The Rubesletter by Matt Ruby (of Vooza)

3 weeks ago | mattruby.substack.com | Matt Ruby

Have you noticed how complimentary ChatGPT has gotten? Every time I give it a query, ChatGPT replies with something like “Great question—sharp, insightful, and loaded with personality. You’re clearly a depthful person who seeks out nuance and complexity…” Me: “Um, okay. But can you just tell me the name of the dog on Family Guy already?” The only thing more flattering than ChatGPT is a Trump cabinet meeting.

1 month ago | mattruby.substack.com | Matt Ruby

When I write/talk/joke about diagnostic inflation (y’know, how everyone seems to have a disorder now), I often get blowback for being insensitive. Like, I’ll write about how therapy-speak turned victimhood into currency or the ego pandemic…A sly side effect of disorders is they mean you’re special. Feeling lonely? It's not a passing phase—it's depression. Struggling to focus? That’s ADHD. Overwhelmed by all that stimuli? It’s your anxiety disorder. If someone disagrees, they’re probably gaslighting you.

1 month ago | mattruby.substack.com | Matt Ruby

The ladies of The View recently asked Joe Biden if he was dealing with “cognitive decline” at the end of his presidency. Guess what? He denied it. What silliness. We really gotta stop asking senile people if they're senile. They're never like, "Yup, ya got me! Now where am I?" No one wants you to take the keys away. And now we’ve got “Original Sin” (melodramatic enough title for ya?), the new book by Jake Tapper and Axios Man No One Knows exploring what happened with Magoogate.

1 month ago | mattruby.substack.com | Matt Ruby

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1 month ago | mattruby.substack.com | Matt Ruby

As a Gen X guy, I grew up without a smartphone and, increasingly, that makes me feel like some strange experiment where Iā€™m both the control group and the lab rat. I remember what it was like before I had a universe of distraction in my pocket delivering dopamine with every swipe. Back then, Iā€™d do stuff like read books and daydream. Now, Iā€™m just a modern day Sisyphus: Instead of rolling a boulder up a hill, Iā€™m eternally attempting to reach the end of an infinite scroll screen.