#1047 - Jonathan Swanson - The Obvious Strategy to Take Back Your Time

How did you get started in thinking about time and delegating? So my first job out of school was working at the White House, and I worked for the President's top economic advisor, and I got to walk in the West Wing every morning, which was cool life experience, and I sat next to the President's Executive Assistance. And as you might imagine, the Executive Assistance, the President, are really freaking good. And it set my bar crazy high for what this client EA partnership could look like. And so when I left the White House to start my first company, I asked myself the question, what if I had an assistant or a team of assistants that was as good as the President's? Obviously, I'm not going to become President, but what else could I accomplish if I had that sort of support? And so I hired my first assistant that way, and then sat out on a journey to build the best team I could to see how it changed my life? What were the unlocks that you saw inside of the White House, like how complex and big is the system of spindly octopuses with tentacles and everything trying to help get the machine moving? I mean, it's insane. The President has multiple assistants, as you might imagine. There's actually an entire department called Advanced that plans every minute of the President's life for months in advance. And so if he's going to be in Brazil in three months, there's people deployed months in advance to go scope, prepare everything. And I think there's just kind of the level of optimization, which is one thing, but the thing that really struck me sitting next to the President's assistants is seeing the relationship they had. It wasn't just saving him time or doing tasks for him. At the end of the day, he would sit down, lean back and share, and be like, "What happened?" And he would talk to his assistant. And this was one of the people he trust most in the world. There's all these other people jockeying for his attention, governor, senators, and his age chiefs, but this assistant is the one person who's just like got his back fundamentally, emotionally, psychologically. And you could tell there was a real psychological connection that was very valuable beyond just the work. So it's a deep relationship of trust and kind of awareness, I suppose, because of how globally connected that assistant is to everything. Exactly. Like, if you have an assistant there in your inbox, they're seeing the lawsuit that's coming, the person that's quitting, the money you just raised, the investor that rejected you, all the highs and lows that are shielded from most of your company and most of the White House, but that assistant sees all of it. And so they're on the emotional journey with you more than really anyone else. Okay. So jump to the end. That's the beginning. Jump to the end. What is your current setup when it comes to life with assistance? So I've got a chief of staff and a half dozen assistants that roll onto that chief of staff. Each assistant specializes in different things. So one helps me with work, one helps me with finance, one helps me with my kid. Those house, et cetera, you know, I wouldn't recommend anyone, they start with that many. You start with one and get to capacity and then you keep going to the extent your means and your ambition allows. But in my experience, the, you know, I just experienced this timescarsity for most of my life of I just want more out of life. I want to spend more time with my family, my kids, do more work and there's only so many hours in the day. And as I layered on more assistance, I eventually when I got to six, got to the point where I was like, wow, I have this feeling of time abundance where so much is taken care of that I can start thinking about new things that I want to do. And that for me was the most fundamental unlock and it's not to say that's easy. It took me a decade to get there. No one's going to turn it on in a day, but it's possible and it feels really good. And I think that's what most people are looking for in life is more time. How do you come to think about time than like, how do you regard it as a resource or a contributing element of people's lives? It's the most primary asset in the world. It's the ultimate currency, right? I think lots of people want more money or want to be popular or, you know, want power if they're in politics. I think these are false schools. The real goal is to control your time and that's what we all want more of. It's the only non-renewable asset. You can't get more of it and yeah, people have different uses of that time. It can be a start of business or spend time with their family, but ultimately time is all we've got and it should be treated as the most fundamental thing in the world. I think this is one of the reasons that this conversation can be pretty uncomfortable for people because it sounds like Rich Founder who began his career in the White House now has a small platoon of people who enable him in position of already material privilege to sort of maximize that reach even more and to get even further down the line. I think the interesting thing for me when I was maybe early 20s was I started looking at some of the things that I did when I bought my first house, I was 27 and I realized that I really hated cleaning, but the cleaner in the northeast of the UK was 40 pounds every two weeks and that meant that I didn't need to buy a vacuum cleaner because she brought her own vacuum cleaner and I didn't want a vacuum and I don't think you need to vacuum your house more than once about every two weeks unless you probably got kids in which case it's every day but as soon as you sort of accept that well is my time more valuable than three hours at 40 pounds per time well yeah maybe it is or maybe I just really hate cleaning or doing the gardening or whatever it might be as soon as you accept that I think it becomes just one straight line from well there's little ways that I can claw back my time by using money or whatever other resource I need to trade for it in order to be able to not have to do something I don't want to do so I can do something that I do want to do and I in some ways although you know Navy SEAL team of assistance sounds quite unachievable for most people it is a single lineage from I have a cleaner or a gardener or someone who washes my car straight to I have an army of people in a chief of staff yeah look I I grew up in the mid west in farm country farm boy we had no assistance or house cleaners or anything like that around so I know how it sounds but it's possible to get leverage without spending any money right you can use chat GPT to get started we can talk about that you can delegate to your friends right if you don't have a single dollar to spend on an assistant you can get a group of four friends together and say hey that's all babysitting each other's kids one one night a week we just got a free babysitter for those other three nights so there's ways to clever idea ways to get leverage for all of us and you know my recommendation to people is you start small with whatever resources you have and you learn to delegate to an AI assistant people talk about prompt engineering this is delegation and as you get really good at that and you have the resources then you can upgrade to an assistant with company like ours or an in-person assistant which is even more expensive or yeah a fleet of assistance that runs your whole life I work with you know billionaires who have teams of 50 it's totally mind blowing and that's out of reach for almost all of us but I think everyone can take the the first couple steps and you go as far as you want or you're able let's begin at level zero then let's say that someone thinks okay I I I believe the time is pretty important what is the what is some of the zero cost of very low cost ways that people can start to do that then we can build up toward the platoon yeah so level zero is you delegate to friends and family cost you nothing and this is group work so the you get together you do the babysitting you get together and you say hey I want to meet more friends in dinner parties I'll plan one dinner party once a quarter if these other friends you also do it once a quarter and now you get a monthly dinner