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

31:35You just want that good life that you want. Wow. 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.

32:17Or 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.

33:01I've seen this in my own life during times with my first company, Thumbtack, 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 over 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 to, yeah, do more cool things for my friends? And 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.

33:42And I suppose that means that the more time you spend not doing the urgent, the more important stuff you have access to. That seems like a pretty good trade. Exactly. Yeah. You got to do the urgent so you have the right and the 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 all have a limited number a little amount amount of willpower and work ethic right It's like, I always say I can work 10 % more, 20 % more, but I can't work 10 times more.

34:30And I can't have 10 times more willpower. It's just impossible. God and nature has 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 my passport renewal. It's just not the highest order thing in my life. I would rather be using that to help a friend solve a problem or accomplish something in my business or something else. And so I think you can unlock more willpower into higher order things the more you unload these 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 and i've been using it every night for over a year now i tried pretty much everyone in the world and uh this is by far the best it's a hard plastic strip as opposed to a soft, flimsy, disposable thing.

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36:41Go through, for me, let's say someone's bought in. 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 does effective levels of integration, where should somebody start? What are the first things to outsource? What are the ways to best onboard? Take me through the full stack. Yeah, so step one is start with ChatGPT 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.

37:25And this is kind of monotonous stuff. It's like your inbox, your calendar, paying bills, passport renewal, etc. This might take a year to offload all these things. As you offload... I need to pause there. What a lot of people might assume, I think, and I know I certainly did when I started working with assistants, 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 at which this integration is going to happen effectively i think is a really really good idea yeah look uh 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.

38:20And 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 in need? And those are the sorts of things that assistant 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.

39:01In terms of the levels of delegation, the way most people start delegating is they delegate by task. Hey, will you help order 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. It's 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 in 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 And then the highest level of delegation, I call it clairvoyant delegation.

40:09This is the nirvana of delegation. This is where you have given so much feedback and your assistant is so in line with your personal and 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 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'd want me to do X, Y, and Z. It's already done. Here, you just got to sign this.

40:46And that is where you're like, yeah, this is good. And yeah, it unlocks so much cognitive load that you didn't even have to delegate it. You don't have to 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 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.

41:28It's still very sort of top-down as opposed to bottom-up. Yeah. Yeah. I do think AI is going, 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 watch them as they work. And then we automatically offload a task they should delegate, but they haven't vocalized to their assistant.

42:12And 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 assistant. 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 where the world's going. I think we're getting to a 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.

42:48What are some of the potential negative externalities of a world where people outsource incorrectly or they do it too much? 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 um 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 uh 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 Athena who just like weren't kind to their assistants, and that's unacceptable to us.

43:57We only want to work with people who are kind and generous with their assistants because our assistants 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 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. Does that make sense?

44:36I totally know what you mean. I live in Puerto Rico and getting things done in Puerto Rico is a little more difficult. I've heard slightly challenging with the Manana-Manana philosophy. And I'm lucky to have this team that's basically filtered between me and the difficulty of getting things done. And I do occasionally step outside of that filter, and I'm like, whoa, I forgot how hard this is. So look, I think for waiting in line at the DMV, I just never need to be good at that. So I don't mind if my skills atrophy. But 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.

45:26and so I think if you delegate something like that, 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 really care if my inbox management skills atrophy, just not my focus in life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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.

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47:27Yeah. How recent is this versus how sort of steeped in history? As we did some fun research at Athena, we actually used AI to do this. We got a list of thousand of the kind of greats of history and downloaded 10 biographies and all of them, and then looked for how they delegated. And across all sorts of people, Cicero, Newton, Caesar, Einstein, Voltaire, Gates, Churchill, Picasso, Buddha, all of them had personal assistants. And it's not a coincidence because these people did not 10x, but like 1 ,000x 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.

48:17But 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 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.

49:02There's also funny stories. So Catherine the Great, I think was one of the greats at delegation. She delegated not just managing her empire and rewriting 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. No way. Yeah. And that person kind of was running top of funnel for her. And I'm like, dude, Catherine, you are an OG delegator. What a savage. Holy shit. Insane. That's like P. Diddy's delegation. the the Wright brothers I've got two books about them my housemate George is obsessed and they delegated the first design of the plane engine for the Kitty Hawk right?

49:57Correct yeah Darwin delegated this whole army of fact gathering assistants 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 Kyoto, and there's actually a shrine that exists in Kyoto today to the assistant who found this. 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 find it.

50:40But yeah, he gets all the credit, and that's fine. that's how history works but it's not how i mean the wright brothers right it's i mean i don't think the first design was the 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 wright brothers as the workingest boys that i ever saw it's 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.

51:20But the first engine design wasn't done by them. So it was like the delegatingest boys that I ever saw. Exactly. Look, history doesn't award style points for doing it all yourself. History awards points for getting it done. And the way you get things done is with the team. and for some of us that's an assistant for other people you know uh steve jobs he had a a team of 10 000 people who are helping him bring the iphone to life but uh yeah you shouldn't you shouldn't try to do it all alone no 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 as a Brit.

52:07Who 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 assistance. 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 goals are more mediocre and more humble, but so is your ability. And I think, I mean, if Caesar and Napoleon and Lee Kuan Yew needed an assistant, think how much I need it. Some of the most high capacity people in the world.

52:52And 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 with inside of our brains. Yeah, delegation goes back to origin or species. And our brains have this relentless desire to optimize both energy and energy and information.

53:36And because of that optimization, the brain has crafted this hierarchy of task distribution, where complex 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. 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 the first things i did after i left my company thumbtack where my meetings i had meetings from 8 a.m.

