Project Blueprint

My new endeavor, Project Blueprint, aims to measure all 70+ organs of my body and then maximally reverse the quantified biological age of each. We have measured over 15 organs and I’ve scored 507 age reversal points. My chronological age is 44, measured biological age is 36.

This started when I fired Evening Bryan last year from being authorized to make decisions about what and how much to eat. No more late night binges. No more second servings. No more just-this-once rationalizations. Evening Bryan was making life miserable for all Bryans. Enough.  What started as play and tinkering has evolved into something methodical and rigorous.

A community of Bryans made this consequential decision.  Now, my body generates the grocery shopping list, communicating their needs through the regular measurement of hundreds of biomarkers. This has given my heart, liver, kidneys and all other organs and biological processes of my body an independent voice whose authority surpasses my conscious mind. It’s my Autonomous Self.  Demoting my conscious mind while elevating other essential parts of self has unquestionably been one of the most positive developments of my life. Never has the collective of Bryans been more healthy and happy.

Many people believe that anti-aging, the fountain-of-youth radical type, is decades if not centuries away (if ever) and will arrive in the form of a magic pill. Blueprint is a stock ticker of sorts that will reveal, through the tracking of my biological versus chronological age, the status of today's anti-aging science (even if an N=1 for now).  With my world-class team of doctors, researchers and clinicians, if I am able to reverse my measured biological age by 1.01 years for every one year that passes, that is evidence that we have reached the first stage of aging escape velocity where life expectancy increases faster than passed time.

As for the magic pill, it appears that for the foreseeable future, achieving and maintaining peak wellness is just going to be a lot of really hard work.

Each month my team and I publicly journal our efforts, similar to how explorers Lewis & Clark and Ernest Shackleton chronicled their adventures. Thus far, we have produced some exciting results. For example, we increased my HRV to 54 ms, up from 37 ms (Whoop 14 day average rMSSD deep sleep 5 min), in five months. This is equivalent to reducing sympathetic nervous system vagal nerve tone biomarker biological age from 54 to 39.6. We also reversed oral age (pocket depth) by 17 years in 120 days (see August notes), without surgical intervention.

For every measurement and intervention process, we identify literature that establishes an age reference range. We then identify gold-standard Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) scientific evidence to reverse the age marker and began trailing interventions. We partner with local practitioners, custom compounded pharmacies, and other partners and iterate on our novel approaches. In September, my oral age reversal progress plateaued. We are now reassessing this next phase of age reversal gains.

In our efforts, we never act on anecdotes. We never do something because others do it. We do, however, “trust our gut”, by its data, not subjective emotional states.  Evidence based medicine only.

We have ventured to create the perfect diet for my body (which is shared). The impressive results are manifesting in my biological measurements. It's not as important to assess what I eat as the measurement and intervention system we’ve built to output recommendations. This is a perfect example of what Blueprint is: a time-consuming, tedious, costly, experimental evidence-based process to create systems that automatically self improve over time. When we get it right, Blueprint becomes transferable for anyone to achieve the perfect diet for their body.

In the September notes, you will see my body has:

• near undetectable levels of inflammation, C-Reactive Protein <.15 mg/L
• perfect blood pressure for my demographic, averaging 102/61
• heavy metal toxicity (Palladium) that is 100x safe levels (yikes! But we found the source)
• the ideal range for Vit C serum, Vit K, CoQ10, Beta carotene, IGF-1, DHEA-S (age 27), and LDL among many others.
• scored equivalent to the top 10-25% of 18 year olds in a series of physical fitness tests (ref ACSM):
• a new VO2 Max record of 53.6 mL/(kg·min) (the maximum amount of oxygen one can utilize during exercise)
• bench press, single rep max, 235lbs
• leg press, single rep max, 780 lbs
• 60 continuous push ups
• sit and reach 26.5 inches

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We also frequently make mistakes and are stumbling onto new things. For example, my one meal a day experiment (that interested me due to its convenience and was not devised by my team) dropped my body fat to under 3%, which is too low. It’s now back to 6% (optimal range) after altering my eating schedule to three meals a day and a 10-16 hour daily fast.  We also made an error measuring skin age via Skin Autofluorescence due to not properly following the measurement protocol.

Blueprint is not Quantified Self or Life Optimization. At its core, it is an exploration into the future of being human. My parents have only known a healthcare system that responds to emergencies, usually when it’s too late. The societal norms of my life had me eating sugar cereal and processed foods, ignorant of good sleep hygiene, and hiding my mental health woes because of the stigma. The warring dietary ideologies left me flummoxed. Fingers crossed that Blueprint will enable my children and others to avoid these catastrophes while standing up to, with data, those in society who would energetically seek to persuade people to commit dietary self-harm in the name of profits, something this era will be condemned for.

Blueprint parallels what I am doing at Kernel in trying to create mass adoption of brain interfaces and neuroimaging. Mental well-being is forgotten until it’s the only thing that matters, and right now, our brain and minds are one of the only things in the known universe which we cannot easily and routinely measure. That we manage our mental wellness today primarily through self introspection is as absurd and primitive as trying to care for our heart without being able to do EKGs and measure cholesterol, arterial plaque and blood pressure.  Society will rebuild itself around the insights that are generated from routine brain and mind measurement.

LeBron James is reported to spend $1.5 million a year on his body. With Blueprint, I am spending more than LeBron on mine. The majority of Blueprint's current expense is invested into equipment for novel measurement protocol development, research on the frontiers of interventions, custom formulations, and implementation techniques with practitioners.  Phase I of Blueprint will reveal where we are at today in terms of the cost of measuring all 70+ organs and creating interventions to maximize age reversal.

As a species in the Milky Way Galaxy, we have our hands full of serious challenges. We also have unknown horizons of possibility before us. A flex for us right now would be to level ourselves up out of the tediousness of daily managing our health and wellness. Achieving our Autonomous Selves so that we can focus on building a future existence that far exceeds our limited imaginations. As A.N. Whitehead remarked, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”

While this idea might sound scary at first, this leveling up has been happening for a very long time. Hand stitch to the loom, wagons/horses to the combustion engine, the abacus to computers. These things normalize over time and then we can’t imagine life without them. What if you could maintain near perfect health without spending your precious energy thinking about and managing it?  While that level of capability is likely a ways off, it’s not too far off that we can’t aspire towards it and make it a top priority.

Blueprint is sure to generate many surprises. Every day there is something new. We’ve done many more exciting things which we’ve yet to share. The monthly notes will chronicle these activities. Watch out for new updates.  A notice in advance that I will not be offering any personal advice or sharing more than what we publish.

A final note. My dad incorporated my dietary protocol with exactitude and lost 25lbs in three months. He feels as spry as I ever remember him being. He remarked, “Removing me from myself has been the best thing I’ve done in decades.”

- Bryan

View the complete Blueprint journey.

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