I gave myself a board of directors. I am not a company.

The idea wasn’t mine. I was watching a YouTuber, Austin Marchese, and he suggested building something like this, so I did. Not because I run a business — I don’t — but because I can’t fully control my own life, and my ADHD brain needs somewhere to pitch ideas before they turn into decisions. Somewhere that can tell me “no, that’s stupid,” instead of me just running with whatever felt exciting at 11pm.

For 24 years I made big decisions with somebody else. That’s not the case anymore, and I don’t fully know why my brain’s answer to that was “build an AI committee” instead of, I don’t know, a journal, or a therapist, or a very patient friend. Might be one of those questionable-decision categories I keep ending up in. We’ll see.

Five seats. Every AI in one of them is modeled on a real person — someone published, someone with a real footprint, someone I either know personally or have watched enough of to pull out an actual philosophy, not a stock personality.

The Navigator (NetworkChuck) owns anything career- or network-shaped. The Treasurer (a blend of Ramsey, Sethi, and Howard) asks the boring financial question before I get to ask the fun one. The Architect (Pieter Levels and Marc Lou) pushes me from idea to shipped instead of letting things live in my head forever, which is historically where most of my ideas go to die. The Anchor, built out of leaders from my own church, handles family, health, and values, and keeps the other four in check when they start optimizing me into the ground.

The Chief — chair of the board — I saved for last on purpose, because I know it’s a little on the nose: I modeled it after my dad. He’s not just my dad. He was a professor of economics at Oklahoma State, a development economist who studied developing countries, and spent time working in Africa as part of a USAID project — we lived there growing up because of it. Most of his career went toward helping graduate students, and our house was always full of people because of that. He’s patient, smart, and loving, and he’s one of the greatest men I’ve ever known. If I’m going to build a fake board of directors for my own life, of course the chair is my dad.

Here’s what that actually looks like in practice.

I moved my C:\AI folder over from another computer, and it brought a pile of hardcoded D:\ paths with it that don’t resolve on this machine. Turned out to be 73 references across 35 folders, 18 of them buried in one folder alone. My instinct, obviously, was to build an agent — not a fix, a whole standing thing that walks the folder, finds problems, and keeps doing it forever.

The board didn’t just wave it through. The Architect told me to knock it off — ship the smallest version, a dry-run and a report, and resist my own urge to scope this into a platform. The Anchor put it plainer than I would have: “this is a fun tangent, and fun tangents are exactly what can quietly eat a Sunday that was otherwise family time.” The Chief’s actual verdict: approved, small. Dry-run first, apply only after I review it, no standing agent — there’s no second use case in front of me yet to justify one. Timebox it to a few hours.

So I did. Built the small version, ran the dry-run, fixed what needed fixing, closed it out. No standing agent, no platform, no eaten Sunday. Which is, annoyingly, the entire point of the thing working.

Here’s the pipeline behind it. I’ve got a private Discord server, just for me, that I call my mind dump. Whatever’s rattling around gets typed in there raw — unscripted, unsorted, completely chaotic. An intake agent tidies it up afterward, finds the actual coherent thread, and sorts it. Then it goes and searches for people dealing with the same kind of problem, specifically how they’re using AI to work through it, and builds a report. That report goes to the board, the board kicks back its own recommendations, and the Chief synthesizes everyone into one answer instead of leaving me holding five different opinions. It all lands in a running markdown log, newest entries on top.

Does it work? I don’t know yet, long-term. But it worked once, on something small and real, and that’s more than I can say for most of my systems on day one. Right now I’m CEO, janitor, and the only shareholder currently suing myself for mismanagement. Meeting adjourned.