About
Hello and welcome. My name is Jay, and I'm the main author and creator of The Human Operating Manual: a monstrously ambitious project that will keep evolving until either I or the internet meets its untimely demise.
The Manual started as something I built for myself because I kept running into the same problem: I couldn't find a single, all-encompassing health resource that had the objectivity of a textbook and the practicality of a toolkit. Something the average person could actually use to build health autonomy and personal agency.
I studied neuroscience at a New Zealand university and started reading obsessively across as many areas of human health as I could get my hands on. Second-hand bookstores all over the country were drained of their science books, leaving behind nothing but crime novels and gardening guides.
But during that process, I ran into an issue: the human brain isn't designed to store endless information. A crucial function of the brain is to discard what it no longer considers useful, partly for energy efficiency, partly to keep memory workable. I wasn't thrilled by that realisation, so the only workaround that made sense was to summarise everything and build a system I could reference when I inevitably forgot it all.
That's why this exists as a website instead of a static book. It's built to keep improving. When the facts change, the Manual can change with them, without having to apologise for something printed in ink ten years earlier, or go down the path of health and wellness influencers who bury their heads in the sand to protect their identities and intellectual property.
The current goal is to publish clear, easy-to-read analyses, documented experimentation, and cheat sheets.
At this point, the project is already beyond the realistic capacity of one person. The next phase is to collaborate with experts within each discipline and reviewers who can sanity-check what I'm building so we don't screw it up too badly.
And if you're reading this, I'd genuinely love your feedback or useful information. No matter how confident we get, all it takes is one piece of revolutionary evidence to blow a worldview to pieces. And that's where all the fun is.
The Human Operators
The people behind the framework
While the Human Operating Manual is a solo project, it has been shaped by practitioners, researchers, and builders whose work spans autonomic physiology, systems modelling, and privacy-first infrastructure. I owe each contributor my heartfelt gratitude for supporting this process in more ways than they could ever know.
Fraser Beck is a breath practitioner and researcher at Otago University whose work centres on the conscious control of the breath and human performance. Fraser was diagnosed with Scheuermann's disease—a condition affecting the spine. His journey through musculoskeletal rehabilitation not only strengthened his body but also ignited a profound curiosity about the connections between breathing, movement, health, and well-being.
His approach treats breathing as a form of exercise, training the diaphragm as the body's most important musculotendinous unit. Fraser has contributed to peer-reviewed research as a co-author on a systematic review of respiratory interventions for anxiety reduction published in Frontiers in Psychology, and has led breathwork programming for Les Mills, Aro Ha retreat, and clinical workshops across Aotearoa.
Albert Vijghen is a knowledge architect and academic whose work sits at the intersection of economics, mathematical modelling, and human behaviour. He holds a Master's in Econometrics and Operations Research from Maastricht University.
In 2014, Albert began building LemiTree: an open-source knowledge system that maps the full landscape of self-development into a structured, scalable framework. The name encodes its organising principle: Less Effort, More Impact. LemiTree functions as a tree of knowledge for human optimisation tactics, prioritising purpose and direction before efficiency, and is designed to centralise scattered insights from practitioners worldwide into a single navigable system.
Steve Phillips is an award-winning software developer, privacy engineer, and cypherpunk whose career has been defined by a single conviction: technology should expand human autonomy, not erode it. He created CrypTag: a system that makes encrypted data searchable without decrypting it, which he presented at DEF CON's Crypto & Privacy Village.
Steve's focus areas: encrypted communication, anonymous coordination, and privacy-preserving infrastructure represent the technical expression of the framework's core principles. Where the Human Operating Manual addresses autonomy at the physiological and perceptual level, Steve builds systems that protect autonomy at the informational and social level. His collaboration with Albert Vijghen on LemiTree's technical infrastructure brought encryption, AI-assisted automation, and scalable architecture to the project, advancing its development further in six weeks than the prior two years.
The Objectives
Vision
Greater individual and collective autonomy, open source education about global systematic thinking, and resetting the default group priorities from tribalism to focusing on the long-term success of the human species.
Mission
To provide resources about how we currently believe the human body to function, to offer sustainable alternatives to current lifestyle choices, and to develop realistic and alternative solutions for education, science communication, and public health systems.