WIL Weekly 5-Point Review #5

Sleep, Testosterone, AI & more.

This is my free weekly newsletter covering 5 interesting points from the week. Subscribe if you’d like to get it in your inbox each week!

1. Simple sleeping hack I’m enjoying

Raise the head of your bed higher than the foot of the bed. That’s it. You don’t need anything special to do this, I just put a thick book under the two legs of the head of the bed.

I learned about this from Ron, maker of the Jaw Hacks youtube channel, in his video 5 Sleeping Hacks for Mewers. He claims that gravity will act to encourage more circulation across the body. I haven’t looked into it too much but I just gave it a shot and it honestly just feels a lot more comfortable. He recommends 6 inches. Ron points out that if you think about it, sleeping on a perfectly flat surface isn’t really natural. Surfaces in the natural environment would have some amount of slant. Further, sleeping without a pillow always made sense to me (I argued for it in this video) but if I’m honest, having my head elevated with a very thin pillow always felt a bit more comfortable. However with the bed inclined, pillow-less feels much better.

I recently interviewed Ron and will have the interview up on the channel first week of August.

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2. You might need more Zinc if you want more T

A study from December of last year looked at 38 papers and concluded that

“zinc deficiency reduces testosterone levels and zinc supplementation improves testosterone levels. …In conclusion, serum zinc was positively correlated with total testosterone..."

Zinc plays an important role in development of the gonads, of sperm health, and the synthesis of hormones like testosterone. Testosterone is synthesized by Leydig cells of the testis, and "zinc-deficient Leydig cells fail to convert ingested sex steroid precursors into active hormones." Converting testosterone to its active form requires zinc.

Keep in mind that you can lose zinc through your sweat or ejaculate.

A study titled The effects of zinc supplementation and weight trainings on the testosterone levels found 6-weeks of zinc supplementation to increase testosterone levels.

In conclusion consequently it has been determined that 6-week zinc supplementation and weight training increase the testosterone levels.

Another study titled Zinc status and serum testosterone levels of healthy adults found zinc levels to pretty much double after six months of supplementation (though these people were marginally zinc-deficient.)

Zinc supplementation of marginally zinc-deficient normal elderly men for six months resulted in an increase in serum testosterone from 8.3 +/- 6.3 to 16.0 +/- 4.4 nmol/L (p = 0.02).

That study also noted that restricting zinc for 20 weeks reduced subjects’ testosterone four-fold.

Dietary zinc restriction in normal young men was associated with a significant decrease in serum testosterone concentrations after 20 weeks of zinc restriction (baseline versus post-zinc restriction mean +/- SD, 39.9 +/- 7.1 versus 10.6 +/- 3.6 nmol/L, respectively; p = 0.005).

Something to think about if you’re sweating a lot, ejaculating a lot and/or not eating much red meat or shellfish.

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Wow, baby food with actual nutrition in it!

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3. New WIL Video on AI

Just last night I published the above video on AI. You may have read my previous post titled AI Crisis: The danger of AI working Perfectly. The plan was initially to incorporate that along with several other ideas about AI into one video, but I realized much of that video would have to be spent showing off the current state of AI so I opted to just isolate that into one video.

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4. Sorry, practical nutrition itself might be anti-vegan

In the comments of my community post sharing my recent article Your Brain craves Protein, someone was lamenting that they feel my channel is now “anti-vegan.” This seemed odd considering “vegan,” “vegetarian,” or “plant-based” were never mentioned in the article. The reason they felt a post about protein is anti-vegan is of course is because if you acknowledge that getting plenty of amino acids is important for health, you have to acknowledge that a vegan diet is suboptimal … considering vegan protein sources come with more calories and less amino acids.

