Where this started
and why it matters
I used to have sticky notes everywhere. Whiteboards full. Articles saved. Apps for Spanish, vitamins, isometric exercises, philosophical sayings. Everything scattered, nothing connected.
When AI arrived I saw one thing clearly: a place to put it all and give it life.
That became Trinity, a personal operating system built around a Mental Science document I started over 30 years ago, before my kids were born. I was always filling it, translating philosophies into my own language, mapping what I learned from Krishnamurti, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Thomas Szasz, James Allen, C.S. Lewis, Cantillon, the Creature from Jekyll Island. Trinity gave that document a voice. The Council inside it is a version of me but without the excuses. A mirror that talks back. It has full access to everything I track, my habits, my tasks, my crypto positions, my consistency. It notices when I am not living what I state.
Pertinent grew out of that same discipline applied to AI governance. The question I kept arriving at was not whether the AI said something wrong. It was whether the AI did something it was never authorized to do. That distinction is the work.
The tools on this site were built for the people I kept talking to — business owners, professionals, educators, coaches — who were using AI every day and weren't sure if they were doing it right. The intelligence reports were built because the people I was testing them on kept asking for them to continue.
Chris McClean · Founder, Pertinent · Victoria BC