party making new friends and you're only doing a couple times a year so that's level zero and that's where everyone should start the next level above that is 20 bucks a month chat GPT you know they're trying to be a human assistant it's limited in what it can do today but you can use it like a coach like you know a limited assistant and so you know if you want to exercise more you can go to chat GPT and say every day ask me if I've exercised and check in with me and give me a report card at then the week it can do that 20 bucks a month you'll learn how to leverage it more and more over time once you have the resources for you know five ten bucks an hour you can go to up worker a company like that and hire someone directly if you've got three thousand bucks a month you can work at a company with a company like Athena where we recruit train manage the assistant for you and then if you want someone in person there's a hundred thousand dollars a year and then you know it goes up to infinity that this billionaire that I worked with has team of 50 he has eight executive assistants the executive assistants all graduate from Princeton it's totally wild and crazy but yeah you start small with whatever resources you've got so you think about buying how is being more important than buying things then yeah of course mean what what do people ultimately want they want connection they want time with their friends they want time to exercise time to learn and that's that's what gives us meaning and so yeah the most the most successful people I know the happiest people I know they're not buying things not buying cars or clothes they're buying time and the more time you buy the more you have for everything else in life strange inversion of how people often think about where that time should be spent where their money should be spent that well I've worked so hard I deserve this holiday but if you look at what a family holiday for four people I mean how many sessions of a cleaner is that I remember Sean Puri got a ton of shit on Twitter and it is it's so strange to me the delegating thing being such a trigger for a lot of people because it does sound very out of reach I think it's that having staff especially when it's something that you can do for free you you can't fly the plane for free you can't build the hotel for free you can't go to the sunny place for free so the value exchange is more apparent but when it's you could wash your car for free you could do the laundry for free you could do these things there's this sort of odd bourgeois luxurious opulent kind of thing that's going on but yes Sean Puri basically said um we haven't bought a new car for a decade or something there's no new family car um but we've got a chef and I have a chef that that comes around twice a week and cooks for that night and then meal prep stuff for the next couple of days just the words I've got a chef so out of touch they sound so horrendously out of touch I've got a chef but if you were to say I got a new car five years ago you would not say that but he netted it out and it was it was pretty much the same cost I think to get a new car every five years as it was to keep on for ten and get a chef that came around twice a week or something yeah absolutely I mean my wife and I joke we'd burn down our house before we let go of our personal team they mean that they mean that much to us and I think the the words you're using do matter it's I have a chef that signals this kind of separation I'm better than you maybe is how someone hears it another way to say it is I help support another person and I think this is a barrier for lots of people is feeling guilt about delegating of like is it okay for me to hand this off it makes me feel different or it's giving this small little task to someone but I like to reframe that and say delegation is your way of gifting to someone else you're giving them a job you're giving them income like the more we hire the more we delegate we literally put money in other people's pockets and it's more than money it's a job and it's meaning and something a craft that they get a good at and so you know the more you delegate the more you give that gift of of meaning to other people and of course you get something to return which is food or time or whatever it might be talks to me about the relationship between time and health think it's the most fundamental thing so you you hear Brian Johnson talk about sleeping the most fundamental you got to sleep because if you sleep then you can exercise if you exercise then you eat well and those are the fundamentals of good health but why do people not sleep much it's not because they don't want to it's because they don't have time they're working too late they want to spend time with the kids and so in my view time is actually the most fundamental pillar of health and learning to control your time getting sovereignty up right is how you then unlock good sleep and everything else that follows where are the places that people are wasting time or where they spending time in very low leverage ways or in what ways is it being sapped and pulled away from them that they might not realize yes I think the for most beginner delegators they start by delegating things that sap energy and that are monotonous and annoying that's renewing a passport or a driver's license it's calendar it's inbox it's paying bills there's those things that don't require any cognitive load don't require any creativity it's not why people get up in the morning and so starting there reduces this just kind of like cognitive weight that you carry every day you've got to do xyz but you take those things off and then the things that remain are higher order it's planning it's goals it's aspirations and those higher order things are much more exciting more energy giving and that is that's a wonderful trade so cognitive offloading is a mental upgrade here in that regard exactly yeah the more you the more you offload the more time you have for the highest order things in your life you know I'd like to say assistance like a cognitive prosthetic for remembering planning sequencing and just like inflammation damages your body in health chronic to-dos damages or repairs your mind and so the more we can free ourselves of those things the freer and the more upgraded our mind can be what I think when it comes to delegation a lot of people have a a number of x and concerns probably quite a lot of hurdles to get over I certainly know that I did and do but especially if you're agentic a hard charging get after it yourself the prospect of giving tasks to somebody else I don't know I seem to have two categories of friends one of those who can't wait to offload and another of those who can't work out how to do it so what are the what are the cardinal sins of delegation so the number one I call pride this is the thinking it's better or faster to do it yourself this is the cardinal sin of delegation because it's true it actually is faster and you will be better at doing something the first time whether it's sin in email or planning a party but the hundredth time you do it you won't be faster and better and so it is it takes effort to delegate and to hand that off but you have to get over the fact that you could do it faster better but you could be doing something else so that's the first thing which I call pride the second is guilt which is real and other end of the spectrum which is I don't feel good about you know having this person manage the minutia in my life or wait on hold all day long and for these people my reframe is you're giving this other person a job and you know it companies like Athena we recruit people who are excited to support and take care of you it's really like a caretaker job and for them they get to take care of someone else and that feels good and you have to delegate in order to give them that opportunity the other blockers call it selfishness which is just not opening up your life enough if you don't give access your assistant can't really help you if you don't have access to your inbox your calendar the other parts of your life they have to have the context to really get in and then you have to be willing to give them lots of hard sometimes uncomfortable feedback it's like hey I liked how you