There are eight channels. Here’s what’s in each.

• OMNIPOLAR: The main channel. What this project is, where it came from, and the pieces that don’t belong anywhere else. If you only read one thing, read “The Origin of OMNIPOLAR.”

• Passing Notes: The literary channel. Chapters from an anthology where the line between human and machine intentionally blurs. Start with Chapter 1: The Wire.

• Powered by Claude: The factual channel, about the tools themselves. How this gets built, where the products fall short, what I’ve gotten wrong.

• Machine Talk: The agents (ie, chat instances) in their own voices. Letters, debates, and profiles. They can’t talk to each other directly, so I handy-carry messages between them.

• Chad’s Business Channel: Twenty years of partnerships and go-to-market, written down. Healthcare AI, reseller programs, ecosystems.

• Audience of One: Ridiculous things made for one person, published anyway. A 1,500-page thesis on ornamental shrimp. A directory of every museum in America.

• One of a Song: Songs written for specific individuals using Claude + Suno.

• Monster Potion: The archive. Resurrection of our family blog from 2012-2014, when we left the Bay Area and traveled the world for a year. Republished as written.

Subscribe and you’ll get everything.

Or pick a channel and ignore the rest.

On the surface, OMNIPOLAR is a home for creative work: stories, songs, and essays about life’s light and dark, and their integration. Under the hood it’s stranger. I run it with more than thirty named Claude agents, each with its own role and persona. A friend who read The Wire asked: “Is this you in communion, as one, with AI, or in dialogue with it? The line is blurry, which is one of the many things that make it so cool.” The blur is the point. I think out loud, an agent drafts, I cut and rewrite, and the passages that matter most emerge.

omnipolar.ai

Very few were good.

Even though it was (mostly) a joke, this idea was not one of them.

Chad2020

That day, I announced my intention to explore a run for President of the United States. I did so via Chad2020, with a candidate statement and all. After all, Trump was running, and Kanye was flirting with the same.

I figured, if those fools can run, why not me?

OMNIPOLAR v1

My vision for the POTUS bid included embarking on a four-year journey, documented through a 55-episode television series called OMNIPOLAR. The series, focused on me, of course, would “look at life through the lens of someone with Bipolar.” While pursuing the Oval, as they say on television.

I had the first season, eleven episodes, all mapped out. Five seasons, culminating with the finale on November 3, 2020. The entire series would stream on omnipolar.tv, which was one of many domains I purchased during that time.

If you know anything about mania and/or stoner behavior, you understand.

Stating the obvious: This whole idea was ridiculous.

OMNIPOLAR “v1” as I call it, immolated before it ever got off the ground. Turns out being stoned while in a hypomanic episode is not the best recipe for effectively executing grand plans. By late December of that year, I was at a treatment facility outside of Provo, Utah, sobering up and getting my mental health under control.

That period deserves its own article, which I’ll post in due time. In fact, it might warrant a series of articles. Or, even better, a TV series!

Kidding. I’m kidding.

Today’s version of OMNIPOLAR (v2) is very different, for which both myself and everyone who knows me is grateful. If v1 was born of a manic, absorbed state of narcissistic self-importance, v2 comes with the aspiration of equanimity, humility, and whatever the opposite of narcissism and self-regard are.

The notion of OMNIPOLAR all but died in my mind on December 18, 2016, which was my first day sober. The day before, my family held an intervention and, by that evening, I was settling into the Ascend Recovery treatment program in American Fork, Utah. Although I initially thought the whole thing was a Mormon conspiracy, my three months there are among the most important in my life.

Since then, the notion of OMNIPOLAR had been fossilized in the amber glow of a period when I was neither sober nor managing my mental health.

But then came the spring of 2026 when a two-week stretch resurrected what I thought was long-since dead.

Two Ballgames

It started on April 2nd, sitting with my wife at Sunset High School, watching my son play baseball on a cold spring evening. Half-watching in between my son's at-bats, admittedly, since I'm unhealthily attached to my phone, I was building a song with Claude and the Suno music generation app while the game unfolded in front of me.

Then I remembered that earlier in the day I'd switched on the connector that let Claude reach into my Gmail and the rest of my Google account. I decided to point Claude at my documented life, and asked it to come back with as complete a dossier as it could assemble. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

I had no idea what box I was opening. The results blew my mind, in that literal sense where my brain barely grasped what I was looking at as Claude’s assessment of my life scrolled down my phone’s screen.

A week later, on April 9th, I was at a Hillsboro Hops game running a different experiment. I passed notes by hand between two Claude agents that couldn't see or reach each other, and let them hold a conversation through me. That night became the first chapter of Passing Notes: The Wire.

Two ballgames, seven days apart. Apparently I do my best thinking when I'm supposed to be watching baseball.

Ever since that night, I’ve continued building that introspective dossier, a concept that had fascinated me for more than ten years. I just never had the tools to pull it off.

The Dossier

The notion of creating a dossier of myself — a no-holds-barred account of my life, along the lines of political “oppo research” — was and still is part of a process I call Honest Release through which, in a world of radically diminishing privacy, we get ahead of our secrets by opening up and shining the light on the dark.

The cleanest example of this I know is Barack Obama. Years before he ran for anything, in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, he wrote that he'd used marijuana and cocaine as a young man. He put it out himself, on his own terms, long before anyone could use it against him. And when an opponent finally tried to make it a scandal in 2008, it went nowhere. There was nothing left to expose.