54:39to 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 go WhatsApp or voicemail. And that was one of the most freeing things I've ever done. It's not something you can always do. But I certainly recommend to anyone who has a chance to kind of work without a calendar for even a little bit. it's a beautiful thing. Okay, and what about the delegating by voice solution? Yeah, so there's a hierarchy of how you delegate. And most people delegate with their thumbs on their phone.

55:26Worst 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 than you can type you can do it between meetings uh in an uber at the gym and it's 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 i need what do i need flowers i need flowers and today, I need flowers today.

56:08And 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 in the park and you talk all day long. 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.

56:40Okay. Start of the year, a lot of people have got new resolutions, myself included. One of my big ones is to reduce my time on my phone. How have you managed to reduce phone use and what are 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. Weak sauce. Weak sauce. Totally. I tried using that. It's just useless. And so 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.

57:23I can Uber, I can 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 news sites, checking the price of crypto, all sorts of other stuff. 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 about you, but I don't mind if I'm on the phone a lot.

58:04If 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 upgrade 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 trade-in 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 200 for that phone like fucking yeah i 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 too but i mean 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 kale phone 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 all my breathwork stuff my logins for all of the different personal development things I was doing and 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 there and I'm sat on the couch, this little couch that's on the right-hand side and I've got this iPhone fucking, it must be a six maybe or a five or something.

59:50It'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 Kauai to the UK it's 28 hours or something basically a day and a half plus 11 hours of time change it's a fucking nightmare I 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 their phone 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 work, the cocaine phone only works on wifi, which means that if you take it out with you, it stops working, which is, you know, great, but you're cementing yourself.

1:01:01You're tethering yourself to your house. I have a, I have a friend who had a real phone addiction and he killed phone entirely and just carried a laptop with him. So when he wanted to call someone or do something, he'd have to open the laptop and it was a real pain in the ass and it worked. But yeah, that's kind of, that's real like AA. That's desperate times. I mean, the other thing is you don't have to have two phones, right? If you don't have the money to buy a second 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.

1:01:35And I have, you know, I don't mind if I'm WhatsAppping whatever on my computer because I'm getting 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 are 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 Saley comes in. It's an app that gives you instant access to eSIM 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 Simba looking for a signal.

1:02:11Just open the app, choose a plan, and you are instantly connected. Best of all, the plans start at just a few bucks. There's no subscription, and you only pay for what you need. And if you haven't activated your data plan or installed the eSIM, Saley offers a full refund within 30 days, no questions asked. Right now, you can get 15 % off any data plan by going to the link in the description below or heading to salie.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's S-A-I-L-Y.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. What do you do from a distraction limitation standpoint when it comes to your laptop setup?

1:02:46My 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 something you work on a little bit yeah me and me and 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 uh through environment design through digital environment design and uh 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 websites that you use most frequently and 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 um you can set certain stuff up so one sort of sos I desperately need it 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 access to his laptop.

1:03:55That's good. It's like every time you go, it lets you, but then it like just auto-debits your account. 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 more. Yeah, exactly. It's noble. It has to be a charity you hate. Ah, you're going to give to the opposing political party. That'd be good. That'd be good. uh all right so let's say let's say that someone's made it this far and they're at least partly convinced by your thesis what are the remaining objections typically or what are the what are the fears that people have um and how do you overcome those yeah i think number one is feel a fear of failure will it work uh and that i say it's it's not going to work on day one.

1:04:48You just got to go for it and it will compound. It'll 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've worked with, you know, one of my assistants for of a decade and she has basically 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 you're comfortable with but you've got to give up some control uh if you want to get more leverage that's just part part of the game um and then i think the the the other fundamental blocker for lots of people is 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.

1:05:44There'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 think if you have that specific goal, then delegation is not about a task, which is kind of the level it's about unlocking something that's more meaningful to you. What I'm trying to think about let's say that somebody onboards a an assistant but they've they need somebody that's in person or 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 a master class that people can follow where would you anticipate or where would you suggest that people go to for that there's nothing that's fantastic out there um but if you go to playbooks.athena.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 youtubes 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.

1:07:11And what we found after we 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'd have to invest as much in teaching and coaching our clients as the assistants. 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 assistants and especially hiring assistants, 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.

1:07:59Bitch Stewie basically did all of the stuff that Stewie didn't want to do. So he made himself an assistant and he 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, ear fell off and he turned into a puddle and broke on the floor and stuff. In your experience, how effective is it to get other members of staff, potentially assistants or other people to do the hiring training or the like delegating the delegating um is this still something that needs to be done by the principal or is the is there a way to outsource outsourcing you can delegate almost everything uh including the active delegation yeah but you have to delegate components of it so for example if I'm recruiting an executive at Athena, I would not have my assistant interview the CFO.

1:09:05But what I would say is, hey, I'm going to go through my CRM now, open a voice note. 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 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.

1:09:44So like for you, like 2026, Chris, 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 uh health uh 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, I've done related to health.

1:10:35One 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 the doctor's 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 should I do about my cholesterol?

1:11:07And it can look over the last decade and make make real recommendations. So yeah, you can always break it down into projects that someone can help take off your plate. heck yeah Jonathan Swanson ladies and gentlemen Jonathan you're awesome Athena'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 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'd love to help you get more leverage and thanks for having me on You do know that one of my friends who I think uses your service named his daughter Athena.

1:11:52I did not know that, but I had twins this summer and my wife and I named one of our girls Athena. Let's go. There's three Athenas in the world now. Fun fact. Jonathan, I appreciate you. Thank you, brother. Thank you so much.