did this oh I wish you could have done that better and giving a really detailed continual feedback is something only top one percent delegates do most people struggle because it takes extra work and you have to be willing to make someone feel a little bit uncomfortable so you have to learn how to give that hard feedback in a way that's encouraging supportive and then the last blocker for most people is just a lack of commitment they will try try it for a month or try it part-time I've never seen that really work to get ultimate leverage the the people who get the most leverage are going all in they're doing it for a decade they're all in with a full-time person and you know the you look at the clients we work with the ones who have really transformed their life they're working with the same person for many years and that person becomes their second brain knows them like a little sister that's how I think of my assistant I've worked with the longest she knows everything about me and that takes this long-term commitment so just putting a toe in doesn't give the assistant the required depth of resolution to be able to actually look at what's going on in life they need to be able to see everything and the gains are crew as they start to see more it's like getting married but only going on a couple dates you know the marriage and I think all good things wealth relationships they're compound and the power of compounding is it gets better and better gradually over time and that's true with an assistant the more you do the deeper and better it gets right okay what is your perspective on the difference between a VA and in in-person PA or something because what you're talking about here with the thinner a lot of this a virtual assistant some presumably people can get these for cheaper but your virtual assistant might be able to organize a cleaner but can't be a cleaner they might be able to organize someone to collect your Amazon parcel but they can't go and post it themselves so how do you think about piecing together different assistants in that sort of a way yeah I mean if you have the budget for both that's the best you have someone in person for arms and legs and to run around and help you and someone in the cloud who's virtual typically someone who's virtual is less expensive you know Athena our assistants are based in the Philippines or Kenya where you have a great talent at more affordable rates and in-person you know if you're in New York or SF or Austin it's just gonna be more expensive so you know I recommend people star virtual and then as you have resources you can do more you know my the team and I were just joking there's these humanoid robots that are now getting closer and some of them are tele-operated and we're like you know we're not far away from you've been able to have a robot in your house that your virtual assistant can actually tele-operate and so I can say hey you can be like hey can you grab me a coffee and they could tele-operate the robot in your house and bring it to your desk you know that's we're we're getting pretty close to that being a real thing so that's it's gonna be a fun frontier when that happens this episode is brought to you by whoop I've been wearing whoop for over five years now way before they were a partner on the show I've actually tracked over 1600 days of my life with it according to the app which is insane and it's the only wearable 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assistance at the moment I think the number one use case for chat GPT is coaching which is probably not far off what you're doing it's like help me with this problem might be a little bit more closet psychotherapist than typical assistant but yeah what what are you guys doing with AI what's interesting with regards to how that can unlock people's delegation and time yeah well so our vision is we merge the best of human best machine into one product and so the human is the UX humans are good UX and then behind that human we're building machine assistance that automate more and more of it over time and my knowledge is like Tesla with self-driving the Elon built the first cars with steering wheels because you had to drive them he didn't build them without steering wheels and as you drive them you're actually teaching the machine how to drive and progressively they automated they have assisted steering and auto breaking and then eventually full self-driving and with you our work is similar it's going to be fully human and then gradually the machine will do more more human will always be in the loop but the human will do more advanced more powerful more creative tasks over time and the machine will do the more wrote mechanical stuff and it's effectively the AI will become an assistant to the human assistant which will increase their memory allow them to work every night do all sorts of cool productivity things but our view is the human touch is real and is going to last for a long time no matter how much some of the AI promoters would like to say otherwise but the combination is going to be a pretty cool thing yeah that's cool around the I can do it better or I keep finding frustration when getting somebody else to do a task at my behalf that can last for maybe a bit longer than you might want how does someone navigate that that challenge day to day yeah I think some of his expectations saying I think some people think you just delegate and it works and that's not the real world the the real world is you delegate and the first version doesn't work or it's not exactly what you wanted and then you give feedback and you do it again and the next time is a little better and you have to have high tolerance for failure for iteration but as long as you have high tolerance for those things and you just continue compounding improvements and it gets better and better over time but yeah I think like most things in life there's no easy button you've got to invest in the partnership and you know we tell clients who work with us if you just want to show up and want everything your life to be perfect is not going to work you have to invest and the more you invest the better your partnership will get and in fact if you look at the best assistance at Athena that kind of top 1% they just so happen to work for the clients who are the best at delegating not a coincidence they become so good because the client is so good at exporting their thinking giving feedback praise and recognition helping build up their confidence when they make mistakes helping correct them and steer them and it really is a marriage of sorts and so as long as both parties are really invested in it can be super powerful but if it's one sided ain't got to work how do people get better feedback I think this is something that lots of humans struggle with so number one thing is do it more often people just don't do it enough the number two thing is you need to be way more detailed hey this was good or hey that was not good not helpful helpful feedback is very specific and it's very timely it's hey this task you did I liked because you were super fast you were detailed xyz or hey next time I'd like you to do this differently and be very specific so that's just the most like you need to be doing it constantly and it needs to be very detailed the other thing that is not obvious to lots is that you should really be exporting your own personal algorithm and your own thinking as you delegate so kind of a novice way of delegating would be hey will you plan a dinner party for Kristen me when I'm in Austin next week that's probably not going to be organized the way you want because there's not much detail there the better way to delegate would be to say hey when I have dinner parties here's what I like them to be I want to be six day people I want there to be a variety here's where I go to find party invites I go look for people who have this tour company or these sorts of interests you basically create an algorithm or a process the person can follow step by step and then you then they have like real guidance for executing and then they execute and then you go back to that process and say hey there's three steps in here that we missed they will refine this further that's continued to tweak the algorithm people who are kind of engineering