Matthew Davis

🧶 Family Guy Season 4, ☀️ Being Circadian, 🥤 Diet Coke (as a nootropic), and more.

October 7, 2024

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Matthew Davis is a New York City-based writer, who I met in a very unexpected way nearly five years ago. When I was just a Software Engineer living in Boston, way before Perfectly Imperfect existed, Matthew interviewed me for a job. I remember thinking “This guy has a weird swag to him. We should connect on LinkedIn” and that was that. However, after I moving to NYC, I realized that Matthew Davis didn’t just write (great) Javascript; he was also an aspiring downtown novelist dating Honor Levy (PI #119 + #447). After stumbling upon his semi-hidden alt Instagram, which was tagged in a photo of him on a rooftop, he messaged me something along the lines of, “You got me,” and later sent me a PDF of his novel that was hosted on taolin.org. He’s been toeing the line of fringe outsider and ultimate insider for as long as I’ve “known” him, which makes him one of the more interesting characters to follow in a crowded literary scene. His sharply satirical and very funny debut, Let Me Try Again, was published a few months ago, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in years. Lucky for us, Matthew is here to tell us what he’s been into.

🥤

Diet Coke (as a nootropic)

Very powerful. People don’t want to hear this, but the results speak for themselves. I drink this for MEDICAL reasons. The taste (which is superior to regular coke and also Coke Zero) is just a bonus—goes down crisp without any syrupy stickiness. You see, aspartame , is made up of two amino acids, aspartic acid and phenylalanine. There are a bunch of studies (of dubious quality) showing that phenylalanine is good for focus, mood, restlessness, stuff like that. They should be giving Diet Coke to poorly behaved children instead of methylphenidate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4777504/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0165178185900241 They sell phenylalanine supplements on Amazon but why take those pills when you can get a perfect blend of aspartame (which is totally safe) and caffeine to balance your mood and help you get into a state of highly enhanced focus and verbal fluency. It’s no wonder why Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other rich and powerful guys—that people hate for being too rich and powerful—all drink like 7-8 Diet Cokes every day.

🙂

Chilling

I never knew about chilling until I was 26 years old. Well, I’d dabbled in chilling, but this year, after I decided to become a bohemian novelist whose primary goal in life isn’t to produce anything of value, but rather to trick people into reading a thing I wrote several years ago, chilling has become an essential part of my life. I particularly enjoy doing 1000 things in one day on Instagram, like this Druski video. I’ve had a lot of days where I’ve done 1000 things in one day. A couple weeks ago I went to all five boroughs of New York City in one day, and did activities in each—but that’s a story for a different time.

☀️

Being Circadian / Getting sunlight 3x a day

You gotta get sun in the morning to start your day right, then get sun in the middle of the day (peak sun), and then get sun as its setting. This is important to tell your eyeballs and also brain when to be awake and when to start getting sleepy. It’s been nice spending a lot of time outside (as a street dude doing 1000 things in one day) lately, and I’m thinking in the winter I might start hitting the tanning beds in order to preserve my base layer of melanin. It’s also good to go to sleep at the same time every night. If you go to sleep and wake up at the same time every night, it’ll really help a lot. Tough to do if you’re chilling, but life is often about tolerating contradictions. Also, how about this new Drake called Circadian Rhythm?

❌

Fasting / Not Eating

Food is one of the worst things for you. For most of the summer, I was having a large smoothie with whey protein isolate, egg yolks, powdered coconut oil, and frozen berries. Only for the past several days (I’m recovering from SARS COV-2) have I abandoned this highly caloric, insulin-bomb of a breakfast, replacing it with cold water, creatine, and powdered coconut oil, blended. You wouldn’t believe how much sharper I feel mentally, how much less hungry I am all morning, my neighbors have stopped complaining about my outbursts… the list goes on and on. Oh, but back to food being bad for you. I really do think eating a ton of food is one of the worst things for you. You can read about this in my book, in which the protagonist, in an attempt to gain weight and become physically more imposing, starts eating a ton of food, and his quality of life suffers greatly. It’s a really clever commentary on masculinity and “improvement culture” in general, actually. You should read it. I too have gone through periods of regimented physical activity (lifting weights) and eating large quantities of food, and it always leaves me feeling terrible, physically and mentally. Lately I’ve started eating huge portions of vegetables again (bag of Brussels sprouts, bag broccoli, two large zucchini) in the middle of the day and it’s been working out really nicely for me. Skin cleared up, mind feels sharp, face looks more chiseled and handsome, it’s been great. You (the reader) should probably eat less food, just like, statistically, most people eat too much. I know that might not be true for the target audience of this newsletter, so if you have an eating disorder then you should eat a little bit more (but not too much too fast), but most people should eat less food and replace some of the food they’re already eating with more vegetables. They’ll experience great benefits from eating their first meal as a large bowl of vegetables with ghee around 2pm.

⛪

The Rosary / Not looking at a screen for 15-30 minutes

Another great one. I’m supposed to be a Traditional Catholic (slash Jewish) novelist, so I feel an obligation to use my platform here to evangelize and tell people to consider the Rosary. Even if you’re Jewish or basically Jewish (atheist who lives in New York City and reads books and smokes cigs and goes to the movie theater and eats lox) it could be nice for you to sit somewhere and close your eyes for 15 to 30 minutes, clear your head, put the phone down, take the AirPods out. Even if you don’t think repeatedly saying the Hail Mary does anything—because you’re not Catholic or whatever—you might as well try it, since people have been doing it for like 1000 years and they all say it’s very powerful. If you’re interested in “meditating” or some kind of secular practice for the depression or anxiety you probably have, why not do the one that might also be good for your eternal soul? What do you have to lose? Seems like a pretty simple calculation: that if you’re going to do some kind of mindfulness practice, you should do the one that might have the added benefit of supernatural assistance from the Mother of God. Here’s a quote from Sister Lucia dos Santos who witnessed the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima: “Prayer and sacrifice are the two means to save the world. As for the Holy Rosary, Father, in these last times in which we are living, the Blessed Virgin has given a new efficacy to the praying of the Holy Rosary. This in such a way that there is no problem that cannot be resolved by praying the Rosary, no matter how difficult it is – be it temporal or above all spiritual – in the spiritual life of each of us or the lives of our families, be they our families in the world or Religious Communities, or even in the lives of peoples and nations. But even if you’re a Jewish atheist and don’t believe that this nun talked to Mary, mother of Jesus a bunch of times, you should still try saying the Rosary. Pretend Andrew Huberman, or Sam Harris, or Doctor Fauci told you about it.

🧶

Family Guy Season 4

I’ve been blown away by rewatching Family Guy Season 4. It’s really impressive, but falls off hard about 10 episodes into Season 5. There’s a subversive and unpredictable quality to these episodes that’s unlike any other show I’ve seen. I had these all recorded on my TiVo as a child and would watch them over and over, so it’s part of a dangerous regressive pattern (see my earlier recommendation of “chilling”), but I think these are some of the most creative episodes of comedy television ever made. They’re bursting with energy and the pacing is mind boggling, joke after joke after joke. I had forgotten how smart the show used to be. In my head it was kind of a dumb show for middle schoolers and adults with tattoos who work at vape shops, but I was wrong, I’ll admit it.

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Matthew Davis

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