At the end of the day, the optimal diet is going to contain some animal foods, especially more animal protein as you age. Let’s briefly consider the idea that vegan diets will make you live longer:

・It’s well known that elderly people need more healthy muscle to live longer.
1) Muscles develop anabolic resistance as you age. This means it takes more protein/stimulus to get the muscle to grow.
2) Stomach acidity declines in the elderly.
3) People often experience a decline in appetite as they get old.
・These three facts mean you need more amino acids per calorie as you age, you need a more efficient delivery of amino acids. We want to put on muscle, not fat as we age.
・Thus, you need more high quality protein. High quality protein means protein that is rich in all the amino acids and is easily digested. The highest quality proteins are animal-based. (Take a look at the image above.)
・Soy and Pea protein powders are technically considered to be high quality proteins. You could probably do well consuming plenty of soy and pea protein powders. However, a key driver of muscle protein synthesis is Leucine.
・To match the Leucine content of 25g of Whey protein, you need to consume 40g of soy and 38g of pea protein.

The more I learn about nutrition, the more obvious it becomes that animal-based foods are a vital part of the diet. The ideal diet will be an omnivorous one. We have to remember that saying a vegan diet is ideal is an extreme position. A 90% plants, 10% animal foods diet is not vegan. Vegan diet advocates assume that animal products are so bad, that you can’t have any amount of them. You can’t have any dairy, you can’t have a tiny 50g serving of nutrient dense liver once a week, you can’t have a handful of shellfish, you can’t even every now and then have a mere 500 calories of animal foods despite the excellent profile of highly absorbable amino acids.

If someone is saying to me “I think a plant-based diet with a very small amount of animal-based foods is optimal” and provide some specifics like “50grams of beef liver, 100grams of shellfish and only 250grams of beef per week,” then that’s interesting. I would want to discuss specifics with them on what exact plants are recommended, but in general would be really keen to hear how they arrived at their conclusion. However, when someone claims that the healthiest diet could not possibly contain any animal products, it sounds like what they are actually motivated by is the environmental or ethical claims behind veganism.

If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at my video Vegan diets don't work. Here's why.

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5. A bizarre Black Mirror-esque result of optimization

A very bizarre video popped up on my twitter of a young woman doing a robotic performance that seemed to be aiming to hypnotize rather than entertain.

She is placing popcorn kernels in a hair straightener and slowly accumulating a pile of popped popcorn while does one of many set performances whenever she is sent the corresponding emoji (emojis cost money to send). Basically if someone sends a GG emoji, she’ll move her head and arms in a specific way while saying “gang gang” with a specific intonation and cadence. If someone sends her a popcorn emoji she’ll say “yes, popcorn” multiple times while making a grabbing motion with her hands. She seems to be trying her best to say the phrase in the exact same way each time. It’s like a little kid hitting a button on their toy to hear the same 15 second jingle over and over again.

Apparently this is somewhat of a thing. Another girl is doing the same type of performance on her TikTok. You can send her emojis to get her to say things like “Um um um, ice cream yum!”

Perhaps this is just a temporary phenomenon and it’s only driving engagement due to its new weirdness. Though, it’s very likely these girls (or someone managing their account and performances) spent hours studying the exact sequences of gestures, phrases, intonation that drive the most engagement and revenue. It just goes to show the weird results you get when you are given a specific set of tools (cute women, livestreaming platform with emoji-based donations) and circumstances (millions of lonely, bored people addicted to their phones) and use those to optimize towards one goal: engagement. Engagement which ultimately means revenue.

This made me think of one of the worries of AI - if you give a generalized AI a goal, while you can set confines for its operation, you have pretty much no way to predict the collateral damage of how it goes about its goal. Simple example is asking an AI to create a compound that eradicates brain cancer in the population and it comes up with a virus that destroys the human brain. No brain, no cancer.

Or you ask an AI to rack up as much revenue as possible and it creates a TikTok account, links it to a bank account and then livestreams a cute AI avatar saying “gang gang. Yes yes yes. Yes, popcorn. Ice cream yum!” when you send it the right emoji.