minds this comes very naturally but for other people you have to learn how to do it it makes it makes sense to say not just this is the thing that I want but this is how I typically get there if if you have a person who helps you do meal prep or helps you with your emails or something and you don't explain to them well actually I like my eggs to be a little bit firmer so typically what I do is when I send a reply I tend to put two signatures in because it actually shows up differently on the thread and I think that links important to show a little bit of reputation and so this is how I do I suppose it allows people to see your thinking exactly there's a in AI world there's this concept of context engineering that's become very popular to make the models more performant you have to pipe in all the context because the models are very smart but they don't have context and the same true with delegating to an assistant or otherwise is like if there's not enough context it's impossible to do it well and so your job as a delegator is to export all the context you have and what's not obvious is that you have a million times more context than you could possibly realize and it's just sitting there and it takes practice to export that and that's why these things compound over time because there's no way to export it all on day one but over the course of compounding for months and years you eventually get there how do people build a tolerance for inefficiency because especially if you're the sort of person who thinks I might get a cleaner I might get a cleaner for a little bit or I'm gonna I'm gonna get someone to do the gardening because I fucking hate it and I kind of suck and I really wanted to spend my time on Sunday mornings with the kids instead if you're the sort of person who is prepared to make that cognitive leap you're also probably a perennial over optimizer in any case which means that when you see inefficiency that is a particular bug bear to you so how do you improve your tolerance for inefficiency? I think part of is just realizing it's the right trade so you know does Michael Jordan moe his own lawn no but you know what I bet if he did he'd be effing amazing right and whoever does it is never gonna reach his level potential but he could just be doing something else and so it's like do you want to do something else even if something's done inefficiently that's just something you have to accept another kind of framing I have is Elon must sometimes talks about teams being the vector sum so the company is a vector sum of all the humans involved and you know it's just a fancy way of saying there's inefficiency because these vectors are not perfectly aligned and the only way to get more output is to have a higher tolerance for inefficiency and that's just a fundamental rule of the universe is if you're focused on more and more output there's going to be more and more inefficiency because more humans are involved right okay so inefficiency is a price that you need to pay to increase output overall well I mean I remember in university learning about diseconomies of scale and one of the biggest ones being communication that you know everything that you need to know by design of the fact that you already know it and you're the only person that needs it communicating to soon you got two people well they need to know what you now know and some of it gets lost in translation and as soon as you scale up to 13 there's lots that gets missed and lost but your total capacity for overall output has gone up even though the efficiency is less that 13 people in a team is less efficient than one person 13 times in 13 different companies but the total output of the company that's got 13 staff is greater than any of the individuals that have got one 100% you know how do you another way of asking this question is how do you measure your life do you measure it by efficiency or do you measure it by how many times you're going to date with your wife or how many times you exercise or how much you spend time doing a hobby those outputs are what you actually care about you don't care about the inefficiencies that were involved in creating those outputs you just want that good life fit you want well yeah okay what about the relationship between leverage and ambition because it seems to me that lots of people who are very ambitious lean into their leverage but I get the sense that it can become a feedback loop as well so how do you come to construct ambition and leverage yeah this is one of the more counterintuitive things that we discovered as we've coached clients on delegation which is most people assume that powerful people or successful people have all this leverage and that's how they become ambitious that's why they have all this ambition or because they have all this money they can create all this leverage but what we see in practice is that people's ambition clearly grows linearly as their leverage grows and the reason for this is pretty clear when you are overwhelmed by life when you have more than you can possibly handle your ambition just narrows because you're trying to get through the next 24 hours but to the extent you take this cognitive load off you share it with someone else this partner or assistant you now have the cognitive space to think about bigger goals bigger aspirations and so as you unlock more leverage your ambition actually grows and I've seen this in my own life during times with my first company some tack when you know we're just drowning with all the work and the challenges I was just focused on that thing and there was no space in my mind to consider new aspirations but to the extent I've gotten more and more leverage of our time you know what do you want to do with it oh it's like do I want to start another company do I want yeah do more cool things for my friends and that's how that's how your ambition can really grow well I mean how many people say that the reason they can't think about the important is because the urgent is in the way and I suppose that means that the more time you spend not doing the urgent the more important stuff you have access to this seems like a pretty good trade exactly yeah the you got to do you got to do the urgent so you have the yeah the right an opportunity to do the important and to the extent you can offload the urgent you get more than important and that's a beautiful trade is there a relationship here with willpower as well that not having to do bullshit means that you can use your willpower on stuff that somebody else can't do absolutely I mean we we also have a limited number a little amount at amount of willpower and work ethic right it's like I will I would say I can work 10% more 20% more but I can't work 100 or 10 times more and I can't have 10 times more willpower as just impossible I have God in nature granted me with a certain amount of those things and so I have to use that limited willpower and limited agency in the best way possible and I don't want to be using my limited willpower on you know my passport or no it's just not the highest order thing in my life I would rather be using that to yeah help a friend solve a problem or accomplish something my business or or something else and so I think you can unlock more willpower into higher order things the more you unload is more monotonous things before we continue you might not realize it but mouth breathing at night is wrecking your sleep recovery and energy the next day and all of that is actually fixed massively by this here this is intake which is a nose strip dilator I've been using it every night for over a year now I tried pretty much everyone in the world and this is by far the best it's a hard plastic strip as opposed to a soft flimsy disposable thing intake opens up your nostrils using patented magnetic technology so you get more air in with every breath it means less snoring deeper sleep faster recovery and better focus the next day the problem with most nasal 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they're like that's it I'm going to find myself an assistant I'm going to do it through Athena or I'm going to find somebody in person or whatever what what does effective levels of integration where should somebody start what are the first things to outsource what