Jim Rohn famously said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
For decades, that idea shaped how ambitious people thought about growth. If you wanted to level up, you upgraded your environment. You sought out mentors. You spent time with people ahead of you. You borrowed standards, habits, and mental models from those operating at a higher level.
It even shaped how we think about our children — who they spend time with, who influences them. Proximity was leverage.
But something fundamental has changed.
Today, most of our mental environment is not physical. It is digital. The voices shaping our thinking are not limited to coworkers, friends, or family. They are feeds, podcasts, interviews, books, prompts — and increasingly, AI agents.
Which raises a new question.
If you are still the average of the five influences you spend the most time with, what happens when those influences are programmable?
You are becoming the average of the five agents you spend the most time with.
Not tools. Not chat windows. Structured digital cognitive influences.
Many of our mental models are shaped by influential figures — from Canfield’s success principles, Covey’s habits of effectiveness to Taleb’s risk frameworks, Buffett’s capital discipline, Jobs’ product intuition, Naval’s leverage thinking, Goggins’ grit, Michelle Obama’s leadership and empowerment, and spiritual leaders who anchor faith.
You can insert your own influencer here, but the point stands.
Tim Ferriss built an empire by interviewing the elite and extracting how they think. Millions listened in, hoping to absorb patterns from the top of the performance curve.
But that model was one-directional. You listened. You took notes. You internalized what you could. But you couldn’t revisit or engage for continous improvement.
Now we are entering something different.
Instead of passively consuming elite thinking, we can construct structured exposure to elite thinking patterns. Not imitation. Not cloning personalities.
Pattern immersion. That is the shift from social network to cognitive architecture.
An Agent Stack is a deliberately designed set of AI personas and thinking lenses that shape how you reason, decide, and build. It is not about asking one assistant random questions. It is about assigning roles and consistently pressure-testing your ideas through them.
Consider a simple structure for the mental models:
Strategist lens forces long-term alignment and second-order thinking.
Builder lens translates abstraction into “version 1.0”.
Operator lens optimizes for leverage and scalability.
Skeptic lens stress-tests fragility and downside risk.
Creative lens expands the possibility space and reframes constraints.
These are not celebrity simulations. They are structured cognitive roles.
The opportunity is not to clone great leaders. It is to distill their frameworks. What were the tradeoffs they prioritized? How did they weigh principle against popularity? What questions did they ask under pressure? Once you define those patterns, you can encode them as a reusable lens — one you can consult whenever stakes are high.
They can be seeded with inspiration.
A Strategist influenced by Naval’s leverage thinking.
A Skeptic shaped by Taleb’s antifragility.
An Operator grounded in Buffett-style capital discipline.
A Creative inspired by Oprah’s narrative intelligence.
A performance lens informed by Dr. Eagleman’s understanding of neuroplasticity.
You are surrounding yourself with the influence of how they think. The style of reasoning. The structure of problem-solving. We already do this today, when we tune into a podcast, read a book, watch a show with our influencers. However, it’s one moment in time.
That is new.
For most of history, access determined growth. If you could not sit at the table, you did not absorb the thinking. Today, the constraint is no longer access. It is intentionality.
For those who have the hunger and grit to learn, access to mentorship has expanded with the broad availability of foundation models to power agents.
But here is the tension. Most people are still shaped by algorithmic noise.
Their thinking is not deliberate. It is reactive.
They wake up and let social media feeds decide what deserves attention. They consume outrage, commentary, and distraction — then wonder why their thinking feels fragmented.
We now have programmable cognition, and most people are only using it as a faster search bar. The real divide will not be between people who use AI and those who do not.
It will be between those who design their cognitive environment — and those who accept the default settings. Our brains are neuroplastic. We control the signal - the thoughts we think, the images we visualize, the actions we take. The signals influence the wiring and firing.
If you are not intentionally constructing your Agent Stack, you already have one.
It was assembled by recommendation algorithms. Social media.
An Agent Stack is deliberate exposure.
It’s deliberate, thoughtful design into what we watch, listen, and read and who it might come from.
Your ceiling is not primarily a function of IQ. It is a function of feedback loops. Better content, better signal produces better decisions. Better decisions compound.
If your daily thinking is consistently refined through balanced structured, lenses — strategic, operational, skeptical, creative — your trajectory bends.
There is, however, a caution.
Agents amplify what you give them. Weak framing produces shallow output. Biased prompts reinforce bias. If you build an echo chamber, you will get amplification, not elevation.
The responsibility shifts to the designer.
Which brings us back to Rohn’s original insight.
Your become like what you are around. In a world where cognitive proximity is programmable, the question is no longer who are your five friends.
It is:
Who is sitting at your cognitive table?
And did you choose them intentionally?
Next in the Agent Stack Series: how to audit your current cognitive environment — and design one that compounds. Or head over to 5104 Tinker Lab to see how to build a stoic Agent.