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 probably 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 real health autonomy.

Textbooks, I learned, are usually written to standardise university curricula for the medical industry. On the other side of the aisle, the health and wellness world often hides its best lessons behind paywalls, funnels, or expensive “magic bullet” supplements. Useful ideas exist in both worlds, but they rarely end up in the same place, and seldom in a form that feels usable for the average person.

So I decided to take the long route: 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 book stores all over the South Island (and some in the north) were drained of their science books. 

But during that process, I ran into another issue: the human brain isn’t designed to store endless information. A crucial function of the brain is to discard information it no longer considers useful, partly for energy efficiency and partly to keep memory workable. I wasn’t thrilled by that realisation, so the only workaround that made sense was to summarise anything valuable and build a system I could reference when I inevitably forgot everything.

That’s why this exists as a website instead of a static book. It isn’t bound to perfection. 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 meta-analyses, documented experimentation, and cheat sheets.

At this point, the project is already beyond the realistic capacity of one person. So 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.