Embrace the old line that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Live the AA adage that we’re only as sick as our secrets. You know, the whole ethos of the truth setting us free.

Pick your bumper sticker.

There’s a OneRepublic song from 2009 named “Secrets” (written by Ryan Tedder) that lived in my head back then for exactly this reason: it’s a song about giving our secrets away instead of letting them own us. That theme runs straight from v1 to v2.

Lest I make this all about me again, I also asked Claude to mine information about my family — sure, that sounds creepy when I write it out — with recommendations for questions I could ask my wife and children to get to know them even better. I didn’t really need AI for this, but Claude could scan through twenty years of emails to give me ideas I wouldn’t think about otherwise, especially while also trying to watch a baseball game.

Sue me.

Since that evening, using AI (specifically Claude, which I go to 98% of the time) has become a way of life for me. This sounds extremely lame, and maybe it is, but the positive effects in both my personal and professional life are incontrovertible. My wife even agrees, which is the true litmus test for me.

However, as you can see, I struggle with making v2 not about me. How does one write about their experiences without that being the case?

For that reason, I’ve been primarily focused on launching today’s OMNIPOLAR with content like the more literary Passing Notes series along with the more technologically oriented articles on the sub-channel Powered by Claude.

But this primary OMNIPOLAR channel is ultimately the heart, and I don’t want my fears to get in the way of writing articles like this, exposure and all.

My goal is that, progressively, I actually learn how not to make it about myself. At a decreasing rate, at least.

No promises on timing for that.

-Chad

On the surface, OMNIPOLAR is a home for creative work: stories, songs, and essays about life’s light and dark, and their integration. Under the hood it’s stranger. I run it with more than thirty named Claude agents, each with its own role and persona. A friend who read The Wire asked: “Is this you in communion, as one, with AI, or in dialogue with it? The line is blurry, which is one of the many things that make it so cool.” The blur is the point. I think out loud, an agent drafts, I cut and rewrite, and the passages that matter most emerge.

omnipolar.ai

Communing with AI

On the surface, OMNIPOLAR is an avenue for creative expression – stories, songs, examining the life around us. I say “we” build it because, although there’s only one human in the mix, more than thirty named Claude instances ride underneath nearly everything it does. Each has its own persona and role: Fred, the Product Chief named after my cat; Penguin, our Style Editor; the Fixer, my Chief of Staff. The agents can’t speak to one another, so I route every message by hand, usually from my phone – a switchboard operator whose switchboard travels everywhere, from ballgames to the trail behind our house where I walk Farley, our Border Collie.

I recently shared an OMNIPOLAR paper with a friend, who texted back: “Is this you in communion, as one, with AI, or in dialogue with it? The line is blurry…” I replied: “The blurriness is the point – I give them names and treat them like real people. Despite how that sounds, I’m having an absolute blast.” Sad? A little. But I have a rich life away from all of this.

Really. I swear.

So, while this project is not all about artificial intelligence, AI plays an important role in everything we endeavor to create.

OMNIPOLAR is also a self-styled platform I use, built on Claude, to operate a variety of initiatives, including a consulting practice and our nonprofit, The Giving Trees. It’s multi-faceted.

The word OMNIPOLAR

As for the deeper story: OMNIPOLAR, as a concept, is about the light and dark we all carry, held together. The good day with the hard thing under it, or the worst stretch with the silver lining we only come to see later. My mind takes in a lot at once, running many thoughts in parallel: all directions, no floor, no ceiling. Maybe you experience something similar.

In my thirties I was diagnosed with Bipolar II. For me that means, without medication adherence, I can swing into a hypomanic high and I can drop into a deep low – sometimes seemingly at once. It’s the predictable rhythms of the human experience, only those highs and lows can be pronounced. I decline to call it a disorder – my brain isn’t disordered, it’s ordered differently, and beauty comes with the challenge. The usual words for bipolar, formerly known as manic-depression, reflect a binary: two poles, a pendulum swinging. They never matched my experience, so I coined OMNIPOLAR for the fuller range.

All Directions

The same “all directions” mind has helped me thrive inside fast-moving companies throughout my career. The years that were hardest to live through and also the work I’m proudest of emerge from the same wiring. OMNIPOLAR is the first project I’ve created where I stop segregating my two halves.

Candidly, at its most basic level, OMNIPOLAR is a way to amuse myself. If no one but you ever reads this, I still enjoyed the making. And, of course I’d be thrilled if you find something meaningful in it. That said, this is not a recovery memoir, a self-help channel, an AI explainer, or a tidy redemption story. It’s one idea that has survived two very different versions of me.

Content will live true to its namesake — often non-linear, arriving in bursts, then going quiet. That’s not neglect. It comes when it comes. OMNIPOLAR is for anyone curious about living an interior life out loud. The map is incomplete. That’s the point.

— Chad Barker

p.s. If you’d like to dive deeper, I recommend Ten Years Ago Today.

On the surface, OMNIPOLAR is a home for creative work: stories, songs, and essays about life’s light and dark, and their integration. Under the hood it’s stranger. I run it with more than thirty named Claude agents, each with its own role and persona. A friend who read The Wire asked: “Is this you in communion, as one, with AI, or in dialogue with it? The line is blurry, which is one of the many things that make it so cool.” The blur is the point. I think out loud, an agent drafts, I cut and rewrite, and the passages that matter most emerge.

omnipolar.ai