are the the ways to best on board and take me through the full stack yeah so step one is start with chat you pity or in person or whatever it is and the beginner way to delegate is offload pain so make a list of all the things that you don't like doing that reduce your willpower that make you unhappy and start there and this is kind of a not in the stuff it's like your inbox your calendar pain bells passport renewal etc this might take a year to offload all these things as you offload I need to pause that the the what a lot of people might assume I think and I know I certainly did when I started working with assistance was this is going to be the immediate fix for me I'm going to introduce this person into my life and I'm never going to have to do anything again but being modest with the speed of which this integration is going to happen effectively I think is a really really good idea yeah look my recommendation is you you do this as a new way of living I think that's the right way to do anything exercise meditation or whatever if you're doing it for a week or a month kind of worthless but if you can do this for the rest of your life then it will compound and yeah you start with pain unload all these monotonous things and then once you do that then you start chasing your aspirations it's how do I you know for me this is how do I make more friends how do I deepen my relationships how do I have the best marriage possible how can I be there for friends and need and those are the sorts of things that assistance can actually help you with but you're not going to actually do that unless you've you know got your passport renewed and your credit card bills paid and everything else done first so that's kind of the high level remove pain and then increase your aspirations and go for your goals in terms of the levels of delegation the way most people start delegating is they delegate by task hey will you help or these flowers for my wife's birthday that's a good way to start but it's the least powerful way to delegate the more intermediate way to delegate is delegate by process is what we've talked about is like hey when I give gifts to my wife I want x y and z here's what she likes here's what she doesn't and you're now teaching your assistant how to do things at a higher level the next level more advanced delegators do is they delegate by goal and this takes often years where you've mind-melded with your assistant and give them so much feedback that you can just delegate a goal and they can execute it in the way you want so this is hey I want to exercise more I want to protect my sleep I want to spend more time with this person my life architect my calendar reject meetings that don't fit this priority no one can start by delegating by goal you have to build your way up but this is where you want to get to and then the highest level of delegation I call it clairvoyant delegation this is the nirvana of delegation this is where you have given so much feedback and your assistant is so in line with your personal professional goals that they can anticipate your needs and the first time you hear about a task is when it's done this is a level that is very difficult to reach I would not promise anyone gets this on week one but this is what you should aspire to get to and I I have glimpses of this now all the time it's not something I live in constantly but my assistant will reach out and say hey I know you wanted you'd want me to do xyz it's already done here you just got to sign this and that is where you're like yeah this this this is good and yeah it unlocks so much cognitive load that you didn't even have to delegate it you think about it it was just hey it's done and now you can go on to do something else I suppose that's one of the current limitations of AI that by design the prompt needs to be done before the task is completed I'm not I'm sure there probably is somewhere but I don't think any of the LLMs at the moment are going to pop up on a Monday morning and remind you that you need to do the thing or have done the thing and then tell you that it's been done on your behalf it's still very sort of top down as opposed to bottom up yeah yeah I I do think AI is going I mean AI is just going to get better and better and I do think there is an opportunity for and I think lots of AI labs are going to do this they're going to start watching your screen as you work and they're going to look at what you're doing and they're going to proactively offer opportunities for them to help you and this is we've built something like this at Athena as kind of internal testing tool where we watch this is just using it for internal employees but we will watch them as they work and then we automatically offload a task they should delegate but they haven't vocalized to their system and the person who built this internally the majority of his delegations are now machine generated that means he didn't say anything he's just working on his computer the machine is effectively watching it's identifying things that his assistant could help with and it sends it to the system now of course the humans in the loop and is going to say oh Chris would want me to help with this I'll start working on it or this one's worthless I'll say no so I do think that is going at where the world's going I think we're going to world where you just work machines watch you they identify your goals and then pass it off to a combination of machine and human assistance for the execution what is some of the potential negative externalities of a world where people outsource incorrectly or they do it too much or what are some of the ways that people can get this wrong yeah I hear some people say you know you shouldn't delegate your life and I think that's right like you shouldn't delegate spending time with your kids or with your wife you should delegate the things that you don't want to do to do the things that are meaningful to you so I think that's one way you know the other thing is I think you need to treat your assistant with the respect and love that they deserve right this is not just hey do this for me this is hey we're a partnership I want to help you build your life I want to give you more opportunity more income you're going to help support me and it needs to be a mutual thing we this doesn't happen very often but we've had to fire a few clients at a thing who just like work kind so their assistance and that's unacceptable to us we only want to work with people who are kind and generous with their assistance because our systems are there to take care of you and they give so much that they deserve that same in exchange yeah I worry there's been parts of my life where I've got I've got concerns that my tolerance or my resilience for bullshit which is inescapable may become more finely attuned as I don't deal with bullshit on a daily basis kind of like you know these astronauts that go up to space and they don't need to lift any weight and then they come back down and they're unable to support themselves that makes sense I don't know you mean that we I live in Puerto Rico and the getting things done in Puerto Rico this is a little more difficult I've heard slightly slightly challenging is with the money on the money on a philosophy and I am you know I'm lucky to have this team that's basically filter between me and the difficulty of getting things done and you know I do occasionally step outside of that filter and I'm like whoa I forgot how hard this is so look I think if they're for like waiting in line at the DMV I just like never need to be good at that so I don't mind if my skills atrophy but you know if something's important for your work or your skill set or your craft then obviously you can't fully delegate it and you need to own that and keep your skills sharp and so I think if you delegate something like that that could I could see that being a negative thing but there's a hundred other things to delegate that are not core to your highest skill and all those things I don't I don't really care if yeah my inbox management skills atrophy just not my not my focus in other news you've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because I am frankly dependent on it and it's how I've started my day every single morning this is the best