You’re Not Overloaded. You’re Under-Leveraged - Jonathan Swanson

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 adviser. 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 assistants. And as you might imagine, the executive assistants to 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 hired my first uh assistant that way and then set out on a journey to build the best team I could to see how it would change my life. >> What were the unlocks that you saw inside of the White House? Like how how complex and big is the system of spindly octopuses with their 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 advance that plans every minute of the president's life for months in advance. And so if he's going to be in Brazil in 3 months, there's people deployed months in advance to go scope prepare everything. Um, and you know, 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 assistance 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 in his chair, 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 jocking for his attention, governors, senators, NSA 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 uh beyond just the work. [snorts] >> So it was a [clears throat] deep relationship of trust and kind of awareness I suppose because of how globally uh 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 or 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 assistants? >> So, I've I've got a chief of staff and a half dozen assistants uh that roll into that chief of staff. The each assistant specializes in different things. So, one helps me with work, one helps me with finance, one helps me with uh my kiddos house, etc. Uh you know, I wouldn't recommend to 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 I just experienced this time scarcity 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. That 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 then? Like how do you regard it as a a resource or a a contributing element of people's lives? >> It's the most uh primary asset in the world. It's the ultimate currency, right? Uh I think lots of people want more money or want to be popular or uh you know want power if they're in politics. I think these are false goals. 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. Uh and uh yeah, people have different uses of that time. It can be to start a 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 an a small platoon of people who enable him in position of already material [clears throat] privilege to sort of maximize that uh that reach even more and to get even further down the line. I think the 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 when I was 27. And I realized that I really hated cleaning, but that a cleaner in the northeast of the UK was £40 every two weeks. And that meant that I didn't need to buy a vacuum cleaner cuz she brought her own vacuum cleaner and I didn't want to vacuum. And I don't think you need to vacuum your house more than once about every two week unless you've probably got kids in which case it's every day. But um as soon as you sort of accept that well is my time more valuable than you know 3 hours at 40 per time. Well yeah maybe it is or maybe I just really hate cleaning or 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 a you know Navy Seal team of assistants 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 uh straight to I have an army of people and a chief of staff. >> Yeah. Look, I I grew up in the Midwest in farm country, farm boy. We had no assistants or house cleaners or anything like that around. So I know how it sounds. Uh but it's possible to get leverage uh 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, let's all babysit each each other's kids one one night a week while you just got a free babysitter for those other three nights." Uh so there's ways >> such a 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. Uh people talk about prompt engineering. That's just 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 assistants that runs your whole life. We I work with you know billionaires who have teams of 50. Uh, it's totally mindblowing 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 I believe that time is pretty important. What is the what is some of the zerocost or very lowcost ways that people can start to do that and then we can build up toward the platoon? >> Yeah. So level zero is you delegate to friends and family. uh 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 uh you know they're trying to be a human assistant. It's uh limited in what it can do today but you can use it like a coach like uh you know a limited assistant and so you know if you want to uh exercise more you can go to chatpt and say every day ask me if I've exercised and check in with me and give me a report card at the end of 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, 510 bucks an hour, you can go to Upwork or uh a company like that and hire someone directly. If you've got 3,000 bucks a month, you can work at a with a company like Athena where we recruit, train, manage the assistant for you. And then if you want someone in person, it's $100,000 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. [laughter] It's totally wild and crazy. Uh but yeah, you start small with whatever resources you've got. >> So, you think about buying hours being more important than buying things then. >> Yeah, of course. I 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 uh that's that's what gives us meaning. And so, um, yeah, the most the most successful people I know, the happiest people I know, they're not buying things. They're not buying cars, uh, or clothes. They're buying time. And the more time you buy, the more you have for everything else in life. Isn't >> it a strange inversion of how people often think about where their 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? Um, I remember Sean Puri got a ton of [ __ ] 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 a 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 bourgeoa luxurious opulent kind of thing that's going on. But yeah, 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 preps stuff for the next couple of days. And just the words I've got a chef [laughter] >> so out of touch. They sound so horrendously out of touch. I've got a chef. Uh, but if you were to say I got a new car 5 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 5 years as it was to keep one for 10 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 [laughter] 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. >> Uh, 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 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 just putting money in other people's pockets. And it's more than money. It's a job and it's meaning and something uh craft that they get 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 in return, which is food or time or whatever it might be. >> Talk to me about the relationship between time and health. >> I think it's the most fundamental thing. So you you hear Brian Johnson talk about sleep being 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 of good health. But why do people not sleep much? It's not cuz they don't want to. It's cuz they don't have time. Uh 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 and getting sovereignty up, right, is how you then unlock good sleep and everything else that follows. [snorts] >> Where are the places that people are wasting time or where are 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. 