cayden@media.mit.edu, caydenpierce.com
Every day, billions of us fall far short of our potential because we're engaging in bad habits of self-assisted destruction. It's not in the high level or difficult tasks where we're causing ourselves harm daily, but in our most basic necessary processes like sleep, diet, and exercise. Every day, we reflect on our mistakes in these areas, and experience stress about our engagement in self-assisted destruction.
What if, instead of constantly making the same mistakes over and over again and then lamenting our failure, we designed a system to follow, and then followed it with perfect adherence? We could codify and algorithmize the most basic things so that we could spend our time doing more important things: thinking, creating, collaborating, exploring, thriving.
The RoutStack system freezes your routine stack so you can live optimally. Autonomize the systems which give you health (sleep, diet, exercise) so you can focus on things that are more impactful and meaningful.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Thanks to Bryan Johnson for inspiration and his open source diet, both part of Project Blueprint.
Optimize your health to optimize your mind. Mental sharpness, creativity, and a healthy body are always more important than an extra hour working at night or an unhealthy meal. We must enter optimal physical states to enter optimal mental states, and our mind is everything that we are - physical decisions we make everday impact our conscious, subjective, lived experience. That's something we should optimize. We could align values within ourselves to enter a peak physical and mental state which will accelerate us entering into an intelligent symbiotic relationship with AI.
We build technology in versions. We make something good, stabilize that version, and use it. Then we make something better on top of that previous version, and call it version 2.0. Human health isn't continually evolved because we don't reach stability - we make upgrades then lose them (i.e. we start a new good habit, and stop doing a previous one). It's time to codify our routine stack (our daily routines of diet, sleep, exercise) so we can start upgrading humanity.
Evolution handed us programs that run in our brains that were optimized for a different environment. To upgrade ourselves, we'll have to start revoking decision authority from the parts of our brain that evolved for different environments. We'll have to replace those old, evolutionary programs of caloric density maximization, endless resource attainment, mindless procreation, zero-sum competition, faith, unchecked dopaminergic pursuit, etc. with new mental programs. The RoutStack system is a way to codify and run those programs on our life. Let's disable deprecated evolutionary daemons and install human 2.0 modules in our minds and bodies. Let's upgrade ourselves.
TL;DR - Determine the absolutest healthiest diet possible for you, and eat only that.
I largely follow Bryan Johnson's Blueprint diet. It's modified slightly for my body and mostly to make the diet affordable (cheaper than the average american diet monthly grocery bill). If you're already convinced, go buy every single thing in this spreadsheet: RoutStack Diet - Cayden Pierce Budget Blueprint Diet
The philosphy behind the Blueprint protocol is to live the protocol, test, iterate, and repeat. While I'm doing this, starting from the results of Bryan Johnson's 2+ years of following Blueprint is a massive shortcut. Bryan has a team of medical proffesional and access to far better testing than I do - so I copied his diet and changed slightly to meet my needs. You can do the same by starting with this diet:
As I test my body more thoroughly, I'll make more modifications to the diet.
Notes
***Work In Progress***
Goal: Attempting to get 90+ sleep score on Fitbit Inspire HR every night.
~1 hour daily, weight train, HIIT, cardio. One walking day as a rest day. Somewhat variable here, but should be hard, sweating, high HR. Should hit 160+ BPM most days of the week
This protocol would be difficult to implement and maintain without codification of a certain routine that works to ensure strict adherence to the protocol.
I follow a four phase day:
To make it easy to load the protocol, I've open sourced my routines codification.
Releasing a diet, sleep, and exercise routine has no backing if I don't provide data to back it up. Below is my health data. This is a work in progress, I'll be providing more data going forward, both from more in depth tests and from wearable biosensors.
I wear two wrist-based PPG fitness trackers all day and all night. Soon to add full time EEG and ECG as well.
| BIOMARKER | RESULT | VALUE | OPTIMAL CLINICAL OUTCOMES RANGE (OCOR) |
| ALT | OPTIMAL | 22 | 15-24 |
| BMI | OPTIMAL | 22.0 | <22.5 |
| Fasting Plasma Glucose | OPTIMAL | 81 | <95 |
| Body Fat | NOMINAL, TO IMPROVE | ~12 | <10% |
| Cholesterol (total) | OPTIMAL | 145 | |
| GGT | OPTIMAL | 14 | <14 |
| HDL | OPTIMAL | 77 | >60 |
| LDL | OPTIMAL | 56 | < 100 |
| RDW | OPTIMAL | 12.4 | 11.7 - 15.4% |
| Triglycerides | OPTIMAL | 42 | < 100 |
| Uric Acid | OPTIMAL | 5.4 | 3.5 - 7.2 |
| V02 Max (Garmin Watch) | OPTIMAL | 52 | >=47 (ages 18-25) |
| TSH | OPTIMAL | 1.55 | 1 - 2.1 |
Some say this routine is torture. I view it as a way to achieve "more life" - to be more conscious, feel deeper, and have more fun than I could otherwise.
This system focuses on the physical side of things. Remember that human relationships, goals, stress, fulfillment, etc. matter just as much. Fortunately, all of those things go so much better if one's physical health are in check.
Note: Bryan Johnson's Bluerprint is about creating diets that are personalized to one's body. Bryan Johnson open sourced the diet that he optimized for his body. While I've made some minor modifications for my body, it's mostly the same as BJ's. I argue that that the Project Blueprint diet is the optimal place to start for most people in designing their own diet for optimal health, because dietary interventions and their subsequent health outcomes have consistent results in the large majority of study participants. People are genetically 99.99% the same. The data show consistency in response.
All writing on this page is my own, except where specified with quotes and credit.
The diet linked to from this page is a fork of Bryan Johnson's Blueprint diet. The original Blueprint diet maintains the "CC BY-NC 4.0" license.
All writing on this page, the RoutStack - Human 2.0 Routine Stack system, and all modifications to the Blueprint diet are relased by Cayden Pierce under the MIT license.