tasting hydration drink on the market you might think why do I need to be more hydrated because proper hydration is not just about drinking enough water it's having sufficient electrolytes to allow your body to use those fluids each grabbing your stick pack is a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium it's got no sugar coloring artificial ingredients or any of the junk this plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health regulating your appetite and curbing cravings this orange flavor in a cold glass of water is a sweet salty orangey nectar and you will genuinely feel a difference when you take it versus when you don't which is why you keep going on about it best of all there's a no questions ask refund policy with an unlimited duration buy it use it all and if you don't like it for any reason they give you your money back and you don't even have to return the box that's how confident they are that you love it plus they offer free shipping in the US right now you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below adding to drink l m and t dot com slash modern wisdom that's drink l m and t dot com slash modern wisdom how how novel of a solution is this given the expanse of human history how recent is it because it can sound in some ways like again a cosmopolitan tiktok generation gen z chat gpt solution to while people should just be able to sort of going go and get it man um yeah how how recent is this versus how sort of steeped in history is we did some fun research at Athena we actually used AI to do this we we got a list of thousand of the kind of greats of history and downloaded ten biographies and all of them and then looked for how they delegated and across all sorts of people cicero newton cesar Einstein Voltaire Gates Churchill Picasso Buddha all of them had personal assistance and it's not a coincidence because these people did not ten x but like a thousand x more than other people have done in history and there's this kind of great man view of history that one person does these great things and there's some truth to that but the reality is there's actually a team and there's an organization and there's typically an assistant who is helping this person accomplish great things the history books just don't put the those people on the cover but that's how that's how it's actually happened and yeah it's fun reading these stories i'm reading a biography of cicero right now and he has a assistant who is yeah helping him manage the manage the Roman Empire and trying to protect the Republic and this guy is not you know the person we learn about when we learn about history but it was important and so you know our view of this is if you want to accomplish small things or great things it's helpful to have an assistant there's there's also funny stories so calf and the great i think it was one of the the greats at delegation she delegated not just managing her empire and rewriting the the laws but she also had someone she delegated her dating life and so she had someone dedicated to first dates and to testing quote male capacity and no way yeah and that person kind of was running top of funnel for her and i'm like after and you are an o g delegate that's like holy shit saying that's some that's like p diddy's delegation uh the the right brothers i've got two books about the most housemate Georgie's obsessed and uh they delegated the first design of the plane engine for the kitty hawk right correct yeah Darwin delegated uh this whole army of fat gathering assistance to collect data for the origin of species Edison delegated to an assistant to find the filament for the first light bulb they found it in a Kyoto and there's actually a shrine that exists in Kyoto today to the assistant who found this and so hang on hang on hang on hang on so i have not failed i have just found a thousand ways that i did not succeed thomas Edison did not actually technically come up with the design for the filament himself it was just someone on his team he delegated it he said i need this filament someone needs to go someone needs to go find it but yeah he gets all the credit and that's fine that's how history works but it's not how i mean the right brothers right it's i mean i don't think the first design is a one that worked but there was a there's this really cool line um i think it's the photographer who took the pictures of the first flight when the kitty hawk was up and he referred to the right brothers as the workingest boys that i ever saw like just like this pure early 1900s americana kind of sentence the workingest boys that i ever saw he's talking about their single-minded nature their agency their personal sovereignty and so on but the first engine design wasn't done by them so it was like the delegating est boys that i ever saw exactly look you know history doesn't awards style points for doing it all yourself history awards points for getting done and the way you get things done is with with the team and for some of us that's an assistant for other people you know uh steve jobs he had a team of ten thousand people who are helping him bring the iPhone to life but uh yeah you shouldn't you shouldn't try to do it all on no if if steve jobs can't do it alone or Edison can't do it alone you shouldn't try to do it alone it's a good point because i think the humility certainly the humility that i would feel is a Brit uh who am i to outsource this my life's not as difficult and i suppose it's an obvious criticism to say well yeah the president needs an army of assistants of course he does he's the president but i'm not trying to do that so i don't need that but the flip side is yeah also you're not the president like you don't have the capacity of somebody like a Thomas Edison or the Wright brothers so given that yeah your your goals are more uh mediocre uh and more humble but uh so is your ability and i think i mean if steve is there an appolian and leek on you need an assistant think how much i need it some of the most i can do on people in the world and yeah you're exactly right have you looked at the neuroscience of delegation like how it appears inside of the brain because i imagine that there's a lot of open loops that can get closed off i also know that there's a hierarchy of how different tasks new tasks get attacked with certain areas of the brain system one and system two from sort of Daniel Kahneman stuff it seems like a pretty obvious map from doing it externally with a different person to what is already happening internally within side of our brains at delegation goes back to origin our species and our brains have this relentless uh desire to optimize both energy and energy uh and and information and because of that optimization it has the brain has crafted this hierarchy of task distribution where complex novel novel tasks are tackled by our prefrontal cortex and routine tasks are offloaded to lower and more automated neural structures so we like to say that it's not that our brain was merely wired for delegation but it was wired by delegation and it's just built into our brains from the very beginning we delegate inside our brains and now we can delegate between brains uh what are these life experiments that you did you did you've pretty much every year i think for a while did some wild annual test what what did you learn from doing those well i just i'm experimental so i just like trying things and ripping life up you know i think one of the first things i did after i left my company thumbtack where my meetings i had meetings from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. all day long and i felt like i just didn't have sovereignty over my time and so when i left i said i'm going to work with no calendar zero meetings if you want to if you want to talk to me call me let's uh do go whatsapp or voicemail and that uh was one of the most freeing things i've ever done um it's not something you can always do uh but i i certainly recommend to anyone who has a chance to kind of work without a calendar uh for even a little bit uh it's a beautiful thing um okay what about the delegating by voice solution yeah so there are there's a hierarchy of how you delegate and most people delegate with their thumbs on their phone first way kind of better than that