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. These are 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 uh giving and that is uh that's a wonderful trade. [snorts] >> So cognitive offloading is a mental upgrade here in that regard. >> Exactly. Yeah. the more you uh the more you offload, the more time you have for the highest order things in your life. Uh you know, I'd like to say assistance like a cognitive uh prosthetic for remembering, planning, sequencing. And just like inflammation damages your body and health, chronic to-dos damages or impairs 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 icks and concerns probably quite a lot of hurdles to get over. I certainly know that I did and do like especially if you're a hard charging get after it yourself uh the prospect of giving tasks to somebody else. Uh I don't know I seem to have two categories of friends. One are those who can't wait to offload and another are those who can't work out how to do it. So >> what are the what are the cardinal sins of 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. uh whether it's sending an email or uh planning a party but the hundth time you do it uh you won't be faster and better and so it is it takes effort to delegate and to hand that off uh but you have to get over the fact that you could do it faster or better but you could be doing something else so that's the first thing which I call pride the second is guilt which is really on the other end of the spectrum which is I don't even feel good about you know having this person manage the minutiae of my life or wait on hold all day long. And uh for these people, my reframe is you're giving this other person a job and you know 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. Um the other uh blockers I call it selfishness which is just not opening up your life. uh 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, 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 like, "Hey, I liked how you did this. Oh, I wish you could have done that better." And giving really detailed, continual feedback is something only top 1% delegators do. Most people struggle because it takes extra work and you have to be willing to make someone feel a little bit uncomfortable. Uh so you have to learn how to give that hard feedback in a way that's encouraging, supportive. And then the last uh 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 acrew as they start to see more. >> It's like getting married but uh only going on a couple dates. uh you know the marriage and I think all good things wealth relationships they compound and the power of compounding is uh it gets better and better gradually over time and it's true with an assistant the the more you do the deeper uh and better it gets >> right okay what is your perspective on the difference between a VA and an in-person PA or something cuz what you're talking about here with Athena a lot of this are virtual assistants And 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. Uh, typically someone who's virtual is less expensive. uh you know Athena our assistants are based in the Philippines or Kenya where um you have uh great talent at more affordable rates and in person you know if you're in New York or SF or Austin it's just going to be more expensive. So, you know, I recommend people start virtual and then as you have resources, you can do more. Uh, you know, the team and I were just joking. There's these humanoid robots that are now getting closer and some of them are tea operated. And we're like, you know, we're not far away from you be able to have a robot in your house that your virtual assistant can actually tea operate. And so, hey, you be like, "Hey, can you grab me a coffee?" and they could teleoperate the robot in your house and bring it to your desk. Uh, you know, that's we're we're getting pretty close to that being a real thing. So, that's it's going to be a fun frontier when that happens. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I have been wearing Whoop for over 5 years now, way before they were a partner on the show. I've actually tracked over 1,600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is insane. And it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it tracks everything that matters. Sleep, workouts, recovery, breathing, heart rate, even your steps. And the new 5.0 is the best version. You get all the benefits that make Whoop indispensable. 7% smaller, but now it's also got a 14day battery life and has health span to track your habits, how they affect your pace of aging. It's got hormonal insights for ladies. I'm a huge, huge fan of Whoop. That's why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. And best of all, you can join for free. Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 5.0 strap. Plus, you get your first month for free. And there's a 30-day money back guarantee. So, you can buy it for free. Try it for free. If you do not like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30-day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.woop.com/modernwisdom. That's join.woop.com/modernwisdom. whoop.com/modernwisdom. What is happening with AI and assistance at the moment? I think the number one use case for chatbt 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 a typical assistant but uh yeah what what are you guys doing with AI? What what's interesting with regards to how that can unlock people's delegation and time? >> Yeah. So our vision is uh we merge the best of human best to machine into one product. And so the human is the UX humans are good UX and then behind that human we're building machine assistants that automate more and more of it over time. And my analogy is like Tesla was 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 braking and then eventually full self-driving. And we view uh our work as similar. It's going to be fully human and then gradually the machine will do more and more. Human will always be in the loop. uh but the human will be able to do more advanced more powerful more creative uh tasks over time and the machine will do the more rope mechanical stuff and it's effectively the AI will become an assistant to the human assistant uh which will increase their memory um allow them to work overnight do all sorts of cool productivity things uh but our view is the human uh touch is real and is going to last for a long time no matter how much uh some of the AI promoters would like to say otherwise, but the combination is uh going to be a pretty cool thing. [snorts] >> Yeah, that's cool. Around the I can do it better or I keep finding frustration when getting somebody else to do a task on my behalf that can last for maybe a bit longer than you might want. How does someone navigate that that challenge dayto day? Yeah, I think some of it is expectation setting. 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 get feedback and you do it again and the next time's a little better and you have to have a high tolerance for failure, for iteration. But as long as you have a high tolerance for those things and you just continue compounding improvements, then it gets better and better over time. But yeah, I think like most things in life, there's no easy button. [gasps] Uh 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. Uh you have to invest. And the more you invest, the better your partnership will get. And in fact, if you look at the best assistants at Athena, the kind of top 1%, they just so happen to work for the clients who are the best at delegating. Not a coincidence. They've 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, it can be super powerful. But if it's one-sided, ain't going 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. It needs to be very detailed. The other thing that is nonobvious to lots is that you should really be exporting your own personal algorithm and your own thinking as you delegate. So, kind of a a novice way of delegating would be, "Hey, will you plan a dinner party for Chris and 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 to eight 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 sort of company or these sorts of interests." You basically create an algorithm uh or a process the person can follow step by step and then you then 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 let's continue to tweak the algorithm. People who are kind of engineering minds this comes very naturally but for other people uh 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 [clears throat] if you have a 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 d or 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 link's important to show a little bit of reputation and so this is how I do it. Um 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 cuz the models are very smart but they don't have context. And the same is 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 nonobvious 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 I might get a cleaner. I might get a cleaner for a little bit or I'm gonna I am I am going to get someone to do the gardening because I [ __ ] hate it and I I kind of suck and I really want 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 overoptimizer 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 it is just realizing it's the right trade. So, you know, does Michael Jordan mow his own lawn? No. But you know what? I bet if he did, he'd be effing amazing, [laughter] right? And whoever does it is never going to 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 uh something you have to accept. Uh another kind of framing I have is Elon sometimes talks about teams being the vector sum. So a company's 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 as 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, 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%. Yeah. 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 go on a 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 uh 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 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. Um 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, uh when you have more than you can possibly handle, your ambition just narrows because you're trying to get through the next 24 hours. Mhm. >> 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. I've seen this in my own life during times with my first company, Thumbtac, when, you know, we're just drowning with all the work and the challenges. uh 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 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. That 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 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 [ __ ] 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 uh a little amount of willpower and work ethic, right? It's like I I will I would say I 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. It's just impossible. I have 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 you know my passport renewal is just not the highest order thing in my life. I would rather be using that to yeah help a friend uh solve a problem or accomplish something in my business or or something else. And so I think you can unlock more willpower uh 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. 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 strips is that they peel off. They irritate your skin. 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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 onboard? And take me through the the full stack. >> Yeah. So step one is uh start with catch GPT 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 monotonous stuff. It's like your inbox, your calendar, paying bills, passport renewal, etc. Uh this might take a year to offload all these things. uh as you offload. >> I just need to pause I need to pause there that that the um 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 uh being modest with the speed at which this integration is going to happen effectively I think is a 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. 