | typical

• meth | math

• IUD | IED

🎯 To photograph a group of 12 people, you used to have to be Annie Leibovitz. Now you just need to be a waiter at Applebee's.

👔 Everyone who owns a boat is a Republican. It doesn't matter where they're from or what they do or even how they vote. Boats make you Republican.

🥁 🎶 Fitter, healthier and more productive 🎶 Always thought Radiohead’s OK Computer was an all-timer. But it just keeps growing in stature. Always superb musically, but now the lyrics/vibe – written way before smartphones were even invented – feel eerily prescient considering our current technodystopia.

🎯 Crazy that we have “windows” to get health care in this country: "Sorry, you can't get sick right now. You'll have to wait until December."

🃏 You get into comedy to make a roomful of people come together and laugh but now the best way to "go viral" is to say something that makes a bunch of lonely strangers start fighting with each other on their screens. Anyway, GO!

🎯 "The Bear is too unrealistic."
"You don't think a kitchen really works that way?"
"No, I've never met a black person who likes Coach K."

🎯 "Dove advocating for female video game character inclusivity." I want male superheroes to have realistic bodies too. Gimme Dad Bod Batman. "Where is his utility belt?" "Actually, he switched to suspenders. The belt didn’t fit anymore. But that's FINE."

🃏 Coming soon in my Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian newsletter:

🎯 Hearing "HSP (Highly Sensitive Person)" a lot these days, but never heard someone say, "I'm a HIP: Highly Insensitive Person. Do whatever you want. Blare those tunes. Say mean stuff. Don't worry, I won't notice!"

🍄 Dosing is too confusing now. Weed milligrams, shroom grams, etc. We gotta stop making people who take drugs do so much math. If people who dig drugs could solve SAT problems, they'd be in college, not at a Phish concert.

🎯 I want more sports teams named after abstract concepts, like the Miami Heat...

• Denver Ick

• San Francisco Pride

• Dallas New Money

• Chicago Beef

• Orlando Woke

• LA Surgery

🃏 Fun Steve Martin riff (as told by Sarah Silverman to Howard Stern). Scene: A dinner party…

Candice Bergen (on when she first met Steve Martin): "Steve didn't what prosciutto was!"
Steve Martin: "Can you believe it? And now I drive one."

🃏 On the latest Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby podcast:

• - When we ran out of needs to fulfill, they started manufacturing desire.

• - Never underestimate the power of inertia.

• - We call our medicine “drugs” and our drugs “medicine.”

• - Tension is a form of prayer.

Here’s a clip:

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Threadhead

Hear that buzzing? It’s Threads!

It's amazing how quickly people sign up for your app when they've, well, y'know, already signed up for your app. But yeah, I’m there too (follow at @mattrubycomedy).

Threads is "cool" because it's "nice" to feel like you’ve been hired to be an unpaid intern creating content for yet another social media platform. 🎶 May the Linktree be unbroken... 🎶

But at least it’s not the husk of what Musk’s left up at Twitter, right? “On Twitter, everyone's voice matters,” wrote Linda Yaccarino, Elon’s biz beard/Twitter CEO, in a recent propaganda post. And it’s kinda true. On Twitter, everyone's voice really does matter: Death threats? Twitter’s got you. N*zi propaganda? Step right up. Fake doctors posting medical advice? Hell yeah. Multilevel marketing schemes? Right this way. Crypto bros? Oodles! All are welc– Wait, why are you leaving!?

Meanwhile, here’s the only company more upset by Threads than Twitter:

Whoops.

Anyway, LOL at Meta being "the good guy" in any of this. There are no heroes here.

However, I wasn’t invited to Michael Rubin’s white party and I wanna party somewhere. Unfortunately, Threads ain’t much of a party. It’s just a place to see what Tom Brady, Gary Vee, Netflix' PR department, Bleacher Report, Zuck, Tostitos, and Shaq have to say. And I’ve spent years trying to avoid these people. They are the mozzarella sticks of social media: bland, gross, and 100% unavoidable.

The vibe is generically inoffensive, just the way advertisers like it.

Jason O. Gilbert

on “What does Threads feels like?”

Have you ever been high/drunk and you walk into a CVS and the security guard is staring at you? That’s what Threads is. It’s deodorants locked behind plastic. It’s TikTok Hype Houses. It is Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. It’s a sneaker collab between Nike and JP Morgan. It’s your favorite stand-up comic showing up in a commercial for Carvana. It’s better than Twitter, of course, which has Berlin 1937-vibes.

Basically, we’ve traded in white supremacists and anti-vaxxers for ad-friendly corporate synergy. Pick your poison. But also: Carvana, I’m available for a collab. Let’s talk.

Meanwhile, there was a new dunkee in the tank on social media this week: Jonah Hill’s Ex-Girlfriend Sarah Brady Branded Him An “Emotionally Abusive” “Misogynist” After Leaking Their Alleged Texts.

In the alleged texts, Jonah appeared to tell his now-ex-girlfriend that her posting photos “in a bathing suit” and being friends with “women who are in unstable places” violated his boundaries.

So how should we feel about all this?