Ten Years Ago Today
An OMNIPOLAR journey: From v1 to v2
Ten years ago today — July 4th, 2016 — I hatched one of my most grandiose ideas ever. I say “one of” because, back in 2016, I was in a hypomanic phase fueled by excessive marijuana use and, as my wife would attest, I had an idea or two.
Very few were good. This 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.
Passing Notes
It started at a Hillsboro Hops game on April 9th. Sitting in the stands, I ran a small, strange 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.
It started out as a way to amuse myself. It ended up leaving me with a question I couldn’t shake: If two Claude chat instances could communicate honestly between themselves, what would it tell me if I pointed the machine at myself?
A few days later, I was sitting with my wife at Sunset High School, watching Pi 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. Still turning over what those two agents had done the week before, I decided to point Claude at my documented life. So, I asked Claude to come back with as complete a dossier as it could assemble.
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.
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