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 in need? Um, 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, uh, 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 and go for your goals. Um, in 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 uh 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 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 deate delegate by goal. And this takes often years where you've mindmelted 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 then the highest level uh of delegation, I call it clairvoyant delegation. Um 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. Uh 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 uh 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 X, Y, and Z. 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 uh yeah, it unlocks so much cognitive load that you didn't even have to delegate it. You didn't think about it. It was just hey, it's done and um 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. Uh, I I do think AI is going I 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 uh 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 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 assistant. Now, of course, the human's 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 I do think that is going where the world's going. I think we're getting 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 assistants for the execution. What are some of the potential negative externalities of a world where people outsource incorrectly or they 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. Uh 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. Uh, we we only want to work with people who are are kind and generous with their assistance cuz our assistants are there to take care of you, and they give so much that they deserve uh that same in exchange. >> Yeah. I worry [clears throat] there's been parts of my life where I've got I've got concerns that my tolerance or my resilience for [ __ ] which is inescapable may become more finely attuned as I don't deal with [ __ ] 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? >> I I totally know what you mean. We uh I live in Puerto Rico and the getting things done in Puerto Rico is a little more difficult than >> I've I've I've heard slightly slightly challenging. Yes. With the mana mana uh philosophy >> and I am uh 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've like forgot how hard this is 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. Uh, 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. Uh, and so I think if you delegate something like that, that could I I could see that being a a negative thing. But there's 100 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 uh yeah, my inbox management skills atrophy. Just not my 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. Uh 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. 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Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklnt.com/modern wisdom. That's drinklnt.com/modern wisdom. How how novel of a solution is this given the expanse of human history? How recent is it? cuz it can sound in some ways like again a cosmopolitan Tik Tok generation Gen Z chatgt solution to well people should just be able to sort of go and go and get it man. Um yeah how how recent is this versus how sort of steeped in history? >> Yes. So we did some fun research at Athena. We actually used AI to do this. We uh we got a list of thousand of the kind of greats of history and downloaded 10 biographies in all of them and then looked for how they delegated and across all sorts of people Cicero Newton Caesar Einstein Voltater Gates Churchill Picasso Buddha all of them had personal assistance and it's not a coincidence because these people did not 10x but like a thousandx 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 those those people on the cover. But that's how that's how it's actually happened. And yeah, it's fun reading uh these stories. is I'm I'm reading a biography of Cicero right now and he has a assistant who is yeah helping him manage the uh manage the Roman Empire and trying to protect the republic and uh this guy is not you know the person we learn about when we learn about uh history but it was important and so you know our view of this is if you want to accomplish small things or great things uh it's helpful to have an assistant. Uh there's there's also funny stories. So Katherine the Great, I think was one of the uh the greats at delegation. She's delegated not just managing her empire and uh 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 [laughter] her. And I'm like, dude, Catherine, you are an OG delegator. >> Savage. Holy [ __ ] >> Insane. [laughter] >> That's that's like P. Diddy's delegation. Uh >> the the Wright brothers. I've got two books about them. Housemate George is obsessed. >> And uh they delegated the first design of the plane engine for the Kittyhawk. Right. >> Correct. Yeah. Darwin delegated uh this whole army of uh 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. And >> so hang on hang on hang. 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 Wright brothers, right? It's I mean the 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 Kittyhawk was up and he referred to the Wright 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. And 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 boys that I ever saw. >> Exactly. Look, you don't 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 with a 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 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 [snorts] humility certainly the humility that I would feel as a 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 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 your goals are more uh mediocre uh and and more humble but uh so is your ability and I think >> I mean compensate appropriately and Napoleon and Lee Kuanu needed an assistant. Think how much I need it. [laughter] some of the most high capacity on their own 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 Carnean 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 uh desire to optimize both energy and energy uh and information. And because of that optimization, it has the brain has crafted this hierarchy of task distribution where complex novel tasks uh 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 did 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, Thumbtac, where my meetings, I had meetings from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 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 uh a beautiful thing. [snorts] >> Okay. And 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. worst 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 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 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 because 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 you 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 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. >> Mhm. 