WILearned

Coffee Video

Hey everyone,

So here's my video on coffee with the script.
Feel free to post any questions or comments you might have, but I'd be really interested to hear some personal anecdotes!

My good friend in Amsterdam just quit coffee and he said that a difference he noticed is how easily he feels stressed out. He was saying that he had one of those days where a lot of things fell through and he had to put out some fires happening with his business. He's had similar days recently w...

Logic Battles, Ad Hominem and Pepto Bismol

Before you start reading, here’s a relevant tweet(This tweet is a joke btw)

Hey everyone, 

So, recently I’ve had two vegan youtubers displeased with my most recent video. One of them (Mic the Vegan) was debating ...

Newsletter - Health "status quo" and motivation

Patreon Newsletter Wednesday 17th

Hey everyone, two things on the agenda today: 

1. Endocrinologist’s Cognitive Dissonance 
2. Question from a Patron on using one dopamine raising task to motivate yourself to do another.

1. The baffling recommendation from an Endocrinologist for a 71yo who reversed his diabetes
Here’s a twitter post from Dr. Paul Mason (who actually I interviewed recently)2020-06-17 11:08:28 +0000 UTC View Post

Newsletter - Goals determine what you perceive

On May 18th, 2012, after spending almost 80,000 dollars on guides, travel, equipment and sherpas, Shriya Shah-Klorfine was on her way to the summit of mount everest. After realizing how unprepared she was in terms of climbing experience and physical fitness, the senior sherpa of the Trekking firm she hired decided he could not include her in his group. He bluntly warned her not to climb an...

The Anxiety of Uncertainty Video Script

Hey everyone,

Here's the script for the new video!
If you're interested, I left in all the points that didn't make it into the video with strikethrough.

-Joseph

Coffee Weaning

Hey everyone, this is a graphic of the weaning approach I did for coffee. I've suspected I would feel better without coffee a couple times in the past but finally got around to getting off it and confirmed this suspicion. I might make a post or a video about the science of why I have less appetite overall without coffee, why I have more energy and why I no longer have to get up to pee 3 times a night anymore but TBH I haven't looked into it yet.

If anyone has been interested in gettin...

Why understanding OCD is a path to having a less anxious and more satisfying life

It's been a while so I thought I'd do something different for the newsletter. This is a long form post, about twice as long as my typical video script.

So recently I’ve been working on the follow up video to my “Why do we find Satis...

(New Vid) Why do we find things Satisfying? + Script

Hey everyone!

It's been a while but the new video is finally out.
If anyone has any comments on the editing please let me know - looking for way to improve and remove effects (that take a long time to do) that don't add anything.

Also I always end up spending a couple hours tweaking the music / audio levels so if you have any comments on that it'd be appreciated!

Have a great Thursday,

Joseph

Questions for a Polyglot - Steven Kaufmann (20 Languages?)

Hey everyone,

I'm interviewing Steve Kaufmann tomorrow. Actually featured him on my video about learning languages from 2018 He speaks 16 - 20 languages so,

Any of you have any questions you'd like me to ask about languages, language learning or language psychology et cetera?

-Joseph

Vitamin E and Novel Coronavirus

Hey everyone,
I hope the Corona situation hasn't affected any of y'all too negatively. I was doing some research to make a video about that - something along the lines of "What could you do that might help and at the very least wouldn't cause any harm?" but decided against it and instead have been working on a video on "What makes things satisfying?"

I didn't think it would be helpful to put out a video that might give people false confidence that they a...

Weekly Newsletter - Hangovers, Commercials and Creatine

Anti Hangover Patch---
My friend living in the Netherlands showed this to me - the "Redee Patch." (I have no affiliation to this product or company.) It's specifically designed to prevent the "Asian Flush" or "2020-03-15 12:32:01 +0000 UTC View Post

Weekly Newsletter - Health Momentum, Food's effect on decisions and Satisfaction

Compounding vicious cycles---
Recently I've had a nice injection of stress in the form of tons of extra paperwork. I'm used to Japanese culture and do my best to respect all forms of it, especially the cultural practices surrounding paperwork. The Japanese philosophy on paperwork has evolved over the millenium, but the key tenet is that there should be a lot of it.  Anyhow th...

FBW - "Debunked," Bananas and a Blasphemous Bariatric Surgeon

Hey Guys, thanks for being patient again - it's definitely not Wednesday...  I'm gonna have to change "Five Bullet Wednesday" to three bullets or maybe four (so I can keep saying "FBW"). These posts take a lot more time than I expected. Next week I'll reduce it to four bullets and see if I can make it on time with that :-)

"Convenience Store Health Method" ---
My "Why I eat one meal a day" vide...

