Insights from a synthesis of thousands of studies — meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and landmark trials spanning hundreds of thousands of participants — organized into an evidence-grounded knowledge tree of human needs.
Eliminating what's broken produces 3 to 30 times more human flourishing than optimizing what's working. The entire supplement industry operates where the evidence says almost nothing works.
Insight 02Foundational needs are binary. Psychological needs are continuous. Meaning has no ceiling. The utility curves systematically shift as you move up the hierarchy — and this isn't a modeling choice. It's what the evidence forced.
Insight 0380% of all branches in the knowledge tree reference trauma mechanisms. Not sleep. Not inflammation. Trauma. It connects almost everything — and it affects 61% of US adults.
Insight 04No supplement, no drug, no single dietary change, no therapy modality simultaneously touches cognition, depression, brain volume, inflammation, autonomic function, and sleep. Exercise does. And the threshold is lower than you think.
Insight 05Human needs are 80% synergistic. A weighted average misses most of the interaction effects. The math that respects this — the Choquet integral — reveals a 4:1 ratio of synergies to redundancies across all branches.
Insight 06When sleep drops below 7 hours, it doesn't subtract from flourishing — it multiplies through every connected branch. A single foundational failure cascades nonlinearly. The math shows how.
Insight 07If you could only choose two things to get right, the evidence says: relationships and sleep. They're the most coupled nodes in the entire tree. And they interact — each one degrades the other when it fails.
Insight 08The optimal strategy for any individual is completely determined by which level of the hierarchy they're currently gated at. This isn't philosophy. It's what 124 dimensions compute to when you let the math run.