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 and >> weak source. Weak source. >> Totally. I I I tried using that. It's just useless. Uh, 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 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 news 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 uh 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. 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 solve 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 a it's not concordant with the amount of value that the device brings. It's certainly not like a $200 for that phone. Like [ __ ] 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 phone's kind of got to be tethered to >> but I 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. 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 work stuff, my loginins 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 there. >> And I'm sat on the couch, this little couch that's on the right hand side. And uh I've got this iPhone [ __ ] 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 Huegh 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. It's a [ __ ] 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 a pretty easy sort of low entry accessible way for people to spend less time on their 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 work 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 it you're >> cementing yourself. you're tethering yourself to your house. >> I have a I have a friend who had a real phone addiction and he had killed phone entirely and just carried a laptop with him. So when he wanted [laughter] 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 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 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. And I have, you know, I don't mind if I'm WhatsAppapping whatever on my computer cuz 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 SY 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. 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Yeah. Me and me and the boys did a 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 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 um you can set certain stuff up. So, one sort of SOS, I desperately need it. 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 [laughter] it. It's like every time you go, it lets you, but then it like just autodebits 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 you >> actually I should use my laptop more. Yeah, exactly. It's noble. It has to be a charity you hate, a political candidate. You don't >> give to the opposing political party. Yeah, that'll be good. That'll 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 fair fear of failure. Will it work? Uh, and that I say it's it's not going to work on day one. You just got to go for it and it will compound. It will get better uh 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. Uh you start with more limited access and then you grant more and more access over time. I worked with you know one of my assistants for over 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 just like knowing what they want more of. And you've got to have this thing that draws you into it cuz 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 think if you have that specific goal, then delegation is not about a task, which is kind of low 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 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 uh 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 if you go to playbooks.aththena.com, Athena.com. We've built some of our favorite playbooks for things you can delegate. So, you can come look at our website. Um, 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. And 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 uh to help people. Um 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 it's all internal. >> Is it possible? I I 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 [ __ ] Stewie. [ __ ] [ __ ] Stewie basically did all of the stuff that Stewie didn't want to do. So, he 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 [ __ ] Stewie and really wanted his own clone. But instead of making it himself, Stewie got [ __ ] Stewie to make [ __ ] Brian. And [ __ ] Brian like ear 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 assistants or other people to do the hiring, training, all 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, but >> including the active delegation. Yeah, but you have to delegate components of it. So, for example, if I'm recruiting 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 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 you know my when people say like what can I delegate? It's basically anything. I 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 uh you can delegate. And so like for you like 2026 Chris what what are your top personal and professional goals? uh build a world-class studio um 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. 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. Uh cuz 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 into chat GPT and be like, "Hey, what's what should I do about my cholesterol and it can look over the last decade and make uh make real recommendations." So yeah, you 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 is a [ __ ] 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. Um, 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 uh we we'd love to help you get more leverage. Uh, and uh, thanks thanks for having me on. >> You do know that one of my friends who I think uses your service named his daughter Athena. >> [gasps] >> Uh, I did I did not know that, but uh I had twins this summer and my wife and I named one of our girls Athena. >> Let's go. There's two Athenas. There's three Athenas in the world now. Technically, [laughter] >> Jonathan, I appreciate you. Thank you, brother. >> All right. Thank you so much. Congratulations. You made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch. Come on.