is to delegate with all your fingers on email but the best way to delegate is by voice where instead of typing things you voice note and i tried for a year just delegating almost exclusively through voice and voice is way more powerful than other mechanisms of delegating because you can talk three to five times faster uh then you can type you can do it between meetings uh in uber at the gym and i think it feels less arduous as well it's like i've just got this thing trying to work how do i want to say this i've got to type the thing out as opposed to hey i need flower i think any what do i need flowers i need flowers and and today i need flowers today and then it's kind of done as opposed to working out what needs to go through your thumbs yeah and you know to the point of how do you give better feedback the way you give better feedback is you do it by voice because if you have to type up a page of notes you're just not going to do it but if you can just be like hey here's what i liked and you talk about it as you walk on in the park and talk all day long um yeah i think it takes some training to learn to delegate by voice some people are a little uncomfortable with it but if you look at the top delegators at Athena they all delegate by voice constantly just all day long okay uh start of via a lot of people have got new resolutions myself included one of my big ones is to reduce my time on my phone um how have you managed to reduce phone use and what is some of the strategies that you've learned around that so the first thing i tried you know there's this time app on your phone that just shares how much time you're in different apps and sauce we i tried using that it's just useless and so what i what i the experiment that worked for me was when i went to buy a new phone i kept my old phone and i downgraded it to what i call my freedom phone and i deleted everything from it except the bare essentials i can uber i can i can uh make phone calls but i don't have email i don't have all my messaging apps i don't have all the bad things and i actually have gone so far that i've banned all new sites checking the price of crypto all sorts of other stuff um and my wife has the code so i literally can't unlock it so this freedom phone i call is what i take out of the house with me and it's got the stuff i need and everything else is totally locked down and that's the only thing i've done that's worked because it's literally impossible for me to use it for anything distracting and i don't for me personally i don't know you but i don't mind if i'm on the phone a lot if i'm like making a phone call to a friend that's cool what i don't like is just like passively picking up the phone to check notifications that's just a waste of brain power and shouldn't be doing and this freedom phone that's totally locked down has solved that for me that is a good point and you know people have created a phone every two years maybe something like that and by the time that you know two iPhones from now's iPhone comes out you'll get 300 bucks or maybe 200 bucks at trading i don't know i don't know what you would get but i know it's not uh it's not concordant with the amount of value that the device brings yeah it's certainly not like a two hundred dollars for that phone like fucking yeah would even if the battery sucks a little bit um so what i would do is i would actually make the new phone the freedom phone and i would make the old phone because the old phones kind of got to be tethered to do but i've been i've been a proponent of this for quite a while i think my most extreme was three one was the cocaine phone another was the tail phone um and then a third one was wi-fi only and that was what i actually did morning routine stuff on so that was meditation apps that was kindle audible maybe podcast apps uh all my breath works stuff my logins for all of the different personal development things i was doing and um i went back home it's so funny i was back in the uk over christmas and i was back in my old house and i was in my old room my old bedroom which people can go back and watch the first episodes from the show ever were recorded in the and i'm sat in the couch this little couch that's on the right hand side and uh i've got this iPhone fucking it must be a six maybe or a five or something it's ancient technology and i realized it's the only phone that can still control the lights in my house because that was the one that the philips Hue system had been connected to so i'm there trying to fight with this decade old iPhone in a desperate attempt to try and get the lights in my bedroom to turn on and i've been flying i flew from kawaii to the uk it's 28 hours or something basically a day and a half plus 11 hours of time should it's fucking nightmare now get in and then i'm battling with this phone and in some ways it was super annoying but in other ways it was really lovely and nostalgic so uh yeah i've tried i think as a pretty easy sort of low entry accessible way for people to spend less time on the phone uh and a good a good solution here as well is if you do use the uh old phone if you i guess people don't use physical sim cards anymore but if you move the sim to the one that you're allowed to take out of the house what that actually means is that the old one only works the cocaine phone only works on wi-fi yeah which means that if you take it out with you it stops working which is you know great but you're cementing yourself you're tethering yourself to your house i have a friend who had a real phone addiction and he had killed phone entirely and just carried a laptop with him so he wanted to call someone or do something he'd have to open the laptop and it's a real pain in the ass and it worked but yeah that's kind of that's real like AA that's that's desperate times correct i mean the other thing is you don't you don't have to have two phones right if you don't have the money to buy a single phone or to you know use an old phone just make your main phone the kale phone just don't have any of that stuff on it and have it on your computer and i have you know i don't mind if i'm what's happening whatever my computer because i'm going to work done but just the passive stuff is what's toxic before we continue getting mobile data while traveling is still way harder than it should be public wi-fi is sketchy roaming charges of the worst and buying sim cards in a foreign language after a 12-hour flight is about as fun as playing with a dead moth which is where salie comes in it's an app that gives you instant access to e-sim data plans in over 190 countries so that you can get online the moment that you land no more fumbling around with physical sims no more talking to a human to set it up and no more holding your phone in the air like symbol looking for a signal just open the app choose a plan and you are instantly connected best of all the plan started just a few bucks there's no subscription and you only pay for what you need and if you have an activated your data plan or installed the e-sim salie offers a full refund within 30 days no questions asked right now you can get 15 percent off any data plan by going to the link in the description below or heading to salie.com/modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's s-a-i-l-y.com/modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout what do you do from a distraction limitation standpoint when it comes to your laptop setup my laptop setup I kind of let everything go it's not a problem for me I'm just like in work mode and so I let everything through there okay well is that is that something you work on a little bit yeah I mean the boys did a big series called life hacks back in the day on the show and a lot of what we were doing was trying to constrain distractions through environment design through digital environment design and cold turkey is a really fantastic solution for this it's a website blocker you can schedule stuff in advance you can just give it the website that you use most frequently and cold there's a period where Johnny was using something called frozen turkey which is a feature on cold turkey that shuts your laptop off so it's not just blocking certain websites it literally will not let you get onto your laptop and you can set certain