Five Bullet Wednesday- Fish eyes, Mushrooms, Passions

Update on Piscivore diet---
No, I haven't started eating only fish, but I came across something the other day while reading the Vitamin E chapter in the Textbook of Veterinary Physiological Chemistry. I posted this to my instagram the other day (below) In case the image doesn't show up, it says:  "The antioxidant action of tocopherol(vitamin E) is effective at high oxygen levels, and thus tends to be concentrated in lipid structures exposed to high p...

Five Bullet Wednesday - BioScandal, Lawyers, and Cat Dogs

After effects---
I held off getting adobe suite for a long time because I just didn’t have the time to learn it.
For now anything I do in after effects I export to a vid file and then import it to Final Cut Pro and do all my final editing there. If premiere (which I haven’t used yet) is anything like after effects then I’d agree with MKBHD that FCP is simpler but much faster. So far I’ve got easy ease down. There's a lot of fun things you can do in After Effect...

Meat & Rust (Heme iron video Script)

Hey everyone,
Here's the script for the meat and heme iron video! (See pdf)

Five Bullet Wednesday: Viruses, Kids and Wasting Resources

Hey everyone, sorry I didn't get this one done in time, I'm in a crunch trying to finish up my newest video at the moment.

Virus I've been into---
Apparently there are more cases of coronavirus than there were of SARS cases. First case not linked to Wuhan travel was reported in Japan. I bought 2020-01-30 06:07:14 +0000 UTC View Post

Five Bullet Wednesday - Water droplets, Jargon, Fish

Things I've been thinking about---
(I realize these are silly/unrealistic)
・Everyone talks about cow farts and the environment. What about human farts? Is there a diet that reduces human methane emissions?
・Should foodstuffs that are not totally absorbed be factored in when considering food waste? For example if you eat food X containing 50g of protein but only absorb 40 grams of that protein, and from food Y you absorb all 50g, have you just wasted 10g of protei...

Five Bullet Wednesday - Strangers, The Environment & Japan

Book I'm reading---
·Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
Half way through and it's a great book so far. So far it doesn't look like this book will help you better talk to strangers. In fact, it's about why we are naturally quite bad at making judgements of people based on our impressions. Gladwell tells several interesting stories (most of them quite famous) while linking them together with different interesting phenomenon. For example, it's our default s...

Update: Five Bullets

Hey Y'all,
Happy New Year! Hope you enjoyed the holidays with good and hopefully weird food. I visited my friend in the Netherlands and we cooked a bunch of food for Christmas. I asked the Dutch people in the sauna if there were any "weird" traditional dishes like a sheep's head stuffed with rice and entrails or something but unfortunately they said the only thing that might be considered weird is the raw herring with onions. I had that and it was delicious. Not to worry, several days earl...

Response to " What I've Learned is Wrong about Bacon and Cancer"

Hi Everyone,

One of y'all asked for a rebuttal to the video of 'Mic the Vegan' 's stating that I got the facts wrong in my recent video on bacon/processed meat. Even if you didn't see the video, I think this will be a fun read because it lets me further highlight the type of rigor and critical thinking I try to encourage with my videos.  
[PDF attached for easier reading]
Mic's arguments seem pretty compelling if you don't dig into the video too much, but .....

Bacon Video w/ Script

Hey everyone!
Here's the script for the bacon video.

How many of you caught the Patreon shout out at the end? ;)

Pausing Patreon Payments briefly (Not going anywhere)

Hey Everyone,

"Your active patrons will not be billed on November 1. Billing will resume on December 1."

I'm going to Pause the Patreon payments for one month. I'm not going anywhere and will still be doing research, making content and being active on here. I just haven't been keeping up with y'alls emails and doing behind the scenes posts etc enough, so I wanted to give myself a month to catch up on that and make sure I'm not leaving anyone hanging.

Thanks for b...

Video Update [How did language begin?]

Hey everyone,
Hope you had a good week and are enjoying the weekend.

After much deliberation, I just tried reuploading and reposting my most recent video as it was performing worse than my worst performing video that was posted back when I had 700,000 subscribers. ...but it was getting 30% more watch time than average. So, people on average liked the content more than my typical stuff but it was getting far less views than average. I hope this doesn't leave a sour taste in your mo...

Bonus for Patrons: "How to Create a Language" video comments

Hey everyone,

This video took a lot out of me. As usual, I waaay over-researched for this as usual - have about 50 pages of unused notes left so I'll for sure need to make another video on this topic from a different perspective at some point.

There's a lot of interesting neuroscience that I wanted to include, but just giving the index, icon, symbol progression story and explaining the implications of Daniel Everett's work with the Piraha ended up taking much longer than expec...