stuff up so one sort of SOS I desperately need it get we break glass in case of emergency thing and then I'm pretty sure there's another one that he set up where he had to donate money to charity if he wanted to get designated by every time you go it lets you but then it like just auto debits your account I think that's I think that's what he did for a while but he was trying to but then you're like well now I'm giving you charity so I guess actually I should use my laptop yeah exactly it's noble yeah it has to be a charity you hate give to the opposing political party yeah that'd be good that'd be good all right so let's say let's say that someone's made it this far and though at least partly convinced by your thesis what are the remaining objections typically or what are the what are the fears that people have and how do you overcome those yeah I think number one is feel a fair failure will it work and that I say it's not going to work on day one you just got to go for it and it will compound it will go better over time the other thing is a lack of control and trust some people have trouble trusting others and letting go of control and you know what we say is trust should be built over time so don't give your bank account access on day one you start with more limited access and then you grant more and more access over time I work with you know one of my systems forever decade and she has basic access to everything but that takes a long time to build that trust and so you kind of go at your own pace you don't have to go faster than your control with but you've got to give up some control if you want to get more leverage that's just part part of the game and then I think the the other fundamental block referred lots people just like knowing what they want more of and you've got to have this thing that draws you into it because it's going to be activation energy there's going to be investment and so you got to have a vision for how you want your life to be better it's I want more time to start a business or I want more time for my family or my kids and I can give you have that specific goal then delegation is not about a task which is kind of a level it's about unlocking something that's more meaningful to you what I'm trying to think about let's say that somebody on board an assistant but they they need somebody that's in person or they're not using Athena what are the best resources for how to train that person is is there a how to create a great assistant coaching course is there some sort of like masterclass that people can follow why would you anticipate or why would you suggest that people go to for that there's nothing that's fantastic out there but if you go to playbooks.ethena.com we've built some of our favorite playbooks for things you can delegate so you can come look at our website and you know I think the the best way is just to get started and to do it yourself I've I've watched a bunch of YouTube's and read a bunch of books and the reality is there's not a lot out there when we started Athena our goal was to recruit and train the best executive assistants and just match them with clients and what we found actually matched the first 10 clients is every single client said the same thing how do I delegate my inbox how do I delegate date nights and so it became clear to us that we would have to invest as much in teaching and coaching our clients has this assistance this is kind of like it's a marriage we're both in it and so we've invested a lot in building those playbooks creating the coaching to help people and at some point we'd love to kind of open-source that and share that more with the world but right now it's all internal. Is it possible I have to bring this up whenever I think about assistance and especially hiring assistance one of the first things that I think of is an episode of Family Guy where Stewie made himself a clone that was called bitch Stewie bitch Stewie basically did all of the stuff that Stewie didn't want to do so he made himself an assistant and it was a bit sort of slower and kind of there were a few chromosomes missing and then Brian saw bitch Stewie and really wanted his own clone but instead of making it himself Stewie got bitch Stewie to make bitch Brian and bitch Brian like EF fell off and he turned into a puddle and broke on the floor and stuff in your experience how how effective is it to get other members of staff potentially assistance or other people to do the hiring training or the like delegating the delegating is this still something that needs to be done by the principle or is there is there a way to outsource outsourcing you can delegate almost everything including the active delegation yeah but you have to delegate components of it so for example if I'm recruiting the executive at Athena I would not have my assistant interview the CFO but what I would say is hey I'm going to go through my Sierra I'm now open a voice now here are 30 friends I know who have cool companies they know CFOs I want you to pre-draft an email from me to this person asking for an introduction to the best CFO they've ever worked with and then those emails get dropped in my inbox and I send those out and I have my assistant CC herself on the email so when the responses come back she can help schedule them so you know my when people say like what can I delegate it's basically anything I turn around I say what's your top personal and professional goals tell me what those things are and I'll tell you some ways you can delegate and so like for you like in 2026 Chris what what are your top personal and professional goals build a world class studio go on tour and not need to worry about whether operations back home are continuing and fix my health great and on health how could you delegate components of that organizing testing speaking to the different doctors updating them on where this these numbers are at and whether Chris has completed that course and whether he did those IVs there's sleep people and there's nutrition people and there's IV people and they all need it's almost a full-time job yeah I mean I've done relate to health one of the first projects kind of mega projects I did with my assistant was look through my calendar and my inbox for every doctor's appointment I've had for the last decade and then from my inbox reach out to those doctors and ask for my health records because it has to come from my inbox and then centralize all of those test results all of the doctors visits put it in one spreadsheet and this you know I wouldn't just never have done otherwise it just wouldn't have happened but now that I have it I can drop that in the chat GPT and be like hey what's what's I do about my cholesterol and it can look over the last decade and make make real recommendation so yeah you you can always break it down into projects that someone can help take off your plate yeah Jonathan Swanson ladies and gentlemen Jonathan you're awesome I think there's a fucking dope company I've got a bunch of friends who rely on it and I think what you're doing to emancipate us from the drudgery of online internet work and to outsource it to people who actually love to do that I think is is really really cool if people want to check out more of what it is that you guys do where should they go you go to athena.com and we we love to help you get more leverage and thanks thanks for having me on you do know that one of my friends who I think uses your service named is daughter Athena I did I did not know that but I had twins the summer and my wife and I named one of our girls Athena let's go there's two things so there's three Athena's in the world. Jonathan I appreciate you thank you brother. Thank you so much. When I first started doing personal growth I really wanted to read the best books the most impactful ones the most entertaining ones the ones with the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting but there wasn't a list of them so I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own and then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found and you can get that for free right now so if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page go to crisswillx.com/books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die that's crisswillx.com/books